prior probability

I received some somber news today (10 January): “As we begin the spring semester, I am sad to write that we’ve learned our former colleague Dean Cleavenger passed away Dec. 10. Dean was on faculty with us for from 2007-21, teaching our core management course as well as in the graduate and MBA programs. He was a great colleague and good friend to many. He was well respected by his students and known for his engaging and humorous storytelling. He had his Ph.D. from Ole Miss and was a Fulbright Scholar and an entrepreneur. He is survived by his children, Samuel and Maggie Cleavenger.” This short notice doesn’t even begin to do justice to Dr Dean Cleavenger’s legacy as a teacher and scholar, and his death is especially poignant because I not only knew Dean personally since the fall of 2014 (we both taught “lecture capture” courses at our home institution and met for lunch almost every month); I am only two years younger than Dean. I will post an elegy to my fellow scholar and friend soon; in the meantime, I found this touching tribute written by Dean’s son Samuel.

Singapore’s 1982 New Year was a little special, as it arrived earlier at 11:30pm on 31 December 1981. To meet the correct time, Singapore’s …

Singapore Trivia – Time Adjustment for Singapore in 1982

Via peterme.com: “Out of Sight was placed on YouTube in 2010, but I only just discovered it in the past month, when The Algorithm served it up and I clicked out of idle curiosity. A gentle Miyazaki-esque animation with a light surprise, it quickly became a personal favorite, which I then immediately shared with D. You won’t spend a better 5:27 on YouTube today.” Hat tip: kottke.

ChatGPT doesn’t know what freedom is. That, or Microsoft’s new bot has become a mouthpiece of the Cuban Communist Party! I recently asked the AI engine, When will Cuba be free? And this misleading and erroneous four-sentence reply is what I got back: “Cuba is a sovereign country and is already free. The Cuban government is responsible for determining the policies and direction of the country, and the Cuban people are free to participate in the political process and express their views. However, there are concerns about the level of political freedom in Cuba, as the government has been criticized for its human rights record and for suppressing dissent. Some people believe that Cuba will become more democratic and open in the future, but it is difficult to predict exactly when or how that might happen.” Notice the use of the passive voice in both parts of sentence #3 and the use of the words “some people” in the last sentence. Even more egregious, the second parts of sentence #1 and sentence #2 are totally false.

I asked the new AI engine ChatGPT: “Hey, where did you get your priors?” And she (it?) replied:

“I was trained by OpenAI on a dataset of billions of words taken from the Internet. As a language model, my training involves predicting the next word in a sequence of words, given the words that come before it. I do not have personal experiences or biases, and I do not have access to external information beyond what I was trained on. I exist to assist users by generating human-like text based on the input that I receive. Is there anything else I can help with?“

What? The ChatGPT bot says it has no priors? It is either misinformed or a liar!