offloading thinking to AI

It’s disturbing if professionals and students are trying to use AI to avoid hard thinking, as this duo of articles suggests. Ideally, at least in the near to medium term, we need to be doing the opposite. Using AI to perform mundane, repetitive, or just plain frustrating tasks that take up a lot of our time but don’t require deep thinking. Figure out coding syntax is an example, or which of the 99 drop down windows and dialog boxes in Microsoft Word will fix the frustrating formatting problem. (Actually, these last two things are kind of the same as you think about it, just two different ways of accessing a complicated menu of options and trying to communicate with a computer in its version of logic.) If AI can free us from these time wasters, we can have more time for deep thinking and creative thinking. I’m not saying this is the general trend, but this is my personal goal for how I am using AI. For now, I want it to help me do something I could have done myself faster or better. Asking it to think for me would be like asking another person to eat, exercise, or poop for me – I won’t gain any benefits from that.

I’ve been trying to use CoPilot to help me debug a simple stock and flow model. It can’t. It gives me sophisticated-sounding answers that do not even come close to working in the software I am playing with (Vensim PLE in this case).

May 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The India-Pakistan conflict seems to have died down a bit (or did the media outlets I pay attention to just lose interest?). But both the potential nuclear conflict and the long-term loss of glacial ice billions of people depend on are terrifying.

Most hopeful story: I came up with four keys to my personal happiness in the moment: sleep, coffee, exercise, and down time. What, no family, community, career accomplishment, or making a lasting difference in the world you ask? No, those are about reflecting on life satisfaction, not being in the moment. No “fun”? Well, my idea of fun may be different than your idea of fun. I wish you joy and happiness as you pursue your idea of fun, only try to have some empathy and don’t force your own idea of fun on others. So there.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The U.S. approach to R&D is a partnership between government (through both grants and procurement power), universities, and the private sector (historically, including regulated monopolies like Bell Labs). Other countries including China have copied this model somewhat successfully, and our own government taking a monkey wrench to our own system that has worked so well seems like a really stupid idea. First we need to stop the damage and then let’s hope it can be repaired.

the ggplot2 “ecosystem”

In the beginning there was R. Or, S? I’ve heard that R actually rests on a foundation of C++ or Java. Anyway, then there was the tidyverse, sort of another whole programming language that rests in R (or a metastasizing cancer that has grown to dominate R, if you ask certain people, but I personally am a big fan). Now within the tidyverse was always ggplot2, which I have grown to rely on almost exclusively for plotting. Now ggplot2 itself has grown into an “ecosystem” of related programs and extensions. Here is a useful guide. I’ve always been interested in finding the really good ones for things like interactive charts (plotly) and animations (gganimate). And awesome as ggplot2 is, there are some things that are just clunky, like scales and legends (seriously, legends are a big pain point for me – I hope there is an extension out there that really streamlines legends). But I am also wary of using extensions that might be buggy or not updated/supported long term, which could make my code obsolete sooner. So I usually try to do things with ggplot2 proper first, and if that doesn’t work with a reasonable effort I will try one of the extensions. So this guide seems timely and useful.

updating the science on nuclear winter

Jeff Masters has a nice summary of the science on the global devastation of even a limited regional nuclear war. He starts with the accounts popularized by Carl Sagan and others in the 1980s, which really did move the needle on global public and political consciousness on the issue. There was also a 2008 paper about the global consequences of a relatively small India-Pakistan exchange. Since then the science has been updated several times, including using the latest climate models. The results are always bad, with even the limited regional war disrupting global agriculture for up to a decade and killing 2 billion people. It would just be cold, in the summer, where food is normally grown, for ten years. Human beings would starve on an unimaginable scale. By contrast, a huge volcanic eruption like the one in Indonesia in 1815 could cause a similar effect, but it would last only a few years. (Nonetheless, we should have a plan for that one, no? Something that happens every few hundred years is common and you have to have a plan for it!) This should probably be the #1 political issue no matter what else is going on. Where are the courageous leaders today?

Kurzweil’s Singularity is Nearer

Well what do you know, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Nearer came out in 2024 and I somehow didn’t notice. I still tell young people who ask that the original book is a drop-everything-must-read. The question is whether I would tell them to drop the original and read this one first. (As much as I love interacting with Gen Z, the idea of many of them reading two complete books seems like a stretch…) I’ll definitely read this one and compare when I get a chance and see. Of course they also need to read How Much is Enough: Money and the Good Life. And probably Manufacturing Consent, which in 1988 might be the best explanation we have of the propaganda techniques we all seem to be falling for here in 2025.

Is the UN on its last legs?

According to The Economist, the UN is close to bankruptcy, in part because the U.S. and China are not paying their agreed share. I believed in the UN back in the first Gulf War era, when it seemed like the so-called great powers could come together through the security council and collectively decide what to do when a regional power invaded its sovereign neighbor. That simple model, where if one country steps out of line all other countries will turn against it, seems so appealing to me. But that model is clearly out the window, at least since the second Gulf War and possibly since the NATO adventures in the Balkans in the late 1990s.

It’s sad. As a mechanism to prevent war, the UN is clearly completely ineffective at this point. If they were to just close up shop in New York, I am not sure the war and peace situation would be worse off – to be clear, it is very bad and just can’t get that much worse with or without the UN. When serious discussions even happen, they are not happening through the UN.

The UN still does important things on the humanitarian and science fronts, however, and if nothing else the General Assembly gives the world’s smaller, poorer, and less powerful nations a way to speak more collectively and be heard.

As the UN has faded, I suppose we have seen other organizations rise in parallel to fill in some of the void, like the G20, BRICs, etc. Maybe this is the future, but it really seems like we need a functioning organization like the Security Council, in parallel if the actual Security Council is hopeless, and we need it now.

the problem with sprawl

This article from Strong Towns has a good explanation of why low-density development is not the answer to the housing supply issue.

this style of development works extremely well for a specific type of private developer… developers like Ross Perot Jr. are masters of the assembly-line approach: secure cheap land on the fringe, install infrastructure, and build tract housing as quickly as possible. At this scale, the profits are enormous, and the risks are low. The federal government provides generous support through mortgage guarantees, tax preferences, and highway spending, and buyers keep lining up for new homes.

But while the private sector gets the cash, local governments get the bill. Sprawling developments create long-term infrastructure liabilities—roads, water lines, sewer systems, schools, fire protection—that far exceed the revenue they generate. Local governments, which are really just collections of us acting together, are left trying to maintain and operate systems that are fundamentally unaffordable.

As Mayor Eugene Escobar of Princeton, Texas, put it, his town boomed with affordable homes, but now it’s struggling with traffic, overburdened infrastructure, and a lack of basic amenities. The city’s leadership is trying to build a real downtown, attract jobs, and create public spaces—but they’re doing it after the fact. That’s not planning. That’s triage.

Some suburbs seem to persist for long periods of time. But they are ones located within commuting distance of urban centers with high-paying professional jobs, and the zoning serves to keep the median income in those successful suburbs very high, and therefore able to support the very high infrastructure costs per resident or per square mile. There aren’t enough of these highly affluent people for all suburbs to work like this, so for every successful one there are many turning into slums.

What seems to be suggested instead is a gradual process of intensification from the middle out, so that populations, incomes, and tax revenues can keep rising over time as value is continuously created. This makes sense to me. I think there may be a more linear model though that could work for U.S. suburbs, where the intensification happens along a transportation corridor with progressively less dense development as you move back from highway. This way, you get a long linear downtown with access to transportation and other infrastructure at a low unit cost. People could live in relatively low-density neighborhoods if they want to and still not be too far from work, school, and inter-city public transportation. And these commercial corridors already exist in the form of arterial highways, water and power lines, big box stores and car dealerships separated by oceans of parking.

why parking is the enemy of affordable housing

This article has a clear explanation of why parking mandates push up housing costs in cities.

Off-street parking mandates add hundreds of dollars a month to people’s rent, even for tenants who don’t drive, who then have to subsidize their neighbors’ parking in the building’s garage. One reason for this is that off-street parking is incredibly expensive to build, especially now that building material costs keep rising, and are expected to rise even more with President Trump’s tariffs.

But the other reason is that parking just takes up a lot of space in a building. All the space devoted to a garage and all the related internal building infrastructure takes up room that can’t be devoted to more homes and living space. Not surprisingly, when cities remove parking mandates, builders add more housing and less parking to projects.

In some cases, the cost of building an underground garage for the required parking spaces ends up being the real limit on how tall a building can be. On paper a builder might be legally allowed to add more units than proposed, but if providing the parking for them is too unaffordable, they’ll opt for a smaller building.

I still think self-driving (and self-parking) vehicles will solve this particular problem in the long term, because vehicles will be able to park themselves in very tight spaces. The technology has arrived in the world’s most advanced countries (not the U.S. sorry, we are behind and falling more behind.). But it might take a generation for laws to catch up, and we are going to be stuck with a lot of wasted space for a long time to come.

why the ruins of ancient cities are found underground

A common reason, apparently, was fire. When a city was largely destroyed by fire, people would just level out the rubble and start building again on top. This also helped protect from floods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyTOYEk_Z2Y&t=1s

We were still doing essentially this same thing in the U.S. even a hundred years ago. Philadelphia, for example, is a city built on originally swampy floodplain between two large rivers. Developers channeled streams into huge sewers in the valleys, cut off the tops of nearby hilltops, and filled in the valleys. This made a flat plain for development, as much as 30 feet above the original land surface in some cases, with sewers ready to go. The sewers were for both drainage and waste, in a time before flush toilets when people previously just tipped their chamber pots into the streets each morning. And remember that added to all that human waste was the waste of horses, the main form of transport. Then there were factories and slaughterhouses discharging all sorts of nasty things to those sewers and rivers. So there was a certain brutal logic to it at the time, but of course we don’t want to be doing this in new areas. It makes sense for people to use these areas where we have already sacrificed the environment more intensely, while greening them up with lots of trees and parks so they are actually nice places for people to live.

Interesting pictures and narrative on this process in Philadelphia are here and here.

What did DOGE actually do?

This article is by David Walker, a former US Comptroller General.

Contrary to assertions by some, DOGE has not conducted audits. Rather, it has performed targeted and tactical transaction reviews of selected government information systems using artificial intelligence capabilities.

Its objective has been to identify possible fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement in an effort to cut federal spending. Musk announced a goal to save $2 trillion, but this was later reduced to $1 trillion and then to $500 billion, which has still proven to be overly optimistic. DOGE now claims to have achieved about $160 billion in savings, but this number may be significantly overstated based on the evidence provided…

While DOGE has so far fallen far short of any of its financial goal, it has brought some important things to light. For example, it has uncovered a number of concrete examples of significant waste in the federal government, and it has re-exposed many of its operational problems, such as outdated information systems and inadequate internal controls. A vast majority of these operational problems were previously identified by the Government Accountability Office and various inspectors general.

So, they just tried to feed all the government’s data into an AI and identify some waste, fraud, and abuse. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like such a terrible job to do that routinely, or just add it to the audit toolbox as this guy is suggesting. So why all the drama and general crazy?

It occurs to me though that the approach was shockingly ignorant in many ways. They seem to have assumed that nothing the government does has any benefits, only costs, and therefore any reduction in spending would be a savings. Government accounting in general does not distinguish between spending and investment, which has always been a problem. I could “save” money by not going to the dentist any more, for example, but I would pay for it many times over both in money and pain sometime in the not too distant future.

The Clinton-Gore administration executed a rational, effective, and somewhat brutal government efficiency campaign in the 1990s. You can hear about it on Planet Money: The Last Time We Shrank the Federal Workforce.

Rationally speaking, the government should step in to improve citizens’ lives where private markets are obviously not able to deliver, like on health care, child care, education, fundamental research, unemployment and disability insurance, and retirement. It should create a level playing field for businesses large and small, regulate anticompetitive practices, set minimum labor and environmental standards, maintain public safety, and provide for the common defense. It should use a portion of the value added by a healthy economy to do these things, which reinforce the healthy economy in a positive loop. I’m not a genius tech bro but these things are obvious to me.