Author Archives: Robert Marsanyi

52 things I learned in 2022. This year I worked on fascinating… | by Tom Whitwell | Magnetic Notes | Nov, 2022 | Medium

This year I worked on fascinating projects in energy, media and health* at Magnetic, and learned many learnings. Tom Whitwell is Managing Consultant at Magnetic (formally Fluxx ), a company that…
— Read on medium.com/magnetic/52-things-i-learned-in-2022-db5fcd4aea6e

I’ve posted things from this guy before. He has an ear.

Capitalism as neural network

https://ai.objectives.institute/blog/ai-and-the-transformation-of-capitalism

Peter Eckersley died recently. I didn’t know anything about him, but two bloggers I follow independently eulogized him so I went down the rabbit hole.

He had an insight regarding the difference between intelligence and wisdom; the former as the ability to optimize to a goal, the latter the ability to determine goals. He started an organization called the AI Objectives Institute to push some thinking around the determination of good goals to apply AI to.

A second insight was the parallel between AI as we currently constitute it (back propagation, …) and capitalism as a system of optimization. Not just an analogy, it turns out, there are structural elements of each type of system that are he same (back propagation of price signals, …) that allow him to claim that capitalism is an AI system. So then he goes on to start thinking about applying the same sorts of mitigation that are used in AI to reign in unwanted behaviors.

Interesting guy.

Tipping in restaurants

I just learned something interesting: tipping restaurant workers is a legacy of Jim Crow. Early in the last century, the National Restaurant Association was formed, and one of their innovations was to replace wages for predominantly Black women working in restaurants with tips, so they could continue not to pay their workers. This was later codified into federal law by Roosevelt explicitly excluding restaurant workers from the newly-mandated minimum wage law. They tried it on with the railway workers, too, a predominantly poor Black class, but unionization pushed back and it was never legalized. The practice was further legitimized in the 60s with the creation of a legal “sub minimum wage” for tipped workers.

However, seven states have long had laws guaranteeing fair minimum wages for restaurant workers (including WA), and since the onset of the pandemic restaurants have been forced to offer more than mandated minimum wages for workers to counteract the massive resignations in the industry.

For more info, see the article here.