Make Me Smart April 10, 2023 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

Alright, we’re ready. Who’s there? Who’s in charge? Who’s in charge? Drew. He runs everything.  Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hey everybody, I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to make me smart. I guess that applies to me too because I’ve been gone. I’m baaaaack. Where we make today make sense. It’s Monday, the 10th of April today.

Kimberly Adams 

And we are so glad to have you back. I’m Kimberly Adams, thank you so much for joining us everyone else as well. We’ve got news, and we’ve got smiles to get to so we’re gonna dive right in with the news fix. And I suppose we should get what’s the worst news done first, because as I was saying to you before the show, I feel like we cannot make it through a week of the show without having to talk about another mass shooting.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, this one today in Louisville. A 23 year old employee went into a bank in Louisville and started shooting. I think four people are dead as it stands now, nine wounded. And I don’t even know what to do with this. It has become routine. As somebody said on one of the cable shows today, we’ve had 150 mass shooting incidents, and we’re barely four months into the year, three and a half months into the year. I don’t know how long this is sustainable in a democratic society. I just don’t. I just don’t And I don’t know what to do with. I don’t know what to do with it.

Kimberly Adams 

I don’t, either. But I also don’t particularly love that response from myself, you know, because it’s the… it makes me feel like you kind of throwing up your your hands and be like, oh, what can we do? We can’t do anything. And that’s exactly how the system perpetuates. But your point is valid. It’s like what else can be done? Because without meaningful change in our lawmakers nothing will be?

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s right. That’s the throw the hands up piece, right? Because if Republicans in the Tenn… and I’m mixing my shootings here, so you know, bear with me. But if Republicans in the Tennessee legislature can expel two young black men for demanding gun control legislation because they have a supermajority, what is there to be done? Other than change the lawmakers.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, I think that’s what it comes down to at this point. Change the lawmakers.

Kai Ryssdal 

Totally. Let’s see. Alright, so anyway, that’s, you know, I wanted to mark that. So I think that’s why I put that in the run down. That’s that’s all. Yeah, yeah. You go. Because mine’s less significant than yours than my other one?

Kimberly Adams 

Okay. There are two really meaningful court cases, pretty much making a beeline for the Supreme Court at this point related to abortion pills. So a Texas judge that’s known to be very friendly to the anti-abortion movement, you know, basically said that the FDA overstepped in approving and I’m going to try to say it right, is it mith?

Kai Ryssdal 

Mifepristone

Kimberly Adams 

Thank you, mifepristone. That, and therefore that the approval that the FDA made for allowing this to be, you know, sold directly to consumers should be suspended. Right? And then, either 20 minutes before or 20 minutes after,I’m sort of losing track of the timeline, in Washington state a judge held that the abortion pills should remain accessible. And usually when two federal judges have opposite rulings, that kicks it to the Supreme Court because these federal judges are supposed to be able to make decisions that affect federal law that therefore affects the whole country. So when you have dueling opinions like this, it gets kicked up to the Supreme Court. And providers don’t necessarily know what to do. In the meantime, you have drug makers, Pfizer, Biogen, hundreds of US drugmakers, who are calling for the Texas judge to, you know, turn back the ruling, and that it ignores, in their letter they said it ignores decades of scientific evidence and legal precedent. They’re calling for a reversal of the decision. The White House wants the decision reversed of course, the Justice Department is appealing the decision, and in particular asking that the impact of the decision be held off until the you know, confusion can be cleared up. In the meantime, Republican lawmakers at the federal level have not been so outspoken about celebrating this. And the Washington Post has a really interesting analysis piece by Aaron Blake about this. Because as they learned, after the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe versus Wade, this is not a great issue for them. It’s great with their base, but it’s not great with the general population. And poll after poll after poll is showing that they are certainly losing younger voters, but they’re kind of disenfranchising lots of voters by digging in on this issue. So a lot of Republicans have been very quiet about this decision. And they do not necessarily want this to be… to define yet another election cycle for them. And the Democrats, of course, would love for that to happen. But that’s one of the big reasons they got a negative turnout, shall we say, or a less positive turnout than they anticipated in the midterm elections.

Kai Ryssdal 

As as Charlie Sykes who was a former Republican, he’s one of many former Republicans who have said this, the Republican party today has boxed itself in on abortion. Yeah, it really has. It is between a rock and a very hard place. Okay, so here’s my other one. It’s a huge piece of the New York Times today about climate change and Bitcoin and let me just say that Bitcoin, far from being the panacea of all things monetary and we’re going to fix the way we pay for things in this economy, it comes at a huge cost environmentally. And I’ll just read a couple of little tidbits from here. “An operation in Dalton, Georgia is using nearly as much power as the surrounding 97 households.” And I should be more clear, it’s not the use of Bitcoin, it’s not the the existence of Bitcoin, it’s the mining of Bitcoin. It is the enormous computer centers that get set up which suck huge amounts of energy to do the computer calculations necessary to get the Bitcoin. Here’s another one. “Riot platforms mine in Rockdale, Texas uses about the same amount of electricity as the nearest 300,000 to homes.” It’s just… we think it’s a panacea and fun, and gosh, it’s great digital money, but it comes at a huge cost. And it is not to be overlooked. It’s just really not great. Not great.

Kimberly Adams 

You know, we did a story on Tech, that about Ethereum doing this thing called “the merge,” where they change the way that you mine, you mine Ethereum. And it was a huge deal. And it basically put all of these Bitcoin miners out of business, if you were mining Ethereum. And I was just looking up what the impact was and according to The Verge, when they made that transition, Ethereum’s electricity use was expected to drop by 99.988% post merge. And to use from, “to drop from using 23 million megawatt hours per year to 2600 megawatt hours per year. To help visualize how massive this is a report compared this reduction to the Eiffel Tower shrinking to the size of a Lego toy person.” (they both laugh.) So there is… it’s a great comparison. There is something to be done about this. But you know, as much as the Bitcoin, you know celebrants like to talk about being you know, sort of separated and apart from the money to interest of the establishment, in some ways they’re now tied to their own industry because you you know, if you make a change like that, and you’re… Bitcoin miners are going to come after you because there are billions and billions and billions of dollars being made off of these operations that people probably don’t want to go away.

Kai Ryssdal 

For sure, for sure. It’s huge story. Huge climate change story.

Kimberly Adams 

For sure.

Kai Ryssdal 

Drew shall we?

Kimberly Adams 

I am so in love with my story today. It made me… like I was reading I was in the Scientific American today looking at something else because why not? And I saw this story in a Scientific American, which directed me to a local TV station in New Orleans that did a story about two teenagers in New Orleans, who… high school students who gave a presentation at the American Mathematical society’s annual Southeastern Conference proving basically, the… they basically proved the Pythagoras theorem using trigonometry without circular logic. All of that is very complicated. I’m going to do my best here. But basically, this is something that math mathematicians have been trying to prove for nearly 2000 years. And these two high school girls seem to have done it. And so, okay, I’m going to try to summarize this. Basically, if you went back to high school, and you learned about the Pythagoram theorem, this was the idea that it’s an equation to calculate the longer side of a right triangle by summing the squares of the other two sides. So if you can visualize this back in high school, you’re sitting there and you’re looking at a triangle, and they would have you draw boxes off the two shorter legs of the triangle, and use the area of those boxes to calculate the area of the bigger box for the third side. And then you, from there deduce the length. The the theorem is often phrased as a squared plus b squared equals c squared. Now then, the way that they’ve proven this before, is, you know, with algebra and geometry, and trigonometry was not able to be used to prove this. I’m botching this. It’s real complicated. But anyway, they were able to do it. Because they’re smarter than me in math. And so the fact that these two girls did it, and that looks like that they’re going to be submitting their proof for peer review and everything. They’re just very cute. It made me smile, and it made me realize just how much of high school algebra I have completely forgot.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, my God. Oh yeah. Oh man, you kidding me? Joanne Chamberlain. If you’re listening to this Mrs. Chamberlain, Joanne Chamberlin from my ninth grade algebra class, I’m really sorry for not paying attention. Because holy cow this stuff is hard.

Kimberly Adams 

I feel like ninth grade was that moment that I really had that transition from feeling like I was good at math to feeling like I wasn’t. And apparently, that’s like a real crucial moment for a lot of people, especially young women in particular because depending on how, you know, your teacher reacts to you in this moment of crisis, can kind of determine whether you go into STEM or not it seems. But I really do love like hearing and reading about math. There’s this YouTube channel that I love called numberphile that just talks about really big, complicated math problems in a relatively simplistic way and it’s just… it makes me feel a little smarter every time I watch it.

Kai Ryssdal 

Good on you. Good on you. Can I have a little credit by the way for pulling my ninth grade math teacher’s name out of thin air?

Kimberly Adams 

Yes, you can! Absolutely! That was impressive.

Kai Ryssdal 

After like 40 years later. A little more than that anyway,. Oh my goodness. Anyway. Okay, so here’s mine. It’s a little geeky, not as weedy as Kimberly’s, but it’s a little geeky. So there’s a, there’s a paper out from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Virginia, The Quantitative Supervision and Research Group. Two researchers there who worked for the Fed. The Fed has, as you know, many many many, many economic instances of PhDs. Here’s the thing they wanted to study. “Can ChatGPT decipher Fedspeak?” Fedspeak is of course, the language that the Federal Reserve Bank uses, both the governors and their statements, the actual board itself to describe monetary policy and how they think the economy is going. The most egregious example, of course, is Alan Greenspan, who took great pride in not being understood and said, actually, to a congressperson, I believe, “if you understand what I’m saying, Senator, then clearly I’ve made a mistake.” He really wanted to be understood. Anyway. So these people ran, these researchers ran Fedspeak through ChatGPT which by the way, I learned what GPT stands for. It’s called “Generative Pre-training Transformer.” That’s what it is. It’s a model called generative pre-training transformer. Anyway, the short answer is, and here’s the abstract, yes, ChatGPT can decipher Fedspeak. And here’s what it says. “The technology can therefore either be hugely time consuming or resource saving” and it can result “or it can result in misleading and wrong conclusions. We set out to test our hypothesis in the context of Fedspeak.” So they ran these these announcements from the Federal Reserve, through Fedspeak and decided to see whether it was dovish, neutral, or hawkish, that is to say, easy on interest rates, neutral or very worried about inflation and interest rates. And so the short answer is, yes, ChatGPT does better than most other artificial intelligence platforms in deciphering Fedspeak. So that means like, in 18 months, I’m out of a job. It’s all I’m saying. It’s all I’m saying. Jay Powell is gonna come and do a press conference, Jay Powell is gonna do a press conference and I’m just gonna run it through Chat…. actually that’s what I should do. Run it through ChatGPT next time and see what it says. Anyway, there you go. That’s my very geeky make me smile. My sister has been using ChatGPT so much. And every day, she’s telling me about something new that she’s doing with this software. And I’m just like, wow. So I told you. So Liv, my, my daughter was doing math homework a number of weeks ago, and couldn’t get something and ran it through ChatGPT and couldn’t get it and couldn’t get it and didn’t get it to work. And she called my wife over.  My wife is the math parent in the household. I am the American political history since 1865 parent in our household, which means I never get called on. My wife got called over and they ran it through and ChatGPT was wrong. Which is not unheard of. But it’s a little scary that like high school kids are using this to help them with their work, and it’s wrong? You know, it’s like the early days of Wikipedia.

Kimberly Adams 

There’s so much wrong stuff on there. There’s this… There’s all these people trying out new ways to work with ChatGPT  and so there’s this one website that’s in development called “have I been encoded?” Which is to find out what AI knows about you. And I put myself in there to see what ChatGPT 3 says about me. And the little excerpt that I got was “Kimberly Adams is an American journalist and anchor for PBS newshour weekend. She is also a correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and a contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition.”

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah buddy!

Kimberly Adams 

None of those things are true. Not a single one.

Kai Ryssdal 

Man, you should update your bio stat. That’s pretty fun. I kind of love that.

Kimberly Adams 

But the thing is, it sounds very realistic, right?

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, sure. Very realistic, because like it’s plausible. Somebody who knows vaguely who you are would say oh, yeah, she’s on NewsHour that makes sense.

Kimberly Adams 

Public radio. Yeah. Public public media. Something. Yeah. Anyway. Well, that is it for us today on this Monday. Tomorrow please join us for our weekly deep dive and appropriately this week, we’re digging into the cultural impact of ChatGPT and other AI tools. I swear that’s not why I brought that up. I’d forgotten for a second.

Kai Ryssdal 

No, but that’s great. It’s great. Until that they’ll keep sending us your questions, your comments, your suggestions, your your ChatGPT exercises you would like to have done. 508-UB-SMART is how to do that. 508-UB-SMART. Email is makemesmart@marketplace.org. Both of those ways will get a hold of us.

Kimberly Adams 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s program was engineered by Drew Jostad. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Our intern is Antonio Barreras.

Kai Ryssdal 

Marissa Cabrera is still the acting senior producer of this podcast. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. And Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital and On Demand.

Kimberly Adams 

What was the best thing you ate when you were away?

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, I had carbonara that for… The best carbonara. I’m a huge carbonara fan. Best carbonara I’ve ever had. I had that the first night after an 11 and a half hour plane ride and a couple of glasses of chianti but it was spectacular. Spectacular.