Chapter 47 — The Mess of Being Out to Lunch
Rufus talk briefly about experiences and giving.
Followed by Chapter 47 —— The Mess of Being Out to Lunch, in which Saskia escapes the hospital.
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Hello Friends,
For those listening to these episodes as they drop, you’ll be well aware that we’re in the midst of the holiday season. For the rest of you, close your eyes and do a little cerebral time traveling.
A hallmark of the season is gift giving. For instance, my youngest has a multiplicity of Secret Santa presents that she’s responsible for, even if Santa himself started passing our house over a few years back. This, combined with a gradual shifting of the lens through which I’m experiencing this time of year led me to a minor epiphany.
It was a while back when someone——I honestly can’t even recall who, now——noted to me that the most important thing in life is our ephemeral experiences. Much more so than any possessions we might acquire. For our experiences stay with us much longer than our material trappings. They shape who we are in the years to come.
I was struck by this with a note of guilt the other day, when, yet again, my wife and I returned home late after a long day literally toiling in the trenches in Ojai. Once again, we’d missed dinner, much to my daughter’s chagrin. I’d like to think that this was the exceptional event that proved the rule of us always being around, but a single missed meal would hardly achieve that.
Still, I did find some solace in a zoom call I was on for supporters of BEAM (that is, the kids program I’ve mentioned a couple of times that shows a lucky few underserved students a pathway to advanced mathematics and STEM study more generally). The call finished with some BEAM alumni, now incredibly well-spoken young adults whose lives were changed over a decade ago by an experience that came out of the blue. The answer to one particular audience question has stuck with me. Asked what it was about BEAM that made that students decide to give it a try, one of the alum explained, very matter-of-factly, that they showed up and showed a genuine interest in her. As she explained, her parents were both out of the house with demanding manual jobs from before dawn to after sunset; they just didn’t have energy left to offer more. It reminded me of what my own daughter missed, if only once in a while.
Of course, that is not all that BEAM offers. They create community and a support structure that stands by their students from 6th grade through college. Moreover, the trickle down effect to other members of the family and community of those first students was also clear.
In any case, if you’re looking for a great place to direct a little gift that might get turned into a life-altering experience, consider donating to BEAM this season, as an added inducement, the board is offering a 5x matching bonus right now!
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a way to give without financial expenditure, consider a little holiday present to me: an in person recommendation to someone you know to give this podcast a listen would be awesome! As I’ve noted before, word of mouth is by far the best way to grow an audience, and even if it’s no longer the silly season because you’re bingeing this much later, the story is about time travel, so anytime makes sense. I’d like to continue this into my next book as I’m enjoying the process. Future you’s will know better than me if that’s panned out, but worst case, even if it doesn’t pan out, it’d be nice for more people to hear this story.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter forty seven, in which Saskia escapes the hospital.
— 47 —
The Mess of Being Out to Lunch
Absent any indications of permanent brain impairment, Saskia was to be released from the hospital in Dallas a couple of days after Mica showed up, with the understanding that she’d check in with her primary care doctor once she was back in LA.
Before he discharged her, though, Dr. Siebling took a minute to thank Saskia for her lesson the other day. It had reminded him that he really needed to spend more time watching the developments of AI, particularly since neural nets held up a novel mirror to the workings of our own human intelligence, the understanding of which was his job.
Saskia smiled. It was gratifying to help another researcher, especially when that help pushed on a frontier that she had no personal expertise in.
“I did a deeper dive on your reading glasses as a technology for the mind metaphor,” Siebling enthused. “Did you know that people who can read, they see landscapes differently to those who can’t?”
Saskia chuckled. She could, if he’d asked, have even named the chief proponent of that observation.
Siebling, however, mistook her mirth as a sign that she appreciated his enthusiasm. So, he continued: “Readers are more likely to pick out specific elements. To conceive of the panorama in front of them as a collection of unique components, rather than a single whole. Precisely because they’ve been trained to label things.”
The happy accident of Saskia’s insight on his work made her wonder if there was a way for her to engineer random conversations to reveal already known wisdom that would impact her own work. Her best bet, here and now, was to simply ask: “You know LLMs still don’t reason very well by causality. Just analogy. If you figure out how the brain does that, please give me a call.”
“I’ll be sure to,” Siebling promised, but with that, his time for banter was up and he returned to his rounds.
Their life paths that had briefly touched diverged again.
∞
After Dr. Siebling left, the nurse returned. There was a copayment Saskia was responsible for before the discharge. Saskia gave the nurse her credit card and the woman left her to run it.
“Time to blow this popsicle stand,” Mica quipped.
Saskia nodded. “You said the oil’s still gushing. Did you follow up with Zeno Williams?”
“No.” Mica sighed. “My sense is: there isn’t much they can do.”
“Really? It’s got to be easier to shut off than me going back in time to prevent it.”
“Maybe.” Mica sounded skeptical. For comparison she’d looked into the Deepwater Horizon spill, about which a lot had been written. She’d found an analogy in the book Fire on the Horizon, that gave some sense of the challenge of lowering the metaphorical plug into the hole that was gushing oil. It framed the task as analogous to lowering a soda bottle from the top of the Empire State Building into a trash can on the sidewalk below. It imagined you on roller skates——to simulate the fact that the Horizon rig was far from stationary——while you were letting string out and noted that, in contrast to the flimsy air in between you and your bottle, you’d have the roiling ocean currents to contend with. “That metaphor didn’t account for the added obstacle that oil was gushing out of the hole, instead of into it, like in a bath, sucking the plug into the drain.” Mica then paused to give a wry smile. “On the flip-side,” she continued, “the Deepwater Horizon blowout was a lot deeper than the Back Gold rig.”
“Well, that’s positive,” Saskia tried enthusing, before Mica doused her in cold water.
“It did take them 85 days and a ten meter cap that weighed seventy five tons.”
Given Mica’s description, Saskia had to admit that going back in time did almost look easier. “Almost,” she emphasized, stopping short of actual agreement.
“You might get better with practice,” Mica encouraged. “You haven’t had the ability long.”
Saskia shrugged, unconvinced. Her own mind though was running in a different direction: “Zeno seemed very nervous. Like he might have known something already.”
“You’d want to go back further,” Mica said, misunderstanding Saskia’s point. “Fresh start and all.”
Saskia bit her lip in thought. If she did go back to intervene with Zeno earlier——could having done that in Zeno’s past ... could that have explained Zeno’s reaction in his front yard? Like an LLM trying to recall a specific phrase it had seen in its training data; data it no longer had direct access to. It was hard to recall if his nervous disposition might have been because he recognized her. And, it was a strange conceit of time travel, your first time meeting one another didn’t have to coincide. She giggled to herself: that was exactly how she and Mica had met.
“What’s funny?” Mica asked.
Happily, for Saskia, just then, the nurse returned. Less happily, she’d tried running the credit card, but it had unfortunately been declined. “I’m so sorry,” she apologized, as if it was somehow her running of the card that had caused the problem.
Saskia waved the apology off. It was a big charge, and out of character with her usual spending patterns. “Give me a minute. I’ll give them a call.” The nurse left them again.
Saskia rolled her eyes. The fraud protection algorithms were great, but sometimes they were also dumb. She flipped the card over and dialed the number on the back.
Getting a human on the line was surprisingly easy. Fraud was evidently something the credit card companies didn’t like. Saskia explained to the man on the other end of the call that it “didn’t really make much sense to fraudulently pay medical bills. They’d trace right back to you.”
“I hear you. And it’s well under your limit,” the agent agreed. “It’s just——you’re sure you’ve been in a coma for the last couple of weeks?”
“What?” Saskia was taken aback by the idiocy of his question. “Yes. I wouldn’t have this bill if I hadn’t ...”
“Right. Sorry, it’s just that there have been a number of charges on your card. In LA. Does anyone else have access to your card?”
The obviousness of the problem slapped Saskia in the face, and she was embarrassed that she hadn’t seen it coming. “No.”
“No worries. I’ll flag those.” The agent had completely misunderstood Saskia’s hesitation. “I’ll run this hospital charge now, but we’ll send you a new credit card after that.”
Saskia was about to protest but the facts as they stood were incontrovertible. She’d been inadvertently backed into a corner. Short of admitting she could travel in time there was no sensible explanation she could offer the man. And frankly, if she started talking about time travel, he might call her doctor.
I guess I get a free lunch for once, Saskia thought to herself.
“Identity theft is rampant, mam.” He then added, with a smile in his voice: “I guess the machines can spot it better than we can. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it.”
For a brief moment, Saskia wondered if her double was also using their credit card. She’d said she wasn’t going to, but, who knows, she might have done so out of habit. The credit card agent didn’t know the half of it: she’d had her identity stolen in a way no one else could ever imagine.
