Russ Roberts: preference

Transcript context

…Let me talk a bit about how I read this book, which was extremely absorbing, highly worthwhile, but it was tough. One thing I did that helped more than anything else was an extensive use of large language models, in particular, the o1 version of GPT. Whenever I would come across a name and not feel I had a full command of what that person had done, I would just ask GPT, “Give me the account of what this person did in the book.” I did that dozens of times. As you mentioned, many characters. I didn’t catch any hallucinations, actually. It was extremely useful. I don’t think I could have read the book nearly as well as I read it without doing that. Interestingly, there’s one character where it just failed. It delivered for me dozens of times, but when I asked it about Vera, like, “Tell me the story of Vera,” it just gave me back, “Oh, I’m a large language model. I don’t know who Vera is. Check your other sources.” I don’t know why, but other than that, it was flawless and highly useful. Well, she doesn’t get a lot of air time, and she isn’t written about a lot. It might have had trouble finding any kind of references to her. As you point out, she plays a very powerful, symbolic role, but she doesn’t take up a lot of pages. I mentioned the essay a minute ago, “The Sistine Madonna.” I asked ChatGPT what it was about, and it totally got it wrong. It said it was about beauty and art. It is not what it is about at all. Claude got it right exactly, which is maybe neither here nor there other than it’s good to have, sometimes, two LLMs to ask questions of. I found my reading of the book was very inconsistent. I struggled in the early pages, as I’ve mentioned, to get my momentum going. When I read Brothers Karamazov, I read it over a fairly long period of time, but the last 300 or 400 pages I read in a couple days because it’s such a page-turner. This book is not a page-turner. As I said, you might get discouraged, but I found myself more, if I may say so, engrossed in it, engrossed in a Grossman novel. There’s almost no or very little narrative suspense. We know how the Battle of Stalingrad turns out. The tide turns. I found it interesting that Novikoff, I think, is part of the lead tank group going into Ukraine. He’s very excited to reclaim Ukraine for the Soviets and take it back from the Germans. It was a slightly eerie shadow of the current moment, but I just kept going. One of my followers on Twitter . . . I apologize to you because this is such a good joke, and we’ll put a link to it in the show notes that don’t have it. But when I said, “We’re reading this book. You should get started. It’s going to air soon,” he wrote back, “I’m on page 12, and all the characters are named Stroganoff. I need more time.” The names are hard. The names are tough.…

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