What I’ve been doing
1-I got notified that my scientific non-profit is now formally registered with the government. To be honest, it happened faster than I expected! What’s left now is a few more submissions to qualify us for certain tax privileges.
2-In last week’s update, I talked about how we’ve published some of our work as preprints. The thing about preprints, however, is that they are not peer-reviewed. So, the next logical step for us is for us to send our work out for feedback from other experts in our field. This past week, the team and I got one of our preprints submitted to a journal. Sometimes, this could be a somewhat engaged process as each journal has their different formatting requirements. The bottom line, however, is that we got the paper submitted – and now we wait for their feedback.
What I need to take care of
1-I made a tiny pinch (not quite a dent) into one of the 4 manuscript drafts the team and I are working on. I need to try to make a bit more than a respectable dent this coming week.
2-As I mentioned in the previous section, there are a few more documentation I need to submit in the coming week to qualify the non-profit for certain tax privileges.
3-The thought piece on accelerating behavioral research in Africa is still the works. Adding this item to this section is just a way of keeping this at the front of my mind. I’m giving myself till the end of June to at least get a second draft ready for feedback.
What I’ve been reading
1-I’m currently re-reading “A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World” by Gregory Clark (2007). Here’s some of the ideas that resonated:
- Clark was able to keep track of the price of commodities and labor as far back as 13th century England. Obviously, this was possible because there were records documenting these details. Sometimes, I wonder how much of sub-Saharan Africa history has been lost to time because of the impermanence of their record-keeping practices (e.g., griots, oral tradition).
- Some modern African societies have wage rates that are below what was obtainable in pre-industrial England. Despite these, their populations continue to grow at rates higher than that of pre-industrial Europe.
- Clark uses some really interesting variables as a proxy measure for living standards. One was calories consumed per day. Hunter-gathers had a more varied diet than pre-industrial Europeans.
- Engel’s Law: The poorer the family, the larger the proportion of its income that will be spent on food. A corollary of this law is that poorer families will also devote a large portion of their income to cheap calories, such as rice, wheat, while spending a lesser proportion on expensive calories, e.g., meat, eggs, milk, pepper, or tea.
- If the majority of income in a society is spent on food, much of the labor in that society will go towards food production – leaving little for aesthetics, or cultural refinement
- Black Americans who colonized Liberia in the 19th century had high death rates from local diseases – suggesting that sub-Saharan Africans, perhaps did not have any genetic protection from the diseases prevalent in the area at the time.
- In pre-Industrial England, workers often worked 10 or more hours a day for 300 days in a year. The work was also often continous and monotonous. In comparison, hunter-gatherers had much lower labor inputs. For instance, they might conusme about 1700 kilocalories a day, yet only “work” (i.e., hunt or forage) for less than two hours in a day – a remarkable return on labor input!
- Marshall Sahlin’s findings: hunter-gatherers have “primitive affluence” whereby they have an abundance of leisure, rather than material commodities.
2-Two essays stood out for me this week. The first is Elan Barenholtz’s essay You’re an LLM. Deal with it. Think about it. When you speak, most times, you only have a general idea of what you want to say. The exact order with which the words come out of your mouth is at best a very rapid prediction based on your experiences and personal history. Which is somewhat the same way LLMs work! The second is Ines Lee’s For anyone worried about being replaced by AI: The Theory of The T-Shaped Professional where she talks about being a T-shaped professional who can “can combine deep expertise in one area (the vertical stem of the “T”) and broad, functional knowledge across multiple disciplines (the horizontal bar of the “T”)”
