STUMP - Death and Taxes with Meep - Podcast

Video Description

One element that sets actuaries apart from related professions is our strict adherence to professionalism standards. Unlike the broad classification of "data scientists," we actuaries may sometimes perceive our precepts and actuarial standards as constraints limiting new technologies' full potential.

Using recent releases by the American Academy of Actuaries, the Society of Actuaries, and the Casualty Actuarial Society, I (Mary Pat Campbell) explore how actuaries can uphold these high standards while venturing into new technological areas, preserving our reputation for dependable results and high-quality insights. Furthermore, as a cautionary example, I examine instances where the lack of checks and controls in technological applications led to failures.

This was given as a pre-recorded segment at the 2024 Actuarial Tech Summit, hosted by Full Stack Actuarial: https://fullstackactuarial.com/

Feel free to skip the first couple of minutes, which was a buffer to wait for attendees to show up.

Slides

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AI Whoopsies

The famous Woodrow Wilson In-Law, Hunter DeButts

ChatGPT, non-Expert Witness

19 Nov 2024, Volokh Conspiracy: Apparent AI Hallucinations in AI Misinformation Expert's Court Filing Supporting Anti-AI-Misinformation Law

Minnesota recently enacted a law aimed at restricting misleading AI deepfakes aimed at influencing elections; the law is now being challenged on First Amendment grounds in Kohls v. Ellison. To support the law, the government defendants introduced an expert declaration, written by a scholar of AI and misinformation, who is the Faculty Director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Here is ¶ 21 of the declaration:

[T]he difficulty in disbelieving deepfakes stems from the sophisticated technology used to create seamless and lifelike reproductions of a person's appearance and voice. One study found that even when individuals are informed about the existence of deepfakes, they may still struggle to distinguish between real and manipulated content. This challenge is exacerbated on social media platforms, where deepfakes can spread rapidly before they are identified and removed (Hwang et al., 2023).

The attached bibliography provides this cite:

Hwang, J., Zhang, X., & Wang, Y. (2023). The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 20(2), 165-182. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2151234

But the plaintiffs' memorandum in support of their motion to exclude the expert declaration alleges—apparently correctly—that this study "does not exist":

No article by the title exists. The publication exists, but the cited pages belong to unrelated articles. Likely, the study was a "hallucination" generated by an AI large language model like ChatGPT….

27 Nov 2024, Volokh: Acknowledgment of AI Hallucinations in AI Misinformation Expert's Declaration in AI Misinformation Case

From the declaration filed today by the expert witness in Kohls v. Ellison (D. Minn.), a case challenging the Minnesota restriction on AI deepfakes in election campaigns:

[1.] I am writing to acknowledge three citation errors in my expert declaration, which was filed in this case on November 1, 2024 (ECF No. 23). I wrote and reviewed the substance of the declaration, and I stand firmly behind each of the claims made in it, all of which are supported by the most recent scholarly research in the field and reflect my opinion as an expert regarding the impact of AI technology on misinformation and its societal effects. Attached as Exhibit 1 is a redline version of the corrected expert declaration, and attached as Exhibit 2 is a redline version of the corrected list of academic and other references cited in the expert declaration.

[2.] The first citation error appears in paragraph 19 and cites to a nonexistent 2023 article by De keersmaecker & Roets. The correct citation for the proposition is to Hancock & Bailenson (2021), cited in paragraph 17(iv). The second citation error appears in paragraph 21, a citation to a nonexistent 2023 article by Hwang et al., and is identified by the Plaintiffs in their motion to exclude my declaration. The correct citation for that proposition is to Vaccari & Chadwick (2020), which appears in paragraph 20. The third citation error appears in Exhibit C to the declaration (ECF No. 23-1, at 39): the citation to Goldstein et al. lists the first author correctly, but the remaining authors are incorrect. The correct authors are Goldstein, J., Sastry, G., Musser, M., DiResta, R., Gentzel, M., and Sedova, K. I discovered the errors in paragraph 19 and Exhibit C when Plaintiffs brought the error in paragraph 21 to the Court's attention, and I re-reviewed my declaration.

[3.] I apologize to the Court for these three citation errors, and I explain how they came to be below. I did not intend to mislead the Court or counsel. I express my sincere regret for any confusion this may have caused. That said, I stand firmly behind all of the substantive points in the declaration. Both of the correct citations were already cited in the original declaration and should have been included in paragraphs 19 and 21. The substantive points are all supported by the scientific evidence and correcting these errors does not in any way alter my original conclusions.

…..

[11.] The two citation errors, popularly referred to as "hallucinations," likely occurred in my use of GPT-4o, which is web-based and widely used by academics and students as a research and drafting tool. "Hallucinated citations" are references to articles that do not exist. In the drafting phase I sometimes cut and pasted the bullet points I had written into MS Word (based on my research for the declaration from the prior search and analysis phases) into GPT-4o. I thereby created prompts for GPT-4o to assist with my drafting process. Specifically for these two paragraphs, I cannot remember exactly what I wrote but as I want to try to recall to the best of my abilities, I would have written something like this as a prompt for GPT-4o: (a) for paragraph 19: "draft a short paragraph based on the following points: -deepfake videos are more likely to be believed, -they draw on multiple senses, - public figures depicted as doing/saying things they did not would exploit cognitive biases to believe video [cite]"; and (b) for paragraph 21: "draft a short paragraph based on the following points: -new technology can create realistic reproductions of human appearance and behavior, -recent study shows that people have difficulty determining real or fake even after deepfake is revealed, -deepfakes are especially problematic on social media [cite]."

….

Academic GenAI Use

RetractionWatch: Papers and peer reviews with evidence of ChatGPT writing

Retraction Watch readers have likely heard about papers showing evidence that they were written by ChatGPT, including one that went viral. We and others have reported on the phenomenon.

Here’s a list — relying on a search strategy developed by Guillaume Cabanac, who has been posting the results on PubPeer — of such papers that we’ll keep updated regularly. We also recommend Alex Glynn’s Academ-AI. Have a suggested entry? Use this form.

STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Recently, the Chicago Teachers Union took a little field trip to Springfield, Illinois to lobby for a bunch of goodies. Too bad that Illinois can’t really afford all the stuff it already promised in the past, as taxpayers scatter to other states.

Episode Links

WSJ editorial: The Chicago Teachers Union Plays Hooky

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) professes to care about students, but the lessons it cares most about are political. On Wednesday hundreds of teachers played hooky and abandoned their students to lobby lawmakers in Springfield for an extra $1 billion they say the state owes the city.

The Chicago Public Schools granted the field trip as a paid day off at the union’s request. Nice non-work if you can get it. The CTU claims the state “isn’t fully funding its own equity formula.”

The “equity formula” in question is the Evidence-Based Funding (EBF) Illinois uses to determine how it allocates money to schools statewide. The law was signed by former Gov. Bruce Rauner as part of an agreement that launched Illinois’s Invest in Kids scholarship program. Lawmakers did the union’s bidding last year and killed Invest in Kids, which allowed the deduction from state taxes of a portion of donations for scholarships.

Wirepoints: Pritzker squeezes Democratic legislators: support tax hikes or expect cuts – Wirepoints

If you’ve been in Illinois long enough to go through a school district tax hike referendum, you’ll understand what’s going on right now as state lawmakers prepare to vote on the 2025 state budget.

In those tax hike referendums, local residents are often faced with threats from school administrators that go something like this: Support the multi-million property tax increase or else face cuts to popular activities including art, music and sports. The tactic works, as all too often voters give in to the false choice. (Real spending reforms, like cutting administrative bloat, are never offered.)

Gov. J.B. Pritzker is doing a version of that right now with state lawmakers who don’t agree with the nearly $1 billion in tax hikes he’s put into his proposed $52.7 billion budget. The governor wants to hike sports betting taxes by $200 million. He’s pushing for another $500 million from tax hikes on companies. And there’s another $93 million tax hike on ordinary residents. The governor is not allowing the individual income tax standard deduction to fully rise with inflation.

To get his way, the governor, via his proxy Sen. Andy Manar, has sent out a letter to his agencies and lawmakers that effectively says “vote for the tax hikes or I’ll cut your district’s grants by $800 million.” Those are grants in the budget, typically of several million dollars, that lawmakers get for their districts to butter up their voter base. If those grants get cut, those lawmakers can become targets. As the Belleville-News Democrat reported: “While Manar’s letter was addressed to “Agency Directors,” it was just as much a message to rank-and-file lawmakers – particularly those within the supermajority Democratic party.”

Oh well, I guess that almost $200 billion is gone with the wind.

Census links

Population Rebounds for Many Cities in Northeast and Midwest

Large cities in the Northeast and Midwest grew in 2023, reversing earlier population declines, according to Vintage 2023 Population Estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Cities with populations of 50,000 or more grew by an average of 0.2% in the Northeast and 0.1% in the Midwest after declining an average of 0.3% and 0.2%, respectively, in 2022. Those in the West went up by an average of 0.2% from 2022 to 2023. Cities in the South grew the fastest – by an average 1.0%.

“The population growth across the South in 2023 was driven by significant numeric and percentage gains among its cities,” said Crystal Delbé, a statistician in the Census Bureau’s Population Division. “Thirteen of the 15 fastest-growing cities were in the South, with eight in Texas alone.”

Topping the list of fastest-growing cities with a population of 20,000 or more: Celina, Texas, (near Dallas), whose population grew by 26.6%, more than 53 times that of the nation’s growth rate of 0.5%.

Meanwhile, San Antonio, Texas, added more people (roughly 22,000) than any other city in 2023, reclaiming its No. 1 spot on the list of gainers and pushing it close to the 1.5 million population milestone.

Amid these notable examples of growth in the South, other fast-growing cities saw their rates of population change slow. For example, population growth in Georgetown, Texas, slowed by more than one-fourth its population growth in 2022, from 14.4% to 10.6%. The same can be said for Kyle, Texas, whose population growth decreased by nearly 2.0% to 9.0% in 2023. 

How is Population Shifting in Cities/Towns in your State?

Illinois Policy Links

Illinois Policy: 9 YEARS OF DECLINE: EXPECT CHICAGO TO BE NO. 4 BEHIND HOUSTON BY 2035

3 IN 4 ILLINOIS COMMUNITIES LOST POPULATION IN 2023

Public Plans Database: Illinois

STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here’s the final fundraising graph: Totalled $2300 for 2023

Movember swag!

Racial gap for prostate cancer

Suicide and soldiers

11 Dec 2023 at The National Pulse: Suicide Is Consistently Killing More U.S. Soldiers Than Anything Else, Including War.

Suicide accounted for just under 40 percent of United States active military deaths as of December 2022, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which found that U.S. military suicide rates have dramatically increased over the past several decades.

Indeed, the current leading cause of death among servicemen is currently categorized as “self-inflicted,” with a total of 333 incidents last year. Suicide was recorded as almost ten percent higher in prevalence than accidents, of which there were 265.

If one goes to the reporting system, there were a total of 844 deaths (from anything) for 1,299,150 active duty members and 90,346 full-time National Guard members.

That translates to a death rate of 60.7 per 100,000. That’s all-cause.

Going to “self-inflicted”, that’s 333 deaths, and out of that many people, that translates to a rate of 24.0 per 100,000.

Going to my recent post on men’s trends of suicide by age in the U.S.:

Focusing solely on younger men:

A rate of 24.0 per 100,000 is actually lower than men’s rates in 2022, for ages 25 - 64 years old …. but this is just men alone.

Obviously, the numbers being reported for the armed forces include women as well. I just don’t know what the gender mix is.

They are correct that the trend is bad, though. It just happens to be bad for the outside population as well.

Thanks to all the donors!

STUMP - Meep on public finance, pensions, mortality and more is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.