Chris von Csefalvay is a computational epidemiologist/data scientist working at the intersection of AI, epidemiology and public health.

Chris von Csefalvay

The year is 1959. Eisenhower is on his second term, Castro just kicked Batista out of the country and Ray Charles’s Let the Good Times Roll is topping the charts.

The 95% myth

Over at the work blog, I’m discussing what knowledge means for large language models (LLMs), and the ways in which we can leverage this knowledge dividend for better inference.  Read the full post here.

The knowledge dividend of large language models

The awesome thing about language is that, well, we all mostly speak it, to some extent or another. This gives us an immensely powerful tool to manipulate transformational tasks. For the purposes of this post, I consider a transformational task to be essentially anything that takes an input and is largel intended to return some version of the same thing. This is not a very precise definition, but it will have to do for now.

LAIR - Language As Intermediate Representation

As the new Omicron variant of concern of COVID-19 emerged over Thanksgiving week (of all times!), attention has been turning to Paxlovid (PF-07321332). If, like me, you torment yourself by perusing conspiracy theories, you might have heard it referred to as Pfizermectin.

Peace, love, Paxlovid and ‘Pfizermectin’

Tip  If you’re here for the DOI matching script, the link is here. Quarto is a great tool for reproducible research. It is also a great tool for building websites. After about a decade of Wordpress-based websites, I’ve moved to Quarto primarily for two reasons. First, most of my content is largely static.

Quarto project scripts are awesomeness

There’s a notion in artificial intelligence known as Moravec’s paradox: it’s relatively easy to teach a computer to play chess or checkers at a pretty decent level, but near impossible to teach it something as trivial as bipedal motion. (Hassabis 2017) The sensorimotor tasks that our truly wonderful brains have mastered by our second birthday are much harder to teach a computer than something arguably as ‘complex’ as beating a chess grandmaster.

The hardest AI problem you’ve never heard of.

It appears that in what is clearly a wonderful little PR stunt, a Polish rum company managed to do a Sophia and appoint an ‘AI-driven’ ‘robot’ as its ‘CEO’.  The other guilty party to this pile of steaming bovine excrement is Hanson Robotics, famous for giving us Sophia, the “world’s first robot citizen”. Most of what I’m saying here goes just as well for Sophia.

The skeuomorphic fallacy

Yesterday, I completed a marathon on the SkiErg, with a pretty respectable time (see results here). I know I can do better, and I know I

 will

do better. On the other hand, this was a marathon where I pretty much did everything wrong. And that was sort of an instructive experience in its own right. The title is somewhat misleading. Not much went wrong – the marathon itself was smooth sailing.

How to do a SkiErg marathon entirely the wrong way (but still finish)

There’s something special about language. It is ‘our own’, it is ‘us’, in a profound way, and quite surprisingly, more so than art. I was deeply struck by this when I first saw reactions to large generative language models that created realistic, human-ish prose.

Beyond Broca

There might be valid concerns about the mRNA vaccines. Then there are the clearly insane ones, such as the claims that it involves the injection of a microchip. The argument that mRNA vaccines are a form of ‘gene therapy’ are somewhere in the middle, and that makes responding to it somewhat difficult.

Why the COVID-19 vaccines are not gene therapy

The temple of Asclepios, the Greek god of healing arts and medicine, at Epidaurus was pretty much the ancient Greek world’s equivalent of the Mayo Clinic. It then tells us a lot about the Greek worldview of healing that one of the things the temple complex prominently featured was a theatre. The Greeks believed in drama therapy, but in perhaps a slightly different way of how we think of it today.

The Moral Pulse of the Machine

Every year, the Commandant of the Marine Corps publishes a reading list of books that often only bear on warfighting tangentially at best. The idea behind this is that those entrusted with the lives of servicemembers should have an understanding of the world that goes beyond the profession of arms. In much the same way, I have been advising data scientists to go beyond professional literature.

Five non-data-science books for data scientists

I used to be on Quora. I’m not anymore. But I used to be. And I wrote some answers. Here are some of my favourites, categorised by field… sort of.

 AI

If I wrote an AI and trained it to score 200 on a standardized IQ test, what could a human of 100 IQ still do better? Read the full answer here. Will true AI come before the ability to completely simulate a human brain? Is there a difference? Read the full answer here.

My favourite Quora answers

In my latest post for the Starschema blog, I discuss the end of dashboards, and what comes next:  Read the full post here.

As we may see: the world after dashboards

In the middle of the green and pleasant countryside of England lies a small piece of commons –– land, that is, over which a number of people share certain rights. In this hypothetical scenario, it’s six farmers,  to . Each of them has a hypothetical cow, which differs from ordinary cows in that it grazes a fixed unit, and produces a fixed amount of milk (unlike real cows, which vary wildly in their input and output parameters, or so I’m told).

Ransomware attacks as n-person prisoner’s dilemmas

Say you’re busing tables and you’re trying to pass someone in a wheelchair. What do you do? Do you say “excuse me” and wait for them to move? Do you say “excuse me” and then try to pass them? Do you just try to pass them? Do you say nothing and just try to pass them? All of these are, actually, pretty legitimate answers. Now, say you’re a robot.

What I learned from getting bodied by a robot.

Asemantic Induction of Hallucinations in LLMs

There’s a style of visual design I’m inordinately fond of called Raygun Gothic. It’s hard to describe what the hell exactly one needs to be on to enjoy it, but think of it like the aesthetic from the latter Fallout games with a more optimistic outlook on the future. Gibson described it as “the future that never was”, and I think that’s a pretty apt description. We get these competing futures in technology all the time.

Prompt Engineering: The Art of Yesterday

It’s not every day that you find out you have climbed the exalted heights of another discipline. My work is pretty interdisciplinary, but it shocked me, too, that I’m apparently holding forth on neoliberalism and the epistemic question in African universities (archive link):  This, of course, came at some surprise to me, as I have never written anything on the topic.

Stochastic parrots, cap and gown edition

In the first four entries (1 2 3 4) of this sequence, I have focused primarily on what LLMs aren’t, can’t, won’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t. It’s probably time to conclude this series by that much awaited moment in all stories, where the darkest night finally turns into a glorious dawn, where we finally arrive at the promised land, where we finally get to talk about what LLMs

 could

be. What I see as the most successful potential model of

Teams of Rivals

My recent post on the Starschema blog discusses the need for better data products to tackle future pandemic challenges:  Read the full post here.

Data for the next pandemic

I have probably spent more time looking at Poussin’s

 Dance to the Music of Time

than any other work of art. Sneaking off to the Wallace Collection in London and just looking at the

 Dance

was my comfort activity while living in London – a time that was not exactly devoid of its trials. It’s not, by any measure,

 great

art, insofar as such judgments can be made with any objectivity.

The Lyre of Hephaestus

In a recent paper that has attracted the interest of popular media as well, Fabio Urbina and colleagues examined the use (or rather, the abuse) of computational chemistry models of toxicity for generating toxic compounds and potential chemical agent candidates.(Urbina et al. 2022) Urbina and colleagues conclude that Urbina, Fabio, Filippa Lentzos, Cédric Invernizzi, and Sean Ekins. 2022.

A different shade of grey

I love posts that allow me to merge some of my addictions.

Auto-DOI for Quarto posts via Rogue Scholar

Yesterday, I completed a marathon on the SkiErg, with a pretty
respectable time ([see results
here](https://log.concept2.com/profile/177991/log/79965221)). I know I
can do better, and I know I *will* do better. On the other hand, this
was a marathon where I pretty much did everything wrong. And that was
sort of an instructive experience in its own right.

The title is somewhat misleading. Not much went wrong -- the marathon
itself was smooth sailing. At a 2:34.6 pace (min/500m), it was one of my
better very long distance pieces -- [my ranked half-marathon pace at the
time was 2:30.7](https://log.concept2.com/profile/177991/log/79735748),
and that was a very intentional, very prepared piece. There were also
really no unexpected surprises in the process. On the other hand, I
built up to this marathon the in worst way possible.

::: {#what-worked-for-me .section .level1}
# What worked for me

It's probably important to be realistic ahead of all: I did go into this
madness with some assets.

- For one, I'm a [multiple world record holder in my adaptive
 class](https://www.concept2.com/skierg/motivation/records/adaptive-world?event=&gender=M&age_category=30&adaptive=31&op=Search&form_id=concept2_record_search_form#results).
 I know a thing or three about the SkiErg, and as a former rower, I've
 got every rower's love-hate relationship with the erg.
- I'm a former multisport athlete, and I've been doing a lot of long
 distance pieces. I know how to cope with the boredom. Most people who
 go into a marathon have done a half, and maybe a 30k piece. I've done
 several split marathons in the past few weeks, as well as several 30k
 pieces.
- I'm probably in a pretty good state of overall fitness. I have enough
 of a gym habit to qualify as not exactly a couch potato. There's a lot
 you can get away with if you have a decent
 ![](https://latex.codecogs.com/png.latex?VO_%7B2_%7Bmax%7D%7D), and
 even though I'm in a wheelchair, I do enough activity to stay in good
 enough cardiovascular fitness.
- I have an incredible boredom tolerance. Marathons are primarily
 psychological: we're just not used to doing the same one thing,
 without interruption, for 3-5 hours anymore.
- I guess insofar as there's such a thing as a genetic predisposition to
 be good at long distance physical activity, I've got the right genes.
 My dad is a multi-marathon athlete, so I likely have the right
 physiology.

::: {.quarto-embed-nb-cell}
::: {.cell execution_count="3"}
::: {.cell-output .cell-output-display}
::: {#fig-skierg-marathon .quarto-figure .quarto-figure-center .anchored}
<figure class="figure">
<img
src="https://chrisvoncsefalvay.com/posts/skierg-marathon/index_files/figure-html/fig-skierg-marathon-output-1.png"
class="img-fluid figure-img" />
<figcaption>Figure 1: Stroke level data for the SkiErg
marathon.</figcaption>
</figure>
:::
:::
:::

[Source: skierg-marathon.ipynb](skierg-marathon.ipynb.html){#nblink-1
.quarto-notebook-link}
:::
:::

::: {#how-not-to-do-a-marathon .section .level1}
# How not to do a marathon

There are generally three commonly accepted things to do for a good long
distance piece:

- get some rest,
- carb load, and
- if you're not doing an organised race, have someone check in on you
 and help with things like hydration.

I've done exactly zero of these things. For starters, I did my marathon
in the middle of 75 Hard, which in retrospect was not the best of ideas,
as it meant that (1) I wouldn't be able to take days off to rest, and
(2) I wouldn't be able to carb load as that would be outside my diet.
I've also decided to do all this while my better half was away visiting
family, so I was pretty much on my own.

At 2am.

::: {.quarto-embed-nb-cell}
::: {.cell execution_count="6"}
::: {.cell-output .cell-output-display}
::: {#fig-skierg-marathon-regression .quarto-figure .quarto-figure-center .anchored}
<figure class="figure">
<img
src="https://chrisvoncsefalvay.com/posts/skierg-marathon/index_files/figure-html/fig-skierg-marathon-regression-output-1.png"
class="img-fluid figure-img" />
<figcaption>Figure 2: Stroke level data of stroke length (metres) versus
stroke duration (seconds).</figcaption>
</figure>
:::
:::
:::

[Source: skierg-marathon.ipynb](skierg-marathon.ipynb.html){#nblink-2
.quarto-notebook-link}
:::

Yes, that's not a joke -- I decided to do my marathon at a time when the
world is falling apart at the seams, and so the only time I could find
during which I could hope not to be interrupted with the latest crisis
was late at night. So I woke up at 0130 hours, much to my dog's chagrin,
and headed down to my apartment building's gym to torture myself for a
few hours before the sun came up. Fortunately, the world decided to
behave for those three and a half hours.

I tried to counteract this to some extent by doing something I generally
dislike: carbohydrate gels. A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away,
I ran the Watford half-marathon when I was still into actually running
(by far the only reason I remember *where* that half-marathon was is
because it was so miserable). It was a bitter cold day, and it actually
started *snowing* in the middle of the damn thing. To keep myself mostly
sane and nourished, I took some of these 100kcal sachets of carbohydrate
gel. What I didn't know, of course, was that that stuff would glue your
mouth together unless you consumed enough water... which I didn't. Bad
idea. On the other hand, I am now older, wiser and able to afford much
better and less sticky-tastic carbohydrate gels, so I thought I was
going to have some. I didn't feel much of an effect one way or the
other. At one 100kcal sachet for every hour, I paced it a little slower
than is commonly recommended (one sachet per every 45 minutes seems to
be the consensus recommendation), but really didn't feel much of an
effect either way. In retrospect, I probably wouldn't bother doing it
again.

As for rest, the best I could do is not do a long distance piece the day
before the marathon. Indeed, I only did a relaxing 2k that day, which is
about a fifth of my average daily SkiErg distance. Nevertheless, I think
it was quite clear that with my ultra-low-carb diet, no carb loading and
at best minimal replenishment (my average burn rate was around
5-600kcal/hr, and I took in 100kcal via the carbohydrate gels, so pretty
much a drop in the ocean), I was running on fumes for most of it.

::: {.quarto-figure .quarto-figure-center}
<figure class="figure">
<img
src="https://chrisvoncsefalvay.com/posts/skierg-marathon/IMG_8541.jpeg"
class="img-fluid figure-img" />
<figcaption>Incidentally, my marathon time is also the SIT2 world record
for my age group.</figcaption>
</figure>
:::
:::

::: {#takeaways .section .level1}
# Takeaways

My key takeaway from this experience was that we all should do a
marathon under suboptimal conditions. Yes, doing a long distance piece
at Bataan death march levels of calorie deficit is probably not super
healthy, but you learn some interesting things about your body in the
process. For starters, I think it was an interesting illustration of the
fact that one's overall level of fitness -- especially
![](https://latex.codecogs.com/png.latex?VO_%7B2_%7Bmax%7D%7D) --
matters a lot more than game day conditions. You can get away with a lot
if you're fit enough, up to and including running the show in quite
sub-optimal circumstances.
:::

::: {#quarto-appendix .default}
::: {.section .quarto-appendix-contents}
## Citation {#citation .anchored .quarto-appendix-heading}

<div>

::: {.quarto-appendix-secondary-label}
BibTeX citation:
:::

``` {.sourceCode .code-with-copy .quarto-appendix-bibtex}
@misc{csefalvay2023,
 author = {Chris von Csefalvay},
 title = {How to Do a {SkiErg} Marathon Entirely the Wrong Way (but
 Still Finish)},
 date = {2023-10-13},
 url = {https://chrisvoncsefalvay.com/posts/skierg-marathon},
 doi = {10.59350/68s7b-8c778},
 langid = {en-GB}
}
```

::: {.quarto-appendix-secondary-label}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
:::

::: {#ref-csefalvay2023 .csl-entry .quarto-appendix-citeas}
Chris von Csefalvay. 2023. "How to Do a SkiErg Marathon Entirely the
Wrong Way (but Still Finish)." <https://doi.org/10.59350/68s7b-8c778>.
:::

</div>
:::
:::