Am I on the Right Path?

I find myself back in a familiar feeling liminal space once again. In previous turns, I was at different points in my career trajectory. Looking back over the last 20 years or so, I see that I have covered a large amount of ground. Now, I am worried that maybe I had set off on a wrong trajectory early on and am currently lost.

Looking back I realize that given the chance I would not change a thing in my past so being on the wrong path is difficult to fathom.

The first turn occurred when I was finishing my PhD and starting my career. I had to find those first footholds as a novice mountaineer to ascend that first vertical cliff wall to establish my new career persona. The feeling was more like the emerging from the chrysalis as a new butterfly.

The second time occurred when I was liberated from corporate life. Looking back at this time, I realized that instead of originally emerging from a chrysalis in my PhD years. I had been more like a dragonfly with that first transition being the egg to the nymph stage. The persona that I had formed over those years was another transformation of the nymph. I was changing, but I was still a nymph that was constrained to the water.

Now, enter a new technology.

When large language models appeared, the public reaction ranged from cynical skepticism, parlor trick amusement, or new oracle. I had a different or minority view of the technology. As a modeler and data scientist, I instantly recognized the architecture.

In my professional world, I piece together disparate biological data from different domains to predict how a molecule behaves in humans. The predictions are used in clinical trials to select doses that are safe, select how often to dose and which dosing regimen is efficacious. As clinical data is collected, the model is further refined.

I believe that conceptually what I model and what large language models (LLM) are similar even though LLMs probe the high-dimensional parameter space of recently recorded human thought.

Large language models are trained over a vast corpus of data taken from literature across domains, social media, code, and forums. The model takes your prompt as an initial condition and simulates a response based on prediction of the next word. This is all based on fractured human knowledge.

Overnight, everyone became a novice modeler operating a high-dimensional epistemic simulator with zero formal modeling background. More critically, the software offered no way to evaluate the goodness of fit. There were no residual plots, no standard errors, and no diagnostic readouts to indicate whether the parameter distributions held firm or where high degrees of uncertainty in the readout existed.

Without a modeling background or basic diagnostic output from the software, users would default into three general bins. They would either accept the output as an oracle proclamation, dismiss it as slop, or interpret the variance in the output as a hallucination.

Over my experience, I discovered that every model is flawed, but can still be useful as described by George Box (1976). Here I am at this new liminal spot with this new technology. Why not see if the new technology can help me navigate forward? Where could I explore my world with this new tool? What could it mean for new potential directions?

At the present moment, I feel drained (competent-yet-drained) on my current track. I see the potential to shift my direction with AI.

Could I finally make that transformation to a dragonfly?

Pattern Recognition gone Amok?

Recently, my wife and I went out shopping for seasonings to make salsa from our remaining tomatoes, onions, and peppers harvested from the garden. During the shopping, she decides to pick up hand soap to refill the stations at home.

She reached for a bottle of soap and a bottle of another cleaner fell to the floor. Upon hitting the floor, the plastic cap broke and cleaner spilled in the aisle. We picked it up and looked for some help. We then went to check out. Behind the counter another employee was starting to copy a key for another customer, and the box with the keys fell to the floor. We paid and went out to breakfast.

At the restaurant, someone was grabbing a plastic cup to serve ice coffee. She went to add ice to the cup and she lost her grip. The cup flew through the air and bounced on the floor. Just weird how these three events all happened within a half-hour. I am not used to seeing that many cases of people dropping things in a short time period and at separate locations. No one observed the previous event.

I was working on this article based on my first long form chapter (Finding-my-way) and three different items dropped to the floor. Just to remind you the items were cleaning solution (Mr. Clean), keys, and an empty plastic cup. I am sure that other doomsday symbolism could come to mind.

At this point, I am reminded of the Charles Dickens' classic, "A Christmas Carol."

A Christmas Carol - Visit by Jacob Marley

The nightly portion of the story starts with a visit from the spirit of Jacob Marley. Jacob Marley is dragging long chains that were formed over his lifetime based on his narrow pursuit of money.

In my case, the narrow pursuit through corporate life left me competent but drained and the recognition that my career trajectory did not match what my true self was looking for. As I look at work with any connection to my experience, the thrill just drains.

Mentally, this feels like pulling long chains.

You can do the work, but it is taxing.

In the story, Jacob warns Ebenezer Scrooge about being visited by three spirits. In my case, it was three dropped items. All within a short time.

Visit from Christmas Past

The first item to fall to the floor was the container of the cleaner. The container hit the floor and the yellow fluid started coming out of the container. Grabbed and righted, but damage done. I have not attributed a meaning to the color of the fluid. Just that the fluid was a cleaning agent.

I believe that this closely resembles my time earning my PhD.

I gravitate to this point of my life not as a prideful thing though many may read into that. That time of life was very difficult. Back then life felt like rafting down a Class IV rapid.

There was the pressure and excitement of being newly married. My son was born during my first year of taking graduate classes. He critiqued my classes by falling asleep as I read my organic chemistry text aloud. I did not blame him. I barely could stay awake while reading it.

My wife worked midnight shifts while I worked at a job in a new field. I was pushing to do everything possible to continue progressing in corporate life. In the home life and for myself, frayed nerves were constant, but coffee helped. At least, I told myself that the coffee helped.

My wife understood or at least tolerated the circumstances and gave me some latitude to work on my hobby or my time investment.

Just to add some more excitement to our water ride, emotional storms added to the river depth as we made sure that we spent time with both of our families. Kind of hard to not let the new bundle of joy experience the family, but this meant that we drove a few hours on weekends on top of everything else. The good thing was we only had to drive to one area. The bad thing was that it was one area so everyone wanted us to visit.

On top of all the previous points, we bought a starter home and improved it in our spare time. My father and brother made the trips down to the house occasionally and we made a ton of improvements.

My wife wanted to stop working the night shift and pursued her nursing degree during this time.

When I circle back to this time, I have no idea how the pieces came together. They just did. Somehow, we survived the chaos and still married.

Now, you may wonder why the cleaner hitting the floor reminds me of this time. The basic thought is that yes the cleaner was spilled, but that part of the floor was cleaned by it. During my time with everything going on, my mind was cleaned by the turbulence of life. There was no time to get into the dregs of any aspect of life at that point. I was living in the now so no chance for the daily grind to settle in.

You kept going. Life kept it that way. The small step compounded. Doubt was washed away. You just kept walking forward from one aspect to another.

The next article will cover the falling of the keys (Christmas Present) and the empty cup (Christmas Future).