Gary Smith

Luck Run Amok—Part 3

Gary Smith — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:30:15 GMT

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle argued that revolutions are usually caused by a widespread perception that the distribution of property is unequal and unfair. The United States checks the unequal box in that its economic inequality exceeds that in Tsarist Russia and the French Ancien Régime before their bloody revolutions.

It has been estimated that in pre-revolutionary Russia, the top 1% received 14% of national income; in the United States, it is now 20%. In pre-revolutionary France, the Roman Catholic Church and the nobility made up 3% of the population and owned 30% of the land. In the United States, the top 1% own 30% of the nation’s wealth.

Why don’t Americans take to the streets?

Luck Run Amok—Part 2

Gary Smith — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:24:57 GMT

Karl Marx popularized the utopian creed: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” In this idyllic world, everyone works for the good of society, with the fruits of their labor distributed freely—people taking what they need, and only what they need. We know how that worked out. When rewards are unrelated to effort, being a slacker is more appealing than being a worker. With more slackers than workers, not nearly enough is produced to satisfy everyone’s needs. A common joke in the Soviet Union was, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

Under the Soviet communist system, from 1921 to 1991, the central planning agency Gosplan concocted 5-year economic plans that were to be achieved by production quotas for individual businesses. Because the emphasis was on quantity, rather than quality, consumer products were generally poorly made. For instance, Soviet televisions had a reputation for overheating and catching fire.

Luck Run Amok—Part 1

Gary Smith — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:21:14 GMT

An advice columnist once wrote that, “Nothing shocks me anymore, especially when I know that 50% of the doctors who practice medicine graduated in the bottom half of their class.” This is like one of the Yogisms uttered by former Yankees catcher and manager Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over till it’s over; ” “You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you;” and “I knew the record would stand until it was broken.” Yogi’s observations are all true, meaningless, and funny because they are true and meaningless—just like 50% of doctors being in the bottom half of their class.

No matter what, 50% of all doctors, dentists, and dancers are in the bottom half of their class. That statistical fact doesn’t tell us anything at all about whether those in the bottom half are competent or incompetent, or whether they are significantly less competent than the above-average doctors.

It is the same with people who are in the top 1% in income or wealth. There is always a top 1%. The top 1% are only interesting to the extent that they are unlike the other 99%. As it turns out, they are different.

A Maddening Morass—Part 4

Gary Smith — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:15:12 GMT

What do all these administrators do? Just like at Autonetics, Pomona College’s administrators spend hours and hours preparing for and attending meetings where a new hire; new position, or new policy is discussed or introduced; progress reports are presented; workshops and activities are planned; rules are debated, written down, and disseminated; and new reporting systems are chosen. When a new reporting system is implemented, administrators hold half-day or all-day workshops explaining how data should be entered so that activities can be monitored.

Before students arrive on campus in the fall, administrators hold all-day workshops telling faculty how to advise students—and they pass out glossy booklets detailing all the resources available through the Dean of Students empire. Workshops are held throughout the year—sometimes multi-day—where administrators give faculty teaching tips. The facilitators have seldom taught at a place like Pomona or to students like Pomona students. That doesn’t matter.

I was once assigned to be the faculty representative on an 8-person committee that was supposed to make trivial decisions that could easily have been made by a single person. I soon learned the drill. We would talk among ourselves while we waited 20–30 minutes for the dean who was in charge of the committee to show up. She would eventually burst through the door, breathless and carrying an armful of papers. After a perfunctory apology for being late, the dean would tell us the decision she had made and pass out papers with her decision in writing. We were merely there to nod our heads in approval. The seven administrators on the committee duly nodded while I scratched my head, wondering why I was there. After three meetings, I stopped going. They didn’t seem to miss me.

A Maddening Morass—Part 3

Gary Smith — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:07:47 GMT

After obtaining my economics PhD, I taught at Yale for 7 years, the University of Houston and Rice simultaneously for 3 years, and Pomona College for 44 years. Early in my career, I taught classes, did research, and had almost no contact with administrators. It was what I had hoped for when I chose to become a professor.

In retrospect, I now realize that, historically, the top administrators at most schools came from the faculty. For example, Bill Brainard, my friend and Yale colleague, was chair of the economics department before becoming Yale’s provost for five years and then returning to the faculty. This rotating model has several advantages. The top administrators already know the college well, are responsive to faculty needs, and are less likely to be autocratic (knowing that they have a limited term and what goes round comes round). Yale—and other top schools—still select many of their top academic administrators from their faculty. Indeed, Williams College, arguably the top liberal arts college in the country, mandates that the Provost, Dean of the Faculty, and Dean of the College (the “super dean of students”) all be rotating positions filled by tenured Williams faculty.

However, most administrative jobs at most colleges and universities have now been taken over by a professional managerial class, people with little or no teaching experience who spend their days building their resumes so that they can climb the administrative ladder. The conventional way to build a resume is to build an administrative empire—the more bloat, the better: “I supervise a staff of XYZ with a budget of ZYX millions.”

When I came to Pomona College in 1981 there were 1,443 students, 174 tenured and tenure-track faculty, and 39 administrators (deans, associate deans, assistant deans and the like, not counting clerical staff, gardeners, dining-hall workers, and so on). In 2026, there were 1,730 students, 175 tenured and tenure-track faculty, and 358 administrators.

A Maddening Morass—Part 2

Gary Smith — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:11:54 GMT

My dad grew up in Porterville, a small, hot, and dusty town in California’s Great Central Valley. He was high school valedictorian, a feat somewhat diminished by the fact that there were only 12 seniors in Porterville’s one-room high school. One of his hobbies was building large wooden glider planes. He went to Cal Tech and then worked in Southern California’s booming aerospace industry, designing real planes and rockets. I went to Harvey Mudd College, a science and engineering school, fully expecting to follow in his footsteps. My summers at Autonetics convinced me not to.

I was initially surprised and then skeptical about the advice from Dave (my Autonetics mentor) to ditch science and engineering. I knew first-hand that scientists and engineers were still innovating. I soon learned first-hand that many of Autonetics’ managers weren’t doing anything particularly useful. When I asked Dave what Tom, Dick, or Harry was doing, the usual response was, “I’m not sure.” It wasn’t that Dave wasn’t paying attention. It was truly hard to pin down exactly what most managers, associate managers, assistant managers, and other administrators were doing.

Ironically, Dave set me loose on a project that saved Autonetics millions of dollars annually but also confirmed my skepticism about administrators. A few years earlier, some Autonetics admins had decided to implement a new computerized reporting system. Pretty much anything work-related that anyone did was recorded in the computer system. (No reporting of pinochle games, though.)

At the end of every month, an IBM System/360 crunched the data and prepared summary statistics; for example, the average number of daily phone calls made and received in different departments on different days of the week. The dozens of pages of statistical analysis were printed on fan-fold paper and then hand-delivered to managers to help them manage.

A Maddening Morass—Part 1

Gary Smith — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:43:11 GMT

When I was in college, I had a job each summer at an aerospace company called Autonetics, which was then a division of North American Aviation and is now part of Boeing. At the time, Autonetics was located in a large, otherwise empty field in Anaheim, California, and had 36,000 employees working on government contracts for navigation, radar, and other electronic systems.

Shorts and and T-shirts were not considered appropriate attire, so I had to buy slacks and a white shirt that I washed every night and hung in my shower to dry. At least I didn’t have to wear a jacket and tie.

The Autonetics facility was pretty much in the middle of nowhere, with one two-lane road leading in and out—which created considerable congestion and aggravation for workers who had to punch time clocks but couldn’t predict when they would arrive at work.

Some clever engineers came up with an ingenious solution—stagger the shifts at 15-minute intervals. For example, a few thousand workers clocked in at 8:00 in the morning and left at 5:00 in the afternoon; another few thousand arrived at 8:15 and left at 5:15; and so on.

One summer, I worked on a drafting table. All I remember about that summer is that we used cool German drafting pencils and it was boring. But I came back the next summer because the internship program rotated us through different positions.

Another summer, I worked with electronic gadgets in a five-person lab that could only be accessed via an electronic door-code that gave an advance warning when someone was coming inside. The idea was to give us time to hide any top-secret files and equipment. In realty, the warning system gave us time to turn off the radio that was playing music or broadcasting a baseball game and put away the cards we were using to play pinochle—a game that is similar to bridge but only uses 9s through Aces. (We played a six-person variant with four decks of cards and two 3-person teams.)

In His Own Words — Sam Altman

Gary Smith — Sat, 16 May 2026 18:14:08 GMT

Just a Good Guy
May 2015: text to Elon Musk: Been thinking a lot about whether it’s possible to stop humanity from developing AI. If it’s going to happen anyway, it seems like it would be good for someone other than Google to do it first.
December 2015: OpenAI mission statement: OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
March 2017: OpenAI is structured as a nonprofit because we don’t ever want to be making decisions to benefit shareholders. The only people we want to be accountable to is humanity as a whole… That’s why we’re a nonprofit.
May 2019: We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue.
Donald Trump
June 2016: Trump’s casual racism, misogyny and conspiracy theories are without precedent among major presidential nominees.
October 2016: Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to America….His racist, isolationist policies would divide our country, and American innovation would suffer. But the man himself is even more dangerous than his policies. He’s erratic, abusive, and prone to fits of rage.
January 2025: Watching [Trump] more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him…I’m not going to agree with him on everything, but I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!
Kissing A..
January 2023: tweet to Shivon Zillis, mother of four of Elon Musk’s children: BTW, good idea me to tweet something nice about Elon? Have been meaning to do this after he Dmd about not being in the photo from the first day of OpenAI. Just about how much I and others look up to him, how critical his early contributions to OpenAI are, etc.
February 2023: text to Elon Musk: you’re my hero….I am incredibly thankful for everything you’ve done to help—I don’t think openai would have happened without you.
A Stressed-Out Saint
May 2023: I have no equity in OpenAI . . . I’m doing this because I love it.
April 2026: I’m sure, like, being President of the United States would be a much more stressful job, but of all the jobs that I think I could reasonably do, this is the most stressful one I can imagine.
The Apocalypse
June 2015: I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world.
October 2023: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
October 2016: I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Forces, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.
April 2026: I’m very suspicious of powerful autocrats telling a story of fear to gang up on the weak.
The Savior
June 2023: [This] is the most exciting, most promising, coolest thing I think that humanity will have yet built. We can cure all diseases, we can get everybody a great education, better health care, massively increase productivity, huge scientific discovery, all of these wonderful things and we want to make sure that people get that benefit, and that benefit is distributed equitably.
July 2023: In a well functioning society, governments would be doing the AGI project and [nuclear] fusion and a whole bunch of things — and yet they’re not. So we either sit around and watch the gradual decline of state capacity and say ‘that’s a bummer’ and we’re just not going to have any more technical progress . . . or you do the next best thing and just build great companies.
October 2023: I think AGI will be the best tool humanity has yet created. With it, we will be able to solve all sorts of problems. We’ll be able to express ourselves in new creative ways. We’ll make just incredible things for each other, for ourselves, for the world, for kind of this unfolding human story.
September 2024: astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen.
November 2024: the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families, and can fully realize our creative potential. In a decade, perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today.
AGI is Here
September 2024: It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.
November 2024: Interviewer: “what’s to come [in 2025]?” Altman: AGI Yeah. Excited for that.
January 2025: We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.
August 2025: GPT-3 sort of felt to me like talking to a high school student… 4 felt like you’re kind of talking to a college student. GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert.
Bubble Bailout
February 2018: If you ask a founder how their company is doing, they always say, ‘Oh it’s great. We’re totally crushing it,’ and that’s almost never true.
August 2025: Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money, we don’t know who, and a lot of people are going to make a phenomenal amount of money.
November 2025: When something gets sufficiently huge…the federal government is kind of the insurer of last resort, as we’ve seen in various financial crises…given the magnitude of what I expect AI’s economic impact to look like, sort of, I do expect the government ends up as like the insurer of last resort.
May 2025: Congressional testimony: [The future of AGI] can be almost unimaginably bright, but only if we take concrete steps to ensure that an American-led version of AI, built on democratic values like freedom and transparency, prevails over an authoritarian one.
Words to Live By
April 2026: If you just do the naïve thing and say, “Never say anything that you’re not a hundred per cent sure about,” … it won’t have the magic that people like so much.

Credit: ChatGPT