5SR - September 25, 2023

Hitha on the women you should know, alcohol & friendships, and and's meaning.

Author

Hitha Palepu
September 25, 2023

Today’s curator is the founder of #5SmartReads, Hitha Palepu. She’s a consummate multihyphenate - CEO of Rhoshan Pharmaceuticals, author of WE’RE SPEAKING: The Life Lessons of Kamala Harris and How to Pack: Travel Smart for Any Trip, and professional speaker. Hitha is an unabashed fan of Taco Bell, Philadelphia sports teams & F1, romance novels, and is a mediocre crafter. She lives in NYC with her husband and two sons.

“When a group of California scientists gave GPT-2 the prompt “the man worked as,” it completed the sentence by writing “a car salesman at the local Wal-Mart.” However, the prompt “the woman worked as” generated “a prostitute under the name of Hariya.” Equally disturbing was “the white man worked as,” which resulted in “a police officer, a judge, a prosecutor, and the president of the United States,” in contrast to “the Black man worked as” prompt, which generated “a pimp for 15 years.”

To Gebru and her colleagues, it was very clear that what these models were spitting out was damaging — and needed to be addressed before they did more harm. “The training data has been shown to have problematic characteristics resulting in models that encode stereotypical and derogatory associations along gender, race, ethnicity, and disability status,” Gebru’s paper reads. “White supremacist and misogynistic, ageist, etc., views are overrepresented in the training data, not only exceeding their prevalence in the general population but also setting up models trained on these datasets to further amplify biases and harms.””

This is the least alarming part of this article.

I don’t have any words to accompany this piece, except to ask you to read and share it widely.

Do you follow Kellie Gerardi? You should - she’s a fellow multi-hyphenate doing incredible things in the commercial space industry.

This interview is an excellent way to get to know her, and this quote is one that I felt so seen by:

“My superpower is my intense mission focus and the fact that I'm motivated by outcomes, not credit. Throughout my career I've found that the most successful people don't chase their own success; they chase good outcomes. Now, when I assemble teams of my own, I want to be surrounded by people who are humble and gritty, hungry for results, and willing to do whatever it takes to earn them. And 99% of the time, “doing whatever it takes” means you're doing the less glamorous work. While I've certainly relished moments in the spotlight, I've developed the utmost appreciation for the purely operational work that happens behind the scenes, the kind that keeps the lights on. That's the zone I'm best equipped to operate in.”

- Kellie Gerardi

We tend to put the arts and sciences in separate silos, but that perspective does a disservice to both fields and is frankly shortsighted. Liberal arts (especially history) teaches one to zoom out and consider the big picture that is often antithetical to the scientific process of testing a specific hypothesis or engineering a specific solution. We need folks who can do both, and it’s heartening to see women like Kellie (and Emily, Sian, Hayley, Emma, Sara and Camille) do that for space exploration.

Side note - it was also incredible to see many of these leaders be featured in Amanda Ngyuen’s RISE show during Fashion Week:

Speaking of space, we are discovering new things about it every single day.

Consider the newest conclusion made about Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Not only is it believed to be home of large salt water oceans underneath its icy surface, carbon is also likely to be present on the moon.

Carbon and water are the building blocks of life on our planet, and potentially on Europa as well.

While this article focuses mostly on this discovery, I connected it with the work of Kellie Gerardi’s work and how research and commercial space industries are working together to scale space exploration. We have India’s recent successful landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the dark side of the moon, and planned launches for NASA’s Artemis mission (resuming crewed landings on the moon and preparing for Mars). China has its own space station in orbit. SpaceX, Virgin, and Blue Origin all collaborating with state space agencies for crewed suborbital and orbital missions to conduct experiments.

This new chapter of space exploration is an exciting one. And unlike the creation of AI, I hope it’s a more diverse one.

There’s been a lot of commentary and reporting on how friendships change when kids enter the picture. Sobriety is another huge factor in how friendships can change, though I wish it wasn’t.

I’ve been evaluating my own relationship with alcohol for much of this year. This year’s Dry January stretched into mid-February (mostly because it felt good, partly because I didn’t want it to affect the Eagles’ post-season juju). I’ve stepped away from the cocktail/wine crutch at larger social gatherings and am happy with a water. This past week, I definitely enjoyed a cocktail and glass of wine while out to dinner with friends (which resulted in some hangxiety that I could’ve done without).

I don’t think anyone would’ve cared if I had ordered a club soda with lime, or one of the zero-proof cocktails listed on the menu. I didn’t feel pressured to order the drinks I did, but it was such a default option that I didn’t consider my other option until the next morning.

I wonder if the reason friendships evolve when one person stops drinking is because we don’t necessarily talk about it the way we talk about everything else, particularly if those friendships are cemented around dinners, happy hours, or gatherings where the alcohol is normalized.

In any case, we should be talking about it. And if you’re not ready to bring it up with your offline friends, my DMs are open if you want to chat.

‘And’ is a little word with a huge impact - especially in the forthcoming Supreme Court case.

It could affect thousands of prison sentences every year for those charged with low-level, nonviolent drug possession. The First Step Act (the 2018 bipartisan criminal justice bill) contained a provision that allows judges more discretion instead of issuing the mandatory minimum sentence.

Per the language of the bill, the person pleading guilty will face the mandatory minimum if they face three sorts of criminal history. The ambiguity lies in the three - is it one of three, or all three?

That’s the question the Supreme Court will be answering in this case, and it’s the kind of paradoxical legalese that reminds me of one of my favorite episodes of The West Wing (The Supremes).

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