Not That I’d Actually Do Such A Thing, No No Of Course Not
Consider a completely hypothetical and obviously made-up scenario:
Say you’re a middle-aged guy who is teaching a subject (oh, say, statistics) at a university in some city in India (oh, say, Pune). Say you’re asked to fill out a file with inanities to satisfy completely nonsensical bureaucratic requirements.
Said file must be filled up by referring to two other, much larger files. The specific content can be found by going through these much larger files, editing located content a little bit, and rewriting some lines to fit some highly specific requirements. Let’s imagine (because remember, this is a make-believe exercise) that those requirements are specified by some regulatory body.
Remember, this is all hypothetical! Keeping that important fact in mind, let’s continue with our completely made-up exercise.
This little thing that I am describing is not just an exercise. It is also a disease. It is an old, all-too-familiar disease that afflicts all Indian organizations above a particular size. The good news is that it is non-fatal and mostly harmless to your physical health. The bad news, alas, is that it will completely destroy your enthusiasm and your common sense.
It goes by the name FillThisOutInTriplicate-itis, and if you are an Indian over the age of 18, you’ve suffered it multiple times. Hell, you’ll probably get a bout before this day is done.
The Good News
We live today in a day and age in which there is a cure for this exercise/disease. If you follow the steps I describe below faithfully, it is possible to get completely cured.
Step 1: Make sure you know where the files you will need to do battle with are located. These could be on your computer, or they could be on your Google Drive, either way is fine.
Step 2: Share these files with ChatGPT, and turn Agent mode on.
Step 3: Tell Agent, using the English language, what you’d like it to do. This is important: think of agent as your helpful human assistant, and give it instructions the way you would when speaking to a human assistant. For example, here is what I would have told it if this were, you know, a real exercise:
” Search impossibly_big_MSWord_doc for content_I’m_looking_for. Modify it to suit hypothetical_accreditation_body_requirements. Put modified content in small_MSWord_doc_I_have_to_submit, formatted as per instructions mentioned at the start of small_MSWord_doc_I_have_to_submit. Once done, give me a link to download small_MSWord_doc_I_have_to_submit”
Step 4 (Optional, but Optimal at 4pm): Make yourself a nice cup of chai
Step 5: Get small_MSWord_doc_I_have_to_submit.docx from ChatGPT, and email it to hypothetical recipient
Step 6: Get back to actual work, such as writing a blog post, for example.
Optional exercise for Econ students: what does this have to do with price, income and substitution effects? Discuss.