Max Planck, the discoverer of the quanta of Quantum Mechanics tried in vain to persuade the physicists of Europe in the early 20th century that this discovery solved many of Newtonian physics' problems. Finally, he declared "The truth never triumphs, its opponents simply die out. Science advances one funeral at a time."
This more-recent Tweet demonstrates that was not unique to the early 20th century.
He’s right.pic.twitter.com/QOSZ2XD01q
— James Melville (@JamesMelville) May 21, 2022
From MiketheMadBiologist: if police are under no ethical obligation to endanger themselves in [school shootings, as they did in Uvalde] then we should stop pretending they’re warrior kings, and start treating them like they’re clerks at the DMV (nothing wrong with that job, but no one calls them Heroes).
(c) by Mark Dempsey
"Hey! He's naked!" - from a child on the parade route of the emperor displaying his new clothes.
.@ARKInvest must share more of our research about #artificialgeneralintelligence (AGI) and how it is likely to transform the way the world works. Within 6-12 years, breakthroughs in AGI could a accelerate growth in GDP from 3-5% per year to 30-50% per year. New DNA will win! https://t.co/RxVp8K4IK4
— Cathie Wood (@CathieDWood) May 22, 2022
The optimism over artificial intelligence (AI) rivals the optimism over tulips bulbs in Holland, railroads in the gilded age, and subprime mortgages and derivatives more recently. But the automation of important decisions still has significant problems.
For those unfamiliar with the concept of artificial intelligence, think of it as computers getting smart enough to program themselves. Tesla's automated driving "teaches" itself to recognize obstacles and routes. It's not that great, but it's young yet. We Americans are optimistic! ("Americans are a primitive people, disguised by the latest inventions" - George Santayana)
And that's just one problem. Buggy software plagues even the most primitive of applications. For example, if programmers divide by zero, without anticipating and correcting the outcome, a computer will keep suggesting larger and larger numbers to multiply, eventually consuming all the computing power available and crashing.
Similarly, some programs continue to consume the computer's memory as they process data until the computer crashes. This is called a "memory leak."
Oddly enough, there are (non-artificial) "bugs" in natural intelligence that are similar. One category is "supernormal stimuli." These are flaws in human and animal software that make those species susceptible to some fairly bizarre mistakes.
For example: Peahens simply cannot get enough of peacocks' tails. For peahens, size matters. To test this, some zoologists built artificial, clearly not-alive peacock models with tails so enormous they could not exist in nature. The peahens preferred the models to live peacocks.
Humans experience something similar with sugar. We can suck on one of those gigantic sugar-filled drinks all day, and our digestive software will never say "Hey! You have consumed enough calories!"
There's some indication that wisdom literature like the ten commandments, or the seven deadly sins, warned people off these supernormal stimuli, saying it's healthier to avoid them. Dierdre Barrett's book, Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose spends a lot of time explaining how restaurants seek to program their customers to want ever more sugar, salt, and grease, ignoring the health effects in pursuit of profit. The epidemic of obesity in America is the result of this Gresham's dynamic in food (bad food drives out good).
The political class's appeal to the electorate with these "can't get enough" stimuli is pervasive, too. Who can get enough safety, justice, or fairness? In pursuit of those goals, between 1982 and 2017, U.S. population increased 42%, but spending on police increased 187%.
Unlike "Law and Order," or "Perry Mason," police don't solve all the crimes--only about 15% in California--despite that massive surge in police spending. Those TV shows amount to revenge porn, and one result is that, with 5% of the planet's population, the U.S. has 25% of its prisoners. That's hugely expensive, and ineffective at reducing crime. Per-capita, the Canadians incarcerate about one seventh as many people, yet their crime rates are about the same as the U.S.
For one thing, Canada has single-payer healthcare, which means people don't need to resort to a life of crime to pay for their spouse's cancer treatment--the plot outline of Breaking Bad.
And speaking of justice, the Guardian even reports that artificial intelligence ("AI") is learning all our worst impulses. "Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (Compas), was much more prone to mistakenly label black defendants as likely to reoffend – wrongly flagging them at almost twice the rate as white people (45% to 24%), according to the investigative journalism organisation ProPublica."
As attractive (and slothful) as it is to automate decisions like the difficult ones in our justice system, automation is as prone to error as any human, sometimes moreso. Sloth, if you missed it, is one of the seven deadly sins, and one possible supernormal stimulus. We simply can't get enough large peacock tails...er, I mean relaxation.
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" - Yogi Berra
People expect AI to predict the future--for example, whether prisoners will reoffend. Yet it's widely acknowledged that AI simply reflects the prejudices of those who programmed its algorithms. The problem is that AI is a "black box" since it teaches itself, so those prejudices appear only after the damage is done. Can't get a loan because you're a person of color? Sorry, our algorithms are opaque, and just happen to be programmed by white engineers who are unaware how their programming ultimately results in bias.
The bottom line: no matter how sophistcated they become, we can't count on computers to automate our thinking for us. Just because we have achieved some momentum in this direction does not mean we can ignore the facts. It's taken millions of years for our natural software to evolve--granted perhaps not as speedy as current programming--but despite all that trial-and-error, we still have "bugs" in our software like supernormal stimuli.
And we still have the problem of ego: the emperor could have set aside his pride and ego, saying "Thanks child for pointing out my mistake. I'll go home and put some clothes on." He would have been more comfortable, too. Unfortunately, the fairy tale says he "grimly continued the parade," reminding us that it's still easier to fool people than to persuade them they've been fooled.
5/20/22 Responding to the Sacramento Bee story: "Newsom's inflation relief plan could drive prices up more" by Cathie Anderson and David Lightman
Your story about how refunds might drive inflation is a reminder of just how the pseudoscience of economics is absolutely bankrupt. Current economic orthodoxy says if our central bank (“the Fed”) raises interest rates it would solve shortages and supply chain problems like COVID and jammed ports. Hey, how about we start bleeding patients to heal them too?
There's never a complaint when that same central bank does the "Quantitative Easing" (asset purchases) that lead to inflation in asset prices, but let an ordinary human have some money and the inflation worries shriek from the headlines. The word "bizarre" hardly describes it.
Update [from nakedcapitalism.com]
The Physical Capacity Shortage View of Inflation Employ America (dk). From the executive summary:
Debates about the origin of inflation have so far focused on supply chain disruptions, excessive fiscal stimulus, and an unwillingness to work among the labor force at large. None of these accounts adequately capture the actual constraints fettering economic production and growth today, nor do they adequately explain where price inflation has most substantially materialized. Rather than inflation due to a shortage of labor, what we are seeing today is inflation mostly due to an acute shortage of physical capacity. US consumption and inflation are tightly linked to the constraints stemming from plant and equipment, which are often primarily located or manufactured overseas and subject to their own logistics constraints. If either of these become impaired, there is little ability to meet demand by redirecting production to domestic capacity.
(c) by Mark Dempsey
MMT is essential if we're to stop believing the notion that we can't afford to address climate because tax revenues, markets and government are simply not up to the task ahead. Here's a brief summary of MMT:
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| Note: This is a 3D image based on NASA data, not a photograph from space. All areas burned in one fire season, not all were burning simultaneously |
The Public Bank Solution by Ellen Brown recounts more public banking stories. Note: Banks do not lend the money on deposit. They create credit out of thin air.
The Bank of England will tell you that loans create deposits.
Imagine not being short of money to anticipate and mitigate climate change! What a concept!
From NakedCapitalism:
“What nudge theory got wrong” [Financial Times]. “[P]onder an advertising campaign from 1971 titled “Crying Indian”. This powerful TV commercial depicts a Native American man paddling down a river that is increasingly laden with trash. “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country,” says a voiceover. “And some people don’t. People start pollution. People can stop it.” The Native American man turns to the camera, a single tear rolling down his cheek. But the message was not what it seemed (and not just because the actor’s parents were in fact Italian): it was funded by some of the leading companies in food and drink packaging. The advert placed responsibility squarely on the shoulders of individuals making selfish choices. It wasn’t governments who didn’t provide bins, or manufacturers who made unrecyclable products. No, the problem was you…. If, however, the real problem is not individual but systemic, then nudges are at best limited, and at worst, a harmful diversion. Historians such as Finis Dunaway now argue that the Crying Indian campaign was a deliberate attempt by corporate interests to change the subject. Is behavioural public policy, accidentally or deliberately, a similar distraction? A look at climate change policy suggests it might be. Behavioural science is all too good at producing perfect icing for the policy cake; practitioners must never forget the cake itself.” • Unlike Marie Antoinette….
On trusting the process after it's openly failed
May 3
Sometimes when I am explaining the somewhat eclectic variety of topics I write about in my newsletter, compared to the work I did at other publications for many years, l joke that “I just ran out of ways to say the Senate shouldn’t exist.” I say “joke,” but it’s also a fact. I was blogging this in 2010. Nothing has fundamentally changed about how the Senate “works” since George Packer wrote the damning portrait of a dysfunctional institution that I reference in that old Salon piece. More than a decade later, Senate institutionalists still make up the majority of the Democratic caucus, and they still believe the way to make the institution work is not to change its rules but to somehow change the nature of the opposition.
So, in some sense, I gave up on the Senate. I spend less time carefully making the arguments for reforming it. I made them already, alongside lots of other smarter people with even better arguments, and the people in charge of the left-of-center party essentially tuned us all out, because they are institutionalists, and the institution can only be failed; it cannot be, by its very design, a failure.
When we all learned that the far-right majority on the Supreme Court plans to gut the right to privacy that undergirds legal abortion access in the United States, a few patterns emerged in people’s responses. Most liberals were furious. Others in the media were outraged—on behalf of the Supreme Court, because they feared the leaking of a draft opinion could undermine the public’s faith in the “legitimacy” of the institution.
Many of those takes were bad faith from conservatives sort of desperately reaching for a talking point, but some of them were quite sincere. This is the mindset of the institutionalist. It is important that people retain faith in our institutions, which does not mean that our institutions should work to earn people’s faith, but instead that people shouldn’t hear about it when they don’t. This attitude is especially common in lawyers, who, as a profession, turned “nothing is true, everything is permitted” into a professional ethic. And of course, many elected officials, and especially many Democrats, are lawyers
To their credit, most elected Democrats did not fret over the circumstances of the “leak.” By and large, they did their best to channel the fear and anger their constituents were feeling into useful political energy. Unfortunately, that sometimes looked like this, from Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, a New York Democrat and the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee:
Democrats: We’re angry and hurt, I know. But it’s not about filibuster, size of the court or what the Senate hasn’t passed. It’s about Republicans, not us. We can save our freedoms. But, it’s November, stupid.
— Sean Patrick Maloney (@spmaloney) May 3, 2022
This was probably the most ham-fisted (and hard to parse) example of the “vote harder” response to the news that the conservative Supreme Court majority plans to eliminate abortion rights this summer, before moving on to other rights in the months and years to come. “We can save our freedoms” as long as you, “stupid,” vote in November.
To paraphrase our former president, I want to be clear: “Vote harder” is not a bad message because it’s untrue. If more people voted for Democrats they would win more elections, and my preference is that Democrats win more elections than Republicans. “Vote harder” is a bad message because it’s annoying, and annoying people is a bad way to make them want to vote for you. At this point, it’s also clear that it’s bad messaging because it’s insufficient. A larger Democratic majority next year might pass a law protecting abortion rights. Barring a massive sea change in how Democrats govern, that hypothetical Congressional majority has no hope whatsoever of protecting that law from the existing Supreme Court majority.
One of the more consequential contradictions of the Democratic Party is that the vast majority of its staffers, consultants, electeds, and media avatars, along with a substantial portion of its electoral base, are institutionalists. They believe, broadly, in The System. The System worked for them, and if The System’s outputs are bad, it is because we need more of the right sort of people to join or be elected to enter The System. But when the party does manage to win majorities, it depends on support from a substantial number of anti-system people. Barack Obama defeated the Clintons with this sacred knowledge, before he started reading David Brooks.
Institutionalists, in my experience, have trouble reaching an anti-system person, because they think being against The System is an inherently adolescent and silly mindset. But believing in things like “the integrity of the Supreme Court” has proven to be, I think, much sillier, and much more childish.
In the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency a lot of very intelligent people tried to come up with ideas for how to change the Supreme Court, which is poised to spend years eroding the regulatory state and chipping away at civil rights. Expand it, perhaps. Or marginalize it. President Joe Biden, a committed institutionalist, formed a commission of legal scholars—from across the ideological spectrum, of course—to investigate what ought to be done about it. They failed to come up with any answers. “Lawmakers,” the commission wrote, “should be cautious about any reform that seems aimed at the substance of Court decisions or grounded in interpretations of the Constitution over which there is great disagreement in our political life.” You might be mad at the Court because of the decisions it produces, but it’s essential that everyone still trusts the processes that led to them.
This was a white flag. I think some people in the White House have some sick hope that the end of Roe will galvanize the midterm electorate. Something like that may indeed happen. But if they wish to understand why the president has been bleeding youth support for the last year they should try to imagine these young people (and “young”, at this point, has expanded to like 45) not as the annoying and hyper-engaged freaks they see on Twitter every day, but as ones they don’t see anywhere, because, having been urged to pay furious attention by people in the party, they discovered that those people had absolutely no realistic plans to overcome entrenched, systemic obstacles to progress. Maybe some of those voters went back to brunch. I suspect many of them went back to work brunch.
The legitimacy crisis is that our institutions are illegitimate. For my entire adult life, beginning with Bush v. Gore, our governing institutions have been avowedly antidemocratic and the left-of-center party has had no answer for that plain fact; no strategy, no plan, except to beg the electorate to give them governing majorities, which they then fail to use to reform the antidemocratic governing institutions. They often have perfectly plausible excuses for why they couldn’t do better. But that commitment to our existing institutions means they can’t credibly claim to have an answer to this moment. “Give us (another) majority and hope Clarence Thomas dies” is a best-case scenario, but not exactly a sales pitch.
Quoted in Naked Capitalism:
Roe vs Wade was settled in 1973
— Gritty is the Way (@Gritty20202) May 5, 2022
- Carter had a veto-proof supermajority in 1977–1979
- Carter had Dem Senate & House in 1979-1981
- Clinton had Dem Senate & House in1993-1995
- Obama had a supermajority in 2009
- Biden currently has Dem Senate & House
No codified protections.
While rallying for Rep. Henry Cuellar in Texas yesterday, Rep. Jim Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat said abortion shouldn't be a "litmus test" for the party. If Roe was overturned, performing an abortion in Texas would be punishable by life in prison. https://t.co/KnXtshGQb8
— Paul Blest (@pblest) May 5, 2022
For those interested in the Biblical take on abortion, here is an interesting Tweet thread.
Finally, here's an interesting take on a possible solution to SCOTUS' rejecting Roe v. Wade:
A friend asks an interesting question: Post-Roe, could Native Americans set up abortion clinics on tribal lands for anyone to use, much like they do with casinos, regardless of state law?
— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) May 5, 2022
From Matt Stoller's blog Big:
When I worked in Congress, one of the more illuminating experiences I had about the importance of the entertainment industry was with the United States Marshals Service, which is the Federal body that arrests people with outstanding warrants. The U.S. Marshals have lots of cool toys, like trucks and mini-battering rams, and they would sometimes bring Congressional staff along as they knocked down doors and arrested people. The idea was that Congress should know about the agencies they are funding. The military services do this too, showing Congressional staffers their various cool weaponry. The institutional goal is to have staffers go back to their boss and recommend more funding.
It was a weird experience, like canvassing in a political campaign, except the goal was to put people in jail. (And mostly no one was home.) Afterwards, I had a conversation with the guy leading the arrests where I asked when the U.S. Marshals got the money for their fancy equipment. He said that it happened in the early 1990s. Why? Well, he said, that was when the movie The Fugitive with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones came out, and that movie is why members of Congress understood what the U.S. Marshals did.
That’s the power of entertainment. The stories we tell shape what we think is possible, they shape our politics, they bound who we as a society consider ourselves to be, and they even help our legislators write laws.
And with that, last week, the antitrust enforcers held a listening session on consolidation in media and entertainment, and at that session, a TV creator named Adam Conover talked about how he was censored in telling a specific story. Conover’s show was called Adam Ruins Everything, and it was a blend of comedy and journalism, where he would walk viewers through a particular corner of the world and expose corruption.
This week I spoke before FTC Chair @linakhanftc and the head of antitrust enforcement at the DOJ about how corporate mergers have devastated working conditions, access to diverse voices, and artistic freedom in the media industry. Here's my full statement. pic.twitter.com/XFuV0r5qyn
— Adam Conover (@adamconover) April 29, 2022
His whole testimony is worth listening to, but the most interesting part was when Conover told the story of how Time Warner threatened free expression, and why it did so. It happened as AT&T was trying to buy Time Warner in a controversial merger. “The only time we were censored by our network was when we did an episode called Adam Ruins the Internet about monopolistic consolidation in the cable industry,” he told FTC Chair Lina Khan and Antitrust Division chief Jonathan Kanter. “And after it aired, Time Warner pulled the episode from reruns and streaming because they were worried it would anger AT&T and jeopardize the merger.”
We just sent $33 billion in militarized aid to Ukraine.
— Kathryn Rose Fisher (@kayrosef) May 1, 2022
Meanwhile, here is Philadelphia. pic.twitter.com/fxuKbcqg9k
jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins
— Mason Mennenga (@masonmennenga) April 30, 2022
It's been a year since Biden redacted the Department of Education's entire report on his ability to cancel student debt. pic.twitter.com/xAl4g2o7mq
— Holding Biden Accountable (@WaitingOnBiden) April 30, 2022
