(c) by Mark Dempsey
In an interview with Charlie Sheen, Hollywood's bad boy, he describes an encounter with Donald Trump. He was with his fiancee in a restaurant when Trump visited to his table. Trump apologized for being unable to attend the wedding, sheepishly admitting he hadn't even got them a gift. Sheen told Trump that was okay, while thinking "Well, you weren't invited, so..."
Flush with inspiration, Trump says he's going to give Sheen his "Harry Winston, platinum, diamond" cufflinks, which Sheen accepts before they part company.
A few years later Sheen is having some jewelry appraised for the sake of his insurance and he asks the appraiser to take a look at the cufflinks. "They're pewter and cubic zirconia," says the appraiser.
So...Trump is a con man through and through. Many voters were taken in, but others recognized that the system left them by the Obama administration was worth wrecking, regardless of Trump's lies and incompetence, so they sent a wrecking ball to Washington.
One of the best analyses of the problems that led to Trump comes from Rob Urie...here.
Excerpts:
"For
those who may have forgotten, the (Barack) Obama administration was
warned when it shifted the judiciary function for capital cases abroad
to the White House that doing so would come back to bite the Democrats.
While Democrats trusted Mr. Obama to adjudicate fairly and only kill (as
a King would) those who were deserving, few others in the world did. To
now complain that too much power is concentrated in the Executive
Branch would be rich if Democrats had any knowledge of what I am
referring to.
"It is the Democrat’s inability to self-reflect— a
product of their near-complete ignorance of the policies that they claim
to support, that makes them so repellant to so many. While the
following was as true of George W. Bush’s supporters as it is with
today’s Democrats, those most supportive of the party know the least
about its actual policies. Barack Obama’s economic policies, in
particular his bailouts of Wall Street, were amongst the most socially
destructive acts in modern American history....."
To connect this to AI:
"In terms of AI being naively brilliant, this refers to its deference to social logic rather than possessing analytical methods that it then applies to the underlying questions of interest on its own. Philosophically inclined readers will recognize the reach of philosophical Postmodernism here. The realm of AI is social, not physical. AI ‘trains’ on texts that reflect human interpretation of facts, not on the underlying facts themselves. This is, in fact, an implied restatement of the postmodern conceit that scientific knowledge is ‘socially constructed.’"
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