Vindicated

Looking at what Trump and his supporters are putting the country through, I feel fully vindicated in my declaration weeks ago, that anyone who supports Trump utterly lacks in decency. They're just a part of a brutal mob. I continue to not to have anything to do with them in my personal life.

Machine Learning and Physics

Machine Learning has in use in the Large Hadron Collider for long enough that there is now a Coursera online course about it. Basically, machine learning is used to help handle the approximately one petabye per second of data collected from particle collisions. That is one kind of use of machine learning.

 Neural networks do the job of recognizing the content of images and video, and speech recognition much better than the traditional type of computer algorithms that people can write, so it is absolutely the right technique to give computers the senses of vision and hearing. The detection of "cat" or "utility" pole from two-dimensional arrays of bytes, which is computer vision, is generalizable to "seeing" patterns in data sets in N-dimensional arrays. This "data pattern sense" is a sense organ humans lack. Neural networks can help provide humans this sixth sense. 

 Beyond that, neural networks have to connect up with some type of symbolic representation, in order to be able to handle concepts, even simple relations like "bigger than", "smaller than", "behind", "above", etc.. The seventh lecture, Neurosymbolic AI, in the MIT introduction to deep learning, 6.S191 is from where I learned about it back in February, and a regret this year is that I have not been able to follow up on it. The idea is something like this (words added to clips from David Cox's slides):

I believe that the computer will have to connect what it can sense with its "data pattern sense" to symbolic representations, and then, what the computer can do will be no better or worse in its performance than whatever automated reasoning can do today, for instance, in mathematics theorem provers. So, if mathematics falls to Artificial Intelligence, then physics may follow, but not otherwise.

Brink Lindsey: The Dead End of Small Government

A center-right party in America no longer exists, one whose primary values are (small government, fiscal responsibility, family values, personal responsibility), and that sees the importance of actual governance.

In his essay posted at the Niskanen Center, Brink Lindsey, traces through how this came about. "Deep-seated intellectual errors" of the Ludwig von Mises/Ayn Rand/Murray Rothbard/F. A. Hayek/the Chicago School of Economics meet the American society with its particular politics and history, and: 

 Here then is what the ideals of free markets and limited government have come to stand for after small-government ideology was filtered through American political realities for a few decades: 

•  A dogmatic attachment to tax cuts, especially tax cuts for the rich, as the appropriate response to virtually any conceivable circumstance; 
• A strong pro-business, as opposed to pro-market, tilt on regulation, too often attacking needed pro-market regulations because they impose costs on business while ignoring anti-market regulations that benefit favored constituencies; 
• A focused hostility toward government efforts to help the poor, pursued with much greater vigor than any opposition to subsidies for the middle class and rich or government policies that injure the poor; 
• A general aversion to government transfer payments that has resulted, not in significant reductions in social spending, but in the redirection of social spending through tax preferences to provide lopsided benefits for the well-off;
•  Incessant bashing of the public sector and public service as inherently dysfunctional and dangerous, while attention to how public policy might actually make Americans’ lives better has dwindled toward zero.

 This is actually existing small-government conservatism, and it is not a pretty picture. I know this is not what a lot of smart and talented libertarian and free-market intellectuals and activists stand for personally. This certainly wasn’t what I saw myself standing for during the more than two decades I worked as a professional libertarian at the Cato Institute. But as libertarians are always fond of reminding us, good intentions aren’t enough. Efforts to influence politics must ultimately be judged by their consequences, not their motives, and the fruits of libertarian anti-statism have grown rancid and unhealthy. 

 This is the diagnosis of the problem and description of its symptoms. In other essays, Lindsey talks about the intellectual remedy to this problem. Before the election, I had hoped that there was a strong rejection of Trump that would lead the Republican Party towards this resolution. Instead Trump won about ten million more voters than he did in 2016; he won more votes in a Presidential election than anyone not named Biden. But Brink Lindsay's essays should be read anyway in this suggested order.

1. The Poverty of Natural Rights Libertarianism. 
2. The Dead End of Small Government 
3. Free Markets and Limited Government Reconceived.

To egg you along, here's where he is headed:

When we see that markets work best, not in the absence of government but in the presence of good government, we are able to see the ideals of free markets and limited government in a new and clearer light. Freeing those vital principles from the misunderstandings created by libertarian ideology, we can reconceive them so that they serve, rather than undermine, the cause of effective government on which our freedom and prosperity depend. 

Thus reconceived, the concept of “free markets” is no longer associated with the overall size and scope of government. Rather, the “free” in “free markets” describes certain key attributes of a well-functioning market system. Markets are free, not when they are unregulated, but when the rules that define them allow for wide freedom of action along a number of key dimensions: free entry, free exit, freely moving prices, free trade across national boundaries, freedom to hire and fire, freedom to take a job or quit, freedom to introduce new products or production methods without prior permission, and freedom to invest. The commitment to free markets is based on evidence, not ideology....

Cartoon - in it together

Rangoli 2020

 

Previous years.

Can/should we talk to each other?

 Guest wrote some weeks ago: 

I despise Trump and all his works, but once you stop talking to your opponents, the only further possible step is violence, so I reject that.

Here are a pair of essays on how we need to talk to each other, and one essay on why not. 

George Ball: 

1. https://www.insidernj.com/gop-ffebly-enabling-corrosive-acid-drip-top-down/ 

2. https://www.insidernj.com/race-as-reconciliation/ 

 Rebecca Solnit: 

3. https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-on-not-meeting-nazis-halfway/

A little from each side.

Ball: 

We better start talking to each other, even if we often can’t find common ground. Because if groups this large {Trump, Biden voters} and this divided do not work harder at validating and accepting each other as human beings, then we will not have a country. Or a future.

You do not have to be a moron to share Trump’s vision of America, or an antifa cancel culture socialist to support Biden’s.  There are millions of well- meaning people with different life experiences that inform their views.  We can agree to disagree without questioning each other’s humanity.  And many of us are willing to listen so long as they, too, are heard.  Whether you do so is a matter of individual choice about how you want to live and what you want this country to be.  No group or movement can make that decision for you.  In America, we are that movement. All 330,000,000 million of us. And we always have been.

Solnit: 

The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.    

 

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

An Account of A Press Conference

Mark Sumner describes a press conference by Trump's legal-team

In an alternate universe

Imagine, had Trump merely said consistently, wear a facemask in public, wear sun glasses or a face shield, wash your hands before touching your face, and follow whatever your local government asks you to do, he’d have been re-elected. No only would Trump have been re-elected, but tens of thousands fewer would be dead or struggling with the long-term after-effects of a bout of the corona virus. I'm leaving out social distancing, staying at home if you have a fever or if you know you were exposed to someone infected, and any appeal to a public spirit of let's help keep each other safe. I'm leaving out all the other measures that could be taken like setting up contact tracing or an app like "Aarogya Setu" or federal co-ordination between the states.

How did we end up here?

 What could be more non-partisan than wearing face masks in public during a pandemic caused by an airborne virus?

Yet, in the US of A, this has become a marker of partisanship, with none less than the POTUS mocking the use of face masks.

Then see the clip here on the Ari Melber show on MSNBC, of Michael Moore (extremely left) and Michael Moore (former chairman of the Republican National Committee).  At around 2:30 in the video they go through a catalog of issues on which they agree - equal pay for women, climate change, a living minimum wage,...  Incidentally, public opinion poll after poll suggests that more than a two-thirds majority of Americans want action on all of these issues.

So my thought is that just like with the face masks, these issues have been made partisan, precisely to block them.  Murdoch and Koch blow the partisan trumpets a bit, Trump and the easy-to-purchase-in-small-states Senators pick it up -- it used to be the Tea Party in Congress too -- and suddenly what is a non-partisan issue becomes solely a "progressive" or Democratic one.  And now the forty percent who are out to "own the libs" will oppose it with every last MAGA and poster they've got.

Fighting The Last Election

 The GOP is stuck in 2016.

Even now, four years after she last ran for any office, Mrs. Clinton has appeared in more Republican ads attacking down-ballot Democratic candidates than has Mr. Biden, according to data compiled by Advertising Analytics.

Libertarians!

The New Republic has a story: 

 The Town That Went Feral 

 When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.

Moon

Black-capped Chickadee

Cropped detail

The Atlantic: The Most Illuminating Moment ....Decency v Politics

 From Adam Serwer, in The Atlantic:

Excerpt:

The moments after your first child is born are humbling and overwhelming, the emotional equivalent of staring directly into the sun. You realize that you are suddenly responsible for a human life that you helped create, a sliver of two souls smuggled into another body, a person you will love and protect desperately for the rest of your life.

 Shortly after Donald and Ivana Trump’s son was born, however, the future president had an unusual concern for a parent:  *What if this kid grows up and embarasses me?*

“What should we name him?” Donald asked, (according to Ivana’s memoir),  Raising Trump. When Ivana suggested Donald Jr., the real-estate heir responded, “What if he is a loser?”

That anecdote helps explain one of the more memorable exchanges in Tuesday night’s presidential debate, as well as Trump’s approach to governance. The president’s Democratic rival, Joe Biden, sought to criticize Trump’s remarks about U.S. service members being “losers,” as first reported by The Atlantic . In doing so, Biden brought up his late son, Beau, who died of a brain tumor after earning a Bronze Star in the Army National Guard.

“My son was in Iraq and spent a year there,” Biden said to Trump, raising his voice. “He got the Bronze Star. He got a medal. He was not a loser. He was a patriot. And the people left behind there were heroes.”

In an attempt to neutralize the attack, Trump changed the subject—to Biden’s other son, Hunter. “Hunter got thrown out of the military; he was thrown out, dishonorably discharged for cocaine use,” he spat out.

To a person who feared sharing his name with his son at the moment of his birth, because the child might turn out to be a “loser,” that attack must have seemed devastating. But normal parents don’t stop loving their children because they do bad things. They love them anyway. That’s what being a parent is.

Biden responded by reaffirming his love for his surviving son. “My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” Biden responded. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”

Biden is a mediocre politician. His two prior presidential runs were failures. He has a tendency toward exaggeration to the point of dishonesty, whether overstating his role in the mid-century civil-rights movement or the struggle against South African apartheid). Before becoming vice president to Barack Obama, Biden backed some of the worst policy decisions of the past 30 years—including the 2005 bankruptcy bill, the 1994 crime bill, and the invasion of Iraq.

But when Biden speaks of loss and pain—of Beau, or of the car accident that killed his wife and daughter—he becomes deeply compelling; as Fintan O’Toole wrote, Biden’s grief is “real and rooted and fundamentally decent.” After eight months of funerals, for hundreds of thousands of American families, the kind of grief that Biden speaks of, the kind that accompanies the loss of a loved one, is no longer distant. The president stood in front of that grieving nation, and taunted a father while he was speaking of his lost son. Before the eyes of a nation struggling with an opioid epidemic, he mocked a dad for having a kid with a drug problem.

More than any other moment of the debate, Trump's response to Biden’s invocation of his dead son—attempting to make him ashamed of his surviving one—threw the dispositions of the two men into sharp relief. I wondered how Hunter must have felt to see his father speak of his pride in his brother, only for his own name to be brandished as a weapon to inflict shame on his father. And I thought about Biden’s response, which was to reaffirm his pride in Hunter, the troubled son living in the indelible shadow of a departed war hero. In the midst of being attacked by a president trying to wield his own family against him, Biden’s instinct was to reassure Hunter that he is also loved, that nothing could make his father see him as a loser.

Biden acted like a father, doing what almost any parent would have done. And yet because Trump is the kind of man who wonders at the moment of his child’s birth whether the child will someday mortify him, he did not anticipate that response. He did not expect that, instead of embarrassing Biden, he would merely advertise the callousness that has made him unable to govern the country with any sense of duty or responsibility, the narcissism that makes him see those concepts as foolish and naive.

All things in Trump’s world revolve around him, and are a reflection of him. The president evaluates everything—even his own children, even at the time they enter this world—by how they might make him look, and he is incapable of imagining that anyone else would do differently. When he was a reality-show celebrity, this trait was minimally damaging to society; now that he is a president, it has proved catastrophic.

A Personal Statement

 I loathe anyone who supports Trump in 2020; if there is any such in my acquaintance, I disassociate from them immediately, permanently and irrevocably. In 2016, one might have hoped for something from Trump, but now, in 2020, there can be not a tiniest bit of doubt any more about what Trump is, and there can be no doubt about what people who still support Trump are.

Added later - there is a point where things go beyond being merely political differences that correctly should not have any impact on personal relationships and instead enter into our fundamental conceptions of ourself as ethical human beings.  As I've written in a comment below, I cannot reconcile support for Trump and being a person with basic decency.

Garden 2020

 iPhone photos of flowers in my garden, starting with the crocus in the spring.

ETA - captions beneath the pix.

Crocus

Blocked on Twitter by ....

4. N.N. Taleb - For this tweet. Taleb had tweeted "I myself came to America because of its properties. Preserving them is my duty." My response was:

"I myself came to America because of its properties. Preserving them is my duty." -- i.e., openness to immigration :)

3. C. Christine Fair - for pointing out to her that Sikh dharma is in the "omkaar karma punarjanma" school (and not particularly Islamic).

2. Sadananda Dhume - I don't remember exactly why, but he was stupid and I was rude.

1. Sonia Faleiro

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky - pioneer Russian photographer

Photo shows the Emir of Bukhara, Alim Khan (1880-1944), p
osing solemnly for his portrait, taken in 1911 shortly after his accession.

Wiki:  Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky August 30 [O.S. August 18] 1863 – September 27, 1944) was a Russian chemist and photographer. He is best known for his pioneering work in colour photography and his effort to document early 20th-century Russia.

Using a railroad-car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled the Russian Empire from around 1909 to 1915 using his three-image colour photography to record its many aspects. While some of his negatives were lost, the majority ended up in the U.S. Library of Congress after his death. Starting in 2000, the negatives were digitised and the colour triples for each subject digitally combined to produce hundreds of high-quality colour images of century-ago Russia.

The Library of Congress collection of Prokudin-Gorsky photographs is here. Enjoy!

Melancholy reflections

From this:

Thomas Chatterton Williams writes in the Atlantic:

America, however, is an utter disaster. Texas, Florida, and Arizona are the newest hubs of contagion, having apparently learned nothing from the other countries and states that previously experienced surges in cases. I stared at my phone in disbelief when the musician Rosanne Cash wrote on Twitter that her daughter had been called a “liberal pussy!” in Nashville for wearing a mask to buy groceries.

Using masks to curb the propagation of an airborne virus that makes some people very sick and kills others is not seen as a simple obligation arising from being part of a society.

It is almost as though the demands of being ethical are considered to be a trespass upon freedom.

Which leads to the question - is freedom a means to an end, namely to lead an ethical life and live per one’s conscience; or is freedom an end in itself, and any kind of duty or obligation, no matter how necessary from an ethical perspective, is an encroachment on that freedom?

W.H.O. on alcohol

As a follow-up to this post from 2014, a poster from the World Health Organization.  The message is that much use of alcohol is harmful (and that by putting its ill-effects in numerous buckets, the harm is made to seem less).

In 2016, the harmful use of alcohol resulted in some 3 million deaths (5.3% of all deaths) worldwide and 132.6 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) – i.e. 5.1% of all DALYs in that year. Mortality resulting from alcohol consumption is higher than that caused by diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and diabetes. Among men in 2016, an estimated 2.3 million deaths and 106.5 million DALYs were attributable to the consumption of alcohol. Women experienced 0.7 million deaths and 26.1 million DALYs attributable to alcohol consumption.