Week 20
John McCain
[About the 2008 US Presidential election, on his choice of S. Palin, paraphrasing] I cannot say it was the wrong decision to choose her as my running mate. She energized the base, and we had an upward momentum, then the 2008 financial crisis happened and ruined it for us.
You were toast before then
Sarah Palin as VP candidate might have "energized the base", but McCain campaign was a lost cause before that; it would have been with or without Palin. The Time for Change model predicts a definite loss for McCain (or any Republican) using June 2008 numbers -- popularity, two term-ness, and gdp. Out of these, net popularity for the sitting president, Bush, was first of all insanely bad, -37. This number in fact is a record low for any post-WWII election. GDP was anemic sure, at 1.4%, but no different from Obama's 4 years later. The point is, the crisis had not peaked at this point, it would have done so later in August. So if we can predict definite loss using precrisis numbers then there was nothing McCain could have done. All Obama campaign had to do was to associate McCain with Bush, and they did that, but frankly they didn't have to try too hard on that either.
This also suggests all the "campaign wizardry" that is attributed to the Bama campaign did not tip the balance to one way or another, as well as the lofty rhetoric that promised "Big Change". Bama played to the culture code, which for a president in US is MOSES, a person who will lead people to the promised land, so forth. This message is on code, but if you are Moses then ppl expect you to divide the effin Red Sea you know what I mean? Bam fell short on that promise which hurt his ability to govern effectively later.
Other patterns I noticed: players on both parties seem to know TFC model, conciously or subconciousy.. The younger, "untried" candidates seem to come out (or pushed forward by the Integrators) during these times. Right now Reps have a certain amount of advantage for example, and lo and behold, there is a stampede in there. People are stepping on each other to be the Rep candidate; Rubio stepping on Bush who used to be his mentor (Reps are pretty hierarchical usually, so this is considered a major diss in the ranks), other younger blood left and right, and all kinds of drama... It's fun to watch for sure though.
Link
[For UK] For all of the punditry around the [use of] social [media before the] election there’s little evidence of much action from the main players. Content from the two main political parties published on social media has so far been less about providing a personal feel of the candidates, or offering an informative or inspirational narrative and more about point scoring.
It probably wouldn't make much difference
Elections are a blunt instrument, and people use rough data points to decide.
Lars Ulrich
[Drummer of Metallica, complaining about his band's music being copied] Just because you are plumber, it doesn't mean you fix my effin toilet for free.
Hah
Good one. But the plumber cannot copy his plumbing service, cannot be in two places at the same time, so this is not a fair comparison. If we had Matrix-like skill transfer program, for bike repair, for flying a plane, or for plumbing, then that code could be copied, so potentially in that case a plumber AI could fix your effin toilet for free.
There is something else though.. I think Lars thinks he is better than the plumber. He could make millions from concerts, other things Metallica sells without selling records (which he could still do by the way, through music services) I guess he is sad because he won't make billions. The plumber does not have that choice, he is mired in low tech, non-replicable service providing. My question is why should Metallica be treated any different from the plumber? Same can be said about being a stock trader, investor, etc.. It is simply a skill that is no different from another. But one can be replicated, can snowball, others can't.
NYT
While a clear improvement, the revised SAT remains problematic. It will still emphasize speed — quick recall and time management — over subject knowledge. Despite evidence that writing is the single most important skill for success in college, the essay will be optional [..] And the biggest problem is this: While the content will be new, the underlying design will not change. The SAT will remain a “norm-referenced” exam, designed primarily to rank students rather than measure what they actually know.
It's so old tech
People cramming into some room for a predefined time, synchronized, being asked the same questions with bazillion of others? Jeez.
Singapore's Prime Minister
I told the Founders Forum two weeks ago that the last computer program I wrote was a Sudoku solver, written in C++ several years ago
Awesome dude
A prime minister who knows how to code! I was going to say he could be the first in the world, but Ozal of TR (PM during the 80s) beat him to it. The world needs more such PMs!
Andrew Ng
[Ng is a deep-learning expert, co-founder of Coursera] Our education system has succeeded so far in teaching generations to do different routine tasks. So when tractors displaced farming labor we taught the next generation to work in factories. But what we’ve never really been good at is teaching a huge number of people to do non-routine creative work.
[In response to question if he buys the argument that the future of labor is less in peril because automation will lower the cost of goods so you will only need to work 10-20 hours a week?]
I would have said zero hours. I see a minimum living wage as a long-term solution, but I’m not sure that’s my favorite
It's not my favorite either
NYT
To give ordinary workers a real stake, [Professor Atkinson] calls for a universal capital endowment for every adult — financed through a substantial wealth transfer or estate tax — and a sovereign wealth fund to invest in promising companies. And he argues for a government bond that offers a real return — perhaps linked to the rise of average household income — to evade the predatory fees that banks impose on the middle class’s investments. Dreaming? Indeed, many of these ideas may strike classic American economists as outdated lefty proposals that already failed in the 1970s. But they look increasingly relevant in what many are calling the Second Gilded Age.
Yes
A lot of things are coming together that create a new "low energy position" for the new system. Let's take artists and music for example; copying is too easy due to new tech, so it will happen. In the meantime technology is creating joblessness that will only get worse. For the former, the low energy position / solution is people voluntarily "liking" artistic work in terms of micro payments, but this will only work if they have "free money" to give (and an electronic payment system such as Bitcoin). So both for joblessness and voluntary artistic "likes" for art we need basic income. Since copyright cannot be enforced, patents should not be either, and patents are getting in the way of innovation that is hitting new businesses more than old / big / entrenched businesses, another issue directly related to inequality. Plus if we are going to sit back and let the robots do all routine work for us, we cannot have pesky little things called patents or copyright to get in the way of our innovating. On and on it goes..
Question
But without patents country [blah] could not have developed the way it has!
That is not so clear-cut
From Hintjens, "In the mid-1800's, writers claimed that the industrial progress of England and the United States was due to their patent system. Other writers claimed that the progress of Germany and Switzerland was due to their lack of any patent system". #ohnoyoudidnt
Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots
[C]onsider a thought experiment. Imagine that Earth is suddenly invaded by a strange extraterrestrial species. As thousands of the creatures stream off their massive spacecraft, humanity comes to understand that the visitors have not come to conquer us, or to extract our resources, or even to meet our leader. The aliens, it turns out, have come to work [..]
Each [alien] is highly intelligent and capable of learning language, solving problems, and even exhibiting creativity. However, the aliens are driven by a single—and overwhelming—biological imperative: fulfillment comes only from performing useful work [..]. Gradually, the aliens integrate into our society and economy. They are eager to work, and they demand no wages. Work, for the aliens, is its own reward; indeed, it is the only reward they can conceive of. The sole cost associated with their employment is the provision of some type of food and water—and given this, they begin to reproduce rapidly.
Businesses of all sizes quickly begin to deploy the extraterrestrials in a variety of roles. They start off in more routine, low-level jobs but rapidly demonstrate the ability to take on more complex work. Gradually, the aliens displace human workers. Even those business owners who initially resist replacing people with aliens eventually have little choice but to make the transition once their competitors do so [..].
Among humans, unemployment begins to rise relentlessly while incomes for those who still have jobs stagnate and even begin to fall as competition for jobs increases [..]
[But a] small number of people—those who own a successful business [..] have been doing extremely well as business profitability has increased. Sales of luxury goods and services are booming. For the rest, it’s the dollar store economy. As more people are unemployed, or become fearful that they will soon lose their jobs, frugality becomes tantamount to survival [..].
Soon, however, it becomes evident that those dramatic increases in business earnings are unsustainable. The profits have come almost entirely from cutting labor costs. Revenues are flat, and soon they begin to fall. The aliens, of course, buy nothing. Human consumers increasingly turn away from any purchase that is not absolutely essential [..].
The alien invasion parable is admittedly extreme [..but this is the key point:]
Every product and service produced by the economy ultimately gets purchased (consumed) by someone. In economic terms, “demand” means a desire or need for something, backed by the ability and willingness to pay for it. There are only two entities that create final demand for products and services: individual people and governments. Individual consumer spending is typically at least two-thirds of GDP in the United States and roughly 60 percent or more in most other developed countries. The vast majority of individual consumers, of course, rely on employment for nearly all of their income. Jobs are the primary mechanism through which purchasing power is distributed.
To be sure, businesses also purchase things, but that is not final demand. Businesses buy inputs that are used to produce something else. They may also buy things to make investments that will enable future production. However, if there is no demand for what the business is producing, it will shut down and stop buying inputs. A business may sell to another business; but somewhere down the line, that chain has to end at a person (or a government) buying something [..]
The essential point is that a worker is also a consumer (and may support other consumers). These people drive final demand. When a worker is replaced by a machine, that machine does not go out and consume [..]
So if automation eliminates a substantial fraction of the jobs that consumers rely on, or if wages are driven so low that very few people have significant discretionary income, then it is difficult to see how a modern mass-market economy could continue to thrive. Nearly all the major industries that form the backbone of our economy (automobiles, financial services, consumer electronics, telecommunications services, health care, etc.) are geared toward markets consisting of many millions of potential customers. Markets are driven not just by aggregate dollars but also by unit demand. A single very wealthy person may buy a very nice car, or perhaps even a dozen such cars. But he or she is not going to buy thousands of automobiles [..].
In a mass-market economy, the distribution of purchasing power among consumers matters a great deal. Extreme income concentration among a tiny sliver of potential customers will ultimately threaten the viability of the markets that support these industries.
Interesting
In the end, it might actually be businesses themselves that go to governments and ask / beg them to initiate a basic income program. Because without it, chances are high they will have very limited earnings.
Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do
Many teachers never raise questions; they simply give students answers. If they do tackle intellectual problems, they often focus only on their subject and the issues that animate the most sophisticated scholarship in the field. In contrast, the best teachers tend to embed the discipline’s issues in broader concerns, often taking an interdisciplinary approach to problems. When Dudley Herschbach teaches chemistry at Harvard, he does so with a combination of science, history, and poetry, telling stories about human quests to understand the mysteries of nature. Because he regards science as a journey rather than a set of facts, he takes his students into the historical struggle to fathom the universe. The lesson on polymers becomes the story of how the development of nylons influenced the outcome of World War II. He invokes the arts, using them to cap- ture the emotional power and beauty with which the poet or the painter stirs the imagination and wonder. He even asks his chemistry students to write poetry while they struggle to comprehend the concepts and ideas that scientists have developed [..].
Third, the natural critical learning environment also engages students in some higher-order intellectual activity: encouraging them to compare, apply, evaluate, analyze, and synthesize, but never only to listen and remember. Often that means asking students to make and defend judgments and then providing them with some basis for making the decision. They might judge the argument they encounter on some important question, decide when and how to use a certain method, determine the implications of what they encounter, or make choices between different methods of solving a problem. Or do all of these. Robert Divine raises an important question about U.S. history, helps students see that question in the context of larger issues, shares with them briefly some of the ways that other scholars have attempted to answer that question, then challenges the class to evaluate the argument he would make. Donald Saari uses a combination of stories and questions to challenge students to think critically about calculus. “When I finish this process,” he explained, “I want the students to feel like they have invented calculus and that only some accident of birth kept them from beating Newton to the punch.”
In essence, he provokes them into inventing ways to find the area under the curve, breaking the process into the smallest concepts (not steps) and raising the questions that will Socratically pull them through the most difficult moments. Unlike so many in his discipline, he does not simply per- form calculus in front of the students; rather, he raises the questions that will help them reason through the process, to see the nature of the questions and to think about how to answer them. “I want my students to construct their own understanding,” he explains, “so they can tell a story about how to solve the problem.”
Now that's teaching
Very cool. I remember reading the memoirs of a researcher who, in school, watched (the famous physicist) Edward Teller give a lecture. In the first lecture teachers usually talk about administrative stuff right, the textbook, office hourse, etc. when a student asks "Mr. Teller what is your office number?". Teller turns to his TA, asks "what's your room number John?", he says "120", Teller says "ah, divide that by 2, add 5 mine then mine must be 65". Then he says "see, I can't remember but I can derive".
The author of the memoir says this comment really stuck with him, and he tried to apply it all throughout his research career. Teaching mathematics, or other subjects like this, through derivation is key; it's necessary both for understanding and remembering. Starting from simple principles students should be able to reach the formula the same way the inventor created it; In teaching (as much as I am capable of it) I try to think what it would take to invent X,Y,Z and try to present that, in that order.
This is why it is painful to see when teachers take shortcuts. This practice is rampant in statistics, because it's just data, and some numbers right? Slap a formula on top and you are done. So instructors pull out formulas, magic numbers out of thin air with little or zero explanation. For example the famous "magic number" 1.96 for confidence intervals usually arrives out of nowhere. But this calculation is based on two mathematical constructs [geek], first $P(z1 < Z < z2) = 1-\alpha 2) second Z = (Xbar - \mu) / (\sigma - \sqrt{n})$ as n goes to infinity, [/geek] the first being a simple statement of probability, second is the central limit theorem. It is so central, it was named the Central fricking Limit Theorem. Put the two together, rearrange around $\mu$, and you get a confidence interval (for known $\sigma$).
News
Unemployment is approaching 5%...
Not really
Here is the percentage of people working (16 or older) in relation to population - called labor participation. Taken from a Department of Labor site;
"But isn't the reason for that fall because of baby boomers retiring?". That doesn't explain the huge drop, which interestingly started after 2001, plus, millenials surpassed the boomers in terms of numbers, and millenials are young. So what's going on?
Comment
[Paraphrasing] Some academics in the International Relations field are objecting against the "mathematicization" of their field, they don't like methods such as rational choice, expected utility, and game theory.
Too bad
This is a futile attempt.. They can object all they want, but every scientific field no matter how "verbal" will have more math incorporated into it one way or another, international relations certainly, and even fields like history at some point. Otherwise all their research is bunch of words that do not connect to each other in a verifyable kind of way, worse, their theories will not gel with data easily.
Oh and my favorite objection: "but you say rational choice but people are not rational, so how can you even model them?". Because, somehow in these people's minds, whenever there is math involved the subject matter must be some kind of rational "machine", whatever that is.
However none of the methods outlined above make such a claim. What these methods assume is that people's preference ordering is consistent - that's it. An example: Let's say a certain dictator with a certain funny mustache in history says: "I like the burn me some Jews"... This is his preference. Then he says "you know what I'd like more... to burn me some gypsies"...Another preference. Then "but seriously, I reaally reaallly like to burn me some Fins now". Then, for this person, in order for his preferences to be consistent, the dictator must like to burn Fins more than he likes to burn Jews. That's all that is required. Well, this is one of the core requirements, but if this and some others are there, the game theory math can take this and crank through its computations. The computations would probably say "take out this f--er, now" but this is another subject.
Question
Why we are on this, why didn't anyone try to take Hitler out?
They tried
In total 14 times. What more can a brother do?
Question
If JFK's assassination was not a government conspiracy, then why was his assassin Oswald shot dead?
Well..
So JFK's assassination was not a conspiracy; but Oswald was killed to make his assassination of the president look like a conspiracy. Weird heh? Because if there is one thing worse than a president having been killed by a conspiracy, it is that he wasn't. In that case The Integrators would like a fool; hence the assassin was assassinated. Forming a mystery around the government was more preferable to having been implicated for a conspiracy.
But in reality Kennedy was an extremely bad president (an MBTI SP and LtCB, a deadly combination it turned out), and he did enough stupid shit to trigger such a response from a crazy extremist like Oswald but, that was the entirety of it all. There it is - extremely banal and boring.
Question
Any movie ideas?
Yes
Some scifi ideas - Now this is going to be providing fuel for the AI-gone-wild camp, but here it goes: silicon is made from dirt right? Well, there are a lot of excerpts in religious texts that "we" were created from soil / earth. A movie can revolve around the fact that religious texts were for the silicon people; a Morpheus like dude, holding a religious text says "this wasn't really meant for us.. it was meant for him" - camera cuts to the AI, WAAAA! [the same sound after M. shows the battery to Neo]. Boom.
Another: we are in a game, and during your sleep (in the game) you wake up in the "real" world, handling your chores, etc, then when you go in the game, you usually don't remember "the dream" right? The real world is crazy futuristic. When people die in the game, relatives etc., they can join your game as watchers (a little cringey, and the script can have a lot of fun with that), and whisper some help for you. Maybe even effecting some change one way or another.
News
Pollsters failed to predict the UK election results.
Their sample must be biased
Calling people up and collecting answers is only one way of making this prediction. I am sure other models could have done a better job. I haven't applied Time for Change model for the UK election (and it is not advisable to apply a model as-is, with the same variables, from one country to the next [litegeek], if one chooses to however the coefficients / weights of the variables should be recalculated as they would now be based on different data points [/litegeek], but let's say UK and US are similar in that they are both old democracies so the variables are the same (not in value) for both countries; then... Cameron was running for a second term, he gets no punishment for two-term'ness for the incumbent. GDP growth, anemic, but there, at least not negative after a huge crisis. Net approval, around -1 percent, you don't love him, you don't hate him - but not a Bush-low which was -37 in 2008. In summary, UK electorate did not feel the need for change. According to the TfC model the election is always about the incumbent party.
Question
What do you mean with bias?
An example
During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald was asked to help the British decide where to add armor to their bombers. The picture he looked at was roughty like below, black parts are where the plane returning from fights had the most bullet holes.
After looking at this, Wald suggested the military armor the white sections, the parts with least bullet holes, because the data was biased. He was only looking at the planes which returned, suggesting the parts with bullet holes are where planes could afford to get hit at.
Question
You say patent system does not work but I know examples X,Y,Z when it did!
It will work if people don't push it too hard
Patents are an example of a system that can function if it is not used all that much. But when all actors in it are combative, trying to use it, exploit it, and break it all at the same time, then we'll have problems. Now there are too many users of the system who are parsing lines, meanings of patent descriptions, reading between the lines of the texts, and some, ironically, are trying to be vague so the patent can apply as broadly as possible. This is not an optimal setting.
And this is precisely what is happening today, as economies are becoming more knowledge-based, more people with diverse interests are applying for patents which is overwhelming the system. As every software architect knows, there is a huge difference between a system built for 100 users and one built for 100,000. Increased load can break a system in weird ways. "Bugs come out of the woodwork" would say a senior architect friend of mine whenever one of his projects started to conduct load testing (simulating a lot concurrent users on a system). A system more suitable for the 21st century is needed. "Better patent lawyers, better judges" won't fix the problem, just like asking for "more and better teachers in classrooms" won't fix the education problem. The purported solution is a practical impossibility that suggests a new approach must look into the structure of the system, not simply trying to potato-stamp the existing order.
Fukuyama
[Political Order and Political Decay, pg. 523] The answer [to lack of democracy in Nigeria] that scholars such as Richard Joseph have given is that politics in Nigeria is what he labels “prebendal,” involving a fatal mixture of rent seeking, clientelism, and ethnicity. Because of oil, the state has ready access to a steady flow of resource rents, which the elites have shared among themselves. While all poor people—the 70 percent of the population below the poverty line—in theory have a common interest in ending corruption and redistributing those resources more fairly, they are divided into more than 250 ethnic and religious communities that do not want to work with one another. Their ties are instead vertical, to clientelistic networks controlled by the elites, who dole out just enough patronage and subsidies to mobilize support at the next election. The system is stable because members of the elite rent-seeking coalition realize that using violence to grab a larger share of the total pie will hurt everyone’s interests, including their own. The typical response to violence like the armed attacks in the delta is a combination of repression and increased subsidies to buy off discontent.
Bad
Good analysis though.. Fukuyama seems to be back-pedalling from that End of History business after all, and now looking into state dysfunction more closely. As a note, F. was one of the cadre of "90s thinkers" who claimed potato stamping of the existing order everywhere / globalization would fix it all. You thought you was gonna have all miles and smiles..! Well...that didn't turn out exactly as planned; We are back in the business of thinking for ourselves, looking at the status quo more closely.
B. Mesquita, A. Smith
[Paraphrasing] There is positive correlation between a leaning toward autocracy and size of ethnic blocks in W (winning coalition).
W for Win
BBM's theory talks about two numeric parameters W (winning coalition) and S (selectorate) instead of talking democracy directly which he claims models state behaviour more closely. In this paper they made a new addition, "size of __ blocks in W" for ethnic, religious, etc blocks that can be present in W. They found positive correlation between size of ethnic bloc in W and leaning toward authocracy. This seems to confirm the case of Nigeria (coincidentally one of the countries BBM uses in his data as well). Turkey's experience would agree; in the past ~30 years there's always been an artificially high representation of ethnic nationalists / Ottomanists / borderline racist people in the government (bcz of the 1980 fascist coup) - which IMO hampered the country's transition to full democracy.
Note: we mentioned before in his earlier work BBM had rough calculations for W,S deriving it from other variables; in this recent research they asked experts from the countries for more accurate W,S.
Question
Do you have a favorite Arnold movie scene?
Yes
It is Party Pooper
Link
In a week when Florida students were logging on to another round of standardized tests, one of the stars of Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel clearly touched a nerve.
"If you want the kids' test scores up, bring back band and bring back shop and get kids actually learning stuff instead of teaching them how to take a test," TV personality Adam Savage said in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times.
Savage, who works with partner Jamie Hyneman on the science-based hit show, was promoting their live performance coming April 23 to Tampa's Straz Center, and his comment exploded on Twitter. A Times tweet of his quote drew more than 245 retweets within 24 hours, plus hundreds of favorites and comments on the value of teaching problem-solving and creativity.
The reaction seemed to underscore not just the public's exasperation over testing but the frustrations of science, art and music teachers who need expensive materials or who see their subjects de-emphasized because so much time is needed to get ready for tests.
Savage said STEM, the acronym for science, technology, engineering and math, should be STEAM "because you need art in there to complete an education."
After getting his start in special effects, he and Hyneman have turned Mythbusters into Discovery's most popular show by blowing things up and building crazy gadgets that use scientific methods to prove or debunk rumors and myths.
Savage said he is excited about the growth of robotics competitions, the makers movement of do-it-yourselfers and a variety of people from diverse backgrounds "getting interested in science by getting your hands dirty."
Agree
Twitter User
[O]dd that dystopia assumes govt is most technologically advanced group in society when in reality they are the opposite
Hah
Navy researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Materials Science and Technology Division, demonstrate proof-of-concept of novel NRL technologies developed for the recovery of carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen (H2) from seawater and conversion to a liquid hydrocarbon fuel [..].
The predicted cost of jet fuel using these technologies is in the range of $3-$6 per gallon, and with sufficient funding and partnerships, this approach could be commercially viable within the next seven to ten years. Pursuing remote land-based options would be the first step towards a future sea-based solution [..].
Navy researchers demonstrate proof-of-concept in first flight of an internal combustion powered model aircraft fueled by a novel gas-to-liquid process that uses seawater as carbon feedstock.
musicMfkaCanYouSingIT
Hintjens on Open Source
https://vimeo.com/68236487
Blow Sh*t Up with Arnold
It is for a benefit apparently; but hilarious all the same.
So Disco #gameOfThrones
