Monthly Archives: December 2016

Brute force

artificial-intellQuantity is quality, attributed to Joseph Stain (although he probably said Quantity has a quality all its own).

Nvidia is a graphic chip builder who, more or less accident, has become the Intel of artificial intelligence. As games became graphic centric, they needed processors that handled a massive amount of information. Quickly. It turns out that as chips fast enough to make Modern Combat 5 work so well also worked for artificial intelligence. As I understand it, artificial intelligence is just lots of memory – and storage, I guess – and lots of processing speed. In other words, brute force.

Now, I am beginning to think that natural intelligence – including human intelligence, maybe especially human intelligence  – is also just brute force. I am beginning to think that we are not as different from other mammals as we like to think we are, maybe we just have better processing, more memory, and more storage.

 

 

 

This made me feel better

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Portrait of a glacier on Highway 66, near Amboy.

By way of a background aside, a couple of years ago, Michele’s stepfather, Jim, gave us a subscription to Forbes. I am an avid magazine reader, almost any magazine, like People in a dentist’s office for example, but Forbes is probably the one magazine that doesn’t resonate with me, even in the slightest. It is a celebration of rich people only because they are rich and we often take it from the mailbox and throw it directly into the recycling.  But, because we were getting Forbes, I think, we got a complimentary issue of Bloomberg Business, which is a different and, to my sensibilities, much better magazine. End aside.

If you read the same papers that I do – the New York Times, The Atlantic, or The New Yorker, for example – it is hard to think of Trump as a rational player. It seems like it will be a win for us all if he just doesn’t get in a pissing match with Putin and start WWIIl. But after reading this fascinating article, Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go, in the aforementioned Bloomberg Business, Trump seems very rational. The article was obviously written before the election and takes the general attitude that Trump is going to lose – for lack of a better word – but it still makes the case that Trump’s campaign was not just randomly different, but different in a calculated way.

Like Obama and his team eight years ago, Trump and his team changed the game.  Before the article, I had sort of held the position that Hillary lost because she ran a lousy campaign – I had joked that, in a year of change, Hillary’s campaign was Vote for me for more of the same – but, with new information, I’ve changed my mind. Now I think Trump won because he ran a brilliant campaign. The article is well worth reading, here is a sample:

Parscale was building his own list of Trump supporters, beyond the RNC’s reach. Cambridge Analytica’s statistical models isolated likely supporters whom Parscale bombarded with ads on Facebook, while the campaign bought up e-mail lists from the likes of Gingrich and Tea Party groups to prospect for others. Some of the ads linked directly to a payment page, others—with buttons marked “Stand with Trump” or “Support Trump”—to a sign-up page that asked for a name, address, and online contact information. While his team at Giles-Parscale designed the ads, Parscale invited a variety of companies to set up shop in San Antonio to help determine which social media ads were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another—the campaign has ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content—and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences. At the same time, Parscale made the vendors, tech companies with names such as Sprinklr and Kenshoo, compete  Apprentice-style; those whose algorithms fared worst in drumming up donors lost their contracts.

The Development business rewards people like Trump

developer-handss

In the early 70s, I was working for a large, Southern California developer. They had bought a huge tract of land, zoned for more than a thousand houses, from Boise Cascade which who was getting out of the development business because it had almost ruined them. The property was purchased with a small down payment and we would take ownership in stages paying for each stage separately, but once we took down a stage and pulled building permits we had to start paying interest on all the property.

Because payments were only triggered by the pulling of house permits, we were able to work on putting in streets and other public improvements without paying for the land. The company CEO wanted us to start construction on the models and I said that would trigger the payments. He said, “No there was an exception for the models,” and he directed me to the paragraph with the exception. I was a young Director of Operations for Northern California and, while I was high enough in the company to talk to the CEO and had been to his house for company parties, I was low enough in the company to be scared shitless. But I was also cocky and the paragraph actually made it clear that there were no exceptions. I read the paragraph out loud to him.

There was a long silence and then he said, “Somebody is lying, either you are a liar or I am, which is it?”  I think I blanked about then because I don’t remember what either one of us said next, but I do remember we pulled the permits for the models the next day.

The point I want to make is that this guy, this CEO was very smart, he came out of Auschwitz broke and he left an estate worth about $1.6 billion dollars. This is the environment that Trump comes from, these are the kind of people he has worked with. It is a mistake to think Trump is stupid or crazy and, so far, the people who underestimated him have not done well.

 

The most mature, reasonable, comment on the election that I didn’t write (but wish I had)

the-road-ahead
Going down into the Central Valley; Patterson Pass

A couple of days after the election, Mike Moore sent me an email with an article column attachment that was written by Peter Coyote. The writing looked long – for internet viewing that is, it is short for, say, a New Yorker article – and the title, OVERLOOKED DRAFT BOARDS FOR TRUMP VOTERS, seemed confusing and awkward so I put it aside to read later which often means never. In this case, it really did mean later, and I’m glad. It very roughly correlates with my election point of view, that Trump is a visible and outward manifestation of a deeper and less visible problem. Peter Coyote is an excellent writer and he more than makes up for the title with a very passionate and sympathetic short essay – for lack of a better word – that makes his case.

I, conversationally at least, have held the opinion that things starting going down hill for labor, and by extension, the middle class, during the Ronald Reagan presidency but Peter Coyote pushes it back:

In 1973, when the Treaty of Detroit—a long-standing deal between management and labor to raise wages as profits rose—was ended to ‘fight inflation’ wages were frozen and have never recovered despite astronomic rises in American productivity. The unintended consequence of this betrayal of labor was that ‘demand’ on industry fell as people felt they could not afford new appliances, cars, and winter coats. Once again the “great policy minds” created an illusory short-term fix by distributing credit cards as if they were Halloween candy. Remember those days? Coming home and finding a sheaf of invitations for a credit card?  Easy credit disguised the backwards slippage of millions of Americans and the credit kept the factory lights on, satisfying campaign contributors. Coincidentally, they also delivered millions into the hands of bankers and financiers who were only too happy to advance money at 29% interest rates. When the bills became due and the downturn became a slippery slope further faith in the Federal Government was damaged and future Trump voters were being groomed.

However, this essay is more than a list of grievances suffered by white-male rust belt workers it is also a plea for understanding that they were are  the canary in the coal mine:

..mothers found themselves forced to stop caring for their children at home and go to work, with no extra allowances for day-care, transportation, or baby-sitting. “The dignity of labor” meant losing their fingernails plucking chickens at a Tyson processing plant for minimum wage while stressing relatives and friends to care for their children. Millions, who were unemployed through no fault of their own, were summarily dropped off the ‘welfare roles’ and funnelled into substandard, low-paying jobs (which incidentally weakened union bargaining positions for those who remained employed.)Coded, dog-whistle language suggested that food-stamps and welfare “entitlements” were giveaways to African Americans, when in reality it was white women who were the major beneficiaries. These were not minor stressors to millions of people. They were and remain festering wounds on millions of people, weakening their political faith and confidence in government and nourishing deep seeds of resentment towards Washington that sprouted this November 8th.

Coyote is a strong liberal and pro-government but he presents the case that government is, increasingly, not responsive to us and that has been the instigator of the Trump phenomenon. Looking at government as a problem rather than see Trump supporters as stupid or delusional:

When I assume that I am the repository of goodness and wisdom and attack those I consider “evil” or “ignorant” they  never listen. They armor up with platitudes and falsehoods and defend themselves just as I do when they attack me. Our political system has degenerated into a blame game of “gotcha” with each side insisting that only they hold the high ground. (One of the things many people do not appreciate about Hilary, I believe.) Only the deep understanding that we are all human and all vulnerable to the birthright of humans—anger, greed, and delusion, can save us from extremism, prejudice, and hasty judgments. The best thing that we can contribute to public life is first of all kindness, then empathy, and compassion, while we struggle to put our own houses  in order.

If like me, you want to just go outside and scream at Trump, I heartily recommend this Peter Coyote reading.

Post-truth: a word I’d never heard

a-different-viewThe 2016 Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year is POST-TRUTH: post-truth adjective. Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. I love words, I love dictionaries and this is the first time – that I can remember, at least – that I haven’t even heard the word before it became officially enshrined in our language. I think I prefer “selfie” from 2013 or even “????” from last year.

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