All posts by Steve Stern

Trumpism and Jung/evolution

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

Stories about anti-heroes are powerful not because they confuse us, but because they deeply satisfy our unconscious understanding of who we are. The victory of Donald Trump was another story about who we actually are. From an article,  Jung and the Trumpian Shadow by Alexander Blum, in a Web magazine called Guillette.

A day or so ago, Patricia Karnowski posted an article, referenced above, with the comment: OK friends. I found it. This explains what is going on… or at least it helps. And it does…or, at least, it clears up many of the very muddy ideas I’ve had swirling around in my heart and head. I want to yell “Read This Article!!” – I actually considered making it the title of my post – not so much because it is so insightful or that it tells the truth – although it is and it mostly does – but that it looks at the election from a new-to-me, detached, Jungian-pattern, overview. So much discussion of why Trump won the election is lost in yelled accusations or, just, sheer rage.      

One of my strongest memories of the disastrous – in my opinion, at least – 2016 election was the first Republican Debate. Trump on the far end of the stage, in no man’s land, and, in the center Jeb Bush, the man who had raised $120 million, more money than everybody else put together. He was resplendent, waiting for his anointment, and Trump destroyed him. In almost every argument about how stupid Trump might be, I have told my arguer how masterful I thought Trump played his position but I couldn’t really define what happened or how Trump did it. Blum analyzes it from a pattern level. 

In an essay titled “Feminism and the problem of supertoxic masculinity,” political scientist Justin Murphy makes an unconventional argument. In encouraging men to be passive, polite, and non-offensive through social pressure, most men will conform to that feminist standard out of a genuine unwillingness to be abrasive or do harm. But a small number of men who cannot be shamed, in a world filled with men who refuse to check them, will begin to dominate….Jeb Bush was far closer to the feminist male ideal than Donald Trump ever was. Bush was tepid, meek, and asked for polite apologies. Trump refused to apologize, bullied him, and bulldozed him. Jeb was too used to the polite society of elite socialization to deal with a man who was, by comparison, an uncouth barbarian. Everyone across the political spectrum, from socialists to Trump’s supporters, thoroughly enjoyed watching Jeb, the civilized man who was promised everything, be devastated by a shameless and cruel competitor. People, regardless of their political views, enjoyed watching a man perceived as weak be totally dismissed by a morally darker but more interesting man.

I don’t agree with every word of the above, or, more accurately, I don’t want to agree with it, but I have to admit that both Michele and I enjoyed Bush getting trashed. My default, however, is not to moralize over what Blum calls the shadow; I prefer to think selfish, unthinking behavior like racism, as being rooted in our territorial animal past and is a deep and powerful force.

As quoted by Blum, Jung says: 

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

And Blum points out that 

American progressives believed that through a respectable politics, the psychology of hatred could be repressed through a combination of censorship and social pressure. They imagined that the march of progress was so inevitable that by shaming and denying the power of our worst impulses, we could create a paradise.

It is turning out that we can’t and I found this article very helpful in my trying to find out how we got here. Jung and the Trumpian Shadow, check it out.   

An interesting observation

Psychological Musings

My sister, Paula, made an interesting observation. By way of background, putting a hand on the other person’s back – or any body part, really – is a sign of dominance. A father puts his hand on the son’s shoulder, not the other way around; the homeowner puts her hand on the gardener’s arm to direct his attention. 

When Donald Trump, President of the United States, and   Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader of North Korea, first made a joint press conference at Capella Resort, Singapore, Kim seemed completely out of his league. He had obviously had never been in front of a gaggle of press and photographers before, not one that large, at least. Trump looked like the kind father, hand on Kim’s back, guiding the naive newcomer around. By the last meeting, however, Kim was doing the guiding.   

Random Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, and the Learning Curve.  

Evolution, Web/Tech

 Intelligence is the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations. Merriam-Webster.

Me: OK Google, call Richard
Google Assistant: Richard Home or Richard Mobile?
Me: Home
Google Assistant: Home is in Portola Valley California

While driving somewhere, Michele and I will sometimes entertain ourselves by comparing the abilities of Google Assistant and Siri. It is fascinating what they can do and even more fascinating what they can’t do. Despite the above example, in almost all cases, OK Google understands better, and is more accurate and useful than Hey Siri.

I’ve read that Google is able to get better engineers because Google gives public credit to its engineers while Apple hides them behind the Apple Brand. For example, at Apple, a paper entitled An On-device Deep Neural Network for Face Detection is listed as written by the Computer Vision Machine Learning Team while, at Google, a paper entitled TFX: A TensorFlow-Based Production-Scale Machine Learning Platform – I have no idea what either title actually means, by the way – credits Akshay Naresh Modi, Chiu Yuen Koo, Chuan Yu Foo, Clemens Mewald, Denis M. Baylor, Eric Breck, Heng-Tze Cheng, Jarek Wilkiewicz, Levent Koc, Lukasz Lew, Martin A. Zinkevich, Martin Wicke, Mustafa Ispir, Neoklis Polyzotis, Noah Fiedel, Salem Elie Haykal, Steven Whang, Sudip Roy, Sukriti Ramesh, Vihan Jain, Xin Zhang, and Zakaria Haque. 

As an aside, when looking at the Google team, they are surprisingly diverse but only in strangely limited areas. The Google Team, which I picked more or less at random, is not a microcosm of America. When I go to the alphabetical Google People Directory, there is a large percentage of Indian names as well as Chinese, Pakistani, Iranian, and Arab names along with the expected European names. Even the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichaiand, was born in India. End aside. 

As another aside, Looking at that list of names above, which has so few women on it, I wonder if the fact that there are so few women in the High Tech biz is because Silicon Valley is populated by a high percentage of men from conservative cultures and they bring an unconscience bias against women. That said, I read that Google just hired two women to head all their Cloud Machine Learning technology; according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, they are “Fei-Fei Li, who was director of AI at Stanford, and Jia Li, who was head of research at Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc”, so maybe, the times are a-changin’. End aside. 

Reading about AI, I realize that, when I think of Intelligence, I am really thinking of being conscious. Intellectually, I know that intelligence is not the same as consciousness, at least from the limited things I’ve read, but I find it very difficult to imagine intelligence without consciousness. It does make me feel better that I am not the only one making this mistake; certainly, HAL was conscience and Skynet, Ava in Em Machina for sure. When we drove through Georgia last fall, we asked Google Maps – with lots of double checking with Apple Maps – to plot a course diagonally across rural Georgia while staying off of highways. It did a super job but, in my imagination, at least, it is just a brute force problem, not Artificial Intelligence. Memorize every road in Georgia with its length, from intersection to intersection, crank in the speed limits of each section – speed limits which even my humble Hyundai knows – and calculate the fasted route. We did go by the world’s largest Peanut Monument and Google did take us through the very cute town of Colquitt, pop. 1,939, where I was able to buy an excellent cappuccino, but I think these were artifacts of the route and Google did not think: Oh, I’ll take him by the Peanut Monument and through Colquitt because it is the only place in rural Georgia he can get a cappuccino.  

On the other hand, when Google DeepMind taught itself to play Go and then beat Go master Lee Sedol in four out of five games, there was a lot more than brute force going on. A disclaimer here, I know nothing about Go, except that I have read that it is much more complicated than chess. Like chess, every move opens the door to many more moves, except in Go, the number of moves starts to approach the infinite. I read that there are more possible moves than all the atoms in the universe, so it is impossible for DeepMind to memorize all the moves, the program had to actually think about what move would be best. One of the things I found most amazing while reading about DeepMind vs. Sedol is that DeepMind made many unconventional moves that nobody had ever seen or thought of before and Sedol says that he learned to think out of the box more by playing DeepMind.  

Years ago, when I was an Industrial Psych major, the thinking was that the Learning Curve was not a smooth curve but a curve broken up by a series of plateaus. Sort of analogous to the evolutionary theory of Punctuated Equilibrium in biology. Change happens, we settle into the new reality, and then we have a jump to another new reality. That way of looking at learning is not as popular as it was but, after looking at the recent Google demo, it seems to me that is what is happening in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (I put both down because I’m not sure of the difference). We are making a jump to a new reality. 

Baby Artichokes

Around home

Yesterday was Election Day here and, from my point of view, it was a mixed bag so I want to change the subject. Let’s talk about baby artichokes. A couple of weekends ago, one of our favorite Farmer’s Market vendors suggested we try his baby artichokes. We got a couple and steamed them. We let them cool, peeled off a couple of the hard outer leaves, bit in. Wow!, it was an unexpected delight, the bottom 3/4s of what is left is all editable and delicious. If you get a chance, check it out.