Pay It Forward

This is what great civilizations are built on. People doing the right thing and giving a helping hand to the next generation. Here is Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about Carl Sagan:



If you want to read a really good book, read Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World.

A Philosophy of Life Given Today's Science & Knowledge

There is a wonderful exploration of what stance we should -- our worldview -- given what various sciences and and wisdom tells us. It is all nicely summarized in simple cartoons at the blog Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

The cartoon format is the perfect way to convert stark intellectual reality into "bite sized" musings appropriate for our poor finite brains. Don't let the blog name or the cartoon format put you off. It is well worth taking a few minutes to ponder the Big Questions. Click the above link and explore.

The Collapse and Failure of Modern "Economics"

Here is a bit from an article in Foreign Affairs magazine which is reprinted in the blog Crooked Timber. The article looks at how monetary and economic policy in Europe is failing as that continent falls under the sway of "austerity" and the incompetence of "modern" economics:

The EU is now drifting toward a thinly disguised version of the gold standard, which wreaked economic havoc in the 1920s and led to a toxic political fallout. Under that system, European states had fixed exchange rates. During economic crises, they refused to increase government spending because of a failure to either understand or care that monetary disturbances and shocks to demand could lead to joblessness. The result was generalized misery. Governments responded to economic crises by allowing unemployment to go up and cutting back wages, leaving workers to bear the pain of adjustment. As Golden Fetters, Barry Eichengreen’s classic history of the period, shows, the gold standard began to collapse when workers in Europe gained the power to vote out of office the parties that supported austerity.

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This approach cannot be sustained for long. The EU has never had much popular legitimacy: many voters have gone along with it so far only out of the belief that their politicians knew best. Today, they are more suspicious. And if they come to think that further European integration is causing more economic hardship, their suspicion could harden into bitterness and perhaps even xenophobia. Ireland’s new finance minister, Michael Noonan, has told voters that the EU is a game rigged in Germany’s favor; editorials in major Irish newspapers warn of Germany’s return to racist imperialism. As economic shocks hit other EU countries, politicians in those states will also look for someone to blame.

If the EU is to survive, it will have to craft a solution to the eurozone crisis that is politically as well as economically sustainable. It will need to create long-term institutions that both minimize the risk of future economic crises and refrain from adopting politically unsustainable forms of austerity when crises do hit. They must offer the EU countries that are the worst hit a viable path to economic stability while reassuring Germany, the state currently driving economic debates within the union, that it will not be asked to bail out weaker states indefinitely.

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Contrary to the beliefs of nearly all anti-Keynesians—and, regrettably, some Keynesians, too—Keynesianism demands more, not less, fiscal rectitude in normal times than does the orthodox theory of balanced budgets that underpins the EU. John Maynard Keynes argued that surpluses should be accumulated during good years so that they could be spent to stimulate demand during bad ones. This lesson was well understood during the golden age of Keynesian social democracy, after World War II, when, aided by moderate inflation, the governments of the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development greatly reduced their ratios of public debt to GDP. This approach should not be confused with the opportunistic support for large budget deficits evident, for example, among advocates of supply-side economics. If anything, “hard” Keynesianism suggests that the problem with the macroeconomic rules governing the euro is not that they are too tough and too detailed but that they are not tough or detailed enough. States in the eurozone should not be allowed to run moderate budget deficits in boom years, the Keynesian argument goes; instead, they should be compelled to run budget surpluses. The surpluses could then be saved in rainy-day funds or used to pay down government debt or, if the country had reached a satisfactory debt-to-GDP ratio, spent as a fiscal stimulus in the event of a crisis. Unlike the kind of budget management advocated by the German government, this approach does not seek to eliminate or minimize governments’ leeway to conduct fiscal policy. It gives governments up-front the means to manage demand whenever they might need to.

The call for "hard Keynesianism" is the right call. It is the call that points out that the last 80 years of "economics" has been a disaster and a mistake built around lovely mathematics but an idiotic understanding of markets and humans.

I think it is funny. The call for "hard Keynesianism" is the call to go back to Joseph in Egypt in 1000 BC when during the 7 fat years the Pharaoh stored up surpluses from the land to feed the people during the 7 lean years. That "modern" economics doesn't understand this need to lean against the wind says volumes about the incompetence of "modern economics".

Fear and Loathing of the Day the Machines Take Over

Here are some bits from an article in The Atlantic magazine about the recent man vs. machine contest when IBM's Watson took on the to greatest Jeopady! contestants and ground them into the dust:

Oh, that Ken Jennings, always quick with a quip. At the end of the three-day Jeopardy! tournament pitting him and fellow human Brad Rutter against the IBM supercomputer Watson, he had a good one. When it came time for Final Jeopardy, he and Rutter already knew that Watson had trounced the two of them, the best competitors that Jeopardy! had ever had. So, on his written response to a clue about Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, Jennings wrote, "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."

Now, think about that sentence. What does it mean to you? If you are a fan of The Simpsons, you'll be able to identify it as a riff on a line from the 1994 episode, "Deep Space Homer," wherein clueless news anchor Kent Brockman is briefly under the mistaken impression that a "master race of giant space ants" is about to take over Earth. "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords," Brockman says, sucking up to the new bosses. "I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."

Even if you're not intimately familiar with that episode (and you really should be), you might have come across the "Overlord Meme," which uses Brockman's line as a template to make a sarcastic statement of submission: "I, for one, welcome our (new) ___ overlord(s)." Over on Language Log, where I'm a contributor, we'd call this kind of phrasal template a "snowclone," and that one's been on our radar since 2004. So it's a repurposed pop-culture reference wrapped in several layers of irony.

But what would Watson make of this smart-alecky remark? The question-answering algorithms that IBM developed to allow Watson to compete on Jeopardy! might lead it to conjecture that it has something to do with The Simpsons -- since the full text of Wikipedia is among its 15 terabytes of reference data, and the Kent Brockman page explains the Overlord Meme. After all, Watson's mechanical thumb had beaten Ken and Brad's real ones to the buzzer on a Simpsons clue earlier in the game (identifying the show as the home of Itchy and Scratchy). But beyond its Simpsonian pedigree, this complex use of language would be entirely opaque to Watson. Humans, on the other hand, have no problem identifying how such a snowclone works, appreciating its humorous resonances, and constructing new variations on the theme.

All of this is to say that while Ken and Brad lost the battle, Team Carbon is still winning the language war against Team Silicon.

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Those were two isolated gaffes in a pretty clean run by Watson against his human foes, but they'll certainly be remembered at IBM. For proof, see Stephen Baker's book Final Jeopardy, an engaging inside look at the Watson project, culminating with the Jeopardy! showdown in the final chapter. (In a shrewd marketing move, the book was available electronically without its final chapter before the match, and then the ending was given to readers as an update immediately after the conclusion of the tournament.) Baker writes:

As this question-answering technology expands from its quiz show roots into the rest of our lives, engineers at IBM and elsewhere must sharpen its understanding of contextual language. Smarter machines will not call Toronto a U.S. city, and they will recognize the word "missing" as the salient fact in any discussion of George Eyser's leg. Watson represents merely a step in the development of smart machines. Its answering prowess, so formidable on a winter afternoon in 2011, will no doubt seem quaint in a surprisingly short time.

Baker's undoubtedly right about that, but we're still dealing with the limited task of question-answering, not anything even vaguely approaching full-fledged comprehension of natural language, with all of its "nuance, slang and metaphor." If Watson had chuckled at that "computer overlords" jab, then I'd be a little worried.

I'm in the 1960s camp of AI. I believe that for machines to really be useful they need logic not pattern matching algorithms or neural networks. The problem with the latter is that they create fragile "experts" that can fail unexpectedly and which we cannot understand what they know and don't know. There was a classic neural network training for the military task of finding tanks in a scene. They tuned up the network and got some pretty good success, but in a new training set they discovered unexpected failures. What had gone wrong? The machine was finding shadows and not tanks. But the humans weren't aware of that. They simply fed it scenes and rewarded "correct guesses" and punished wrong guesses. They had no way of knowing what the underlying machine-learned "algorithm" really was "identifying".

I'm willing to let AI make use of the dumb algorithms, but unless the machine system includes some real intelligence, i.e. logic and concepts manipulated in a human-like way, there will never be a "team silicon" to threaten "team carbon".

A Motto to Clutch

This makes sense to me:

If you're not a socialist in your twenties, you have no heart; if you're not a capitalist in your forties, you have no mind. I think there's an important addition: If you're not a humanist in your seventies, you have no soul.

I found it in a post by James Fallows on his Atlantic blog.