AI?

 

Well Respected Man

Cause he's oh, so good
And he's oh, so fine
And he's oh, so healthy
In his body and his mind
He's a well respected man about town
Doing the best things so conservatively 

What about an Artificial Man?

The Kinks had a hit with Well Respected Man.  They were less fortunate but had something to say about Artificial Man in their album  Preservation Act 2 that had way less critical acclaim but was just as insightful.  Things aren’t always what they seem.  Just because you call it Artificial Intelligence does not mean that it is INTELLIGENT.  It is definitely Artificial, we can all agree on that.  But AI is only Artificial INFERENCE in that it can only be trained on data it has encountered, NOT on what it has NOT encountered.  When it encounters something unexpected, then its inference can be correct, or it can be hallucinating, making the wrong inference from that input. What it choses can never be better than its training data.  It has no more than a non-artificial, a real, intelligence chance of being correct.  At most game theory and statistics tell us that an individual agent can have no more than a 5/6, 83.33% chance of being correct.  If you want to rely on what the AI tells you to do then understand that the AI might deserve no more respect than you do.  You individually might be only 50% certain.  But collectively a group of 12 individuals, an unbiased jury, might be 99.99...% certain.  So a group of humans are still better than a single AI. That single AI can not be more than 83.33% correct.  A single AI can never be more certain than a jury of unbiased humans, but that jury approaches 100%.  

Free Speech II

 

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

All at once, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, "Turn around men!
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.

Peter Seeger’s song was about foolishly following a Captain into the Big Muddy when the Captain did not have the correct information. This action cost the Captain his life.  The Sergeant and the men of his platoon would have also paid that price if they had listened to, obeyed, the Captain. And that is what free speech is all about. No one is absolutely certain unless that person is also the absolute. Everybody , not just the  absolute,  is free to state their opinion, but it is just that,  their opinion, not the facts. Free Speech is your opinion. Acting if that opinion is the Truth is what has consequences, not the opinion itself. You should follow the truth, not obey an opinion.

You are free to give your opinion, but your opinion is NOT an order, nor should it be. If you follow that opinion, act as if it were the truth, then you will share in the consequences of that opinion if it is false. I will defend your right to free speech, opinion, to the death. But you, and everyone that accepts your opinion as the truth, has to accept the consequences of that speech. It is the action, not the speech, that has consequences. Free speech? Yes. Actions without consequences? No.

Sports

Wide World of Sports Theme Song

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports:
The thrill of victory
And the agony of defeat
The human drama of athletic competition
This is ABC's Wide World of Sports.

In anticipation of the upcoming Olympics I want to honor some of my favorite sports clips.

Sports are a group activity, not just for the players and their owners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIzLllotJpk

The group is stronger than any competitor. Watch Canadian hockey fans sing their national anthem before an Edmonton Oilers game.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XfMdiwd_LA8

Even when the power went out at a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game with the Nashville Predators, the Canadian fans took over in singing the national anthem of the USA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHSaHRd4Q48

But this was before the current picking of a fight with Canada,.  Here are Canadian hockey fans booing the US national anthem.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=aXkRNnvs2S8

Do you know how bad you have to be to get a Canadian sports fan mad at you?

Theme songs by fans are a tradition in sports. Here is a version of  Take Me Out To the Ballgame which is sung by the crowd in the seventh inning stretch at baseball games,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0Jim3U8ylE

or Sweet Caroline during the eighth inning stretch at Red Sox Games,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMYBrZkyK1g

or the singing of You’ll Never Walk Alone before Liverpool futbol matches.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zVe7bvDkhbc

The summer Olympics traditionally finish with the Marathon bemuse every runner who competes is a winner. Life is a Marathon, NOT a sprint.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYnNOA9U3cM

Remember “When the game has been decided, and you’re just burning out the clock” hold tight to your anger and don’t give into your fears. Play on and you'll never walk alone.

National Anthems

 

This Land is Your land

This land is your land, and this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters|
This land was made for you and me.

My country right or wrong?

The anthem, This Land Is Your Land, of love for  the United States of America was written by Woody Guthrie in response to the adoption of God Bless America by Christian Nationalists.  Christian Nationalists should also be aware that God Bless America was written by a  Jew, Irving Berlin, who was born Israel Isidore Beilin. ( the fact that he also wrote White Christmas, where White referred only to snow, and Easter Parade might also surprise those same Christian Nationalists)

Rather than dueling anthems, each  thinking that they alone are correct, as the Buffalo Springfield sung “Nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong.”  A better statement is that "My Country, Right or Wrong" is correct, but this is statement alone is incomplete.  The correct full statement should be “My Country Right or Wrong.  If it’s Right, KEEP it Right, but if it’s Wrong, MAKE it Right.  That is real love of country that both sides should find correct.

Laffer Curve

 

Walk On The Wild Side

Jackie is just speeding away
Thought she was James Dean for a day
Then I guess she had to crash
Valium would've helped that bash
She said, "Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side"
I said, "Hey, honey, take a walk on the wild side"

Just don’t take a walk on the Laffer, aka Supply-side.

Today’s Explain It Daily email was on the Laffer Curve, also known as supply-side economics.  It tries to uses fancy language but let’s call a spade a spade.  The Laffer curve, the basis for Reaganomics, Thatcherism, the Tea Party, tax cuts and what almost bankrupt the state of Kansas under Governor Sam Brownback, is a fraud.  It is based on the proposition that a curve can be constructed of tax revenue based on total income.  The problem is that it tries to explain the curve as a parabola instead of as a hyperbola. 

When the revenue approaches zero, the curve requires that at zero taxes there is zero revenue.  This requires two roots at zero income but mathematically tax revenue using an inverted parabola must become imaginary for incomes less than the roots of that inverted parabola, i.e. negative incomes.  A more reasonable interpretation that never goes imaginary and where incomes do NOT become negative is that tax revenues are a hyperbola, not a parabola, In a hyperbola, tax revenue approaches, but does not equal, zero at two points.  In fact,  the distribution of tax revenue seems to follow a sech squared, logistics distribution. This does a better job of explaining the observations of revenue.  In fact then the optimal tax rate would be 1/6 of income, or 16.67%.  The maximum normal rates then would be 8.33% for the lowest rate and 33.33% for the highest rate.  These are the effective rates.  

In addition to confusing parabolas with hyperbolas, the proponents  of the Laffer supply side curve also confuse marginal/first derivative rates with effective, no derivative, actual tax rates.  The highest effective tax rate would be 33.33%.  The marginal rate at this rate would be 100% but that 100% is the percentage of the effective rate, which at its maximum should be 100%.   So the Laffer curve is a mathematical mistake , but that mistake is no Laffing matter.

Economics

 

What a Wonderful World

Don't know much about geography
Don't know much trigonometry
Don't know much about algebra
Don't know what a slide rule is for

And yet economists try to use calculus even though they apparently don’t know much about calculus!

Economists want to use calculus and advanced mathematics to show that they are a real science.  But unless their principles are stated correctly, then we can get mistaken economic principles. Take the macroeconomic belief that at the optimal, marginal cost must be equal to marginal revenue and that at this optimal no quantity of goods are sold. This is often expressed as MP=MR, Q=0, or that the optimal quantity of goods is when marginal price is equal to marginal revenue. Unfortunately this also requires that the volume of goods be allowed to be negative. If the statement had been correctly formatted as Revenue, Unit Price sold multiplied by the Quantity sold, and Cost = Unit Cost multiplied by the Quantity produced PLUS a constant, it can not be assumed that when marginal Revenue, the first derivative of revenue with respect to quantity, to be equal to marginal cost, the first derivative of the production cost with respect to quantity To be an optimal the quantity sold/produced must be equal to zero.  This also assumes that the quantity sold/produced can be negative and it can not.  The correct formulation, like any proper exponential distribution, which includes radioactive decay and cellular growth, follows an exponential distribution and is  Revenue = Unit Price * Quantity sold = Unit Production Cost * Quantity made PLUS a constant, where the Quantity made or sold must also be greater than or equal to 0. Instead Marginal Price = Marginal Revenue must be equal to half of the constant in the cumulative equation, and that constant does NOT become zero when the derivative is taken.  This means that the optimal quantity sold is not when MR, δR/δQ = MC, δC/δQ, when Q = 0, but instead there is no optimal quantity to be sold unless the quantity sold is allowed to also be less than or equal to zero.  If the quantity is declining, then it can approach zero but never reach zero. If the quantity is growing, revenue can approach but not exceed,  a constant related to an absolute. Expressed statistically, growth, or decay, should be regressed as log-linear, an exponential function. It is neither linear‑linear,  a trend function, or log-log, a power function.  Growth, including negative growth, also known as decay, is variable not constant.