None of the Above

 

Complicated

Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?
I see the way you're acting like you're somebody else
Gets me frustrated
Life's like this, you fall
And you crawl, and you break
And you take what you get, and you turn it into
Honesty and promise me I'm never gonna find you faking
No, no, no

A yes or no response isn’t enough

Facebook, I am told, allows you to set your relationship status as single, in a relationship, engaged, married, in a civil partnership, in a domestic partnership, in an open relationship, it's complicated, separated, divorced, and widowed. In this there are more than two options but even when there are only two responses, there should always be a third, It’s Complicated/Other. Thus a True/False quiz should be True/False/It’s Complicated. Otherwise you can be asked misleading “Have you stopped beating your wife?” questions, where you are damned if you answer yes (implying that you used to beat you wife but have stopped) or no ( admitting that you are currently beating your wife.). There always better be three options or the responses can’t tell anything.

This goes for any response/choice. If you are asked to choose between good and evil, you might choose to be 100% good or 100% evil, but you are not the only one making that choice. Each individual’s choice can be binary, but the sum of all choices is where we live.

AI

 

Dawn (Go Away)

Think (think)
What a big man he'll be
Think
Of the places you'll see
Now think what the future would be with a poor boy like me
Dawn go away

Thinking is intelligence, not inference

The topic du jour seems to be AI, Artificial Intelligence. This is, IMHO, an oxymoron. It really should be Artificial Inference. Computers (the Artificial part) are building inferences based on the data that they examine. However inferences are NOT always intelligent. Before Copernicus, the inference was that the sun moved around the earth. Before modern geology, the inference was that the Earth was only a few thousand years old. Before Michelson, the inference was that light moved though a luminiferous aether that permeated empty space. Before Einstein’s Theory of relativity, it was inferred that there was an absolute frame of reference.

The best that can be hoped from computers is that they will make inferences, discover a pattern in the data. It will be up to some one else to use intelligence to say what that pattern means.

Before you acknowledge that there is a pattern, make sure that you know what data has been examined. The Literary Digest famously predicted that Alf Landon would defeat Roosevelt in the Presidential election of 1936 because they had only polled their readers. If the data that AI is using is not inclusive, any patterns from that data will reflect its exclusions. You can’t make any inferences from data that you don’t have.

MAGA? II

 

Glory Days

Yeah, just sitting back, trying to recapture
A little of the glory, yeah
Well time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister
But boring stories of

Glory days, yeah they'll pass you by
Glory days, in the wink of a young girl's eye
Glory days, glory days
Glory days, yeah they'll pass you by

Make America Great Again?

Make.  Good, an action verb.  Making things is progress. 

America.  The group to which you belong.  I’m with you. 

Great. What you aspire to. Now, that is inspirational. 

Again.  Uh.  You lost me there sport. 

Silly Rabbit. You can’t go home again.  You can’t recapture the glory days.  What has happened, has happened.  You can’t make the future look like the past. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is only tying to distract you.  MAG is fine. MAGA?  Not so much.

The Right Reasons

 

A Kiss From A Rose

Baby, I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the grey
Ooh, the more I get of you, stranger it feels, yeah
And now that your rose is in bloom
A light hits the gloom on the grey.

Before I give you my rose, are you here for the right reasons?

Some rules of thumb which I generally follow when I enter the voting booth, if I do not know the candidate. They are actually identical to the rules of thumb if I do know the candidate. A candidate for office is supposed to represent me to the group. I want someone who is for truth, justice, and the American Way. By that I mean that someone who acknowledges the truth; acts for justice for the group, not for himself; and promotes inclusion in the group (America is known for being a melting pot.).

A plus for being a woman and/or a member of a traditionally excluded group.

Women and others have too long been excluded from the group. Being a woman or a minority member does not mean that you aren’t in favor of exclusion (e.g. Ann Coulter, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Peter Thiel, Clarence Thomas, and Tim Scott) but hopefully you will be more sensitive to those who have traditionally been excluded.

A plus for being rich.

I do not think that the rich are smarter than others in the group. I just think that they have a higher price than anyone else, e.g. they have more to lose if they act for themselves and not for the group, and have a higher price such that only when the bribe is enormous will they act for themselves and not the group. The self-made rich are usually think first of themselves, but this may not be true of their descendants. That means I will give points to the descendants of the Kennedy, Roosevelts, and Rockefellers. E.g. Joseph Kennedy, Senior? No. John F. Kennedy? Yes.

A plus for being a veteran, a member of a non-profit, a teacher, etc.

I want someone who will act for the group, not for themselves. Veterans, Doctors Without Borders, Peace Corps volunteers, teachers, etc. have demonstrated that they place the interests of the group over themselves.

A minus for being a celebrity

I expect the Peter Principle to apply, that being good in one job does not mean that you will be good in another job. Being a great football coach does not mean that you will be a great senator. (E.g. Tommy Tuberville)

A minus for being in any form of show business.

I have to trust the positions that are, and will be, supported by the candidate. The art of show business is learning the art of distraction, the razzle dazzle, which means I can’t trust the stated position. That means I won’t vote for a Jane Fonda or an Al Franken, but I also won’t vote for a Ronald Reagan, Doctor Oz, or Donald Trump.

A minus for attending a top school.

This sounds counter intuitive. I attended a top school. Shouldn’t I want someone like me to represent me? Don’t I trust myself? (Uh…not really!). Attending a top school might mean that the person wanted to get the best instruction, but it also could mean that the person is merely doing resumé padding. I attended classes at the Wharton School while at UPenn, but Donald Trump, Donald Trump Junior, Ivanka Trump, and Elon Musk also all also graduated from Wharton.

A minus for being divorced.

Yes, I realize that there are people in unsuccessful marriages and those people are perfectly justified in getting a divorce. However when they married, they took an oath that they would be in that marriage forever. A successful candidate will also be asked to take an oath to support the group. That is an oath that I don’t want them to break.

The candidate who has a higher point total than their opponents, is the one who will probably get my vote. To use a line from one of my wife’s favorite shows, I want to give my rose to a person who is there for the right reasons.

Unconscious Bias

 I Don't Know Why (I Just Do)

I don't know why I love you like I do
I don't why, but I do
I don't know why you thrill me like you do
I don't know why, but you do.

Shouldn’t you want to know why?

Unconscious biases can be long lasting and may be …doh…. unconscious, something of which you aren’t even aware. Case in point. I attended Brown University where the Computer Science Building was funded by one of its alumni, Thomas Watson, Jr, a former CEO and son of the founder of IBM.

In the 1980s, IBM was introducing Personal Computers, PCs. They used a subcontractor to work on its operating system and that subcontractor had a competing version of the BASIC computer language, which ran on those PCs. That version of BASIC was obviously not to be taken as seriously as IBM's since that competing version of BASIC went by the name GW (Golly Whiz) BASIC. So clearly there was no serious reason to invest in that subcontractor when they had their Initial Public Offering. That subcontractor was, at time, a little firm called Microsoft. Being biased in favor of IBM did not work out so well for me.

When search engines were being developed, Scientific American did a review of two competing, innovative search engines. One was IBM's CLEVER. The name of the other search engine is the punch line. Needless to say, I was much more impressed with IBM’s search engine and saw no reason to invest in its no-name, fly-by-night competitor. The name of that competing Search Engine... GOOGLE. Another case of where being biased in favor of IBM led me to back the wrong horse.

As to how long-lasting unconscious bias can be, my father’s parents saw two of their children die in the Spanish Flu Pandemic, before my father was even born. My father had an abiding fear of public spaces, anything shared, that I am fairly sure that he learned from his parents, but he never acknowledged why. When I reflect on my response to the COVID pandemic, which was influenced by my own upbringing by my father, I had to reflect on this incident that happened before my father was even born.

A coincidence. The firm at which I worked since 1998, had its HQ less than a mile from where my Uncle and Aunt died and were buried. I do not know, but suspect, that their deaths were why my grandparents moved from Cambridge, MA to Providence, RI where both my father and I were born.

Economics IV

 

Everybody Needs Somebody To Love

Everybody needs somebody to love
I'm not afraid to be by myself but I just need somebody to love
All the time

In economics, maybe you need two somebodies.

Economics is a three-party game. There is a buyer, a seller and the goods being exchanged.

It is a mistake to think that you will always be a seller. At some point, every seller will have to be a buyer. (Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.)  If a seller has acquired all of the goods, (or the currency, if that is being used as a medium for the transaction in lieu of some of the goods), has eliminated all of the other sellers, and there are also no buyers, then those goods will have no value. They only have a value if there is a buyer.

Economics thus should not be viewed as a game of domination, where the seller tries to accumulate all of the goods at the expense of the buyer. Eventually the seller may “win,” accumulate all of the goods, eliminate his competing sellers, and all buyers, but in doing so he will have "lost".

If the seller does not try to dominate each buyer, then there will be more buyers and the goods that are accumulated will have a value. It makes no difference whether the accumulation is of goods or the currency that can be exchanged for goods. If there are no other buyers or sellers, then that accumulation is worthless.

There is a reason for the infamous triangle trade. At a minimum it takes three buyers and three sellers to have a set of successful economic transactions. Thus there have to be three participants, parties, for those three transactions. In Transaction One, Party One is the seller, and Party Two is the buyer. In Transaction Two, Party Two is the seller and Party Three is the buyer. In Transaction Three, Party Three is the seller and we have come full circle and Party One is the buyer. If there are only two Parties, and Party Two does not want to buy what Party One is selling, then there is no economic transaction. If there is only one Party, then there is no one with whom to trade, and thus there can be no economic transaction.

Impulse Control II

 

Incident on Rogers Creek

Were you lost?  No, just bewildered,
Were you caught? No, just surrounded.
Were you brave and were you courageous?
Well, wait and see.

Are we there yet?

If you are a boomer like me, you might remember the lyrics in the song from an animated featurette on Captain Kangaroo. ( the song is by Bing Crosby, which I don’t remember the Captain ever saying). The Captain was trying to teach his audience the virtue of patience.  The toddler’s cry “Are we there yet?” is an indication that the toddler in the back seat has not yet learned patience.

“Marry in haste, repent at leisure” is an adage that is taught to children.  A related saying is "Look before you leap".  Something that sounds good at the moment, because you have no impulse control, might not look so good to you once time has passed.  An important step in growing up is learning patience and not to giving into your first instinct. Learn to wait and see.