“While it takes as much skill to make a sword or a ploughshare, it takes a critical understanding of human values to prefer the ploughshare.”
Walter Lippmann, in his first Editorial for the New Republic, 1918.
Monthly Archives: March 2016
Donald Trump Berlusconi
Nice piece by Bill Emmott who — as a former Editor of the Economist — was twice sued for libel by Berlusconi. Sample:
The reality is that, while Berlusconi certainly has his charm, Trump’s swelling base of support seems to see a certain charm in him, too, even if it is a less seductive version. Moreover, while Berlusconi undoubtedly possesses business acumen, he has, like Trump, cut plenty of corners along the way. The ties of Berlusconi’s close aides and friends to Italy’s various Mafia clans are well documented.
But none of this is particularly important, in terms of its implications for the United States today. What is important is that both Trump and Berlusconi are ruthless and willing to resort to any means to achieve their (self-serving) ends.
Given this, underestimating Trump would be a huge mistake; he will always prove stronger, more slippery, and more enduring than expected. The only way to avoid Berlusconi-level disaster – or worse – is to continue criticizing him, exposing his lies, and holding him to account for his words and actions, regardless of the insults or threats he throws at those who do.
Too many Italians shrugged their shoulders at Berlusconi’s lies and failings, figuring that he would soon go away, having done little harm. But he did not go away, and he did plenty of harm. The US cannot afford to make the same mistake. The price of liberty, Americans are fond of saying, is eternal vigilance. In confronting Trump, there can be no discount.
Yep.
Europe and the US: two continents divided by a common technology
This morning’s Observer column:
Three years ago, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman (aka adult supervisor) of Google, spent some time in Cambridge as a visiting professor. He gave a number of lectures on his vision of what a comprehensively networked world would be like and then at the end took part in a symposium in which a number of academics commented on his ideas. As the discussion converged on the question of the new kinds of power wielded by the great internet companies, an increasingly puzzled look came over Schmidt’s countenance. Eventually the dam broke and he intervened in the debate to say that he had suddenly realised that the difference between Europe and America was that “in Europe, people tend to trust governments and are suspicious of companies, whereas in America it’s the other way around”.
What the butler saw
So it begins. As the media establishment wakes up to the realisation that this Trump nonsense might really be serious, so its organs begin to burnish the clown’s image. First up is this NYT piece about the property that will be “the Western White House” if Trump were elected President. It’s a three-sickbag piece, so be warned. Sample:
“You can always tell when the king is here,” Mr. Trump’s longtime butler here, Anthony Senecal, said of the master of the house and Republican presidential candidate.
The king was returning that day to his Versailles, a 118-room snowbird’s paradise that will become a winter White House if he is elected president. Mar-a-Lago is where Mr. Trump comes to escape, entertain and luxuriate in a Mediterranean-style manse, built 90 years ago by the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post.
Few people here can anticipate Mr. Trump’s demands and desires better than Mr. Senecal, 74, who has worked at the property for nearly 60 years, and for Mr. Trump for nearly 30 of them.
He understands Mr. Trump’s sleeping patterns and how he likes his steak (“It would rock on the plate, it was so well done”), and how Mr. Trump insists — despite the hair salon on the premises — on doing his own hair.
And so on, seemingly ad infinitum.
And the headline over this farrago? “A King in His Castle: How Donald Trump Lives, From His Longtime Butler”.
Text and marriage
So who are these Trump voters, exactly?
Here’s the answer, from a fascinating interview with Dr. Robert Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, who has done a lot of detailed, fine-grained polling:
In a nutshell, I think these voters are best understood not as values voters, not even as Tea Party voters, but as nostalgia voters, these voters that are looking back to — they’re culturally and economically disaffected voters that are anxious to hold on to a white conservative Christian culture that’s passing from the scene. I think that’s the core of who his supporters are. I think it’s highly doubtful that there are enough of those voters out there to get him across the finish line no matter who the Democratic nominee is in the general election. But there may be enough of them, and it looks like there are, to get him across the finish line to be the Republican nominee.
Lots of detail in the interview. Worth reading in full.
An alternative view is that they are people who are in revolt against the ‘Establishment’. But what is that, exactly? Here’s Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s take on it:
One funeral at a time
This morning’s Observer column:
Science advances, said the great German physicist Max Planck, “one funeral at a time”. Actually, this is a paraphrase of what he really said, which was: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” But you get the drift.
I always think of Planck’s aphorism whenever moral panic breaks out over the supposedly dizzying pace of technological change…
So what’s with Eddie Redmayne and his camera?
Semiotics isn’t my thing, but I’d really like to know what’s going on in this full-page ad in the Financial Times.
On the face of it it’s an advertisement for an Omega wristwatch. But if so, what is Eddie Redmayne doing with a lovely 1960s Rolleiflex 2.8E?
Is it because he’s a photography buff (plausible because a good many celebs have been snapped in the past wielding Rollei twin-lens reflexes)? Or is there some kind of subliminal message — for example that the Omega Globemaster watch belongs in the same category of superb analog engineering as the Rolleiflex?
Turns out that I’m not the only photography buff to spot the image. There’s a lively thread here which, among other things, contains some plaintive cries for someone to design a digital back for the Rollei, like has been done for the Hasselblad 500. But it isn’t going to happen, alas. Creating a digital back for the Hass was relatively straightforward, because it always had a separate, detachable back which held the film, so you could keep the camera body and just change the back. The Hasselblad CFV-50c doesn’t come cheap, though — it retails at ~£7,000. The watch is cheaper.
Implications of AlphaGo’s victory
Many and varied, I guess, and there will be lots of fevered speculation. But I liked this summary by Quartz’s Gideon Lichfield:
“It’s not a human move.”
What shocked the grandmasters watching Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top Go players, lose to a computer on Thursday was not that the computer won, but how it won. A pivotal move by AlphaGo, a project of Google AI subsidiary DeepMind, was so unexpected, so at odds with 2,500 years of Go history and wisdom, that some thought it must be a glitch.
Lee’s third game against AlphaGo is this Saturday. Even if man recovers to beat the machine, what we will remember is that moment of bewilderment. Go is much more complex than chess; to play it, as DeepMind’s CEO explained, AlphaGo needs the computer equivalent of intuition. And as Sedol discovered, that intuition is not of the human kind.
A classic fear about AI is that the machines we build to serve us will destroy us instead, not because they become sentient and malicious, but because they devise unforeseen and catastrophic ways to reach the goals we set them. Worse, if they do become sentient and malicious, then—like Ava, the android in the movie Ex Machina—we may not even realize until it’s too late, because the way they think will be unrecognizable to us. What we call common sense and logic will be revealed as small-minded prejudices, baked in by aeons of biological and social evolution, which trap us in a tiny corner of the possible intellectual universe.
But there is a rosier view: that the machines, sentient or not, could help us break our intellectual bonds and see solutions—whether to Go, or to bigger problems—that we couldn’t imagine otherwise. “So beautiful,” as one grandmaster said of AlphaGo’s game. “So beautiful.”
How AlphaGo works
Very good explainer from the Economist:
AlphaGo uses some of the same technologies as those older programs. But its big idea is to combine them with new approaches that try to get the computer to develop its own intuition about how to play—to discover for itself the rules that human players understand but cannot explain. It does that using a technique called deep learning, which lets computers work out, by repeatedly applying complicated statistics, how to extract general rules from masses of noisy data.
Deep learning requires two things: plenty of processing grunt and plenty of data to learn from. DeepMind trained its machine on a sample of 30m Go positions culled from online servers where amateurs and professionals gather to play. And by having AlphaGo play against another, slightly tweaked version of itself, more training data can be generated quickly.
Those data are fed into two deep-learning algorithms. One, called the policy network, is trained to imitate human play. After watching millions of games, it has learned to extract features, principles and rules of thumb. Its job during a game is to look at the board’s state and generate a handful of promising-looking moves for the second algorithm to consider.
This algorithm, called the value network, evaluates how strong a move is. The machine plays out the suggestions of the policy network, making moves and countermoves for the thousands of possible daughter games those suggestions could give rise to. Because Go is so complex, playing all conceivable games through to the end is impossible. Instead, the value network looks at the likely state of the board several moves ahead and compares those states with examples it has seen before. The idea is to find the board state that looks, statistically speaking, most like the sorts of board states that have led to wins in the past. Together, the policy and value networks embody the Go-playing wisdom that human players accumulate over years of practice.
As I write this, the score in the best-of-five games between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, who is generally reckoned to be the world’s best player, stands at 2-nil in favour of AlphaGo.
LATER AlphaGo won the third match. Game over.