Month: July 2017

Controversial Speeches on Campus Are Not Violence – The Atlantic

A claim increasingly heard on campus will make them more anxious and more willing to justify physical harm.

Source: Controversial Speeches on Campus Are Not Violence – The Atlantic

We think the mental-health crisis on campus is better understood as a crisis of resilience. … As Van Jones put it in response to a question by David Axelrod about how progressive students should react to ideologically offensive speakers on campus:

I don’t want you to be safe, ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe, emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.

The implication of this expansive use of the word “violence” is that “we” are justified in punching and pepper-spraying “them,” even if all they did was say words.

Free speech, properly understood, is not violence. It is a cure for violence. … Freedom of speech is the eternally radical idea that individuals will try to settle their differences through debate and discussion, through evidence and attempts at persuasion, rather than through the coercive power of administrative authorities—or violence.

The conflation of words with violence is not a new or progressive idea invented on college campuses in the last two years. It is an ancient and regressive idea. Americans should all be troubled that it is becoming popular again—especially on college campuses, where it least belongs.

Bread and Circuses | Elaine’s Idle Mind

I never really understood the appeal of Universal Basic Income, but after reading the European parliament’s proposal for Robotic Civil Rights I think I finally get it.

By the time the Republic turned into an Empire, slaves made up 40% of Italy’s population and held all the farming and service jobs. …
The nobilis preferred to keep wealth out of the plebs’ control, and provide them with guaranteed grain rations instead.

Source: Bread and Circuses | Elaine’s Idle Mind

 

I think that UBI has quite a few advantages, most of which rely on the ‘universal’ part.

  • UBI, being universal, can be an attempt to increase the civic value of citizen’s collective communal ownership of and investment in the state. This perspective sees UBI as a continuation of village commons, state parks, and national infrastructure. (see: Alaska’s PFD)
  • UBI, being universal, can be a way to compensate those citizens who do real work but are not traditionally financially compensated for that work (parents, family caretakers, community volunteers, the unemployed seeking a job, etc.), and support those who cannot do real work. And UBI accomplishes this without threatening loss of benefits for limited engagement in remunerative work. This perspective sees UBI as an improvement of communal support and the social safety net. (see: negative income tax as UBI)
  • UBI, being universally received but necessarily paid for by progressive tax rates, would effectively be a rich-to-poor income transfer which would broaden (and likely increase) consumer spending and economic demand which should grow the economy. This perspective treats UBI as little more than another pro-growth policy tool.
  • Politically, things provided broadly are easier to get and maintain support for. (see: mortgage interest deduction, F-35 production)

Ultimately, it seems to me that support or opposition to UBI turns on how someone feels about their fellow citizens. Are they adult peers who can and should be allowed to make their own intelligent decisions about how to spend their fair share of our society’s collective productivity? Or are they children whose every choice must be limited to the “good” options lest they misbehave and harm themselves or others? Or are they strangers, best avoided and left unaided and unsupported in favor of a more local tribe?

I Blame The Babel Fish · Jacques Mattheij

“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
— ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ by Douglas Adams

 

Why is the world moving towards a more authoritarian kind of rule all of a sudden, and why is this happening now. Me, I blame the Babel Fish.

Source: I Blame The Babel Fish · Jacques Mattheij

The cost of almost all forms of communication, written, voice, video, worldwide to an unbelievably large audience is now essentially zero. The language barrier is still there but automatic translation is getting better and better and it won’t be forever or we really can communicate with everybody, instantaneously. That kind of power – because it is a power, I don’t doubt that one bit – comes with great responsibility.

If what you say or write is heard only by people already in your environment, who know you and who can apply some contextual filters then the damage that you can do is somewhat limited.

But if you start handing out megaphones that can reach untold millions of people in a heartbeat, and combine that with the unfiltered, raw output and responses of another couple of million of people then something qualitatively changes

Removing barriers is generally good, and should be welcomed. But we also should be aware that those barriers may have had positive sides and that as a species we are not very well positioned to deal with such immense changes in a very short time.

Great power comes with great responsibility, the power to communicate with anybody instantaneously at zero cost is such a power.

The limitations of deep learning

Source: The limitations of deep learning

In general, anything that requires reasoning—like programming, or applying the scientific method—long-term planning, and algorithmic-like data manipulation, is out of reach for deep learning models, no matter how much data you throw at them.

This is because a deep learning model is “just” a chain of simple, continuous geometric transformations mapping one vector space into another. All it can do is map one data manifold X into another manifold Y, assuming the existence of a learnable continuous transform from X to Y, and the availability of a dense sampling of X:Y to use as training data. So even though a deep learning model can be interpreted as a kind of program, inversely most programs cannot be expressed as deep learning models—for most tasks, either there exists no corresponding practically-sized deep neural network that solves the task, or even if there exists one, it may not be learnable, i.e. the corresponding geometric transform may be far too complex, or there may not be appropriate data available to learn it.

Why Canada Is Able to Do Things Better – The Atlantic

Most of the country understands that when it comes to government, you pay for what you get.

Source: Why Canada Is Able to Do Things Better – The Atlantic

I’ve come to focus on a more mundane explanation: The United States is falling apart because—unlike Canada and other wealthy countries—the American public sector simply doesn’t have the funds required to keep the nation stitched together. A country where impoverished citizens rely on crowdfunding to finance medical operations isn’t a country that can protect the health of its citizens. A country that can’t ensure the daily operation of Penn Station isn’t a country that can prevent transportation gridlock. A country that contracts out the operations of prisons to the lowest private bidder isn’t a country that can rehabilitate its criminals.

The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), a group of 35 wealthy countries, ranks its members by overall tax burden—that is, total tax revenues at every level of government, added together and then expressed as a percentage of GDP—and in latest year for which data is available, 2014, the United States came in fourth to last. Its tax burden was 25.9 percent—substantially less than the OECD average, 34.2 percent. If the United States followed that mean OECD rate, there would be about an extra $1.5 trillion annually for governments to spend on better schools, safer roads, better-trained police, and more accessible health care.

It’s really quite simple: When Canadian governments need more money, they raise taxes.