Unsightly Mental Blemishes

From CNN/Politics on 4/18:

Gary Shapley, whom President Donald Trump named acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service earlier this week with the support of Elon Musk, will no longer serve in the role, sources told CNN — a win for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s office, which had opposed his appointment. …

Shapley had the backing of Musk and congressional Republicans, while Bessent’s office had reservations, three sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Bessent was out of the country when Trump appointed Shapley.

Shapley’s ouster from the top leadership role, which was first reported by The New York Times, ends a whiplash week at the IRS, which is a bureau of the Treasury Department. Trump signed the paperwork appointing Shapley on Tuesday, triggering panic among some career civil servants.

Shapley, who helped lead the Hunter Biden investigation, had provided whistleblower testimony to Congress as Republicans claimed partisan bias by Justice officials had hindered the investigation of the son of President Joe Biden. Republicans had celebrated his ascension at the IRS after Trump had previously named him deputy chief of IRS criminal investigations.

So Musk and Bessent bang heads and Bessent wins. But I don’t see any reason given for Bessent’s objection. Or was this dogs pissing on each other?

Republicans are not known, at least any longer, for subsuming their ambitions for the greater good. And Musk is notable for not being a formal member of the Administration.

This may be an obscure signal of power struggles behind the scenes.

I haven’t had time for blather, although I do see the markets fell some more today, and Professor Richardson thinks the Trump Administration is beginning to panic. Here’s a picture of spring tulips.

And stay tuned, here’s our seasonal management team!

For those readers who are dissatisfied both major American political parties and rooted for the independents in the 2024 Campaign, here’s a bit of good news.

Dan Osborn, the independent Senate candidate who nearly toppled an incumbent Republican last year, is taking steps to prove his overperformance in deep-red Nebraska was no fluke.

On Thursday he announced the formation of an exploratory committee, setting him on a potential collision course with one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, Republican Pete Ricketts — something Osborn said amplified the “illness” of the uber wealthy influencing politics.

“Billionaires have bought up the country and are carving it up day by day. The economy they’ve built is good for them, bad for us,” Osborn said in a post on X. [Politico]

Osborn came up short by less than seven points, which is not as close as the Politico article artlessly implied. Still, Senator Ricketts may be quite vulnerable in a year and a half.

It’ll be a race worth watching.

Rescission:

the act of officially ending a law, taking back a decision, or saying that an agreement no longer exists [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Bring Back Rescissions: How to Realize DOGE Savings,” Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett, The Debt Dispatch:

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has encountered repeated legal setbacks as a result of its efforts to shrink the federal workforce, cut costs, and reshape the executive branch. Part of the challenge that the administration faces is a constitutional one—Congress, not the executive or judicial branches, is vested with the power of the purse. This means that congressional action is unavoidable if the administration wants to deliver substantial, lasting savings. To add legitimacy to DOGE’s efforts to cut spending and encourage Congress to take responsibility, the president should submit a rescissions package (or multiple) under the Impoundment Control Act that officially requests Congress to cancel certain spending.

Glancing over the rest of the article, I don’t think Boccia and Lett understand the nature of Trump and Musk’s activities in the least. This isn’t about reducing spending, it’s about establishing dominance so that later actions, such as transferring the contents of Fort Knox to Mr Musk, or creating a “strategic reserve” of bitcoin, is not considered illegal.

Last night, while watching the news, we saw a bit about some group suing the Trump Administration over something or other, this “other” being an obviously illegal action on the Administration’s part. This prompted my Arts Editor to rather bitterly react that it didn’t matter because the Administration would simply ignore any adverse conclusions and directives.

Which got me to thinking: What is the point?

Well.

At some point, if the American citizenry has any balls in its pants, the folks responsible for this stupidity, Trump and Miller and Vance and Musk and Navarro, the various Secretaries such as McMahon of Education, Rubio of State, Hegseth of Defense, Bessent of Commerce, the lawyers, the whole kit & kaboodle, will face criminal trials.

Ignoring the results of trials today, as the guy at the end of this viral clip points out, is illegal and gets your ass dumped in jail.

If the Administration ignores such directives, such decisions become evidence of malicious, illegal intent, and will become evidence in future criminal trials. MAGA may scream that such trials are politically motivated, but the evidence is public and very clear.

So what’s the point of having trials today? Why, to give these folks a chance to convict themselves of serious criminal charges in the future.

All these idiots may think they’re cool, that God is on their side, but they have a serious misunderstanding of how the world works. It’ll be a good thing for our society to put them away.

And they are helping in that endeavour.

A quick update on activities related to DJT, and while, yes, DJT’s price has leapt upwards since Monday’s $18.88 to $22.04, or a 16% increase over four days, that’s not the activity of interest. Instead, Globe Newswire (via yahoo! finance) has this news release from Trump Media and Technology Group Corp, aka TMTG, concerning a letter it sent to the SEC:

This letter serves to inform you of suspicious activity related to a disclosure filed in Germany by the U.K.-based hedge fund Qube Research & Technologies (“Qube”). The following data points raise critical questions about the timing and methods used in Qube’s trading activities:

• On April 10, 2025, Qube disclosed a nearly six-million share short position in Trump Media & Technology Group Corp (“TMTG”) (NASDAQ, NYSE Texas: DJT). Thus, a U.K.-based entity, with a data center in Iceland, only disclosed these short sales in Germany.
• According to Nasdaq, the total short interest in DJT as of March 31, 2025, was 10.7 million shares (see attached chart). Third party sources inform TMTG that the total short interest as of April 16, 2025, is virtually unchanged—approximately 11 million shares.
• Neither Nasdaq, NYSE Texas, nor any other source has been able to confirm when the trades disclosed by Qube were conducted or if they were conducted at all.

The above factors, especially when combined with the history of suspicious trading surrounding DJT stock—including DJT appearing on Nasdaq’s Regulation SHO Threshold Security List continuously for more than two months in 2024—could be indications of the illegal naked short selling of DJT shares.

And etc. Unfortunately, I do not have experience in interpreting this letter, but its mere existence suggests DJT is a ping pong ball in a high stakes international game. Short selling requires the price of a stock to decline in order for the short seller to make money, so the latest price increase suggests the short seller is currently losing.

But don’t take my word for it. I’m an interested, amateur bystander in this mess – only. Heck, I had to go look up naked short selling:

Naked short selling is a notorious trading practice that has been largely banned in the U.S. and EU since the 2007-2008 crisis. But that doesn’t mean the practice still doesn’t occur. It was banned because naked short selling is when the seller sells securities they do not own or have not borrowed, which leads to a lack of supply for the shorted securities and a potential drop in the price.

The aim is to profit from a decline in the asset’s price by later buying the shares at a lower cost to cover the short position. This is different from traditional short selling when you borrow the shares before selling them.

Which explains assertions of illegality.

But I suspect there’s a lot to this story. I hope I learn more.

Concerning the Harvard imbroglio, there’s a couple of elements to observe:

1. President Trump is, like a dog that wants to be big, trying to establish dominance by ignoring the law and common sense.
2. I sure wish a more clear cut issue was chosen.

The issue has to do with anti-semitism, an issue that seems clearcut. However, with Gaza and Israel having decided this is an existential conflict, it’s become a little harder to see this a question of anti-semitism. Thus, students, who are notoriously immune to nuance, staged riots and harassed Jewish students on Harvard and other campuses during the height of the recent conflict in Gaza following the horrendous mass kidnapping and murder of Israel citizens by Hamas, who controls the Gazan government.

Because of the emotional turmoil, that clouds this entire issue of President Trump thinking he has any right to interfere in Harvard affairs, even if anti-semitism is involved.

And that’s unfortunate. We need separate debates over the actions of the students and the actions of the President and how they interfere with all-important academic freedoms. The corruption of the left does not help, either.

Complaisance:

willingness to please others by being polite and fitting in with their plans [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “A new documentary continues the Thomas Kinkade art hustle,” Philip Kennicott, WaPo:

Unfortunately, the consequences of being an idiot aren’t suffered just by the idiots. Stupidity is a mass phenomenon: It builds on its own momentum, and that momentum can change empires. The treacle and nostalgia that [Thomas] Kinkade monetized — and that other artists, including much of Hollywood, monetize — continue to haunt us, continue to divert people from genuine experience into escapism and fantasy, continue to fritter away our public energies into private complaisance. Bad art can destroy democracy.

I think Steve Benen may be dodging the muss & fuss of examining the Party towards which he leans when he analyzes the Democratic victory in the race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court seat:

Reassessing the Democratic “brand”: Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado told NBC News over the weekend that his party’s brand is “problematic.” Around the same time, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, said the Democratic brand is “toxic.” Days earlier, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania told Politico, “If we don’t get our s— together, then we are going to be in a permanent minority.”

Maybe so, but while some Democratic officials complain about the party’s reputation, Democratic candidates have been doing pretty well lately.

In the aftermath of Election Day 2024, the conventional wisdom suggested not only that Republicans had entered an era of electoral dominance, but also that Democratic voters were demoralized, disheartened and prepared to withdraw from civic life for a long while.

And yet, the Democrats remain the losers of the 2024 election, despite facing a passel of palpable fourth-raters. Benen may think a rehabilitation of the Democratic brand has occurred, but I don’t. I see this as a slight variant of an old aphorism:

What have you done to me lately?

Before the election, it was the economic inflation, which was apparently denied by the Biden team (paywall) (I must have missed that news), along with botching the management of the transgender issue, the lack of a primary once President Biden had withdrawn from the Presidential race, and a few others. These alienated many independent voters.

Have the Democrats reformed to the public’s notice? Minimally. Not enough to matter. I’ll bet most of the public who are uneasy about transgender athletes are not aware of Rep Moulton (D-MA) and Governor Newsom (D-CA) joining them in that uneasiness.

But now we have Republican tariffs, destruction of the federal government, and mass Republican delusions about the popularity of their destructive and sometimes illegal management of government. With the abortion issue lurking in the background. I’m sure there are jokes about how many fourth-rate Republicans can we stuff into the government, but let’s not go there. It’s too much on the nose.

The point is now it’s the Republicans who are drawing the ire of the public. The Democrats didn’t fix anything about themselves, it’s just the Republicans stepping into the obvious quicksand and drowning in it.

Both sides are too arrogant to carry out the necessary self-examination. They’re not actually thinking. Try Erick Erickson’s recent cognitive blunder:

For all the hand-wringing over a so-called constitutional crisis, the reality is this: President Trump keeps winning at the Supreme Court. Time and again, progressive judges in the lower courts have tried to block the lawful exercise of presidential power—and time and again, the Supreme Court has struck them down. Whether it’s firing federal employees, deporting violent gang members, or declining to spend appropriated funds, the Court has affirmed the constitutionality of his actions.

He’s made the logic error of Appeal to Authority, and while falsification of such claims can often be a bit vague, this one is so bad that its puncturing is like a pin in a balloon. Simply consider the conservative wing’s frantic intellectual contortions to give President Trump immunity. If SCOTUS is effectively a tool of conservatives, why should the Appeal to Authority actually work?

Will one side or the other change? Or will we need to replace both Parties?

I know this is late, but I keep running into the short form of the quote. Here it is:

Tech billionaire Elon Musk on Sunday stressed the importance of the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, saying it could determine “the future of America and Western Civilization.” …

“This Wisconsin Supreme Court race might decide the future of America and Western Civilization!” he continued. “It’s a big deal.” [The Hill]

An obscure judicial election will decide the fate of Western Civ?

Ah, such narcissism, not only for Musk, but for how he imagines the electorate thinks. After all, such clarity of vision will appeal to everyone who would like to think they’re in the middle of an end-times battle against evil and, ah, onerous regulations.

Yeah. His candidate lost (gracefully) by ten points.

I am beginning to think Musk has exhausted his political capital. He’s disliked in Washington, and now it appears outside of it as well. While many rumors circulate of various upsets of federal computer systems, many of these will be remediable; the passing of a few new laws imposing touch penalties for corruption of federal systems may smother attempts to use installed-exploits; offers of rewards for concrete revelations may reveal more.

It may take a few years, but I could see Musk rotting in prison. Or taking up residence in the Seychelles, a notorious island hangout for white collar criminals.

It’s time for that 6 week checkup on DJT, stock symbol for Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., I seem to indulge in. What progress has President Trump’s attempt at running a company based solely on his personal appeal made? Here’s its one month chart of stock prices:

Six weeks ago, February 21, 2025, the price of DJT was $27.80; DJT‘s price is is down 32% since. It’s fair to say DJT is paying the same price as the stocks of nearly all the other public companies on the market, due to President Trump’s deficient understanding of historical incidents and/or financial maneuvering.

For those who haven’t kept up, I refer to his imposition of tariffs on every bit of land in sight, including islands only occupied by penguins, using Congressional powers delegated to the office of President by Congress many years ago. A legislative branch controlled by rational folks would have withdrawn this delegation almost immediately; this provincial collection of dependent wusses? We’ll have to see if they remain a pack of dogs competing frantically for Trump favors, or if they’ll be growing up anytime soon. Long-time readers know about the Earl Landgrebe nominations on this blog, but I fear I have not kept up with the veritable shitstorm of potential nominations. Here’s an example for the curious.

Back to our subject, DJT‘s valuation (stock price X #outstanding shares) remains a bit over $4 billion, a mystifying fact in the face of a corporation with a primary, and even sole, offering of also-ran social media platform Truth Social, featuring Donald J. Trump. I am glad I was not one of those naive fools who were initial investors in this venture, or con if you prefer. My expectation is that’s lost money.

For those foreign leaders looking to bribe the President of the United States, perhaps offering and consummating a buyout of DJT at twice the price would be effective.

But DJT is not a proxy for President Trump’s popularity or respect accorded to him, or lack thereof; I think it’d be a mistake to use DJT for projecting political futures or maneuvers. Its price reflects the judgment of professionals of various disciplines: analysts of corporate ventures, financial advisors, and investors. These are modulated by market manipulators, who are naturally of a dishonest nature, and usually of foreign origin. At the moment, given DJT‘s valuation, the latter retain an advantage, along with that portion of the honest investing public who do not understand the essential nature of DJT and its principal. That advantage, however, is leaking away.

I expect DJT to move with the market. If the President abandons tariffs, it’ll move up with the balance of the market, and if he’s stubborn and insists that tariffs are, somehow, taxes on foreigners, it’ll move down, again with the market.

But I’m no financial guy. I’m a broken down software engineer, and this is just my view of DJT.

From Maddowblog: a few days ago:

* While much of the attention in the April 1 elections has focused on the Wisconsin Supreme Court election and the congressional special elections in Florida, Bolts’ Daniel Nichanian highlighted some of the down-ballot contests that election waters will be keeping an eye on.

Evolution improves H₂O? Steve Benen of Maddowblog has the story soon, I’m sure.

From CNN/Politics:

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported. In a tense hearing, DOJ wouldn’t say where he is. What happens next?

Does the Administration realize that failure to do one’s defined duty …

Less than a day after the Supreme Court said the Trump administration had to “facilitate” the return of a man mistakenly deported to El Salvador, the case appeared headed for even murkier waters.

… shall result in dismissal and possible criminal trial? The Presidency is not a safe space for Mr Trump to hide; it is a position of responsibility and exposure to the worst metaphorical winds a civilian might face.

And the fact that he’s C-in-C makes it worse. We’re not talking bankruptcy or Mr Trump living on the streets. We’re talking about trial followed by execution.

And members of MAGA had best pay attention. If Mr Trump can break the law and ignore SCOTUS, why does any MAGA-head think they’re safe?

Following a couple of links last night I ran across this, from United24 Media:

Ukrainian forces have found an effective counter to Russia’s long-range glide bombs, particularly the notorious UMPK  kits used to convert conventional bombs into guided munitions, said Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrskyi in an interview with Ukrainian media outlet Lb.ua on April 9.

“We have a sufficient number of electronic warfare systems that disrupt the guidance of enemy glide bombs,” said Syrskyi.

“It was flying in one direction, and then for some reason veered off in another. The battle between guidance systems and electronic warfare is constant—just like the contest between drones and EW.”

Syrskyi confirmed for the first time that electronic warfare (EW) systems are now Ukraine’s primary defense against Russian glide bombs, including KABs equipped with UMPK kits. These bombs rely heavily on satellite navigation, which can be jammed or spoofed to mislead them off course.

I’ve not heard of this news site before, but I quote it only for context, because we know: Ukraine perseveres.

What does this mean?

In standard evolutionary biology, the individuals of a species face challenges as each, in their own way, tries to perpetuate the species. When most of the members of a species are facing the same, new challenge, this is an evolutionary pressure on the species, and it can be existential.

That is, find a way to survive it, or the species goes extinct. Evolve a defense against that new predatory species, or learn to metabolize oxygen, for example.

The thing is, the surviving species often move from weak sister to big brother. If & when Ukraine survives Putin’s War, what will most likely emerge is a stronger, tougher nation, a nation that knows how to make war – and, with thanks to Professor Turchin, why to avoid going to war.

They survived the first week of Putin’s War, when Putin expected them to collapse in a few days. That was 24 February 2022. More than three years later, they continue to survive. They’ve learned how to deal with allies, with Russian meat attacks, Russian tanks, use and defend against drone warfare, and now glide bombs.

They’ll have some skills that no one else has, if they survive. That’s something to remember.

Plimsoll mark:

The Plimsoll line is a reference mark located on a ship’s hull that indicates the maximum depth to which the vessel may be safely immersed when loaded with cargo. This depth varies with a ship’s dimensions, type of cargo, time of year, and the water densities encountered in port and at sea. Once these factors have been accounted for, a ship’s captain can determine the appropriate Plimsoll line needed for the voyage[.] [NOAA]

Noted in the video “How Exactly Is A Ship Weighed?” by Oceanliner Designs:

You know, the one that uses an overhead projector and uses sand to make pictures. The movie on Spaceweather.com today reminds me of that.

Go on, hit the link. I’ll not steal the video. Someone made it for Spaceweather, so I shan’t interfere. And I do think it’s real cool.

On the hoof:

From last week’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race:

As the first news outlets began calling the Wisconsin Supreme Court election for the liberal candidate Susan Crawford, her opponent called her — to concede.

Minutes later Tuesday night, the conservative-backed Brad Schimel took the stage at his watch party to acknowledge the loss. Angry yells broke out. One woman began to chant about his opponent: “Cheater.”

Schimel didn’t hesitate. “No,” he responded. “You’ve got to accept the results.” Later, he returned to the stage with his classic rock cover band to jam on his bass. [AP]

Schimel is a classy dude when it comes to the basics of democracy. While the Wisconsin Republican Party has conducted itself extremely poorly over the last decade or so, there are still Republicans who know how this is supposed to go.

One of those Republicans who’ve been less than gracious was Michael Gableman, a lawyer and former judge and occasional subject of this blog. He seems to received a dose of comeuppance:

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who led a widely derided review of the 2020 presidential election,  searching for evidence for baseless accusations of fraud, will have his law license suspended for three years, according to a stipulated agreement between him and the state Office of Lawyer Regulation (OLR).

Law Forward, the progressive voting rights focused firm, filed a grievance against Gableman with the OLR in 2023. The OLR filed a complaint against Gableman in November that alleged, among other counts, that he had failed to “provide competent representation” and to “abstain from all offensive personality” and of violating attorney-client privilege. [Wisconsin Examiner]

Perhaps the officials of the Wisconsin Republican Party will pay attention to this object lesson and stop acting like idiots.

This morning the markets reflect the tariff war with which President Trump is afflicting the world, but there’s an outcome that I worry about. Here’s CNN/Business:

Trump also threatened to slap an extra 50% tariff on China if the country doesn’t back down from its retaliatory tariffs it announced Friday. China’s Commerce Ministry on Tuesday said the country would “fight to the end” of the trade war and would continue to stand up to Trump.

The escalating trade war between the two largest economies is turning into a high-stakes game of chicken. China may be staring down a midnight deadline to avoid tariffs surging over 100%, but it so far it is standing up to Trump, with no signs of blinking.

China has squashed deals that Trump wants – including a US company taking control of ports on both sides of the Panama Canal and a deal to sell TikTok to a US-based company. Both countries’ economies would be hurt in a trade war – and given the massive trade imbalance with the United States, China could very well be hurt worse.

Here’s the thing about autocracies like China – leaders, especially those who attain lifetime positions, like Xi Jinping, tend to leave only when dead – and rarely voluntarily. They become victims of their failures or their rivals.

And, knowing that, thrusting China and, therefore, Xi into a crisis like this may have existential overtones for Xi. This could lead to violence.

For all the bluster from both sides, neither wants to take this to the next level. Neither leader can afford to have the citizenry become restive, Trump moreso than Xi. After all, Xi can spin a brutal response as Being necessarily tough, but here in the States, while such a claim would gain some supporters, the substantial opinion to a brutal response will be to place Trump in an inferior position to most other leaders, domestic and foreign.

If you have to oppress your citizens, you’re not a strong leader. You’re weak and a bit of an idiot – and in danger of being run out of town.

So watching this play out should prove very interesting.

Spaceweather.com has a warning for folks with associations to objects in orbit around Mercury, Venus … Earth:

THE CENTENNIAL GLEISSBERG CYCLE: You’ve heard of the 11-year sunspot cycle. But what about the Centennial Gleissberg Cycle? The Gleissberg Cycle is a slow modulation of the solar cycle, which suppresses sunspot numbers every 80 to 100 years. It may have been responsible for the remarkable weakness of Solar Cycle 24 in 2012-2013. New research published in the journal Space Weather suggests that the minimum of the Gleissberg Cycle has just passed. If so, solar cycles for the next 50 years could become increasingly intense. Read the paper here.

Along with the phenomenon causing the cycle, folks like Elon Musk, sponsor of the StarLink family of satellites, should have long term concerns about those objects in orbit for which they have responsibility. A big CME could burn out the electronics of those objects.

No fingerpointing, please.

Force majeure:

Force majeure is a clause included in contracts to remove liability for unforeseeable and unavoidable catastrophes interrupting the expected timeline and preventing participants from fulfilling obligations. These clauses generally cover natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes, and human actions, such as armed conflict and human-made diseases. [Investopedia]

Noted in this article title: Tariffs: Howmet Declares Force Majeure; Nintendo, Jaguar Impact, from Investor’s Business Daily, via yahoo! finance.

That’ll tickle President Trump’s … fancy.

The crocuses are blooming.

Last night my Arts Editor and I saw Lettice and Lovage at Theatre In The Round in Minneapolis. This production was quite long, 3+ hours, so be prepared if you go.

The first Act was a bit stodgy, although it did end on a high note; the second Act moved along at a faster, more interesting clip.

The third Act was the best, as various loose ends and what we considered to be throwaway elements came back to haunt the characters. Although bits of it seemed forced, the actors do forget the necessary bonds between the other characters and the audience.

Definitely a mixed bag, as a few audience members disappeared during the intermissions; this production doesn’t appeal to all temperaments. But it may appeal to your’s! A bit of whimsy and an appreciation for characters who find society lacking in graceful aesthetics, and the consequences thereof, is necessary.

Good luck.

“How it got into the hotel bar, I’ll never know.” With apologies to Grouch Marx.^[1]

Sorry. Not really. What triggered some pleasant silliness in this time of shock & unhappiness?

Indeed, many AI scientists are increasingly of the view that LLMs aren’t a route to the lofty goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI), capable of matching or exceeding anything a human can do – a machine that can think, as Turing would have put it. For example, in a recent survey of AI researchers, about 76 per cent of respondents said it was “unlikely” or “very unlikely” that current approaches will succeed in achieving AGI.

Instead, perhaps we need to think of these AIs in a new way. Writing in the journal Science this week, a team of AI researchers says they “should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated”. The researchers compare LLMs to “such past technologies as writing, print, markets, bureaucracies, and representative democracies” that have transformed the way we access and process information. [“Should governments really be using AI to remake the state?” NewScientist (22 March 2025)]

I’ve expressed my opinion that generative AI is little more than a party trick for quite a while, as long-time readers may recall. Its use as a summarizer, however, may be of use in certain situations – although generative AI’s propensity for fallaciousness must give users pause.

But I also wonder why this took so long. Could it be caused by the marketing magic of the artificial intelligence industry? Ask most any AI researcher, and reportedly they will tell you that that what is popularly called artificial intelligence isn’t. It’s better known as machine learning. It even has a well-known acronym, which is ML.

In case you’re wondering, the mythical artificial intelligence is that which can pass the famous Turing Test,

… is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human. In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine’s ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic). [Wikipedia]

Or, in other words, think of your friends and being able to depend on an AI to be as conceited and self-centered as them while spouting mathematical proofs of arcane propositions.

ML? Sure, here’s the Wikipedia definition, but I like mine better. Problem solving is the process of moving from state A (“my car won’t start!”) to state B (“my car started!”). If you know how to get from A to B, you don’t need ML (or AI, either). But if you don’t know how to get from A to B, nor does anyone else, then ML may be applicable. ML has proven reasonably good at discerning rules for taking a set of data (“This set of data represents a breast X-ray”) and discovering its implications (“You have breast cancer!”), if shown what similar sets of data implies.

I’m a bit off the beaten track, so let me get back to marketing. I’ve been somewhat fascinated by the thought that some of our current social chaos is caused by sloppy thinking. For example, those who want socialized medicine, aka single-payer healthcare, will occasionally make the argument that the citizenry deserves free healthcare. They make that statement with great sincerity.

And it’s just total bullshit. If my reader discards the well-meaning but lazy Well, I know what they mean filter, and turns on their literal interpretation capability, the “argument,” such as it is, collapses in a cloud of dust.

And if I continue on along this abstract track, I soon ask if such bad rhetorical devices are actually infecting their reasoning with bad consequences. Our example is certainly unconvincing, but rather than finding more effective arguments, it functions as a placeholder, a checkmark: I made an argument, one that is approved by my fellow enthusiasts. In that sense, the bad rhetorical argument binds together a disparate collection of individuals into a group, which implies social bonds, social hierarchies, and the whole bit of what Western Civilization pursues. It helps accomplish an unstated goal while actually hindering the putative goal.

As I said, it’s better to think of AI as ML, but if we call it AI, a phrase which comes with certain implications consequent of its parts, then certain expectations, beneficial to the patrons of the marketers, will come into play, while the limitations (or advantages, if you think about it) of ML fade from the consciousness.

And so the subtle contamination of the reasoning mind continues.

¹ Yeah, yeah, I know, mine doesn’t depend on the ill-advised lack of punctuation to bring forth the ambiguity; for me, of late, the odd, unrelated multiple meanings of many English words has been striking. Why they went on strike … English is all about confusion masquerading as communication. Yes, the cat tricked me into getting up early this morning, and I’m grumpy about it.