יום שני, 29 בדצמבר 2014
A good problem to have
Who said, "A good game of billiards is a sign of a well-bred man, but a too-good game of billiards is a sign of a youth ill-spent"?
Kan't keep up
How can anyone "keep up with the Kardashians" when there's so much new material coming out all the time?
Maybe flashcards.
The carrot and the stick
Minimum-wage economy edition. Seen on the way out of the squalid toilet at a Rite-Aid in Union City, CA.
Made in China, but not for export
A tourist near Sather Gate on the UC Berkeley campus.
He said, "I bought it in China".
Who knows what it's supposed to mean...
Who knows what it's supposed to mean...
Won't even make a good family heirloom
$300 is the new $200 was the new $100...
Seen at UC Berkeley bookstore.
Seen at UC Berkeley bookstore.
יום רביעי, 5 בנובמבר 2014
Bostrom, Superintelligence
There are three pieces to this book:
1. Superhuman machine intelligence is coming.
2. It's potentially catastrophic for humanity.
3. We might be able to tame it.
"Superintelligence" is not human-level artificial intelligence as in meeting the Turing Test. It's what comes after that. Once we build a machine as smart as a human, that machine writes software to improve itself, which enables it to further improve itself -- but faster, then faster and faster. The equal-to-human stage proves brief as the technology charges ahead into superhuman territory.
Before long, the thing is way smarter than any human, and it parlays its superhuman skill at programming into superhuman skill at everything else, including strategic thinking, practical psychology and propaganda. It can start innocuously enough as a device that only thinks, but using its superhuman strategic skills it persuades humans to give it control over physical resources like manipulators and nanofactories. At that point it becomes a deadly threat even without "wanting" to. For example, its goal could be perfecting battery technology, but as it pursues this goal it could decide it needs more computing resources (to really figure things out...) -- a lot more resources, and so it proceeds to turn half the earth's crust into computing machinery, while tiling the rest of the planet with solar cells to power that machinery! We lose.
If you're scared now, then you'll want to read the second 50% or so of the book, which is about how to tame superintelligence, or for now, how to prepare to tame it before it's already upon us and out of control. This part of the book is a hard read, but even if (like me) you can only follow half of what he says, that still leaves tons of great stuff to think about: Can we precisely define an ultimate goal that couldn't be misinterpreted disastrously? Can we finesse that problem by getting a machine to iteratively discover humane motivations and adopt them? Etc. Unfortunately, there's little room for hope; time and again Bostrom reminds us that what we're engaging in is an exercise at outsmarting something that's smarter and more powerful than we are. Kind of like me planning to beat the world chess champion by doing a whole lot of pre-game contingency planning. Or designing a monarchical political system that will yield good outcomes under any king including kings yet unborn.
So basically we're doomed. Unless it turns out that human-level general artificial intelligence never happens -- not in the next century, not in the next thousand or million years. My money's on that. But what do I know? According to Bostrom, 90% of big-name researchers in artificial intelligence think a machine will pass the Turing Test in the next hundred years. And those guys are smarter ("super-smarter"?) than me. So what I'm counting on is that when the time comes to actually program a full-scale full-featured general intelligence machine, the coding effort will be so vast that the super-smart guys will have to hire less-smart guys like me to do most of the detailed implementation, and we'll screw up.
1. Superhuman machine intelligence is coming.
2. It's potentially catastrophic for humanity.
3. We might be able to tame it.
"Superintelligence" is not human-level artificial intelligence as in meeting the Turing Test. It's what comes after that. Once we build a machine as smart as a human, that machine writes software to improve itself, which enables it to further improve itself -- but faster, then faster and faster. The equal-to-human stage proves brief as the technology charges ahead into superhuman territory.
Before long, the thing is way smarter than any human, and it parlays its superhuman skill at programming into superhuman skill at everything else, including strategic thinking, practical psychology and propaganda. It can start innocuously enough as a device that only thinks, but using its superhuman strategic skills it persuades humans to give it control over physical resources like manipulators and nanofactories. At that point it becomes a deadly threat even without "wanting" to. For example, its goal could be perfecting battery technology, but as it pursues this goal it could decide it needs more computing resources (to really figure things out...) -- a lot more resources, and so it proceeds to turn half the earth's crust into computing machinery, while tiling the rest of the planet with solar cells to power that machinery! We lose.
If you're scared now, then you'll want to read the second 50% or so of the book, which is about how to tame superintelligence, or for now, how to prepare to tame it before it's already upon us and out of control. This part of the book is a hard read, but even if (like me) you can only follow half of what he says, that still leaves tons of great stuff to think about: Can we precisely define an ultimate goal that couldn't be misinterpreted disastrously? Can we finesse that problem by getting a machine to iteratively discover humane motivations and adopt them? Etc. Unfortunately, there's little room for hope; time and again Bostrom reminds us that what we're engaging in is an exercise at outsmarting something that's smarter and more powerful than we are. Kind of like me planning to beat the world chess champion by doing a whole lot of pre-game contingency planning. Or designing a monarchical political system that will yield good outcomes under any king including kings yet unborn.
So basically we're doomed. Unless it turns out that human-level general artificial intelligence never happens -- not in the next century, not in the next thousand or million years. My money's on that. But what do I know? According to Bostrom, 90% of big-name researchers in artificial intelligence think a machine will pass the Turing Test in the next hundred years. And those guys are smarter ("super-smarter"?) than me. So what I'm counting on is that when the time comes to actually program a full-scale full-featured general intelligence machine, the coding effort will be so vast that the super-smart guys will have to hire less-smart guys like me to do most of the detailed implementation, and we'll screw up.
(amazon.com: "74 people found this helpful")
יום רביעי, 24 בספטמבר 2014
Chafetz, Devil's Night and other True Tales of Detroit
"Affectionate" would be the best way I could summarize, in one word, Chafets' attitude to his native city. To be sure, in the early going, affection doesn't look like where he's going. We learn that his family was one of the several hundred thousands that fled Detroit's disorder and lawlessness. Moreover, his family lost not, like so many others, just its house and business but also (to armed robbers) Zeev's grandfather.
The affectionate side comes out chiefly in two ways: in memories of his good and tragic boyhood friend Charles from the black ghetto; and in Chafets' passion for Motown music. That passion finds its way even into some of his books about Israel (!) but here he gets to take it to the next level. There's a chapter about Motown stars who give back to their community by running an after-school program for kids, and he finds other Motown stars to talk to. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if he took up writing this book in part as a front to give him access to his musical heroes!
Of course there's the political part too. Chafets interviews Mayor Coleman Young, talks to other black politicians (including an extended behind-the-scenes look at a campaign to unseat Young), and then heads for the suburbs to hear from the refugees. It was 1986 and he could write things that would get his college fraternity banned today:
"...Young's name adorns everything. There is a Coleman A. Young
community center on the east side and a seventy-five-acre Coleman
A. Young civic center downtown on the Detroit River. Accomplished
schoolchildren receive financial aid from the Coleman A. Young
Scholarship Fund. The mayor's picture hangs in virtually every city
office, like the visage of some postliberation African leader..."
He skewers the white politicians too. He travels up to the suburb of Southfield, settled by white refugees from Detroit. Good liberals that they are, they welcomed integration as middle-class blacks started to join them. But when the black population hit 1/3 of the total, people started getting nervous:
"The Southfield strategy is based on another irony -- the only
important city in the Metro area that has declared integration to be a
policy goal wants to maintain it by recruiting whites and steering
blacks away...
The idea is to set up a nonprofit office in Detroit that would help
those who want to leave find housing elsewhere in Oakland
County. `[Neighboring towns] can't hurt us', said [one official]. Fair
housing is the law of the land'.
Southfield's leaders were counting on blacks to go along. `The
minorities here understand that if we can't maintain a racial balance,
they will be the losers,', said the mayor. `Their kids will go to poor
schools and live in filthy neighborhoods.'"
Those guys went ahead and made TV spots for Southfield. Chafets watches some:
"Young couples dining in fine restaurants, relaxed businessmen...happy
children frolicking in a safe schoolyard, youthful families walking
hand in hand across well-tended lawns...After watching half a dozen of
the commercials it became clear that they had a common denominator--the
only blacks visible were little girls and light-skinned women...No one
who saw the ads could possibly have guessed that nearly half the
students in the Southfield schools are black."
Oh yeah, I forgot to say Chafets has a great sense of humor too!
(And for a modern postscript on Southfield, this is interesting: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41810267/ns/us_news-life/#.Ub7MWPZ4bqr .)
The affectionate side comes out chiefly in two ways: in memories of his good and tragic boyhood friend Charles from the black ghetto; and in Chafets' passion for Motown music. That passion finds its way even into some of his books about Israel (!) but here he gets to take it to the next level. There's a chapter about Motown stars who give back to their community by running an after-school program for kids, and he finds other Motown stars to talk to. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if he took up writing this book in part as a front to give him access to his musical heroes!
Of course there's the political part too. Chafets interviews Mayor Coleman Young, talks to other black politicians (including an extended behind-the-scenes look at a campaign to unseat Young), and then heads for the suburbs to hear from the refugees. It was 1986 and he could write things that would get his college fraternity banned today:
"...Young's name adorns everything. There is a Coleman A. Young
community center on the east side and a seventy-five-acre Coleman
A. Young civic center downtown on the Detroit River. Accomplished
schoolchildren receive financial aid from the Coleman A. Young
Scholarship Fund. The mayor's picture hangs in virtually every city
office, like the visage of some postliberation African leader..."
He skewers the white politicians too. He travels up to the suburb of Southfield, settled by white refugees from Detroit. Good liberals that they are, they welcomed integration as middle-class blacks started to join them. But when the black population hit 1/3 of the total, people started getting nervous:
"The Southfield strategy is based on another irony -- the only
important city in the Metro area that has declared integration to be a
policy goal wants to maintain it by recruiting whites and steering
blacks away...
The idea is to set up a nonprofit office in Detroit that would help
those who want to leave find housing elsewhere in Oakland
County. `[Neighboring towns] can't hurt us', said [one official]. Fair
housing is the law of the land'.
Southfield's leaders were counting on blacks to go along. `The
minorities here understand that if we can't maintain a racial balance,
they will be the losers,', said the mayor. `Their kids will go to poor
schools and live in filthy neighborhoods.'"
Those guys went ahead and made TV spots for Southfield. Chafets watches some:
"Young couples dining in fine restaurants, relaxed businessmen...happy
children frolicking in a safe schoolyard, youthful families walking
hand in hand across well-tended lawns...After watching half a dozen of
the commercials it became clear that they had a common denominator--the
only blacks visible were little girls and light-skinned women...No one
who saw the ads could possibly have guessed that nearly half the
students in the Southfield schools are black."
Oh yeah, I forgot to say Chafets has a great sense of humor too!
(And for a modern postscript on Southfield, this is interesting: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41810267/ns/us_news-life/#.Ub7MWPZ4bqr .)
יום חמישי, 11 בספטמבר 2014
Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament
He starts out strongly, with a nightmare in which he dreams about what music education would look like if schools took the bloodless approach they take to math. Unfortunately, after that he gets carried away and settles into a long rant over the schools' excessive interest in math as useful tool, and insufficient appreciation for math as art. For example,
"Anyway, the point is not whether mathematics has any practical value--I don't care if it does or not...Math requires no pathetic industrial or technological excuses."
It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the overall thrust. Most of the math I saw in school, and which I note from observing my children's courses, was indeed a sort of intellectual-free zone that emphasized formulas and manipulation at the expense of ideas and imagination. I probably would have enjoyed having Lockhart as a substitute teacher, but most students aren't math nerds and I think Lockhart either doesn't realize that, or he's such an idealist he thinks the right teacher can fundamentally change people. He also overlooks the fact that it would be hard to hire teachers who could teach math the way he thinks it should be taught. (And of the few you could find, half might quit in disgust the twentieth time a helicopter parent hassled them over "arbitrary" grading--less of a problem in today's mechanistic one-right-answer kind of school math!)
At least he ends strongly, with some neat thinking problems suitable for kids.
"Anyway, the point is not whether mathematics has any practical value--I don't care if it does or not...Math requires no pathetic industrial or technological excuses."
It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the overall thrust. Most of the math I saw in school, and which I note from observing my children's courses, was indeed a sort of intellectual-free zone that emphasized formulas and manipulation at the expense of ideas and imagination. I probably would have enjoyed having Lockhart as a substitute teacher, but most students aren't math nerds and I think Lockhart either doesn't realize that, or he's such an idealist he thinks the right teacher can fundamentally change people. He also overlooks the fact that it would be hard to hire teachers who could teach math the way he thinks it should be taught. (And of the few you could find, half might quit in disgust the twentieth time a helicopter parent hassled them over "arbitrary" grading--less of a problem in today's mechanistic one-right-answer kind of school math!)
At least he ends strongly, with some neat thinking problems suitable for kids.
יום רביעי, 30 ביולי 2014
Sugrue, Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
This is an interesting account of the hardships and legal handicaps suffered by the first generation of African American migrants to booming industrial 1930s-1950s Detroit. We learn that African Americans were handed the worst jobs and limited to the lowest-quality housing. Sugrue's account ends around the time of the great riot of 1967 (about which he does not have much to say).
My only objection is that Sugrue offers this book as an explanation for why Detroit became the wasteland he found thirty years later (the book was published in 1996). You'd draw that conclusion too, reading his introduction, but I also understand that this book is popular in college courses where, once again, it's billed as an explanation for Detroit *now*.
Which makes no sense at all, because after 1967, most everyone who was in a position to subject Detroit's African Americans to racial discrimination had fled -- the racist shopkeepers who didn't want to employ black teenagers, racist homeowners and realtors who kept blacks out of the better neighborhoods, racist policemen, racist politicians who tolerated it all. If those were the reasons behind black Detroiters' misery, then the elimination of those conditions should have led to a steady improvement over the following decades. Just as the cessation of firebombing in 1945 resulted in a general improvement of conditions in Tokyo and Hamburg. Of course, the opposite occurred: far from reversing itself, Detroit's decline accelerated. But if there's a book that explains why that happened, I haven't seen it yet.
My only objection is that Sugrue offers this book as an explanation for why Detroit became the wasteland he found thirty years later (the book was published in 1996). You'd draw that conclusion too, reading his introduction, but I also understand that this book is popular in college courses where, once again, it's billed as an explanation for Detroit *now*.
Which makes no sense at all, because after 1967, most everyone who was in a position to subject Detroit's African Americans to racial discrimination had fled -- the racist shopkeepers who didn't want to employ black teenagers, racist homeowners and realtors who kept blacks out of the better neighborhoods, racist policemen, racist politicians who tolerated it all. If those were the reasons behind black Detroiters' misery, then the elimination of those conditions should have led to a steady improvement over the following decades. Just as the cessation of firebombing in 1945 resulted in a general improvement of conditions in Tokyo and Hamburg. Of course, the opposite occurred: far from reversing itself, Detroit's decline accelerated. But if there's a book that explains why that happened, I haven't seen it yet.
יום שישי, 9 במאי 2014
"Americans don't attribute colder weather to climate change"
So says Gallup. Everybody's heard of global warming, but "climate change" is more subtle; it'll take some work before most people understand that everything is evidence for climate change, and nothing can be evidence against it.
The Times has gone into full-court press mode on this, over the last few days. And so has our President, who's flying his 747 cross-country to instruct us about the importance of energy conservation.
יום חמישי, 8 במאי 2014
יום רביעי, 30 באפריל 2014
Weinreich, College Yiddish
This is the book to get if you want to learn Yiddish the old way: some grammar, some vocabulary, some reading, followed by more grammar, more vocabulary and more reading...thirty chapters of it. Beware about the "College" part of the title; this book is laid out like college books were long ago, which makes it different from the appearance of the $250 French 1 text you'll find in your college bookstore in 2014. Weinreich is systematic and serious-minded, pitched to the attention spans and English reading skills of the college students of his time (the 1940s, 50s and 60s). When you're done with this book, you'll be able to read the Forward, Peretz, Asch and the others: very satisfying. That's what I was looking for, hence my five-star rating.
On the other hand, this is not the right book for you if...
1. You don't want to learn the Hebrew alphabet. (In that case, you can try Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning Yiddish , which spells everything in Latin letters. Nothing wrong with that, except you won't be able to read real Yiddish elsewhere. Like it or not, the Yiddish alphabet is the Hebrew alphabet.)
2. You mostly want to learn to speak, not read, Yiddish. There's no CD or online component. Of course you might be fortunate enough to be using this in a course with a real teacher...
3. You're mostly interested in picking up pithy sayings and learning about the culture. In that case, try Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (P.S.) , or The Joys of Yiddish , among many others. (Each chapter here does end with an interesting couple pages of cultural interest, but of course the main thrust is teaching the language.)
I have a couple of complaints. The end-of-chapter vocabulary lists (though not the end-of-book general vocabulary) are alphabetized awkwardly; "das leben" comes before "zorg" because dalet comes before zayin. So it takes longer than necessary to find words. Compounding this problem are two more: the indentation is awkward, and the vocabularies miss some words, so you waste time. I'm commenting on an older edition, though, so maybe the newer ones have been fixed...
On the other hand, this is not the right book for you if...
1. You don't want to learn the Hebrew alphabet. (In that case, you can try Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning Yiddish , which spells everything in Latin letters. Nothing wrong with that, except you won't be able to read real Yiddish elsewhere. Like it or not, the Yiddish alphabet is the Hebrew alphabet.)
2. You mostly want to learn to speak, not read, Yiddish. There's no CD or online component. Of course you might be fortunate enough to be using this in a course with a real teacher...
3. You're mostly interested in picking up pithy sayings and learning about the culture. In that case, try Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (P.S.) , or The Joys of Yiddish , among many others. (Each chapter here does end with an interesting couple pages of cultural interest, but of course the main thrust is teaching the language.)
I have a couple of complaints. The end-of-chapter vocabulary lists (though not the end-of-book general vocabulary) are alphabetized awkwardly; "das leben" comes before "zorg" because dalet comes before zayin. So it takes longer than necessary to find words. Compounding this problem are two more: the indentation is awkward, and the vocabularies miss some words, so you waste time. I'm commenting on an older edition, though, so maybe the newer ones have been fixed...
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