A primer on this subject:
You may wish to read Politics Part 6: The Missing Meta in November 8.
(Axios) Trump up, Dems down in new polls.
The history of American politics, as envisaged by political science, is divided into epochs called “party systems.” A party system isn’t determined by which party is in power. It is a statement about how bags of attitudes and constituents become represented in a two party system, and perhaps a marginal, temporary third party.
The prominence of the idea does not guarantee correctness. In their desire to find order in chaos, various authors have sliced the cake in various ways. Minus the details, the concept cannot be denied legitimacy. The vestigial First Party System was composed of Washington’s advisors and others present during the American Revolution. In the period following 1828, denoted the Second Party System, the brand-new Democratic Party resembled the traditional conservatism of the modern Republican Party. Beginning in 1854 and continuing to late in the century, the Republican Party of the Third Party System was a radical force for civil rights. Party ideological alignments were the opposite of today. Did this system end with the end of Reconstruction in 1876 or in 1896? I prefer 1876; historians prefer 1896.
Things remain pretty clear during the Fourth Party System of the Progressive Era. The Fifth Party System of the New Deal was a transformative coalition of the poor and marginalized, and the genesis of “big government.” Alignment with Big Labor dates to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Many antagonisms with traditional Republicans remain based on this legacy. A personal anecdote. As a child who might have appeared thoughtful, I was repeatedly, randomly approached by elderly strangers who imagined it was important for me to understand that FDR was an evil man, and to further this to subsequent generations.
With the Sixth Party System, things become more debatable, the timing murky. The Jim Crow laws of southern states were invalidated with actions like the 1954 Warren Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In response, the Republican Party devised the racist Southern Strategy, which gained them the presidency in 1968. But beginning with the New Deal, and continuing into the 1980’s, the South benefited from a net inflow of federal money. The money ran out about 1983, but slowed the Republican takeover of southern congressional districts. Not until the Congressional elections of 1994, forty years after Brown , did the South flip Republican.
So the Sixth Party System, unlike predecessors, cannot be chronologically defined. Yet remarkably, the advent of a Republican South had profound effect on the ideology of the Democratic Party.
Deprived of their rural southern base, which had a conservative cultural outlook, the mainstream Democratic ethos became unmoored. Union labor, which had been culturally conservative, was diminished by de-industrialization of the U.S. As the union rolls diminished, blue collar labor’s muscles atrophied. Deprived of the requirement of broad cultural inclusion of southern and union attitudes, the Democratic Party was free to drift to the left.
De-industrialization was consequent to the granting China permanent most-favored nation status in 2000, and the more general effects of globalism, which for a period of time afforded low inflation and a boost in living standard at a cost which would not be fully appreciated for a generation.
A constant of the U.S. political landscape is geography. Throughout history, cities have been the sources of intellectual ferment; densely populated coastal areas combine awareness of human interdependence with cosmopolitan outlook. In areas of low population density, which is most of the U.S., the mythology of autonomy combines with exploitation of the land. The Sixth Party System, reflecting this political constant of nature, derives stability from geography.
New features of the Republican Party, of the Seventh Party System are:
If the two-party system is to continue, the Democratic Party must develop a new opposable identity. As the Axios, CNN, and other polls reveal, there is rage against the perceived impotence of Chuck Schumer, a groundswell for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a strongly negative view of the party. Those who urge for activism may be overplaying their hand. Although this administration may stumble on the economy, restoration of the Democratic Party to traditional parity may require an Eighth Party System.
The news media almost invariably discuss politics at the tactical level. You won’t read about the party systems, any more than you read about the next five years. The deficit, that killer of nations, is mentioned less and less as the menace steadily grows. The choices offered so far: let the ill and elderly die in the street, or go broke as a nation. The nation has been unable to resolve this further since the New Deal. It appears that the political process is incapable of simultaneous compassion and responsibility. The words are too long.
Within four to six years, a new menace, with a conveniently short acronym, will become available to the Democrats. Their historic concern for the importance of wealth distribution over wealth creation will become describable as:
As humans become vulnerable to obsolescence, which is already happening to some knowledge workers, the job market will crater in every category. Those who want to work will be deprived of the dignity of work. Half of humanity possess less-than-average intelligence. What will happen to all the menials, truck drivers, cab drivers, deliverers, cooks, waiters, cleaners… when they realize that their replacements are not ethnicities, but machines? What will happen to the rest of us, as the machines displace white-collar and battle among themselves in the markets?
This threat is so alien to the political mind it is not yet perceived by either party. The Democratic Party, with its cosmopolitan roots, will seize it first, in resonance with a former alliance with Big Labor.
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This is something different. It’s impossible for my small blog to compete with the heightened anxiety of politics. So what follows are nibbles for you to devour in catnaps or bedtime. Recall that Western thought was originally encapsulated in a subject called philosophy. It was pushed aside by modern science, with these derisive observations:
The major antagonist of philosophy has been the king of sciences, physics. Physics has hit multiple stone walls lately, with a lack of new testable theories to extend the frontiers. In consequence, some branches of physics have taken on a philosophical character, with theories that are, at least for the present, untestable, allowing philosophy to regain respectability.
Physicists have stubbornly hoped that some subjective qualities, such as consciousness, would ultimately be explained as physics. The rise of AI has left that hope in the dust. Instead, the rise of AI has resulted in a serious revival of philosophy, as it attempts to grapple with questions that rigorous mathematics cannot. The nibbles for your dreams:
Can a computer or program be truly intelligent, or merely an excellent mimic?
If a computer can be intelligent, what are the crucial features?
If it can’t, why not?
If it can or can’t, does it make any practical difference to human users?
Is there anything special about our brains and AI?
Does “true” AI rely on mechanisms that exist in another world?
Is consciousness merely associated with intelligence, or is it an essential part?
Can a computer be conscious? If so, what makes it conscious?
If it can be conscious, does it possess a soul? Does it have free will?
Is existence of a mind the same as consciousness?
Is the arrow of time — “time marches on” — a fiction of our minds?
Is it possible that consciousness creates the Universe, rather than the other way around?
The greatest minds of today are in broad disagreement. This gives us ignoramuses the opportunity to be as foolish as we choose. You may wish to first look at
while you could skip DeepSeek and the AI Bubble; Napkin Calculation.
To be continued shortly. Sweet dreams!
This is exigent to repost: The Ghost of Henry Kissinger Speaks; Ukraine, Israel, Saudi Arabia. Quoting in entirety,
Henry Kissinger, so recently deprived of his own voice, speaks to us now through his voluminous writings on realpolitik.
The current issues of U.S. foreign policy are fraught with moral dilemmas that resist solution or even separation. Realpolitik does not address these dilemmas. It does offer predictions. If the following are not addressed as commitments that must be met,
,where the list order is deliberately counterintuitive,
Republicans, remember that Kissinger was a Republican. This is your watch. He speaks loud to you now, through the veil.
President Trump’s focus on mineral wealth is equivalent to establishing a mercantile economy. This can work, but requires a superlative military, not one diminished to the extent of unilateral disarmament. Secretary Hegseth’s experience is limited to the tip of the spear. It takes a general officer, or brilliant civilian manager, preferably with technical background, to understand that the power of the tip comes from the weight of the shank.
To the extent that the U.S. fails to honor Ukraine’s sacrifice in defence of their national identity, to the extent that the U.S. concedes to Russian murder of Ukrainians and Russians alike, the honor of the United States is at stake. This might be understood as the business term goodwill.
The result will not be something to be remarked upon by historians. It will bite us in the ass short term. Once goodwill is lost, it cannot be recovered.
The 8% DoD budget cuts, rather than increase, will render us helpless in the face of our enemies. Compensation with some major’s dream of “warrior culture”, beyond what is already highly developed in U.S. over multiple generations of service, is crap. Once the base is lost, it cannot be regenerated in a time frame relevant to conflict.
We continue from DeepSeek and the AI Bubble; Napkin Calculation. You may wish to first peruse AI for Dummies, in Bite-Size Pieces, Part 1
Some may accept the probabilities outlined in DeepSeek and the AI Bubble; Napkin Calculation as worthy of consideration in the same manner as the Technological Singularity Both are typical of futurology, lacking hard justification. Yet those who have infrequent contact with futurology may demand a little more justification of the napkin calculation. The gist is this: When there exist a sufficient number of reasonably independent ways an event can happen, that event has a statistical character. Mathematicians use this very precisely with the ergodic theorems; we take license, applying it imprecisely but with strong analogy.
AI is a field where many things can happen. See (Wikipedia) Timeline of artificial intelligence. 1943 saw publication by Warren Sturgis McCulloch and Walter Pitts of the seminal paper, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” Since then, many speculative AI ideas have temporarily been the focus of attention, with minor development of some, before sinking under the intermittent surge of newer ones.
In most fields, the past is littered with discredited ideas. Rather uniquely, AI is not. The vast majority of the undeveloped past of AI remains fertile ground. Most of it is eligible for renewed interest. We cannot tell which idea and when; the statistical principle applies.
The ideas of AI bedrock, which are distinct from modeling, are a set of contradictions, governed by tradeoffs and practicality:
The first item is relevant to DeepSeek, so let’s first focus on it. The designers claim to obtain performance comparable ChatGPT4 while using less: energy, computing resources, and training. Detractors suspect that DeepSeek cleverly cannibalized other AI’s, with the premasticated data responsible for the training economies. Even if this turns out to be the case, a significant aspect of the DeepSeek claim may be due to genuine improvement.
In the early years of AI, notwithstanding the early work of McCullough and Pitts, neural networks were assumed to have little in the way of complex structure — other than that induced by the weights. In theory, if every neuron were connected to every other neuron, with a structure that resembles an amorphous glass in hyperspace, if you knew how to set the weights or train the thing, the useless/redundant connections would vanish, and the optimal network would self-assemble. This has no practicality, with time to train unrealizable in the real world. It does have a mysterious attraction, the possibility of elusive, spontaneous, general intelligence, — g.
So structure was imposed. Some structures, like Rosenblatt’s perceptron, are layered, with an orderly progression from input to output. Some structures incorporate loops, saving processing units by re-use which allow the net to consider the results of its work multiple times. Some networks start with everything zeroed out, while others are initialized with hopefully helpful patterns. With the advent of large language models, layered systems took the lead.
Why they took the lead is not explainable in formal terms, because neural nets are the Wild West of mathematics. There appears to be a lot of truth in this bold statement: If a principle can be proven, it has limited utility, and if it is useful, it can’t be proven. The atmosphere contrasts with the frontiers of physics, where the latest developments are rigorous and disconnected from validation.
The hardware support for a natural language model has to be sufficient to store enough information to discriminate between all the patterns – words, sentences, logical statements, etc., that the designers intend to train with. Given a vocabulary of a certain size, how big does a network have to be? The Wild West has no answer to this question. The designers of ChatGPT et al. proceed empirically. If a designer desired a better answer, he would look at two papers: On Neural Network Kernels and the Storage Capacity Problem and Memory capacity of large structured neural networks. You need look only at the abstracts. The first paper works with a two layer, infinite network, which cannot be made or used, to derive some rigorous results that have no real world application. The second abstract depicts frustrated, limited research on more practical configurations, but is noteworthy for the ratio of kvetch to result.
In consequence, there is no first-principles way to tell how efficient a net is at storage. Try it and see is the order of the day. Regardless of the truth or lack, of accusations that DeepSeek is a DeepFake, this uncertainty is one hole DeepSeek found, crawled through, and successfully exploited.
This is a lot for your neural network to digest, so we’ll continue shortly.
The claims of DeepSeek are highly credible, and should strike fear into the heart of anyone playing this bubble. AI Winter follows AI Summer. A serial “kill-chain” of risks can now be described, of which the failure of any one will lead to DeepFreeze of DeepWinter. The serial possibilities:
The failure of any one item in the above list punctures the current projections. The multiplicative uncertainty of multiple factors may be sufficient.
We assume that frontier engines such as ChatGPT4 approximate human capabilities. In fact, they are clearly superior, in many categories of formal reasoning, to the average human. Rumor has it they may shortly exceed superior human intellects.
We seek to answer, in a napkin calc, whether the claims of DeepSeek are plausible.
10,000 : 1
The energy reduction of DeepSeek is made plausible by what is possible.
Anyone with skin in the game who has given this ratio consideration has sleepless nights worrying about being blind-sided, which is exactly what happened. Group-think takes care of the rest. Ironically, human nature suggests if the ratio of energy consumption were more like 100:1, it would get our attention. But for the quants who “know everything”, the number does not compute. Incomensurable numbers do not exist. Hence, it does not exist.
So why not copy the brain? Do we need to? What is the prospect for further disturbing surprises? Due to time constraints , this will be continued shortly.
(Al Jazeera) Russia tight-lipped on Syrian demand of al-Assad for military bases. Quoting,
Russia has declined to comment on reports that Syria has demanded the return of Bashar al-Assad in return for allowing Moscow to maintain its military bases in the Middle Eastern country.
There is a traditional face-saving solution: Assad assassinated in Moscow by radicals recruited by the KGB or GRU from central Asia. The assassins never know who they are actually working for. Following the accomplishment, the assassins themselves are liquidated.
Similar action could be facilitated with Assad first receiving asylum in northern Cyprus, where the survival record of Russian traitors is notably poor.
An alternative is the “unfortunate accident”, such as a fall down the stairs, or defenestration, but this requires coordination with Assad’s security detail.
And, of course, there is always Novichok.