Trump plays at being an aeronautical engineer

Trump is known for his obsessions, wildly irrational beliefs that he holds on to despite any evidence to the contrary. One is his hatred of windmills. While that is well known, less known is his obsession with the technology used to rapidly accelerate fighter jets from the decks of aircraft carriers. Older ships have largely a mechanical system of catapults but more modern ships have shifted to an electromagnetic system. Trump, for some reason, hates the newer systems.

What is troubling is that he seems determined to impose his will on a new aircraft carrier that is being built and demanding that they change the system to his preferred one.
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Backlash against Facebook and Meta’s pervert glasses

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has introduced eyeglasses that can record what the user sees with only the smallest indication that the people who fall into the field of vision are being recorded. That this would lead to a serious problem should have been obvious but they plowed ahead anyway and now they are facing a backlash with content creators who use them being barraged with hostile comments, even leading to calls for the glasses to be banned in the UK

Despite being marketed as the latest must-have gadget, Meta’s smartglasses, which can record video footage while being worn, have faced a vicious backlash, particularly relating to concerns about surveillance. There are widespread fears about the glasses being used to film people, especially women, without their consent, and the resultant footage being posted on social media. This has earned them the label of “pervert glasses”, and content creators, no matter how they are used, have faced a flood of negative comments for deploying them.
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What if the Lincoln reflecting pool can’t be fixed?

I have become fascinated, for both technical and political reasons, with the saga over the Lincoln Reflecting Pool. That the original attempt to paint the pool blue was botched is now well established with even Trump lackey Jeanine Pirro conceding it. Trump will continue to claim that it was vandalized (even if he knows that the claim is false) but only his most deluded cult members will believe it. Pirro is pointing the finger at the Department of the Interior for not providing them with all the information thus requiring her to withdraw the prosecutions of the four alleged vandals, although it makes her look utterly incompetent in rushing to indict without having the facts. The Secretary of the Interior Doug Burghum is angrily pushing back.

Here is a review of the timeline of the pool renovations, including when Trump’s motorcade actually drove into the drained pool during the renovation. It is not clear if he drove over sections that had been painted (which would make him one of his alleged vandals) or the part that was still bare.

We tend to think that a solution will eventually be found, possibly at a high cost, because we have faith in the power of technological innovation to solve practical problems. But what if that faith is unfounded in this case? What then?
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The Trump administration consists of ‘The Worst and the Dimmest’

Back in 1972, journalist David Halberstam wrote an excellent book with the title The Best and the Brightest that was a devastating critique of how Kennedy and Johnson stocked their administrations with those they considered considered brilliant people, consisting of highly credentialed people with elite educational backgrounds or who were seen as successful heads of industry. Those people took the US down a devastating path in Vietnam.

The book title refers to Kennedy’s “whiz kids”—leaders of industry and academia brought into his administration—whom Halberstam characterizes as insisting on “brilliant policies that defied common sense” in Vietnam, policies often implemented against the advice of career U.S. Department of State employees.

People who, for whatever reason, pride themselves on being extremely clever can often be blinded by their own sense of being brilliant and make decisions that are reckless and unwise. The beginning of Alexander Pope’s poem An Essay on Criticism succinctly warns about the danger of such shallow brilliance.

A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

Those who have achieved success in some area can succumb to thinking of themselves as being clever at everything. A truly intelligent person knows that their knowledge is both limited in depth and narrow in scope, knows that there are people with greater depth of knowledge in every area, and seeks them out for guidance. No one can accuse Trump of hiring the best and the brightest. He has seemingly chosen people on the basis of how sycophantic they are to him and they are turning out to be best described by the opposite of Halberstam’s title. They are the worst and the dimmest.
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Anthony Fauci slams senator Rand Paul as ‘unhinged’

The loony right has been obsessed with the belief that the Covid-19 virus did not jump from animals to humans but was because of a Chinese lab leak, and that scientists especially Anthony Fauci who spent 38 years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and was a key figure in the fight to prevent the virus from harming more people than it did, was part of the cover-up.

Senator Rand Paul has been relentlessly pushing this notion and targeting Fauci and called him up before a special hearing. But Fauci refused to answer his questions and called him unhinged.

The hearing was centered around an assertion Paul has promoted for years: that the Covid pandemic began in 2020 as a “leak” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even as virologists see a natural jump from animals to humans as more likely.

This belief underpinned Paul’s argument for bringing Fauci before the committee. If the pandemic was indeed started by a “lab leak”, Fauci “could be responsible for this entire pandemic” because the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided the institute with a sub-grant, he later told reporters.

His only witness was Fauci, who served as a key adviser to Trump and Joe Biden during the pandemic, and has become a political punching bag on the right.

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Are hot and cold streaks illusions?

Following his team’s loss to Turkey in the final game of their group stage, the US soccer team’s manager Mauricio Pochettino complained about the use of the word ‘momentum’ in sports.

“[Momentum] is a topic that I don’t understand,” Pochettino said when asked about how the loss would affect his team’s prospects. “What is momentum? To play with the same team that we played against Australia? And to take the risk to receive a yellow card and not to play the next game? Did Germany lose the momentum too [in their 2-1 loss to Ecuador]? I don’t know. [There are] too many topics in soccer that I don’t understand. The objective was to finish first, and we are first, and now is the next stage, and it’s going to be a final, and we are ready.”

Pochettino has a point. There is no doubt that a team is happy when they win and sad or disappointed when they lose. But ‘momentum’ is one of those words that have a scientific sheen and used to give weight to the idea that there are ‘hot streaks’ and ‘cold streaks’ in sports, that a win will likely increase the chances of a win next time and a loss will lead to more losses. But one result is not a trend, though the word ‘momentum’ seems to suggest that it can be.
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It may take the collapse of the AI bubble to save us from these sociopaths

There is a lot in the news these days that is depressing so it takes a lot for me to point to one article and say that it may be a top competitor to be the most depressing thing that I have read this year. It is a long profile of OpenAI head Sam Altman and it deals with him and all the other big players jockeying to be the biggest player in the AI world.

[T]he founding premise of OpenAI was that it would have to be different. The founders, who included Altman, Sutskever, Brockman, and Elon Musk, asserted that artificial intelligence could be the most powerful, and potentially dangerous, invention in human history, and that perhaps, given the existential risk, an unusual corporate structure would be required. The firm was established as a nonprofit, whose board had a duty to prioritize the safety of humanity over the company’s success, or even its survival. The C.E.O. had to be a person of uncommon integrity.

But Altman is portrayed in the article by many who have worked with him as utterly untrustworthy and a power-seeker, whose actions did not match the noble goals that it had set forth.
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A new twist on the Turing test?

Recent developments in AI technology and its spawning of personalized chatbots has renewed attention in the Turing test.

The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949, 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.

It seems clear that, by and large, these AI chatbots can simulate human conversation pretty well, apart from the tendency to occasionally hallucinate, to make up stuff and say it will confidence, a trait that many humans also exhibit. If one is not aware of the details of what it says, one might easily be convinced that the made-up fact is genuine. For example, a mathematician friend of mine said that his son (also a mathematician) tested out an AI system. He multiplied two very large integers together and then fed the result into the AI system and asked whether the number was ‘prime’ i.e., not divisible by any number other than 1 and itself. The machine said ‘yes’.

But despite those well known problems, people are treating the AI bots as being at least partly sentient, as demonstrated by those who seem to have formed long-term ‘relationships ‘with them and consider them as friends or even more. So at least as far as these people are concerned, these bots seem to have passed the Turing test.
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Is mathematics invented or discovered?

The above question has been a long-standing source of debate. ‘Discovered’ means that the structures of mathematics exist objectively and independently while ‘invented’ implies that mathematics is the free creation of the human mind. The same debate exists in science.

An article profiles a mathematician Sergiu Klainerman who is convinced that it is discovered.

The equations that govern black holes were true before there were black holes. That claim is hotly contested, and cuts through one of the deepest fault lines in the philosophy of mathematics. On one side are those who hold that mathematical structures, including well-established principles and basic geometric shapes like the tetrahedron, exist independently of human thought – not as a language we invented to describe reality, but rather as the substrate of reality itself. On the other side of the debate are those who argue that mathematics is the product of human labours, imposed on a world that would be wholly indifferent to it were we not here.

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Is agnosticism a viable stance on the existence of God?

I am busy today and in lieu of an original post, thought that I would post an old article of mine that was published in the UK magazine New Humanist in July 2011. I moved my blog to FtB in 2012 from my earlier platform where it started in 2005, so the article appeared before many current readers would have started reading the blog and they may find it of interest.

The topic was whether being agnostic on the question of the existence of God was a viable position to take. I argue that the answer is no, hence the title of No Doubt that I gave the piece.

That magazine used to have a more playful, irreverent style that you can see just below the header. It later became more staid.