MacBookPro Brought to Its Knees at Last!, & þe Stupidity of Believing þt “Intelligence” Is a One-Dimensional “g” Even in Machines, Let Alone in Brains, &
MacBookPro Brought to Its Knees at Last!, & þe Stupidity of Believing þt “Intelligence” Is a One-Dimensional “g” Even in Machines, Let Alone in Brains, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-03-18 Fr
First: MacBookPro Brought to Its Knees at Last!
& the Stupidity of Believing that “Intelligence” Is a One-Dimensional “g” Even in Machines, Let Alone in Brains:
I have found something my MacBookPro cannot do without becoming unusable: open ten <http://bloomberg.com> tabs in Safari:
You can say it is my fault for cheaping out and only getting 16GB of RAM—only 262,144 times the memory of the first PC I used back forty years ago. That if I had gotten the 32GB or 64GB version it would be fine. For, after all, what is one webpage as it sets up its camping site deciding that it should be spreading out its stuff to take up 4.12GB of memory among friends?
No, the processing cores were not occupied. They were simply sitting there, peacefully waiting for instructions, with the upper three cores nearly completely dark:
It was the memory controller(s) that could not handle it.
(And, Atrios, Twitter, and Vox, I am looking at you: why are your webpages also setting up house in this way?)
I must say that owning a modern computer has made me a person with zero tolerance for any claims that there is a single thing called “g” for “general intelligence” among humans. It seems to me to spring from too many people having too naïve an approach to the world that has led them to generalize inappropriately from early von Neumann-architecture machines. This Beast on my desk is not really a von Neumann architecture machine. Yes, there are registers and there is, somewhere, a load-process-store cycle. But there are 10 processing cores. The old separation between hardware for basic and for floating-point arithmetic—I do not know where that went. There are Graphics Processing Units—lots of them—doing lots of things other than graphics processing. There is a Neural Engine, and what it is doing different and better than the GPUs is beyond my comprehension. There are video-processing afterburners. There are caches and dispatch logic to try to keep the cores filled (they are failing). And there are the memory-swap processes enabling virtual memory—this particular machine’s hardware-plus-software Akhilleus’s Heel, at least when it encounters multiple webpages from <http://bloomberg.com>.
Ask me, ask anyone, “What is the general computational intelligence, the ‘g’, of this machine?” and we will simply laugh at you…
One Video:
Oleg Ustenko & Jacob Funk Kirkegaard: Sanctions & More <https://www.piie.com/events/discussion-oleg-ustenko-ukraines-chief-economic-advisor-sanctions-and-more>
One Picture:
Very Briefly Noted:
Dan Kennedy: Republicans Have a Putin Problem: ’& the media need to stop glossing over it… <https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2022/03/16/republicans-have-a-putin-problem-and-the-media-need-to-stop-glossing-over-it>
Jomini of the West: Ukrainian Theater of War, Day 20 & 21: ’The third week of the war ends with failed Russian efforts to regain the strategic initiative in Kyiv, exposed to raids and ambushes in the Sumy Oblast, slow progress in the Donbas, and brutal siege warfare in Mariupol…
Adam Davidson: _’I just watched a bunch of GOP political ads. I am embarrassed—even ashamed—that for years I reported earnestly about the GOP’s free-market based vision. That clearly was a thin scrim over ethnonationalism. I truly regret the error…
Paolo Bacigalupi: ’Particularly worth noting how Fox News hosts and far-right Republicans are providing aid and comfort to the Kremlin propaganda effort. Amazing to see Republicans acting as willing tools for Russian imperial desires… <
Eric Topol: ’Many countries Europe & Asia-Pacific have Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 breakouts, some countries, like the United States, are cutting funds to prepare, somehow thinking they are immune…
Paragraphs:
J.R.R. Tolkien: Telling Off Nazis: ‘Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject—which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride. Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its sustainability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung…
LINK: <https://gizmodo.com/whats-classier-than-j-r-r-tolkien-telling-off-nazis-a-5892697>
Joseph E. Gagnon & Christopher G. Collins: Low Inflation Bends the Phillips Curve: ‘The Phillips curve, which traces out a negative relationship between inflation and unemployment, has undergone tremendous changes over more than 100 years. Some researchers argue that the slope of the curve in the United States fell substantially around 20 years ago so that unemployment now has little or no effect on inflation. This paper shows that another hypothesis is equally consistent with the data: The Phillips curve may be nonlinear when inflation is low, with the economy having operated in the flat region of the curve for most of the past 20 years. The next few years may be decisive in the debate between these hypotheses, as unemployment has returned to a range in which a nonlinear curve ought to display significant steepness. A flat Phillips curve implies little change in inflation going forward, but a nonlinear curve implies moderate increases in inflation over the next few years…
LINK: <https://www.piie.com/system/files/documents/wp19-6.pdf>
David Reifschneider & David Wilcox: _The Case for a Cautiously Optimistic Outlook for US Inflation_: ‘There is a risk that the expectations-augmented Phillips curve model is fundamentally wrong and that the stability of long-run inflation expectations does not actually matter…. We… are skeptical…. Core inflation hardly responded—and then only briefly—to the rise in oil prices from $30/ barrel in early 2004 to almost $140/barrel by the summer of 2008, to the Great Recession, to the tight labor market of 2018 and 2019, or to the shutdown of much of the economy in the spring of 2020…. If we are experiencing a return to pre–1990 inflation dynamics, long-run inflation expectations should have jumped even if they do not play an important role in propagating inflation…. The FOMC should look through today’s elevated inflation readings and any future bumps that may occur and focus instead on attempting to discern where inflation is likely to settle out…. It should avoid unnecessarily restraining real activity in the near term to combat an inflation problem that can be reasonably expected to, for the most part, self-correct…. The Fed must… demonstrate that it continues to understand that it has inescapable and unconditional responsibility for controlling inflation over the longer run… demonstrate its willingness to shoulder this responsibility…. We think that the Fed may not need to take the federal funds rate materially above its neutral level in the current cycle of tightening…
LINK: <https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/documents/pb22-3.pdf>
Jude Doyle: If You Say “Cancel Culture” One More Time, So Help Me: ‘[Sarah] Hepola’s article is bad… The reader braces for the expected “gender critical” turn, or perhaps a brisk bit of racism, only to find… Hepola is actually accusing Brock Turner’s victim, Chanel Miller, of being a blackout drunk who invited her own rape. “I have no reason to suspect that Chanel Miller is a chronic blackout drinker, but my research taught me that blackout drinking can be chronic in college environments,” Hepola assures us, and that, plus the fact that Hepola used to have a drinking problem, has given her the wisdom to know that some girls are asking for it: “I watched from afar as the person whose memory had not recorded the incident came to control the narrative…. I sympathized with many of these men: Johnny Depp, Ryan Adams, Brett Kavanaugh, every booze-soaked dumbass who has been accused of doing or saying things he may or may not remember, may or may not regret, may or may not have done while under the influence. But being sympathetic to these fallen creatures—a trait instilled by literature, my mother, and Oprah—had been declared a sin. I toyed with the idea of writing about Brock Turner. Maybe it would get me into The New Yorker!”…
For what it’s worth, Brock Turner was not convicted on Miller’s word. He was interrupted in the act of raping her by two witnesses, who pried him off Miller’s unconscious and badly injured body.
This is a fact Hepola does not mention and, quite possibly, does not know.
Yet Brock Turner, like all God’s creatures, is two steps away from having his face melted off in a nuclear conflagration…. You sound like an out-of-touch jackass writing about “cancel culture” at the best of times, but you sound downright delusional writing about it in March of 2022. There are real problems in the world…. Hepola mentions none of these things. They might as well not exist for her. There’s a war and a pandemic and a fascist uprising and she’s complaining about hanging out in a fucking brownstone with New York Times columnists who are worried they won’t get enough likes on Tweets about Jonathan Franzen novels. The world is on fire, and she’s so desperate for problems that she has to make them up…
LINK: <https://judedoyle.medium.com/if-you-say-cancel-culture-one-more-time-so-help-me-a598d6cff708>
Brianna Wu: ’Going after elites, conspiracy theories, mocking his critics as unpatriotic. He reminds me of someone, but I can’t quite say who: Michael Elgort: “I have translated and added subtitles to the latest video speech by Vladimir Putin from two hours ago. Please don’t let it go in vain—I want everyone to see what a speech of true fascism looks like. No further comment needed, it’s all here, in his speech.” It’s like we’ve been listening to the fascism cover band since 2016, and now the musician with talent is here to play the same song…
LINK:
Timothy Burke: The Read: Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War: ‘French does a terrific job in effectively and consistently explaining to his audience why this history matters and in underlining his own astonishment that it hasn’t mattered more to general knowledge about the modern world. “How is it that this story has gone for so long being so seldom examined or told?”, he asks about Portugal’s early acquisition of gold and other valuable commodities from West African trading partners. There’s a very clear chapter-length explanation of “wealth in persons” as different from “wealth in things”, a key concept that I often struggle to communicate effectively to my students…
LINK:
Director’s Cut PAID SUBSCRIBER ONLY Content Below:
Subject: The Post-WWI Political Emergence of Ukraine
Illustrissimus Adam Tooze has a ver nice extended quote from his own book, The Deluge <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Deluge/HC7aCwAAQBAJ>, on Ukraine between Imperial Germany and Bolshevik Russia in 1918:
Adam Tooze: Brest-Litovsk—Imperial Germany & the Troubled Birth of Modern Ukraine: ‘In 1918 Austria and Germany confidently expected at least 1 million tons from their new Ukrainian ally. But by the end of April it had become clear that ‘exploiting’ the bread basket of the Ukraine would present more problems than these fantasies allowed. If they were to avoid the enormous costs of a full-scale occupation, Austria and Germany needed a cooperative local authority to collaborate with them. Having been driven out of Kiev (by a Bolshevik attack), only to be restored courtesy of the German Army, the Rada needed a breathing space to re- establish itself. But the scale and urgency of Germany and Austria’s economic demands made this impossible.
In Ukraine, as in the rest of revolutionary Russia, the only way to secure popular legitimacy was to cede possession of the land to the peasants. Over the summer of 1917 a nationwide land grab had redistributed the gentry’s estates. In the nationwide Constituent Assembly election, the peasants of Ukraine had voted in their millions for the party that promised a village- based agrarian future, the Social Revolutionaries. The SRs were reliable allies against the Bolsheviks, but their land policy ran directly counter to the interests of the Central Powers. To maximize the surplus available for export, they needed cultivation to be concentrated in large, market- orientated farms. For the Rada to have presided over the restoration of the great estates for the sake of its German protectors would have discredited it completely. For the Germans themselves to reverse the agrarian revolution by force would have required hundreds of thousands of troops from the Western Front that Ludendorff could ill afford.
If the Germans had been able to barter desirable manufactured goods in exchange for grain deliveries, this conflict might have been alleviated. Under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Germany had committed itself to trading grain for industrial goods. But under the strain of the war effort, goods for export were in desperately short supply. To purchase the grain they needed, the Central Powers resorted to the short- term expedient of simply ordering the Ukrainian National Bank to print whatever currency they required. This gave them purchasing power and avoided requisitioning, but within a matter of months it rendered the currency worthless. As General Hoffmann noted from Kiev: ‘Everyone is rolling in money. Roubles are printed and almost given away… the peasants have enough stocks of corn to live on for two or three years, but they will not sell it.’
Having reached this point, there was no alternative but to resort to coercion. In early April, Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, the German occupation commander, issued a decree requiring compulsory cultivation of all land. However, the Field Marshal acted without the approval of the Rada, and the deputies refused to ratify the decree. Within days, the German military decided against diplomacy. In a coup d’état, they ousted the Ukrainian National Assembly and installed a so-called Hetmanate under the Tsarist cavalry officer Pyotr Skoropadskyi. Only six weeks after the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty by Germany’s own Reichstag, under the pressure of economic necessity, the German military had unilaterally abandoned any residual claim to be acting as the protector of the legitimate cause of self- determination. Skoropadskyi spoke virtually no Ukrainian and filled his cabinet with conservative Russian nationalists. The real power-holders in Germany seemed to have lost interest in the project of creating a viable Ukrainian nation state. Instead, they appeared to be readying Kiev as the launching pad for a conservative reconquest of all of Russia.
The result, as Erzberger lamented in the Reichstag was not just discreditable, but dysfunctional. ‘A German soldier can no longer show himself unarmed in Kiev… the railway men and workmen are planning a general strike… the peasants would not deliver any grain, and bloodshed must be reckoned with in the event of requisitioning’. Instead of the 1 million tons promised under the peace treaty, the Ukraine delivered no more than 173,000 tons to the Central Powers in 1918. 54 But it was not bread alone that was at stake. The question that concerned Erzberger and his colleagues in the Reichstag majority was who controlled the Reich. In future Erzberger demanded all measures in the Baltics and Ukraine should have the approval of the Reichstag.
By June, Ludendorff’s staff had lost any interest in long-term sponsorship of an independent Ukrainian state. Instead, they hoped to march to Petrograd and install a pro-German conservative government for all of Russia that would trade the return of Ukrainian to Russian sovereignty in exchange for German economic domination of all of Russia.
As Germany’s position on the Western front collapsed, the Reichstag found itself struggling to prevent the generals from launching a final German offensive in the East towards Petrograd. As they were agonizingly aware they were, de facto, helping to assure the survival of the increasingly terroristic Bolsheviks regime, which they abhorred on political grounds.
And, as Germany’s power collapsed, so too did the regime it had created in Kiev. Skoropadsky’s regime did not last beyond December 1918 when Ukraine became a People’s Republic…
LINK:
As I understand it, immediately after the fall of the Czar Nicholas II Romanov, Mykhailo Hrushevsky led the formation of the Central Rada in Kyiv which sought approval from Petrograd to establish a regional government. By late June 1917 the Central Rada had declared Ukrainian autonomy within a Russian federation. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd, the Central Rada declared independence: a Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR). The Bolsheviks faction in Kyiv then found itself massively outnumbered, and fled to Kharkiv, where Christian Rakovksy declared himself the head of the real, Bolshevik, government of Ukraine. Then came Trotsky's March 1918 signature to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which the Bolsheviks recognized the independence of Ukraine, and its location within the Imperial German sphere of influence. By the late Spring of 1918, it appeared that this independent Ukraine included all lands up to and including the Lower Volga and the Kuban, with a boundary perhaps at the Caucasus.
Then the Germans staged their coup d'etat, establishing what they hoped would be their puppet Hetmanate. It did not survive the end of the German Empire in November 1918. As the Bolshevik Ukrainian armies moved in and defeated the non-Bolshevik armies, non-Bolsheviks in Lviv declared a Western Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR). Neither the ZUNR nor the UNR could get the Allies in Versailles to give them the time of day. Things then got swept up in the Bolshevik-Polish Wear and with the Peace of Riga in March 1921 the Ukraine was divided between (a) Poland, (b) the Ukrainian SSR, and (c) Russia, which took Crimea, Kuban, and Don Cossacks. Somehow, in all this, Carpathian Ruthenium found itself in Czechoslovakia, and Bukovina found itself in Roumania. And I have not mentioned Nestor Makhno.
Now it could very easily have gone otherwise. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and a Greater Lithuania assigned to Germany in some form., It had Finland, Estonia, "Livonia" (Latvia), and Ukraine "self-determined". All of the German-assigned and self-determined territories at Brest-Litovsk became interwar nation-states, save for Ukraine, which became the Ukrainian SSR, and a member of the USSR.
I have always thought that Lennon's attitude toward nationalism derived from his belief that the nation state was little and the party was all. Individual soviet socialist republics could be independent. But their parties would be directed from Moscow. And that would be what counted. I think we see a legacy of this in the Soviet demand that each of the USSR's union republics have a seat in the United Nations, which was then bargained down to the USSR having three seats: Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. (Was Russia always the Security Council power, or was it the USSR? I do not know.)
I believe that in Lenin’s mind the template was tha,t as the revolution advanced, newly Bolshevized areas would join the USSR as member republics, independent but with their parties democratically centralized under Moscow. Today the Ukraine. At some future date Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Later on Bavaria, Hungary, Austria, and Prussia, and so forth.
But after World War II that pattern was not followed. To my knowledge, none of the Soviet satellites petitioned to join the USSR—although in 1960 the government of Czechoslovakia did change its name from "People's Republic of Czechoslovakia" to the "Czechoslovak Soviet Socialist Republic", ČSSR...
Offhand it sounds like something is off in Safari (or ads?).
Anyway I think you've discovered that g (or whatever) is affected by alcohol consumption. I suppose resistance to alcohol is one version of g. Maybe an important one even.