Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
The problems in American democracy run far deeper than Trump.
In most modern cases, "democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps."
They rot from the inside, poisoned by leaders who "subvert the very process
that brought them to power." They are hollowed out, the trappings of
democracy present long after the soul of the system is snuffed out.
...
"How Democracies Die" is being read as a commentary on Donald Trump,
but the analysis of Trump is the book's least interesting,
and least important, contribution. Trump is a symptom, not the cause,
of the problems bedeviling American democracy.
...
Demagogues and authoritarians do not destroy democracies. It's established
political parties, and the choices they make when faced with demagogues
and authoritarians, that decide whether democracies survive.
The proportion of medical procedures unsupported by evidence may be nearly half.
In 2002, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study
demonstrating that a common knee operation, performed on millions
of Americans who have osteoarthritis - an operation in which
the surgeon removes damaged cartilage or bone ("arthroscopic
debridement") and then washes out any debris ("arthroscopic
lavage") - worked no better at relieving pain or improving
function than a sham procedure. Those operations can go for $5,000
a shot.
Many orthopedic surgeons and medical societies disputed the
study and pressed insurance companies to maintain coverage of the
procedure. Subsequent research on a related procedure cast further
doubt on the value of knee surgeries for many patients with arthritis
or meniscal tears, yet the procedures remain in wide use.
...
The knowledge gap is especially large for medical procedures,
as opposed to drugs, since there is no FDA for surgery.
Doctors learn about new procedures from colleagues, specialty society
meetings, and information provided by medical device companies -
a potentially arbitrary and unscientific process.
The booming field of artificial intelligence (AI) is grappling
with a replication crisis, much like the ones that have afflicted
psychology, medicine, and other fields over the past decade. AI
researchers have found it difficult to reproduce many key results,
and that is leading to a new conscientiousness about research
methods and publication protocols.
...
The most basic problem is that researchers often don't share
their source code. At the AAAI meeting, Odd Erik Gundersen,
a computer scientist at the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology in Trondheim, reported the results of a survey of 400
algorithms presented in papers at two top AI conferences in the
past few years. He found that only 6% of the presenters shared the
algorithm's code. Only a third shared the data they tested their
algorithms on, and just half shared "pseudocode"-a limited summary
of an algorithm. (In many cases, code is also absent from AI papers
published in journals, including Science and Nature.)
We've been promised a revolution in how and why nearly everything happens. But the limits of modern artificial intelligence are closer than we think.
But there are many things that people can do quickly that smart
machines cannot. Natural language is beyond deep learning; new
situations baffle artificial intelligences, like cows brought up
short at a cattle grid. None of these shortcomings is likely to be
solved soon. Once you've seen you've seen it, you can't un-see it:
deep learning, now the dominant technique in artificial intelligence,
will not lead to an AI that abstractly reasons and generalizes
about the world. By itself, it is unlikely to automate ordinary
human activities.
...
According to skeptics like Marcus, deep learning is greedy, brittle,
opaque, and shallow. The systems are greedy because they demand
huge sets of training data. Brittle because when a neural net is
given a "transfer test"-confronted with scenarios that differ from
the examples used in training-it cannot contextualize the situation
and frequently breaks. They are opaque because, unlike traditional
programs with their formal, debuggable code, the parameters of neural
networks can only be interpreted in terms of their weights within
a mathematical geography. Consequently, they are black boxes, whose
outputs cannot be explained, raising doubts about their reliability
and biases. Finally, they are shallow because they are programmed
with little innate knowledge and possess no common sense about the
world or human psychology.
In other words, bad behavior, or even alleged bad behavior,
can taint an artistic work, because the artist cannot be separated from
his art. This is at least a more interesting proposition than the notion
that art should be disqualified just because we don't like the way
the artist behaved in private. But is it right?
...
It is also true that art can transcend the private behavior of the
artist. A writer, filmmaker, or painter who behaves badly toward
wives or lovers can produce art that is deeply sympathetic to
women. By the same token, perfectly behaved people can break all
kinds of social taboos in their art. To judge the moral component
of artistic expression, then, we must look not at the person who
made it but at the work itself.
Drawing the right lessons from the fall in urban violence. Book review.
In the United States over the past three decades, while people argue about tax cuts and terrorism, the wave of social change that has most altered the shape of American life, as much as the new embankments of the Thames changed life then, has been what the N.Y.U. sociologist Patrick Sharkey calls "the great crime decline." The term, which seems to have originated with the influential Berkeley criminologist Franklin E. Zimring, refers to the still puzzling disappearance from our big-city streets of violent crime, so long the warping force of American life"driving white flight to the suburbs and fuelling the rise of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, not to mention the career of Martin Scorsese. ("Taxi Driver" is the great poem of New York around the height of high crime, with steam coming out of the hellish manholes and violence recumbent in the back seat.) No one saw it coming, and the still odder thing is that, once it came, no one seemed adequately equipped to praise it.
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