The Democrats are trying to belittle the concept of a Wall, calling it old fashioned. The fact is there is nothing else’s that will work, and that has been true for thousands of years. It’s like the wheel, there is nothing better. I know tech better than anyone, & technology…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 21, 2018

This comes from a man who does not know how to close an umbrella.

Does Trump really believe that he knows more about tech than anyone? Even if we take away the hyperbole, does he think he’s an expert at technology? What could he mean by that? That he knows how to build a computer? What an Internet router does? That he can explain what an adversarial neural network is, or just the difference between machine learning and deep learning? That he can provide IT support when Jared can’t find the song he just downloaded to his iPhone? That he can program his VCR?

But I don’t think he means any of those things by his ridiculous claim.

I think it’s worse than that. The phrase is clearly intended to have an effect, not to mean anything. “Listen to me. Believe me.” is an assertion of authority intended to forestall questioning. A genuine expert might say something like that, and at least sometimes it’d be reasonable and acceptable; it’s also sometimes obnoxious. Either way, “I know more about x than anyone” is a conversational tool.

So, Trump has picked up a hammer. His hand is clasped around its handle. He swings his arm and brings the hammer squarely down on the nail. He hears the bang. He has wielded this hammer successfully.

Except the rest of us can see there is nothing — nothing — in his hand. We all know that. Only he does not.

Trump is not lying. He is insane.

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For the past six months I’ve been a writer in residence embedded in a machine learning research group — PAIR (People + AI Research) — at the Google site in Cambridge, MA. I was recently renewed for another 6 months.

No, it’s not clear what a “writer in residence” does. So, I’ve been writing occasional posts that try to explain and contextualize some basic concepts in machine learning from the point of view of a humanities major who is deeply lacking the skills and knowledge of a computer scientist. Fortunately the developers at PAIR are very, very patient.

Here are three of the posts:

Machine Learning’s Triangle of Error: “…machine learning systems ‘think’ about fairness in terms of three interrelated factors: two ways the machine learning (ML) can go wrong, and the most basic way of adjusting the balance between these potential errors.”

Confidence Everywhere!: “… these systems are actually quite humble. It may seem counterintuitive, but we could learn from their humility.”

Hashtags and Confidence: “…in my fever dream of the future, we routinely say things like, “That celebrity relationship is going to last, 0.7 for sure!” …Expressions of confidence probably (0.8) won’t take exactly that form. But, then, a decade ago, many were dubious about the longevity of tagging…”

I also wrote about five types of fairness, which I posted about earlier: “…You appoint five respected ethicists, fairness activists, and customer advocates to figure out what gender mix of approved and denied applications would be fair. By the end of the first meeting, the five members have discovered that each of them has a different idea of what’s fair…”

I’ve also started writing an account of my attempt to write my very own machine learning program using TensorFlow.js: which lets you train a machine learning system in your browser; TensorFlow.js is a PAIR project. This project is bringing me face to face with the details of implementing even a “Hello, world”-ish ML program. (My project aims at suggesting tags for photos, based on a set of tagged images (Creative Commons-ed) from Flickr. It’s a toy, of course.)

I have bunch of other posts in the pipeline, as well as a couple of larger pieces on larger topics. Meanwhile, I’m trying to learn as much as I possibly can without becoming the most annoying person in Cambridge. But it might be too late to avoid that title…

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