Let’s all play “Spot the Fallacy”! What is the fallacy in this sentence:

New breakthroughs in artificial general intelligence give us hints about its potential to solve problems human minds never could.

from an article by Garvin Jabusch at Worth. That’s the slug of the article and it reflects an error I’ve noticed is very common in people who don’t know much about artificial intelligence.

It’s official. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are all losing population:

The New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago metro areas are all losing people, according to 2018 population estimates just released by the Census Bureau. But other coastal regions—the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Washington, along with the traditional Sunbelt boomtowns—continue to grow.

Ninety-four metro areas, representing about a quarter of the nation’s total, lost population last year on a region-wide basis. This includes nine major metros of more than 1 million people. Among them were the three biggest: New York (down 19,474 people, or 0.10 percent), Los Angeles (down 7,223, or 0.05 percent), and Chicago (down 22,068, or 0.23 percent).

says Aaron M. Renn at City Journal. I would venture to say that without the massive subsidies that New York has benefited from over the last several decades its population would be fleeing even faster.

He also takes note of the city of my birth:

Two of America’s most troubled cities continued their downward population slide. Baltimore lost 7,346 people (1.20 percent) and St. Louis 5,028 (1.63 percent). Baltimore is on track shortly to fall below 600,000 people, and St. Louis will soon have fewer than 300,000 residents. The loss in St. Louis is particularly acute, with the city having hemorrhaged 65 percent of its population from its 1950 peak—worse than Youngstown or Flint.

Baltimore and St. Louis have a number of things in common other than that they are losing people. Both have very large black populations; in both the city is itself a county.

What I find most distressing about all of that is that growth seems to be synonymous with subsidy. If it’s subsidized, it grows. If it’s not, it declines. What sectors are growing month after month? Government, education, and health care. They are also the most highly subsidized sectors. That’s not a formula for success.

Here’s something that might not have occurred to you. Due to the structure of Social Security it subsidizes Sun Belt states at the expense of Northern states. Wage incomes are taxed to finance the system and, historically at least, most wage incomes have been paid in the North. Taxing those incomes results in less spending in the North than would otherwise have occurred. When people move south as they age and collect their Social Security retirement incomes in their new homes, it results in more spending and, consequently, more economic growth in those places than otherwise would have taken place. That may resolve itself in time but that does nothing for Northern cities now.

I can think of a half dozen different ways of collecting that policy flaw, none of which would be popular in the slightest.

Here’s something else that might not have occurred to you. As a society we have no orderly way of dealing with cities that have experienced rapid population decline, cf. Detroit.

There’s an interesting article at Discover Magazine about the search for causes of autism. In all likelihood the root causes of autism are multi-factorial and, consequently, there is no “silver bullet” solution. The diagnosis of autism may not be particularly helpful at all.

Among the causes that have been suggested (in no particular order):

• Paternal age at conception
• Parental drug use
• Exposure to environmental toxins
• Other intellectual disability
• Extreme preterm birth
• Exaggerated maternal immune responses

The factors we can be pretty confident are not implicated are vaccines.

We have now entered a period during which the Mr. Mueller’s report will be dissected, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, and clause by clause, in a wild attempt at rationalizing conclusions that were not reached through reason. As I have been saying for some months now, the pressure on House Democrats to begin impeachment proceedings will only mount. IMO delaying the inevitable will not help Democrats in the general election so they’d better get a move on.

One of the notable passages in the report is this one:

The investigation did not identify evidence that any U. S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA’s interference operation.

The “IRA” mentioned there is the Russian Internet Research Agency which managed the information operation about which people have been complaining for two years. As Glenn Greenwald points out:

The result of all of that was that not a single American – whether with the Trump campaign or otherwise – was charged or indicted on the core question of whether there was any conspiracy or coordination with Russia over the election. No Americans were charged or even accused of being controlled by or working at the behest of the Russian government. None of the key White House aides at the center of the controversy who testified for hours and hours – including Donald Trump, Jr. or Jared Kushner – were charged with any crimes of any kind, not even perjury, obstruction of justice or lying to Congress.

or, as I noted waggishly in the title of this post, Hillary Clinton has been exonerated by the Mueller report.

I wanted to make a last few observations about the cathedral of Notre Dame, partially in reaction to things I’ve read.

The cathedral is not owned by the French Catholic Church. It is owned by the French government and has been for two hundred years. The roof that burned and came near to destroying the entire edifice was installed in the 19th century, a reaction to Victor Hugo’s campaign to preserve the cathedral. The Catholic Church is merely allowed to use it.

The French government allowed the cathedral to fall into substantial disrepair. It had other priorities.

The modern French state is based on several pillars, including “Frenchness” and laïcité secularism. Those two values are inevitably in tension. What does it mean to be French without French history or French culture? The Church is a substantial component of that history and and culture. These are questions with which the French will need to come to terms. Maybe they shouldn’t rebuild the cathedral at all.

I was pretty disappointed with the proposals of Josh Hoxie in his piece at MarketWath, “10 practical steps to bridge the racial wealth divide”:

The median black family today owns $3,600 — just 2% of the $147,000 of wealth the median white family owns. The median Latinx family has assets worth $6,600 — just 4% as much as the median white family. (These figures exclude cars, which are a poor store of wealth because they depreciate.)

Put another way, the median white family is 22 times wealthier than their Latinx counterparts — and 41 times wealthier than the typical black family.

Here’s what he proposes:

1 Baby Bonds
2 Guaranteed Employment and a Significantly Higher Minimum Wage
3 Affordable Housing
4 Medicare for All
5 Postal Banking
6 Higher Taxes for the Ultra-Wealthy
7 Fixes to Upside-Down Tax Expenditures
8 A Congressional Committee on Reparations
9 Data Collection on Race and Wealth
10 A Racial Wealth Analysis

The reason I was disappointed should be obvious. Even if all ten were implemented, they would have very little effect for a simple reason. The savings rates of blacks and Hispanics are lower at every income level than those of whites. See this report for more. Try as they might, torturing the data all the way to avoid it, it’s the inescapable conclusion from the data the authors present.

And that doesn’t even take into account another reality: the differences among whites are enormous, too. The Mr. Hoxie tells us nothing about the standard deviation.

In just about an hour Attorney General Barr will make a redacted version of the Mueller report public. At this point I don’t believe that anybody believes that will satisfy the president, his opponents, or his supporters. Neither his supporters nor his opponents are deducing their conclusions from facts; they’re just restating their premises.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about a misconception about how our system is supposed to function. Under our system the Congress does not have the authority to demand executive branch work product. The Congress’s powers with respect to the executive branch are limited to just two: the power of the purse and the power of impeachment. The powers of the court over the other two branches of government are even more limited. Basically, it has none. Whatever power the court exerts is just honored by convention. The Supreme Court has no authority to order the Congress or the President to do or not to do anything, as pithily observed by Andrew Jackson almost two hundred years ago.

What raises all of these questions and, indeed, what put President Trump into office to begin with is the dereliction of their duties by all branches of government. I guess that’s the material for another post.

I suppose I should comment on President Trump’s veto of S.J. Res. 7. The text of the joint resolution is here. The president’s veto message is here.

I do not think the United States should be supporting the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s war against Yemen at all. I think that President Obama was wrong to do so and I think that President Trump is wrong to do so. I do not think the KSA is our friend let alone our ally. Both of us have a burr under our saddle about Iran. I’m more worried about the KSA than about Iran.

That having been said I don’t think much of S. J. Res. 7, either. As President Trump notes U. S. forces aren’t engaged in combat in Yemen and that’s the emphasis of the joint resolution. It’s an order to withdraw forces coupled with a shot across the bow.

Basically, what I think the Congress should have done is given the president 90 days to show cause why we should support the KSA’s war (support of an ally isn’t nearly enough reason) and then denied funding.

I had to laugh out loud when I read the opening of Margaret Sullivan’s column at the Washington Post:

It’s certainly possible that the news media will do a nuanced, accurate job Thursday of helping citizens understand the redacted version of the Mueller report.

It is also possible that the atoms of my hand will simply pass through the atoms of my desk when I strike it with my hand but I have no expectation that it will happen. I don’t think the prospect of the media doing a “nuanced, accurate job” of explaining the redacted version of the Mueller report expected tomorrow is a great deal greater.

But this was even funnier:

It’s possible they will do a better job than many of them did with their credulous and misleading coverage of Attorney General William P. Barr’s letter on the report last month in which they failed to adequately challenge President Trump’s false claim of being completely exonerated.

Got that? In her version of nuance it’s the job of the media to challenge claims of the president they find false.

IMO the claim of exoneration is like Schrödinger’s cat, simultaneously true and false. It wasn’t Mueller’s job to exonerate. That’s not what special prosecutors do. What he did not do was indict. If that’s exoneration, then it was an exoneration.