Ideation Of Managed Economy

A software defined economy(SDE) is what we already have for the most part. Most transactions in the economy exchange money electronically, over software defined networks. Various rules and triggered activities occur automatically. In a broader sense we can mention some constructs like the IRA, Roth IRA, 401k, 529, HSA, etc. etc. These types of accounts belong to a person fully, however the funds held in these accounts have statutory or contractual restrictions on when and for what purpose the money maybe spent. In a lesser light, food stamps and rationing tickets for the worse-off are also basically money or constrictions on money regulating the use of money for specific purposes and amounts.

Therefore, in this post-cryptocurrency era, it is completely imaginable to refactor our whole society, well at least the whole economy on top of a software defined system. We can specify what every single cent maybe spent on, because the software can account for every single cent of money that is transacted. There would be different levels of authority who may reappropriate money for other purposes, but each of those authorities have their own limits of power and checks and balances. The transference of money changes their purpose marker according to established reasonable rules implemented in software. For example I may have authority over the accounts of minors under my guardianship such that I can specify the money can only be spent on pencils and paper. The store who receive this money can convert the label from stationary to salary, then shipping and inventory, etc. Yang’s UBI can be distributed with earmarks for food, childcare, and other bare necessities of human life. Supermarket will refuse to take food money for beer or cigarets. Amazon automatically refuses to receive toy money in exchange for designer boots.

Usefulness

Another interesting property we had added as a feature specifying velocity. In an SDE, we can specifically say how long you are allowed to hold on to certain funds. For example the stimulus money for COVID-19. Those $1,200 is not only restricted to rent/grocery payable, but also has to be spent in a month. If it is not spent, the money reverts to the issuer—federal government. Such a requirement would propagate the money so that the bottom-up economic stimulus shoots up the system and really jolts the economy to life. If I put the money into savings account, it would still participate in the economy but in a much slower and possibly counter-productive ways. The money flow graph can be programmed to send money back to the issuer after an entity exceeds its allotted time to spend the money, if he does spend it in time, the next entity starts its own countdown clock to spend the money. Another possibility is for the stimulus money to have a fixed life time that can be held by any entity but it either vanished or is transmitted back to the issuer at the expiry. The ability to expiring money or alter its inherent value is not new, what is new is the ability to identify money, track it and set expiry at a massive scale, one that is the entirety of the economy, and do so in the very finest grain, down to the smallest epsilon of economic value, at the same time. Being SDE also means that the implementation is easily and accurately auditable. It brings a reassurance of universality of the system of rules of our economy to our minds.

Challenges

A moment of pause is required to view this design critically. The fact that we already do this to money is not the proof or even evidence that this should be done. One reason why money is loved so much is the universality of its purchase power. It doesn’t matter that I just cursed a god and spat on a little kid or defected in public, money will buy what money will buy irrespective of circumstance and status. Money is great because it does not care about most things we care about. If we start restricting what money can do, it seems to deprive this powerful tool of a most important function. Money would be worth less if we are not free to spend it as we like. OTOH, being able to dictate what money does after it leaves my hand seems like a supernatural power everyone desires—at least you wish you can order it to turn around and end up in your own account again. One can imagine a certain set of people who would feel such abilities enabled by SDE adds significant value rendering the money of this economy much more valuable.

Exchange: there cannot be exchange between different class of money.

One concern you may have is whether the demand will be consumed by the uncertainty of money. Who would ever want $1 that becomes $0 in the next second? Well maybe in a v2 or v3 we’d have the need for that kind of money, and an exchange market where one might dump short lived money for long lived money at a discount. but in v1 we may have to resort to reclassification and quantization. Recall when food money goes to grocer it’s classification becomes wages, shipping, cogs, etc. When this transmutation occurs the money will gain a new expiry, possibly offset from date of transaction, as determined by its issuer. A second remediation is to quantize the expiry in reasonable terms: one will never expect to receive money that dies in the next 30 days without reasonable transmutation. But once implemented, the money is universal again, as long as you have the right kind of credit of money, you can buy. Seller can not refuse to sell because the money you pay expires in a month instead of in a year.

Implementation

The SDE does not have to fundamentally challenge our real economy, in fact its flexibility means we can write economies as dictated by economists. We can apply prescriptions of economic theory just by reprogramming the economy in the software. In fact, Spiral City should start with an SDE and then we practice migration to SDE v2 as the city outgrows it’ wedge, it implements an updated SDE on the next the sector. Software engineer can have a pleasant dream about the refactoring and data migration for this task, who wouldn’t want to do the work of reclassifying every cent in the economy ?!

And perhaps the world can tolerate two kinds of money—liberal money and illiberal money. Bitcoin, for example, can be the liberal money, and fiat currency can be SDE with all the restrictions. An exchange can produce the other currency at a discount or premium.

Haa, as I write this I see that EU has approved some where between $800m and $2.06b stimulus package. At least some of that should be put towards the development of an SDE so that the rest of the fund maybe used with surgical precision to produce predictable and intended consequences.

Other ideas for expansion upon establishment of an SDE platform: administration of affirmative action, probable stability of money flow given software expressive assumptions about agents of money. The ability to produce random numbers uninfluenced by individual agents, it enables implementation of trustworthy randomized fairness.

Has anyone noticed that strange behaviors like random purchases occurring on mobile devices frequently after receiving a long and pointless call?

Just wanted to throw this out there, in case it isn’t just my fat face punching the screen when I talk too long on the phone.

In previous posts(1, 2, etc.) we wondered about a practical definitions of fairness considering all the advantages of our modern sciences and technologies. One particularly stimulating idea was the idea of equality of effort in servicing. Equality of effort demands that a servicing entity (the Server) must make equal effort to provide service to all its customers (the Customer). My examples was for the servers at a restaurant in Little Mexico to serve me real cow components cooked the same way and on the same plates as all fellow customers who speak Spanish and all of whom do not abstain from eating meat. Since my peculiar affliction of birth, education and vegetarianism is no fault of the restaurant owners, it might be very reasonable to only demand that they try hard enough to please me. That is, to demand that they try but not demand that they succeed in pleasing me. But some of that servicing involves a live human person thinking. Their facial muscles moving to smile as they greet me. How do we request that Server make sufficiently fair mental and emotions effort? we consider the mental component of that question in this blog entry.

In this day and age of impending computerized AGI, we may suppose WLOU (without loss of usefulness) we can write the Server’s mental process in a functional manner: his brain B upon receiving input I and service order O produces an output B(I, O). Suppose that there is another person H for whom she makes the same consideration B for an identical service order O, producing B(H, O). How do I know if the B doesn’t have a clause inside that says:

B(I,O) := 0
B(x,O) := O^6

Clearly, it did no thinking for me producing 0 while it exponentiated O six times for everyone else which is arguably a lot more thinking than 0. One inclination is to declare that we must have identity-blind thinking. If we disallow thinking about the Customer when servicing then the effect will be an equal effort:

B(x,O) = B’(O) = O^6

It only matters what Customer asked for but not who is asking. The problem with this is that while it achieves some type of fairness, it is unrealistic and ultimately not fair. I would most definitely want the Server to think about me when serving me. If you can imagine that I walk into the restaurant with a child on my back, a Server who is indifferent to me will pull the chair back and ask me to sit. An intelligent, attentive and thoughtful Server would firstly inquire whether I preferred a child seat or booster seat, brought my choice out and placed it next to my chair, and then pull my chair back for me—and if I looked masculine enough, perhaps forego the pulling back of the chair for me as it is suggestive.

So in fact, we expect that to have been thoughtful, the Server must consider me:

There is no such B’ such that

B(x, O) = B’(O)

This requirement is difficult for some situations. For example, if part of the Server’s job is to open the door as I approach, would it not do so for everyone? Due to the nature of the Service, the Server cannot consider different action for different people.

Sadly, I must suggest a workaround like Kant exaggerating to a thug, is for the program to look up in a lookup table the individual for exceptions. From program analysis perspective, the x would become needed in an irreducible way. And in reality this is good habit to program for extensibility. For example we may later implement special rules for opening doors for wheel chairs, stretchers and crutches.

Another workaround is to adjust the scope and analyze the possible outcomes. A program does not need to be intelligent if it does not have the freedom to make any choices. Recall that we have previously attempted to quantify cardinality and qualify ordinality the ideas of freedom, empowerment, liberty, and rights based on the cardinality of the available choices. A thought with no freedom of choice is not an intelligent thought.

In reality, our thoughts leading to the outcome is probably a mix of intelligent and unintelligent thought functions:

Inputs: x, O
a = f1(x)
b = f2(O)
c = f3(a, b)
d = f4(c)
Output; d

Each of the f’s above are irreducible. in particular, the function f3, being an irreducible function, requires both input a and b to compute its output. (Example of such functions include addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, if-then-else, etc.) f3 is where we truly decide what we need to do, differently, for different person making the same order O. And it is precisely here that we can inject intelligence. Therefore we shall refer to these irreducible functions nodes that dominates both forward and backwards the Intelligent Kernel. To be fair, we must ensure that all Intelligent Kernels are fair. This idea is somewhat reductionist, we might feel the need to say that in the domain of computable functions, what we can best express Intelligence as seem irreducible functions having at least two inputs. But it is not so absurd as it sounds, for example the transistors that do most of the thinking for computers calculates such a function in binary.

In the case of my nearly $50k worth of Tesla solar system, the lack of thought inspires a different idea of thoughtfulness. What happened was the Tesla engineer(the Server) in charge of designing my system cobbled together a system where the solar panels can charge batteries fully for a few months around the summer solstice of each year. For the other half of the year, due to my particular situation as a Customer, the solar panels generates so little energy that the battery is effectively empty. Based on the response of Tesla support teams (and I mean entire teams of people because I spoke to many over the ensuing years), I would imagine he thought he was pretty smart. The way Tesla goaded customer into their folds was a “total annual generation” metric. The support team repeated to me several dozen times that the total annual generation will be great. The unfortunate part is that there is also a battery system that is part of Server’s design. And in the half of the year that the solar panels cannot generate much of any things the battery will also be useless. It would seem to me that the engineer at Server somehow did not consider the empty batteries in the winter. This problem could have been avoided if he ran a very basic simulation of the system and noticed that batteries would basically not charge for half a year. In the present system we must insist that the simulation function T takes into consideration the customer. (And in Tesla versus me case the shading on Customer’s house in the colder half of the year)

t1, t2, ..., tn are the n time steps of a discrete simulation
s0 is the way things are on the day the system is activated

s_{i+1} = T(x, s_i)

That T must not be decomposable to

T(x, s_i) = T(s_i)

(Man! I hate to drive now days with so many growing number of Tesla cars on the roads. Without these thoughtfulness requirements, it is hard for me to raise my confidence in their products)

It’s July 4th, let’s think of something bright and happy. Lets build a new city, designed to allow for easy expansion over many generations of growth. Some part of me is suspecting that this is my subconscious trying to tell me to stop blogging. I know nothing about urban design, but my overly proud CS mind is yelling: “but it’s just a ring buffer with random replacement!” So, here we go, happy July 4th everyone!

Designate a city center. Build outward, radially, say northward. An arc of the circle looking like a slide of pizza—the name for this shape, oddly, is a sector. Perhaps it can be one radian wide and along radius of several kilometers long. Major transportation “beltways” are now straight line routes lay on the immediate outside of the zone(each on its own radius), also radiating from the center. The straight transportation pathways are great because the vehicles only need to travel in straight line most of the time. Some work can be put into optimizing city design in this linear layout.

Zoning shall be by rings that are concentric with the city and incidental to the current developmental sector. There are some obvious ideas like putting garbage centers on the outside, governance buildings on the inside. Convenience (Shopping, restaurants) and public utilities(hospital, fire company, police, park, etc) can be zoned at regular intervals along the radius for easy access.

Density of population is highest in near the city center and decreases as you travel away from the city center. So imagine something like the city from sci-fi where buildings are especially high in the center and drops exponentially traveling outward. Ranches and mansions, then SFH on the outside, town houses and then condos, efficiencies, and sleeping pods towards city center.

When the city feels like upgrading, it establishes a development sector of several kilometers by sweeping clockwise. The new sector can be longer than the last city development zone. As the city builds new components like libraries, schools, etc, the new buildings can be placed near the old building but within the new development sector. This means people who use the new facility have almost identical travel pattern as they had before the growth. Instead of turning left off of the highway(radialways) exit ramp, one would turn right and voila, the brand new library. Similar matter with plumbing, sewers, electricity, Internet, connecting with the previous generation is easy physically because of the proximity. The building in the new development sector means there will be minimal disruption to life in the previous zones. The new sector is occupied as the new population is added to the city by reproduction or immigration.

As dangerous as segregating population by age or by economic class sounds, it does present us with an opportunity to grow our society in a planned manner. The new development zone can implement new rules of law and social conventions. Instead of squeezing the radical people in with everyone else, we can throw them into a brand new city, where they, and the whole greater city, have the ability to try out something completely new. The developmental zone. New economy, new money(like bitcoins), new tech(the Internet, mobile phones, self driving cars, street video monitoring, robotic police, …) new laws(universal healthcare, new institution of marriage with fully integrated insurance, financial, social, medical adjustments of benefit and responsibilities. Maybe new traffic laws like we can all drive on the left, UBI, min/max wages, min/max work hours, licensing to kill, etc.), maybe even a new more efficient language—everything is written and spoken in the new language. In the least, the new city can enforce a new coding convention in a new programming language.

An equal opportunity system may be implemented by subsidizing all immigrants who wants and is accepted to work or live exclusively in a new zone with universal income. An immigrant from an old city block requires that their old wealth be frozen or otherwise render unusable in the new city zone. (They can go back to where they came from and use that wealth there) Because of all the political differences, this sector may have different voting system than the previous. But in the new city sector, everyone is “born” equal. It’s like a brand spanking new sector of America as it were in 1700’s—and you can have one every few decades.

To stimulate growth, the city will never replace any dysfunctional facilities. Old power generators and factories will be abandoned and demolished. But new building will not happen on the lot until another development zone incidents that plot of land. After the development zones sweep all the way around and use up the last swath of land, the next development zone needs to demolish the oldest zone. Hopefully the zone has been deserted and demolished for some generations by this time. One can even imagine the funding for each of the development zones to include land reclamation costs so that by the time demolition begins, the effort is fully anticipated and paid for. The benefit of only building next to live technology and order of people that were recently developed. We never have to connect to century old telephone wires or asbestos laden drainage pipes.

Btw, I’m watching the tv series bat women. Does anybody find it really annoying that bat women is quite hot, but then you kind want to be her when she flirts with her gf… man, this will really screw with male viewers minds. Personally I find it really offended that it takes a lesbian women to be bat women, I mean what’s wrong with a straight women, is it so hard to imagine a straight women to be bat women? Again, my eyes rolling into my head because I’ve seen it done once long ago but someone else who should be finding this offensive. Kinda weird to have people stuck in your head for long long time. Anyways, America just ended it’s special relationship with Hong Kong due to Chinese changing of their laws. The Nimitz and Ronald Regan are in the South China Sea to watch Chinese military exercises. And covid19 yet rages.

Thus, we have described a geographical-versioning system to choreograph the advancement our socioeconomic and sociopolitical system along with its physical infrastructure. The geographic feature of the city plan minimizes impact on existing population but maximizes the freedom with which the new part of the city may develop. The proposal plans to facilitate centuries of future growth over many many human generations.

ACA-5 is currently on California’s November Ballot, it repeals proposition 290. Proposition 290 was a law enacted in 1996 that invalidated many race-dependent legislation in California state operations. ACA-5 explicitly says that the government should now once again consider gender, race and ethnicity in college admission and State contracting.

My understanding of many Asians objection to this law is that obviously, Californian colleges today admit disproportionately large number of Asians(the percentage of college admissions given to Asians is higher than percentage of Asians in the population), that ACA-5 directly reduces Asian admitted to colleges by giving those slots to less qualified minority students. Even though the legislation directly calls out that Asians have been discriminated against and wants to protect us, the effect will be to reduce number of Asians receiving state benefit due to them based on merit!

My first reaction was: WHAT IN THE FLAMING HELL has gotten into these blacks people? Do they not remember the sacrifices their parents and grand parents and further ancestors made to gain their constitutionally protected civil rights as equals? Do they not know that it took a lot of people dreaming about the American idea to achieve non-discrimination guarantees by the law of our land? Have too much Chinese personal sacrifice mentality gotten into these black minds that they would sacrifice their own persons’ enjoyment of equal rights protection for their children’s education and employment ?! Why would any sane person want to remove law requiring equal treatment ??!!

I read several internet articles about the matter, especially Economist article on affirmative action. Washington Post article on affirmative action. I am surprised to learn that even in recent centuries, the same federal administration that we talk about today, the VA, the FHA, and others, had just a few decades ago systematically enriched large swarth of white families by means of geographic exclusion. The White people built up generational wealth by excluding black and colored from making purchase property in some cities. Descendants of these white people can then use this wealth to buy their children admittance into Harvard. It makes sense. White Americans today are some of the smartest people in the history of humanity, their ability to behave in a very coordinated and sustained way to build up racial wealth is completely logical, this all make a lot of sense. Considering the millenniums of strife Europeans experienced in wars of swords and wars of the minds, this accomplishment seems rather underwhelming in terms of difficulties.

But that life really sucks! Living in a country, watching a lot of happy people get happier and happier, watching their kids get happier and happier. remembering ancestors who were whipped and raped and killed for these happy peoples ancestors enjoyment and enrichment. For the past few days since learning about the passage of ACA-5, I find that I feel for African Americans, I also feel for the Latino community, we are all colored people in the eyes of whites. Thinking back hundreds of years, reviewing all the efforts these ancestors made to improve their own lives, thinking of all the smart or dirty tricks white peoples have, as a united body of people, each concerting to the trickery, have route so much anguish to them. Think of all the suffering. Think of all the blood shed. Think of all the mental torture. Yet, here we are today, white people can and can and may still be doing the same thing again and again to colored people. I wonder if the civil rights leaders, whoever they are, are right in asking for ACA-5. American black and Latino community have dealt with this life far longer than my family experiences. Could their solution be right ? On what rational basis fo I have to challenge their decision to push for this legislation? This may very well be the best path forward for minorities in America.

An article later I also learned is that America is home to a lot of smart people, white or otherwise. The great Martin Luther King Junior advocated for class based affirmative action to improve the lives of blacks and all that needs help. My deepest respect for this great civil rights leader deepens as I learn more about what he brought to bear as he lead the resistance against racism in America. Admittedly, I did grow up partially in Communist China, back in the 1908’s it was struggling to free itself from the strangle hold of an ideology. Giving to the people who actually needs it—helping the poorer class to advance economically and socially using affirmative action—comes almost straight from communist master Marx himself: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

Even at risk of being classified as a Communist by American Secret police or other vigilantes, class based affirmative action makes sense! Not only does it advance my own race, it advances all poor irregardless of race! It is a race blind policy that I feel is much more in line with America’s founding principles than race based affirmative action.

MLKj was such a great leader!

I wish we had a good leader today for our civil rights movement. When something like ACA-5 gets approved by both houses of California state legislature, one cannot help but begin to yearn for a leader in this space, someone who speaks to all races as MLKj did. Someone who can stand up and speak loudly and justify this legislation. Lacking that, I have only google to resort to, and my conclusion regarding ACA-5 is that we need real civil rights leaders here much much more than we need this legislation that make no sense to me—specifically, I would like the law of all parts of United States to repeatedly affirm that unequal treatment according to race and other protected and immutable attributes is illegal and immoral!

And I should appendix that I do appreciate modern day California minority politicians specifically calling out the suffering of Asian minorities. We have for three centuries had trouble even coming to America, staying here, marrying, working, buying properties, voting. We have everything blacks and Latinos experienced and more. The only way we were treated differently was that we were so disliked that we were not even permitted to come, or even reproduce, much less own property and vote. I mean talk about the worst treat Americans can imagine: no sex, no kids, no vote. (Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) When Asians do come to America, they are treated with utter distrust!(internment of Japanese-Americans for fear of their sabotage of American society…) for a modern day example check out how many times the New York Times calls out Chinese Hackers on its front page. Seriously, Asians really need to stand up, like the African Americans and fight for our place in society. Have you looked down recently? Look down! You’re here until you die! Look down! You’ll always be a slave! Look down! You’re standing in your graves!

…

Reading a very interesting disagreement between Yann LeCunn and Timnit Gebru.(article, article, Reddit ) I should preface by saying that LeCunn would be one of my most favorite computer scientist if I understood his papers in the 1980’s. But I didn’t, and I still enjoy reading his tweets until he quit Twitter this week ending a passionate and political exchange with Timnit Gebru.

It’s hard for me to read Timnit’s tweets. I worked for several hours to track down the conversation and honestly, her presentation of her opinions/view/facts does not persuade me to her point. Unlike LeCunn, who for the most part lectured about what an ML system is and some of its properties relevant to racial bias, Gebru linked several authors and conference, and said whatever LeCunn said was simply insufficient or incorrect. It reads like an angry personal attack. It was very difficult for me to read the conversation because the tone used to express rage repels me. 😦

I suppose I should start by criticizing LeCun. He obviously lived in a United States for many years. Been chosen to represent the academic/scientific community at Facebook and professor at NYU does implicitly burden him with higher responsibility to engage serious matters like this. He could have handled it better IMHO, I don’t personally know how that is possible in this situation, but that’s why he gets paid the big bucks and Turing award, right ? Gebru is a much much younger person, recent graduate(recent as compared to LeCun) with an Advisor who is honestly also much much much much much younger and much disadvantaged when compared with Lecun’s Ph.D. advisor. Gebru herself come from disadvantaged race in America. How can LeCunn let this get so out of hand ? Why was that outbreak even possible? I really wish LeCun handles this more effectively. I mean, seriously, I will miss his tweets. And now I’m forced to visit Facebook often to keep up with Deep Learning knowledge. Why can’t Twitter appease LeCun by labeling the whole discussion “controversial” or something more derogatory like “inflammatory speech”?

Now, Gebru has a point. Basically, base on my best ability to read her post despite violent emotional response they provoke in me, she says that no matter what LeCun’s point is about the Data being the cause of ML Bias, because of his esteemed status and ability to influence, he should really be talking about the People that cause the bias. The argument is that the hard work towards racial equality, is the same hard work as before technology: people, culture and subconscious has to change. This is a simple and important thing to understand.

Now, I would NOT be proud to follow Gebru as a civil rights leader today. I would NOT be proud to follow Gebru as a technical leader today. I would not invite such a person to speak to me or my kids. And seriously, as an author and conference presenter, how do you complain about people not hearing what you said? Is it possible to present this material in a way that people like Yann LeCun could hear you? Is there a way for you to publish so that LeCun could cite you? I mean, hopefully not by throwing a sissy fit on Twitter, but by… you know… normal ways.

(And yes, I can imagine everything she said: she did all her research on the matter and published a lot and gave workshops and presentations at major ML conferences over which LeCun presided. Professors at prestigious universities wrote books delivering the same opinion/fact….And LeCun still does not agree with her point about the True Nature of bias is due to the True Nature of people. He does not cite her. I mean, I have experienced white superior at work, white superiors who experienced uncharacteristically rapid ascend in the organization, who then say to my face: “we know you wrote that design document and it was approved, but we don’t care. We don’t care that you already said that.” It really does happen a lot in America, in my case with seemingly vastly superior people. And seriously, this isn’t about my interaction with Tesla support, it is really about real white people who have real power over other people who openly just don’t care.” Oh you think it’s funny I’m trying to explain this? Or do you just not care? Everyday, you just want to scream: “what do I have to do to make this reasonable to you?” Based on the number of people expressing unreasonably anger at Yann LeFun, I would surmise that Gebru and I are not alone in our experience of ignorance. (But I have no evidence that Yann LeCun is such a person, I certainly do not believe he does it deliberately the way I experienced it.)

But, honestly, back to tweet storm, for an academician, this is in the same vein as the CIA publishing news saying “The Chinese lied to us about COVID19.” Like, isn’t that your job to make people notice you and understand your work?! Black or white, part of the job is to discover but equally important is the part where you have to teach it to other people. The same way that the whole mission of the CIA is to collect information from China ? Like they get paid to do that, just like you get paid to do what you do—tell the people what they’re missing about race and bias and make them understand.

Gebru’s advisor didn’t seem to have trouble getting citations from LeCun and his students and collaborators. Why has Gebru not being cited? Please don’t answer the question in the preceding sentence in any respect. It’s really nice to be writing in a blog where inflammatory comments cannot elicit flame wars. Even if discussion of the question have the potential to reveal insight into the subject, the anger and conflict it stirs must be managed or else ask/discuss/answering only serve to distract attention and waste time.

But now that I say that, I have to admit, she did succeed in a small way. I downloaded her papers too and watched her presentation. AFTER her tweets. Well, I watched one second and then started blogging. Sadly this is a contentious issue that everyone is like Gebru and LeCun, we all have an immediate opinion about it and can’t wait to express said opinion. I hope in the years during which my blogging software keeps this entry bottled up, I will have had more time and experience to comprehend the matter better. In the mean time, I must have faith that someday, there can be a more metered discourse by which these painful concerns can be promulgated)

I really wish America produced passionate people like Gebru more like MLKj. Yes, I wish we produce them, definitely do not want to import an immigrant civil rights leader, even if that’s what we desperately need. I guess here I diverge from LeCun’s immigrant ally politics as well. But that’s a conversation for another day.

At the end of the day, I’m glad it happened. It was very painful to work through the threads and follow the discussions. But I’m glad I did it. I feel enriched by this experience. Hopefully it will not be a detriment to development of science or equality and justice.

Happy July 4th, everyone!