This is how to have a presidential debate

Tired of questions that sandbag and incite rather than hit the crucial policy issues?
Tired of presenters chasing their own ratings rather than the social contract?

Play Political Pursuit instead

Begin with a large pool of potential questions solicited from the public at large. Of these, 300 or so questions are selected, chosen for breadth, relevancy and popularity by an independent non-partisan group or groups such as the League of Women Voters.

These final selected pool questions are published at least two weeks before the debate so that both the public and the candidates may prepare as well as they wish before the evening of the debate.

The debate itself is conducted in a straightforward manner:

Each candidate has one minute to introduce themselves and to frame their candidacy.

Each candidate then selects from an urn of 300 balls a question number, which they have one minute to address or to rebut the previous answer of another candidate, or to respond in any other way they wish. The listeners and pundits of course may refer to their notes regarding this indexed question asked by a presenter to the candidate whose turn it is to be in the spotlight.

After the minute, the next candidate selects a new random question and so on.

The debate ends after a predetermined number of full rounds giving each candidate the same opportunity to speak.

Finally, each candidate has one minute to sum up and recapitulate their position.



This format has the advantages of being fair to each candidate, giving each the same amount of time to speak. It has the advantage of including those questions deemed most relevant to the public and gives obscure or heretofore unknown issues the possibility of being asked, not just what the presenters think is important in the current news cycle.

No candidate will be hit with a presenter's argumentative, biased, or unexpected question. And, since they will not be sandbagged with a previously unknown or argumentative question, candidates will not have to prepare a set of side-stepping general "answers" that basically ignore the question at hand. The public will know that the candidate had time to prepare and will judge accordingly.

Each candidate may prepare cribs as much or as little from the potential pool, which has the admirable side-effect of being a kind of test-prep for the candidate and their staff for the Presidency and is the ultimate focus group for issues important to the electorate.

This benefit accrues to the public as well as they see the breadth and quality of the pool that will in itself constitute a short course of our democratic republic. Pundits can also pre-fact check.


Overall, publishing the pool ahead of time will raise the level of political discourse in our entire country among all its citizens.

Most importantly, anyone--including non-citizens or minors--may submit a potential pool question with the final pool selected by a non-partisan group from among those submitted by the public. The group does not need to select banal, irrelevant, non-civil, repetitive, unnecessarily technical, or even, well, boring questions to be among the final debate pool.

The excitement of a lottery but without the faux drama of the presenters fomenting discord--while no more "debate" than the entertainment reality show that is palmed off now, it will be a meet-and-greet, but with real meat. Political Pursuit.

Popular internet news sources as curated by the New York Times on October 1, 2015

Derived and transformed from http://nyti.ms/1KNTKSX

http://al.com
http://bbc.com
http://bleacherreport.com
http://bostonglobe.com
http://boston.com
http://businessinsider.com
http://buzzfeed.com
http://cbsnews.com
http://chicagotribune.com
http://chron.com
http://cnet.com
http://cnn.com
http://dailymail.co.uk
http://dallasnews.com
http://elitedaily.com
http://engadget.com
http://examiner.com
http://foxnews.com
http://freep.com
http://gawker.com
http://huffingtonpost.com
http://independent.co.uk
http://latimes.com
http://mashable.com
http://mic.com
http://mirror.co.uk
http://mlive.com
http://msn.com
http://nbcnews.com
http://news.yahoo.com
http://nj.com
http://npr.org
http://nydailynews.com
http://nypost.com
http://nytimes.com
http://salon.com
http://sfgate.com
http://slate.com
http://techcrunch.com
http://telegraph.co.uk
http://theatlantic.com
http://theblaze.com
http://thedailybeast.com
http://theguardian.com
http://time.com
http://upworthy.com
http://usatoday.com
http://usnews.com
http://vice.com
http://vox.com
http://washingtonpost.com

But who will speak for the iPhones? Siri, I guess.

In response to prompt

Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.

By SHERRY TURKLE 

SEPT. 26, 2015

New York Times 

 

Grady Ward

New York City 

Professor Turkle--not hyperbolically--says "...but psychologically potent [Internet] devices that change not just what we do but who we are."

The power of instantly using a smart device to pin down the arrant fact at the time is is needed rather than l'esprit d'escalier has not only is making us better educated and socially coherent but an entirely new variety of sapiens, an augmented variety of human vastly more powerful in an information age than those without the technology at hand.

But "sapiens" means wisdom, which is more than a wreath of facts and is also the mulling and thoughtful simmering that Ms. Turkle is commending.

Reflection guided by facts. I am looking forward to the reconciliation.

Eve is the hero of Genesis

In the Biblical story of Genesis, Eve is often portrayed as the villain who caused the fall of humankind through her act of eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. However, a closer examination of the story reveals that Eve is actually the true hero of the story.

First of all, Eve's curiosity and desire for knowledge are traits that are typically associated with heroism. While Adam passively accepted the conditions of the Garden of Eden, Eve actively sought to expand her understanding and break free from the limitations imposed upon her. This act of intellectual courage and independence was the first step towards human progress and growth.

Additionally, Eve's actions in the Garden of Eden also showed her bravery and selflessness. By eating the forbidden fruit, Eve knew that she would face consequences, but she made the decision to do so anyway in order to share knowledge and experience with Adam. This act of selflessness and her willingness to take risks for the greater good are hallmarks of heroism.

And despite not being one of her kind created in God’s image, she accepted the diverse advice of the serpent. The hero accepts the truth wherever found.

Finally, Eve's actions and rejection of prejudice in the Garden of Eden set the stage for the development of human civilization. Through her curiosity and desire for knowledge, Eve helped to bring about the intellectual and spiritual awakening of humankind, leading to the creation of art, science, and philosophy. Without her act of bravery and selflessness, human history would have taken a different path.

In conclusion, the story of Genesis should be reinterpreted as a celebration of Eve's heroism, rather than a condemnation of her supposed villainy. Her courage, selflessness, and thirst for knowledge make her the true hero of the story and a symbol of human potential.

— Grady Ward revisedFebruary 11, 2023 (the antepenultimate Eve of St. Valentine’s Day)

Casual neuroscience chat in media res...

Dale Favier: Nope. There is no unified command in the brain. It's a circus in there. And the less aware of that you are, the more the clowns run the show. I hate it when people say, "fix your relationship with yourself," as if there was just one. Fix which relationship between which two selves? And with what? Duct tape and WD-40?

John JMesserly Maybe not leaves but billions of cockleburs, not aligned along a plane, but interpenetrating with a mass of interlocking dendtrite threads, elongated recently due to mutations in genes, and able to make unusually broad connections between seemingly unrelated cocklebur images.

Grady Ward Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky, 1988. The notion that intelligence emerges from the complexity of simple components. Closely related to Cellular Automata and Complexity by Stephen Wolfram, 1994.

John JMesserly Minsky's metaphor was nice for a few pages but he got a bit long winded. I much prefer the relation to precepts in an individual's "Kosmos" that Whitman provided some images for. Some are uncannily prescient of the insights of modern neuroscience. For example, it would probably be a fruitful seminar to take the mind body exploration of Songs of Myself part 24 and juxtapose it with what Antonio Damasio explores in his introduction to neuroscience found in "Self comes to Mind" [...]

Grady Ward Well, a mash up of Walt's Milky multitudes and António's Somaticisms would be heady compost for a coordinated study. We would need a dedicated 3-d printer to replace the mental gears stripped in the turning of the axons: I sing the body Actinomycetes!
But being simple, a Gimpel among the skeptical, I would rather work bottom up rather than top down, to generalize from demonstrable cases rather than search the decay products of a poetic critical mass.

I remember one of my Los Altos roommates back in 1979 named Bill Gosper when we lived together with Richard Weyerauch. Bill was a brilliant and original mathematician who enjoyed applying the lisp and new Xerox machines to his rational subjects as continued fractions, fractals, and cellular automata, which had been far too tedious to research deeply by chalk and blackboard. Among many other things, he invented a notational way of computing Conway's Game of life future generations called hashlife, which was its own way of leap-frogging the intermediate calculations of simulation formations analogous to Newton's integral calculus shortcut of adding up all those infinite slices under a curve.

Fast forward to 2010.
First Self-Replicating Creature Spawned In Conway's Game of Life (summary of NewScientist article) http://boingboing.net/2010/06/18/first-self-replicati.html in which Andrew Wade discovered the 'Gemini' self-replicating pattern: basically, the double-helix for Conway's game. The importance of this discovery should not be underestimated. I would rate it a more important discovery than assembling individuals molecules to create a new life-form. And, yes, Wade used Bill's hashlife platform.

What it means essentially is that a large enough assemblage of simply-ruled elements can fundamentally leap its complexity frame and become alive. No limbic system needed, no hormonal amendments required. More importantly, there is no reason to believe that everything we associate with life will not follow from this profound discovery as to the surpassing emergence of complex life-forms from categorically simpler stuff.

Yes, we are still ants trying to make sense of a page of Vitruvius by walking over the page. We are still at the stage of trying to distinguish a pixel of type from a pixel of illustration. And no one claims that our human emotional structure doesn't shape and even define aspects and interaction of our cognition as per Damasio. But not all life and not all cognition and not all blades of grass.

Within a reasonable time I don't doubt that what we call mind, cognition, intelligence, and, yes, love, empathy and the contradiction within the multitudes will be modeled as surely as the power set of the simple countable aleph-null is the uncountable aleph-one.

Can a woman be close friends with a man outside of marriage?

I want to think about this issue because a Google search shows that most of the people asking this question apply a religious source or cast to the discussion. Does religion really co-opt this kind of moral act? Can I find sources and reasons to think about extra-marital friendship other than custom and received belief?

Naturally, this question is not limited to women. It equally applies to married males and possible extramarital partners who happen to be friends. Nor is it limited exclusively to heterosexual or even monogamous relationships. Every distinction of a family group has borders and edges, what is beyond the pale and what is not; otherwise, we wouldn’t even have the concept of “family,” much less support it as one goal of civilization.

I have been married almost thirty years and have helped raised two sons into college and beyond. Back in the day of the 1970’s there was experimentation with “open marriages,” “group marriages,” and just “shacking up.” While none of these experiments are extinct, when I read about them nowadays it is most likely a wistful nostalgia of free-wheeling hippie failures rather than models of the current collegiate trends of “hooking up,” abstinence and group encounters that my sons tell us about. Here too, correspondents reaching their thirties say that even the newer experiments self-extinguish and converge as the cohort ages into a custom what us oldsters used to call “dating” as new families are conceived.

Alternatively, is this a simple matter of male and female personal freedom? What right does a spouse in a trusting, mature marriage insist on the other not seeing whom they want for whatever purpose they want? Isn’t this simply, say, a patriarchal response one step removed from treating woman (or men) as chattel, or not much better, slaves, servants, or “help-mates.” In other words, the ladies’ auxiliary to a real, vital, masculine life?

For example, can a married woman visit a man alone in his apartment? How about driving all day alone with him in his car? How about a man sharing a room visiting a female relative of the same age? How about a group drinking date? How about something as innocuous as neglecting to mention the relationship to the significant other?

Now, let’s continue on. How about extramarital oral sex? How about A-Z Kama Sutra full-on experimentation with an interesting stranger?

Wait. Hold on! you say. Am I really equating sex with a simple friendship based upon a handful of shared interests?

Yes, I am. For the same personal freedom reason, why should a man or woman’s choice of extramarital partners be limited to purely non-sexual activities? Surely utter physical and other emotional closeness is part of a whole, fulfilling life and should be as much a personal choice as what color clothing to wear in the morning, or what toothpaste to use, or what book to read? And if we reserve some intimacies only for our husbands, isn’t this a slippery step to them eventually requiring us to shroud in hijab?

And I counter with my own argument. Why ought not a middle-aged father sleep in the same bed as his teenage daughter? You recoil in disgust. But wait. Assuming a non-sexual intent and the sole purpose of fostering emotional bonding between a father and daughter, how does this differ from overnight camping for a married woman with a good male friend? OK, age is one difference. But we are not talking sex here, so age of consent is not an issue.

Most shudder at this comparison: Men are perverts. They don’t think with their big heads. They are physically and socially overbearing. Women are more selective and self-controlled in their intimacy because, among other reasons, the consequences for them can often be far greater than for a man.

And I agree that regardless of the moral or intellectual intent that it would be inappropriate for a father and daughter to sleep in the same bed. But similarly, I think it is inappropriate for a married woman to share a room in an overnight business trip with a good male friend, also regardless of prior non-attraction or merely platonic intent.

So, where is the line? Is a cup of coffee together OK? How about a movie together? How about a long-term extramarital emotional relationship?

To form a tentative bright line, one thing that should be properly factored into the debate is the strength of impulse compared to the strength of chastity.

Now regardless of which religion or belief system you hold, whether magical or scientific or evidence-based or fairy based, chaste or libertine, those beliefs are far, far newer and juvenile than our physical existence as family-forming primates on the planet.

It really is hard to compare the invention of, say, writing, in Mesopotamia several thousand years ago with the distinction of primates as primates in evolution about 60 million years ago. Multiple orders of magnitude difference.

Primates have spent much of that time before morality or the articulation of good intentions or platonic thoughts or feminism or patriarchy refining their senses and skills for one basic end, which is to successfully mate and to perpetuate and improve those very narrow skills of soliciting, grooming, and having sex, sex, and more sex. Every single one of our senses--from sight, sound, feeling, smell to taste—has been refined, discarded, improved, perfected, and improved again for millions of years longer than we have spoken or wrote about them. Even our nose is thought to exploit quantum tunneling to distinguish similar molecules millions of years before Schrodinger and Pauli defined the concept.

Compared to the single-minded sophistication our physical machinery, our most thoughtful and reflective musings as recorded in canon, beliefs, testaments, glossing, commentary, social science, bibles, and hallowed traditions (including this blog) are laughable infant babblings of illiterates.

And this is the crux of the matter.

No matter what your higher intent when you enter into any extramarital relationship, no matter how you have been raised, what church you go to, what liberalism you espouse, or what guru you follow, the fact is that your body creates primordial impulses that the late-coming mind is ill-equipped to deflect.

Sure, we have laws and customs and a substantial measure of self-inhibition so most people don’t engage in wanton pillage and rape based upon their feral urges. But it is a losing battle to bet against the body when it comes to keeping hands off another given the additional opportunity of a bed, a private car, a hotel room, or a two-person camping trip.

So, I would argue that often neither men nor women don’t use our “big head” to reason out the most socially coherent and positive relationships. Insisting that one’s mind is sufficient to enforce a non-sexual friendship and to prevent wanton compulsion ignores the strength of the primal impulses that well up from the core of our species. We cannot escape our impulses, but we can avoid the accompanying opportunity.

What are the consequences?

The destruction of families and the long-term security of children and economic co-operation of spouses (ever wonder why the income poverty level between households of size one versus size two differs by only about 25%?) are some of the stakes here.

No, having an affair or a divorce is not going to lead to the destruction of civilization, just as street crime is not going to engulf our basic social institutions. Breaking up families is not going to crush the newly-singled even if the economic fragments of the familial destruction are more likely to descend into poverty.

Nor do I think that crushes, admiration and relationships between a married man or woman with an extramarital friend is negative: not many people believe that the spouse is or can be the entire source of social fulfillment for their partner. You need other people to admire to learn the best qualities of life and to further improve and exalt in oneself. So, I guess, finally, the answer is "yes" to the question of "Can a woman be close friends with a man outside of marriage?"

But until we understand the millennia of advantage our bodily impulses have over our nobler thoughts--just as we oughtn’t try heroin “just once”--we ought to restrict our friendships excluding situations in which the errant impulse, unbidden and unwished, but acted upon, can in a moment endanger a family of multiple lives that perhaps was years or decades in the flourishing.

No, there is no enforcement mechanism other than experience and foresight to appreciate the force of impulse combined with opportunity.  Just never, ever, underestimate the wisdom of the body—nor its utter stupidity.

Arbitraging the human psyche

Because, I suppose, of its umbilical connection to the requirements of everyday life, the financial world has engaged some deep psychological truths such as, for example, the "self-fulfilling prophecy" describing disastrous bank runs.

Now, high-speed trading has resolved the old joke about the poor financier walking ten miles to school each day and ten miles back--both uphill.

Of course most of us realize that high-frequency (or high-speed) trading in and of itself is not dangerous or even disingenuous. After all, the world succeeds in generating more wealth for all when market makers as well as scientists and educators and writers innovate and succeed. Traders using the "mysterious algorithms" and cutting-edge equipment needed for high-frequency trading claim with a vaporous wave that they "add liquidity" or some other benefit to the market. Naturally, though, we outsiders assume that we are being unfairly gamed since history confirms this again and again. Gamed--as in zero-sum gamed with us retail investors and pension funds as the opponent, unfairly--as in they play by rules both unarticulated and unavailable to mortal retail clients.

Investigators have looked at the obvious such as front-running and even the meta trade practice of channel clotting. (Front-running is when you unfairly get to look at the panel of potential trading partners and then cherry-pick the partner offering you the best price regardless of the time submitted of the order compared to your benighted customers; Channel clotting--a variety of denial-of-service attack--is to issue so many bids, asks, and cancellations that your exchange co-located conspirators get virtually the entire order channel to itself for crucial milliseconds in order to manipulate the market by removing unfavored liquidity--even if only for a few hundred milliseconds at a time.)

Yes, evidence of both those have been found. As well as another dozen of the old cheating saws that would have been extinct decades ago if the various securities overseers have had more incentive than even a congressman going to work as a lobbyist for the industry in which he or she oversaw. But that's another story.

But where again, I suppose, only a writer might look, the "mysterious algorithms" describing high-speed trading perhaps are not as mysterious as its first blush. The act of trading, even when accounting says the units out are equal to the units in, can arbitrage the human spirit to the financial advantage of the traders.

Let's take a simple example. XYZ corporation has been muddling along at $10 a share without much of a catalyst to make it move upward or downward. A PR statement from XYZ is issued. Before it's content is analyzed and disregarded as not particularly material to the value of the corporation--just some exercise in image-building--the high speed trader--call him Frankentrader--issues a hundred thousand sell orders of a few shares apiece. In this fictional example the total offered is say one percent of the daily market float of the stock. Within milliseconds new sell orders are issued by interspersed with cancellation orders for elements of the first block. Within a second or two the entire sets of trades has been mostly cancelled. Frankentrader's entire risk capital has gone from a million dollars to a few thousand or tens of thousands in this flurry of orders.

But to the human eye and mind, the stock took a momentary dip of half-a-point. With the hundreds of thousands of years of safety found in following the herd, we slow humans respond and perhaps sell a bit of stock ourselves from fear; further, other automated trading platforms amplify the first hundred thousand orders with their block of sell orders on a hysteresis delay that is also noticed by the human psyche only at human speeds. The stock dips as much as three-quarters of a point.

Frankentrader now issues buys of a few shares, gradually closing his position, interspersed within the interacting rings in the pond that he himself caused just seconds before. The stock price slowly ticks higher as they make purchases and close positions, but never as high as when they sold. At the end of less than a minute or so, Frankentrader has completely liquidated his position in XYZ and made thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, merely by exploiting both human evolution coupled by our organic speed limits. And there are 23.4 million milliseconds in a normal trading day. Fertile ground to stake high-frequency claims in this wild, wild west of nano-scale psychology.

But the secret is not the simple fact that computers are faster that people: you see, Frankentrader and the master analyst underneath the "mysterious algorithm" simply knows that an instantaneous drop of 10 basis points with a single human perceptual frame causes more fear in humans than ten serial gains of one basis point over several human perception frames causes corresponding elation. The math is commutative but the human reaction is not.

And that asymmetry is the true underlying basis of the perpetual wealth generating machine of high-speed trading.

A new math PhD applying for work with a high-speed trader would be best served by studying Dostoyevsky's The Gambler or perhaps even Crime and Punishment and an encyclopedia of optical illusions or sleight of hand, and thereby the consequence of encompassing the post-graduate axiom that money can indeed flow downhill to them both ways.

###

If you like the cut of my neural jib, buy my new technothriller on the coordinated Chinese cyberattack on the United States, and MITs shadow laboratory's response. Goods are checked at the border for weapons of mass destruction. Computer firmware--never.
http://amzn.to/R4ypa8