Monday, December 5, 2016

Donald Trump is like a biased machine learning algorithm

A quick observation: Donald Trump is not like normal people. In particular, he doesn't have any principles to speak of, that might guide him. No moral compass.

That doesn't mean he doesn't have a method. He does, but it's local rather than global.

Instead of following some hidden but stable agenda, I would suggest Trump's goal is simply to "not be boring" at Trump rallies. He wants to entertain, and to be the focus of attention at all times. He's said as much, and it's consistent with what we know about him. A born salesman.

What that translates to is a constant iterative process whereby he experiments with pushing the conversation this way or that, and he sees how the crowd responds. If they like it, he goes there. If they don't respond, he never goes there again, because he doesn't want to be boring. If they respond by getting agitated, that's a lot better than being bored. That's how he learns.

A few consequences. First, he's got biased training data, because the people at his rallies are a particular type of weirdo. That's one reason he consistently ends up saying things that totally fly within his training set – people at rallies – but rub the rest of the world the wrong way.

Next, because he doesn't have any actual beliefs, his policy ideas are by construction vague. When he's forced to say more, he makes them benefit himself, naturally, because he's also selfish. He's also entirely willing to switch sides on an issue if the crowd at his rallies seem to enjoy that.

In that sense he's perfectly objective, as in morally neutral. He just follows the numbers. He could be replaced by a robot that acts on a machine learning algorithm with a bad definition of success – or in his case, a penalty for boringness – and with extremely biased data.

The reason I bring this up: first of all, it's a great way of understanding how machine learning algorithms can give us stuff we absolutely don't want, even though they fundamentally lack prior agendas. Happens all the time, in ways similar to the Donald.



rest at https://mathbabe.org/2016/08/11/donald-trump-is-like-a-biased-machine-learning-algorithm/

No comments:

Post a Comment