Another Increment in Mind Reading Technology

For the wonks in the crowd

In recent years, an area of research called brain-machine interface (BMI) technology has made incremental progress in reading minds and translating that into useful outcomes. A technical report in Nature Neuroscience describes another incremental improvement, namely an increase in the speed and accuracy of reading minds using electrodes that set on the surface of the brain.

The paper describes the state of the art like this:

“In the last decade, brain–machine interfaces (BMIs) have transitioned from animal models into human participants, demonstrating that some amount of motor function can be restored to tetraplegics—typically, continuous movements with two degrees of freedom. Although this type of control can be used in conjunction with a virtual keyboard to produce text, even under ideal cursor control (not currently achievable), the word rate would still be limited to that of typing with a single finger. The alternative is direct decoding of spoken (or attempted) speech, but heretofore such BMIs have been limited either to isolated phonemes or monosyllables or, in the case of continuous speech on moderately sized vocabularies (about 100 words), to decoding correctly less than 40% of words.”

A BBC article summarizes the results like this:

“Scientists have taken a step forward in their ability to decode what a person is saying just by looking at their brainwaves when they speak. They trained algorithms to transfer the brain patterns into sentences in real-time and with word error rates as low as 3%. Previously, these so-called "brain-machine interfaces" have had limited success in decoding neural activity. The earlier efforts in this area were only able decode fragments of spoken words or a small percentage of the words contained in particular phrases. Four volunteers read sentences aloud while electrodes recorded their brain activity. The brain activity was fed into a computing system, which created a representation of regularly occurring features in that data.”

As usual, there are cautions to consider. First, the electrodes need to be placed on the brain. That is highly invasive. Second, it took a lot of electrodes to attain high word reading accuracy. Third, the decoded speech was spoken, not read from text, and limited to 30-50 sentences with a 250 word vocabulary.

What was extremely interesting was the ability of the BMI and software to learn. The word decoder they used was not just classifying sentences based on structure because accuracy increased by adding new sentences that were not used in the original tests. That data was interpreted to mean that the machine interface can identify single words, and not just whole sentences. If that is true, then it could be possible to decode sentences never encountered in a training set. The authors commented: “Although we should like the decoder to learn and exploit the regularities of the language, it remains to show how many data would be required to expand from our tiny languages to a more general form of English.”

When the computer system was trained on brain activity and speech from one person before training on another, the decoding results improved. That was interpreted to mean that the technique may be transferable across people.

Obviously, this line of research will be pursued. It is too important to not pursue it.

Why this could be important

It is not clear how far mind reading technology can progress. Research over the next ~10 years should start to clarify what inherent limits, if any, there will be in how far it can progress. If one day it is possible use machines that can read minds without invasive procedures, the impact on society could be enormous. For example, people testifying in court probably would not be able to lie and deceive nearly as well as they can now. In theory, the mind could be contradicting oral lies and deceit. Politicians making statements to the public could also similarly be fact checked in real time for lies and deceit.

The thought experiment is this: What is going in in your mind when you lie to someone? How can you really know all that is going on up there in brainlandia? Specifically, you may not consciously think of the lie itself, but your unconscious mind by be thinking, ‘that's a big, fat whopper I just told’. If that turns out to be true, or even if your conscious mind cannot help but think, ‘that's a big, fat whopper I just told’, imagine how different the world would probably be.[1]

For better or worse, this line of research will continue. We will find whatever impassible limits there may be. If there are none, then mind reading machines just might transform the world in one of at least three ways. First would be a world of far less lying and deceit by rich and powerful people and by crooks and liars, more civility, and more widespread prosperity and well being. Second, would be about the opposite. Third would be something in between.

Footnote: 

1. Yes, I know. Many people, maybe most, will instantly and strongly object to such an outrageous intrusion on their privacy and maybe even their freedom. That is a legitimate concern. That is why one wants to live in a civilized democracy that operates under the rule of law and social comity. We all know what will happen if mind reading technology is in the hands of demagogues, tyrants, murderers and kleptocrats. They will use it against political opposition, not themselves. 

More evidence that no two people are alike --

just look at how those brains work differently

The President Accidentally Speaks Some Truth for a Change

Salon and other sources are reporting that the president openly admitted that the Trump Party (formerly the GOP) has to suppress voters to allow republicans win elections. That is blatantly authoritarian and anti-democratic. Salon writes:

“Trump admits "you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again" if voting access expanded -- Trump says the quiet part out loud on the GOP not wanting higher turnout

President Donald Trump on Monday came right out and admitted his Republican Party would soon be defunct if voting in the United States was easier in a way that allowed more citizens to vote in elections, telling a national television audience it was a good thing that Democratic proposals for increased voting protections and ballot access were left out of last week's coronavirus relief package.

The comment came during an interview with Fox & Friends, the president's go-to show for positive coverage.

‘The things they had in there were crazy,’ Trump said of the voter protection and expansion proposals in the bill. ‘They had things—levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.’

As the Washington Post's Aaron Blake noted:

Trump didn't expand on the thought. But he clearly linked high turnout to Republicans losing elections. The most generous reading of his comment is that he was referring to large-scale voter fraud resulting from the easier vote-by-mail options; Trump has in the past baselessly speculated about millions of fraudulent votes helping Democrats in the 2016 election. The more nefarious reading would be that allowing more people to participate in the process legally would hurt his party because there are more Democratic-leaning voters in the country.

That's apparently true, but you typically don't see Republicans expressing the sentiment so directly. Generally, they'll connect tighter voting rules such as Voter ID to protecting the integrity of the process.”

It is amazing that Trump actually stated truth. Trump Party excuses about voter fraud and election integrity are deflections from the reality that they win elections by disenfranchising voters. That is authoritarianism, pure and simple.

It will be interesting to see how Trump Party blowhards spin this. There are two reliable ways to spin it. The first is this:

The second is this:

I suspect that both tactics will be used and the one that seems most effective will become the go-to Trump Party lie about the truth.

On the other hand, could this be something that Trump just made up? That is always a possibility. Pelosi and crew now have a profound moral responsibility to show us exactly was was in the bill about voting rights and every other thing that got taken out. The public has every right to see how it  has been deceived, lied to, betrayed and manipulated.

Or, do the two parties shield themselves from transparency by some norm or law that says that the public cannot see exactly how the two parties operate when making their disgusting sausage of lies, deceit and self-dealing?

Trump is more popular than ever, but there's more to the story

Sorry to the haters, doubters and slack-jawed disbelievers: Donald Trump has the highest approval ratings of his presidency. 

The barrage of criticism he's faced in the media over his handling of the COVID-19 crisis does not erase the fact that he's getting decent marks from the public.

He's closer than ever to cracking the 50 per cent mark in public approval. 

Trump took a pause Friday from dealing with this deadly, economy-pulverizing pandemic to tweet his thanks to a journalist who pointed out his poll numbers.

As the president often does, he insisted his real support must be much higher than what's in the media. "Add 10 points!" he tweeted. 

Needless to say, you can't arbitrarily add 10 points to a survey and call it statistically sound. But here are a few things we can definitely glean from the polling so far.

Trump has more support than ever

Trump had a 47.3 per cent average approval rating, according to an aggregate of surveys compiled by the website Real Clear Politics. The closest he's ever come to 50 per cent support was right after his inauguration in 2017.

Some surveys even show him with more public approval than disapproval for the first time, though most don't.

Yet he's still in political danger

Still, most polls show his ratings slightly underwater, with the Real Clear Politics average showing two per cent more disapprove of his leadership (49.3 per cent) than approve.

The other bad news for Trump involves the general election. He's beaten his likely opponent, Joe Biden, just one time in 24 head-to-head national polls listed on the site this year. 

Of course, U.S. elections are fought state by state. What the swing states show is a close race, with some challenges for the incumbent.

Trump has been a bit behind in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and a bit ahead in Florida. There's less data from Ohio, and it's mixed. An additional challenge for Trump is, entering this crisis, he was trailing Biden in the Republican-leaning states of Arizona and North Carolina.

There is another important point to be made, since any talk of U.S. presidential polling inevitably draws complaints that pollsters got it wrong in 2016, and Trump himself habitually claims his true support is much higher than published figures.

It's this: the national polls were not wrong in 2016. 

In fact, they were close to bang-on. The Real Clear Politics average missed the 2016 result by one percentage point. Same for Florida, and to a lesser extent in Pennsylvania. 

But they were wrong where it mattered most in 2016: at the state level, in Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. Surveys in those key states were way off.

Leaders poll well in a crisis

Leaders are getting strong public support in this crisis — it's happening throughout the U.S., and in lots of other places.

Look at the results from one Fox News poll. It asked respondents to rank the performance of various figures in the U.S. Everyone got good marks — and everyone else polled better than Trump. 

Seventy-seven per cent approved of the job done by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; local officials got 75 per cent; state governments 74 per cent; Vice-President Mike Pence 55 per cent; and Trump 51 per cent.

The federal and provincial governments in Canada are getting high marks for their handling of the crisis, with approval ratings mainly in the 60s and, in the case of Quebec Premier François Legault, way higher. One survey showed 93 per cent support for Legault's performance.

France's unpopular president, Emmanuel Macron, has gotten a bounce, with polls showing him gaining as much as 14 per cent during the crisis. Italy's governing party is polling better, too.

Warning to all of them: this kind of mid-crisis polling can prove to be the political equivalent of a sugar high.

Take George H.W. Bush, who had an approval rating around 90 per cent after winning the first Gulf War in 1991 but lost re-election the following year. A soft economy quickly pulled his Gallup approval down as low as 29 per cent.

His son, George W. Bush, also reached 90 per cent approval after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and narrowly won re-election three years later.

Democrats regroup

The handling of this crisis will be litigated for decades to come. It's still very early in the debate, and there's no telling what turn it will take in the seven-plus months until election day.

Some Democrats sound disheartened on social media, venting their frustration that Trump is being rewarded by the public for what they see as catastrophic leadership.

They argue that he's repeatedly messed up basic facts; picked petty fights; downplayed the need for new ventilators one day, then treated it like a national emergency the next; disbanded a pandemic task force; and wasted precious weeks telling the country this crisis would never hit.

Trump's reply: He was quick to close the border to China, then did the same with Europe as the crisis spread. He's also signed a second massive economic-rescue bill.

He's also declared a national emergency, put the military on guard, and used emergency powers to order General Motors to make ventilators. (The company says it was already working on it.)

Amid all this, Biden has kept a relatively low profile. Biden's team has been debating whether it's advisable to criticize Trump too strongly amid a national crisis. 

But the Democratic advertising machine is starting to unload on the president. In Facebook ads, and in TV ads.

The largest Democratic super PAC is running an ad in different states showing a rising number of coronavirus cases over a period of weeks where Trump downplayed the crisis.  

The Trump campaign warned stations they could lose their broadcasting licence for running the ad — the president's campaign lawyers argue it is misleading.

The Democratic group responded by saying it would buy more ads.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-popularity-spike-1.5512983

Channel Note

Germaine is disgruntled and grumpy

FYI

Some people commenting here have been getting hung up in moderation. So far, almost all of those people had lost their Disqus upvotes. I've been told that the situation is due to either hackers or to a mistake that Disqus made when fiddling around with the commenting platform. Regardless, the problem has persisted for a couple of months, and Disqus is unresponsive to my complaint about this that I submitted a couple of weeks ago. Just saying 'no time for a fix has been announced' is not responsive to my satisfaction.

When people lose their upvotes, their reputation is downgraded. When that happens, comments on other sites that use Disqus usually send the comment to moderation, sometimes marked as spam. Spam further damages reputations and puts everything into moderation. Moderators on most other sites either don't look at their moderation dashboard or they won't bother to make someone like me a  trusted user. Being a trusted user bypasses this problem.

Given the refusal of Disqus to fix the problem, maybe I'll try setting up a new Disqus account, maybe as Germaine II or something like that. I could also remove the Disqus comment plugin from this blog, but that probably would be the end of it as far as getting comments using the standard blogger comment system here.

That Disqus won't fix this is disqusting (disgusting). Grumble, grumble.

Coronavirus Update 5

ABC News and several other sources are reporting that some congressional republicans are floating the idea that the democrats and impeachment are to blame for America's coronavirus situation. ABC News writes:

“WASHINGTON -- As global markets plunged amid growing fears about the coronavirus outbreak, President Donald Trump and his allies pulled from a familiar playbook Friday and blamed others for the slide. It's a challenging sell for a president who has lashed his fate to Wall Street like no other. 

The president's team responded to the biggest one-week Wall Street sell-off in more than a decade with a deflection strategy, playing down the threat and eagerly parceling out responsibility to Democrats, the media and the entrenched government bureaucracy. 

Trump tweeted that “The Do Nothing Democrats" had wasted time on impeachment and “anything else they could do to make the Republican Party look bad" while defending his own response, which many Democrats have deemed sluggish and scattershot.”

This may come as a surprise to some, but there are more than just democrats who criticize the president’s incompetent response. What is no surprise is the president and his Trump Party enablers and lickspittles blaming anyone and anything except themselves. The dems are a perfect place for blame to deflect from their own incompetence and culpability.

Maybe some good news

The New York Times reports that early evidence suggests that efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus are starting to pay off. The NYT writes: “Officials in Washington State worry that their gains are precarious, but they see evidence that containment strategies have lowered the rate of virus transmission. Deaths are not rising as fast as they are in other states. Dramatic declines in street traffic show that people are staying home. Hospitals have so far not been overwhelmed. And preliminary statistical models provided to public officials in Washington State suggest that the spread of the virus has slowed in the Seattle area in recent days.” These are still early days. The situation in Washington State should be much clearer in the next week or so.

Capitalism fails, again

The NYT writes on a failed private sector effort to build low cost ventilators for use in an epidemic. A project that was envisioned and started 13 years ago collapsed into total (100%) failure in terms of delivered product. Once again, the profit motive is seen to be fundamentally incompatible with health care. The NYT writes: “Money was budgeted. A federal contract was signed. Work got underway. And then things suddenly veered off course. A multibillion-dollar maker of medical devices bought the small California company that had been hired to design the new machines. The project ultimately produced zero ventilators. .... The stalled efforts to create a new class of cheap, easy-to-use ventilators highlight the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of preparing for a future crisis.”

A follow-on project was started in 2014 and it’s product was approved in 2019, but no ventilators have been delivered yet. Anyone who claims that capitalism can do all things for everyone is wrong. For the most part, with few exceptions, the core and only moral value of capitalism is profit. Service to the public interest is not important. Profit is important.

Tyrants and demagogues cause failure

The NYT reports on the failures of coronavirus reporting in China. It turns out that the US and China have roughly the same problem, communications. Specifically, people are afraid of reporting bad news out of fear for their careers, maybe their lives. In China, people didn’t want to upset the powers in Beijing. In the US, the president didn't want to damage his chances for re-election by being honest with the American people about the situation. The NYT writes:

“Hospitals could input patients’ details into a computer and instantly notify government health authorities in Beijing, where officers are trained to spot and smother contagious outbreaks before they spread. 

It didn’t work. 

After doctors in Wuhan began treating clusters of patients stricken with a mysterious pneumonia in December, the reporting was supposed to have been automatic. Instead, hospitals deferred to local health officials who, over a political aversion to sharing bad news, withheld information about cases from the national reporting system — keeping Beijing in the dark and delaying the response. 

The central health authorities first learned about the outbreak not from the reporting system but after unknown whistle-blowers leaked two internal documents online.”

That speaks for itself.

Magic, miracles & lies

The Washington Post writes on why the US still cannot do large scale testing for coronavirus. Initial efforts relied on magic, miracles and lies. “We have it totally under control.” — President Trump, in an interview, on Jan. 22. “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” — Trump, in remarks, on Feb. 27. “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. They’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.” — Trump, in remarks at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, March 6. WaPo writes: 

“When the first U.S. case of the novel coronavirus was confirmed, President Trump assured the American people that the situation was “totally under control.” Cabinet officials, the vice president and the president repeated that refrain throughout February. By the end of that month, as global financial markets and the American public started to quiver, Trump held firm: “You may ask about the coronavirus, which is very well under control in our country.”

Still, China’s previous failures to be forthcoming about public health crises meant that public health officials elsewhere already were wary of its government’s official statements. As reports of the mysterious virus increased, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned Americans against traveling to China and activated an emergency management tool used to direct operations, deliver resources and share information. 

Despite the alarm bells and increased intelligence briefings, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar struggled to get Trump’s attention for weeks.” 

Clearly, the president did not care about this, Since he is a hopelessly self-centered narcissist, that makes sense.

Moving the goalposts - failure is not an option

In the last few minutes, NPR broadcast a statement from the president who is now saying that if there are 100,000 or 200,000 deaths the US response to coronavirus will have been well done. That sounds very different from the president’s “We have it totally under control” comment on Jan. 22. 200,000 deaths does not sound like something totally under control.

Given the president’s obvious lack of concern about facts, truth, logic or fact checkers, the day may come when 300,000 deaths will constitute a great job well done (by him and him alone). But, if it gets to a point where even our narcissist-in-chief can't move the goalposts enough, then it will be the democrat’s fault.

Being an alt-fact, alt-truth, bogus logic and lies-based president has got be easy, maybe even fun.

And finally, there is this narcissist insanity 

Reuters reports: “(Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday bragged about the millions of people tuning in to view his daily press briefings on the coronavirus pandemic, saying on Twitter that his average ratings matched a season finale of “The Bachelor.”

At least everyone knows what is truly important to the president. It is not the coronavirus.

Coronavirus Update 4

The New York Times reports on how the delay in large scale testing blinded the US to what was going on. From what I can tell, the US is still unable to test, leaving the US significantly blinded to what it is dealing with. The incompetence is staggering. The NYT writes:

“WASHINGTON — Early on, the dozen federal officials charged with defending America against the coronavirus gathered day after day in the White House Situation Room, consumed by crises. They grappled with how to evacuate the United States consulate in Wuhan, China, ban Chinese travelers and extract Americans from the Diamond Princess and other cruise ships. 

The members of the coronavirus task force typically devoted only five or 10 minutes, often at the end of contentious meetings, to talk about testing, several participants recalled. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, its leaders assured the others, had developed a diagnostic model that would be rolled out quickly as a first step. 

But as the deadly virus spread from China with ferocity across the United States between late January and early March, large-scale testing of people who might have been infected did not happen — because of technical flaws, regulatory hurdles, business-as-usual bureaucracies and lack of leadership at multiple levels, according to interviews with more than 50 current and former public health officials, administration officials, senior scientists and company executives. 

The result was a lost month, when the world’s richest country — armed with some of the most highly trained scientists and infectious disease specialists — squandered its best chance of containing the virus’s spread. Instead, Americans were left largely blind to the scale of a looming public health catastrophe.”

The president’s claim that anyone who wanted a test could get it was yet another of the president’s thousands false public statements. His incompetence will probably lead to thousands of deaths that could possibly have been avoided if he was competent at the beginning. It is too late for that now.


The NYT also reports on far right crackpots who are attacking the government scientist Antony Fauci for contradicting the president. This is true dark free speech-driven authoritarianism-fascism raising its ugly head. The NYT writes:

“At a White House briefing on the coronavirus on March 20, President Trump called the State Department the “Deep State Department.” Behind him, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, dropped his head and rubbed his forehead.  

Some thought Dr. Fauci was slighting the president, leading to a vitriolic online reaction. On Twitter and Facebook, a post that falsely claimed he was part of a secret cabal who opposed Mr. Trump was soon shared thousands of times, reaching roughly 1.5 million people. 

A week later, Dr. Fauci — the administration’s most outspoken advocate of emergency measures to fight the coronavirus outbreak — has become the target of an online conspiracy theory that he is mobilizing to undermine the president. 

That fanciful claim has spread across social media, fanned by a right-wing chorus of Mr. Trump’s supporters, even as Dr. Fauci has won a public following for his willingness to contradict the president and correct falsehoods and overly rosy pronouncements about containing the virus.”

The NYT also comments that their analysis found more than 70 Twitter accounts promoting the hashtag #FauciFraud. Some tweet up to 795 times a day. This crackpot sentiment is coming from posts by Tom Fitton, the president of radical right Judicial Watch group and outspoken Trump supporters including Shiva Ayyadurai, who falsely claimed to have invented email. Crackpots and purveyors of dark free speech are coming out of the woodwork with a vengeance.

In another article, the NYT describes the overwhelming of the health care system in New York city. Emergency workers there are starting to have to make life-or-death decisions in deciding who goes to a hospital, and who isn't because they appear to be well enough to be left at home. The hospitals can take only the most sick. The NYT wrote: “‘It’s all a war zone,’ one of the paramedics said. .... ‘I honestly don’t know if I’m going to survive. I’m terrified of what I’ve already possibly brought home.’”

Finally, an article in The Intercept reveals the incredible self-centered narcissism our president and by extension, the rest of us have to suffer with. TI’s article, In Exchange for Aid, Trump Wants Praise From Governors He Can Use in Campaign Ads, comments: “AS HE INCREASINGLY tries to shovel blame for the shortage of medical supplies onto the governors of states with densely populated areas that are suffering the most from the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump was asked on Friday what more he wants them to do. It was, he said, ‘very simple: I want them to be appreciative.’”

This 4-minute video on C-Span shows the president telling governors to be nice to him, even while he attacks them. The president’s pathological self-centeredness could not be much clearer.

It is fair to say that things are not going well on the coronavirus front. America still cannot do large-scale testing. Our president remains clueless about what is happening or how to respond to it. He cannot even deal responsibly with legitimate criticism from state leaders that his incompetence has more or less abandoned to their fates.