My experience as Virginia election official 11/5/2024

 One of the major reasons I serve as an election official so often here in Arlington Virginia is that  it gives me a special additional window into reality. In one day. I hear so MANY people from different walks of life give deep insights into their lives and feelings, much more than what you get from narrow studies or polls. ALSO... I am strongly called by law NOT to speak much about anything but the rules, but to explain the choices available to the voters, whom we empower to express THEIR views and preferences.

Given the incredible bipolar tensions in the US right now, and given the huge turnout expected,

  we were given special videos on how to avoid confrontation, and how to deal with signs of it.

But in fact, this was the smoothest election of all the ten or so my wife and I have officiated at.

Credit goes to a new management company at the eldercare facility (Cuilpepper) which hosts our precinct. In the past, the big monitor people would see as they exited the elevator

would display commercials for local businesses, telling them just to leave the building. People got upset and angry as they did not know where to go in the Building, and anger created all kinds of bad things.

I often got to sit at the desk under that monitor, to orient people to vote.

In the most recent general election, I got a chance to ask people WHAT ISSUE was most important to them. In previous years, it had been the kind of issues you might expect -- inflation, immigration,

government programs. But then, as people got angry... the building technicians came and tried to fix the inputs to the monitor. But they couldn't. That year, both the voters and the professionals all agreed that

ONE issue swamped all the others for them: HOW UNFRIENDLY the new internet was already becoming for them in their lives. And they couldn't fix that monitor.

This year, a new company got the local internet working. The country set up that desk as an information desk, and helped train me how to explain new voting rules and options that baffled people in the previous election.

One of the building people, Ray Reyes, came by the desk, checked several times, and explained things in Spanish to voters  who could understand that better than my English. A new manager, PaulTimpane, had prepared the building with

in-building signs which prevented confusion, and led to great calm and pleasant discussions everywhere.

I saw just one VERY depressed looking face: the pollwatcher from the Democratic party. I can only guess what might have depressed her yesterday.  But I did tell several people

about how happy and relieved I was that on this very special and important day it went so smooth, compared with the previous one I just mentioned. One voter gave credit to Youngkin. But I gave credit to the building people...

to their face, and to our county team. 

There were many very political people from both parties present, of course. 

I heard one saying; "Actually... based on this experience... we really wish we had persuaded Kamala to push more user friendly internet as one of the top issues, maybe the top issue." 

ANYONE could ask me anything at the information desk I ran for many hours. (I had expected to spend more time on more volatile and stresssful, challenges posts, which I DID get some experience with, butlater in the day  the Chief said:

"People UNDERSTAND your explanations, and they have reduced spoiled ballots, which other people really appreciate a lot. So..."

Only one voter probed me personally enough to learn I know something about these computer issues (other than how badly the scanner/computer behaves if they spoil their ballot). He turned out to be a guy who

built a bank, which depends more and more on the internet, and wonders about its future. He sounded like a major influencer (and job creator) in the economic hub of Virginia. 

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Older as I am getting... (lots of voters talked about aging!! Or about the pains of having too move too often...)... I feel a duty here and now to reveal a few minor personal things.

The front of the two page ballot was about President, Senate, House and School Board. the back was about country spending and county board. I could tell them the RULES exactly for the back side,

which caused most spoiled ballots (we think , but need to check).   YES, people have a kind of moral duty. The people in the county who are directly affected have a special role... in checking how those choices affect THEIR lives, and affect whether THEIR money is not 

spent on corrupt schemes as are common when key decisions are made in the dark. BUT I confessed -- we all have different duties and capabilities. **I** spent so much time on thinking about the front side of the ballot that I did not feel qualified

even to vote, myself on the back side. The county provided two sheets with additional information on the bond measures and on the county council, but I could tell no more -- EXCEPT that they could use their cell phones to check the web BEFORE they entered the voting area proper. (I heard different stories about who can do what to use the internet, quietly, when in the voting area.) 

Before yesterday, I solicited YOUR thoughts about my own personal vote. I thank you all for your feedback, which was very diverse and helpful, even though I feel heavy variances even today.

Initially, I planned NOT to vote at all, and NOT even to think hard on partisan lines in my morning meditation, in personal conversations or even in emotional reactions as I watch France24.

I have personal responsibilities now, as I did when I worked at NSF, which should not be entangled in an inappropriate way with other decisions. 

ONE of you convinced me that I should stay silent, generally, BUT SHOULD vote for Trump privately and in my mind, BECAUSE (1) I saw more certainly about the existential problems coming from Harris, for whom I 

have had very special information more direct than what many of you are stuck with; (2) there is HOPE of a miracle of sorts; (3) Vance and Musk MIGHT reduce the worst problems, and open the door to the incredible technology

advances we need to survive. (Oh, oops: I also noted that RFK junior over FDA might overturn a rigid rule which happens to threat my own life, as well as Biden's and Trump's!)

Yesterday morning, however... I finally did vote. For President, I voted Libertarian, to make it clear I see major problems with Harris and Trump both, and appreciate the RISKS which go with simply saying "YES" to either of them.  

I did not vote Green, which sounds natural, because they have chosen to back the current Iranian position in the Middle East, which is also quite existential.

But now... meeting in 20 minutes. 

"Who is the Real Paul Werbos": reply to a Critic of Nobel Prize to Hinton

Many leaders of the neural network field were shocked that a Nobel Prize this year went to Jeff Hinton, who is best known in the field as coauthor of a chapter on backpropagation in the classic PDP books of Rumelhart and McClelland.  They asked: (1) how could that happen, after IEEE and others long ago gave you prizes recognizing you were the true author? and (2) Who is the real Paul Werbos anyway?

                     Outline of my one hour plenary at WCCI2022, recording posted by IEEE CIS

For question (1), I said that Jeff Hinton was basically a well-meaning innocent bystander here, and one of many pawns in a much larger struggle for the future of the internet. In truth, I once tried to reach out to him to collaborate on new work on "dark energy," where the best present work on earth is even less meaningful than the Boltzmann machine was. But for question (2), I replied:

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 In my usual morning meditation today, I felt somewhat guilty to hear that you might use the chapter in Talking Nets to get a picture of "who is the real Paul Werbos?" In many ways, that would be like using one data point, one input/output record, to model an incredibly complicated nonlinear dynamical system. None of the half hour conversations I have had would be more than a few data points, either. My latest CV gives a broader picture, as did the piece on me for LiveScience arranged by NSF years ago (or see the brief piece posted by the National Space Society)... but to get a correct picture of who I really am... even a partial murky picture... It has been a very complicated nonlinear process. My life has been as complicated as the nonconvex systems discussed in my latest patent granted on October 15 (https://patents.justia.com/inventor/paul-j-werbos).

Lately, I do not watch any television except France24, but a few years ago I watched the TV series for Indiana Jones. My initial reaction; "This is SO unrealistic. How can one person, working at a middle level of a complicated bureaucracy, have so much intense, important and fundamental interaction with so many of the leaders of  the world at that time." But then I realized; my OWN life was very much like that, even more impossible. I immediately thought of my long conversations with Oppenheimer, with ed Teller, with Julian Schwinger, with Marvin Minsky (from whom I took an independent study in the 1960s, when I wrote a paper on the levels of intelligence in vertebrates), with Steve Grossberg, with Warren McCullough (in the dorm room of Dan Levine and the Commons of Adams House, Harvard), and with B.F. Skinner. 

On my latest cruise to the Bermuda Triangle (arranged by my wife, an incredible person in her own right), the captain came to our table and

described how many nations he had visited, aspiring to be a real life Indiana Jones. I just smiled and sadly wondered what I could tell him about what it would  be like to be the real thing.

And no, I am not exaggerating; here is a small sample of the many, many places: https://photos.app.goo.gl/K5YopR37f5Ezda3f7 ;

https://photos.app.goo.gl/8L5mq8kgn4xTYbfU9 ; https://photos.app.goo.gl/8v3W8ZizJpKFGmN99 ; https://photos.app.goo.gl/97YFNADavCFc34i57. 

Just before my 21st birthday, in 1968, I was on an airplane from the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica to the Pentagon, where I met with the number three (Einthoven) and number 6 (Thayer)

people in DOD running the Vietnam war. I was there to give them a classified briefing on what I learned in my new data analysis of what was really happening there. (I had programmed a simplified approximate version of backpropagation, slightly beyond what I had published as an undergraduate in the journal Cybernetica (Namur); I have scanned many, many of the old papers into my digital files, including letters to me from De Broglie. The letter from Betrand Russell in 1964 had a big effect on my life, but I probably lost it.)

But in my second university job, in the summer of 1969, there were two major very competent efforts to kill me, as part of incidents recorded in the Ann Arbor newspapers.

The first was by a Black Panther, who was later captured when he spoke too much in bars about how "murder on Main Street" did not work out as they planned.

The second was incredibly lurid , in front of University Towers, where the attacking motorcycle gang did kill one person with their molotov cocktails, but I was protected by a ring of 

tough local police with machine guns checking IDs for anyone trying to enter. Years later, at a political science convention, I had a chance to safely confront the guy who ordered the hit:

"WHY? I was not doing anything to attack you. I am visibly just working for peace in my own way." I will never forget his brief response: "You knew too much."

By the way, my high school, Lawrenceville, says they included a condensed version of that story in the class of 1964 folder somehow in Harvard archives. 

In fact, in 1969, I had already decided I had watched too many James Bond movies. "No, I will not get rid of the good parts. Tropical places like RAND Santa Monica and high tech and beautiful Russian women...  I only want MORE of that. But no more proximity to guns or lies or excess newspaper appearances." And so it was.

Quiet, compartmentalized, maximum benevolent impact ... but no more risks to my life. Or not many.

In truth, the scariest risk to my life was later, in Kathmandu, in a conference on Science and Spirit. Machine guns again, this time pointed at me by a pro-Chinese red army faction keeping a few us from crossing their red lines before the Temple of Shiva. I wondered. Have I graduated from James Bond to Dr. Strange? THAT week was unbelievable. 

I HAVE discussed bits and pieces of my life with science fiction writers, like Nathan, who filed my latest patent. (The summary looks innocuous but the contents go beyond what most science fiction writers imagine.) One was Philip K. Dick, whose final collection includes a letter or two from/to me, as Dick encountered things in the desert rather mild compared to what

 I connected to in Nepal and In India. 

BUT: as improbable and important  as the past seemed to be, it is as nothing compared to what is happening and coming now. For me, this email

is basically just a way to calm down and relax, compared to what we may see and connect to (as quietly as I can manage) as Virginia election officials tomorrow,

with long-standing connections to Pennsylvania, whose Senator I worked for in 2009 (the year of climate legislation).

Next I review election laws, check news, and pack.

By the way, here is a link to my 1972 thesis proposal, https://vixra.org/abs/1902.0046, which I printed 50 copies of and distributed as widely as I could.

Advanced search in scholar.google.com shows about 500 published papers, across many fields, but there are many more not published in other important areas,

which I hope might get archived someday in a relatively open, accessible organized way.  Since my retirement from NSF in 2015, I have tried to focus on the short list of challenges, attached... and on staying alive in general, living as normal a life as I can manage.  

ADDENDUM:
And in my list of memorable conversations... I should have added Edward Heath and Richard Nixon. Heath I met in a Bow Group meeting in the House of Commons in 1967 or 1968.

Nixon I met... something like summer of 1966... in a bar in Boston, when he was feeling very down and out. It was just me and maybe one or two other Harvard Young Republicans.

After what he did in 1972, breaking some promises, I became an Independent and still am. But after I started working for NSF, I had many other more normal meetings with familiar names. 

In a way, the most striking was a meeting arranged by Congressman Trent Franks (R-Texas) in the Senate Visitor Center, where he talked about the experience of getting the job of tracking ALL the worst existential threats to the US, using ALL (classified) sources of information.   And then the struggle of trying to get rational action on the worst of them.

if only HE had taken over oversight of NSF instead of Lamar Smith!!! But then again, in that case I would probably still be there, and missed out on learning the things I learned since

my retirement in 2015, which freed me to push a lot harder past the usual boundaries limiting what people know about fundamental issues.