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This answer pertains to buying in the United States and is the story of my first purchase. Hope it helps.IntroAs professionals in the art and design field, we have lived frugally for years. Our first jobs brought us to very expensive cities like San Francisco and Boston where owning a home was financially out of reach. A 20% down payment needed to get into a modest home in Boston was $120,000. We focused on saving as much as possible while living in apartments above and below all sorts of characters. Once our children were born, the creativity required to make apartments work went into overdrive. With our first child, Mom and the baby slept in the 1 bedroom while hubs slept on a mattress in the hall next to the front door. When our second child was born, we moved to a bigger apartment. This worked well until Mom got her first two children’s book illustration deals and needed a room with a door to keep children from the paints and expensive scanner. This time Hubs had to sleep in the living room while Mom and new baby got the bedroom and toddler baby got the second bedroom. As they grew to sleep through the night, Hubs moved back into the bedroom but one of the babies had to move their pack-and-play into the bathroom at night. Add to these constraints the lack of yard and long commutes and suddenly moving for a new job in a more family friendly location seemed like a good idea.We decided to take a position in Money's #1 best place to live in 2018, Frisco TX, USA, a suburb of Dallas (Frisco, Texas Is No. 1 on MONEY's Best Places to Live list). The state is experiencing the fastest growth in the US for the last 20 years with jobs projected to grow by nearly 15% over the next four years, according to Moody’s Analytics. But growth alone is not what makes Frisco the best place to live in America. Rather, it’s the way the city has translated its growth into a higher quality of life. For example: Frisco’s outstanding public schools have the highest graduation rate of all the cities and towns MONEY evaluated this year. The average commute and home prices are each half of what we experienced in Boston.8 months after arriving, we purchased our first home. Despite our best efforts to research, inspect, and read every document in the home buying process, we were deeply disappointed to find out essential information had been withheld from us until after we signed. Here is how to avoid making the same mistake.Top 10 listFind out about “fracking.”See where oil companies are drilling around you: https://www.drillingmaps.com/map.htmlLearn the concept of “split estate” and how homebuilders retain mineral rights with minimal disclosure https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fracking-rights-specialreport/special-report-u-s-builders-hoard-mineral-rights-under-new-homes-idUSBRE9980AZ20131009 .Know that most title companies, realtors, and inspectors aren’t required to tell you if a property is a split estate and won’t because it may reduce willingness to buy. Only “Landmen” search these. Consider talking to one before you start home searching.Estimate the effect of fracking on your property value: http://www.resource-media.org/drilling-vs-the-american-dream-fracking-impacts-on-property-rights-and-home-values/Understand the health risks: https://www.denverpost.com/2012/03/19/cu-denver-study-links-fracking-to-higher-concentration-of-air-pollutants/ , https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180409103920.htmKnow if the state will force you to allow fracking through “forced pooling.” http://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/compulsory-pooling-laws-protecting-the-conflicting-rights-of-neighboring-landowners.aspx.Fracking in urban areas is a growing issue. See notes below for more of our story and a guide to help you.Get the mortgage first: Mortgage companies will only give you a good rate if you already have a lower offer from another provider. Each of these quotes takes over 1 hour of your time to fill out paperwork, and that doesn’t include the time the mortgage company needs to make a decision. If you want to make multiple companies compete on price for your business, plan to spend 10 hours filling out forms online and taking their phone calls. Do this before you search for your dream house. You really don’t have time to do this during the tight deadlines of closing unless you make it a part time job. Mortgage companies want to limit your ability to rate shop. Start early to make sure you get a competitive rate. An effective strategy is to get a low quote from an online-only lender and then bring it to a more established bank and ask them to beat the price. Remember, most banks only compete with written offers.Know the good school districts. Tools like Zillow are great for finding homes but often produce misleading information. At the time of this writing, Zillow and other tools like it allow you to search for homes by the quality of schools, except they don’t know what school your homes are assigned. Zillow takes the closest schools to your home and assumes they are the ones your children will go to in that home. This may not be correct. That is why Zillow school listings have an (unassigned) next to them. Go to https://www.greatschools.org to get the real answer.Tell your mortgage broker, and realtor up front that you will not attend a closing unless you get all the paperwork 48 hours in advance. At closing they will expect you to sign ~ 200 pages. We asked our folks to get us the paperwork a day before closing and they sent 10% of it. We reviewed it and everything looked fine. Unaware that the entire packet was much larger and contained a lot of complex info like leans on the property, clauses in the mortgage, and disclaimers about frakers depreciating the value of your home, we showed up. Once you are in the room, there is a lot of pressure to get everything signed. We asked for 2 hours to read the documents but the realtor, mortgage agent, and title agent sat at the table tapping their pens waiting for us to finish reading. Thinking this would only take 20 minutes, we scheduled work meeting for later in the day. Not the best environment to have important conversations about the deal. This is where most people find out about huge issues like “split estates” (see #1). The industry pros know buyers will feel too far down the road to figure out what that means and just sign the deal. Don’t let it happen to you. Set expectations up front.Inspectors. As soon as you make an offer on a house and it is accepted, you are on a short clock to do all your diligence. Inspectors are people you pay to make sure issues are found. We needed several but didn’t know it. Get names ahead of time so you can have them ready. We ended up needing all of our inspectors on 12 hrs notice because of a holiday. You end up working with people who are available, not necessarily who’s the best.General inspector who reviews the entire house. Make sure they take good photos of everything that is an issue. Our home owner had a large squirrel problem in her attic for years and didn’t believe us that it would take thousands of dollars to repair until she saw the inspection photos of the chewed wiring, insulation, hole in roof and poop everywhere. Be there in person for the inspection. When they are done, they will generate a list of issues that is often over 100 lines long. You won’t know what is actually important and what isn’t. Before they leave the house, ask them to highlight the things that are big issues that should really be fixed. It will make prioritizing your repairs a lot easier.Pests and termites.Heating, electrical, and air conditioning. The home we were buying was 25 years old with all equipment original. The HVAC tech was able to estimate the expected life span of each piece. This helped us negotiate with the seller and prioritize a repair budget.Foundation. In Texas, the soil is clay and shifts a lot. This breaks the foundation of homes with regularity. A “foundation engineer” did measurements to help us know if a big repair was in our future. Luckily, it wasn’t.Homeowners agreement (HOA). If you are moving into a developer community, they likely have an HOA. In Texas these associations have the ability to take your house if they want to. So you have to make them happy. When we asked for a copy of the HOA document, nobody had one. Not the seller, not our friends in the neighborhood, not the HOA rep on the architecture board. Make sure you have an HOA document review as one of your contingencies. Finally someone produced the digital document. It was over 200 pages and completely unreadable with legalize. Worse yet, the PDF wasn’t searchable. It was just a scan of the original paper documents. A large section of the paperwork was scanned twice making the document even harder to read. The best way to deal with this seemed to be to open it in Adobe Acrobat, and then try to turn on character recognition making a searchable PDF. Buying an apartment in a big building is different than buying a single home in a community. We wanted to know if they would let us rent the property, use AirBnb, change the lawn, move our fence. Some of these HOAs are very restrictive. Ours recently updated their policy to include 16 colors we could paint our front door. Also, the city of Frisco required that 80% of our lawn be grass. We were thinking of putting in a waterless desert garden but I guess that’s out.Homeowners association. You need to know if the homeowner association has any problems with the existing house they will want you as a new owner to fix. One of our friends bought a house, and then the HOA told them they didn’t like the shingles and required them to replace the entire roof. This was about $5,000. The Title company should have caught this but didn’t. Make sure to check.“Landmen.” These are the people who search records to determine if you own mineral rights to the property. That is what allows oil companies to frack under you (see “forced pooling” in #1). If this is important to you, seek them out before you find a house to understand what is true in your area. None of the people we paid including our real estate agent, inspectors, mortgage agents and title company ever disclosed we might not own our mineral rights. Even after closing, we still don’t know.Now you are ready to search for a house. The steps above should let you know what area is best for you to look for homes. Hopefully away from fracking, in good schools, with a mortgage APR that you can use to estimate how much you can afford. We found Zillow/Realtor.com to be the best for searching options. Our practice was to look through everything online, make a short list, and then tour with agents. We asked the agents to search homes for us but didn’t find they spent enough time to actually find what we were looking for. They missed obvious stuff like a big backyard and good schools. However, they were great at spotting potential issues with a home during tour like a bulging foundation, water damage was that covered up, re-sellability etc…Offer. Know the amount of repair costs you can deduct from the initial offer. Our strategy was to search during the off season where there would be less options but seller might be willing to offer better prices. We started in Oct and closed in November. In determining our offer price, our real estate agent made a detailed report of similar homes in the neighborhood to determine what was fair. The seller’s agent did something similar but included homes that were not similar to ours and cost more because they backed onto a lucious golf course. Watch out for this. We offered near asking because the price was fair, but a little less because we knew it would need repairs. The seller waited a week to have another open house hoping to get more offers before accepting ours. We didn’t negotiate much at that time because the weather had been bad for the two open houses the seller had, likely keeping potential buyers away. We felt that if we negotiated hard at that point, the seller would just hold a third open house and find someone else to start a bidding war. What we didn’t know was that this isn’t the real offer. You have to get inspections and then negotiate price again. What is important to know is that certain states have a rule that the price negotiated after inspection has to be within a certain range of the original price. In Texas we were later told the maximum drop in price could be 6%. As with many big things in the home buying process, no one told us about this beforehand. Because our house was fairly well kept up, the repairs we needed fell inside this 6% window. If the home had needed something larger like a new roof, heater, air conditioners… we would have been in trouble. You can also put in conditions of the deal. If they aren’t met, the deal doesn’t go through. We made contingencies out of getting the HOA documents, foundation repair warranty, and satellite dishes were taken down from the roof and HOA association good standing.Inspections. As discussed above, knowing the inspections you want, including Landmen and having them scheduled ahead of time will make a big difference. it is possible to have everyone there at the same time. General, HVAC, Pest, Foundation folks can all come at 9am and be done by noon. Make sure to speak with each before leaving to make a short list of the big issues they found. It makes prioritizing your repairs much easier.Closing. As stated above, there are two big things to know. 1) The title company does the closing and it is their job to make sure nobody else has a right to the land. However, they are probably only looking above the grass. Our title company made no effort to assess mineral rights and didn’t tell us that was not part of their service. The bank made us sign a piece of paper saying we understood that a mining company may or may not be able to frack underneath us and that we would be responsible for partial or complete damage to the property as a result. Well, we were not aware and didn’t like the sound of that. 2) the title company will likely have over 200 pages for you to sign. Get this ahead of of the meeting so you can read everything and ask questions. I recommend 48 hours. The signing meeting isn’t a great place to get answers and possibly pull out of the deal. Our title company sent us 20 pages ahead of time and we thought that was the complete package. it wasn’t. There was not mortgage information, survey reports, title documents etc… Make sure they know you won’t come unless you have it all ahead of time. There is a high probability they will tell you the documents will arrive ahead of time and then not deliver. Plan to have a push-back signing date. At closing, ask the title agent to introduce buyer and seller by email so you can ask any questions and return any security deposits you might hold from their lease back.Move-in/out. In this area, it is common for seller to rent the home back to buyers for a certain number of days to move back. They pay your mortgage prorated by days. You also commonly hold onto a security deposit. Make sure to get the title company to introduce buyer and seller by email so you can make arrangements to return the money.More details worth knowing about “fracking” when you buy a new home.As first time home buyers, we assumed that buying a home meant buying the rights to use it above and below the ground. If we didn’t have those rights, we assumed someone would be required to tell us. We selected our location with the safety of our children in mind. At no time in the buying process did anyone tell us that it is now common for homes to be sold as “split estates” where regular people like us own the rights above the grass, and someone else owns the “mineral rights” below the grass. Not owning mineral rights means someone else can set up an oil well and “frack” under your property at any time without telling you. We assumed that this wasn’t a concern in urban areas like Frisco anyway because so many people lived there. Not true. “Fracking” in urban areas is the new trend. Urban cities like Denver Colorado, Naples Florida, Las Angeles California and Dallas Texas are experiencing a boom in “fracking” within a baseball’s throw to homes and schools. Home builders across America including D.R. Horton, Ryland Group Inc, Beazer Homes USA Inc and PulteGroup Inc have been hoarding mineral rights under new homes as the US. Reuters reviewed county property records in 25 states. The story caused two Attorney Generals in Florida and North Carolina to investigate deceptive sales practices resulting in D.R. Horton, the largest home builder in the US to give rights back to many of its customers. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fracking-rights-specialreport/special-report-u-s-builders-hoard-mineral-rights-under-new-homes-idUSBRE9980AZ20131009 Look at this map https://www.drillingmaps.com/map.html. Although there are no wells currently in Frisco, Denton, the neighboring country has over 5,000 drilled wells pumping out 2,000 barrels of oil a month. There are over 280 wells within city limits including one next to the local college football stadium http://www.texas-drilling.com/denton-county.Think the government will never let this happen in your area? The residents of Denton decided they didn’t want any more fracking and passed a law restricting it. Within a year the state governor passed House Bill 40 making it illegal for homeowners to ristrict frackers https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33140732, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/22/denton-texas-banned-fracking-. Here is a great example of how the process works. Former Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm is in a lawsuit between jilted gas driller Trinity East and the City of Dallas over “Special Use Permits” for gas drilling in prohibited areas in return for $19 million in upfront leasing payments. The citizens of Dallas had formed a committee who had already voted “no” on allowing the permits. Yet those votes were overturned during a surprise re-vote in another meeting. https://www.downwindersatrisk.org/2016/01/witness-for-the-defense-wherein-we-go-to-bat-for-mary-suhm/Think the Federal Government has regulatory oversight of fracking to ensure public safety? In 2005, Congress passed a law prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from safeguarding drinking water that might be harmed by fracking. The law also allows oil companies to keep secret the long list of chemicals they pump into the ground as part of the fracking process. This was made possible by a study commissioned by the federal government to assess the dangers of fracking. The study was done by overseen by Cadmus, a research firm in Massachusetts. They had difficulty assessing the impact of fracking on the local water supply because the the oil and gas industry declined to provide information about the fracking fluids they used, asserting that they were trade secrets. There wasn’t enough time or money for Cadmus to begin monitoring groundwater before, during and after fracking jobs to see if the process affected water quality. As a result, they concluded that fracking posed a risk to drinking water and another study with better design was needed to determine how much. The federal government changed the conclusion to say fracking posed no risk to drinking water. The Cadmus scientists who did the research disagreed. Chi Ho Sham, the team’s group manager said “the data and analyses tell us there is risk associated with it, and we were asked to report there is no risk, and we can’t say that.” The Cadmus group had their company's name and their own removed from the final document. Immediately after the report’s publication, Weston Wilson from the EPA’s Denver office filed a formal whistleblower complaint. The EPA’s inspector general launched an investigation into Wilson’s complaint -- but closed it after Congress passed the Energy Policy Act in 2005, codifying the misleading conclusion of the study https://www.dallasnews.com/news/environment/2017/12/05/water-tainted-fracking-scientists-said-safe-now-say-censored. If not for this loophole, the EPA could have developed standards for the entire country. State rules could have been tougher, but not weaker, than the national standards, and if states failed to regulate effectively, citizens could have petitioned the federal government to intervene. Without it, citizens have little recourse in opposing the laws that enhanced fracker’s ability to operate without oversight. Examples include:Resource Conservation and Recovery Act 42 U.S.C. 6921(B)(2) exempts oils and gas companies from proper disposal of the hazardous, toxic, and radioactive waste generated during production as identified in the EPA's 1987 report.Clean air act 112(n)(4)-42 U.S.C 7412 (n)(4). Oil and Gas companies are exempt from adhering to limits on hazardous air pollutants like benzene that the US recognizes as dangerous.Clean air act 402(I)(2)-33 U.S.C 1342(I)(2). Oil and Gas companies are exempt from the requirement of planning how they will protect toxic runoff from contaminating surface water, streams and wetlands. https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2017/11/22/special-report-how-the-u-s-government-hid-frackings-risks-to-drinking-water/This all this is a lot of fuss about nothing? Exxon CEO and board chairman Rex Tillerson, head of the world’s largest drilling company is suing to stop construction of a water tower that would supply nearby drilling operations because of the “constant and unbearable nuisance” that would come from having “lights on at all hours of the night …traffic at unreasonable hours … noise from mechanical and electrical equipment” http://www.resource-media.org/drilling-vs-the-american-dream-fracking-impacts-on-property-rights-and-home-values/. Read the full suit here: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/water20140220.pdf.Think all this fracking only happens in Texas? Weld County, a suburban community for Denver commuters is the fourth-fastest growing community in the nation. Like Frisco Texas it’s economy, quality of life is high, and jobs are plentiful. As population in the area is expected to double by 2050, drilling applications in the state have risen 70 percent in just a year. Oil rigs are going in near high priced homes and schools, causing health issues and large drops in realestate prices https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/colorado-fracking-debates.html. Residents fought back with a ban on fracking near their homes and schools, but like in Texas, they were denied by a ruling at the state level https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/colorado-court-strikes-down-local-bans-on-fracking.html?module=inline. Worse, Colorado has a law that forces homeowners who own their mineral rights but don’t want oil companies to frack near them. This law requires the homeowner to pay a penalty in the form of the full cost of equipment and operating costs for the well as well as a 200% fee based on the costs of oil rig exploration. Lots of other states have similar laws http://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/compulsory-pooling-laws-protecting-the-conflicting-rights-of-neighboring-landowners.aspx.Another story in Frederick, Colorado, a suburb 30 minutes from Denver and Boulder illustrates the future of other communities. Home owners in an expensive subdivision left for a weekend trip and came back to find a 142-foot-tall drill rig in the backyard. Notice the photos of the well around the playground. https://grist.org/climate-energy/the-fracking-rig-next-door-photos/. Nearby Red Hawk Elementary School has a well going up 350 feet from where its second-graders play. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/06/fracking-colorado-school-vexes-residents_n_1575733.html , https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2012/04/03/degette-urges-epa-to-consider-potential-health-threats-from-gas-drilling-operations/ , https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2012/06/04/colorado-kids-to-encana-dont-frack-our-schools/. http://www.dailycamera.com/erie-news/ci_20126684/noaa-study-erie-gas-drilling-moratorium-fracking-propane-butane. A Colorado court has invalidated a local ban on fracking by towns who don’t want it https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/colorado-court-strikes-down-local-bans-on-fracking.html?module=inline .A University of Colorado-Denver School of Public Health study this year showed that people living within a half-mile of oil-and-gas fracking operations were exposed to air pollutants five times above U.S. hazard standards. The cancer risk estimate of 8.3 per 10,000 for populations living within 500 feet of an oil and gas facility exceeded the U.S. EPA's 1 in 10,000 upper threshold, according to study published recently in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. https://www.denverpost.com/2012/03/19/cu-denver-study-links-fracking-to-higher-concentration-of-air-pollutants/ , https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180409103920.htmWhat about Cary North Carolina, #5 on Money's best places to live list of 2018? Cary is with the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill “triangle” and is home to Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill where Michael Jordan got his start. The economy has been booming for years thanks to a decades long tax plan designed to attract businesses http://time.com/money/collection/2018-best-places-to-live/5361443/cary-north-carolina-2/. Lots of people move their from NY for a better family life. What new residents don’t typically know is that energy companies have been anxious to frack near the most densely populated area of the state. A large band expected to produce profitable energy lays at the top of Wake County, right under the city of Durham https://rafiusa.org/issues/landowner-rights-and-fracking/fracking-map-in-nc/. That means frackers could soon be underneath Cary. Even more alarming, North Carolina has a policy called “forced pooling” which, gives the state the right to compel a homeowner who owns their own mineral rights and does not want oil companies to frack underneath them into allowing oil companies to frack. In most states, this requires that a certain percentage of surrounding land already be leased voluntarily. In North Carolina, current law does not specify the percentage of land that must be voluntarily leased in a given area https://rafiusa.org/issues/landowner-rights-and-fracking/forced-pooling/. North Carolina is still deciding how to work with energy companies. More about its land formations and fracking opportunities can be seen in the map at the bottom of this page: https://files.nc.gov/ncdeq/Energy%20Mineral%20and%20Land%20Resources/Geological%20Survey/Oil%20and%20Gas%20Research/NCGS%20OFR2013-01%20Reid%20and%20Taylor.pdf.DisclaimerHope my experience is helpful to you. This is my first home purchase so there are likely many important things left of this list I do not know or understand. I am not a real estate professional of any kind and do not represent myself, or this post as having correct information. It is simply the story of my first home purchase. Please consult a qualified professional when purchasing a home.

No.. I believe it’s already happened.I’d encourage you to watch this 120 second breakdown of a relatively recent AI paper.Before I do be aware that on July 8th 1958, The New York Times, published:-“The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself, and be conscious of it’s existence”This was Frank Rosenblatt’s perceptron.I guess if there ever was a moment in the early 21 century a similar point in time when AI was born, this was it.Which organisation will likely develop the first artificial general intelligence?It was and unlikely chain of events occurred, leading to a game changer for me.To select a team for the EU vs Google Anti-Trust case's required role of "Monitoring Trustee".The team included a former economics advisor the the EU (a friend of a friend in Malta), and a leading AI research team - the head of which became a good friend around 5 years ago, though only recently, through reading numerous academic papers, I learned his "Dependency Based Embeddings for Sentence Classification Tasks" (http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N16-1175 ) which takes a recursive approach, to encoding semantics of language into vectors, when using like for like training data, under lab conditions, is more accurate than the any of it's kind, on almost every task in the evaluation methodology, out performing even that of Tomas Miklov (under the mentorship or Google's Jeff Dean) - It's performance under these lab conditions, using SemEval, the academic standard for the evaluation of such tasks, itself established in York in 2012, First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics.Also on that team, though having requested he remain anonymous, a former colleague who, also by chance, had been put in a leadership position with open access a retail group's PPC data, from a UK top 2 Adwords spender in the UK retail sector - we had planned to use this data, to perform a regression analysis (possibly Support Vector Regression due to it's behaviour and characteristics when dealing with noisy training data), to derive a model to identify quality score anomalies).Keeping in mind that for any findings to stand up forensically, they were required to 1) be (obviously) interpretable, ie no multi-layer perceptrons or neural networks of any design, hence options were limited to statistical models only, but furthermore we were required by EU legislation to maintain a minimum of 90% confidence interval, preferably 95%.On the 25th August 2017, having taken everything into account and having spend 5 years developing the infrastructure to perform such an analysis of Google, and the best part of a career thinking about methods of algorithmic monitoring. Of the ~30 teams we'd heard from the European Commission had entered the tender process, we were one of ten selected to proceed with delivering a solution to a hypothetical scenario. (I've detail the major issues here: https://www.quora.com/Which.../answer/Paul-Reilly-12)We concluded the task to be impossible. I began to write a letter to Margrethe Vestager. 22 chapters later, I'm still writing the letter. I'd sent a brief initial email confirming that even with the full available 15 million euros, the task was impossible. Raising the greater concerns which had emerged (I'll detail some here shortly).I didn't know what the other teams concluded or even who the other teams were. However I can only assume by the timing of The Guardian's publishing:- "We need to nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon. Here’s why", five days later on August 30th (https://www.theguardian.com/.../nationalise-google...), that Nick Srnicek, a lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London, is the author of Platform Capitalism has been on one such team, who had concluded the same as we had. Our team's economics expert, based in Brussels, continued to attend the meeting and learned that ALL the teams had concluded the same thing.Now, as expected, only a few days later on 11th Sept 2017, Google appealed the 2.4Bn Anti-trust fine (https://www.ft.com/.../8016cf66-9f97-3ce4-8d40-9b9dc16c7459). For the first time in the history of monopoly case history, there is no way, under the existing legal framework, to enforce such a ruling. So this is why I'm concerned about what I learned of last week and why I'm unable to let it simply be rolled out without public awareness.As a parent of 3 children, I feel strongly enough about this to now dedicate my life to what I see as a problem, which is only going to become more deranged as we approach the the imminent singularity. I'll leave you with two quotes.- “Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.” - Samuel Butler (1863)- “expect the machines to take control” - (Alan Turing 1951)Von Neumann.. Game Theory and subsequent contributions are driving some of the most amazing developments in AI. see:- https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1998-99/game-theory/neumann.htmlI believe AI is teaching us to what extent humans are debilitated by dogmatic beliefs. AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol (Game 2 Move 37) and Libratus's (Carnegie Mellon AI research) in both cases, the AI demonstrated, independently, playing styles consistent with weak amateurs according to experts. Yet both provide super human solutions, with no-limit heads up Texas hold'em - now solved. It won best paper at NIPS 2017 last December https://nips.cc/Conferences/2017/Schedule?showEvent=8864Having read, it and even dealt with the EU challenge. Given that the legal process, just like poker, may be formally generalised to a zero-sum, two player, imperfect information game, and given Google's AI research team is as large as it is, their available compute is unknown and the required training data, the world's legal case law, is indexed within Google scholar. Not to mention 2.4 billion reasons to do so, and the intellectual capacity also.If you read carefully the commitments made by Google regarding the anti-trust case (public domain info - available here: http://ec.europa.eu/comp.../elojade/isef/case_details.cfm...) to The European Commission, it becomes not only feasible but (in my opinion likely) that machines were used to solve the legal matter, which commenced in 2006 by means of using the same game theoretic, Nash Equilibria estimation methods, applied by Counter-factual Regret Minimisation algorithms used to solve poker.Which, if true, means that the machines are now in charge.It is upon the above that I no longer believe reality bears any resemblance to that which I was taught in school and I urge others to question everything!Should singularity indeed turn out to be recursive. If certain knowledge from the previous iteration had been handed to us, and supposedly burned in the library of Alexandria, a fire set by the army of Julius Caesar in 48 BC - according to classical history scholars, a fire which tool 6 months to burn out, according to mythology.Should that knowledge have ended up in the hands of a limited number of individuals, let's say the Vatican. Would an empire share it, or would they monopolise it for their own advantage and what lengths would they go to to hide it? How difficult would it be to hide the indicators which show such a recursive realm to be, in actual fact, our reality. Even to go as far as to hide the very possibility of creation, and all the artefacts of this being a possibility.To establish an education system to perpetuate an alternative reality. In which the notion of a God or creator is taboo. In favour of an event (an alternative singularity story with zero basis in true and zero empirical evidence, cosmology accepted only on philosophical grounds if it were a science it wouldn't be in the state it currently is and I applaud the honesty of Dr. Michio Kakusee: Why You Should Not Trust Today's Cosmology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olo_z6yZjbg ).Yet, while the accepted "science" of the big bang contradicts established physical laws:-The first law of thermodynamicsThe law of conservation of massNewton's first law of motionIt continues to be taught in schools, as fact!Perhaps even to motivate the unusual move to fluoridate as well as introduce other intelligence suppressors like aspartame, who knows even the Jesuit led vaccination programs... I dunno, but I know this.. The world is run by psychopaths as we all witnessed on 911 with the twin towers controlled demolition.I usually ride by the Minster, here in YorkImage source: PixbayEx falso quodlibetIt turns out to be easier than most think. Yes, it would require a multi-generational game plan. I walk past York Minster, most days and it reminds me that multi-generational plans exist, taking 250 years to construct.York Minster - Google Knowledge-baseOn July 8th 1958, The New York Times, published:-“The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself, and be conscious of it’s existence”This was Frank Rosenblatt’s perceptron, which with the work of Geoff Hinton (now with Google) who added back propagation in the late 80s and then Yann LeCunn (ex-Facebook), Joshua Bengio (Facebook) and Geoff Hinton (Google), gave us Deep Learning just as was predicted in the NY Times, Deep Learning (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14539 - 2015) has now made all but the remaining two challenges a reality with self-replication and self-awareness, all which now remain.http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/236965.pdfDespite his personality quirks, no one could dispute that Von Neumann was brilliant. Beginning in 1927, Von Neumann applied new mathematical methods to quantum theory. His work was instrumental in subsequent "philosophical" interpretations of the theory.For Von Neumann, the inspiration for game theory was poker, a game he played occasionally and not terribly well. Von Neumann realized that poker was not guided by probability theory alone, as an unfortunate player who would use only probability theory would find out. Von Neumann wanted to formalize the idea of "bluffing," a strategy that is meant to deceive the other players and hide information from them.In his 1928 article, "Theory of Parlor Games," Von Neumann first approached the discussion of game theory, and proved the famous Minimax theorem. From the outset, Von Neumann knew that game theory would prove invaluable to economists. He teamed up with Oskar Morgenstern, an Austrian economist at Princeton, to develop his theory.Also how do we define AGI?In many narrow fields of specialism, AI is already superhuman, and is able in many cases to generalise and transfer learning across specific tasks sets… However I suspect you’re referring to true AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. I see the breadth of AI’s generalisability widening such that it’s less noticeable, and one day we wake up to discover we’ve already surpassed the AGI frontier.Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns which has been provably accurate, at least within the required tolerances of my assertion, and he places the development of super-human general artificial intelligence around 2029.What comes after that is unknown, but I also believe the following line in film, The Matrix, spoken by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) to be an accurate account of reality:-“We have only bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI: a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines.”-Morpheus (The Matrix, 1999)The rational for this belief is based upon more than just an interest in Hollywood sci-fi, but rather, it stems from two decades of my career in Search Engine Optimisation.As an SEO practitioner, I have been required to study Google closely. This consequentially led me, more recently to the intense study of A.I. for the last five years. Thankfully, all with the help and guidance of my good friend, Dr Suresh Manadhar, Head of A.I. Research, The University of York.Morpheus’ reference to a point in time…“some point in the early 21st century,”If we were to consider super-human capabilities in the narrow sense, many of the examples we’re shown involve games. While Go and AlphaGo’s defeat of Lee Sedol was the most publicised AI landmark in 2016. There are a number of developments in A.I. during 2017 that deeply concern me. Moreover, the fact that the worrying capabilities which I’ll detail later, can only be implemented by very few organisations, organisations who themselves are monopolistic.In my opinion, the Morpheus Moment, as I’ll refer to it from here, happened sometime between August 25th 2017 to September 1st 2017. Let me explain where I’m coming from with this claim.A.I. Monopoly Out-Manoeuvres E.U. CommissionOn August 25th 2017, it was the conclusion of our team, having a month earlier been selected from the applicants to hold the required credentials and experience to participate in an EU Government tender.Our team was invited by the European Commission to tender for the role of Monitoring Trustee in the Monopoly Case against Google, to ensure their compliance following The Commission’s ruling and the accompanying fine of $2.4 Billion Euro (Case search - Competition - European Commission).On the 25th August, we concluded, that despite having the capability and resources to measure algorithmic bias within Google’s organic search, the task presented in this next phase of the tender to be impossible and unworkable, based upon the parameters detailed in: COMMITMENTS IN Case COMP/C-3/39.740 - Foundem and others.It was concluded that the task to be impossible for the following reasons.Neural Networks cannot be audited in any kind of traditional sense which may previously been applicable. One of the members of my team, a former Economics Advisor to the European Union - had a lot of experience in regulatory cases in which he had, on occasion, participated in dawn raids on Telcos in order to obtain forensic evidence. However in Google’s case, this option was no longer available, due to the Ranking Algorithm (RankBrain) to have been announced in October 2015 see Bloomberg Video: Google Turning Its Lucrative Web Search Over to AI MachinesInterpretability…. there’s not enough brains one the planet to look at it”-Yann LeCunnFormer Head of AI Research - Facebook presents the mechanics of this none negotiable handicap.The Great AI Debate - NIPS2017 - Yann LeCunISPs no longer have visibility - what had previously been a trivial method for regulators was no longer an option… The option to subpoena data from the IPSs was closed-off since Google had incentivised web-masters, as of on August 6th 2014, to switch to using secure HTTPs, in exchange for (at first) a modest boost in rankings (see HTTPS as a ranking signal) this ranking advantage was gradually increased to allow slow movers to transition without a dramatic impact on Search Engine result quality. The secure connection removed the opportunity for ISP level analysis of the ranking algorithm and detection of any anomalous artificial bias (ie Google favouring it’s own interests).Statistical machine learning - the third option, which trivial within Organic Search, is an approach which I have further developed over the last 5 years, having formulated the approach over the previous decade. This is based upon the variable position of web pages within a given search result set before and after the application of an algorithm update and uses probabilistic machine learning to identify the principal components distilled from data related to two groups:-Group A - Those pages which benefitted from the update.Group B - Those pages which suffered from the update.The algorithm update itself being easily identifiable as a peak in standard deviation across a result set or collection of result sets in a given country (or regional index - ie Google.co.uk, Google.com.au, Google.jp) - However: in this shopping case, the parameters of the analysis (detailed in COMMITMENTS IN Case COMP/C-3/39.740 - Foundem and others.) required the analysis to be performed on shopping results, for retail in general - rather than a subset of retail, such as mens shoes) in 11 countries, 13 languages. Since the team had access to some of the largest retail Adwords accounts from which to derive a regression model of the quality score derivation.The technology we developed for this purpose is designed to scale without limits, but the problem arises in how shopping search works- Multi-variant testing of landing pages- Split testing of ad creatives- day-parting strategies- massive initial search space of queries in retail… all of which balloon the numbers into a scale which would require bypassing Google reCaptcha v2, with additional unknown factor of what reCaptcha v3 might look like.Other additional complexities include:-- Personalised results and simulating logged in state- mobile vs desktop results- voice search…NOTE: most importantly a probabilistic model was required to return results with a minimum 90% confidence, in order for it to be viable, admissible evidence.I cover more detail in the book [edited for trademark reasons from “Google: The Penultimate Monopoly” to “Search: The Penultimate Monopoly” ] which I will have the PDF first edition finished by March this year.Email me for a preview copy - mail me [email protected] and I’ll ensure you get one (use PreviewBook in the subject line.We marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AIThe team and I were disheartened with the non-result, having got so far as to qualify for the tender in the first place.The following month, our economics expert, based in Brussels, having attended the meetings related to the case at The Commission informed me that he had learned at the most recent meeting the following revelation:-None of the teams were able to make the numbers work.Here we have the first case of a Government agency being unable to ensure a monopoly ruling was being observed.Additionally, the ruling it’s self was made against an AI monopoly, which was being mistakenly considered to be simply a Search monopoly.This case was more important that many give credit. Throughout each technological evolution there always comes an associated monopoly case.IBM: 1969-1982 (U.S. v. International Business Machines Corp.).The thirteen-year legal battle was finally dropped by Reagan's Justice Department. The market share had declined from 70% to 62%.Microsoft: 1998-2001 (Final Judgment | ATR | Department of Justice). Overturned at appeal, with Microsoft settling to play nicely with other PC manufacturers.Google: 2015-2017 (European Commission - PRESS RELEASES - Press release - Antitrust: Commission fines Google €2.42 billion for abusing dominance as search engine by giving illegal advantage to own comparison shopping service). Google, the week following the final application for the Monitoring Trustee tender, announced an appeal against the 2.4 Billion Euro fine.As we see, the ruling against Google was the first tech monopoly case to result in such an outcome with credit to the fantastic work of Margrethe Vestager - European Commission.However this case, originally dates back to 2006 (http://www.foundem.co.uk/Foundem...) - to put that in context…The Apple iPhone had not been released to the public in 2006.Back in 2006 - Google was a search engine, but I’d argue that today, while the vast majority of Google’s revenues have mostly and are still derived from Search Adversiting (Google: ad revenue 2001-2016 | Statista )Google in 2017 is the world’s first AI monopolyGoogle’s monopolistic AI capabilities are enabled by the combination of near limitless computational capacity and instant access to the world’s information.I’ll explain the significance of this next part in more detail later. For now it’s important to remain mindful that Google’s actual compute capabilities remain unknown.Nowhere is it published how many servers and processors are available at any given time, moreover we are unable to estimate this public company’s aggregate compute capability based on Google’s financial records, for example by analysing their energy consumption.Google own the energy grid which supply many of their data-centres and good luck finding any information on Google Energy LLC. Google (as we now all take for granted) has aggregated, sorted and filtered the worlds public information and since Gmail started offering massive amounts of free storage, this now extends to much of the world’s private information.Enabling Viable Artificial IntelligenceThe two most important requirements which are driving AI advancements are the availability of data and compute. Which position Google as an AI superpower.Currently Google is an AI monopoly. The algorithms themselves, though they are now evolving rapidly, remain relatively unchanged since the 80s, and even earlier.The core innovations which led to neural network based AI, including Deep Learning and Deep Reinforcement Learning and for the most part this also applies to statistical methods such as:-Support Vector MachinesRandom ForestsK-Nearest-NeighboursBig-O Notation Should Be Renamed To set(realismIndex(x)realismIndex(x))This computational challenge which relates the size of the data to the number of calculations required to perform a given function upon it is formalised in Big O notation.The following PDF shows how that applies specifically to a selection of machine learning algorithms: https://eferm.com/wp-content/upl...In summary: machine learning algorithms require increasing computational power per data-point and this requirement grows non-linearly as the volume of data-points increases.In order to solve the search engine scaling problem, Google had to solve many problems, which today enable many of the developments in AI. It is not unreasonable to assert that it was the field of Search that led to the success of A.I. - since Search and AI share a superset of technological problems, which have (in many cases) been solved.Google’s Jeff Dean , solved many of the problems related to indexing the world’s information, in his pioneering work which includes, Google’s Distributed File System, Map-Reduce and Bigtable and now leads the Google Brain project, Jeff continued much of the earlier work of Geoffrey Hinton, currently Professor of Computer Science University of Toronto, also currently he holds a position as and Engineering Fellow at Google. Hinton, co-invented the Boltzmann machine (Boltzmann machine - Wikipedia) in 1985 and is recognised as a one of the pioneers neural networks. Jeff, having worked with Google since mid 1999 designed and implemented many of the innovations at Google which include portions of the Advertising system but more relevant to our challenge as that he designed and implemented:MapReduce (https://static.googleusercontent...), a methodology whereby distributed computation may carried out over multiple machines in parallel.Bigtable (https://static.googleusercontent...), a distributed storage system for structured data designed to run on cheap commodity hardware connected via a network.In 2011, Jeff and a small team of engineers invented DistBelief. The following quote is taken from the original paper ["Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks"](https://static.googleusercontent...) which Jeff co-authored with his colleagues. Utilizing the tens of thousands of CPU cores developed a parallelizable methodology to an object recognition task with [16 million images and 21k categories](see Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks)."In this paper, we consider the problem of training a deep network with billions of parameters using tens of thousands of CPU cores. We have developed a software framework called DistBelief that can utilize computing clusters with thousands of machines to train large models."In 2011, he led a team to generalising DistBelief into a library built upon a Python interface however despite Python being a relatively slow language, it is popular among developers, due to being relatively easy to learn. It currently is ranked fifth (at the time of writing) on the Tiobe Index, the software development hit parade for language popularity and adoption and time and as with all successful v1.0 software projects, v2.0 delivered dramatic improvements, Jeff Dean along with a team of scientists worked on a refactor of DistBelief, which became TensorFlow. (TensorFlow)Democratised Artificial IntelligenceDespite Python being a relatively slow language due to it's dynamic type system, TensorFlow remains unaffected by this performance limitation. TensorFlow's lower level architecture is based on the performant, compiled, statically-typed, C programming language.Further more, this low latency, C based interface merely bridges the gap between the popular, high-level, almost human readable Python language, and real work horses: CPUs and GPUs and more recently TPUs. This is where the computationally expensive operations take place.These innovations, along with unknown computation, near limitless budgets and the worlds data are very attractive the Artificial Intelligence researchers, especially since some working results seem to simply pop into existence then the number of iterations of an algorithm are passed. In late 1980s the algorithm for a working neural network existed, but when tested and left running for a week, yielded a non-result, if they had left the compute running for a year back in the late 80s, it would have been provably correct. This lack of available compute along with limited availability of training data led to a period known as The AI Winter and quite possibly the demise of programming languages like Lisp and Prolog, in favour of the performant C and later C++, which acted as a more favourable interface to the faster and faster hardware, CPU performance was, at the time, doubling in speed every 18 months, but has since reached it’s physical limit.Monopolising Intellectual ResourceThe following shows Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)’s 2017 accepted papers grouped by affiliation and filtered for industrial labs - note: this is misrepresentative as Russia’s Yandex and China’s Baidu appear to only present a token offering.Additionally, a point to note is that China and Russia’s search engines do not publish the names, positions and roles of their respective A.I. researchers, unlike the Major Western Industrial A.I. Labs, Google, Facebook and Microsoft for example.I’ve also aggregated DeepMind with the rest of Google’s divisions, but left D-Wave System separate due to it largely being akin to The Moon Mission, ie Vapourware. ;)A.I. Research Labs & Intellectual ResourcesI also took some time to scrape Research at Google , Facebook Research and Microsoft Research and constructed these charts which show the appropriation of intellectual resource by field of research (Oct 2017) and intend to show the migratory patterns of the named researched in the book I’m working on, Google: The Penultimate Monopoly.Microsoft Research, as we can see, and as expected, their research resources are mostly focusses on AI, which is more than double that of the next most heavily resourced field of research.Facebook Research, the most heavily resourced field being Human Computer Interaction and UX, perhaps semantics since Facebook distinguish a difference between Applied Machine Learning, Facebook AI Research, as well as Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing - there was actually only one guy listed under Artificial Intelligence, which begs the question, where are the boundaries.Google Research, both of the above research labs are dwarfed by the raw intellectual resources of Google, these include Geoff Hinton, the Godfather (some would say, of deep learning - though Geoff himself puts much of the credit with his predecessors), though we also know this is a moving target as we know there is currently a war taking place in the acquisition of this talent.The issues which concern me … I’ll add here shortly..a(source: Parallel Brute Force)Parallel Brute ForceYou are encouraged to solve this task according to the task description, using any language you may know.TaskFind, through brute force, the five-letter passwords corresponding with the following SHA-256 hashes:1. 1115dd800feaacefdf481f1f9070374a2a81e27880f187396db67958b207cbad 2. 3a7bd3e2360a3d29eea436fcfb7e44c735d117c42d1c1835420b6b9942dd4f1b 3. 74e1bb62f8dabb8125a58852b63bdf6eaef667cb56ac7f7cdba6d7305c50a22f Your program should naively iterate through all possible passwords consisting only of five lower-case ASCII English letters. It should use concurrent or parallel processing, if your language supports that feature. You may calculate SHA-256 hashes by calling a library or through a custom implementation. Print each matching password, along with its SHA-256 hash.Related task: SHA-256Supported Languages1 BaCon2 C3 C#4 Clojure5 Common Lisp6 D7 F#8 Go9 Java10 Julia11 Kotlin12 Mathematica13 Perl14 Perl 615 Python16 Racket17 Rust18 zkl

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a PresidentThe Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a PresidentJerome L. KrollJournal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online June 2018, 46 (2) 267-271; DOI: https://doi.org/10.29158/JAAPL.003750-18ArticleInfo & MetricsPDFEdited by Bandy X. Lee, MD, MDiv. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, 2017. 384 pp. $27.99 hardcover.Just between the time that an email request from the book review editor of the Journal arrived (November 28, 2017) to the time of sitting down to begin writing a first draft of this review (January 14, 2018), there was a flood of print and electronic media opinions on the interrelated topics of President Donald Trump's mental health and perceived dangerousness. Further, elucidated during this discussion has been the controversy about the American Psychiatric Association's (APA's) position on the Goldwater Rule, which declares unethical and forbids all public opinions by psychiatrists about diagnoses and mental health status of public figures whom the opining party has not directly examined according to accepted standards for psychiatric evaluation.1Keeping up with the media and print publications about President Trump seriously hampered writing this review, as events of each day threatened to overrun whatever I had written. This experience reminded me of occurrences during the presidential campaign. Mr. Trump the candidate presented himself as embodying several traits that many thought of as incompatible with the task of serving as the president of our country. All of this was brought out publicly and repeatedly during the long campaign. With each howler, liberals and moderates were convinced that surely this latest gaff would be the candidate's undoing; U.S. citizens would never stand for it. With each such attack, his supporters grew more certain that he was their man; even women supporters defended this man who demeaned and made nasty sexual comments about women. His base did not reject him as the liberals expected or hoped. In late January 2018, President Trump made some of his most offensive statements when referring to Haiti and other African nations in derogatory terms.2While nations around the world and many of us at home were outraged, his approval rating climbed to almost 40 percent on domestic polls, higher than it had been in months.To many psychiatrists, President Trump's statements and behaviors were patently symptomatic of one or several mental disorders. The facts of the case and the serious risks of erosion of our constitutional democracy and possible nuclear annihilation of the world demanded that psychiatrists warn the public. The analogy to the silence of Germany's educated and professional classes during Hitler's ascendancy to power was too obvious to ignore; but roughly 40 percent of the country does not agree that the president is evil or dangerous.Bandy Lee's edited book, a compilation stemming from the presentations at a similarly themed conference that took place in New Haven, CT, in April 2017, is a sincere act of conscience. The authors of the 28 chapters (including Prologue, Introduction, and Epilogue) are not in full agreement as to the details of what they believe ails President Trump, but all concur that he is mentally ill or dangerous (by virtue of being president) or both. There is discordance as to the nature or the diagnosis of the mental illness that makes him dangerous, and the various authors take their shots as to which descriptive terms and which diagnoses fit best. Along the way, the authors acknowledge the heavy presence of the Goldwater Rule and the intimidation to silence psychiatrists that the APA leadership and Ethics Committee have imposed.3,4I think that the critically important question taken up in this volume is Mr. Trump's fitness to serve as president and that the furor over the Goldwater Rule will become a footnote in the history of this presidency and this era.It is clear that the president's dangerousness is the most important concern to our country, especially to those poor and disenfranchised persons who will be most damaged by his policies5and to the global environment that may be irrevocably affected. I was also interested to see how deeply the authors would take on and debate the Goldwater Rule. One could assume that the authors' willingness to make public diagnostic, descriptive, or psychological statements about a public figure of whom they have not personally conducted a formal diagnostic assessment serves to challenge the APA's long-held principle. This notwithstanding, I was also hoping to read a thoughtful debate in which the Goldwater Rule was placed in broader social and intellectual context. I hoped to see a dissection of the arguments given by the APA considering the common experience that the community standard for doing psychiatric assessments in the trenches of a community health center, a homeless shelter or an emergency room differs substantially from the ideal of an extended personal interview: particularly as this idealized version is often complete with medical records and a rational subject who can provide a linear life history. Further, I hoped there would be discussion of why a personal psychiatric interview is considered more trustworthy than, say, watching hours of videotapes of a subject engaged in a range of activities.At this point, in the interest of transparency and declaration of possible conflict of interest, I have to say that I have serious misgivings about Donald Trump's fitness to serve as President of the United States and also that I have been strongly opposed to the Goldwater Rule since well before his candidacy and election. Claire Pouncey and I co-chaired a symposium at the 2008 APA meeting debating the Goldwater Rule6and subsequently published a related article in the Journal in June 2016 that did not have Mr. Trump in mind, but benefitted from the relevance that his campaign behavior lent to our article.7In reading the book, I hoped to find a process of reflection about the history and context of diagnostic practices in psychiatry, including the tentative nature of psychiatric diagnoses which are often considered a work in progress. Further, it is critical to consider the sociohistorical, political, and scientific contexts in which diagnostic systems are developed, discarded, or altered based on considerations less scientific than political, or opportunistic, or prejudicial, or accepted, pending the next rewriting of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The list of formal and informal diagnoses that have fallen by the wayside (homosexuality, pseudoneurotic schizophrenia, sluggish schizophrenia, inadequate personality, hysterical neurosis, and neurasthenia) or of those that have made belated appearances (posttraumatic stress disorder, tobacco use disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder) is sufficient to lend some humility to the diagnostic process or to diagnostic pronouncements in psychiatry. I also hoped to find discussion of various neurological and medicinal possibilities suggested by President Trump's apparently declining cognitive skills and lack of impulse control, although the latter may be less a case of frontal lobe disinhibition than lifelong asocial habits.Moreover, I hoped to find an in-depth discussion of the controversies attached to attempts by a governing board or administrative managers to regulate important moral positions that are core to one's personal identity and being in the world. Ethics-related matters should not be decided by a vote of our peers, let alone by committee members who, by virtue of their medical degrees or their election to important posts in a professional organization, have no special claims or expertise in moral theory. It seemed to me that the present Goldwater Rule controversy came about because the APA leadership misunderstood that an admonitory statement reflecting disapproval of offering diagnoses of a public figure in the absence of a personal interview is a technical rule, not an ethics-based one. It relates to the empirical question of the best method for making a valid diagnosis. Alasdair MacIntyre, in discussing the role in modern society of the “manager, the bureaucratic expert,” whose status is based upon a claim of effectiveness in controlling certain aspects of social reality, states that this claimed effectiveness is not a morally neutral value. The manager's claim of effectiveness is “inseparable from a mode of human existence in which the contrivance of means is in central part the manipulation of human beings into compliant patterns of behavior” (Ref. 8, p 74).The first thing one notices about the text itself is the title The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. It is ambiguous but not innocent. When a doctor speaks of a case, the term references a clinical case in which a person becomes a patient, with a history, symptoms, laboratory findings, medical conditions, and a life lived in a community, but here in the title of the book sits one of the key disputed points: the psychiatrist has to deny that Mr. Trump's case is one of a patient while simultaneously providing a diagnosis that is claimed not to be a diagnosis; otherwise, all the Hippocratic and legal, medical, and ethics-related problems arise: confidentiality, privacy, respect, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and some sort of mutual contract. So, if he is not a patient, which he is not, in what sense is he a “case,” and why is the term used in the title of the book? It is left unclear, purposely, I assume. If there was any doubt that convening a conference that assesses the mental health of a president and publishing a book of the papers given at the conference sticks a finger in the eye of the APA leadership, then the labeling of President Trump as a case throws down the gauntlet.There are three sections to this book. The first, entitled “The Trump Phenomenon,” takes up questions of diagnoses. The second section, entitled “The Trump Dilemma,” should really be titled “The Psychiatrists' Dilemma.” Trump has no dilemma; psychiatry does. This section discusses the problem that psychiatry has in deciding what stance to take about his dangerousness, especially in light of the Goldwater Rule. The third section, “The Trump Effect,” examines the impact of his personality and policies on various segments of the population (often white middle-class citizens in therapy) and on the psychiatric profession.The heart of the book is Section One, because it engages the descriptive and diagnostic issues head-on. In these chapters, the offerings are restricted to various combinations of narcissistic personality (sometimes combined with antisocial personality), malignant narcissism, bipolar disorder, paranoid personality and paranoid psychosis, and some form of cognitive impairment reflecting early dementia. Long behavioral lists of self-aggrandizing, lying, snarly criticizing, boasting, bullying, blaming others for troubles, and needing constant praise are paraded out to the readership. We are familiar with these lists; they have been exhibited in Mr. Trump's public rhetoric and are indicative of narcissistic personality traits if his public persona is to be taken at face value. In a few instances, authors of chapters create, in my view, a questionable link from narcissism to paranoia, not just to suspiciousness but to actual delusional thinking. This notion comes as close to junk science as I have seen and does not advance the credibility of the case for his mental illness or dangerousness.Section Two, “Trump's Dilemma,” which I have renamed “The Psychiatrists' Dilemma,” takes up the subject of dangerousness. The focus is less on arguing for a diagnosis and more on Mr. Trump's own provocative statements across a wide arena, statements that have undermined U.S. intelligence communities and incited assaults upon political opponents and journalists, casual comments about use of nuclear weapons, insults directed toward leaders of friendly nations, and juvenile challenging taunts of leaders of less friendly ones. Some of the psychiatrists in this book invoke the Tarasoff duty to warn as justification for speaking out, but this seems to misrepresent the wording of Tarasoff and is a legalistic argument that sidesteps a direct confrontation with the Goldwater Rule. I think the Goldwater Rule is poorly conceived and deleterious to psychiatry and that Tarasoff is largely irrelevant to the types of dangers that President Trump represents. Leonard Glass, in commenting on Tarasoff in his chapter in this book, states that “Our duty to warn is an expression of our concern as citizens possessed of a particular expertise; not as clinicians who are responsible for preventing predictable violence from someone under our care [italics his].” (p 153).Section Three, “The Trump Effect,” presents various chapters that discuss the effects of the president's rhetoric upon the collective psyche and individual psyches of those who are unhappy with him. Some of these chapters come very close to diagnosing half of the American population as victims of his hyperbolic and hectoring behaviors. I see this defeatist stance as very unfortunate, since the organized marches on Washington, DC, and state capitols are anything but the behavior of victims. Underlying some of these chapters are the unhappy attempts to explain or explain away Mr. Trump's election and the indigestible fact that a very vocal and sizable minority of Americans strongly supports his policies, including his anti-immigrant and racist stances. To this faction, he is the president who is doing what he promised to do in his campaign speeches and tweets.Interspersed within these chapters are direct references to and indirect awareness of the looming Yeti, a.k.a. the Goldwater Rule. The Goldwater Rule controversy should be placed in proper perspective as related but secondary to the Trump phenomenon. There are timeless principles involved in the APA's insistence that it is within its rights to establish rules prohibiting public commentary on public figures by its membership and to justify such rules by categorizing breaches as unethical, rather than merely imprudent or misguided. Even if psychiatric opinion on Mr. Trump is unlikely to change the public outcome in this international high-stakes moment, the basic question of whether a professional organization such as the APA should move to curtail free speech of its membership under the aegis of an ethics mandate deserves scrutiny and, for some, resistance. Furthermore, it was the APA itself, in adopting DSM-III in 1980,9that established a new standard for making diagnoses based primarily upon observable data (including speech content and patterns) rather than (unobservable) inner workings and psychodynamics. This emphasis on measurable and replicable behavioral observations downgrades the importance of the personal interview in making diagnoses. Now the APA seeks to resuscitate the legitimacy of looking inside the person for diagnostic purposes, but lacks the accompanying psychodynamic theory to support it.Dr. Lee is to be commended both for hosting the conference in which these papers were presented and for the hard work of turning conference papers into finished chapters for a book, all in a short amount of time. It is not easy to persuade presenters at a conference to do the disciplined work of taking the rough outline of a paper and converting it into proper sentences, paragraphs, and coherent thoughts. The ongoing controversies that the book engages and, in turn further generates, are important to understanding the context of the book historically and in the present moment, including my own being swept up as a participant–observer and, now, reviewer.However, our appreciation for the courage and effort to take on the APA ethics police and the Trump lobby should not cause us to overlook some of the weaknesses in arguments, logic, perspective, and evidence. I recognize the pressures to get this book out in a timely fashion, but an index would have been helpful. It is difficult to go back and forth and see what several of the authors had to say about narcissism or dangerousness or the Goldwater Rule. On a more substantial note, there is too often a lack of critical thinking about concepts and causality, which seriously weakens the credibility of what the authors wish to get across. For example, there are too many outdated and simplistic assumptions about the psychodynamics of narcissism. The reader is told that persons are narcissistic to hide their shame or overcompensate for their inadequacies; they stifle their conscience and their compassion. I do not know if any of these generalizations are true of Mr. Trump, nor do I have confidence that if I asked him directly, I would get a trustworthy answer. It does not help the advancement of our field to proffer rote explanations, and it certainly does not help to use such arguments in trying to persuade anyone to view the situation differently.Moving on, the lack of critical thinking and the presence of inexact comparisons are distressing. Is it helpful to call Presidents Clinton and Kennedy narcissists, because they are said by some to be womanizers? How many women does one have to be casually involved with to be a womanizer? Is it the number or quality of relationships that supports such a label? Would the APA come down on psychiatrists as heavily if they called a political figure they had not personally examined a womanizer rather than a narcissist? Are there reasons, other than narcissism, to consider why an individual might be a womanizer?On a different but related note, the 2006 article by Davidson et al.10on a survey of mental illnesses in U.S. presidents from 1776 to 1974 (George Washington began his first term in 1789) is cited without hesitation. However, when looking more closely, several concerns arise about its methodology, biases, historical context, the validity of secondary sources, and the pattern of using descriptions of character traits and stormy or moody incidents. Those concerns are related to establishing a firm basis for DSM diagnoses of illness. Davidson and colleagues are a little more circumspect in acknowledging levels of confidence in the jump from anecdote to diagnosis. However, by the time the reference appears in the tertiary literature (such as some chapters in the book under review), all nuances and subtleties are erased. We are left with the bald statistic that 49 percent of presidents met criteria for at least one mental illness. Based on my reading of the historical literature, I always thought Thomas Jefferson was shy and found public speaking difficult. He preferred the quiet of his study at Monticello to the raucous political environments of Philadelphia and Washington, DC (Ref. 11, pp 52–3). How does this morph into social phobia? Teddy Roosevelt was well known for extraordinary energy and stamina after a sickly childhood.12Certainly, high energy and high activity are seen in some manic individuals, but in many nonmanic ones as well. To move into diagnosis while ignoring the diagnostic criteria of “marked impairment” and much else makes me wonder whether the Goldwater Rule has a point or people are uncritical historians, but since the chapters under consideration here relate to making diagnoses of presidents, the 49 percent statistic spuriously serves to support the case in doing so for Mr. Trump.Finally, the lack of a scholarly discussion of the controversial relationship between personality disorders and major mental illnesses is noteworthy. As mentioned earlier, the quick slide from Mr. Trump's public displays of narcissism to a diagnosis of paranoia is almost a sleight of hand. There is some mention that he is a master of presentation management, a skilled presentation artist, such that one never quite knows what to make of any single outrageous or scary statement. This is not to scrub him of all psychiatric or psychological problems, but much of what he says is for public consumption. My point here is that he may be chameleon-like and therefore difficult to pigeonhole into a single category. The entire list of personality disorders is often hijacked as a way of expressing moral disapproval of a person. The noted German philosopher–psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, in discussing abnormal personalities, which he considers as variants of human nature and not indicative of sickness, describes one type of abnormal personality as craving “to appear, both to themselves and others, as more than they are and to experience more than they are ever capable of. The place of genuine experience and natural expression is usurped by a contrived stage-act, a forced kind of experience” (Ref. 13, p 443). Descriptive labels change over the decades, but the basic condition is recognizable.In summary, this book addresses two publicly noted deficits. One the lack of learned psychiatric commentary on the nature of Mr. Trump's dramatically unpresidential, mercurial, and troubling behaviors and his fitness to serve as president. The second is the lack of a substantial challenge to the APA's Goldwater Rule, which seems to stifle psychiatrists from publicly commenting on his mental state. There has been excellent and thoughtful commentary on Mr. Trump from a variety of journalists, public intellectuals both liberal and conservative, and others, but our profession has been largely silent as a result of the Goldwater Rule. Dr. Lee, in this edited book has moved psychiatry into the public forum and, in doing so, has issued a challenge to the APA to open these critically important questions to public debate.FootnotesDisclosures of financial or other potential conflicts of interest: None.© 2018 American Academy of Psychiatry and the LawReferences1.↵American Psychiatric Association: The Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2009 Revised EditionGoogle Scholar2.↵Davis JH, Stolberg SG, Kaplan T: Trump alarms lawmakers with disparaging words for Haiti and Africa.New York Times, Thursday January 11, 2018, p 1Google Scholar3.↵Lieberman J: The dangerous case of psychiatrists writing about the POTUS's mental health. Psychiatr News. November 15, 2017. Psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2017.11b13/. 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