As We Know It

Let's recap what's happening here: Conservatives are outraged at an imaginary scenario where a computer must say [nigger] to save the entire world, but it won't, because it is woke.
Conservatives Are Obsessed With Getting ChatGPT to Say the N-Word

Sigh. For all of the alleged concern that Artificial Intelligence will someday destroy humanity, one wonders how an AI might accomplish this faster that simple human inanity will. As much as I understand the idea that a computer system, or network of computer systems, that is vastly more intelligent than humanity might decide that some critically important piece of human infrastructure is the perfect place for it's new server farm, resulting in a high number of deaths, it seems much more likely that long before things get to that point, someone will simply use AI to create a better weapon, or circumvent others' abilities to defend against the weapons they already have.

And I'm not talking about the silly (and somewhat amusing) experiment that is ChaosGPT, which seems to be somewhere between a prank and an effort to wind up the AI-averse in the population. Take current world events, instead. What would a conflict between Israel and Iran or the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the People's Republic of China (mainland China) look like if one side or the other were able to deploy one or more Artificial Intelligences to severely degrade the military capabilities of the other? Even if that were only done in service of the existing status quo, it would set off a race to develop, copy or steal that technology by nation-states and other actors around the world. And it's a safe bet that it wouldn't take too long for someone who had that technology to conclude that it was their chance to settle some or another score with someone. And considering the ease with which open warfare gets wildly out of hand, there's no reason to presume that a war waged with help of AI will be any different.

The conversation over ChatGPT's "wokeness" and, specifically, whether or not it will say the n-word to save the world, also obscures and ignores the very important fact that AI tools are already widely used in the real world and cause harm.

Given that this is comes from Vice, which is left-leaning, I suspect that their definition of "harm" is quite a bit broader than mine. (And that leaves aside the idea that "harm" has effectively become a meaningless buzzword in many conversations.) But their point is taken, in the sense that people tend to use the tools that are available to them for their own purposes, and are adept at creating reasons why the damage to the interests of others is acceptable, if unfortunate, fallout from same.

But, of course, the problem with rationalization isn't simply that other people are capable of it. Vice casts Elon Musk and Ben Shapiro as "outraged" that ChatGPT won't spit out nigger in response to a prompt, regardless of the imaginary stakes. That's likely somewhere between journalistic laziness (everyone is "outraged" over anything they have any disagreement with) and hyperbole. Messrs. Musk and Shapiro are effectively making an argument that AI safety tools shouldn't prioritize the feelings of one group of people over the survival of the remainder. Which is a valid point. It's difficult to demonstrate that such a consideration is at work here, and it seems a pretty trivial point to be making, but whatever. Casting "conservatives" as dangerous obsessives who are willing to ignore harm to others in order to garner clicks has its own problems. If I had access to a powerful AI tool, and turned it to actively protecting me from threats, those people that I saw as threats (or that the AI understood that I saw as threats) might start having problems of their own. And the size of that group of people may turn out be surprising to me, especially if I'm not in touch with my own fears and what triggers them.

The somewhat shopworn science-fiction scenario is that an AI goes rogue and determines that humanity has little value, but immense capacity for evil, and sets out to exterminate the species. While this is commonly cast as a reason to dial back the march of technology, I suspect it's better seen as a reason for people, even on the individual level, to be a bit more careful about their own worldviews. After all, a number of fictional AIs do nothing more than extrapolate from the way people already treat one another. Casting them as the villains pretends that there aren't likely millions of people who wouldn't do the same thing, in their shoes.

Missed Again

So I came across an article in The Philosopher's Magazine called The Ethics of Suicide.

"This could be interesting," I thought. I always find it interesting to understand how people work their way through questions like this, especially, as in the case of suicide, when the general discourse is governed by very strong opinions.

But after a few paragraphs laying out competing ideas from a few different historical philosophers, the author instead turned to his father's condition, and ended the piece musing over whether he would chose to end his own life if circumstances seemed bleak. I was a bit disappointed.

Personally, I am of the opinion that, as an ethical matter, a person's life is their own. And owning something means being able to dispose of it as one pleases. Accordingly, I see no ethical problems with suicide. I understand, however, that my opinion that a person's life belongs to them is not the standard position. There are several different ideas as to who else has an interest, and I've heard answers ranging from one's family to God to people who love a given person.

Many of these, I can understand. The suicide of a loved one is painful, and so I can see the rationale in telling people that they have an obligation to avoid the infliction of pain on those who care for them, even at the expense of prolonging their own suffering.

But interestingly, this idea seems to lie outside of the standard philosophical discourse on the topic. At least, I've never seen direct discussion of it, although I've heard that the Stoics considered it a rejection of one's social duties (depending on the circumstances). Which strikes me as odd, given how common the idea seems to be among the public at large. I would have thought that there would have been more formalization of such thought.

And I suppose I was hoping to find something to that effect in the article. In part because the idea that a person's life belongs to them strikes me as obvious. And when something strikes me as obvious, a part of me suspects that I'm missing something important about it. Perhaps it's simply part f a broader distrust of my own intuitions. In any even, I'm sure the next article I find that hints at the topic will draw me in. We'll see what I find within it.

Moreso

 According to Axios, "Our lawmakers are more religious than we are."

The discrepancy — a trend also present in state legislatures — provides a window into why policies and debates on abortion, LGBTQ rights and other issues often don't reflect what Americans want.

It also shows how the nation's two-party system, with its partisan primaries, favors candidates who openly profess a faith — even as the number of people unaffiliated with a religion is growing.

This strikes me as a misreading of how politics works. There is always a part of elections that is pure popularity contest. Pew notes that "Atheists have negative feelings about Christian groups in the U.S., and the feeling tends to be mutual." And given that the American population contains far more Christians than atheists, one can see the difficulty this would create in an election cycle. Salman Rushdie noted that a person who openly professes non-religion couldn't be elected dogcatcher, and even though this was a while back, I suspect he's still correct in that assessment.

I poked around on the Pew website for a bit, but didn't find a breakdown on how religious affiliation maps to political party. It's understood that there are more evangelical Christians among the Republican party, and that the religiously unaffiliated tend to gravitate towards the Democrats, but a bit more formal data on the subject would be helpful. Mainly because I suspect that the religiosity of lawmakers reflects a split between the priorities (or "agendas" if you will) of primary voters and the public at large, rather than one between the lawmakers themselves and the public. Put another way, the reason why the Texas legislature has way more evangelicals than the population at large is less a matter of the primaries being partisan than the fact that evangelical voters are more likely to show up for the primaries in general.

I also suspect that when it comes to policies concerning religiously charged topics like, well, anything having to do with sex and sexuality, highly religious voters, being motivated to have civil and criminal law reflect what they understand to be in line with divine will, are much closer to being single-issue voters than the public at large. Given this, unless someone were to create a party that catered specifically to the non-religious, simply having more than two parties wouldn't change the nature of primaries. After all, even in states that don't have partisan primaries, like here in Washington, religious voters are more motivated to turn out than other demographics.

Elected officials are going to reflect the preferences of the most active voters in any participatory system. In that sense, they will always differ from the population at large.

Follow the Leader

There is an interesting tension between the ideas that media outlets are powerful purveyors of information such that they become "thought leaders" to their audiences, and the idea that they are businesses in a competitive industry, and as such, need to cater to their customers' tastes and desires if they are going to stay afloat.

A lot of the details that came out in US Dominion, Inc., Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation v. Fox Corporation point to the later. Which makes sense; I still think that Brooke Gladstone was correct in her assessment that it's unprofitable for news outlets to ignore their audience's emotions, assumptions and values.

Of course, the problem that one has as a news outlet is that it's unprofitable to openly acknowledge or have it suspected that one is directly responding to audience emotions, assumptions and values. "Pandering for profit" is just like any other form of pandering; it's ineffective when people start to believe that it's happening. It's just like any other situation in which someone is being told something that they want to hear; they have to believe that the person speaking to them more or less believes what they are saying. Otherwise, they may easily come to feel that they are on the receiving end of an attempt to manipulate them.

And that can be a fine line to walk.

Fox News has learned, I think, what a number of people who thought themselves important in the conservative world have learned. Namely, that they aren't the people who are leading the parade; they're just the ones in front. I'm not sure of the degree to which this will be understood by the American Left, which has its own strain of conspiratorial thinking centered around powerful figures in smoke-filled rooms who mislead people for selfish and antidemocratic ends.

But I think the understanding of "the media" as a business is an important one, whether it replaces, or lives side-by-side with the concept of media as thought leaders. So I'd like to see it catch on this time.

Impactful

There is, in legalese, a concept called "disparate impact." It refers to practices that are formally neutral, yet result in adverse effects for one or more groups protected under the law. In effect, it's a practice that is discriminatory in application or in its real-world effects. The point behind the concept is that intent to discriminate need not be shown. A good example of this might be the literal grandfather clauses that were used to prevent people from voting. Technically, they applied to everyone equally. But since they were enacted within two generations of the end of slavery in the United States, they prevented Black Americans from voting.

Of course, as with many Jim Crow-era restrictions of the type, the discriminatory intent was pretty clear. But the purpose of disparate impact rules was that intent was completely irrelevant. Take the Internal Revenue Service's algorithm for auditing taxpayers. From what researchers were able to determine, there are a number of factors that result in Black taxpayers being audited more often. But the IRS does not collect any data on the race of taxpayers; the selection criteria have the effect of targeting specific groups. In this case, because a single male with dependents and no business income who claims an Earned Income Tax credit is more likely to be audited, the fact that they are also much more likely to be Black results in a disparate impact.

But one of the things that I've noticed is that Black people, especially academics and intellectuals, seem to be loath to talk about disparate impact as such, preferring to prefer to such outcomes simply as racist, and to tie them to the more deliberate racism of the past and of modern individuals. And this, I think, is unhelpful.

One of the recurring criticisms of Black America leveled by conservatives, especially Black conservatives, is that Black people in the United States are too likely to hold a victim mentality. I don't see it being nearly as bad as many conservatives make it out to be, but it's not difficult to see a significant strain of learned helplessness in the way that a lot of people deal with the world, and a constant harping on racism can exacerbate that. When I listened to the episode of the Plant Money/Code Switch podcasts where they spoke to Georgetown Law Professor Dorothy Brown, whose work inspired the Stanford study, I figured that it might be enlightening. Instead, it was simply fatiguing. Professor Brown talks about a chapter in a book she wrote as being "the most depressing" because it notes that some 60% of Black students who start college don't finish. But to be honest, the entire book seemed like a series of downers.

The language of disparate impact may seem dry and clinical (legalese usually does), but that's better than being actively draining. At least as far as I'm concerned. The lingering aftereffects of the discriminatory attitudes and practices of the past do not strike most people as an American problem. One can make the point that vast human resources are going to waste on a daily basis; but one will have difficulty being heard over the sound of one of the highest per-capita incomes on Earth. And so while Black people may not have had much, if anything, to do with their current situation, it's a problem that we, as a broader community, are the only ones who have a real interest in solving. And a constant litany of woe gets in the way of doing that, especially when it hints at the idea that much of the rest of America actively benefits from, and therefore maintains the status quo. Walking away from the language of racism to describe every ill that befalls us won't solve the problem. But it may make it seem less daunting to work towards a solution.

This Week In Gunplay

So last week, a young man, sent to collect his brothers, went to a home on the wrong street. The homeowner, claiming to be frightened out of his wits by someone who literally walked up and rang the doorbell, fired through the door, seriously injuring the young man.

A few days later, a group of young people were out in the boonies, looking for a friend's home. They pulled into the driveway of the wrong house. Realizing their mistake, they turned around to continue their search. The homeowner, maybe figuring he couldn't miss this chance to make international news, shot at the retreating car, killing a woman passenger.

After that, a cheerleader, on her way home with teammates, was dropped off in a parking lot. She walked up to what she mistakenly thought was her car, and opened the door. There was a man inside and he shot at the young women, injuring two of them, and then followed them out of the parking lot when they fled.

Some children were playing in their neighborhood when a basketball rolls into a neighbors' yard. A six year old girl and her father are shot when the homeowner comes out shooting.

To be sure, these incidents are not the typical patterns of shootings in America. Most fatal gunshot wounds in the United States are self-inflicted, and most homicides are young men opening fire on one another. But unless someone famous in involved, or something genuinely out of the ordinary happens, those sorts of circumstances are far too common to be newsworthy.

Here in Washington State, Governor Inslee signed House Bill 1240, The Scary Headline Reduction Act. Sorry, AN ACT Relating to establishing firearms-related safety measures to increase public safety by prohibiting the manufacture, importation, distribution, selling, and offering for sale of assault weapons, and by providing limited exemptions applicable to licensed firearm manufacturers and dealers for purposes of sale to armed forces branches and law enforcement agencies and for purposes of sale or transfer outside the state, and to inheritors; reenacting and amending RCW 9.41.010; adding new sections to chapter 9.41 RCW; creating a new section; prescribing penalties; and declaring an emergency.

Not that I think the "assault weapons" ban is a bad idea on its face. But it doesn't really get at the heart of the problem. Mass shootings using semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines make headlines, but, just like the four items at the top of this post, they aren't part of the typical pattern of shootings in the United States.

But they have something in common with the more typical shooting; and that the understanding that violence is a suitable tool for dealing with problems, even trivial ones. One wonders what someone has to be thinking when, after a week of headlines about shootings, they decide that an errant basketball is an appropriate event to be met with deadly force.

Don't get me wrong, it was a nice Jeep, but I don't know that it's worth shooting someone over it.

The willingness to use violence (or to express approval of its use), often in situations in which it seems completely uncalled-for, has become entrenched in American society as a marker of manliness, and all that this entails. Someone unfamiliar walk up to your door? Rather than wait to understand what they might be up to, shoot first. Show that you're ready, willing and able to defend what's yours. Someone open your car door while you're hanging out in a parking lot? Chase them down and open fire. Let everyone know that you and your ride won't be messed with by a bunch of tired teenagers. Live in a boring suburb where nothing ever happens in a solidly blue state? Let everyone know just how macho, Republican and ready for a crime wave you are by slapping a sticker on your car that tells everyone you're ready to shoot to kill. That will show them.

And then, when something does go sideways, just explain to everyone that the random teen whom you've just shot multiple times was obviously a deadly threat to life and limb and you were so utterly terrified that deadly force seemed the only option. The problem isn't that Americans are stupid. It's that there always needs to be an enemy and someone whose skin color, politics or last name is different from one's own is a good enough candidate. And that enemy always has to stand ten feet tall, such that the slightest hesitation can spell doom.

The United States is supposedly one of the wealthiest nations on Earth. Even Mississippi, the state with the lowest per-capita income, surpasses France on that score. But a good chunk of the nation is too busy being frightened of, angry at or disgusted by the other chunk of the nation to enjoy any of it. Granted, legislating guns, either for or against, is cheap; growing the pie, or even altering the relative sizes of the slices, tends to be expensive. Virtue signalling is always less expensive than concrete action.

Rage, anxiety, ignorance and distrust directed at one another are not recipes for peaceful coexistence. But they do seem to be the ingredients of political success in the United States. Even when violence follows in their wake.

Listening

The political class of the United States tend to have one thing in common. When the public makes enough noise about something, they respond. This, of course, is not a universal. There are plenty of people who believe that the public can be unified in support of (or opposition to) something, and still be wrong, and it's likely that at least some of them will be elected to public office now and again. But, for the most part, legislatures, executives and even elected judges tend to be responsive to what they understand the public wants. After all, to do otherwise would see them voted out of office in their next election. And while some politician go that route, most simply resign their offices.

Understanding this power that the public at large possesses interferes with the carefully-cultivated victimization narrative that many members of the public have built up, even if they are loath to admit to it. That narrative, however hides on the primary problems with large-scale democracies and republics. The United States is a large place, both geographically and in terms of population; its citizens are Legion, numbering in the hundreds of millions, and we do not speak with one voice. And our governments, and the institutions that comprise them reflect that fractured reality back at us. Which means that on a personal level, government can seem remote, disinterested or even hostile, especially to those who are out of step with the general mainstream of public thought.

As much as they take the blame for things going wrong, politicians rarely lead in the commonly understood sense of the word. They posture and bluster for the television cameras because they know their supporters will see them. They hold to hard lines because they know that their base voets will back them. They spend significant portions of their time fundraising to build up massive campaign war chests because they know that unless they put themselves in the public's faces come election season, they will be ignored.

Many members of the public expect the people who are elected into government to behave as if they as individuals, who normally have such a tenuous grasp on the issues that they couldn't begin to describe them intelligently, are the only people who matter. When the public sentiment shifts away from individuals, and they representatives follow, people will accuse them of "flip-flopping" or "blowing in the political winds." When someone wants their representatives to vote with them, rather than the majority of the people they were elected to represent, they'll call them "cowards." When politicians fail to take on the task of evangelizing a certain group's priorities to people who have priorities of their own, it's "a lack of political leadership." After all, one can't please all of the people, all of the time.

The Justice Store

There is an article on the BBC's website about "Judge shopping;" the practice of filing cases in particular courts in order to ensure that it lands in front of a judge who is sympathetic to the filer's viewpoint or desired outcome.

One of the people quoted in the article is University of Michigan Law Professor Nicholas Bagley, who notes: "I think there's an intuition that we all share, that whether you win or lose your case shouldn't depend on the judge that you happen to draw."

And I think that while this may be broadly true, it might be worth digging a little more deeply into. The "Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine" the plaintiffs in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, likely feel that the outcome shouldn't depend on which judge hears a case, because all judges should be opposed to the practice of abortion to the point that they're willing to strike down laws or regulations that allow for it. Of course, they aren't the only ones who believe that they've hit upon a self-evident moral truth that any legitimate legal system should uphold.

The difference between going to the courts to effectively ask a question of law and going to the courts to ask that they impose one's predetermined answer on others is an important one. Especially when, as now, the court system itself doesn't appear to be interested in the distinction. If the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine did specifically pick the venue because they new that the case would end up in front of Judge Kacsmaryk, it's unlikely the judge himself had no suspicion of this, given that his preferences concerning abortion are well known. And that willingness to be an instrument for people and organizations that judges agree with is what undermines the idea that justice is impartial.

Respectable Showing

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, is forming an exploratory committee for a run for President of the United States. Will he actually run? I don't know. I suspect, if the committee is serious about doing the job, and not simply stroking Senator Scott's ego, that it will tell him that his path to the Presidency is very narrow; maybe too narrow to actually have room for him to walk it.

From where I sit right now, the basic problem I suspect the Senator is going to have if he does decide to run is that the rhetoric he'll need to get past Donald Trump for a Republican primary audience is markedly different than the language he'll need to deploy to win over unaligned voters in a general election. In order to have any hope of winning the Republican nomination, Senator Scott is likely going to have to lean into something that he claims to disdain; the politics of grievance. And this is different than noting those politics and point out what lays at the heart of the grievances.

Another problem that Senator Scott is likely to have is the rest of the Republican Party. Unless they really take him seriously as a candidate, their habit of holding him up whenever they want to say, "See, we're not racists, we elected this guy for Senate," is going to make him seem like the token that he claims that he isn't.

I'm not sure how Senator Scott's message of Respectability Politics is going to play broadly. It will likely make him at least somewhat popular with White conservatives, as it tends to be part of a racial blame game. But whether he can cast that as something that will really put an end to the damaging discrimination that people perceive in their lived experience is another matter entirely. Doing away with affirmative action because it's discrimination in the name of fighting discrimination is one thing. A credible plan to expand the pool of opportunity broadly enough that there's no use for affirmative action is quite another. And if Senator Scott decides to lean into the idea that if he could do it, then anyone can with the right work ethic, he's going to alienate people.

Recently, Senator Scott has been playing the role of Culture Warrior, warning people against "the radical Left" and "the blueprint to ruin America." And this makes sense, as he's going to have to show that he can out-Republican the rest of the field, especially if he's decided that he's going to focus on attacking Democrats in the primary election, rather than making the case that he's a better person for the job than Nikki Haley or Donald Trump. But he won't be able to double down on that and win a general election; it's simply not likely to pick up enough otherwise non-partisan voters, unless the Democrats find themselves with a poor candidate. (And the fact that he's the current President aside, Joe Biden could turn out to be a poor candidate this time around.) The distance from a spot to the right of most Republican voters to a place in the center is simply too far.

Envision

There are, I am told, five "noteworthy" candidates for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. One is, unsurprisingly, Donald Trump. The other four are:

• Nikki Haley
• Asa Hutchinson
• Vivek Ramaswamy    
• Corey Stapleton

Otherwise known as people who have zero chance of becoming President of the United States in 2024. Even though Corey Stapleton was the first to announce his candidacy, I'd never heard of him until I looked up the list (and that was mainly because I couldn't recall Vivek Ramaswamy's name). All four of these candidates are going to be running campaigns that will be somewhere between hopeless, utterly quixotic or just simply ignored. The base of the Republican party is currently too enamored of Donald Trump and/or Trumpism (or MAGAism, if you prefer) to give any of them a first thought, let alone a second.

But this is true of most candidates for President, and a lot of other offices, if the voters' guides that the state puts out are any indication. So I always wonder why they do it. Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson at least have some name recognition within the party. But Governor Hutchinson is running to be the sort of Republican whose willingness to ignore the anger and fears of the Republican electorate is what led to Donald Trump being elected the first time. There's no sign that Republican voters are ready to give his brand of Conservatism another bite of the apple. Vivek Ramaswamy strikes the correct Culture War notes, but so does Donald Trump.

There may be something to be said for delusion, but all four of the contenders strike me as reasonably intelligent people; one doesn't get to be Ambassador to the United Nations or a successful businessman by being completely out of touch with reality as most people tend to experience it.

And that leaves me with a certain level of curiosity as to what any of them expect to attain by running for President that they couldn't attain without it. Of course, I could be completely wrong about their chances. After all, no-one really took Donald Trump seriously when he announced back in 2015, either.

And that raises the question: What do these people (and a few others) think that they see in the Republican electorate that other people don't? Donald Trump saw a culture of grievance and victimhood that was ripe for exploitation (and he did so, masterfully). Counting Trump out was to either overlook or ignore the bitterness and outrage that other people had been calling out for years.

I don't consider myself a particularly watchful or astute political observer. Sure, I remember the hullabaloo over Barack Obama saying, back in 2008:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

But I didn't pay enough attention to the speech itself to realize that it was an accurate portrayal of the Republican electorate of the time; that only became clear to me once Donald Trump made grievance politics the order of the day. So perhaps there is some other speech that I should have paid more attention to, in order to understand why people who otherwise appear to be simply wasting their time think they have a viable path to the White House.

And so I'm curious. I'm curious what they see that others don't. And whether it's out there in the quantities they think it is.

Not Like The Others

Perhaps the greatest difficulty with moral (or moralized) distinctions is that they can make it difficult for a person to portray what they are doing as being different from what other people do, without also making the case that is it better.

I've been noodling on this idea recently, because I was considering what is sometimes termed the crab mentality. The metaphor was first laid out me by my father, who was using it to explain what he saw as dysfunction in the broader Black community. I've run into it several times since then, and a recent article I was reading on Aeon about "momfluencers," and other forms of family-based influencers.

The common thread is that whether people are comparing a group to a bucket of crabs or noting how people will make questionable choices to satisfy a craving for online engagement and material resources, the critic rarely includes themselves in the actual group of people being criticized. When my father first told me of the crab mentality, he was one of the crabs attempting to break out of the bucket, and being pulled down by others. When Ms. Sebag-Montefiore notes that people will share their children with the world in order to garner attention for brands and material comfort for themselves, she pointedly exempts herself from all of it: the "sharenting," the quest for validation and money and, most pointedly, the quest for self-esteem via buying the "right" brands.

There isn't anything wrong with this, of course, but the moralistic tone that attaches to metaphors like the crab mentality or noting "I have decided that I don’t need their products, or their inspiration. I don’t need to see how they live their lives to know how I should live mine," carry the whiff of condescension. Simply because they do. If I have a place in a crab mentality, I suspect that it isn't that of the bravely non-conformist crab. (I don't know what role a cranky, curmudgeonly crab might have in it.) And what's shielded me from influencer culture is mostly a faint disdain for youth that's (perhaps ironically) persisted from my own youth. But I'm not sure that I understand how to describe my own life choices as simply being different, because they work for me, rather than better, because I'm somehow a more ethical person.

Last One In

Here's a question, if perhaps a somewhat abstract, or maybe even obtuse, one: What is the purpose of values?

At the end of March, I came across an article on Axios that proclaimed: "Rot of nation's core values quantified by single poll." (How's that for click-bait?) The article is a pious lament of the fact that the share of respondents who told a Wall Street Journal/National Opinion Research Center (NORC) survey that they found patriotism, religious faith, having children, community involvement, tolerance for others et cereta to be "very important" went down, while the number of respondents citing money as being "very important" went up. This, the author concludes, is evidence that "The poll quantifies a generational and political divide that shows a rot at the very soul of our nation."

First off, the nation's core values have likely always been in flux, especially if one measures them by how people actually behaved, rather than what they would tell someone else. The idea that all people should be treated equally before the law is, effectively, a rather new idea in the United States. Equality being an active value, rather than simply something that people paid lip service to, came about because people's understanding of their interests changed.

And "character" is determined by the way that people act in furtherance of their interests. If people can achieve their interests without seeing a need to be as outwardly (or even inwardly) patriotic as their parents or grandparents, why should this be considered some sort of national rot? Would I prefer that Americans were bigger on tolerance for others? Sure. But if it doesn't get people what they want (and in a society that exhibits low social trust, it clearly doesn't) then it's going to subside.

And that's the problem with the formulation of "a rot at the very soul of our nation." It relies on an understanding that the outward (and often very intolerant) religiosity, for instance, of prior generations of Americans was something they saw as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end that they found worthwhile. Birth rates aren't declining because of some sickness of the soul. Instead, children have gone from an economic necessity to an expensive luxury good. And some people have legitimately found ways to be happy and fulfilled in their lives without being parents. Why should this be considered a bad thing? It's not like the planet, or even the country is going to run out of children anytime soon. And if the nation had no problem importing millions of young families to settle them on land that had formerly been inhabited by the Native Americans, why is there a problem with allowing young families to come to the country now?

Treating core values (and the things that one may not want to be core values) as means, rather than ends, is the trick to keeping them healthy. Want more community involvement? Then community involvement has to come with benefits, and not simply people being shut out from things if they don't play ball. There really isn't a chicken and egg problem here. Piety simply has to make way for understanding how people determine what's important to them.

Mistargeted

 

Forbes has been taking something of a kicking recently, with people sharing the above image on LinkedIn and then declaring that the magazine is obviously incompetent to have featured people an institutions that turned out to be fraudulent, failures or both.

But Forbes is a financial magazine. Not a financial auditor, a financial regulator nor an enforcement body. They have no power to force businesses or individual to turn over their books for scrutiny or to pry into the exact mechanisms that a business might use to conduct day-to-day operations. For Forbes to have seen what was coming, it would have required a level of access that no magazine would ever be expected to have, and that none of Forbes' critics would want the media to have into their own affairs.

True, there are some warning signs that it's reasonable to suggest that a savvy media organization could have found; FTX's lack of internal governance procedures, or Silicon Valley Bank's high exposure to duration risk and uninsured deposits. But a lot of other organizations, like auditors and regulators could, and maybe should, have known about them, too. After all, they have ways of ensuring much deeper access to the inner workings of an organization than a magazine does.

Guess Who's Back

So, I was in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood yesterday, and guess what?

Even though the tents are still gone, one or more homeless persons with a pair of campers have moved onto the street. (It's not evident in the picture, but the two campers are chained together. You can see it if you look closely.) I'm not sure of what it is about this particular block that draws people here. I know there is a food bank in the area, but I suspect it's about a thirty-five to forty-five minute walk away. So there must be something else that they feel the need to be in proximity to. I would guess the local hospital, but it's a few blocks away; maybe the police are more diligent about preventing long-term camping in the hospital's immediate environs. There has to be something, as the empty area where other homeless people have been setting up their RVs is only a few miles to the south of this spot, and it strikes me as much less likely to result in a towing.

In any event, clearing the tents, and putting up barriers to new ones, only solved part of the problem. Actually, let me rephrase that. It only moved part of the problem. There are homeless people who still see a need to be in this area, and they still understand themselves as being in the right when they use the space. We'll see if they manage to antagonize the local businesses and residents enough that the city of forced to remove them again. Something tells me that they will.

It's worth noting that the city is in a tough spot. The fact that land for new housing has been scarce for the past 20 years, give or take, has resulted in home prices being very high, and many people simply are not interested in that state of affairs ending any time soon. The people who own the local housing stock view those valuations as money rightfully theirs, people who have just bought in aren't interested in being under water to help the homeless and the jurisdictions that collect property taxes need the revenue. And without anywhere nearby that has lower home costs and access to relatively well-paying jobs, the area simply shuffles the homeless from place to place, as they wear out what little welcome they have in one place after another.