Unreal

I was reading an essay about one person's ethical qualms about eating lab-grown meat. The broad point they were making as that eating "replica" meat showed a lack of respect for the animals being replicated. By way of analogy, the author presented the example of "Mr. X" and a sex-doll designed to replicate a woman. "Imagine Mr X" requests the author, "doing something to a woman-replicant doll that would be (whatever it was) undeniably degrading if done to an actual woman." This is unethical, because "Mr X's behaviour towards the woman-replicant represents a failure of respect towards womankind."

It reminded me of an online debate I had with some readers of The Atlantic (back when The Atlantic still allowed reader comments). about an article (now locked behind a subscription wall) about a man who owned a pair of Real Dolls, one he considered his wife, and the other his mistress. According to the subtitle "Davecat lives with his wife and mistress, both dolls, and thinks synthetic partners are ideal for those who don't want to deal with humans' inconsistencies." The debate centered on whether Davecat had managed to dodge acting unethically by effectively pretending that "Sidore Kuroneko" and "Elena Vostrikova" were the sort of impossibly pliant and consistent women that he felt he could have a relationship with, or if the desire for companionship that avoided dealing with other humans' (or maybe specifically women's) inconsistencies was unethical in itself.

I was on team ethical, mainly because the alternative struck me as a bit too close to thoughtcrime. Besides, I (and I suspect, a lot of other people) could sympathize with Davecat wanting a partner (or partners) would never lie, cheat or be otherwise disagreeable or critical; even if, in the course of the debate, there were people who felt that braving such slings and arrows were the price of admission to a life of something other than abject loneliness. And so in the case of lab-grown meat, I look at it the same way; a person can have their respect for living animals, and eat their hamburger, too. Insisting that the only complete abstention from meat is the only ethical way of life, because anything else is disrespectful, again, raises the specter of thoughtcrime.

And the problem with thoughtcrime is how does on prove oneself innocent, given that it's not possible to conclusively demonstrate what one is thinking? Not to mention the simple fact that demanding people think a certain way does nothing for anyone else. An animal is no more harmed or injured (let alone slaughtered) by a person eating a synthetic burger than they are by that person eating lettuce. At least with the cases of "Mr. X" or Davecat, one can make the point that living women might be put out or made uneasy by their relationships with their replicant partners. But even that can be iffy. I've met any number of people who are disturbed by the idea that others consider their values or spirituality to be false or mistaken. I am unfamiliar with a school of ethics that, on such a basis, claims that in the face of such discomfort, others must convert.

But still, it was an interesting piece, and I'm glad that I came across it. Understanding the thinking of others, and how people connect seemingly disparate ideas, broadens the mind.

It's Not Me, It's You

During his remarks, Scott said the nation was "standing at a time for choosing: victimhood or victory? Grievance or greatness? I choose freedom and hope and opportunity."

Tim Scott, the next White House hopeful

Scott criticized Democrats on a number of issues, like education and public school funding.

"They're more interested in keeping those kids trapped in their schools and trapped out of their futures," Scott said.

Republican candidates hope to win in Iowa as they look to topple Trump in 2024

Maybe it's just me, but accusing Democrats of having an interest in poor education and poor life outcomes for people sure seems like indulging in grievance to me. What other point is there to calling out people as actively working against the interests of the public other than to stoke a sense of grievance?

It’s also not clear whether voters will buy Scott’s message of unity and forgiveness at a time of hyper-political polarization.

Tim Scott’s Uphill Battle To Win The Republican Nomination

If Senator Scott is the voice of forgiveness and unity, I'm pretty sure that those concepts have lost most, if not all, of their meaning.

But I do find it interesting how the steady drumbeat of partisanship has changed how people see the world. Senator Scott's message is viewed as a positive one, despite, as one would expect from a Republican office-holder, the open attacks on Democrats. Writing for FiveThirtyEight, Alex Samuels notes: "His vision is relentlessly optimistic, an implicit rebuke of the grievance politics that have taken over the Republican Party — though it’s unclear if the party wants to pivot in his direction." Partisan grievance has become so commonplace that it's effectively invisible. Senator Scott limiting his complaints to an opposing political party, rather than the world at large, is seen as unusually optimistic in a candidate for President.

Personally, I tend to lump Senator Scott in with the long list of other hopeless candidates for the Republican nomination. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have a shot at it, but I suspect that the only way that Donald Trump doesn't make it into the general election in eighteen months is that he drops dead (or is otherwise knocked out of the race due to health or age) between now and then. But stranger things have happened, so it's very premature to write him off now. I have to admit that I don't normally pay much attention to the actual details of how candidates run their campaigns, as it's taken on a "if you've seen one, you've seen them all" flavor over the past few cycles. But if Senator Scott (or anyone else, for that matter) manages to make it past Donald Trump, he's going to be faced with the need to walk back some of his comments about people who aren't fellow Republicans, while not giving those fellow Republicans reason to believe that he's bowing out of the fights they want to pick. That job might be made easier by people's lack of enthusiasm for President Biden, but the challenge will still be there.

Senator Scott's basic message, as I understand it, is a simple one. The United States has enough opportunity to offer everyone. Policies that make opportunities more available to Black Americans and others who have been historically left out will allow them to improve their material conditions substantially and rapidly, such that policies of wealth transfer, which Senator Scott finds fundamentally unfair, won't be necessary and the lingering effects of past discrimination will be completely erased. Like most Republicans, he buys into the idea that the Democratic Party is too wedded to ideas of paternalism and control to implement policies that would result in less neediness on government programs. And there's nothing wrong with this messaging, for the most part. I take exception to the idea that half of the nation's political establishment is actively malicious, but it's a concept that's not going anywhere. Presuming that he actually has to answer questions about it, where I think that Senator Scott is going to have a hard time winning over skeptics is in actually pointing to areas in which Republicans have managed to create the post-scarcity society he talks about. Republican orthodoxy has long been concerned with increasing the size of the pie by growing the largest slices, even at the direct expense of the smaller ones, and I suspect that Senator Scott is going to be left needing to blame Democrats for his inability to produce concrete examples of the prosperity that he claims is there for the taking. And it's hard to keep partisan grievance from becoming personal grievance.

Donald Trump's path to fame and political achievement was a simple one: find a fight, and then openly support one side or the other. And in situations where this wasn't a workable strategy, he foundered. Senator Scott appears to want to avoid that, but the route that he seems to taking will, in fact, lead him right through there. Saying that the Democratic Party is full of people who would rather be in power than work for the prosperity of the nation as a whole is one thing. But I've had a lot of conversations with partisans in my day, and it doesn't take long for them to question what sort of person votes for a bad politician. Soon, the idea that Democratic voters are inappropriately irrational, gullible or deliberately Evil takes hold, and the grievances become personal again. Whether Senator Scott is ignoring this, or believes that he can somehow head it off I don't know. But I suspect that it will undermine him, presuming he manages to climb very high with it in the first place.

Q and A

I found a somewhat interesting article on the Prindle Post, entitled: Your Political Party Isn’t Right About Everything: Intellectual Humility and the Public Square.

The author, to demonstrate the effects of partisanship, asks five questions:

1. Is abortion morally wrong in most circumstances?
2. Should homosexual couples be allowed to marry?
3. Is illegal immigration into the United States a serious problem?
4. Should the United States federal minimum wage be raised?
5. Is it okay to consider race when making college admissions decisions?

He notes that there is no particular reason why answers to these should be strongly correlated. But, to a degree, they are. Mainly because they're partisan questions, although same-sex marriage has become less so in recent years. One doesn't have to listen to a lot of stump speeches or watch many political television shows to understand that these are the sorts of questions that define partisan identity. Personally, I'm not so sure that, given American history, that these are questions that one would expect to be independent of one another, but i take the author's point.

As one can guess from the title, the author counsels that people "become more intellectually humble" as a corrective to partisan division. It's a suggestion based on a simple idea:

But if we do not have a strong reason to think that Democrats are consistently better at answering political questions than Republicans, or vice versa, then we are faced with a bit of a dilemma. If our opinions on many complex and unrelated political issues are best explained by our party affiliation, and we have no reason to think that one side is right more often than the other, then maybe we ought to be less confident in our political beliefs.

And here's where I think that the piece misunderstands modern politics. Take the first question that he asks "Is abortion morally wrong in most circumstances?" That's more than just a political question; it's a moral one, and it illustrates why partisanship has become so intractable. To the person who believes that aborting a fetus is murdering an unborn child, or the person who believes that restricting the practice is tantamount to forcing women to give birth against their will, calling for intellectual humility is effectively asking people to abandon their commitments to right and wrong. And the case can be made that the rest of the questions have become entwined with moral salience as well. And once people become convinced that opposing partisans are always on whichever side is morally wrong, they're even more unlikely to buy into the idea that the parties are equally good at answering important questions.

It's one thing for people to admit to not having all of the answers in the face of specific policy questions. It's easy to rule out a federal minimum wage of $4 an hour or $40 an hour; those are the stances of committed ideologues. But whether $7.50 and hour is better or worse than $8.00 is something that many people have difficulty with, if for no other reason than their day job doesn't require them to think much about it. But as to which is the moral imperative, leaving the wage where it is, or raising it to a "living wage," it's hard to find people who have an opinion one way or the other, but don't think that they understand enough to stand by whatever conviction they have.

Accordingly, in order to reduce the rancor of partisanship, and especially negative partisanship, one would first need to remove the moral salience of the issues that drive partisan activism. That is, I suspect, something of an unlikely outcome.

On the Horizon

For all that GPT4 and ChatGPT have kicked off a round of doomsaying that artificial intelligence will decimate the job market and potentially even result in the extinction of humanity, it's important to remember that thus far, what we have a very powerful and sophisticated version of Autocomplete. General Artificial Intelligence, which is what so many people are worried about, it still some ways in the future; which, to be sure, it's always been.

For right now, what people consider to be AI is of limited use. Attaching a consumer-grade Large Language Model to the Bing search engine results in something that couches a non-answer to the questions I've asked it in natural-seeming language. Which is interesting, but perhaps more proof that it really isn't intelligent, in the sense of having the ability to use the information at its disposal to formulate useful answers to novel questions.

Likewise, a blindingly obvious phishing e-mail landed in my Outlook inbox. One would think that a genuine AI would be immensely helpful in detecting these sorts of things, this providing a market advantage.

So I think that I'll take a pass on the LLM hype for the time being, and see what the next big innovation has to offer. I appreciate the concerns of the people who tell us that we should be preparing now, mainly because at the current state of the art, there is still time to be prepared.

Detoxed

Let me start by admitting that I don't get it.

I suppose that what Steve Kelly is getting at is the idea that "toxic masculinity" is simply a lifestyle choice, and one that's somewhat appealing to a particular group of women. Okay... so? I'm pretty sure that there are men out there who prefer women with chins... not to mention skulls that aren't a full quarter of their body height.

But I guess what this cartoon is really about is Mr. Kelly leaning into the idea that that "toxic" and "traditional" (read: "stereotypically conservative") masculinity are one in the same. This sort of redefinition of terms that originate with people that the stereotypical conservative doesn't like is common enough that if I'm talking with a conservative acquaintance and a term like "wokeness" or "toxic masculinity" comes up, I immediately stop them and ask them to define the term for me, so I know what they're referring to. Otherwise, things are likely to go South quickly, as we talk past one another. Which, to be fair, happens often enough anyway. Usually because this or that conservative thinker swears that the idea that "toxic masculinity" refers to something genuinely corrosive is yet another hateful Leftist plot against America, and the person I'm talking to refuses to entertain that their favorite pundit may not have their facts straight.

But even with that, this is just a guy with noodles for arms and questionable fashion sense. I've met people who look every inch the part of urban hipster but would never have anything to do with Liberal politics. Physique and clothing choices aren't really very good indicators of broader social attitudes.

And I guess that's why I don't get it. The guy in the cartoon could be anyone. Sure, he'll never make a Marlboro advertisement, but the presumption that he's somehow incapable of espousing or living "traditional" masculine values is to make that box even more confining than it already is.

Cliffhanger

Earlier this week, The Week published a short editorial with a simple question as its subtitle. What if, the magazine asks, images of mass shooting victims were published? It returns to the idea, asking some variation of the question, or about specific incidents, six times in the two paragraph body of the piece.

No effort, however, is made to answer it. One can imagine a simple experiment to test a hypothesis: publish some of the many photos that are taken of these scenes and see if that sparks any changes. The Week itself is unlikely to attempt such an approach due to, among other rationales, the "the sensibilities of readers." But another reason the magazine gives is: "preserving the dignity of the dead." But if, as the editorial hints, more members of the public seeing the images of the untimely dead might make it less likely that the victims of shootings would "be written off as the regrettable but necessary price of 'freedom'," that seems to indicate that "the dignity of the dead" is more valuable than the lives of the living.

But I'm not sure that either is particularly treasured by American society at large. While the readership of The Week may be disinclined to see bloody pictures of shooting victims, the response to photographs of the shootings in Allen, Texas being posted online shows that plenty of other people are interested in them. And in a nation where violence is often viewed as simply another tool for solving problems, including some that come across as trivial in the grand scheme of things, lives tend to be considered cheap. Especially those with the misfortune to be shot by someone who is disinterested in a body count.

Because why only worry about the images of those killed in mass shootings, with military-appearing weapons? A lone person murdered with a revolver or a double-barreled shotgun is just as dead, and just as much of a tragedy, as someone who is one of many. Why not ask why more images of those who die alone from gunshots are not published?

I don't know if I would look at such photographs myself. I'm squeamish when it comes to the sight of blood. (I don't do horror movies, either, for that same reason.) But, as someone, who is already past the point of seeing American gun culture as worth expending any effort to defend, I'm not sure that I'm one of the people that The Week's William Falk thinks needs to see such photos. Although I suspect there are activists out there who would advocate that I should be shown a steady stream of such photographs until I agreed to joint the cause.

I am, I think, getting ahead of myself, however. Because since the editorial declines to answer the questions it raises, there are nothing more than hints of what might happen. As much as I'm not a fan of journalism as advocacy, if one is going to advocate, advocate. Rather than simply suggest that afflicting the comfortable with gruesome images of gunshot victims would change the public calculus, state it, then stand by whatever decision one makes after that. It's not a tactic that I would engage in myself; as I noted, I'm squeamish, and am not the sort of inflict on others that which I shy away from. A New York Times article from a year ago "Should We Be Forced to See Exactly What an AR-15 Does to a 10-Year-Old?" (which Mr. Falk may have cribbed from) does a much better job of actually addressing the question, giving arguments pro and con, and then coming to a conclusion. Personally, I feel that the idea that politicians should see the photos lets the general public off the hook, but I understand the rationale.

At the Times article points out, in the end, it's more about people than photographs. And for all that mass shootings (however one defines them) tend to make breathless headlines, they're rare enough that most people are quite distant from the dead and injured. And they're farther still from most of the everyday survivors (or not) of gunshots. And not even the most graphic photographs can always bridge that gap.

Daily Bread

So where I live, in a quiet section of the Seattle suburbs, there are a number of different places where one can buy groceries and the like. There is Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Target, Costco (although Costco really isn't a grocery store),  Safeway, Albertsons, Haggen, Quality Food Centers (QFC) and Fred Meyer. Expand the radius out farther, and you'll find Wal Mart, Win Co, PCC, Grocery Outlet and some other independent stores.

QFC and Fred Meyer are both owned by the Kroger Company, the largest supermarket operator in the United States. Safeway, Albertsons and Haggen are all owned by Albertsons Companies, Incorporated, which is the second largest. And now they want to merge. Supposedly to retain their ability to compete against their smaller rivals. In order to appease regulators, the combined chain has promised to sell off a few hundred of its stores. This is nothing new. When Albertsons and Safeway merged back in 2015, they divested a number of stores. It went poorly. The American Antitrust Institute noted, according to the National Law Review, that "several stores were sold to an untested rival that could not maintain them, and, ultimately, most of these stores were shuttered or reacquired by Albertsons." That "untested rival" was Comvest Partners, a private-equity firm out of Florida, which had purchased Haggen. Under Comvest, the newly-expanded Haggen foundered badly, and, less than a year later, went into bankruptcy. Which is how Haggen came to be owned by Albertsons.

Thus did a divestiture, mandated by the Federal Trade Commission as a means to maintain competition, result in even further consolidation of the local grocery industry.

I bring all of this up because of the list which with I started off this post. While there are about a dozen names on the list, the Albertsons and Kroger-owned stores are the lion's share. Generally speaking, the "neighborhood grocery store" is going to be one of those. The two nearest stores to me are both Safeways. And that means that, more than likely, this is going to be an area where the combined company sells or closes stores. Amazon might purchase some of them, to add to it's grocery holdings. Whole Foods, however, is already a pricier and lower quality shopping experience than it had been earlier.

And the uncertainty over what is going to happen is beginning to worry people. Grocery workers are worried for their jobs. Neighborhoods are concerned about their access to grocery stores in their local areas; Albertsons kept leases on some shuttered stores, and entered into restrictive covenants on others to prevent other grocers from moving in. One neighborhood in Bellingham won't be able to use a former Albertsons location for another grocery store until 2038.

Given how thoroughly the FTC allowed the last merger to go sideways, I'm expecting that this one, if it goes through, will also be a disaster for many people. If the FTC didn't think to explicitly disallow openly anti-competitive practices like extending the leases on closed locations to prevent other companies from operating in areas vacated by the merged company last time, it seems likely that they'll miss something that turns out to be important this time as well.

And the ideas that the nation's number one and two grocery chains are merging to a) preserve their ability to stay competitive and b) provide better value to customers seem like a child saying that they really, really, need to have whatever it is they saw in a store and that they promise to be good if they're allowed to have it. It doesn't take a degree in child development to understand that they're saying what they think people want to hear.

In any event, I will admit to a morbid curiosity to see just how badly everything goes. Companies in the United States have a habit of putting metaphorical guns to the public's head whenever they want something. Accordingly, I suspect that even Chairwoman Lina Khan's open criticism (see below) of the earlier merger may not be enough to prevent this one.

The [divestiture] remedy in the Albertsons/Safeway case is arguably even harder to fathom. To allay the FTC’s concerns, the merging entities sold 146 Albertsons stores in towns and cities in the Western United States, where they competed with a Safeway, to a small supermarket chain called Haggen. Following this acquisition, the number of Haggen stores increased from 18 to 164. Even a casual observer could have predicted that Haggen would have great difficulty expanding its storefronts nearly ten-fold in a very short period of time. The skeptics have been proven right. Haggen struggled to integrate the new stores and, despite its reorganization efforts in bankruptcy, may be forced to liquidate. Underscoring how the remedy backfired, Albertsons has reacquired a number of the stores it sold through the bankruptcy process.

(As an aside, as someone who lives in the area, and has shopped at Haggen for most of the time I've been out here, Ms. Khan's statement that "Haggen struggled to integrate the new stores" is putting it very mildly. One would not have been considered foolish at the time to bet that Haggen would simply fold.)

Nothing to Fear But...

Even if you're an individual with no health risks and you catch the virus, there are things to worry about: just plain feeling awful is possible even if you're not high-risk. You might have to miss work. You run a risk of long COVID. And then there's the possibility you could transmit the virus to others at risk of severe COVID and death from the virus.
Coronavirus FAQ: 'Emergency' over! Do we unmask and grin? Or adjust our worries?

All true enough. But none of this, other than "long COVID," is unique to a SARS-CoV-2 infection. But this is National Public Radio, and NPR's audience, being left of center in the United States, is primed to see constant vigilance concerning SARS-CoV-2 as a marker of conscientiousness.

The thing that I've found strange for the past three years is the idea that many people seem to have that serious respiratory viruses simply didn't exist before SARS-CoV-2 came along, despite the earlier panics over emergent diseases like, well SARS. You know, the illness caused by SARS-CoV-1. Like the various strains of SARS, any number of other illnesses spread pretty quickly in crowded conditions, like cities. So It's not clear to me why precautions like wearing a mask in public or carrying hand sanitizer wherever one goes aren't simply held out as useful things a person can do if they are worried about illnesses in general. After all, there's nothing unique about SARS-CoV-2 that renders it uncommonly susceptible to vaccines, for instance. After all, there are photos of people wearing face masks during the influenza pandemic of 1918. And, as so many people have been quick to note, SARS and influenza are not the same.

As has been made clear by Fox News, media outlets tend to be beholden to their audiences. And, as a publicly-funded entity, NPR is perhaps more beholden to it's audience than most. But even noting that, it seems mired in a need to always present the 2019 coronavirus as a singular threat, unmatched by any other possible pathogen, rather than simply one of any number of virii and/or bacteria that have potentially serious health consequences attached to them. And I'm not sure that I see the need. If someone wants to go all out to avoid catching the common cold, more power to them. Being sick is a drag, even when it's not particularly serious. Constantly hyping up the potential complications of a single illness in the name of justifying precautions seems like little more than a recipe for anxiety. But maybe that's what the audience tunes in for.

Party Payoff

"Call it the Trump Law of Inverse Reactions:" says a story in Axios. "Everything that would seem to hurt the former president only makes him stronger."

But I think that there's a better name for the phenomenon: The Partisan's Dividend.

This is a play on the concept of the Liar's Dividend, which, put simply, is the idea that a person (or organization) can discredit true, and damaging, information by pointing to instances of fakery and then claiming that the information about them is also faked, then taking advantage of the benefit of the doubt on behalf of people who would withhold or withdraw their support were they more certain that the damaging information were accurate.

A Partisan's Dividend works in much the same way. In an environment where there are constant claims that accusations against a politician, their allies and/or supporting organizations are nothing more that politically motivated fabrications, a politician can maintain support in the face of what would otherwise be career-ending accusations or actions. See this article on Republican women's reactions to the verdict in the second E. Jean Carroll vs. Donald J. Trump case in the BBC.

This accusation is only meant to hurt his character in his upcoming run for the 2024 election. This is serious.

To be sure, this isn't the best example, as the person quoted is a committed Republican, as opposed to someone who might go either way, but it illustrates the point. And Donald Trump is unlikely to be the only person who benefits from this effect. Republican efforts to tie President Biden to any misdeeds of his son Hunter are also likely to run into the idea that they're simply attempting to damage an opposing partisan, rather than actually having genuine evidence of wrongdoing on behalf of the President.

And it's likely that, as time goes on, the effect will become stronger, and both parties will have more and more difficulty convincing people who do not already support them that the other side has actually done anything wrong. Which means that it becomes more and more likely that politicians will actually commit crimes and the like, knowing that they can muddy the waters by claiming investigations into their actions are bad-faith partisan attacks.

When partisan loyalty is what brings home the goods, it's rational for people to become more loyal partisans, even if it eventually results in blind loyalty. Which simply makes the voices directed at those who don't give their loyalty even more strident.

Read All About It

"Allen, Texas mall shooting: How graphic videos spread on Twitter" proclaimed the headline. It was one of four stories the BBC had up on its web page about the incident. And it seemed ironic for the BBC to be critical of Twitter for allowing graphic images of the event to stay up for a day, while posting story after story themselves.

Clearly, people are, for whatever reason, interested in these stories. That's why so many news outlets are devoting space to it. And if it's big in the news media, both domestic and international, those people who are attempting to get the attention of the attention economy are also going to jump on that bandwagon. And some number of them will be rewarded well enough for it that others will want to emulate that next time.

So maybe the problem isn't that Twitter's moderation staff is too small for the job given to them. They're caught between powerful sets of incentives, from both the people posting the content, and the people looking for it. It's legitimate to say that large companies should be in the business of protecting people from themselves; but then it should be recognized what a difficult task that is.

Frenemies

For all that the political relationship between the United States and China has become bogged down in the two nations' differing ideas of their own interests, and that the political rhetoric is becoming more more and more acrimonious, it's worth noting that the interests of the two nations have not entirely diverged.

This is a Chinese-flagged bulk/dry cargo carrier picking up a load of grain at a Seattle terminal. An acquaintance of mine, who is something of a free-trade booster, is constantly telling anyone who will listen that trading partners rarely go to war with one another. Honestly, I have no idea how true that is; it comes across as the sort of thing that's true as a technicality, as it seems rational that nations would terminated trade with one another prior to a declaration of hostilities, lest ships be seized and the like.

But still, the sight of a Chinese vessel in Seattle speaks to the idea that, at least for now, the two nations haven't decided that it's not worth having anything to do with the other. We'll see how long that lasts, given the mutual distrust that colors the domestic politics on both sides of the Pacific.

As I am with people, I am always skeptical of the idea that nation-states have principles. Rather, they have interests. And it's pretty clear that the interests of the United States and China are on a collision course. Whether it's simple "great power rivalry" or differing understandings of the sovereignty of the Republic of China, the United States and the People's Republic of China have differing ideas of both how the world should be, and how the world would be were it not for the actions of the other.

Recently, celebrity investor Warren Buffet noted that: "It's imperative that both [the United States] and China understand what the game is and both can't push too hard, but both can prosper." Which makes sense. But it relies upon the idea that each nation can benefit when the other does better for itself. And I'm not so sure about that. Here in the United States, anti-China sentiment is picking up. According to a new study out recently, only 22% of Asian Americans feel that they belong in the United States. Not that they're alone in this, given that the numbers for Black and Hispanic Americans were only 24% and 25%, respectively. Personally, I suspect a political system that continuously tells people that they're at constant risk of abject poverty in order to motivate people to vote. But it could be any number of things.

Whatever the reason, the United States seems to be settling into the idea that China is the new Evil Empire and China seems to have cast the United States in that same role. Which is unfortunate. Combined with a lack of understanding of how the other sees the world, the citizens of both nations my wind up going along with (if not actively pushing) their governments in a move towards an open conflict which is likely to benefit neither side in the long run.

Wrapped

I'm not really concerned about the advance of Artificial Intelligence. As for why not, stop me if you've heard this one. And you likely have; I've seen it multiple times.

So there's this girl in school, and her and her classmates are being taught about the Salem Witch Trials, and the teacher comes up with this supposedly clever in-class activity that hints at the idea that maybe people were simply reacting to hearsay. The story ends with this aphorism: "Do not allow the negative and hateful efforts of some to divide and destroy us. We must remain united against those who would do so..!!"

The children are described as "teens" in the most recent version that I read. But we learn nothing else about them. What grade level, what school, where they are, what year this happened,  who the clever teacher was; none of that detail is included. When asked about the story, the person who posted it to LinkedIn said "I found the story on Facebook a few months ago. It was anonymous."

Like a lot of the "life lessons taught to children/teens" stories that pop up on LinkedIn, the story has enough holes in it that it seems reasonable to doubt its veracity. The children act in ways that don't make much sense, outside of the fact that they're the ones driving the story, the teacher comes up with a "clever" way to teach a life lesson that appears to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the events or concepts being used as a backdrop; and in each case valuable classroom time is being used to teach a philosophical point that is completely unrelated to any sort of academic pursuit.

But they speak to people, and so they are passed along and repeated. This is not to say that everyone treats them as fact, but the stories persist, even when the bland aphorisms at the heart if them make enough sense on their own.

Sure, with the help of AI, people can create a million dubious stories as wrappers for this or that concept that they want people to believe. But people are already doing that. So to a degree concerns about AI are concerns about the loss of external willpower; the same thing that telephone marketers complained about when the Do Not Call list was being created.

And there is nothing wrong with external willpower. Salespeople being prevented from cold-calling the general public or would-be social influencers being prevented from flooding social media with dubious messages are both fine. But people are always going to be looking for ways to reach what they believe to be a receptive audience, and laws and regulations won't be able to block them consistently, or forever.

If the only way that a person will listen to a message that seeks to speak out against "Shunning, scapegoating, stereotyping, and dividing" is if is shows up in a social media feed wrapped in a narrative or some sort, but then it is accepted uncritically, the problem isn't going to be a million random AI-generated narratives; it's the uncritical acceptance of narratives that feed a person what they want to hear.

Back to Normal

According to the BBC, "The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared that Covid-19 no longer represents a 'global health emergency'."

To which most of the rest of the world would answer "We could have told you that."

Not that the World Health Organization is beholden to public opinion when making decisions. But it's unknown how these decisions are made, and that is what I think drove (and still drives, apparently) a lot of conspiratorial thinking concerning the WHO and the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. No-one has asked me (and with good reason), but I would advise that organizations like this have published criteria for making these sorts of determinations. It could easily lead to a really complicated formula for figuring things out, but this is why mankind invented computers.

Would it fix anything? Maybe not. The arguments and conspiracy theories might simply shift to the data, with skeptics of interventions declaring that the data was faked. But for other people, there would be some opportunity to look at the information, and predict what's going to happen next. Here in Washington State, back when the state government put a "shelter in place" order into effect and ordered many "non-essential" businesses to close, I was making the same point; measures like that should not be seen as something that an administrator, or even the governor, arbitrarily decreed into existence. Data was being tracked, and made public, and so tying decisions to that data would have allowed people to predict what was coming, and therefore be prepared.

Social trust is a more fragile thing than I think it's been given credit for. A better ability of the general public to understand how the institutions that drive world events work my be helpful in building and maintaining that trust.

Unclear

The FBI defines a murder "cleared" if a suspect has been identified and arrested. But a murder can also be declared cleared through what's known as an "exceptional means." For example, if a suspect is dead, can't be extradited or prosecutors refuse to press charges.
More people are getting away with murder. Unsolved killings reach a record high

There's one problem with that. There is nothing on the FBI's page on Clearances, a page that the NPR article links to, that says that a prosecutor's refusal to press charges allows for a clearance by exceptional means. That page is from 2017, but the page from 2019, the most recent one, says the same thing. One of the criteria that must be met for a case to be cleared by exceptional means is:

Encountered a circumstance outside the control of law enforcement that prohibits the agency from arresting, charging, and prosecuting the offender.

A prosecutor declining to press charges wouldn't seem to be outside the control of law enforcement.

There's also the matter of a fairly obvious perverse incentive. If a case can be cleared when prosecutors refuse to press charges, why wouldn't police agencies arrest people who might fit some description or profile, refer them for prosecution, and then mark the case as cleared when the prosecutor declines due to lack of evidence. One would expect very high clearance rates this way. (Not that the current normal criteria don't inflate clearance rates somewhat... if someone "Turned over to the court for prosecution" counts for clearance of a case, the later acquittal of the suspect doesn't appear to matter.)

Not to say that a refusal to prosecute can't be a reason why a clearance by exceptional means would be granted. But it would seem that there would have to be something more at play than a prosecutor simply declining to press charges, since we expect prosecutors to decline to charge people when the case against them is very weak, or there are otherwise circumstances that lead prosecutors to be less confidence than police officers that they have the right person.

The criteria for case clearance is one of those things that likely only a small number of people outside of law enforcement or otherwise attached to or interested in the criminal justice system really pay attention to. So, if the public is going to be informed about the matter, it's important that media outlets describe it properly, because most people aren't going to have any other source of knowledge. I was actually familiar with the FBI's case clearance guidelines, so the NPR statement stood out for me when I saw it. Honestly, I suspect that I'm not the only one. I wouldn't be surprised to see a correction in the article tomorrow. But for now, the statement is dubious, perhaps because it's secondary to the human-interest story that drives the piece.