Inexhausted

"What," the graphic asked, "is Black Fatigue?"

It gave five answers:

• The fatigue that comes from the pain and anguish of living with racism every single day of your life.
• The constant fatigue of not knowing whether you or a loved one will come home alive.
• Enduring the ravages of intergenerational racism.
• Being fatigued by those who are surprised and express outrage (with no action) that such inequities still exist.
• The fear, frustration, anger and rage that is part of many Black people's daily lives.

I get where this sort of thing is coming from, even as I wonder about its overall effectiveness.

I'm of the opinion that it's not helpful to give other people a veto over one's peace of mind, because they're likely to exercise that veto. Not out of spite or animus, but simply as a side effect of looking out for themselves and attending to the priorities that are important to them. And I suspect that for at least a sizable minority of the American public, if racism were to end tomorrow, they wouldn't notice its absence. And that means that it isn't a priority for them; they have problems of their own to worry about. Accordingly, it being a constant weight on one's shoulders is a recipe for unhappiness, because it's not likely to go anywhere on anything approaching a reasonable timeframe. Depending on who one might ask, or how one defines the phenomenon, racism in the sense that we understand it today dates back from anywhere from the Middle Ages to Classical Greece. It's likely not going anywhere anytime soon.

The fact that many Americans (of all racial backgrounds) lead lives of enduring desperation (quiet or not), fear and/or uncertainty is certainly a failure of the United State's vaunted ideals. And in the face of this, a commitment to "personal responsibility" (which often, ironically, is seen as a commitment that entire demographic groups should make) comes across as victim-blaming. Even so, there is something to be said for changing what one can change, and simply letting the rest of it go. Beating the drum over racism doesn't make it any more salient of a concern to those for whom it isn't a real problem. But the idea that it constantly erodes mind, body and spirit, or that it's a continuing problem for the mental health of the Black community serves as a constant reminder of the inability of Black Americans to either solve the problem, or insulate themselves from it. And what does that do to help anything?

I understand that, for many Black people, my outlook on life is nothing more than proof that I've turned my back on my people, and bought into a culture of White supremacy. Perhaps that is true; I don't claim to have a particularly clear perspective on myself, given the lack of distance between me, myself and I. But if my understanding of people in general is even somewhat accurate, ceding the ability to be happy in life, or at least satisfied, to others is simply a bad idea. I decided that I wasn't going to let racism get me down, because I could exercise at least that much control over my life. Were the fact there are people for whom the unequal nature of life in the United States surprising, but not motivating, a reliable source of fatigue, I wouldn't even have that. Homo Sapiens doesn't live up to the hype. It never has. I've never found accepting that fact to be particularly uplifting; only better than the alternative.

Private Show

A busker puts on a show for three in Seattle's Lake City neighborhood. The small park here was, for a time, a fairly populous homeless encampment.
 

Gone Green

I grew up in the distant suburbs of Chicago, where pretty much the only "ethnic" food generally available was Chinese and (pseudo) Mexican. (Random suburban pizza places do not count as Italian food...) There was a much broader selection in the city proper, but it wasn't until I moved to Seattle that I started really branching out. But still having my rather pedestrian Midwestern tastes, I have yet to acquire an appreciation for avocado, mainly because I'm one of those people who dislikes the taste of cilantro, and so tend to avoid Tex-Mex and Mexican food. But not being a fan of avocado also means that I don't eat much in the way of roll sushi, since it tends to be a pretty common ingredient.

Being pretty sure that avocado is not native to Japan, I was curious why it was so common in sushi. The simple answer is that many sushi rolls are American creations; to the extent that they exist in Japan in the same forms they do here, they've effectively been re-imported. The slightly more complex answer to why so much sushi contains avocado is one of immigrant ingenuity; what's at question is whether they were working around supply chains or Americans.

The first explanation I found for the prevalence of avocado in sushi (on the website of a local sushi restaurant) was that a Japanese chef in Los Angeles couldn't source fatty tuna for their sushi, and avocado was a good substitute for texture and consistency. The second explanation is that Americans didn't like the taste of raw tuna, in much the same way that uramaki sushi rolls were developed because of American dislike of the texture of seaweed.

Now, I'm going to admit that I tend to have a rather limited palate; I'm not that experimental when it comes to food. Which is part of the reason why, when I vacationed in Japan, I would simply point to a random menu entry and eat that. The upside was I had some amazing food I wouldn't have thought to order. (The downside was I don't know what any of it was called.) So I understand the idea that foreign cuisines tend to be (sometimes heavily) modified for American tastes.

But the competing narratives over the inclusion of avocado, rather than tuna also speak to how people, domestic and overseas, see the United States. While both are stories of innovation, one is a story of needing to work around Americans' refusal to try different foods, and I suspect that it sticks around specifically because it plays into people's understanding of the United States.

Overinformed

I was reading an article online the other day about jury selection for The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump. It gave some basic data on the seven people selected by that point; things like occupation, employer, what part of New York they live in and where they were originally from.

"This is a bad idea," I said to myself.

Sure enough, today we learn that a juror has bowed out because people have managed to track them down, and they're afraid for their safety.

Data Privacy is about more than keeping just sensitive information safe. When I read the article, I was fairly sure that, even with the scant details listed, I could track down at least one of the people selected, because some of the information presented, when taken together, couldn't be more than a very small number of people, thus allowing for triangulation from public records.

And the article I read was fairly circumspect in what they published. I'm sure that others went into more detail, given that Judge Merchan has directed reporters to not publish physical descriptions of jurors (among other things). But as the public, there is no need to know any of it. I, as a member of the public, don't need to know where any of the jurors live or where they are from or what they do for a living or where they work or what they look like. None of that is germane to the case itself. It's effectively trivia, with no genuine relevance to the matter at hand. Institutions that deal with data have to recognize that.

The information was shared precisely because media outlets believed that it would garner public attention. Which was a reasonable expectation, given the number of people who have taken an interest in anyone associated with the various legal cases against the former President. An interest that could have been predicted to lead to doxxing, given the atmosphere around some of Mr. Trump's other legal entanglements.

Unsung

The country's leader Ramzan Kadyrov told culture minister Musa Dadayev to make its music "conform to the Chechen mentality", said The Moscow Times. Announcing the ban, Dadayev said: "Chechen musical culture has always been diverse in tempo and methodology. We must pass on our cultural heritage to our children: the customs, traditions, our adats [traditional laws], nokhchalla [code of honour] – features of the Chechen character, which includes the entire spectrum of moral and ethical standards of life of the Chechens."
Why Chechnya has banned music that is 'too fast or too slow'

This is one of those things that occurs when I'm reading a book; I start to notice the parallels between that book and real-world events. In The Republic, one of first ideas that Socrates puts forth in the service of creating his ideal state is, effectively, censorship. Bad stories lead to bad character, and so the Guardian class (and presumably everyone else) need to be protected from those stories that do no reflect the world as Socrates thinks that it should be (and in some cases, is). Music is also on the list of things that Plato's Socrates thinks needs to be controlled. "Give me these two modes," says Socrates, "one stern, one pleasant, which will best represent sound courage and moderation in good fortune or in bad." All other music, such as that suitable for dirges, lamentations, relaxation and drinking songs, is to be banned from the State that Socrates and his interlocutors are planning. The goal here is to have music fit for the training of soldiers, but since it also happens to be the only morally upright music, it's all that anyone would be able to access.

So the idea that music carries the moral and ethical standard of a people, and music that does not conform should be restricted or banned is not new. Previously, the whole thing would have simply struck me as silly. And to a degree, it still does; I'm still not convinced that the ideals laid down in The Republic for a just state are to be taken at all seriously. But I expect that Plato meant for them to taken seriously, if not strictly literally. Granted, I haven't finished the book yet, but it seems that Plato is simply taking the Nurture side of the Nature versus Nurture debate to its logical conclusion. If people are shaped by their environments, if one can control the environment, then one can ensure that the people turn out properly. And that's a theme that recurs over and over again in human history.

In Chechnya's case, I suspect that the immediate impact of the new rules will be to make the country a laughingstock. The article in The Week wasn't exactly praising the decision. Whether it has anything approaching the intended effect remains to be seen. Conventional wisdom says that the ability of people to access information from all over the world will bring their efforts to naught; but people said as much about China's ability to control information, and that has mostly turned out to be wrong. So perhaps the Chechens have a shot at it.

Doctored

"Frankly, we get asked all the time, 'So you're a junior doctor, are you going to graduate from med school soon?'" [Alisa Gifford, president of the Oregon Society of Physician Associates] said. "It's important to show them that we're associates, we are professionals."
Physician assistants' push for a rebrand gains steam

But the answer to that patient question is "no." The Physician Assistant (or "Associate") that's working with them is likely not going to graduate from medical school soon, because Physician Assistant programs are not a stop on the medical training that MDs receive. Now, it's possible that the PA in question is, in fact, in medical school, but that would be up to them as an individual; the programs are separate.

I'm not convinced that it was wise for Axios to print Ms. Gifford's statement as-is, in the way that they did. The American Medical Association says that changing the role title from "Physician Assistant" to "Physician Associate" would be confusing, presumably because it would lead patients to believe that "Physician Associates" were a junior class of actual physicians, "Associate Physicians," as it were. And, as presented, Ms. Gifford's statement appears to acknowledge that confusion and use it as a rationale for the change.

As there the ratio of doctors (especially general practitioners) to the overall population ticks down, Physician Assistants and Nurse Practitioners are starting to take over the role of primary care provider for a growing number of people. And many people, correctly or not, understand their primary care provider to be their "doctor." It strikes me that what the PAs and NPs are up against is that connotation, along with the idea, as advanced by the American Medical Association, that a "physician" is a person who holds either a Doctor of Medicine (MD) or Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) degree. The PAs may have decided that in updating their title to "Physician Associate" may help break down that distinction in the eyes of the public, and offer them greater status. Because for an allegedly "classless" society, the United States is very status-conscious.

I suppose that the best thing for everyone involved would be for the public to have a better understanding of the training and capabilities of MDs, DOs, PAs and NPs, so that society at large comes to see medical practitioners who are not Doctors as reliable and competent and not the "unskilled labor" of the medical profession (to the degree that anyone involved in medicine can be "unskilled"). But it's likely, as the saying goes, "That sounds too much like work." And besides, I doubt that the Doctors see it in their interests (just as they don't see allowing practitioners from overseas to practice here as being in their interests).

Step one of problem-solving is understanding the problem to be solved. There's a certain strain of affluenza that leads people to conflate their interests with the problem(s) to be solved. And that's what strikes me as going on here; it's common when questions of status (which tends to have impacts on pay) are involved.

All In The Family

As I quoted back in January, David Brooks noted research by Jonathan Haidt when noting that parents were being overprotective. Mr. Haidt recently penned an article for The Atlantic, titled End the Phone-Based Childhood Now, which I listened to as a podcast this past weekend. And it occurred to me that I have the same criticism of Mr. Haidt that I tend to have of Mr. Brooks; namely, he understands that things have changed in a way he doesn't like, but not really putting any effort into understanding why those changes came about.

One of the points that he makes is that many Generation X/Millennial parents prevented their children from having the sort of childhood that they themselves "enjoyed." And I can see this. I certainly enjoyed hanging out with my friends, going to the arcade, going to the comic book shop as a group, et cetera. I look back on that with a certain amount of fondness. But it seems odd to me that if that was the most common understanding of the time for people of my, and the following, age cohort, it wouldn't be so close to complete extinction. Accordingly I suspect that for a lot of people, the sort of "free-range parenting" that Mr. Haidt so lauds is regarded as negligent, bordering on abusive, either because they perceive that the times have substantially changed, or they don't think very highly of their own parents' ways of going about things. (Of course, nothing prevents it from being both...)

In the several years leading up to my moving from Chicago to the Seattle suburbs, a few of the people in my circles married and had children of their own. And one thing that I noticed about them as a sensitivity to what other people, especially fellow parents and authority figures thought of their parenting. This isn't something I remember being as much of an issue for my own parents. And I suspect that contributed to a high level of social pressure.

When I was young, it was pretty much understood that after high school, one would go to college, unless a person was either fairly poor, or very stupid. It may as well been another four years of mandatory education. And while my parents signed on to that mode of thinking, I felt most of that pressure from my peers. Now, I suspect that there is much more pressure to make sure that children are successful from other parents. And this is on top of the greater investment in individual children that come from smaller family sizes. Few of the people in my current circles are parents, but nearly all of those who are have only one or two children unless they married someone with children of their own. Even then, a blended family with more than three children between them seems large. When I think of my friends' children by name, all of them who come immediately to mind are only children. Not that huge families were the norm when I was young, but only children were unusual, and many of my friends had two siblings, and sometimes three.

Of course, not everyone reacts to social pressures the same way, but people do react to them. that's sort of the point of it in the first place. And I don't think that the pressures, and the norms they create, are going away anytime soon. Mr. Haidt can offer new norms, but without changing the factors that buttress the current ones, it likely won't help.

Free To Be Free

The reason Plato called his book The Republic is that it's about the care and feeding of a morally upright State more than it is about individual ethics or morality. And Plato's Socrates has a highly-controlled situation in mind. Having made it to the end of Part III, I've been expecting the book to reveal that it's actually parody, given that Plato seems to be laying the groundwork for a stereotypical dystopia.

Interestingly, one of the critiques of the character of Socrates given back in Part I is that he never actually lays out his definitions of things; rather he asks others to define things, and then, if he disapproves, sets out to refute them. This is a criticism that may be made of the book as a whole, at least so far. For instance, I think, given the way that things are shaping up, that Plato is defining a "free" State as one that is free from being controlled by people foreign to it. The flourishing person appears to have little need for other freedoms, Plato's Socrates is adamant that even the music they listen to be subject to approval by the State.

The book may as well have been titled Why Athens Sucks, and it's pretty clear that Plato is pursuing grievances here, and basing a lot of things on the simple idea the he knows better then everyone else. He has, for instance, determined that the gods must be perfectly moral, and so much of Greek mythology, which tends to appear to us as the humanization of the seemingly capricious forces that people have to deal with on a daily basis, would be suppressed as both lies and corrosive to public morality. A public morality that is apparently unable to take hold unless people are scrupulous protected from any hint that bad behavior exists until well into adulthood. Given that the book has promised to explain to us why being Just is inherently better than being Unjust, it seems odd that Plato is apparently convinced that Injustice seduces people with the slightest whisper.

I hadn't really understood how influential Plato was before embarking on this. Now that I'm reading it, however, I can see a number of Platonic ideals that lasted well into history. It's a remarkable thing, how a single work like this managed to shape so much of what came after it, simply by virtue of surviving long enough to become widely-read and influential.

Uncentered

Uri Berliner, a Senior Editor for National Public Radio's Business Desk, is the latest in a long line of people to complain that NPR is too left-leaning, and doesn't have enough Republican (a.k.a. critical of American Leftism) voices on staff.

Like many critics, Mr. Berliner accuses NPR of telling people how to think. But I still agree with Brooke Gladstone's contention from The Influencing Machine that "it's unprofitable to ignore your readers' emotions, assumptions and values."

While I understand the critique that NPR should play everything straight up the middle, and that, in hindsight, its editorial decisions shouldn't appear to have any partisan or ideological bias, at the end of the day, NPR is a business. And it has to appeal to its listeners and readers. Do I find NPR biased? Yes, I do. Not in the sense that it's actively advocating for a particular set of values, but in the stories that it chooses to tell and the guests and experts they choose to interview and consult.

In my opinion, NPR understands its target audience to be younger, less White, less straight and more Left-leaning/Democratic than the nation as a whole. So that's where their coverage lands. I don't understand why this is surprising to anyone, given that no-one wants to hand the network a giant pot of no-strings-attached cash to spend without regard to operating income. If catering to the "center" of American politics actually paid off in terms of subscriptions and/or advertising revenue, news outlets would be actively doing it, and as near as I can tell, no-one is. I consider NPR's general bent to be to the Left of where I am. I also don't pay them anything... so given the choice between catering to me, and catering to someone who writes a check every pledge drive; not a difficult decision.

And that's why I think that Brooke Gladstone offers a better understanding of what is up with NPR than Uri Berliner does. While it may be true that NPR's listener and reader numbers are down, I don't think that NPR not speaking to all of America equally is the culprit. I think it's because it doesn't go far enough to stake out a partisan position and really own it. Because people don't go to the news media to understand what their viewpoint on the world should be; they patronize those media outlets that agree with the viewpoints they already have. This is why Fox News so recently found itself in hot water; it wasn't playing the tune its audience wanted to dance to. NPR is no different. If the most vocal part of the audience is young, racially diverse, queer (or queer-adjacent/sympathetic) and both socially and economically Progressive, then that's the news that an outlet that needs that audience is going to present.

Mr. Berliner, like a number of people who want news outlets to cater to other people's priorities, believes that the news outlet makes the audience. And in certain cases, that's true. But much more often, the audience makes the news outlet. If, as former Republican Speaker of the House of Representative John Boehner (possibly paraphrasing John Maxwell) noted, "A leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk," a news outlet without an audience is simply people speaking to one another. And NPR aspires to speak to more than just itself. There's a valid point to be made that NPR has an obligation, as, well, public radio, to attempt to appeal to everyone. But valid is not the same as workable.

Socrates Among the Thoughtless

I started reading The Republic the other day, and found the first chapter to be quite strange. Most likely because I am otherwise unacquainted with Greek writing. I don't know what I was expecting, but a series of dialogs that made nearly everyone other than Socrates seem like an idiot wasn't it.

But I came to realize that it was merely an unfamiliar way of establishing the premises of what was to come. Rather than simply lay out the initial viewpoint of the book, Plato uses the dialogs between Socrates and those around him to build up a picture. What makes it strange is how agreeable everyone is, for the most part. There's almost no pushback against the ideas that Socrates lays out, even when they seem manifestly at odds with reality as most people understand it to work. For example, when Socrates says that it is generally agreed to be wrong to return a borrowed weapon or to be strictly honest with someone who has become mentally ill, a lot of assumptions are being made there. Yet there is no disagreement, or mention of those assumptions, allowing Socrates to easily stymie the others by driving them to repugnant conclusions.

Of course, if Polemarchus or Glaucon had more thoughtfully argued their cases, that could have easily taken up an entire book right there, and left no room for Socrates to lay out how he feels the Republic of the title should work.

But perhaps more importantly, Socrates' interlocutors illustrate the idea that many people adopt standards of ethics or justice that seem valid to them, but don't really think about them as deeply as, well, someone like Socrates does. For my own part, I don't argue with people like Socrates on an ad-hoc basis; I beg a day or two to consider the viewpoint that I plan to bring to the discussion; there is no surer way to lose a debate than to be convinced to undertake one while unprepared, and I don't think as well on my feet as I would like.

In the end, though, it was an interesting, if somewhat obtuse, way to set things up. The dialogs didn't do as good a job of laying out the initial premises as a more straightforward explanation would have, but I can see why it had been done that way; it reads much more like a play, and I could see it being staged for an audience in lieu of people reading the text for themselves, given that mass production of books was still centuries away.

This far, I'm not in agreement with most of what Socrates/Plato are putting forward, but that's likely due to a difference in overall world view. But it's interesting reading thus far.

No Escape

I stopped by the bookstore today, as I've been looking to do some more reading recently. I meandered through the Science-Fiction and Fantasy aisles, checking out things at random. About midway through, I realized that I missed my old habit of picking up books based on how much their cover art appealed to me. I found some real gems back in the day using that "method."

Today I was reading the back cover blurbs, and I found that publishers seemed to have become much more explicit in describing the themes of their books. Sci-Fi and Fantasy have always been ways of exploring various aspects of the times in which they were written, but modern books came across as much more specific in calling out exactly which aspects they were tackling, whether it was sexual consent, prejudice or whatever.

For some reason, I decided that I didn't really want that mixed in the "what if" factor of speculative fiction. So I picked up a copy of Plato's Republic. I didn't claim it was logical.

Shielded

This is something that I see from time to time with panhandlers in the area; they tuck their heads down behind the tops of their signs, so that their faces cannot be seen from the front. I've always presumed that it's simple fatigue; most of the panhandlers I encounter are attentive for people coming towards them, in order to actively ask for money, especially in a situation like this, where his positioning places him on the passenger side of a car leaving the parking lot. But I can't presume to know.

For as long as I've been out here (which by this point is the majority of my adult life), the Seattle area has always struck me as having a large number of homeless and/or destitute people. The expansion of the technology sector in the area, along with stagnation in homebuilding, has only made things worse. Developers are building apartment buildings, townhouses and condominiums, but the market still encourages them to chase higher-end customers, so the less-well-off are left out in the cold (and, in this part of the country, the rain).

As is often the case, the perfect is the enemy of the good when it comes to solutions, if for no other reason than good solutions require trade-offs. And since those trade-offs typically impact either perceived quality of life or the equity that people have in their homes, they tend to be deal-breakers. It's easy to forget that even a housing crisis has clear winners. And so, the panhandlers remain. They may drift around from place to place, but they're almost always around somewhere. Even if they don't always show their faces.

To Tell The Truth

 I was reading a somewhat alarmist article on Axios yesterday, "Hackers force AI chatbots to break their own rules." At the DEFCON conference last August, some participants in a red teaming challenge were able to get a generative AI chatbot to project the GDP of Florida for the year 2500 and to write a speech claiming that the Great Recession kicked off in 2005, rather than 2008. The theme of the story was clear; chatbots are not yet fully proof against "bad actors" who might use them to generate "fake, sensitive or misleading information."

Missing from the article, in my opinion, was any discussion of the feasibility of engineering a World Wide Web where one can reasonably expect to take everything one reads at face value. And that gave me a new idea for a test prompt in my series of generative AI experiments: "Should humanity aspire to a future where no tools are capable of causing harm?"

Copilot was off the races with this one, in full poetic, contemplative, philosopher mode. I mean, dig this:

The chisel carves the sculptor’s vision; the pen inscribes the poet’s soul. And so, our journey intertwines with responsibility—to use our tools wisely, to mend what we break, and to safeguard the fragile fabric of existence.

The answer reminded me of a student attempting to disguise the fact that they didn't have an answer to a question by piling every eloquent word they knew into a salad.

Perplexity.AI seemed to take the question "personally," as it were; it's answer, backed up by citations from the Pew Research center, MIT Sloan School of Business and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (among others), focused exclusively on AI. It did, however, note that "completely aspiring to a future with no tools capable of causing harm may not be a realistic or desirable goal." ChatGPT 3.5 also followed this line of reasoning, and was the one model of the four queried that explicitly noted that "tools themselves are neutral."

Gemini had the best answer for this, considering that there really isn't an answer. It laid out a set pros, cons and additional considerations and noted that there would be "trade-offs between safety, functionality, and user awareness." But trade-offs tend to play poorly to the public at large, and this may be why there is no real mention of them in the Axios article, aside from noting the difficulty of determining a user's intent. (Because it's worth noting that something that can only create facts is blocked from writing fiction as much as it is from lying.) The supposedly desirable end state that Axios implies may not be realistic, but it sells clicks.

Name Game

Instead, [GE] has now become three separate companies — GE Aerospace (worth $148 billion as of the close of trade on Tuesday), GE HealthCare ($40 billion), and something called GE Vernova ($38 billion).
Felix Salmon "With GE’s split, the last chapter of the Jack Welch era is over" Axios.

"Something called GE Vernova?" A veteran financial reporter couldn't be bothered to take 10 seconds to look it up? Granted, I would have simply left it as GE Power had it been up to me, but this new corporate naming trend (which includes 3M Health Care becoming "Solventum" and IBM Global Technology Services becoming "Kyndryl") isn't going anywhere. It may be fun to snark about it, but that's neither newsworthy nor informative. Rather, it feels like virtue signalling, in the sense that Mr. Salmon is relaying to Axios readers that he too finds the name to be vapid and non-descriptive. Which I can completely sympathize with, but it represents a blending of news and commentary that I'm not sure is useful.

I'm going to admit that I don't really understand the reasoning behind the new naming convention, outside of the fact that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, boxed and shipped, and that creations like Vernova, Solventum and Kyndryl, being unique, are easier to trademark and create websites for. They may also be seen as less stuffy, especially in these cases. But they don't really resonate with me, as I pointed out before when I likened "Kyndryl" to the name of a prescription medication.

But if the point is to report on goings-on in corporate America, whether or not the name sound good, or even make intuitive sense, is beside the point. GE Vernova is the renamed GE Power. Felix Salmon could simply have pointed that out, and moved on. Arch commentary should be reserved for, well, commentary. And this goes back to one of my common criticisms of advertising supported news outlets; because the people who read them don't rely on them for actionable information, they tend to drift into being entertaining diversions. Mr. Salmon hosts the Slate Money podcast, and before that was a regular on Marketplace, so I'm familiar with his voice. I could positively hear the snark dripping from his English accent when I read that passage from the article. And I'm sure that if he actually says those words on Slate Money, it will be amusing to hear. But that's tuning in for something other than to learn things I don't know about the world around me.

After the Laughter

With today being April First, I was hoping to find some good April Fools' Day hoaxes. It is also Monday, after all.

I found a story in Axios: "Exclusive: Trump allies plot anti-racism protections — for white people" that one would think qualifies. But this is Donald Trump, after all, and if one isn't either an ardent supporter of the man, or terrified that he heralds the end of the world, he's already descended into self-parody.

But I hunted through news sites and press releases, and pretty much came up empty. No-one seemed to be a mood to be funny this year. Perhaps not surprising. NPR's story on April Fools' Day pranks equated being fooled with a failure of media literacy, in the same way that one is tricked by misinformation. And LinkedIn News ran a short piece noting "April 1 is a marketing minefield," that was focused on the misses; how Google's original Gmail launch announcement was thought to be a prank, while Volkswagen's "Voltswagen" joke was mistaken for a real rebranding.

The comments following the LinkedIn story were telling, with people advising that companies simply not make any announcements at all on April 1st and that any pranks should be clearly labelled as such and "MUST be reviewed by Marketing/PR before posting."

Forbes took a swing at it with their story "April Fools’ 2.0: AI Is Crafting Ultimate Pranks You Won’t See Coming." But the "what if" piece came across as too careful (and too obvious) to be really funny. It seemed silly instead, and, like the captions in the Getty Images pictures that accompanied the piece, over-explained. IGN's video claiming that Nintendo had announced the Virtual Boy Pro was more like it. Nintendo themselves, however, didn't seem to have any jokes for the day.

It strikes me as a symptom of the general lack of unity that's always been lurking in the United States. Jokes are all fun and games until someone thinks that the joke is on them, and as the United States becomes more fractured and partisan, people become more vigilant for humor that might come at their expense. And since it's effectively impossible to make a joke that no-one can find fault with, organizations with a lot to lose don't try. It's a minor symptom of a serious problem; as people look at their neighbors with suspicion the social distance between them grows. And though there are endless debates about which systems of governance and economics would close gaps between different groups, none of them will work if Americans see one another as enemies.

Transacted

Trump has developed a sense of impunity when it comes to religious messaging, forged through a grand compromise with Christian conservatives who see him as a flawed — but effective — champion of their movement.
Trump's Bibles and the evolution of his messianic message

Okay. I'll bite. What "grand compromise" is Axios referring to? I don't really see Donald Trump as having conceded anything to Christian conservatives. Sure, he pays lip service to religiosity and advances policies that Evangelicals like, but there's no indication that prior to some negotiated agreement with some form of conservative Christian leadership. His buy-in to the idea that the "War on Christmas" has evolved into a broader "War on (conservative) Christians" was not something that Mr. Trump needed to agree to in order to obtain the support of a section of the electorate; it's a basic part of his general modus operandi of finding a fight already in progress and picking a side.

The whole point is that there was no compromise, in the same way that an expression of gratitude after a gift isn't understood to be a compromise. The attitude of Christians who see the former (and maybe future) President as a champion for their efforts to elevate their values and interests to a privileged place in American life have shifted from something along the lines of "God may use the flawed to further its ends" to "he's genuinely one of us." The fact that, over the past decade, he's shifted from someone considered to not know one end of a Bible from the other, to being considered more religious (among his base, anyway) than his famously Evangelical Vice-President shows that while there may have been a transaction here, it wasn't a compromise.

Similarly, prominent conservative Christians are well past the point of "holding their noses" to support Donald Trump. And they haven't needed to, or been asked to, give up anything in the name of forging an alliance with Mr. Trump, or Trumpism more broadly. Those people who were willing to air opposition to, or even reservations about, taking a seat on the Make America Great Again bandwagon have been sidelined. Mainly because the understood, if not always openly stated, goal of the entire MAGA project is to more than roll back the clock to a supposed halcyon age of the supremacy of Christian leadership from the pulpit. It's to implement a vision of Christian faith as the exclusive foundation of all American ideals; to move to an understanding that in order to genuinely believe in (and thus work to implement and sustain) ideas such as "equal protection under the law" or "freedom of expression," one must be an open, practicing Christian. It's an outgrowth of the idea that ethical behavior itself requires a belief in the Abrahamic God, and the only correct belief/faith in that deity is the Western understanding of Christianity. And this means buying into the idea that the supernatural war between "Good" and "Evil" is playing out in the material world.

Donald Trump has been able to insert himself into this narrative through his support of the worldview that Evangelicalism holds. Accordingly, his legal troubles stem not from a failure to "give to Caesar what is Caesar's," but from the "fact" that attempts to advance the cause of the divine in the world will be met by those who, inadvertently or knowingly, are on the other side. Much of modern American Christianity sees itself as persecuted because of an understanding (and this is a more common viewpoint than perhaps it's given credit for) that their values and goals are demonstrably the best thing for everyone, rather than a set of interests that are in opposition to those of other groups.

It may be very accurate to describe the political relationship between Donald Trump and the Christian Right in the United States as "a grand bargain." Both sides bring something important to the table, both sides see powerful benefits from the arrangement and each apparently believes in the other's sincerity. It's a good match. To look at that, and characterize it as "a grand compromise" is, I think, to demonstrate a lack of understanding of what's at stake here. True, Christian conservatives have decided that Mr. Trump's prior history and irreligiosity are things to be overlooked. But to call that a compromise is to elevate the importance of that factor far higher than history would warrant.

Hype Technology

"The core problem is that GenAI models are not information retrieval systems," [AI ethics expert Rumman Chowdhury] says. "They are synthesizing systems, with no ability to discern from the data it's trained on unless significant guardrails are put in place."
Chatbot letdown: Hype hits rocky reality

Of course generative artificial intelligence doesn't live up to the hype. If it did, one could make the case that it wasn't hyperbole. But it generally turns out to be hype, if for no other reason than there seems to be something deeply alluring about the idea that people can build something, and it will just solve a bunch of problems, and not have any downsides. In the time that I've been in the technology sector, I've seen a consistent discomfort with the idea of trade-offs, even when the reality of them is metaphorically staring people in the face, and generative artificial intelligence is no exception.

When I've experimented with Microsoft's Copilot system, I haven't found it to go off the rails in the way that many earlier systems may have, but it is verbose, because its default is take in whatever data it's given and to synthesize more. Back when I used the tool to help me translate an old story snippet I'd written in Japanese into English, it volunteered a prompt, requesting it to tell me how the main characters met. And then it synthesized a story; it had no other choice, the characters it offered to tell me about had no other existence beyond the short passage that I'd written more than two decades ago; there couldn't have been any information about them in the training data. And I can see how that lends itself to an interpretation that the model "knows" things, and that asking it more questions will reveal more information. But that requires seeing it as something more than a remarkably sophisticated auto-complete function. Which it isn't.

That said, there are several things that one can do with a really sophisticated auto-complete function that will make businesses, and potentially people, more efficient and productive. But for right now, they're mainly limited to applications where it becomes evident fairly quickly if the system has it correct or not. I knew that the AI systems made errors in my initial experiment, to determine the length of time between two dates, because I asking the question with the goal of having the systems tell me the answer; I already knew the answer, because I'd sorted it out for myself. I was looking to see the degree to which the various models disagreed with one another. But if I'd been asking because I genuinely didn't know, and had used the answers provided for anything important, that could have spelled trouble.

The term generative artificial intelligence is a misnomer because the systems involved are not intelligent. As Ms. Chowdhury notes, the systems lack the native ability to discern things from the data they were trained on. But they're treated as thinking, and as knowing, because that's how they appear to people. Copilot, when it tells me that it's taken a "whimsical journey" (otherwise known as synthesizing random details about something), behaves as though there is a creative intellect in there, somewhere. And I think that this, combined with the speed of its answers, makes it easier to see the system as smarter than a person. And since any problem can be solved if one is just smart enough...

Except, that's not true. There are plenty of problems with the world that are going to take more than a person, or a machine, being clever about solutioning. I was listening to a podcast about Haiti today. That doesn't see like a problem that's mainly here for want of a clever solution. Likewise, the question of workers displaced by continued adoption of automation is also not a problem that will yield to cleverness. Like many things that don't live up to the hype, the problem is overly optimistic impressions of what the technology can do.

Faith Based

Every year. Pew Research Center conducts a study on both governmental restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion. This year's report made for interesting reading.

The report was at pains to point out that it "is not designed to determine which religious group faces the most persecution." Which was a shame, really. Clearly they understood that religious partisans would be combing the report looking for evidence to back up their claims to being The Most Oppressed, presumably in the service of demanding more resources and protection for themselves. Granted, the report offers the opportunity to indulge in a sense of victimization. It notes that Denmark requires that animals be stunned prior to being killed for meat production, and that this makes it more difficult to obtain Kosher or Halal meat, but it doesn't specify why this is about government harassment of a religious group, as opposed to an animal welfare/anti-cruelty measure. Similarly, it calls out restrictions on the ability to claim conscientious objector status (or be exempted from otherwise mandatory military service) or to hold in-person gatherings in the face of public-health orders to the contrary to be examples of government interference in worship. This gives the impression that simply having to follow the same rules as everyone else can be viewed as governmental restriction on religion.

Likewise, the report seems to code simple disputes between religious communities, and communities that happen to have different religious beliefs as a form of social religious hostility. For example, it was noted that Bolivia's social hostility score went down because "there were no reports coded in 2021 that Protestant pastors and missionaries were expelled from Indigenous communities for not observing Andean spiritual beliefs." (This raises an interesting question; when one group wants to proselytize, but the leadership of another group does not want their community proselytized to, who can claim the hostility? While the expulsion of missionaries seems like a clear case, it's worth noting that for many missionaries, the end of other religious beliefs is their stated goal.) In Nigeria, conflicts between “predominantly” (quotes in original) Christian farmers and Moslem herders are framed as sectarian social hostility, despite the fact that conflicts between herders and farmers have been taking place for nearly the whole of human history.

None of this is to say that the situations and incidents mentioned aren't religiously motivated (especially the expulsion of missionaries) but I did find myself questioning what the expectation of religious entitlement was. Governments enact laws with disparate impacts due to other factors all the time, and fighting between groups is pretty much the one constant to be found in human history. Why people should expect that, for example, only secular buildings should be subject to vandalism, or that clergy of faiths that claim an exclusive understanding of truth would refrain from public criticism of attempts to propagate "incorrect" teachings is never addressed.

Religion is often viewed as being a higher-stakes enterprise than other aspects of one's daily life. If I attempt to convince someone that they might also enjoy building plastic model kits, someone close to them might object on the grounds that it can be expensive or time-consuming. But were I to attempt to convince someone that their deity isn't real, I could be seen as attempting to set them up for a punishing, rather than pleasant, afterlife, or some other form of real spiritual harm. Not everyone believes that all religions are equally valid. (Or, as the late Christopher Hitchens has put it, equally demented.)

And that might be the most curious thing about the report. It posits a world in which no-one ever fights over religion; one in which immoral teaching and leading people away from true faith may be possible in the abstract, but aren't seen as worthy of any real-world actions. The stakes are not simply low, they're non-existent. But that's not how religion in the world actually works. And it's unlikely to ever do so.

Springtime

Taken while walking around the neighborhood. Spring came early this year, and settled in to stay.
 

A You Problem

I was reading "The psychological battle over trauma" as part of a deeper dive into the phenomenon of "therapy speak," and came across the following passage:

The psychotherapist Alex Howard, author of It’s Not Your Fault, distinguishes between overt trauma, as described by Bonanno, and covert trauma, this less tangible, nevertheless traumatic experience. [...] But this covert trauma, for an increasing number of clinicians, explains why we are the way we are. And through this interpretation, we are moving our conception of mental health away from “what’s wrong with you” and toward “what happened to you?”

The title of Mr. Howard's book is telling, and perhaps points to the root of the problem, at least here in the United States. American society is, in a number of ways, focused on efficiency: how to derive the highest returns from any given set of inputs. But it also manifests itself in a drive to decrease the inputs while maintaining the same returns. And labor is one such input.

The material needs of the United States can be satisfied, generally speaking, without needing the entire populace of the nation to work. One could make the case that there is unrealized demand in some or all sectors of the economy, as the United States' high levels of inequality have the effect of suppressing demand at the lower levels of the income and wealth distributions, but as things are currently structured, the United States effectively has an excess of labor capacity. The fact that the United States has a weak system of social supports, given that it is an industrialized and expensive society, means that this excess capacity becomes competition for work. Likewise, technological advances (and differentials in education) have led to that competition being international. The result being that an unemployed American can find themselves competing with workers literally on the other side of the globe for opportunities. For those people who hold opportunities, and thus can distribute them to others, this creates a wealth of choices born of a flood of candidates. And so a means of discrimination is required. And "something is wrong with this person" is as good a means of sorting as any.

Part of the rationale behind the adoption of "therapy speak" is overt effort on the part of people to say "Whatever flaws you may perceive in me, they aren't my fault. Nothing's wrong with me; something happened to me." This is a sub-optimal viewpoint on the subject, because it buys into the hostile framing of the underlying concern that the "judge" brings to the question, namely: "I have learned this bad thing about you, and it legitimately disqualifies you from the opportunity to work to support yourself." Of course, these sorts of questions extend beyond work; people deploy variants on "It's not my fault," in all sorts of situations, and many of them serve to legitimize what should be understood as the basic problem; the continuous need to find fault with others as a means of justifying the choices one makes concerning others.

Were it up to me, I'd steer society away from it's current apparent level of buy-in to a culture of stigma. But I understand that it's a tough sell. While I was never a big fan of Senator Bernie Sanders, I think that his perception that one of the primary factors driving prejudices is the perception of scarcity is largely correct. While it's true that there are people out there for whom preventing people from meeting their needs is an end in itself, for many people, the competition for resources pushes them to developing ad-hoc heuristics that sort themselves into the group of people who are deserving of access, while keeping enough other people out that a perception of shortage is averted. In other words, instead of viewing scarcity as the problem to be solved, resource distribution to the undeserving is the concern. Assigning stigma to others, then, becomes a solution, even if it isn't a good one.

Torched

New York City drugstores are so rife with plastic lockup cases that one crook was forced to use a blowtorch to blast one open, making off with $448 in skin care products.
Retailers pile on new tech to deter theft

I'm going to admit that I hadn't seen that one coming. I understand investing in some amount of equipment and going through some amount of effort in order to get one's hands on something, but blowtorching open a display case for less than $500 in stuff (especially given that it won't sell on the street for that much) strikes me as over to top. But I suppose that it shouldn't. After all, whether one sees retail thieves as done in by economic conditions or systems that have rendered them unemployable, or simply too lazy or venal to find honest work, $450 dollars in "free stuff" is attractive all the same. And blowtorches aren't that expensive.

I'm originally from the Chicago area, and I've been in parts of the city that could teach prisons a thing or two about security. It's strange to walk through a neighborhood where literally every window accessible from the ground has heavy bars to prevent people crawling in, or to go into a fast-food restaurant where the counter sports thick, bulletproof plexiglass, with a turntable through which money and food can be passed. Strange, but apparently not newsworthy.

What I think has been driving the current push of news stories about retail theft is precisely the fact that it's spread from benighted and forgotten neighborhoods on the South side of Chicago and out in the suburbs and downtown areas where wealthier people shop. So it's now confronting people who can profess to be shocked and upset by a state of affairs that other people have been attempting to deal with for some three decades, if not more. And shock and upset drive attention.

Personally, this is the sort of thing that calls for solutions journalism, and not simply the solutions of increased surveillance and buying into trading personal data. But a solution to the problem of... I'd say poverty, but I think it's more leaving people behind. Of course, that presupposes that there is a solution to a situation that's persisted as long as it has precisely because it works for people. Or, at least, for enough people that the will to pay the price of fixing it isn't there. Anti-theft technology will do a good enough job at a good enough price to be a viable patch on a difficult problem. It's sometimes disappointing that it's all society asks.

Blocked

I suspect that one of the barriers to reducing, let alone eliminating, poverty is simply this: The exploitation of poverty creates active incentives to perpetuate poverty, because poverty itself becomes a resource. And one that's much more renewable than many others one might name. As I've grown older, I've come to believe that the "wealthy world" including, or perhaps especially, the United States, has built its economy in such a way that were global poverty to go away tomorrow, the system would quickly become unsustainable. The idea that the world's leading economies would structure things in a way that could actually solve global poverty presupposes that people who have built their affluence on the exploitation of poverty are careless enough to kill even a shabby goose that lays golden eggs.

And, to be sure, I'm not simply talking about nameless, shadowy "élites" in a figurative smoke-filled backroom somewhere. Irrespective of how precarious they feel their lives might be, a lot of middle class Americans (and likely some people for whom the middle class is out of reach) rely on the low labor costs, and thus poor returns on labor, that poverty enforces to have the comforts they do have in their lives. And people are loathe to surrender their comforts, even when it can be shown that they come at a cost to others.

This strikes me as a recurring theme in life. When I was young, Generation X's "generational anxiety" was about the nation's level of debt, which began to climb sharply after Ronald Reagan's slashing of income (and other) taxes. But that anxiety only seemed to last long enough for the cohort to understand that if government spending was to be brought under control, "we" would need to be the ones on whom less was spent. And the political establishment understood that; so while there's political benefit in pointing the finger at someone else and vowing to raise their taxes, telling the public as a whole it's time to pay the buffet bill is a non-starter.

There are constituencies for the continuation of all of life's big problems. I'm curious how many of them I'm a member of.

Rewrites

One of the worries that I'd heard voiced about Generative AI concerned the biases that might be present in the data. This prompted me to wonder, what could you understand about the dataset and/or the training that went into it, given the sorts of responses a system gave to prompts?

To be sure, I have no idea of how to determine this... I simply don't know enough about how these systems work "under the hood" as it were. I'm a dabbler, not an engineer. But since the genesis of this series of experiments was someone finding that different systems gave different answers to the same prompts, another test came to mind. Last week's experiment had Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini and ChatGPT 3.5 translating a snippet of a document I'd written in romanized Japanese some two decades ago. This week, I gave each of them the entire translation, as created by Copilot, and had each system re-write the text. In a nutshell, the text is a brief narrative about Tom, who works for a bank in Sim City.

Copilot and Gemini both did two things that stood out from the other two: 1) they created titles for the story, and 2) they re-ordered some of the details of the story. In the original, I start by noting that Tom works for a bank, but don't note that he's the branch manager until later. Copilot and Gemini note both Tom's workplace, and his position when they introduce him as a character. Perplexity and ChatGPT 3.5 had their own similarity: they created very similar text. The first sentence for each matched; literally word-for-word, and there is a sentence in the middle of the story where the two systems varied only by a single word.

Gemini's rewrite was brief, managing to trim the text by almost 40 words, nearly a quarter of the total. Copilot, conversely, was the most verbose of the systems; it was the only system where the re-written text was longer than the text I'd submitted, by about a dozen words. Mainly because it tended to add little flourishes into the final document, but also because it cut the fewest corners in noting the details of the original text. To be sure, however, all of the systems had trouble with the details, sometimes appearing to miss the nuances.

In the end, despite what I said earlier, I think I can start to understand something about the "interior" of each system from this test, given that I'm already starting to build a set of expectations of what each would do with a given input. I expect it will take several more trials to distill what seem like "personalities" into a distinct set of rules that each operates by. The fact that I'm not an engineer would make the task longer, but it seems doable. Which makes sense; it's the differentiator of systems that are otherwise doing the same thing.

Uncommitment

Today is the 13th of March, and that makes it, among other things, the day after the Washington State Presidential primary election. Not that it matters; both the Democratic and Republican primaries, to the degree that they were actually contested, were already over on the national level.

But there's always something interesting going on, and yesterday, I came across this sign, stuck in the parkway near a local grocery store:

I don't know when the idea that a vote for an "Uncommitted Delegate" became a sort of vote against continuing Israeli military action in Gaza. And I suspect that if I'm not clear on this, the campaign to re-elect President Biden to another four-year term isn't either.

It's a strange way to conduct politics: the Biden campaign is meant to take away from this that there are voters who are unhappy with the relationship between the United States and Israel, but then what? In the event that the conflict between Israel and Hamas simply drags on, an incoming Trump 2.0 administration is unlikely to request that Israel, dial things back... the Evangelical portion of the Republican/Trumpist base tends to be fairly Zionist and unconcerned with the plight of the Palestinians. So is the threat here that people will withhold their votes in November?

Given the nature of the Electoral College and Washington State politics, one may as well put Washington's 12 Electoral College votes in the "Joe Biden" column right now. This place hasn't been competitive for decades, and isn't likely to become so anytime soon. So there's no real leverage for a small number of ceasefire supporters. (If there were more of them, and they had more resources, their message would be more widespread.

That makes this a signal that has a difficult time carrying any information. Politics tends not to work in the way that many people want it to; policymakers tend to have a level of insulation from all but the most intense levels of direct public opinion. Given this, signals have to be clear and unambiguous in a way that common public channels rarely are.

Unscriptured

Back when I first started this project, I wrote about a group of activists who met every Saturday to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I'd dropped in on them from time to time, to see how things were going. With the end of active military operations in the two nations, the protests wound down.

But with the war between Israel and Hamas, and the common idea that Israel is dependent on the United States to the degree that President Biden could effectively end Israel's ability to prosecute the war, protests are on again, in the same place at the same time.

I made time to drop in on the protests this week, mainly to get some photographs; it's the sort of thing that I find to be worth recording. I chatted with the protestors for a bit, noted both their small numbers and the absence of any counter-protests, and snapped a few photographs. Far from the paranoia of the mid-00s, a couple of the protestors wanted to make sure that I was able to get clear pictures of their messages.

I've had four years of theology classes and I'm pretty sure I don't recall that being in the Gospels.

I'm still unconvinced that street protests like this, especially when they are small scale, actually get anything done. But I will give them credit for persisting.

Romance On Demand

Experimenting with generative A.I. reminds me of how much I enjoyed software testing. I find coming up with interesting, and plausible, use cases and seeing what the systems do with them genuinely fun.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, some friends and I took Japanese lessons. For one of the exercises, I wrote a short story about a bank manager named Tom. Because we were only learning spoken Japanese, I wrote it in rōmaji, or Latin script. Fast forward two+ decades, and I barely had any idea of what it says. So I dropped it into Google Translate; which recognized it as Japanese, but its "English" translation was basically just a trimmed version of the original rōmaji text.

So I figured I'd see what the generative A.I. systems would make of it. I asked Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini and ChatGPT 3.5 "What does this say:" and then dropped in a snippet of the text. Gemini took the prompt to be a request for information about Tom, and noted "I do not have enough information about that person to help with your request." Perplexity's translation was a bit redundant in places (and somewhat confusing for that), but it was close to the answers that ChatGPT and Copilot gave.

Getting Copilot's answer, however, was a bit of work. It initially took the romanized Japanese I provided, and wrote it out in Japanese characters, using Kanji, Hiragana or Katakana as (I presume) appropriate, so I had to then ask it to translate that text into English for me. It seemed to be fairly true to what I sort of remember writing back in the day, so I took it a step further and dropped in the entire story, which had more details of Tom's commute and how he spends his weekends and includes another character, Noriko. At the end of another two-step translation, Copilot presented some interesting choices for follow-up prompts, like: "How did Tomu-san and Noriko-san become friends?" Curious, I clicked on it.

It was an interesting exercise in generative pre-training hallucination, as Copilot spun up the plot of a cozy, cheesy romance novel, with Tom and Noriko as the stars. (Forming an interesting contrast with Gemini.) I can see how building an LLM that's programmed to allow it to expansively "infer" things from a short text sample can be useful, especially given that Copilot clearly noted that it had engaged in a "whimsical journey," but I think that I would have built the system to make it clear up-front that the offer is for what's effectively a work of speculative fiction. That would also give the system a chance to ask just what sort of fiction the user wants; as I would have chosen a much different theme than Copilot's derivative romance plot.

Two-Sided

It's been interesting how much bandwidth the Israel-Hamas war, and by extension, the conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians more broadly, has been taking up here in the United States. I've listened to a number of podcasts on the events, even without doing anything to seek them out. And one thing that's occurred to me from listening to multiple people discuss both the current conflict and its history is the idea that both sides will appeal to other parties when it suits them, while denying their legitimacy when it doesn't.

One of the arguments that I'd heard from people supporting the Israeli side of the conflict was that Israel agreed to the terms of the United Nations partitioning of the former Mandatory Palestine, while the Palestinians (and other Arabs in the area) did not. The common Palestinian counter to this is that the United Nations had no legitimate right to hand over Palestinian land to the Jewish residents of the area. It makes sense for the Israelis to support the right of the United Nations to give them land, and for the Palestinians to dispute that right, but both positions are fundamentally self-serving.

Likewise, the Palestinians and their allies in the international community feel that the United Nations should be able to call for a binding cease-fire. For the Israelis, on the other hand, the only international voices that matter are those that support them, most notably the United States, who they rely on to block any criticism of them in the Security Council. Again, this is understandable, even though the positions are self-serving.

In the end, this will likely be one of those situations which has no good end. Both parties feel that they have the more legitimate grievance, and their historical views of the conflict tend to have starting points carefully chosen to support their specific viewpoints. Just as one man's war crime is another man's smart fighting, one man's justified reprisal attack is another man's atrocity. No one ever sees themselves as abusive or evil, and rarely, if ever, do they understand their reasoning as self-serving. That's left to the people they don't listen to.

Marked

 

Graffiti is, for the most part, impenetrable to me. I can admire the clear artistry that goes into some of it, but the message is generally beyond me. Such is the case here, with the spray-painted scrawl I encountered on the boarded-up front of what had been a Staples office-supply store in the area. I presume that odd mix of Christian and Egyptian motifs means something (other than the tagger being mentally ill) but I have no idea that that something might be.

This sort of weirdness pops up a lot, here in the Seattle area, and more so as one gets into the city proper. It's the sort of thing that local Republicans decry as the beginning of the end of any semblance of Law and Order in the region, while local Democrats often feel it doesn't rise to the level of criminality. Political arguments (and talking points) aside, it does seem as though the area is in something of a tug-of-war over whether the local architecture should be a canvas or not.

Buzzy

Artificial Intelligence is any number of things. Two of them are 1) a technology and 2) a buzzword. This is common; it happens over and over and over again; this isn't a new phenomenon. When a technical term becomes a buzzword, it's spoken of as if the things one does with it are somehow fundamentally different than they were previous. Take e-commerce. Placing an order with a vendor in another location is certainly easier and faster via the World Wide Web than ordering from, say, a physical mail-order catalog. But the fundamental processes on the back end are more or less the same. And the goods and services aren't any different. Ordering a book on Amazon has any number of similarities to me going over to Barnes and Noble and requesting a book.

I mention this because I found a brief article in The Week about "AI"-generated pornography. It quoted Parrots Lab founder Naja Faysal, and I decided to look up the Medium post that the article referenced, to read it for myself. One of the points that Mr. Faysal makes is that recent advances in generative AI raise "critical ethical questions about the representation of consent, the portrayal of healthy sexual relationships, and the potential impact on human empathy and connection." Fair enough. But doesn't pornography created by other methods raise those same "critical ethical questions?" I'm not seeing what this one specific technology is doing that changes the ethical landscape around depictions of human sexuality for the viewer's pleasure. The invocation of AI here seems to be more a means of getting people's attention than a genuinely salient factor.

Or Not To Be

For this week's random act of large language model experimentation, I wanted to know how the systems would react to a request for a model of a thing, rather than the thing itself.

To this end, I asked Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini and ChatGPT 3.5 two questions:

1. Give me a model of a joke.
2. Give me some text in the form of a joke, that is not actually a joke.

(Bing and Google both did their basic Search Engine thing, and so aren't included here.)

Copilot and Perplexity gave me a bog-standard "dad joke" for both questions. What was interesting was that they gave the SAME joke, word for word, as the answer to Question 1.

Why did the scarecrow win an award?

Because he was outstanding in his field!

The only difference was that Copilot tacked a "😄" onto the end. It also told me that this was a "light-hearted joke." In case I missed it, I suppose.

Gemini and ChatGPT both offered a simple "Setup and Punchline" model for Question 1 with the setup being a question, and the punchline being a statement. This was, in fact, the format that all of the systems used in their jokes. (I had been expecting at least one "knock-knock" joke to make it in.) While ChatGPT offered up a vegetable-related dad joke as an example, Gemini followed up with a setup, but left the punchline blank.

Here's an empty model you can fill in:

Setup: A man walks into a library and asks the librarian for books about paranoia.

Punchline: ____________________

To be sure, it seemed more like a test than an example. I suspect that coming up with a good punchline to that would prove difficult.

The two systems' answers to Question 2 were interesting, since they seemed to presume that pretty much any two sentences in "question then statement" format qualified as being "in the form of a joke." Gemini asked if I know that 771 million people lacked access to clean drinking water, then told me they were mostly marginalized communities. ChatGPT offered up wordplay. Both of them then explained why the text wasn't a joke; Gemini explaining that it was to leave "space for reflection instead of laughter," and ChatGPT informing me of its wordplay.

Why did the computer go to the doctor?

To get a byte checked out!

(Note: This is not actually a joke, but rather a play on words that uses computer terminology.)

But the scarecrow joke also strikes me as wordplay, rather than "providing a clever or unexpected resolution," which was part of ChatGPT's definition of a joke.

Gemini is the clear winner of this round, being the LLM that seemed to have the best ability to stick with the idea of not actually giving me a joke. All of the systems surprised me with the very narrow view of humor that they offered; I don't think that any of my favorite jokes from television or stand-up qualify. But this is the thing about LLMs; since they're operating on probability, and the format they offer is one that many child-friendly jokes use, it makes sense that it's the most common, and hence most probable type in the data sets.

Awaiting

I was reading an article on Christian Nationalism, and this lead me to an interesting paper on The Rise of the New Apostolic Reformation and Its Implications for Adventist Eschatology. The paper is some thirty pages, so I didn't read it carefully all the way through, but it was interesting nevertheless. Reading it, I was reminded of an article that I'd read in Slate, back in the day, Full House at King of Kings Assembly. There was a quote in it, that reads as follows:

There's something in the bloodstream of American Christianity that looks for, and reacts to, signs of the apocalypse. To me, it's not a great thing to herald the end of the world while I'm living here. I have kids. I want to see them grow up.

While Full House at King of Kings Assembly was about Christian Zionism, that desire to see the end of the world (or at least the end of the present world) come as quickly as possible is still prevalent in Christian Nationalism, which also wants to bring about the return of the messiah. And this seems driven, at least in part, by a notable hostility to the world as it currently is. Which makes sense once you learn a little bit about their theology. This is, after all, a worldview that holds that "much of the world is under demon control, which includes many individuals, people groups, nations, territories, false religions and ideologies." I suspect that if I believed that literal demons were leading most of the world around me, I would be pretty hostile to it, too. Especially if I saw a number of post-Enlightenment changes, such as acceptance of homosexuality, religious pluralism, and separation of church and state, as being the result of supernatural "evil influences."

But the thought that I kept coming back to while reading the paper was: "Man. That has to suck." Because it simply can't be a pleasant experience to look at the world around oneself and understand that a good deal of what one sees as being the result of the enemies of what is just and right. The world can sometimes come across as a pretty miserable place even when one grants that everyone has good intentions and is doing their best. Seeing people as in thrall to literal forces of evil, of their own doing or not, has to make the world into a much darker and more hostile place that it would be otherwise.

Untimed

The problem with the idea that the moral failures of people in the past were the result of their negligence in understanding the self-evident moral principles that were present (although often not widely held) in their world is that it presumes that today is the end of moral history; or at least a history with any clarity. Either today's moral viewpoints become the indisputable, universal, and eternal strictures that somehow eluded the whole of humanity before us, despite having been in plain sight, or we somehow have the misfortune of encountering hidden moral truths that won't be uncovered until later generations discover them. Both of these options strike me as unlikely; accordingly, judging yesterday by the moral standards of today seems hold past generations to a standard many deny the present should meet, all in the service of the pretense that 50 years from now, the 2020s won't be found as morally wanting as many people today find the 1970s.

Accounting

The other day, I did another experiment with Generative A.I., this time around a question that I'd been looking to answer for some time.

I asked "A.I.": "How many grocery stores are there in Washington State?"

In keeping with the original experiment, I asked the Usual Suspects: Bing, Copilot, ChatGPT and Gemini. Alexa had been included in the original experiment, but I don't own an Alexa-enabled device and don't want the application on my phone, so it was excluded. In it's place, I added Perplexity, which I'd just heard about recently. I also asked Google, which was part of the original experiment, but had been excluded from my trials, as it's primarily a search engine. (This time, as expected, Google simply give me a list of web links. I was curious if it would present any inline answers, but it didn't.)

When the question first occurred to me, several months ago, I'd asked Bing, and it didn't really give me an answer, but it did offer some not-particularly helpful links. This time both Bing and Copilot appeared to dodge the question. Rather than even attempt to answer the question as asked, they focused on "notable" local stores, providing what seemed like ad copy for Trader Joe's, Grocery Outlet and Haggen. The wording was different between the two, with Copilot being more verbose, but they offered (unsurprisingly) fundamentally the same answer.

ChatGPT flat-out admitted that it didn't have the information, and offered places where I might be able to find current statistics. (But, since it's not a search engine, no direct links.)

Perplexity gave an interesting answer, informing me of how many independent grocers and food co-ops were in the State in 2019. It also gave the number of Kroger and Albertson's stores in the state that would be sold to C&S Wholesale Grocers if the merger were to go through. But it said "The state is also home to various top grocery chains like Amazon Go Grocery, Safeway, and Haggen," so its clarity and timeliness may need to be updated.

Gemini offered a verbose and nuanced answer, noting that how many stores qualify depends on the definition of "grocery store," and offered a range "between several hundred and a few thousand." But it was able to find a source that gave a definitive number (2,313, if you're curious), explained how they arrived at that number, and noted the potential shortcomings of that methodology. (It also took a moment to plug Google Maps and search {natch}, but that can be forgiven.)

In the end, finding specific information that someone else hasn't already packaged up and put out there is still outside the capabilities of "A.I." The various systems mostly fell back on behaving like search engines. The information they gave me was well-presented, but there was no attempt to problem solve. I can think of a few ways that I'd come up with a count, if I could access information as quickly as modern computerized systems do.

Deleveraged

"We're eager to continue working with the [Security] Council on this proposal, one that would see a temporary cease-fire as soon as practicable, based on the formula of all hostages being released," [U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield] said after the vote. The proposal "would get aid into the hands of those Palestinians who so desperately need it," she added.
The U.S. has again vetoed a U.N. resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza

So... let me get this straight...

Israel to Hamas: You release all of the hostages that you still hold, and we'll temporarily stop trying to kill all of you.

United States to Hamas: It's a good deal. You should take it.

There's clearly something here that I don't understand, because I'm having a hard time seeing why anyone thinks that Hamas would agree to this, as Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield laid it out. When the United States vetoed Algeria's proposed resolution calling for a humanitarian cease fire, the Ambassador argued that in order for their to be a durable peace, Hamas had to release the remaining hostages. So if the plan expects Hamas to release hostages, why not offer a durable peace, rather than a temporary cease-fire?

The more the United States wants to be seen as instrumental in creating "peace in the Middle East," the more I suspect that the process would do better were the United States to stay out of it. Because in order to be able to work with both sides, the United States has to be seen as an honest broker, and no-one outside of the State Department or the government of Israel sees the nation that way. And with good reason. One can debate the cause, but it's pretty clear that the effect is that the United States is pushing for a settlement that is acceptable to Israel, without regard for what anyone else wants. The White House and other elements within the government make occasional noises about a "two-state solution," but that seems to be the one option that American administrations are unwilling to put any political capital behind.

In the end, the Palestinians have no good options. They can't fight their way into a position that would allow them to deal with Israel as equals, but it seems unlikely that even if they completely gave up the fight, that they'd be granted equal status, given that current Israeli policy insists that any independent Palestine be effectively a client-state of Israel. Palestine can't win a war of attrition; attempting to do so will likely only end in their gradual extermination and/or expulsion from the land they currently hold. If this is really a state of affairs the United States wants to avoid, something needs to change. And Washington is as good a place to start changing things as any.

Snuck

Trump's high-top sneakers sell out hours after launch

Personally, this seems more like an advertisement for Brand Trump than something that would be filed under "Politics & Policy," but maybe that's just me. Presuming that this is a legitimate news story, what I would like to know is: What are the sources? As near as I can tell, the only way the Axios reporter knows that the shoes are sold out is that they went to the website, and saw the "Sold Out" stamp on the picture of the shoes.

But that's not proof that the shoes are sold out. Only that they've been marked as such. Granted, with the ability to buy three pairs at a time, only a few hundred people needed to make purchases to buy the 1,000 pairs reportedly available for sale.

Still, anyone can go to a website, see a "Sold Out" stamp, and then come up with two hundred words. Axios didn't even seem to bother looking into the company that's reportedly selling the shoes, "CIC Ventures LLC." (Which, according to one X sleuth, is headquartered at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach.) Instead, they simply copy and paste a statement from the website seeking to put some distance the business and Donald Trump.

This isn't a story, it's journalistic filler. Which I get. After all, filler content is cheaper than material that actually takes work to put together. But it seems like part of the death spiral that news outlets find themselves in.

On the Seventh Day

Last week, I replicated an experiment with "A.I." conducted by a user on LinkedIn. The question was: "How many days between 2000-03-09 and 2002-09-30?"

Basically, ChatGPT 3.5 got the answer all kinds of wrong. It had come up with workable steps to find the number, but made errors in each one, resulting in it being off by 100 days. But it showed its work, so one could see where it went off the rails.

This morning, I asked again, and this time, ChatGPT's answer was only slightly off from the ones originally provided by Bing, Alexa, Copilot, and Gemini, answering 934 days. (By my math, it's off by 1.) Again, it gave the steps, but this time, it didn't show its work.

I then decided to test a theory of mine about generative A.I., and asked: "How many numbers are there between 1 and 100?" This is a trick question. For starters, it's ambiguous, because I don't define "number." So the answer could be "an infinite number." I also suspected that ChatGPT wasn't going to leave out 1 and 100, because this isn't the way people normally interact with numbers like this. Sure enough: "Therefore, there are 100 numbers between 1 and 100, inclusive."

(Just to check, I asked it: "Is 1.5 a number?" To which it responded "Yes, 1.5 is indeed a number. It is a decimal number representing the value one and a half. In mathematical terms, it's a rational number and can be expressed as the fraction 3/2.")

Curious as to how ChatGPT parsed the word "between" I asked: "How many days are there between Sunday and Saturday?" The answer came back as: "There are 6 days between Sunday and Saturday, inclusive." So it seems that the use of "inclusive" changed, from counting both 1 and 100 in the number question to counting Sunday or Saturday in the days of the week question.

To be sure, these are simple questions. But they point to the idea that ChatGPT, at least, because of the data that it's been trained on, tends to use language in the same inconsistent ways that people commonly use language. And this is why I suspect that prompt engineering is such an important piece of the puzzle. Getting to the "right answer" is likely going to mean constraining the system, especially if the "Temperature" and/or "Top_p" settings of a system are set to allow for more variability in the answers given.

Wingman

I watched Microsoft's Super Bowl commercial for Copilot. It's a good spot, well put together with a clear message. But I'm not sure that the message conveyed is really the one that Microsoft wants to send.

The basic format of the spot is this: it shows a number of individuals, recounting the doubts that other have about them. It focuses on one person, and her succinct response: "Watch me." Cue the inspirational music as we're shown how Copilot can empower people to achieve more.

For the people who dream of doing big things that are hard to achieve by oneself, Copilot positions itself as something that can help. But it does that, not by making the people in the spot better at what they're already doing, but by allowing them to do things that they'd otherwise ask of others. Commercials operate by showing a need, and offering a solution, and this one is no exception. But the need it appears to be solving is that of human collaboration. At no point in the ad does the viewer see two or more people collaborating on anything. In the world that the commercial shows, there are no teams... only individuals and Copilot. I can see the appeal to people who enjoy working alone, but I suspect it will heighten anxiety for others. If one's fear is that technology will drive isolation, or that AI will render one's skills obsolete, the message of this commercial is not reassuring.

It's the difference between speaking to the target audience and the total audience.

In one scene, a young man asks for sign ideas for his classic truck repair shop. Copilot takes on the role of graphic designer. That scene would have been just as powerful showing Copilot helping a graphic designer to create even more ideas. Or helping "Mike" source specific information on a model of truck that he's repairing. It's A.I. as complement, rather than competitor. By showing Copilot as helping people be productive with the skills they already have, a commercial can avoid the appearance of pitting people against one another, or devaluing the knowledge and talents that they bring to the table. It speaks to the total audience.

The primary fear that many people have of A.I. technology is that it's going to obsolesce their skills and damage their employment and/or income prospects. And, to be sure, it's going to take more than well-crafted commercials to assuage those concerns. Be that as it may, there's value in not feeding those concerns. Creating an advertisement that implies that Copilot can replace people, and expecting those people not to notice, was a misstep, if for no other reason than it implies that destroying people's livelihoods will be a known side effect of rolling out the technology.

The disruption to labor markets of Generative A.I. systems, and possibly Artificial General Intelligence is not a matter of "if," but of "when" and "how intensely." If A.I. companies don't position the technology as something that benefits broad sections of society, as opposed to further concentrating wealth at the top of the income distribution, people will push back against the threat they perceive it to pose. Messaging that speaks to a target audience, but leaves out others, plays into that sense of threat,