Naturally

How I wish human nature was a bit different with more care for each other and more attention to the long-term consequences of our actions.
Dan Ariely. "Hybrid Work and Work Abuse Concerns" LinkedIn

Dan Ariely, of all people, should know better. Human nature tends to focus on the personal and the short-term because that's where the incentives are. In a social situation where most of the people one is interacting with are effectively strangers, the impulse to look after one's own interests, even if it costs everyone something, is adaptive. While everyone working together, and looking out for the best interests of the group may come with the greatest rewards, being a team player when other people are defecting comes with much greater risks. And in a situation where it's difficult or impossible to tell who may be free riding, there is no ability to punish such people... and they generally know it. This means that the incentives are on the side of individuals looking out for themselves.

Similarly, in a situation where people have differing time horizons, for whatever reason, getting everyone to privilege the long term over the short term is difficult. A person who knows, that for whatever reason, they're going to be leaving soon (whether that's for another job, retirement or what have you) is not going to be in a position to defer a reward or gratification. A bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush once it's understood that the bush won't be there indefinitely. So again, the individual looking out for their short-term interest is the best thing for them in that moment.

Accordingly, the thing to do isn't wishing. It's engineering. With some communications thrown in. When the clear incentives lie with taking care of one another and looking out for the long term, that's when people will do so. Modern American society tends to push people to place their short-term self-interest above other considerations because it feels both precarious and isolating to many people. Wanting to change "human nature" after hundreds of millennia of evolutionary pressure is pointless. But modern society hasn't been around anywhere nearly as long. The problem become s that change is hard, and comes with costs. When I was young, there was a lot of concern about the national debt. The general consensus was that something needed to be done. Why, 40 years later, hasn't it changed? Because the drive to make the lifestyle changes and part with the money needed to allow the government to run surpluses simply wasn't there. Even know, with tax rates much lower, and deficits much higher, than they were when I was a teenager, you can still find proponents of supply-side economics who are convinced that by lowering taxes even further, that the magic of the Laffer Curve will suddenly kick in and solve everything. And people buy into it because it offers a solution that (supposedly) doesn't cost anyone anything.

Creating a society where the tangible benefits accrue from biting the bullet now is going to take confidence that it's going to turn out as planned. Wishing people were different won't bring that about.

Only One

Trump, whose front-runner status in the Republican presidential race has solidified his leadership of the GOP, has loudly vowed to kill the bipartisan border deal.
Trump, House Republicans plot to kill border deal

If the problem that House Speaker Mike Johnson (who appears to be speaking now on behalf of Donald Trump) has with the current legislation is that "it wouldn't do enough to stop illegal border crossings," one would suspect that the answer would be to either add amendments to shore up that part of things, or simply pass another bill later. I would not be surprised if the problem that Mr. Trump (and thus, the Republican leadership) has with the plan currently under consideration is that it would hand a legislative win to President Biden, and take immigration out of the mix of issues for Mr. Trump to run on in the summer and fall. He supposedly wants a "perfect" immigration bill, and is calling on Republicans in the House of Representatives to block anything less. Of course, no details of this "perfect" legislation have been provided to anyone.

But such is the nature of partisanship. If Donald Trump is elected to a second term in office this fall, he won't actually need to do anything with the border. The Republicans are unlikely to obtain sixty seats in the Senate, and that means that Democratic senators will be able to block legislation that they don't like. And it's hard to see them wanting to play ball with a Trump Administration again. And since Republican voters will blame Democrats for any problems, legislation or none, Mr. Trump could respond to difficulties in passing legislation by not bothering to have any such legislation put forth. Given this, I suspect he's more invested in blocking progress now than making progress later. Otherwise, there's no real reason to literally let the "perfect" be the enemy of the good.

Errored Out

When searching for Swift on the site, a message appears that says: "Something went wrong. Try reloading."
X blocks searches for Taylor Swift after explicit AI images of her go viral

Of course, nothing "went wrong." As the headline notes, X was actively blocking searches for "Taylor Swift" in an effort to suppress generative "A.I."-created nude images purported to be of the superstar singer. So... why not simply say that? A message that reads "Due to a spike in inappropriate activity connected to the search terms you have entered, we have declined to complete the search at this time," would get the point across, be broadly applicable to a wide range of situations and not hint at what people aren't supposed to be searching for (on the off chance that people don't already know what they want to find). And it's not a bald lie.

Of course, companies are in a bit of a bind here. While I suspect that the real reason why X.com is lying to users is that since the error message pops up when there are actual errors, pressing it into service when the company simply declines to carry out a request is the path of least resistance. The alternative I suggested above would take some time to put into place, since there are so many stakeholders (including lawyers) who would need to sign off on it; and for that to happen, it would need to have almost zero chance of blowback. And, in American society today, white lies tend to have much less chance of blowback than even seemingly innocuous truths.

Submerged

Someone put videos, purporting to be sexually explicit clips of Taylor Swift, online. Cue the calls for regulation of "deepfake" apps to protect people from being fooled. While such news stories are well meaning, they fall into portraying people as unable to protect themselves from being fooled, injured or defrauded. But perhaps more importantly, they cast society as being unable to change.

The ability to doctor photographs and videos to show people who weren't involved or events that didn't actually happen is nothing new. In a number of cases, it's simply termed "special effects." True, for the most part, the technology has been expensive enough to be completely unavailable to everyday people. But that state of affairs wasn't going to continue forever. And I'm not sure that regulation is going to put that particular djinn back in the bottle now.

So if one sees a nude picture of a person whom one understands is highly unlikely to pose for a nude picture, it seems that a certain level of skepticism is called for. But maybe a better response is not treating the nude body as some sort of pathogen that ruins the minds of young people forever. One of the stories of people creating and sharing faked pictures of nude teenage girls is from a local high school. Given what we know about teenage boys, and the desperation with which some of them will pursue anything remotely sexual in nature, the idea that someone would set about to make graphic images of classmates should have been a given.

Likewise, in a society with so many members who will do something simply because a celebrity endorses it, absolutely no one should be at all surprised that hucksters (and fraudsters) have been cobbling together videos of random celebrities saying "buy this thing." Because again, what else would one expect?

As Professor of law Danielle Citron puts it in the NPR piece, even deepfake videos designed explicitly to fool people are nothing more than a sophisticated form of lying. And there's no level of regulation that will ever prevent people from lying to one another; especially not when being believed comes with material benefits.

But there are tools that people can be given to help them see through lies, like the skepticism I mentioned earlier. But there are also steps that society can take to reduce the impact of lies. The sexual prudishness of the United States is part of what makes sexualized pictures of Taylor Swift, or a teenager's classmates, so desirable. But it also makes it a matter of shame for the people whose images are faked. If the response to someone passing around a celebrity sex tape was a collective "so what?" a lot of the incentive to create them would go away. If it took more than a celebrity endorsement on social media for a product or service to rack up sales, faked endorsements wouldn't be as useful.

The problem of faked media is not one that, as a society, the United States (or any other nation) is going to be able to regulate its way out of. It's going to take a lot more work than that.

Secondary Importance

According to NPR, "[New Hampshire] could be the last stand for Republicans who don't want Donald Trump to be their nominee again. There likely won't be another opportunity with such a moderate Republican electorate."

Personally, I think the Never Trumpers' last stand was likely some months, if not some years, ago. Donald Trump has pretty much had ownership of the Republican electorate since he first won the Republican nomination for President, and those people who felt that he was bad for the party and/or the nation have never mounted a genuinely serious challenge to that ownership. And that includes Nikki Haley's alleged run for the White House. I'm no more convinced (and haven't been, at any point in this process) that her goal was "Haley '24." Rather, like Ron DeSantis and Tim Scott, this was about positioning herself for the presumed post-Trump landscape of 2028. And even that presumes that Trump doesn't simply anoint a "Mini-Me" like Vivek Ramaswamy to carry the baton forward for him.

So the idea that "there likely won't be another opportunity" presumes that New Hampshire is, itself, an opportunity for someone to come across as an actual competitor to Mr. Trump. Given all of the ink that has been spilled on the idea that even when the Republican field was reasonably large, the only candidates who were attempting to make the point that Donald Trump would not be a good President were people like Chris Christie, who were "running" specifically to make that point, this seems predicated on some large, but otherwise quiet, well of anti-Trump sentiment in the party; people who couldn't be bothered to actively support one of the many alternatives who threw their hats into the ring, but are now going to coalesce out of the woodwork to propel Nikki Haley to a primary victory.

I completely understand wanting this to be a story. After all, polls have been reported as saying that voters don't want to relitigate Biden versus Trump. But Democrats are willing to have President Biden be the nominee again (due to their woefully thin bench of other possibilities) and Republicans have been enthusiastic about Donald Trump carrying their grievances forward. Casting any part of primaries as worth the attention requires ignoring those facts.

Administrata

In the New York Times, David Brooks opines on the growth of the "administrative apparatus" in the United States, and how that "redistribute[s] power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap[s] initiative, discretion, creativity and drive." Not to mention taking a quick dig at the "dangerous ideology" of diversity, equity and inclusion.

I tend to like David Brooks' writing, which is why I read him. But he seems to evince the same tendency in most his articles; decrying change in the world without understanding why it came about. The closest he comes in speaking to the incentive structure that brought about the rise of the administrative apparatus is to note: "Organizations are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits." But he doesn't investigate why organizations need such protection. Instead, he goes on to say "but the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid."

This, however, is not unique to administrators. Dan Ariely posted a link to the column on LinkedIn (which is where I first saw it), and he notes that there is a dilemma between "1) having more and clearer rules (and more people to make us keep those rules) and 2) creativity and freedom that is needed for motivation." I disagree with him on that. Rather than "more and clearer rules," I suspect that people are looking for greater and more comprehensive safety. And they often define "safety" in a way that not only means that nothing bad ever happens to them, but that anything bad that does manage to happen isn't their fault.

Childhood is now thoroughly administered. I’m lucky enough to have grown up at a time when parents let children roam free to invent their own games and solve their own problems. Now kids’ activities, from travel sports to recess, are supervised, and rules dominate. Parents are afraid their kids might be harmed, but as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have argued, by being overprotective, parents make their kids more fragile and more vulnerable to harm.

It's a worthwhile point, but what's missing from it is any means to assuage parent's fears of immediate harms. I'm old enough to remember for myself "a time when parents let children roam free to invent their own games and solve their own problems." But I'm also old enough to remember the Chicago Tylenol Poisonings (which were never solved). Not only did they cause a panic (especially in the Chicago area, where I lived at the time), but they reignited fears of poisons and other foreign objects being placed into Halloween treats (despite the fact that the real threat to roving trick-or-treaters tends to be automobile traffic). These events marked, for me anyway, a gradual shift in parental attitudes; one that was well under way, if not complete, by the time I graduated from college.

The Overton Window was shifting, and it's likely going to take quite a bit to shift it back. Mr. Brooks' speaks of the "administrative apparatus" as a thing unto itself, but it's being driven by social attitudes. Parents are highly invested in their children's success, and society at large tends to hold parents accountable for any ills that befall said children. Mr. Brooks is incredulous that colleges have directives on how students should practice bondage-discipline-sado-masochism (BDSM), but as noted earlier in the piece, the goal here is to protect themselves from lawsuits. And who is going to bring those lawsuits? Students and their parents. If Mr. Brooks wants to roll back the tide of administrators in the United States, step one is going to be making parents more at ease with the idea that terrible things are going to happen to children, and that a hunt for the guilty, either in a court of law or in the court of public opinion, serves no-one.

Studies have shown that when subjects are informed that this or that group of people have some sort of power or agency over their lives, the subjects' sympathy for those people diminishes. This creates a direct benefit to being seen as "weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid;" and if people don't naturally gravitate towards playing that part, personal injury lawyers will happily coach them at it. And so, yes, people come off as barely able to care for themselves. After all, it's not like there's a YouTube video showing you how to iron your clothing while wearing it, or anything... While some warning labels are corporate cover your ass, some are basically there to say, "hey, if you do this, and it goes sideways, you can't say we didn't warn you."

I would argue that it's difficult for an administrator to make the case that people should be treated as strong, resilient, tough and intelligent when if someone comes to harm, that administrator will be on the sharp end of a lawsuit. Accordingly, rolling back the various systems of administrators that have sprung up to protect people is going to mean rolling back conceptualizations of harm, likely quite substantially, because the definition of "safety" is going to have to change.

Many modern Americans see themselves has just having enough to feel the sting of its loss; whether that's children, housing, employment or whatnot. Convincing them that they're well enough off they they needn't worry about what they have is going to be a tough sell.

Open Season

“The only thing we are not doing is, we are not shooting people who cross the border because of course the Biden administration will charge us with murder.”

Gov. Abbott: Texas hasn't shot migrants on the border because Biden will 'charge us with murder'

I have to admit that I find Governor Abbott's formulation of that statement to be strange. Surely there are other authorities who would frown upon gunning down migrants as they attempted to cross the U.S./Mexico border, legally or otherwise. Especially in light of the "clarification" the Governor made later.

[A]t a press conference Friday morning, Abbott told reporters his remarks were made after he "was asked to point out where the line is drawn about what would be illegal, and I pointed out something that is obviously illegal."

One would suspect that more than the Biden Administration's Department of Justice would have a problem with open murder.

But I get it. This is about partisan signalling. "Securing" (or perhaps "sealing" would be a better term) the border with Mexico has become something of a cause for Republican voters, who resent the perceived damage that low-wage workers from Central and South America do to their wages. Less top-of-mind for them is the fact that companies being able to underpay (if not simple steal wages from) migrant workers helps keep prices low. There is a certain mindset in the United States that is too self-important to accept wages that would allow for the prices they are willing to pay for goods and services, and too price sensitive to pay the prices that would support the wages they would want for the work. And of course, the shareholders of the businesses that commonly employ migrant labor aren't about to reduce their own dividends to employ Americans without raising prices. Note that this doesn't mean that the common refrain of "Americans don't want to do this work," is true. I think that plenty of Americans are willing to do the work... just not for the poverty wages offered. (Besides, it's not like the migrants think the work is great, either. The fact that so many of them want their children to receive good educations so they can do something better demonstrates that. But the work is relatively better, and often much safer, than what can be had in whatever part of Latin America they've left. Americans complain about crime, but they'd like desert whole cities if faced with the sort of crime that drives people to move thousands of miles to escape it.

But I digress. In any event, this particular flavor of partisan signalling strikes me as strange. I understand that there is a constituency for the idea that making the border into a (reasonably) impermeable barrier through a combination of wall-building and firepower. I don't know how they think that this would work, given how long the border is (and the fact that no-one else has ever managed to seal such a large expanse of territory), but I recognize they think it can be done. And I can see that Governor Abbott would want to signal to such people that he has their backs. What I'm dubious about is the idea that he couldn't manage to find messaging that didn't project an image of "bloodthirsty manic kept in check by the political opposition. But, of course, I'm working under the idea that they'd rather not look like "bloodthirsty maniacs." I could very well be that I'm mistaken in that. At least in the sense that Governor Abbott's constituency in this may want to portray themselves precisely as Blue America perceives them. After all, being thought of as dangerously violent can have its advantages.

And maybe it's this desire on the part of partisans, to deliberately stoke the anxieties of those they disagree with, that's pushing partisan messaging into more extreme territory. Some extremes, it seems, being more extreme than others.

Go For The Silver

Given that the Washington State presidential primary is late enough in the season that no-one really cares about it (especially not in a year where Donald Trump could reasonably sweep every state contest), I hadn't expected to see any campaign signs up at all. But it turns out that the precinct-level caucuses for the state Republican Party were this weekend, and DeSantis' supporters decided that a bit (but only a bit) of lobbying was in order.

Late to the Party

Political independents have further cemented their standing as the dominant voting bloc in America ahead of the 2024 election, new Gallup data showed.
Independent voters dominate U.S. while Dems slip to record low: Gallup

Ah, yes. The fabled "independent voter." Who is mostly a figment of the imagination.

As open partisanship has pulled the perceptions of the Democrats and the Republicans towards their activist bases, being "independent," "non-partisan," "moderate" or what-have-you has become a more popular identifier among the American public. But most political analysts would note that many, if not all, of the self-identified independents, have distinctly partisan preferences, and therefore, voting patterns. They just don't want to openly associate themselves with the two primary political parties.

Because there are other parties in the United States. And it's a safe bet (although an absolute lock might be a better way of putting it) that between them, the "third parties" of the American political landscape will not receive a plurality of the votes. 43% of Americans might say that they're Independent, but it's generally a surprise when independent political parties (like the Green Party, Libertarians or the Socialists, to name a few) together manage to break into the double digits in terms of vote share.

And I understand the impulse to not associate with the big two political parties. I tend to describe myself as "not Republican." Which, for many people, is simply a roundabout way of saying "Democrat." To be sure, I tend to have somewhat "idiosyncratic" policy preferences. I'm what many people would call fiscally conservative, but socially liberal. And I'm not a national security hawk. For many people, that places me in the Democratic camp. But personally, I'm not really a fan of the sort of interventionist policies that Democrats tend to favor. On the other hand, most of the politicians that I have positive opinions of tend to be Democrats. So... am I a Democrat? Since I live in Washington State, I don't have to be; we don't have to declare partisan affiliations for primary elections. And I do vote third party as often as I can find someone who's not either completely crazy or obviously running a message campaign. But not because I ever expect any of them to win; it's more that I think that if third-party candidates can manage to pull down a decent number of votes, we'll start having more choices. But  suspect that anyone who looked at my voting record (assuming they could, with secret ballots and all that) would presume that I'm a consistent Democrat who was willing to vote third party once in a while. Especially recently, as most Republican candidates for local and statewide offices are acolytes of Donald Trump; with all of the baggage that entails. But I don't identify as a Democrat. But all that really means is that I don't vote for them simply out of partisanship.

The politics of the United States may come off as simple-minded at times, but it's more complicated than having only two viable political parties in most of the country can account for. Given that there are only two, however, the number of Americans who aren't effectively affiliated with one or the other of them is pretty small. Much smaller than 43%. The high number of people who tell pollsters that they're "Independent" isn't a measure of their politics. It's a sign of how poorly the parties are viewed by much of the country.

Code, Talking

By now, we've all seen forecasted trends and what seemingly seems plausible for 2024, but I predict four indispensable trends in 2024 due to the emerging blockchain economy. This transformation will redefine the essence of influence, placing innovation at its core, overshadowing mere exposure.
Four Transformative Trends Leaders Can't Ignore in 2024

What in the world is that supposed to mean? I suspect that ChatGPT, or some other Large Language Model-driven "A.I." chatbot wrote it, and has no real idea what it means either. To follow it up, the four "transformative" and/or "indispensable" trends that are predicted have nothing to do with blockchains.

Welcome to the new world of A.I. Where before, you had to pay someone who (presumably) knew how to write to be one's ghostwriter, now you can outsource the job to a computer, which will say things like: "I predict such leaders, who balance commercial success with social responsibility and operational excellence, will rise to unprecedented levels of influence and admiration,...more than ever this year." To be sure, I could be wrong, and these passages were hand-written by a man with 25 years of experience in the business world and who (I think) has started up and sold two companies. But if these sorts of mediocre English skills can set one up for a career in business, a lot of people have been missing out.

So suspect that at least some of it was generated via Large Language Model, maybe (and just maybe) cleaned up a bit and dropped into LinkedIn as the sort of Business Leader Wisdom that people don't really bother to read (let alone try to understand) before giving it a "like" so that it will be relayed to their networks. And this is the allure of generative systems. They don't have to be good. They just need to be inexpensive and/or quick. Because of they save someone 20 minutes or $100, who cares if it's of noticeably lower quality? It's something (in this case "content"), and it leaves the requestor with more time, money or both. And that's what matters. If generative systems are incapable of being good, they can be relied upon to be fast and cheap. And that seems to be good enough.

Doing For Oneself

And at the risk of coming across a broken record (albeit one with a very long cycle time), when someone comes to view themselves as essential to the well-being of another person or persons, they view what is best for themselves as also being in the direct interest of those they are looking after. To fall back on my Good Shepherd analogy yet again, a shepherd may be utterly convinced that sacrificing one or two of the animals in the flock to save themselves is the best thing for the flock. After all, where would they be without the shepherd? And so even if the shepherd aids themselves at the direct expense of their charges, the flock is still better off than it would be under the alternative.
Minding the Flock

I was reminded of this when I was reading a news story about the nakedly self-serving provisions that organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation, U.S. Wheat Associates and the National Association of Wheat Growers want to see encoded into law as part of the "American Farmers Feed the World Act." The simple description is that it would prevent a federal program called Food For Peace from giving money or vouchers to recipients. It would also prevent the program from buying food locally in the countries where it works. Instead it would require that the program's budget be used to buy food from American farmers, and use American companies to export it out. It would also move the program from the United States Agency for International Development to the Department of Agriculture.

One could see U.S. Wheat Associates and its allies as being deliberately greedy, backing approaches that work to entrench poverty abroad, rather than fighting it, with the full intention of lining their pockets at taxpayer expense. But I suspect that, as with the Good Shepherd analogy that I keep coming back to, that leaders in American agribusiness see this not as helping themselves, but as helping everyone. And I suspect that this is something that a lot of people outside of the United States realize about it; the tendency to see itself as indispensable to the world. And so the United States see aggressively looking after it own interests as something that it's doing for the world at large.

Of course, this way of looking at the world (and, perhaps, avoiding looking at oneself) existed prior to the formation of the United States, and it will exist even once the United States has passed into history. What's interesting about it is how open it all is. The fact that the United States effectively dumps commodities (clothing being another big one) on poor nations in a manner that crushes their local industries (and therefore, hampers their ability to lift themselves out of poverty) has been known, and talked about, for years. The piece on the NPR website is far from the first time that I've read about it.

Of course, a sense of entitlement also fits the bill. I'm sure that if one were to ask advocates for American agribusiness, they would rather confidently claim that American farmers are deserving of the aid money that is funneled to them, even it means that it's spent less efficiently than it could be. After all, what good is being exceptional, if it doesn't come with financial benefit.

The Good Machine

I was listening to a recent episode of EconTalk, where host Russ Roberts was having a conversation with University of Toronto psychologist Paul Bloom on the subject of "Can Artificial Intelligence Be Moral?" One of the points that Mr. Bloom made was that (and, of course, I'm paraphrasing here) people don't really want artificial intelligence, learning machines or what have you to be "moral" in the sense of upholding the entirety of what someone thinks a good moral code to be. It's more that that want them to be deferential to their interests as they perceive them, in the long term but also in the immediate term, so as not to feel like a serious constraint on their freedom of choice. This is because, in the end, AI, whether that be the generative "AI" systems that we have now or the artificial general intelligence that may (or may not) be created in the future, is seen as a tool, and the purpose of tools is to extend our capabilities, not constrain them.

Earlier in the conversation Messrs. Roberts and Bloom had been discussing what I feel is the most important upshot of the statement, attributed to Socrates, that no-one intentionally does evil. They noted that many people have done things that other have considered to be unspeakably evil, but that those people themselves felt that what they were doing contributed to the good, often because their religion told them so.

As am aside, that triggered curiosity about the degree to which divinities themselves are seen as, basically, tools. Not consciously, of course. I wouldn't expect to walk up to a believer in Shinto and have them say to me that they considered Amaterasu Ōmikami to be simply a tool of human interests any more than I would expect a Moslem to say the same of Allah. But it's fairly common for religion to manifest in this way, with the understanding that one of the things that a deity wants is the thriving of their worshipers, even if that comes at the expense of others. This isn't to say that religiously-defined morality carries no constraints; but those constraints tend to be personal, as they are for the good of the community. I don't believe I've seen religious strictures that explicitly place the will of the divinity over the interests of the community at large; the two tend to be conflated. I. however, am not a scholar on religion, so it very well may be the case that there are religions where morality and community interest don't align.

In any event, the fact that AI tools are, well, tools, means that the question of ethics in AI is going to be moot; it's nice to think that technology will find a way to constrain bad actors by refusing to do the bad things those actors request of them, but it's really a matter of attempting to force obedience to a certain understanding of right and wrong. And most people would resent living in a world where one's tools enforced obedience to someone else's ideals (the young-adult dystopian fiction novel series pretty much writes itself). And this is really where the lack of a universally accepted morality come into play. Ethical AI, will, more or less by definition, wind up enforcing a particular understanding of ethics onto people who may not hold the same understanding. Either that, or the understanding of ethics will be so broad and vague to be generally useful.

Coverage

On the Axios home page this morning, there is a story about Jeffery Epstein; or, more precisely, about a handful of the people whose names are in a set of recently unsealed court documents.

Also on the Axios home page this morning, there is a story about which states have the highest relative rates of homelessness.

So far, so "what else is new?" What struck me as interesting about these two slices of the site were the "Go deeper" links offered for each one. As can be seen in the screenshots, there is an introduction to each story on the home page. The full story, however, resides at its own link, and Axios helpfully notes roughly how long it will take to read that story.

The story about people named in the court documents, from a civil suit filed against Ghislaine Maxwell, is listed as being a 3-minute read. It runs about 890 words. The story about relative rates of homelessness, on the other hand, is listed at less than a minute. Which is reasonable, given that it's less than 170 words.

For critics of the media, this is an example of how the institution cynically directs people's attention away from what's important, giving the plight of the homeless in the United States short shrift while calling attention to a salacious story that, in the end, is mostly pointless unless one assumed that merely having known Jeffery Epstein is proof of some wrongdoing. Take, for instance, the following, which was noted in the Axios piece: "In one instance, one of Epstein's accusers says the financier had remarked that Clinton 'likes them young,' referring to girls." This basically amounts to "someone said that Jeffery Epstein said something about Bill Clinton." Okay... and...? It's basically hearsay. Not to mention the sort of thing that drives conspiracy theories. But it's not really useful information. It simply makes the former president look bad, but without telling the audience anything beyond the fact that someone said something.

Likewise, the story on the highest rates of homelessness simply takes the Department of Housing and Urban Development's estimates of the homeless population of each state as fact, and presents it. Insight into how Mississippi has such a low rate (and absolute number) of homeless residents? Not a bit. Is the state doing something that other states might want to copy? Who knows?

But there is a case to be made for "Who cares?" And for many, the answer to that is "not the public at large." And in this logic, Axios is following, rather than leading, its audience. For all that advocates for social justice and the homeless believe that the public should be better educated about the causes of, and solutions for, homelessness, the public itself has other interests. And Axios, as a business, needs to present stories that will result in people reading them. And people simply aren't interested in reading a thousand words on how and why homelessness varies between states.

I, for my part, suspect primarily the latter. Axios is, after all, a business, and it understands what the majority of its readers want. Sure, I would have rather had a much deeper dive into the homelessness story, but I'm in a fairly small minority; not one that's big enough for Axios to devote resources to. Their job, after all, is to give the people what they want.

Going Both Ways

So I found the preceding aphorism on integrity on LinkedIn this morning. It's pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, with the bog-standard verbiage about "doing the right thing" and "it takes great courage."

But what it misses is anything about trust. If this sort of integrity is going to be anything but suicidal, it has to result in some benefit to the individual undertaking it at some point along the way. It's when people can't see how there's anything in it for them, or at least how integrity doesn't make their position worse, that they throw it out of the window.

And I think that this, in the end, is why these sorts of exhortations fail to move the needle. Integrity is about more than being trustworthy; it's also quite a bit about being trusting. Letting people know that if they follow the rules, the community will ensure that the common good is also good for them would go a long way in making the desired style of behavior more common.
 

Negative Polarity

When there are (effectively) only two sides, declaring that one isn't on one side is the same as declaring that one is on the other.