Target Selection

I started listening to The Rest is Politics out of the United Kingdom a few months ago, at the suggestion of a British coworker, and have been really enjoying it. Mainly because politics here in the United States can be a drag, and it's nice to hear about what's going on elsewhere for a change. TRiP, however, had other ideas, and has spun up a third weekly episode, hosted by Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci, to talk about American politics in the run-up to the presidential election in November.

During their first episode, one of the points that Ms. Kay made concerned political cynicism. She noted that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had gone to the Columbia University campus to excoriate the administration there on their handling to anti-Israel protests over the current war in Gaza, but, back in 2017 (when the Speaker was still a freshman Representative) he'd had nothing to say on the matter. (Google appears to back her up on this.)

I don't know if I'd term it political cynicism so much as political expediency. Parties don't garner very many votes by criticizing their voters. President Trump made his infamous statement: "They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides," not because he was attempting to praise neo-Nazis and White nationalists, but because he understood that Republican voters are considered part of the American Right, and a blanket condemnation of the politically Right activists at the rally would have hurt him. Likewise, Speaker Johnson has a lot to say about real and imagined antisemitism on college campuses specifically because Republican voters have come to see universities as bastions of the Left, so "Standing With Israel," has no political cost. Neither does turning on the very college president who passed muster when they were summoned to Capitol Hill to be grilled on how they would handle protests.

As the American political landscape drifts further and further into two camps made up of people who believe that the other hates them, the real and imagined mutual hostility between them becomes fertile ground for politicians (who are partisan more or less by definition) to play up those feelings as a means of displaying their own loyalties and (genuine or expedient) hostilities. Right now, college campuses where there are demonstrations, and the administrators are unready, unwilling or unable to put an end to them are target-rich environments for Republican lawmakers looking to prove that they have little tolerance for anyone further to the political Left than themselves. It's the nature of the game.

Placement

So I've finished The Republic, and not a moment too soon; it's something of a slog. Mainly because of its construction as a dialog where all of the other characters seem to serve no real purpose other than to agree with Plato's Socrates. I started to suspect that they were meant to be avatars for the audience; either as a way of getting the audience to agree with the positions that Plato was taking, or as something of a pander, showing them to be as wise as Socrates was.

In any event, the interesting part of the book was seeing out some of its concepts have lasted through the years, like the idea that there is a better, and "more real," reality out there, and that's where the wise seek to focus their attentions. Or the idea that some people are simply better than others, and therefore they should be given leadership for the good of everyone. Although it could be said that the fact that The Republic's disdain for fiction and artistry never seemed to have caught on is also interesting.

I'm not going to say that the basic insight of The Republic, which seems to be that an autocracy of benevolent Philosopher Kings would make the best form of government (and likewise, the philosophical mindset, presided over by pure Reason makes the most just person), has been debunked, but it quickly becomes evident that it would be a difficult system to maintain in practice, even outside of the communal nature of the place. Plato's understanding is that the everyday world that people inhabit is so corrupting that only constant vigilance for any negative influences will prevent it from degrading. Plato's just state would take a phenomenal amount of effort to enact and relies on the best minds being given the best education at the correct times in their lives. There simply isn't enough room for error for the whole thing to be a human enterprise.

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.