Weather-Wise

While everyone talks about how much it rains in Seattle, being a native of Chicago, I find that is mostly drizzles. I miss the heavy, audible, rain and the rumble of distant thunder that used to be a fairly common occurrence, and so when it happens here, it is something to be savored.

(Unless, of course, I'm on the road. Because for someplace where it allegedly rains 14 months out of the year, a number of people seem to have remarkable difficulty with wet pavement.)

That said, drizzly and dry are not the same, even if they both are something other than genuinely raining. While Winters in the Seattle area don't have the same homicidal instinct that that Midwestern cold can often exhibit, they're still a poor time to not have a home to be inside. I wonder how many people find themselves here in (admittedly short) Summers, and think they've found a clement place to get back on their feet, only to realize that a good nine to ten months of off-and-on precipitation has been awaiting them. Recently two whole weeks passed between rains, and nearly set a new record for January being dry. But the wet is back, and while it doesn't require an umbrella, it's much more pleasant with a roof.

Misread

Print magazines are no less susceptible to a bit of bait-and-switch to lure in readers than online news sources. After all, sometimes, they're the same publication. The cover headline of the February issue of The Atlantic proclaims Donald Trump Wants You To Forget This Happened, under a photograph of January 6th, 2021. Mr. Thompson's actual story is titled: Is this what patriotism looks like? And it's the story of one of the January 6th rioters; one who assaulted police officers, but was pardoned by President Trump.

But let me stick with the cover headline for a bit, because while I think that it will resonate with a lot of people (after all, these things are not chosen casually), I also happen to think that it isn't true. There's a difference between seeking to erase a narrative, and seeking to change one. Historical revisionism is just that... revisionism, and that's closer to what I think that President Trump is after.

For a lot of people, mostly, but not exclusively, Democrats or Democratic-leaning, January 6th 2021 is a story of partisans being sore losers. Deluded, or cynically dishonest, about the nation's opinion of Donald Trump and his performance in his first term in office, they sought to use violence to overturn a free and fair election and act out their grievances against Congress.

Trumpists, unsuprisingly, profess (honestly or otherwise) to see things differently. For them, the President's nationwide popularity is an article of faith; the idea that enough people would vote for the Biden-Harris ticket that Donald Trump would lose the popular vote, let alone the Electoral College, was unthinkable. Malfeasance was the only possible explanation. And so the events of January 6th weren't a crime; they were a principled, even heroic, stand against the forces of corruption and the people who enabled it.

And that's what Donald Trump wants the historical record to reflect. An angelic light on the people who support him. Yes, there are things that the President would prefer to have removed from the annals of history. The Trail of Tears, for instance, is not something that can be readily spun into a narrative of American moral superiority. But revolutions, even failed ones, can be turned into tales of national (and perhaps ethnic) greatness. And so that's the way that Donald Trump, his acolytes and supporters would prefer it to be remembered.

I offer no opinion on whether they will succeed, and, if they do, on what timeline. But that it is the goal, I'm reasonably certain of. 

Line of Fire

"Too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force," the report found. "[I]n some cases agents put themselves in harm's way by remaining in close proximity to the rock throwers when moving out of range was a reasonable option."
CBP has a history of excessive force. Critics say they were unprepared for Minnesota

This isn't a new criticism of law enforcement. It was raised in the media in the aftermath of the Amadou Diallo shooting, and that took place in 1999. I suspect that the tendency of court cases pertaining to potentially unlawful uses of deadly force to concentrate solely on the immediate lead up to the point when an officer pulls the trigger is a large part of this. If the timeline is never wound back far enough to get to the point where it's reasonable to ask: "Should the officer have been in so vulnerable a position in the first place?" there will be little incentive for officers to avoid making themselves vulnerable.

The Trump Administration's reflexive defense of every shooting, and the immediate casting of the person killed as dangerous or a terrorist also ramps up the danger level. Not only because officers can come to feel secure in the idea that the Administration will back them, but as I was taught when I spent a summer as a security guard, a dead person can't contradict your version of events. In this sense, fatal shootings become easier to justify than non-fatal ones, where there is a survivor who can demand evidence of the allegations against them.

But perhaps the central problem is the polarization of the general public... or at least between those people who see themselves as ardent supporters or critics of the Administration. For people who see the Trump Administration's crackdown on economic migrants and asylum seekers alike as warranted (or even long overdue), interference with it, or even protest against it, makes one a bad person. And if the actions of law enforcement mean that bad people are hurt or killed, what's the harm?

The one thing that Americans appear to dislike more than fighting with one another is not having anyone to fight with, and the current Administration understands that it will be forgiven a certain amount of overzealousness, so long as it's directed towards perceived enemies of its base of voters. And as long as there's a significant segment of the public that's willing to ignore law enforcement personnel putting themselves in situations that they then feel the need to shoot their way out of, there will be little incentive for change. 

Misbelief

I read Ross Douthat's Believe recently. It's not a long book, about 200 pages, generally devoted to the proposition that there is a generalized obligation for people to believe in some sort of higher power, and for those people who are uncertain which one to believe in, one of the four primary contemporary religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism) are the best bets.

I was only on page 2 when I realized that I likely wasn't in the target demographic for Mr. Douthat's book. I'm not the sort to regard secularism as "an uncomfortable intellectual default." In other words, I wasn't looking for permission to believe. But I also don't believe that it's "just too difficult to be a thoughtful, serious modern person and embrace religious faith." I don't have faith in higher powers, myself, but that's because I don't perceive any real need for them, not because I find them somehow irrational.

Because Believe is a book for people who already want to believe, it doesn't set out to answer the question of "Is this true?" Rather, it's an answer to the question of "Why is this true?" Accordingly, Mr. Douthat starts from the proposition that God is real, and this lends the book the air of begging the question at times. "Nonbelief requires ignoring what out reason has revealed about the world around us," to quote the dust jacket, because Mr. Douthat's faith admits no ambiguity in reason's revelation. This is a bit at odds with the fact that he admits to assuming certain things to be true: I don't come to different conclusions about the world than Mr. Douthat does because I'm cynically engaged in motivated reasoning... I literally have a different starting point than he does, and that differing vantage point means that my view of the landscape is going to differ from his.

I have a number of notes about the book, but I'm sure that many of them come from my tendency to overanalyze things, so I'll cut to the chase. Mr. Douthat seems to want to avoid falling into Pascal's Wager, but the basic gist of his argument is the same: That what the higher Power wants from people is their belief. There's no indication that belief is a means to an end; that once someone chooses to believe, that then, and only then, can they embark on some project, or come into alignment with the story into which they have been placed. This makes it difficult to square the idea that it's not of primary importance to believe in the correct understanding of that Power.

If, as Mr. Douthat says, "It would be a strange God indeed who cared intensely about how we spend our money or what votes we cast or how we feel about ourselves, but somehow didn't give a damn about behaviors that might forge or shatter a marriage, create a life in good circumstances or terrible ones, form a lifelong bond or addictive habit, bind someone to their own offspring or separate their permanently," isn't is also a strange God who is only moderately interested in which faith, and thus which set of instructions one follows? The idea that the various differences in how different religions dictate that people spend their money, cast their votes and live their sex lives are minor details doesn't seem in keeping with the importance of maintaining a conservative outlook on sexuality.

In the end, it was an interesting read, but the limits of the target audience is worth keeping in mind. Believe isn't for people who are fine where they are; it's for those who find themselves standing outside of a religion, hoping to be invited in. 

Only One

It took me longer that it should have to get the joke. I'm impressed that decals this specific can be found for sale.
 

Afterwards

Zanny Minton Beddoes of The Economist interviewed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at the World Economic Forum in Davos, on the topic of "The Day After AGI."

A short period of time was spent talking about the disruptions to the labor market that growing adoption of generative automation is bringing and that "artificial general intelligence" could bring if and when it arrives on the scene, and during that section of the conversation Mr. Hassabis expresses a hope that AGI might bring about a post-scarcity society. It's a hope that I find to be completely misplaced. Technology companies may be able to find a way to make computing resources cheap enough to effectively give them away to the public at large, but unless people are reliably able to turn that access into money, things like food, shelter and clothing are going to become problems.

But then, interestingly, Mr. Hassabis says that what keeps him up at night are concerns over how people will find meaning and purpose.

And I've always found this strange. I've known a few people who have been able to retire from the working world relatively young, along with those who stopped working at regular retirement ages, and none of them have suddenly found themselves bereft of meaning and purpose. Given that their material needs are taken care of, they fill their time with things that the want to do. Not to mention people too young to have entered the workforce full-time... there's no indication that people who aren't metaphorically punching a clock every day are succumbing to ennui en masse.

I've never certain if the tech utopianism that many executives in these companies express is a carefully-vetted corporate talking point, created expressly for public consumption, of if they somehow actually believe that some great redistribution of wealth is going to take place to allow people whose labor has been devalued to survive. Talk of how people will find "meaning" in the absence of being able to make a living may sound like concern for those who aren't independently wealthy, but if that's what it actually is, it completely misconstrues the problems that are going to actually need solutions.

To be fair, Mr. Hassabis does note that he doesn't know if society has the right institutions in place to distribute productivity and wealth "more fairly." But I think a better follow-on to that observation would be a plan to create them, and get them into place. But that's not Mr. Hassabis' job. It belongs to society at large, which, so far, has shown no interest in it.

Newspeak

If you parse through those syllables, you may see that [Mr. Nadella]’s not only urging everyone to stop thinking of AI-generated content as slop, but also wants the tech industry to stop talking about AI as a replacement for humans. He hopes the industry will start talking about it as a human-helper productivity tool instead.
Microsoft’s Nadella wants us to stop thinking of AI as ‘slop’

What immediately jumped out about this for me was recalling the ad for Copilot that Microsoft ran during 2024's Super Bowl. I wrote a post about it on LinkedIn at the time. As far as I was concerned, the whole message of that ad was that Copilot was a replacement for people. At the risk of seeming narcissistic, I'm going to quote myself at length here, understanding that not everyone has access to LinkedIn.

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.

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.

This is what Mr. Nadella wants the industry to stop doing... the very thing that Microsoft itself was doing in that Super Bowl spot. While other big names in the generative automation business (not to mention journalists) have been predicting that generative automation will destroy jobs, Mr. Nadella understands that "we're making software that will render you unemployed, and perhaps unemployable," is bad PR. But I'm curious where this sentiment was during 2023, when the "Your everyday AI companion" spot was in production. After all, concerns (or hopes, depending on which side of the job market one was on) were already starting to mount. Because reducing the costs of productivity by lowering labor costs was the primary value proposition that generative automation was supposed to bring... not much different than any other sort of automation, really. A technology that leads to greater productivity but doesn't increase aggregate demand will pretty much always lead to lower employment in the absence of some other source of higher demand.

Even the skilled trades or vocations, which are now being touted as "'A.I.' proof" occupations are unlikely to be the safe havens that they're presented as. Sure, we don't have robots that can do home plumbing or electrical work yet, but if people crowd into those professions, were are their customers going to come from? I suspect that former knowledge workers subsisting on low-level service jobs aren't going to be clamoring for skilled tradesmen to come into their homes, and generative automation won't make their low-paying jobs pay any better.

Generative automation both making the pie larger and ensuring that more slices are sufficient for people to thrive needed to have been openly (and honestly) stated as the goal from the outset, because that's the only way that this doesn't cause what could be generations of disruption.

Oh, the Super Bowl advertisement? Here's the link to it... but you likely won't be able to see it... It's been made Private. But, of course, other people have posted it, so maybe this link will work, instead.

A Truth of One's Own

I'm not a fan of discussions concerning "critical thinking." Mainly because I find the point of such discussions are too often little other than a reason to be critical of other people's thinking. In this, "critical thinking" has become something of a buzzword for "coming to the predetermined correct answer."

Which is fine, as far as it goes, I guess, but I'm not really one to think that correct answers are anywhere near as common as they're made out to be. Because it's rarely important if an answer is objectively correct, so long as it works. (One can say this is also the thing about the "marketplace of ideas." It doesn't separate correct from incorrect or wisdom from folly. It separates workable from not workable and popular from unpopular.)

People believe the things that they do because it works for them to believe such things. And while I'm old enough that it should be par for the course by now, I'm still somewhat surprised that people don't seem to realize this. But maybe this is just the way things work in a society of hundreds of millions of people spread over the face of a continent; understanding people well enough to speak to them as people is slow, and seems like a lot of work. Easier to expect that those people will do the work to convince themselves, rather than whatever it is that they'd rather be doing.

To be fair, that was uncharitable of me. The fact that I don't regard the truth, whatever it may be, to have some special right to be first and foremost in people's minds doesn't license me to look down my nose at people who do. (Not that lacking a license has ever stopped me...) And I guess that's the thing about truth; everything looked different once I stopped believing that there was some singular Truth about things that it would benefit everyone to hold.

Whether I'm simply an epistemological relativist, or shade all the way into nihilism, is something that I'm going to have to think about. The two positions are different, even if they have some things in common, and so it may be best not to conflate them.

In any event, learning to become comfortable with the idea that I see the world the way that I do because (and only for as long as) it works for me was freeing. The stress of being right or wrong about the world, and constantly working to understand the difference, gradually went away. Which allowed me to focus on whether or not a given understanding of the world worked for me, rather than trying to reconcile that with some number of other understandings. It's still something of a work in progress, mainly, I think, because it tends to be a solitary pursuit, but I'm winding it a worthwhile one; if for no other reason than it becomes one fewer reason to be critical of others. 

Safe Bet

I was listening to Wired Magazine's interview with LinkedIn founder Reed Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman is an "A.I." optimist, who understands the technology is going to give everyone who uses it "superpowers." But he notes that there's going to be disruption, and there's going to be pain.

What he didn't say is that there's going to be neither disruption nor pain for Reed Hoffman.

Like a lot of technology boosters, not to mention outright utopians, the costs and benefits are always conceived of in the aggregate. Okay, so there are costs, and there are benefits; but as long as the costs outweigh the benefits on, say, the national level, then everyone wins.

But this isn't the way that many people experience costs and benefits of technology in their day-to-day lives. If a factory closes, and the work is sent overseas, to use an easily accessible example, yes, the former factor worker now has access to the goods they once helped make at a discount, perhaps even a substantial one. But their income takes a significant hit, and their other local costs don't decrease. So while the benefits of the change are spread out over many millions of people, the costs tend to be concentrated on the specific people whose careers suddenly ended, and the people who made their livings from their disposable income.

Mr. Hoffman believes that people can use generative automation to create even greater value, and thus head this off, but I'm not sure that he's accurately calibrated for human nature here. He gives the example of a musician he knows, whom he calls "Sarah." Sure, people can now use generative automation to create Sarah-sounding music to listen to, but now Sarah can use automation to make even better music. But the reason why people would use automaton to make Sarah-sounding music in the first place is that even if it falls squarely into the category of "A.I. slop," it's still good enough. And it comes a lot cheaper than paying Sarah.

It's entirely possible to buy legitimately hand-crafted items today. The reason so many of them are so expensive isn't that artisans are greedy; it's that the lower end of the market was disrupted ("collapsed might be a better term) by automation, and if someone can only count on selling two tables a month, each table needs to pay all of their expenses for a two week+ period of time.

And sure, the people who now cater to the lower end of the market could use generative automation to raise their output quality, and look to the higher end of the market, but there are only so many customers in those market segments... and if a lot of people are chasing them, it becomes a matter of who can avoid starving long enough to wait out the other competitors.

Reed Hoffman, being wealthy well past the need to ever work again, is never going to have this problem. Worst case scenario, he starts his comfortable retirement earlier than he expected to. The level of disruption that forces him to wonder how he's going to keep a roof over his head, or put food on the table will have demolished a lot of lives well before it reached him.

Indistinguishable

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

I've been reading William Gibson's Neuromancer again, after some 30 years. I spend a lot of time staring at screens of one sort or another, and have always found paper to be a good way to unwind. The novel is part of the founding canon of the science-fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk, and I'd originally read it because I'd become interested in a running a campaign for the Cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying game (now in its fourth iteration).

Now that I live in the Dark Future, I find Neuromancer to be interesting in its outlook on technology. The post something-53 ("It's [an AI] got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of '53.") setting of the novel has a technological base that can only be described as "disjointed." While cellular telephony was present in the early 1980s, it was pretty cutting edge at the time, and so there are no cell phones, as such, in Neuromancer. But at the same time, the mercenary Molly is outfitted with a full broadcast simstim setup that allows protagonist Case to have the sensation of being her, from miles away, and it clearly operates on some sort of radio signal, since the gang fixer Larry can tell not only that it's there, but that it's in use, even though it's strictly a one-way connection. And pay telephones are still a thing. Given where we are in 2025, it seems strangely anachronistic, in the same way that the decidedly analog future of Alien, et al does.

On the other hand, some of the technology seems, quite simply, magical. The character of Peter Riviera can simply project illusions into the visual fields of people around him, out to an undefined distance. "What he imagines, you see," as another character puts it. This due to implanted "silicon," and while it may be rare, it's not unique... the character describing the effect has seen the schematics for the implants. Riviera is basically an expensive entertainer, but the ability to project holograms like this would be a capability with a wide range of applications, licit and otherwise. But strangely, simple communication doesn't appear to be one of them. Likewise, Case is able to surf the net, via a fully virtual reality interface, from a tugboat in space. That's a remarkable amount of bandwidth, and something that seems magical, given the lack of more pedestrian uses for the technology.

All in all, it's shaping up to be an interesting read, as much for assessing the accuracy of Mr. Gibson's portrayal of "the future" as for the actual storyline of the novel. Which, oddly, I'm not very compelled by. (But I am curious as to how a Gibson-esque telling of the main storyline from Cyberpunk 2077 would go.)

But it serves to illustrate that predicting the future is difficult, in the sense that it's often easier to envision new technologies than to spin out where current ones will go.

Bunched Up

To take a pop culture example of the rising material expectations for American families, the TV sitcom The Brady Bunch, which ran from 1969 to 1974, followed the lives of a family with six children—three boys and three girls. The Bradys were prosperous, upper-middle-class Californians who could afford family vacations to Hawaii. Yet the three boys shared a single small bedroom, as did the three girls. What is more, all of the kids shared a single bathroom!
Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years

As the quote points out, The Brady Bunch was a sitcom. It was neither a documentary nor reality television. The fact that the show was set in a relatively small home says nothing about the material expectations for American families at the time. By 1974, my parents had purchased their first home, and it had four bedrooms (which made perfect sense to me at the time... of course everyone would have their own room), and this wasn't understood as cutting-edge... it was the norm for pretty much the entire neighborhood where I grew up.

The Heritage Foundation brings up the example of The Brady Bunch primarily to push back on the idea that "the way to raise successful children is to have fewer of them and invest more in each one," which has generally been the case in developed nations as children have gone from, as I recall one economist phrasing it, economic necessity to expensive luxury good. But was a situation comedy that ended more than 50 years ago, really the best example they could find to make a counterpoint? After all, there were no real Brady children to have outcomes to be tracked.

And that's the thing about the Heritage report in general. It's a deeply ideological document that drifts between feeling deeply. profoundly, cynical and naïvely, childishly, earnest. But it never seems to make what strike me as effective policy suggestions.

This is perhaps due, at least in part, to its stated goal and outlook. The goal being to have people marry earlier in life, then have children younger and have more of them, and the outlook being that a lot of otherwise disparate factors (like people's understanding of "quality versus quantity") play into their choices if how many children to have. But factors all different then the incentives the report notes:

First, many of the past incentives to have large families are gone. For instance, far fewer Americans live and work on farms in 2025 than they did in 1825 or 1925. Few married couples now think of the labor potential of children on a farm or in the local coal mine. Infant mortality has also dropped to near zero, and life expectancy has more than doubled. Far fewer elderly Americans live with and depend directly on their children and grandchildren now than they did in the past—due in part to vast entitlement programs.

There's a bit of grousing about entitlement programs; the Heritage Foundation is, after all, a conservative think tank, but otherwise, there's nothing in the document that suggests the fix is a return to a largely agrarian society, with increased levels of child labor as standard, higher levels of child mortality and people's entire social safety nets being their children. And so it's swimming against the tide with a rallying cry of "Virtue!" But, as if often the case with fundamentally religious outlooks, it refuses to recognize that "virtue" is almost always the celebration of responses to necessity. Sure, the Bible calls on people to have large families. It also calls on them to respect one another's property, and we all know how well that turned out. So 100 or 200 years ago, large families weren't a response to the idea that this is what the universe wanted, or even demanded from people; they were a response to a material situation in which whatever comforts could be squeezed out of life depended on having as many children as was practicable.

The three policy prop0sals that the paper makes are all basically to throw money at it; give married couples who have (their own) children a tax credit, give married couples who care for their own children at home a tax credit and (wait for it...) set aside money for each child born to a citizen and allow for tax-advantaged withdrawals from this fund if the grown child marries between the ages of 18 and 30. (Granted, these are better than some of the suggestions from an earlier draft, like giving parents extra votes, seeking to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges or forcing the owners of "starter homes" to receive bids from families before they could legally sell.) I'm dubious that it would work, partially because I'm not sure they solve the problem the Heritage Foundation thinks it's attempting to solve, but also because I don't think that they're really geared at solving anyone else's problems. Sure, there are some people who think that it's too expensive to raise a child, but I don't see how Heritage plans to force the djinni of greater educational attainment and broader choices for women back into the bottle.

Miscredit

When reading posts from people who understand generative automation, and the skills to use it well, as being the future of work, it starts to sound like financial credit.

The person who has managed their finances well enough that they don’t need to borrow money to fund their lifestyle finds themselves penalized for that. So credit stops being a tool that is employed because it’s the best tool for the job at hand, but simply for its own sake, because one isn’t allowed to employ it for important things unless one has demonstrated that they’ve employed it for trivial things. (And not essential things... if a bank comes to feel that one actually relied on credit cards and other small iterations of revolving credit, then that’s a risk factor.)

Generative automation is moving in the same direction. I saw a post a while back where the poster notes that misusing an LLM to prepare for an interview is a yellow flag for them, but a candidate being proud of the fact that they didn’t need to use one at all is a red flag. And it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen this idea that generative automation should be used, simply for the sake of using it, rather than it’s the best or most effective tool for the job at hand.

If we understand that locking credit behind unnecessary borrowing (with all of its attendant costs) is pointless and wasteful, it shouldn’t be that much of a stretch to see expecting people to use generative automation, just so they can say they’ve used generative automation is the same. Generative automation is a good tool. But it’s not the only tool. Treating it as indispensable, regardless of the task at hand, in the present, on the assumption that it will one day get there, is premature.

Divide

Back when FiveThirtyEight was still around, they would talk about the effect of partisan signalling on public opinion polls. Said signalling is, to put it simply, the idea that a certain amount of the response to a poll is independent of what the respondent might actually think about the question, but is geared towards expressing their support, or lack thereof, for a person or party.

Perhaps the most common example of this is are people's economic expectations.

The fundamentals of the United States' economy didn't change precisely on January 20th of last year. And it's worth noting that both sets of partisans got it wrong... and were likely to; there's pretty much no chance that inflation was ever going to drop to near zero. 4% turned out to be closer to the reality of last year, but not by much, considering that the average was somewhere in the 2.65% range. Given this, "How much do you like the current (or incoming) Administration's handling of the economy would likely have been a much better question to ask.

Likewise with a recent article from Axios on the Administration's Greenland policy. There's nothing intrinsic to either Democratic or Republican ideology about Greenland.

So it seems pretty evident that this is really a poll about support for the President himself, which means that a high level of partisan skew is to be expected. And it would be, even if the question concerned people's view of Donald Trump tying his shoes.

Maybe it's just me, but the high levels of partisan signalling that one would expect renders such questions somewhat pointless. Why not simply ask the question that it's understood that people are actually asking? 

The Importance of Being Important

I was listening to Russ Roberts interviewing Rebecca Newberger Goldstein about her book, The Mattering Instinct, on EconTalk recently. While the putative subject of her book is people's desire to matter, or to be significant in some way or another, it felt very much to me like yet another book on meaning, and the interview touched on some of the same themes.

One thing that tends to come up in these conversations, and it did so here, is the idea that seeking mattering, meaning or whatever one decides to call it, is a human universal. Ms. Newberger Goldstein has, after all, entitled her book The Mattering Instinct. But I'm of the opinion that it's an artifact of culture; to desire significance or to search for meaning in life is something that people learn. Mainly because I'm not sure that everyone takes part in this. Or, perhaps it's better to say that I'm not convinced that everyone who feels themselves not to matter, or believes that there is no meaning to be had in life, is suffering from some or another malady or malaise.

That aside, however, I think that Ms. Newberger Goldstein's thesis, that as sapient living beings, a lot of our attention is directed to ourselves, and this can prompt people to seek out ways in which they are deserving of that attention, to be an interesting one. It hadn't occurred to me to think of it that way. For me, the naturalness of it all it cuts against the idea that people necessarily feel the need to justify it to themselves, however. It's not much different than the fact that most people never feel the need to justify the rather unique place that humanity holds when compared to other life on Earth... for them, it just is. Sure, there are some people who feel that some level of justification is needed, but I suspect that it's far from being a universal thing. If maintaining homeostasis in complex organisms is a lot of work, then a significant amount of attention being paid to that work is only to be expected. While it's not surprising that some people would find that to be uncomfortably self-centered, for others, it's simply the price of admission, and not something that demands further consideration.

Philosophy and psychology strike me as having a lot of overlap, for any number of reasons, but so far, I don't think that I've encountered very many people who are practitioners of both disciplines. I went to school for the latter, but that was a very long time ago, I'm confident that the state of the art has progressed a good distance in the intervening decades. Perhaps it's time to seek out a book on the intersection of the two, and see what people have to say.

Medlock

Mathew asked NPR not to use his full name because he fears repercussions from his health insurance company if it finds out he got married to obtain coverage.
Marrying for health insurance? The ACA cost crisis forces some drastic choices

Like, what, exactly? There's no indication in the story that Mathew didn't actually marry Christina, his long-time roommate, so it's not as if he could be charged with fraud. And marriages of convenience aren't a new thing. When an unemployed ex-girlfriend of mine was having mental health issues, co-workers had no compunctions about suggesting a walk down the aisle, with the express purpose of obtaining coverage for her on my insurance plan.

This is another problem that corporations have, reputation-wise, in the United States. The idea that some actuary somewhere pores over news stories like this, and when they find someone who married someone they don't plan to have children with, as a means of gaining coverage, they report it to the legal department or something. It's how people like Brian Thompson become the villains in their own murders; the idea that they're so grasping, and so petty, that nothing that gives them a reason to deny people is off the table. And so Mathew doesn't give his full name, even though there's likely enough information in the story that a sufficiently determined insurance company employee could likely figure out who he was.

But I think that this goes beyond a problem with corporate reputations. Just like with science, it's not clear that there's nothing about corporations that render them inherently untrustworthy. So this becomes yet another story about a lack of trust in people. And there's no shortage of those. The United States is a society of people who constantly fear that others are out to get them, or get over on them, because everything is zero-sum. Everything that anyone wants has to be taken from someone else, and if that person (or persons) isn't ready, willing and able to go to extraordinary lengths of protect what's theirs, they lose out. And that's all that matters.

Reduction

The problems with the stereotypical reductio ad Holocaust when it comes to making comparisons to current affairs are many and varied. This LinkedIn post, and repost, illustrate a couple of them for me.

Part of the problem comes from the way the Nazi Party and the Third Reich are viewed today. Rather than having embarked on poor policy born of extremism, they're typically seen as irredeemably Evil, and, as such, willfully perverse. And to the degree that this is part and parcel of the Nazi "brand," as it were, it's really hard to convince people that "never again is now," because things are already set for "this time, it's different." If, as I'm guessing (there's something of a lack of context here) that Mr. Latz is referring to the Trump Administration's stepped up (or simply off-the-hook) immigration enforcement, the Administration and it's supporters don't see themselves as anything like the Nazi government of 1930s and 40s Germany. Even if Mr. Latz is referring to conditions in the Gaza strip, the same is true of the Netanyahu Administration. In both cases, the governments involved see themselves as fighting the good, and just, fight against people who are engaged in either direct wrongdoing, or willful support of others who are so engaged.

To stick with the United States for the time being (since, as an American, it's what I have the most experience with), the Trump administration doesn't see itself as perverse. If anything, it sees prior (Democratic) Administrations, and their "lax" enforcement of the United States-Mexico border, as the willfully perverse ones, deliberately swelling the ranks of non-citizens in the country as a means of keeping themselves in power with the support of "undeserving others" who have no legitimate right to reside on American soil.

And this takes me to Ms. Dorsey's repost. The second Trump Administration didn't come into place due to a military, or even civilian coup against the Biden Administration (as much as it appears that the outgoing first Trump Administration may have worked to spark one). Donald Trump was duly elected the President of the United States. And while many supporters of Trumpism may have pooh-poohed his rhetoric on immigrants and immigration out of not wanting to be directly associated with it's overt racialism, now that the Administration's immigration policy, which mainly targets states in which the President lost, mind you, is in place, they see it as being at best of direct benefit to themselves, and at worst, someone else's problem, of no real concern to them.

And even if one considers the roughly third of the American electorate that views itself (accurately or not) as Independent of partisan labels, this just isn't a big deal for them. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the United States Border Patrol aren't coming for them, and they have other problems of their own to manage. Even if the actions of the Trump Administration aren't doing them a lot of good, halting the broad border enforcement and deportation initiatives aren't the solutions that they need.

Democrats and other left-leaning segments of American society, on the other hand, are already "rising up." Their problem is that protest is the last resort of the politically powerless. Republican lawmakers, whether in state capitols, or in Washington D.C., aren't going to stand up for them, or work to advance their interests, because there's nothing in it for them. They're going to face primary challenges from a Right wing that sees them as insufficiently committed to the Cause, and it's not as if Democratic voters are going to back them over one of their own.

So the problem here isn't that people aren't paying attention, or are unwilling to push back; it's that such pushback really only matters come election time, and no-one really concerns themselves with angry partisans otherwise.

There's never any profit in attempting to influence people to change by holding up a mirror and expecting them to see Nazis in it. The people who have come to see themselves as on the wrong side of their own ethics don't need such a heavy-handed reminder that they're not living up to the persons they want to be, and people who are comfortable in themselves tend to respond with anger and resentment. The label of "Evil" is Othering, and its primary point is to cast those so labeled as undeserving of the sorts of obligations that people otherwise have to one another. It's a mantle that few are willing to shoulder voluntarily.

Understanding the Assignment

The cover story for the January issue of The Atlantic is "The Most Powerful Man in Science." It's ostensibly a story about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but it's really a story about Secretary Kennedy's worldview and his feuding with the "medical establishment." And, as such, the phrase "trust in science" came up.

It was misplaced. Many people, and I would count Secretary Kennedy among them, don't have a problem with science; they has a problem with people. What they suspect is going on is that the policy prescriptions that they're receiving are not neutral, but motivated by people who stand to benefit. Opaque, technical studies are being used as weapons against them.

And once the specter of human dishonesty enters the picture, all bets are off. Because a study, or one hundred studies, can say whatever; once someone believes that the outcomes of the studies have been manipulated, none of it matters anymore.

Social trust is a tool, not a moral imperative. People have to feel that trusting other people comes with some direct benefit to themselves. The public-health and perhaps the broader scientific communities have a problem in the sense that people feel that not trusting them is the best way to go. High profile arguments, or even future data, aren't going to solve that. A sense that trust is rewarded with a better life will. 

Right Virtues

The Atlantic is a subscription-only site now, as far as I can tell, and so it's been a while since I've read anything there. Realizing that, I went to the bookstore to pick up a physical copy of the January issue, so I could see what they were up to (other than those stories they released as podcasts) these days.

On page 18 was a column by David Brooks: Bring Back the Neocons. I suspected I knew what I was going to find, but I still like Mr. Brooks' writing, so I dove in.

According to Mr. Brooks, the second lesson of neoconservatisim is: "The most important values in a democratic society are the pedestrian bourgeois virtues. Aristocratic societies may do better at inspiring heroism, genius, love of honor. But democratic societies rely on showing up on time, working hard, being there for your neighbor, listening with curiosity, respecting traditions." Okay, let's say for a moment that I buy into that. My question for Mr. Brooks (and a variation on the question I nearly always have for Mr. Brooks) became: If democratic societies rely on these "pedestrian bourgeois virtues," why aren't they worth rewarding?

Many cultural commentators seem to be allergic to economics, if for no other reason than economics says that it's not enough to simply make something into some sort of moral imperative. If you want more of something, pay for it. I know I've said this before, but I find it bears repeating: If people are no longer doing something that one finds it's important for people to be doing, ask: "why." People stopped "showing up on time, working hard, being there for your neighbor, listening with curiosity [and] respecting traditions," because those things stopped being reliable ways to take care of oneself and one's family. For the person for whom showing up on time and working hard simply made them a chump, or the person for whom listening with curiosity simply made them confused, or the person for whom respecting traditions simply lead to a feeling of going through empty motions, it makes sense for them to find other ways to interact with the world.

The end of a widespread embrace of "the common bourgeois virtues: hard work, thrift, self-reliance, self-discipline, respect for tradition, and an intense focus on education," can be laid at the feet of one or both of two factors: they didn't pay off, and people could get by without them. Accordingly, bringing them back isn't simply going to be a matter of telling people that they're in a moral and spiritual crisis, and so they need to rededicate themselves to the values of the same people who brought us the Iraq War. They're going to have to be clear and direct solutions to people's problems. And in modern society, they aren't.

Mr. Brooks notes that Donald Trump "is a genius at cultural warfare." I'm not sure I agree with that, if for no other reason than it doesn't take a genius to go to people who are hurting and resentful and saying to them "if you allow me to mistreat the people who you feel are responsible for your problems, I will fix your problems." It's not like that's some sort of political innovation. It's a well-worn playbook by this point.

Mr. Brooks relates that the neconservatives were the children of immigrants who escaped poverty by apply themselves to the "common bourgeois virtues." But many, many, more people than the parents of Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick were industrious and traditional, and many of their children watched them fail. Virtue by itself has never been enough; if a society isn't ready, willing or able to reward people for the virtues it claims to honor, people will gravitate towards the ones that honor is shown.

Viewpiont

In addition, what philosophers are talking about is stuff that affects us all. “For example, do we have free will or not? If we didn’t have free will then we’d have to completely reform the justice system.”

What’s the point of doing philosophy?

This is one of the things that I've always found interesting, and more than a little confusing, about the free will debate. If people don't have free will, whether or not they believe that free will is real isn't really up to them; many people would still have the sense that others' decisions are freely made, and thus would be amenable to interventions, like jail or corporal punishment, designed to alter people's behaviors.

It's one of the strange things about the debate over free will, that somehow the understanding that people don't have free will could be a catalyst for people to willfully change how they see others. Which, I don't think I need to say, sort of presumes that free will is, in fact, in play.

But then, I'm not a philosopher. There may be something in the formal education that philosophers receive that addresses comments like mine. But still, it seems a strange thing to presume that there is some proof out there that would convince people, but not require them to be able to will themselves to change their viewpoints.

Perhaps this is why I find philosophy so interesting. It's a completely different way of looking at life and the world. When I was growing up, for instance, I understood the search for "meaning of/in life" mainly as a punchline... some guy would have climbed a mountain to find someone living in a cave, and they'd learn something either blatantly obvious or completely nonsensical. Either way, it rendered their whole effort moot. Coming to understand that this was a serious pursuit among philosophers was something of a surprise.

In any event, I don't typically find philosophy to have the sort of everyday relevance that's spoken of in the quote at the beginning of this post, but it's still an interesting field for all of that. Of course, "interesting" isn't the same as "useful," but that can be said of a lot of things. 

Rationalizing

It's not hard to find someone who will pontificate against the tendency of social media and news platforms to present audiences with "rage bait" and other fare that's designed to drive interaction by making people angry. What I'm much more curious about is why people are so willing to take the bait, and/or reward other people for doing so.

I suspect that part of the reason why it's so much easier to find people willing to talk about the former than the latter is that railing against, say, Jubilee on YouTube for posting videos designed to drive thousands of hot-takes is a form of rage bait, and perhaps virtue signalling, in and of itself. It allows people to present themselves as righteous, and an audience can feel righteous along with them, feeling themselves superior to both the purveyors of the content, and the people who rush to engage with it.

Understanding why it comes across as so compelling and satisfying to react to (even if one hasn't bothered to fully understand, or even watch, read or listen to it) is unlikely to simply present other people as stupid or uneducated. Sure, there's still likely to be the ability for an audience to hold themselves as above whomever is being spoken of, and to declare themselves immune from such open manipulation.

But I also think that the truth of the matter, the reasons why it's so easy to spark people to outrage, especially by simply hinting that certain people are not simply Other, but bad people for that, is that it's dry, and technical. And so it doesn't offer a quick dopamine hit, or a fix of Meaning. Instead, it's simply a lesson in human psychology, something that people don't find all that interesting, judging by how little it appears in feeds or podcasts.

Small Problems

I understand the push for companies to automate as much as possible; they're looking to keep their costs as low as possible, and having people do things can be expensive. Sure, eventually companies run the risk that automation is in such widespread use that their customers find themselves out of work (or stuck with poorly-paying service jobs) and can't afford their products and services, but that's a problem for future CEOs.

The problem that high degrees of automation bring now is that it's not infallible, and if there are few to no people around, there's no-one there to catch mistakes, like this one:

I'm not sure how this was classified as a Technology story; there are any number of places along the way where that could have happened. And, because Age of Sigmar is a niche within the greater niche of Warhammer tabletop fantasy wargaming, it's unlikely that most of the people who scrolled past this set of stories realized that it was misplaced.

But these are the sorts of admittedly minor errors that erode people's trust in technology; because if there are problems in areas that one knows something about, might there not also be errors in areas where one doesn't have firsthand knowledge? In this sense, it's similar to "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy," which can be understood to be a reason behind a general distrust of media stories.

The answer from Google News would likely be that their classifications of stories are accurate enough... it's not like the categorizations are done at random, or anything. And that's likely true. But there's still a problem with not knowing if novel information is accurate that prevents these sorts of automated systems from being trusted sources in the way they were intended to be. 

Another Lap

It's another new year. I think I've learned my lesson with resolutions. My goal of being more politically engaged back in 2004 has resulted in a steady stream of fundraising e-mails from all around the country that has yet to dry up, and my gastrointestinal tract still hasn't forgiven me for deciding to go vegetarian for all of January 2019. Other years haven't been much better in that regard.

But still, it's nice to have goals, and so I do want to have one for this year. So maybe I'll just go with something simple, and put some effort into being more helpful. Helping people out with things, even minor ones, can make my whole day, and it's not like I'm attempting to make the whole world, or even the whole of Washington State, a better place.

It's easy to be negative; after all, I've become quite good at it, for all that it's gotten me. So why not instead do a little work to spread some positivity? The world is still likely to suck for a lot of people, but I don't have to be an active agent of that. Besides, as often as I say that I should be the change I want to see in the world, I may as well put my money where my mouth is.

The other thing that I'd like to do this year is try my hand at podcasting. That's a much longer shot, I have no real idea on what all that entails, but it can't hurt to learn, right? (I feel like I've just tempted fate with that last bit... we'll see how hard it bites me.)