D Three

I was listening to a podcast about robotics and automation and the trope of "robots coming to take our jobs" was front and center throughout most of it, as well as roboticists and automation company executives talking about labor shortages and "dull, dirty and dangerous" work.

This framing, I believe, moves the conversation away from the actual social problem that large-scale automation risks; namely that the elimination of certain forms of labor may not create opportunities for other labor at the same skill levels. If a bar is able to automate making and serving drinks (an example from the podcast that appears to fall well outside of the touted "dull, dirty and dangerous"), what work does this create that the bartenders whose skills have been obviated will be able to qualify for?

The podcast hosts dutifully raised the point that workers would need retraining if they were going to remain employed in a society with high level of automation, but, and this has always been the problem with such schemes, private companies see the benefits of making, selling and deploying systems of automation, but it is governments that are expected to foot the bill for preparing the public for disruptions to the labor market. And,  at least here in the United States, governments have been poor at the task, in no large part because those jurisdictions that have the most work to do tend to be the most starved of resources, because their constituents are already financially straited.

Definition

It’s worth reiterating that these studies were conducted in the US, where most religious people are adherents of Abrahamic monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Things might look very different in other cultures. But, if these findings are correct – at least in this Western context, where being religious typically means believing in a creator God – they raise the question of whether secular Western society is in a position to reproduce the existential benefits of religion.
Michael M Prinzing "Religion gives life meaning. Can anything else take its place?"

Fair enough, I suppose. But, what are "existential benefits of religion?" From what I could glean from the article, the answer seemed to be "existential comfort." Not that "existential comfort" was clearly defined.

Like a lot of popular philosophy articles on "meaning in life," this one presupposes that having some sort of meaning in life, even if it goes no farther than a person's self-perception that "At present, I find my life very meaningful," is better than not having it. But no mechanism as to why this should be the case is offered. I am one of those people who is of the opinion that life is meaningless; life need not make sense (it doesn't need to form a coherent and satisfying narrative), it doesn't need to be independently valuable (so the statement "this person's life is worthless" is not truth-apt in any way) and it doesn't need to have any form of significance (the fact that, at some point in the future, no-one will either know or care that I ever existed is not a bad thing in itself). And people tell me all the time that I have adopted the wrong stance on such things. Yet, they are always at a loss when I ask them, "why?"

It's possible to make the point that certain things about life are better for people who understand themselves to have found some meaning in life, but I'm not sure how important that is. It's something like  avoiding tobacco and alcohol. There is clear evidence that people who don't smoke and don't drink live longer than people who don't. Both those are averages - it's not like the longest possible healthy lifespan of someone who smokes and drinks is shorter than the shortest possible healthy lifespan of someone who does neither. There are simply too many other risk factors in play for that sort of causal relationship to exist.

But with something like meaning in life, there is another possibility in play; the simple idea that it's possible to believe that having meaning in life is better than not having it is independent of whether there is any such thing as meaning in life, and that any despair brought about by a lack of meaning is a result of being told that one should despair. I think of it as being similar to the idea that one should be sad when confronted with the death of a family member. But there are any number of reasons why it may make sense to be something other than sad. These tend to be ignored in favor of a social consensus that dictates sadness in most circumstances. And one might not even understand that the main driver of sadness in a given situation is the expectation that one will be sad.

I have a suspicion that the same is true with the quest for meaning. Enough repetition of the idea that a meaningless life is not worth living, and it makes sense that people will internalize that idea. Every so often, I'll have a conversation with someone who insists that whether I know it or not, I'm miserable and suffering because I don't feel that life is meaningful. "Don't you realize you're desperately unhappy?" I have been asked. Eventually, I started answering: "No. Do you want me to be?" They would tend to answer no, but then insist that I had to be. "Only if I listen to you," I would reply. A few people I have said this to responded as if it had never occurred to them that a sense of despair over life's meaninglessness could be something other than an objective, effectively physiological, response. And this despite the fact that the sort of meaning that Abrahamic monotheism posits is nothing close to universal.

And if it's possible that the way left-leaning media and political figures talk about current events contributes to depression(https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depressed) among young liberals, it's possible that the way Western society talks about lack of meaning could do the same. So perhaps the "existential benefits of religion" are simply a matter of people being told that they exist, and responding accordingly.

Swept

This is the sort of thing that drives resentment of the homeless population of the area, but doesn't actually spark any efforts towards fixing the problem. I will be unsurprised to find that the next time I'm in the area, the sidewalk, if not the entire encampment, has been cleared; this isn't the sort of thing that I expect the locals, even in a stereotypically liberal place like Seattle, will suffer gladly.
Unwalkable

Well, the next time I was in the area was yesterday, and somewhat to my surprise (considering how bad I am at predicting the future), the encampment was gone.

In its place were some nice planters; and some very large stones. While it's generally too much to expect people with substance abuse and/or other mental health problems to be good neighbors, there are apparently limits and the small encampment in Ballard crossed them. The result being that the city (most likely) has made camping in the area much more difficult than it had been before.

And simply clearing the camp and placing large objects to prevent tents being pitched again the the future doesn't do anything to solve the problem. More than likely, the people who had been living in the camps are still homeless; they've just been pushed elsewhere. Which may be enough for the locals to declare victory. Of course, elsewhere might not be very happy with that turn of events. Which runs the risk of a race to the bottom, as neighborhoods compete to be the least welcoming of the homeless.

The problem, as it exists now, has been building for decades. I moved out here a quarter-century ago, and one of the first things that struck me about the area was the rather large number of homeless people, compared to Chicago. My first impression was that Seattle was simply a more clement place to be homeless than Chicago, where the summers and the winters can be severe enough to be fatal. But in the meantime, I've learned that there are more deliberate reasons. Rocks and planters won't lower the high cost of housing, or create more places to build. That takes political action; which there isn't much motivation for at this point.

And Going, and Going, and Going...

WHO says Covid remains a global emergency but pandemic could near its end in 2023

That's nice. Come back when there's actually something resembling information to share.

One of the things that I was looking for when this whole mess started up was clear guidance. Not only on what governments were going to do, but what the trigger points were. This way, it would be possible to look at the situation as it unfolded, and have a workable idea of what was coming, and what preparations it made sense to take.

No such luck. And I think that this is what drives a lot of the conspiratorial thinking concerning the SARS-CoV-2 situation. (Even calling it an "outbreak" seems strange, after three years.) As much as the public health community here in the United States found its job made more difficult by a lack of public trust, I'm not sure that much has been done to repair that trust. Pushing the World Health Organization to create and publish formal guidelines for when a pandemic starts, and when it ends, might help. It's difficult to make the case to people that three years in, with many people having some level of immunity from vaccination and/or having been sick with the disease, that it's still an emergency. A problem to be dealt with, sure. But after all this time, an emergency seems to be stretching things just a bit. SARS-CoV-2 seems to have passed through its acute phase, and has now become a chronic concern. A rather more serious one than other respiratory viruses, like influenza, but still a chronic concern. The language of emergency doesn't seem to suit things at this state.

“We remain hopeful that in the coming year, the world will transition to a new phase in which we reduce hospitalizations and deaths to the lowest possible level, and health systems are able to manage Covid-19 in an integrated and sustainable way,” [WHO Director-General] Tedros [Adhanom Ghebreyesus] said in a statement.

As the saying goes, hope is not a strategy. If the World Health Organization and other public-health bodies are going to retain credibility, they're going to have to do something more than hope that something changes; especially in the face of a world that is constantly changing. If a 70% drop in the number of serious illnesses doesn't allow for the alert level to be brought down from it's highest point, maybe a more granular scale is in order. Because eventually, things are going to get to a point where no-one feels that these statements are worth listening to. And that could have serious consequences the next time around.

Unintelligent Artifice

It should come as a surprise to no-one that if one trains an Artificial Intelligence on what people post to the Internet, a chatbot powered by that AI will sound like the average person on the Internet. And as anyone who has had the misfortune of spending any amount of time interacting with people on the Internet will tell you, it's not going to sound informed, compassionate or even mentally healthy. And given people's incentives to demonstrate the shortcomings of AI, prompts to bring out the worst in it are inevitable. Active, deliberate and intensive troll-testing is an absolute must under these circumstances. There is no reason why Microsoft should be burned in this a second time, given that it's a known quantity.