Doing For Oneself

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

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

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

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

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

The Good Machine

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

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

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

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

Coverage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going Both Ways

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

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

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

Negative Polarity

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