Dash Kindly

The "em-dash" has become the new "kindly."

Generally speaking, Americans do not use "kindly" in professional writing. It is, however, common in parts of the Commonwealth of Nations, especially those parts that many Americans associate with Internet fraud, such as India, Kenya and Nigeria. Accordingly, it's become the one thing that many unsophisticated people look for when attempting to sniff out a bogus investment scheme or employment offer, because it's allegedly a foolproof telltale that allows a correspondence to be immediately written off. Some people are willing to go so far as to claim that the use of "kindly" is a deliberate marker of fraud, and that people who continue to correspond after having seen it are showing themselves to be rubes, ripe for the plucking. This, in turn, has lead to a certain amount to ridicule being directed at anyone who shows uncertainty about a message with the word "kindly" in it.

The "em-dash" has become this marker for spotting "A.I. slop," as the Internet likes to call it. Because, supposedly, "real people" never use the em-dash, so any text in which is features prominently must have been created by generative automation. The fact that this forgets that large language models basically take their training data, chop it up into pieces, figure out the mathematical relationships between various parts and create their outputs based on that is surely of no real importance to the process.

The common thread here is the idea that there is a shortcut to discernment. Be on the lookout for "kindly" and you'll never be tricked by an Internet fraud. Stay alert to the "em-dash" and you'll always be able to tell when a passage was generated by an LLM. Utterly reliable and remarkably easy; who knew that the signs were so obvious?

That there is widespread anxiety about being deceived is understandable, at least in the case of internet frauds. While many schemes may only cost someone a small amount of money, individual losses can easily run into the thousands, or tens to hundreds of thousands. Avoiding that financial hit by spotting a supposedly ubiquitous telltale is clearly attractive. With text generated by LLMs, the case is a little less clear. Okay, so someone generated text with a Copilot or Perplexity prompt rather than writing it all out themselves. As long as it gets the point across, who cares? The intersection between generative automation and internet fraud is a concern, but the "em-dash" isn't something that is apparent in a faked celebrity pitch video for a fraudulent investment scheme.

It seems that a lot of what drives the hype (hysteria?) concerning both "kindly" and the "em-dash" is the need to appear discerning to other people. Despite the fact that there weren't any consistent glaringly obvious tells in GPT-2's text output, the idea that there's a silver bullet to detect generated text from any current LLM is strong and, if the enduring attachment to "kindly" is any indication, not going anywhere anytime soon. It's common for people to seek ways of ranking themselves against one another; it's been postulated that people find meaning in positive self-worth, and one way of attaining that is to seek out ways of showing that one is better than others. But that also means avoiding indicators that one might be worse than others. If one doesn't jump on the "em-dash" or "kindly" bandwagons and is subsequently tricked, the ego-bruising ridicule is likely to follow.

I spend more time than is likely healthy looking at dodgy material in my Junk Mail folder and, quite often, my inbox. And I've done my share of looking at things online. While there are certainly tells for a good amount of internet fraud, most of them come from the fact that the average would be perpetrator of internet fraud isn't targeting specific people, or is clearly attempting to pass themselves off as someone they aren't. An e-mail that claims to have found someone's résumé online but is addressed to "applicant" or the recipient's e-mail alias, or a LinkedIn profile that claims to be for a recruiter working in a hybrid model for a company in Texas but who supposedly lives in Liechtenstein. But these are really markers of poverty and poor education; the things that drive people to internet fraud for a living in the first place. It's how "kindly" first became a marker of fraud; people attempting to pass themselves off as Americans without having any idea of how Americans actually write. Pretty much no-one in the United States feels the need to remind another American that Atlanta is in Georgia, let alone the United States.

The tells from the uneducated are easy to spot, because they tend to recur over and over again. The graduates of "hustle kingdoms" in West Africa, for instance, go on to teach others the same things that they have learned, and this seemingly rote transfer of knowledge results in tells that are decades old still being common. And these are the sorts of fraudsters that the average person is likely to encounter. The truly sophisticated fraud artists aren't randomly e-mailing people, playing a numbers game.

With the "em-dash" the motivation, avoiding looking like a rube, is the same, but this time, it's the reader who is uneducated. Again, LLMs use the "em-dash" because it's common in the training data. To the degree that the "em-dash" is a marker of LLM-generated text, it's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy; people are starting to avoid the punctuation mark specifically because Internet paranoids have marked it as a surefire sign of inauthenticity. And because most of the people who have the time to be online a lot are young, and young people are reading less, they're not as exposed to how people older than themselves commonly write. But the makers of LLMs do not limit themselves to the young and online; they're vacuuming up all the data they can get. "Doesn't read like a human" is really "doesn't read like a young and affluent online Westerner."

The idea that there is a quick way to be "smart" about things is an attractive one, and difficult to debunk, so it's going to persist. With any luck, it's not too expensive of an idea to hang on to.

Hat Trick

It seems like a fairly straightforward idea. Wear a hat that says "Make FPS Great Again." FPS, in this context stands for First Person Shooters, the genre of video game pioneered by Wolfenstein 3D back in the day, and is still going fairly strong today, with titles like Halo and Destiny (both created by Bungie) being big players in the space.

I would say that it created controversy, but I'm not sure that such would an accurate way to put it. But there were complaints, which I happened to come across on LinkedIn:

While I've always understood why people who don't identify with the American Left consider it a censorious bunch, this seemed to typify the trend for me.

I don't see anything particularly Trumpist about the hat. A lot of people have used the Make [blank] Great Again formulation for things, like the book Make Healthcare Great Again or the documentary Make Democracy Great Again. And there have been open parodies of President Trump and his supporters using variations on the formulation, such as when Neil DeGrasse Tyson was shown with a series of red hats, one of which read "Make America Smart Again."

From where I sit, the problem with Ian Proulx and his hat is that no-one really knew who he was, outside of the fact that he was a White guy ran a video game studio, and that gap made his politics uncertain. And in that uncertainty grew fear that perhaps his goal was to express support for President Trump to the largest audience for video games in the United States: young White men. It's "if you're not obviously with us, you might be against us." And that sort of binary isn't really useful. Allowing only people whose politics are clearly known to parody, or otherwise play on, political slogans doesn't do anything useful. Mainly because it buys into the idea that unknown qualities are best thought of as threats. And we have enough of that already.

Trumped Up

So Kilmar Garcia, whom the Trump Administration supposedly couldn't get back into the United States, is back in the United States. Because the Trump Administration has charged him with "conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain" and "unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain."

Somehow, I suspect that I'm not the only person who thinks that, in this attempt to make an example of Mr. Garcia, perjury was suborned along the way. Any takers on a bet that the witnesses to Mr. Garcia's involvement all turn out to be people in custody for something or other? Didn't think so.

This may be the evil that Trump supporters are familiar with, but is it really the evil they signed up for? I know that a lot of Trumpists think of Democrats as weak and spineless, but this still strikes me as a dangerous precedent to set, precisely because it probably looks to anyone who isn't deeply supportive of the President like a deliberately bogus prosecution. And, as the saying goes, two can play at that game.

But it's a game we don't really want people playing. While I suspect that President Trump is betting either that Republicans Trumpists will win the next election (or that he's found away around the next election), that comes across as a pretty high-stakes gamble. Which gives me a certain suspicion that all of this might simply be a way to lever Mr. Garcia into agreeing to be deported; it's unlikely his conviction would survive a change of party in the White House, and a Democratic administration would have ways of making El Salvador's President Bukele wish he'd never played ball with President Trump if the current administration suddenly shipped Mr. Garcia back after an electoral loss, hoping to keep him away.

At this point, a lot of President Trump's actions seem geared towards taking, and using, as much power has he can, confident that he has a strong enough base of voters that Congress won't really do anything about it. This next midterm cycle is going to be interesting, to say the least. 

The Better Evil

"It's kind of a two-edged sword," [Ken] Green[, a retired entrepreneur and three-time Trump voter] said. "You either support [President Trump] or you support the other side, and I can't support the other side right now so … it's the evil you know."
Trump voters call president's pardon of corrupt Virginia sheriff 'a terrific mistake'

This, in a nutshell, sums up the brokenness of American politics for me. A strong binary with the understanding that both sides are, in their way, "evil." And so people vote for the evil they know. This viewpoint, that one should vote for the "lesser evil," and "the other side" is necessarily the "greater evil," is not new. But it strikes me as spreading.

This negative partisanship pretty much can't, by definition, lead anywhere good, because it provides and active incentive for people to excuse what they would otherwise consider clear wrongdoing done by their own side; or perhaps more accurately, by people they identify with. The case of Luigi Mangione, facing trial for the ambush murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is illustrative here, with a significant number of people being willing to excuse murder because it aligns with their political outlook.

But I think the bigger problem is the perceived lack of choices. To some extent, that lack of choices is real; there are only two viable nationwide parties in the United States. But nothing other than people's voting habits and fear of "wasting" their votes perpetuates this, because there are a number of nationwide parties for people to chose from; and once people start choosing them, the money will follow. But there's no real first-mover advantage to incentivize people to abandon whichever major party they currently back. And the "third" parties aren't necessarily making it easy; there are several different flavors of Socialist party to chose from, for instance. Were they to come together under one banner, they might appeal to enough of the Democratic Left to actually get somewhere.

Of course, negative partisanship works against these other parties, too, with the idea that their presence merely paves the way for the other side of the ideological divide to dominate politics. The fact that there are people who don't understand how electoral math works (for instance, believing that a third party vote both takes a vote away from one party and gives to the other major party) doesn't help matters.

As long as people are willing to overlook things they understand to be bad acts done by people who share their perceived enemies, the greater the incentive for the other side to do so. Being willing to punish the wrongdoers on one's own side when "the other side" isn't strike many people as little more than a messy form of suicide. But just as bad is the unwillingness to give credit for good things done by opposing partisans, since it actively pushes against the one thing that would be most likely to lower the temperature.

Into the Pool

One concept that I hear a lot is that a 4% unemployment rate is "full employment." And I always wondered why that was, since one person out of every 25 not being able to find a job doesn't quite seem "full" to me. Today I did some digging, and came across the concept of "Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment," or "NAIRU." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: "Newer concepts of full employment require some unemployment to temper inflation," and that "some" is represented by the NAIRU, which comes out to be 4%. The logic is simple, once the unemployment rate starts to dip below the magic 4% number, workers start becoming hard enough to come by that employers are forced to increase pay in order to attract and retain workers, and those cost increases are promptly passed on to customers in the form of higher prices.

Straightforward enough. But it raised a question for me: If there must be a certain level of unemployment at all times, where unemployment is defined as people who want work, but can't get it, does this explain why the "safety net" in the United States is generally considered garbage? After all, social programs robust enough to mean that certain people didn't have to work in order to scrape by would mean that people could opt out of particularly nasty job markets, pushing things back towards an older understanding of "full employment," which was basically that the only people who weren't working were in the process of changing jobs.

It also gives a more economically sound (depending on one's understanding of economics) for seeking ways to push people into the labor pool than conceptualizations of "dignity" or concerns about "moral hazard." In situations where labor is scarce, workers have a decent number of options for putting pressure on businesses to shift some of the profitability of the business from shareholders to themselves. It would also, I expect, go some way towards eroding the idea of an "underclass." After all, work that wasn't valuable enough to entice people away from either benefits programs or other jobs would simply cease to exist, as happened here in the Seattle area a few years after I arrived. With technology companies hard up enough for workers that they were willing to train (in order to get around what it called "structural unemployment"), in addition to paying decent salaries, jobs that people took because they needed them tended to lose people. More than a few local restaurants closed because human resources people recruited away the wait staff during lunches. There was a local Burger King that resorted to offering $500 signing bonuses in order to attract applicants, and they likely had to slip some cash to the people they already had while they were at it.

Interestingly, despite the fact that the current unemployment rate is just about 4.2%, there doesn't seem to be much sign that the United States is on the verge of having prices take off in an effort to keep up with worker expectations of more money. Likely because of the fact that nearly a quarter of those people out of work, and looking, have been unemployed for longer than six months. (But it seems that the percentage of long-term unemployed can be inversely correlated with unemployment more generally; the number jumps when unemployment is low and drops like a stone when the broader unemployment rate climbs.) I know people who have been looking for a year and half at this point; mainly because the gaming sector is, as one person I know put it, a landfill fire, and the skillset doesn't exactly transfer over into other industries. I suspect that enough people are in "take what they can get" mode, that pushing up inflation is the last thing on their minds. So perhaps, as people were pointing out before the turn of the century, it's time to adopt a new way of thinking about the issue.