Unreal

I was reading an essay about one person's ethical qualms about eating lab-grown meat. The broad point they were making as that eating "replica" meat showed a lack of respect for the animals being replicated. By way of analogy, the author presented the example of "Mr. X" and a sex-doll designed to replicate a woman. "Imagine Mr X" requests the author, "doing something to a woman-replicant doll that would be (whatever it was) undeniably degrading if done to an actual woman." This is unethical, because "Mr X's behaviour towards the woman-replicant represents a failure of respect towards womankind."

It reminded me of an online debate I had with some readers of The Atlantic (back when The Atlantic still allowed reader comments). about an article (now locked behind a subscription wall) about a man who owned a pair of Real Dolls, one he considered his wife, and the other his mistress. According to the subtitle "Davecat lives with his wife and mistress, both dolls, and thinks synthetic partners are ideal for those who don't want to deal with humans' inconsistencies." The debate centered on whether Davecat had managed to dodge acting unethically by effectively pretending that "Sidore Kuroneko" and "Elena Vostrikova" were the sort of impossibly pliant and consistent women that he felt he could have a relationship with, or if the desire for companionship that avoided dealing with other humans' (or maybe specifically women's) inconsistencies was unethical in itself.

I was on team ethical, mainly because the alternative struck me as a bit too close to thoughtcrime. Besides, I (and I suspect, a lot of other people) could sympathize with Davecat wanting a partner (or partners) would never lie, cheat or be otherwise disagreeable or critical; even if, in the course of the debate, there were people who felt that braving such slings and arrows were the price of admission to a life of something other than abject loneliness. And so in the case of lab-grown meat, I look at it the same way; a person can have their respect for living animals, and eat their hamburger, too. Insisting that the only complete abstention from meat is the only ethical way of life, because anything else is disrespectful, again, raises the specter of thoughtcrime.

And the problem with thoughtcrime is how does on prove oneself innocent, given that it's not possible to conclusively demonstrate what one is thinking? Not to mention the simple fact that demanding people think a certain way does nothing for anyone else. An animal is no more harmed or injured (let alone slaughtered) by a person eating a synthetic burger than they are by that person eating lettuce. At least with the cases of "Mr. X" or Davecat, one can make the point that living women might be put out or made uneasy by their relationships with their replicant partners. But even that can be iffy. I've met any number of people who are disturbed by the idea that others consider their values or spirituality to be false or mistaken. I am unfamiliar with a school of ethics that, on such a basis, claims that in the face of such discomfort, others must convert.

But still, it was an interesting piece, and I'm glad that I came across it. Understanding the thinking of others, and how people connect seemingly disparate ideas, broadens the mind.

It's Not Me, It's You

During his remarks, Scott said the nation was "standing at a time for choosing: victimhood or victory? Grievance or greatness? I choose freedom and hope and opportunity."

Tim Scott, the next White House hopeful

Scott criticized Democrats on a number of issues, like education and public school funding.

"They're more interested in keeping those kids trapped in their schools and trapped out of their futures," Scott said.

Republican candidates hope to win in Iowa as they look to topple Trump in 2024

Maybe it's just me, but accusing Democrats of having an interest in poor education and poor life outcomes for people sure seems like indulging in grievance to me. What other point is there to calling out people as actively working against the interests of the public other than to stoke a sense of grievance?

It’s also not clear whether voters will buy Scott’s message of unity and forgiveness at a time of hyper-political polarization.

Tim Scott’s Uphill Battle To Win The Republican Nomination

If Senator Scott is the voice of forgiveness and unity, I'm pretty sure that those concepts have lost most, if not all, of their meaning.

But I do find it interesting how the steady drumbeat of partisanship has changed how people see the world. Senator Scott's message is viewed as a positive one, despite, as one would expect from a Republican office-holder, the open attacks on Democrats. Writing for FiveThirtyEight, Alex Samuels notes: "His vision is relentlessly optimistic, an implicit rebuke of the grievance politics that have taken over the Republican Party — though it’s unclear if the party wants to pivot in his direction." Partisan grievance has become so commonplace that it's effectively invisible. Senator Scott limiting his complaints to an opposing political party, rather than the world at large, is seen as unusually optimistic in a candidate for President.

Personally, I tend to lump Senator Scott in with the long list of other hopeless candidates for the Republican nomination. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have a shot at it, but I suspect that the only way that Donald Trump doesn't make it into the general election in eighteen months is that he drops dead (or is otherwise knocked out of the race due to health or age) between now and then. But stranger things have happened, so it's very premature to write him off now. I have to admit that I don't normally pay much attention to the actual details of how candidates run their campaigns, as it's taken on a "if you've seen one, you've seen them all" flavor over the past few cycles. But if Senator Scott (or anyone else, for that matter) manages to make it past Donald Trump, he's going to be faced with the need to walk back some of his comments about people who aren't fellow Republicans, while not giving those fellow Republicans reason to believe that he's bowing out of the fights they want to pick. That job might be made easier by people's lack of enthusiasm for President Biden, but the challenge will still be there.

Senator Scott's basic message, as I understand it, is a simple one. The United States has enough opportunity to offer everyone. Policies that make opportunities more available to Black Americans and others who have been historically left out will allow them to improve their material conditions substantially and rapidly, such that policies of wealth transfer, which Senator Scott finds fundamentally unfair, won't be necessary and the lingering effects of past discrimination will be completely erased. Like most Republicans, he buys into the idea that the Democratic Party is too wedded to ideas of paternalism and control to implement policies that would result in less neediness on government programs. And there's nothing wrong with this messaging, for the most part. I take exception to the idea that half of the nation's political establishment is actively malicious, but it's a concept that's not going anywhere. Presuming that he actually has to answer questions about it, where I think that Senator Scott is going to have a hard time winning over skeptics is in actually pointing to areas in which Republicans have managed to create the post-scarcity society he talks about. Republican orthodoxy has long been concerned with increasing the size of the pie by growing the largest slices, even at the direct expense of the smaller ones, and I suspect that Senator Scott is going to be left needing to blame Democrats for his inability to produce concrete examples of the prosperity that he claims is there for the taking. And it's hard to keep partisan grievance from becoming personal grievance.

Donald Trump's path to fame and political achievement was a simple one: find a fight, and then openly support one side or the other. And in situations where this wasn't a workable strategy, he foundered. Senator Scott appears to want to avoid that, but the route that he seems to taking will, in fact, lead him right through there. Saying that the Democratic Party is full of people who would rather be in power than work for the prosperity of the nation as a whole is one thing. But I've had a lot of conversations with partisans in my day, and it doesn't take long for them to question what sort of person votes for a bad politician. Soon, the idea that Democratic voters are inappropriately irrational, gullible or deliberately Evil takes hold, and the grievances become personal again. Whether Senator Scott is ignoring this, or believes that he can somehow head it off I don't know. But I suspect that it will undermine him, presuming he manages to climb very high with it in the first place.

Q and A

I found a somewhat interesting article on the Prindle Post, entitled: Your Political Party Isn’t Right About Everything: Intellectual Humility and the Public Square.

The author, to demonstrate the effects of partisanship, asks five questions:

1. Is abortion morally wrong in most circumstances?
2. Should homosexual couples be allowed to marry?
3. Is illegal immigration into the United States a serious problem?
4. Should the United States federal minimum wage be raised?
5. Is it okay to consider race when making college admissions decisions?

He notes that there is no particular reason why answers to these should be strongly correlated. But, to a degree, they are. Mainly because they're partisan questions, although same-sex marriage has become less so in recent years. One doesn't have to listen to a lot of stump speeches or watch many political television shows to understand that these are the sorts of questions that define partisan identity. Personally, I'm not so sure that, given American history, that these are questions that one would expect to be independent of one another, but i take the author's point.

As one can guess from the title, the author counsels that people "become more intellectually humble" as a corrective to partisan division. It's a suggestion based on a simple idea:

But if we do not have a strong reason to think that Democrats are consistently better at answering political questions than Republicans, or vice versa, then we are faced with a bit of a dilemma. If our opinions on many complex and unrelated political issues are best explained by our party affiliation, and we have no reason to think that one side is right more often than the other, then maybe we ought to be less confident in our political beliefs.

And here's where I think that the piece misunderstands modern politics. Take the first question that he asks "Is abortion morally wrong in most circumstances?" That's more than just a political question; it's a moral one, and it illustrates why partisanship has become so intractable. To the person who believes that aborting a fetus is murdering an unborn child, or the person who believes that restricting the practice is tantamount to forcing women to give birth against their will, calling for intellectual humility is effectively asking people to abandon their commitments to right and wrong. And the case can be made that the rest of the questions have become entwined with moral salience as well. And once people become convinced that opposing partisans are always on whichever side is morally wrong, they're even more unlikely to buy into the idea that the parties are equally good at answering important questions.

It's one thing for people to admit to not having all of the answers in the face of specific policy questions. It's easy to rule out a federal minimum wage of $4 an hour or $40 an hour; those are the stances of committed ideologues. But whether $7.50 and hour is better or worse than $8.00 is something that many people have difficulty with, if for no other reason than their day job doesn't require them to think much about it. But as to which is the moral imperative, leaving the wage where it is, or raising it to a "living wage," it's hard to find people who have an opinion one way or the other, but don't think that they understand enough to stand by whatever conviction they have.

Accordingly, in order to reduce the rancor of partisanship, and especially negative partisanship, one would first need to remove the moral salience of the issues that drive partisan activism. That is, I suspect, something of an unlikely outcome.

On the Horizon

For all that GPT4 and ChatGPT have kicked off a round of doomsaying that artificial intelligence will decimate the job market and potentially even result in the extinction of humanity, it's important to remember that thus far, what we have a very powerful and sophisticated version of Autocomplete. General Artificial Intelligence, which is what so many people are worried about, it still some ways in the future; which, to be sure, it's always been.

For right now, what people consider to be AI is of limited use. Attaching a consumer-grade Large Language Model to the Bing search engine results in something that couches a non-answer to the questions I've asked it in natural-seeming language. Which is interesting, but perhaps more proof that it really isn't intelligent, in the sense of having the ability to use the information at its disposal to formulate useful answers to novel questions.

Likewise, a blindingly obvious phishing e-mail landed in my Outlook inbox. One would think that a genuine AI would be immensely helpful in detecting these sorts of things, this providing a market advantage.

So I think that I'll take a pass on the LLM hype for the time being, and see what the next big innovation has to offer. I appreciate the concerns of the people who tell us that we should be preparing now, mainly because at the current state of the art, there is still time to be prepared.

Detoxed

Let me start by admitting that I don't get it.

I suppose that what Steve Kelly is getting at is the idea that "toxic masculinity" is simply a lifestyle choice, and one that's somewhat appealing to a particular group of women. Okay... so? I'm pretty sure that there are men out there who prefer women with chins... not to mention skulls that aren't a full quarter of their body height.

But I guess what this cartoon is really about is Mr. Kelly leaning into the idea that that "toxic" and "traditional" (read: "stereotypically conservative") masculinity are one in the same. This sort of redefinition of terms that originate with people that the stereotypical conservative doesn't like is common enough that if I'm talking with a conservative acquaintance and a term like "wokeness" or "toxic masculinity" comes up, I immediately stop them and ask them to define the term for me, so I know what they're referring to. Otherwise, things are likely to go South quickly, as we talk past one another. Which, to be fair, happens often enough anyway. Usually because this or that conservative thinker swears that the idea that "toxic masculinity" refers to something genuinely corrosive is yet another hateful Leftist plot against America, and the person I'm talking to refuses to entertain that their favorite pundit may not have their facts straight.

But even with that, this is just a guy with noodles for arms and questionable fashion sense. I've met people who look every inch the part of urban hipster but would never have anything to do with Liberal politics. Physique and clothing choices aren't really very good indicators of broader social attitudes.

And I guess that's why I don't get it. The guy in the cartoon could be anyone. Sure, he'll never make a Marlboro advertisement, but the presumption that he's somehow incapable of espousing or living "traditional" masculine values is to make that box even more confining than it already is.