Naturally

How I wish human nature was a bit different with more care for each other and more attention to the long-term consequences of our actions.
Dan Ariely. "Hybrid Work and Work Abuse Concerns" LinkedIn

Dan Ariely, of all people, should know better. Human nature tends to focus on the personal and the short-term because that's where the incentives are. In a social situation where most of the people one is interacting with are effectively strangers, the impulse to look after one's own interests, even if it costs everyone something, is adaptive. While everyone working together, and looking out for the best interests of the group may come with the greatest rewards, being a team player when other people are defecting comes with much greater risks. And in a situation where it's difficult or impossible to tell who may be free riding, there is no ability to punish such people... and they generally know it. This means that the incentives are on the side of individuals looking out for themselves.

Similarly, in a situation where people have differing time horizons, for whatever reason, getting everyone to privilege the long term over the short term is difficult. A person who knows, that for whatever reason, they're going to be leaving soon (whether that's for another job, retirement or what have you) is not going to be in a position to defer a reward or gratification. A bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush once it's understood that the bush won't be there indefinitely. So again, the individual looking out for their short-term interest is the best thing for them in that moment.

Accordingly, the thing to do isn't wishing. It's engineering. With some communications thrown in. When the clear incentives lie with taking care of one another and looking out for the long term, that's when people will do so. Modern American society tends to push people to place their short-term self-interest above other considerations because it feels both precarious and isolating to many people. Wanting to change "human nature" after hundreds of millennia of evolutionary pressure is pointless. But modern society hasn't been around anywhere nearly as long. The problem become s that change is hard, and comes with costs. When I was young, there was a lot of concern about the national debt. The general consensus was that something needed to be done. Why, 40 years later, hasn't it changed? Because the drive to make the lifestyle changes and part with the money needed to allow the government to run surpluses simply wasn't there. Even know, with tax rates much lower, and deficits much higher, than they were when I was a teenager, you can still find proponents of supply-side economics who are convinced that by lowering taxes even further, that the magic of the Laffer Curve will suddenly kick in and solve everything. And people buy into it because it offers a solution that (supposedly) doesn't cost anyone anything.

Creating a society where the tangible benefits accrue from biting the bullet now is going to take confidence that it's going to turn out as planned. Wishing people were different won't bring that about.

Only One

Trump, whose front-runner status in the Republican presidential race has solidified his leadership of the GOP, has loudly vowed to kill the bipartisan border deal.
Trump, House Republicans plot to kill border deal

If the problem that House Speaker Mike Johnson (who appears to be speaking now on behalf of Donald Trump) has with the current legislation is that "it wouldn't do enough to stop illegal border crossings," one would suspect that the answer would be to either add amendments to shore up that part of things, or simply pass another bill later. I would not be surprised if the problem that Mr. Trump (and thus, the Republican leadership) has with the plan currently under consideration is that it would hand a legislative win to President Biden, and take immigration out of the mix of issues for Mr. Trump to run on in the summer and fall. He supposedly wants a "perfect" immigration bill, and is calling on Republicans in the House of Representatives to block anything less. Of course, no details of this "perfect" legislation have been provided to anyone.

But such is the nature of partisanship. If Donald Trump is elected to a second term in office this fall, he won't actually need to do anything with the border. The Republicans are unlikely to obtain sixty seats in the Senate, and that means that Democratic senators will be able to block legislation that they don't like. And it's hard to see them wanting to play ball with a Trump Administration again. And since Republican voters will blame Democrats for any problems, legislation or none, Mr. Trump could respond to difficulties in passing legislation by not bothering to have any such legislation put forth. Given this, I suspect he's more invested in blocking progress now than making progress later. Otherwise, there's no real reason to literally let the "perfect" be the enemy of the good.

Errored Out

When searching for Swift on the site, a message appears that says: "Something went wrong. Try reloading."
X blocks searches for Taylor Swift after explicit AI images of her go viral

Of course, nothing "went wrong." As the headline notes, X was actively blocking searches for "Taylor Swift" in an effort to suppress generative "A.I."-created nude images purported to be of the superstar singer. So... why not simply say that? A message that reads "Due to a spike in inappropriate activity connected to the search terms you have entered, we have declined to complete the search at this time," would get the point across, be broadly applicable to a wide range of situations and not hint at what people aren't supposed to be searching for (on the off chance that people don't already know what they want to find). And it's not a bald lie.

Of course, companies are in a bit of a bind here. While I suspect that the real reason why X.com is lying to users is that since the error message pops up when there are actual errors, pressing it into service when the company simply declines to carry out a request is the path of least resistance. The alternative I suggested above would take some time to put into place, since there are so many stakeholders (including lawyers) who would need to sign off on it; and for that to happen, it would need to have almost zero chance of blowback. And, in American society today, white lies tend to have much less chance of blowback than even seemingly innocuous truths.

Submerged

Someone put videos, purporting to be sexually explicit clips of Taylor Swift, online. Cue the calls for regulation of "deepfake" apps to protect people from being fooled. While such news stories are well meaning, they fall into portraying people as unable to protect themselves from being fooled, injured or defrauded. But perhaps more importantly, they cast society as being unable to change.

The ability to doctor photographs and videos to show people who weren't involved or events that didn't actually happen is nothing new. In a number of cases, it's simply termed "special effects." True, for the most part, the technology has been expensive enough to be completely unavailable to everyday people. But that state of affairs wasn't going to continue forever. And I'm not sure that regulation is going to put that particular djinn back in the bottle now.

So if one sees a nude picture of a person whom one understands is highly unlikely to pose for a nude picture, it seems that a certain level of skepticism is called for. But maybe a better response is not treating the nude body as some sort of pathogen that ruins the minds of young people forever. One of the stories of people creating and sharing faked pictures of nude teenage girls is from a local high school. Given what we know about teenage boys, and the desperation with which some of them will pursue anything remotely sexual in nature, the idea that someone would set about to make graphic images of classmates should have been a given.

Likewise, in a society with so many members who will do something simply because a celebrity endorses it, absolutely no one should be at all surprised that hucksters (and fraudsters) have been cobbling together videos of random celebrities saying "buy this thing." Because again, what else would one expect?

As Professor of law Danielle Citron puts it in the NPR piece, even deepfake videos designed explicitly to fool people are nothing more than a sophisticated form of lying. And there's no level of regulation that will ever prevent people from lying to one another; especially not when being believed comes with material benefits.

But there are tools that people can be given to help them see through lies, like the skepticism I mentioned earlier. But there are also steps that society can take to reduce the impact of lies. The sexual prudishness of the United States is part of what makes sexualized pictures of Taylor Swift, or a teenager's classmates, so desirable. But it also makes it a matter of shame for the people whose images are faked. If the response to someone passing around a celebrity sex tape was a collective "so what?" a lot of the incentive to create them would go away. If it took more than a celebrity endorsement on social media for a product or service to rack up sales, faked endorsements wouldn't be as useful.

The problem of faked media is not one that, as a society, the United States (or any other nation) is going to be able to regulate its way out of. It's going to take a lot more work than that.

Secondary Importance

According to NPR, "[New Hampshire] could be the last stand for Republicans who don't want Donald Trump to be their nominee again. There likely won't be another opportunity with such a moderate Republican electorate."

Personally, I think the Never Trumpers' last stand was likely some months, if not some years, ago. Donald Trump has pretty much had ownership of the Republican electorate since he first won the Republican nomination for President, and those people who felt that he was bad for the party and/or the nation have never mounted a genuinely serious challenge to that ownership. And that includes Nikki Haley's alleged run for the White House. I'm no more convinced (and haven't been, at any point in this process) that her goal was "Haley '24." Rather, like Ron DeSantis and Tim Scott, this was about positioning herself for the presumed post-Trump landscape of 2028. And even that presumes that Trump doesn't simply anoint a "Mini-Me" like Vivek Ramaswamy to carry the baton forward for him.

So the idea that "there likely won't be another opportunity" presumes that New Hampshire is, itself, an opportunity for someone to come across as an actual competitor to Mr. Trump. Given all of the ink that has been spilled on the idea that even when the Republican field was reasonably large, the only candidates who were attempting to make the point that Donald Trump would not be a good President were people like Chris Christie, who were "running" specifically to make that point, this seems predicated on some large, but otherwise quiet, well of anti-Trump sentiment in the party; people who couldn't be bothered to actively support one of the many alternatives who threw their hats into the ring, but are now going to coalesce out of the woodwork to propel Nikki Haley to a primary victory.

I completely understand wanting this to be a story. After all, polls have been reported as saying that voters don't want to relitigate Biden versus Trump. But Democrats are willing to have President Biden be the nominee again (due to their woefully thin bench of other possibilities) and Republicans have been enthusiastic about Donald Trump carrying their grievances forward. Casting any part of primaries as worth the attention requires ignoring those facts.