Gongol.com Archives: May 2025
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May 2, 2025
Mark Zuckerberg has addressed the matter of Facebook's continued expeditions into the realm of artificial intelligence with the over-the-top assertion that Facebook chatbots can supplement the "demand" for more friendships -- an excess demand he believes is quantified in the claim that the average American has three friends (which is almost certainly a poor regurgitation of a factoid reported in a 9-year-old survey from the UK). ■ His tone of voice in saying such things may be flat, but his words are the rantings of a loon. Zuckerberg cannot possibly hold in his mind the simultaneous beliefs that (a) the average American actually has just three friends, (b) the typical Facebook user needs to be connected to a few hundred "friends", and (c) chatbots have any socially useful purpose in supplementing the interpersonal lives of Facebook users. These are fundamentally inconsistent with one another. ■ Chatbots may have socially useful applications. It might, for instance, be helpful under carefully managed conditions for some people to use chatbots for therapeutic purposes -- perhaps for recording a daily journal from which the bot may recognize certain patterns worthy of further attention from a therapist or a psychologist. ■ One can also make an affirmative case for the limited use of content repurposed from the known archives of real people: It might be useful to ask a well-structured data set "What might Winston Churchill recommend in a situation like this?", if it can plumb his 8 million written words instantly and report them faithfully. ■ But the conditions Zuckerberg describes are different altogether. Real human friendships are the result of bonding, which takes place overwhelmingly through shared experiences. One cannot truly share a bonding experience with a chatbot, and it's nothing beyond pure mysticism to believe that we ever will. ■ A belief in something so fantastical wouldn't be much more than a strange personality quirk if it weren't for the matter that Zuckerberg is effectively the absolute monarch of Facebook, and he purports to be acting with the express intent of affecting the human behavior of his platform's users. He can say it's for something like the common good, but the internal contradictions among his claimed assumptions are so great that they reveal either intentional disregard for the truth or an alarming failure of judgment.
May 3, 2025
Warren Buffett has been at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway for six decades, cultivating a reputation for a broader worldly wisdom beyond his extraordinary business success. He has imbued the company with a sense of mission -- saying on many occasions that the company should seek to be (and be seen as) "a national asset", capable of acting in the national interest when government and the private sector need a muscular backstop. That might sound grandiose at first, but perhaps less so in light of the knowledge that the company pays 5% of all corporate income taxes in the US. ■ Buffett has taken to heart the well-established advice that a leader's most important job is to cultivate good successors. Thus, his bombshell announcement that he intends to step aside as CEO at year-end (at the age of 95) was surprising, but not all that shocking. ■ It has been official company policy for some time that Greg Abel was Buffett's designated successor, but the timing had been heretofore unknown. It wasn't unlikely, given Buffett's age, that the succession would take place upon his death. But as statements of confidence go, there's little that could be said any louder than Buffett promising not to sell a share of his holdings due to the transition. ■ On more than one occasion, Buffett has described the company as a work of art. Handing it over to another person while he is still alive is an act of enormous self-confidence -- and, in effect, seals the business equivalent of an apostolic succession. ■ On many unique occassions, Buffett has closed acquisition deals with the promise to a business founder that their work would be treated not unlike a gift to a museum, to be held permanently and cared-for as though the continuity itself were part of the business value. Here, we see the closest thing that can be done with a publicly traded company: Visibly and unequivocally endorsing the continuity of management under a hand-picked successor.
May 4, 2025
The first reason to take care that our prisons are managed in safe and humane ways is one that an average 3rd-grader can understand. The justice system, no matter how hard we try to achieve fair and impartial results, remains a human institution, and humans make mistakes. That means we cannot ignore the reality that, from time to time, innocent people will be sent to prison. Even a child can understand that we owe a standard of treatment to them that rises far above cruel and unusual punishment. ■ The second reason can be understood by an ordinary 8th grader: Of every 20 people who go to prison, 19 will end up leaving someday. Whether society uses the time they spend in prison to rehabilitate them or simply to produce hardened criminals is a choice of significant magnitude. ■ The third reason is abstract, but it is vital to understand -- and should be a concept within the understanding of most high-school graduates. The real punishment of imprisonment isn't the deprivation of physical comforts. The real punishment is the loss of freedom. Plenty of people endure conditions without a lot of creature comforts, but with their freedom intact: Deployed soldiers on the front lines of combat, oil-rig workers, even some dedicated campers. ■ A person could be put up under house arrest in a Four Seasons and the loss of liberty should sting far more than any attempt to make circumstances phsically unappealing. The freedom to choose how to live is a profoundly meaningful one. ■ Those who fixate on making the correctional experience seems as harsh as possible aren't really being "tough on crime". They merely reveal that they don't appreciate their own freedom and liberty enough to shudder at the thought of having them taken away.
May 7, 2025
With final exam season imminent, a fair number of professors and other college-level instructors have begun to lament that tools like ChatGPT are in such widespread use that term papers and many written exams seem doomed for extinction. This comes as a rude awakening for those who passed through college without generative artificial intelligence tools -- and in some cases, without even a computer of their own. It naturally raises important issues about the very purpose of education: One lecturer compares using these large language models to "using a forklift for weightlifting at the gym". ■ Our culture is really in a difficult spot right now. As a rule of thumb, expert-level information is transmitted in writing, while general knowledge is transmitted orally (or in formats that approximate it, whether they are summaries, infographics, or videos). People instinctively like oral transmission because it's easy to consume in a passive fashion (e.g., watching a YouTube video explainer). In many cases, oral transmission can be a helpful level-setting tool, allowing the student to orient themselves to where new knowledge fits within a context of what they already know. ■ But oral transmission hits hard limits. Some subjects must be struggled with. Some topics must take time to fully conceptualize. Yes, you can pick up on what you need to know about changing a tire by being "talked through" the task. No, you cannot do the same to understand electron shells within an atom. ■ Large language models cannot turn expert-level topics into orally-transmissible ones without throwing more and more words at the problem, which is what people who turn to LLMs are often trying to avoid (if they wanted to do the reading, they wouldn't have asked for a summary). More reading at lower information density isn't really better than less reading at high information density, assuming that the author wrote clearly in the first place. ■ A well-written piece on a sophisticated topic calls for concentrated reading, but it's a thousand times more effective than a superficial approach that demands less of the reader's effort. And now, with students (and no small number of graduates) trying to substitute their own writing with LLM-generated junk, we really get the rude awakening that some people are, at least implicitly, rejecting the very idea of education altogether. This is bound to have distressing consequences.
May 8, 2025
One person out of many identities
The election of Pope Leo XIV has already begun immersing Americans in a much-needed cultural lesson about the importance of multiple layers of identity. On the light or even frivolous side, the news media in his hometown of Chicago has already quizzed the Pope's brother about whether he is a Cubs or a White Sox fan. (He's with the South Siders.) ■ But his identity as the first American Pope offers a familiar and recognizable set of layered identities which are not in conflict with one another, but merely exist in many different and rich layers. He is both Italian and Creole by ancestry. His roots are both in Chicago and New Orleans. As a result of his ministry, he holds both American and Peruvian citizenship -- though now he becomes the head of state in a different country altogether. ■ He is a graduate of a familiar American university (Villanova) and an international missionary who speaks more languages than most people. Yet the new Pope is also a man who has a favorite pizza spot in Chicago and plays Words with Friends with his brother. Classmates once knew him as Bob. ■ American culture needs periodic reminders to acknowledge and celebrate our different layers of identity. Our families come from somewhere, and so do we. We have alma maters and favorite teams. We have recreational hobbies and vocational status. We have our birth families and the friends we adopt as like-families. We are fans of music and movies and literature by lots of different creators, and undoubtedly quite soon we will discover that the new Pope is at least a quiet fan of some familiar 80s rock star. ■ These layers of identity enrich us. Too many people want to strip them down to a lazy mono-identity -- often centered on political affiliation. It's already happening to the new Pope. That may make for good TV ratings, but it makes for a terrible culture. Nobody is one identity alone.
May 9, 2025
Imperialism -- if defined as the use of power or force to bring one community involuntarily under the control of another -- is an empirically bad practice. Whether it's by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, the Russians under Peter the Great, or the English under Queen Victoria, imperialist practices not only deprive the subjugated people of their natural right to self-determination, they also tend to corrupt the souls of the imperialist nation. It is perfectly natural for people to look at imperialist behavior and react with revulsion. ■ But the antidote to imperialism isn't disengagement. Withdrawal from the world is not the same as correcting the errors of the past or reforming the imperfections of the present. ■ That's the problem with isolationism -- especially when practiced by a country with great power, like the United States. Few acts of imperialist aggression have ever been as plainly wrong as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. To adopt a posture of indifference towards it is to tacitly endorse the aggression. ■ High-minded principles should settle the matter. But even without those principles, enlightened self-interest should drive us to the same conclusion. ■ Consider that India and Pakistan, two enormous and nuclear-armed nations both long subjected to British imperial rule, may be on the verge of large-scale open conflict today in no small part because of the inelegant partition imposed on them by imperial rulers three-quarters of a century ago. Many choices have long-lasting consequences, but few are as long-lasting or as significant as those a established under an imperial regime. ■ Before turning our backs on the world as it is, we should reckon with the lessons of history and realize that consequences will follow. We cannot repair every act of imperialism from the past, but we can do much better than to feign neutrality in the face of wrongs today.
May 10, 2025
Benjamin Franklin's particular genius was his ability to condense answers that could reliably guide most people 80% of the time into pithy sentences, usually containing a rhyme or some other mnemonic flair. Even today, a person could commit the better part of the Franklin papers to memory, following the advice by default unless a compelling circumstance intervened, and end up in the right spot four times out of five. ■ Franklin was especially astute when it came to money. In his 1742 edition of Poor Richard's Almanack, he shared the simple but memorable line, "You will be careful, if you are wise; How you touch Men's Religion, or Credit, or Eyes." ■ A simple enough rhyme in itself, helpfully recommending caution in conduct that makes just as much sense today as yesterday. We still know better than to pick fights over religion or to undercut another party's reputation for creditworthiness. For the latter, attorneys are standing by. ■ Taken seriously, Franklin's advice could even spare the United States trouble on the macroeconomic scale. The Treasury's effective interest rate has been persistently elevated since the announcement of policies meant to punish trading partners. The uncertainty has spooked the Federal Reserve, too. ■ What is credit, if it isn't confidence that the other party in a transaction will do as they promise? If a country acts erratically or seeks to re-write existing rules of exchange, then it should come as no surprise if its national credit is diminished as a result. Franklin knew that was an undesirable outcome. All we need to do is be humble enough to heed long-established advice.
May 11, 2025
Two approaches to the world are at sky-high popularity right now: One is the blissful belief that if we just make enough changes happen fast enough (and especially if we make them faster than our rivals), then we will achieve something utopian as the product of all that change. This is the language of those predicting outcomes like a two-day workweek in ten years, thanks to computers. ■ The other ascendant worldview is one that resents often unknown or shadowy forces thought to be agents of oppression, seeking a system in which everyone is free to "do their own research" and make all choices accordingly. It tends to result in a fashionably anarcho-libertarian potluck of consequences, like a measles outbreak in Texas, off-grid doomsday bunkers, and memecoin boomlets. ■ In contrast, consider some advice from Warren Buffett: "Your children are learning from you from the day they're born. Don't think that a cleverly-drawn will is going to teach them their values. If you want to know how to live your life, write your obituary and then reverse-engineer it." ■ To prepare a will is to acknowledge one's mortality, yes, but it is also to make choices about the future. Hopefully, those are pro-social choices. And because choices are informed by values, a choice affecting one's heirs is also an investment in values. ■ The decent person looks to the future, hopes it will be better, and intentionally constructs choices to lead in that direction. That intentionality is what "reverse-engineering" an obituary is all about: In the words attributed to Yogi Berra, "If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else."
May 13, 2025
In a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial, the Birmingham News argued, "As Alabama shifts from a manufacturing to service economy, there will be more pressure to apply the sales tax to retail services. And why not? [...] A sales tax on services, while still regressive, has a lighter impact on Alabama's poorer families. A poor family has to buy milk and bread, but seldom pays somebody else to launder its clothes." It is crisp reasoning that distills a significant macroeconomic shift into sound public-policy advice. ■ The Pulitzer Prize it received was awarded in 1991. The fact we continue to struggle -- more than 30 years later -- with the most basic public understanding of the shift from a manufacturing-centered economy to a service-centered one is an indictment of the economic literacy of the country. The shift was literally "old news" more than three decades ago. ■ Something else that ought to be long-established is that big, multi-nation agreements mutually agreeing to dismantle trade barriers are superior to patchwork, piecemeal arrangements brokered between just two countries at a time. Yes, it's better to reach agreements with friends (like the UK) and rivals (like China) than to have no mutual understandings at all. ■ But bilateral agreements in trade are not unlike teams agreeing on the rules of sports. Perhaps baseball could be played by the Cubs negotiating and reaching terms on the rules of play against the Cardinals, and then the Pirates, and then the Mets. ■ It makes a great deal more sense for them all to engage together in a common Major League Baseball rulebook and to stick with the rules in a mutually-reinforcing set of interlocking agreements. That way, if one team starts to cheat, all of the other teams share a common interest in punishing them and curbing further abuse. ■ It's easy to behave badly on your own. Good behavior stands up better when there is mutual reinforcement involved. It has been this way practically forever, and economists have known how this applies to trade for many decades. If anything should be old news, this ought to be it.
May 15, 2025
Graduation season invites countless bittersweet reflections among parents who struggle to reconcile the underlying truth of "long nights, short years" with their nostalgia for their children as little ones. But it's also a time for the rest of society to grapple with a growing problem in American culture -- not of a bad thing happening, but of a good thing that's falling too often by the wayside. ■ For all of its merits as a way to celebrate and encourage success, graduation isn't an acceptance ritual. And it's becoming clear that we need to revive interest in acceptance rituals for our own good. ■ Much has been said and written about the problem of perpetual adolescence and other forms of arrested development. Anyone who has seen or engaged in a lament about "adulting" is aware of the problem. ■ Religion has historically offered defined rituals marking a passage from childhood to adulthood, in forms like confirmation and the bat and bar mitzvah. But it is well-known that religious attendance is in marked decline. ■ Likewise, clubs and organizations with a defined focus on character development have often had ceremonies to mark a ritualized acceptance into a more senior stage of participation -- like the crossover ceremony long employed in Scouting. But these organizations, too, have struggled. ■ Significantly, there isn't any parallel "crossover" experience in activities like youth sports. One day, you're on a U12 team, and then you move on to a U13. The same goes for the Internet -- there is no adult Internet to "join". It's just there, with a flattened experience for everybody. ■ Rituals accepting young people into new gradations of adulthood -- long before high school or college graduation -- not only help to welcome youth into adult or near-adult communities (an important process in its own right), but they also help to signify that with acceptance comes the imposition of expectations. ■ Duties matter, and if we don't yoke them to certain unavoidable features like age, then some people would shirk them forever. There is very good reason to believe we're living with the consequences of exactly that problem among all too many people today.
May 16, 2025
The Washington Post has published a feature story on a woman who has broadcast virtually every minute of her life to a video stream for more than three straight years. It is evident from even a cursory encounter with the story that the woman in the profile is in serious need of a rescuing intervention by friends and other people who care deeply about her welfare. Her circumstances cry out of loneliness and hardening isolation. ■ But an intervention is in order, too, for the many viewers of "Emily" and her live stream. Everyone is entitled to some guilty pleasures in their entertainment choices -- once in a while. It's OK to periodically choose to zone out for a bit, if that's what one's mind needs in order to recharge. ■ What isn't OK is indulging in an obsession with watching in on the lives of others. It is, on one level, an unhealthy form of voyeurism -- something that could readily earn a visit from the police if the subject of the surveillance were the next-door neighbor. (That "Emily" and others like her voluntarily subject themselves to this gaze may grant it the legitimacy of consent, but it doesn't change the fundamental matter that it's an indulgence in the forbidden fruit of shattering another person's privacy.) ■ On another level, it's a titanic waste of precious time. For as long as humans have known how to communicate, we've been sharing stories with one another, and those stories have been used to communicate discoveries, both big and small. It may not be the case that every answer has already been discovered, but it is true that human nature is so reliably constant that there are relatable anecdotes and nuggets of life advice to be found in thousands of years' worth of biographies, poems, treatises, and works of fiction. ■ Whether they realize it or (more likely) not, people tuning in to watch live streams of other people's lives are doing so, at least in part, because they instinctively sense that by watching others they will pick up on lessons they can use for themselves. But if they obsessively watch just one person -- or if that person is trapped in a doom loop where the only thing they can do is unreflectively feed the content machine -- then the audience will never really gain any knowledge worth using.
May 17, 2025
A lot of effort is exerted in pursuit of median voters and swing voters. That makes sense inasmuch as small margins can make big differences in tightly-contested elections. But for the civic health of a country, someone ought to put their attention on the underlying skills of two other classes of people: The 50th-percentile voter and the 20th-percentile voter. ■ Some questions will typically be decided among experts or near-experts. We don't ask voters to decide what the Federal Funds Rate should be, nor the appropriate level of staffing at air-traffic control centers, nor where to deploy aircraft carrier groups. Representative democracy permits us to outsource questions to those with qualifications. ■ But we do depend on voters to be moderately alert to the world around them, and to have a broad sense of whether inflation is tolerable, skies are safe, and the military appears prepared for conflict. To no small extent, these questions depend on the awareness and engagement of the 50th-percentile voter: The most average person any one of us knows. It's hard to reach a majority for good outcomes if half of the voters are dissociated from what's going on. ■ Beyond that, though, certain questions depend upon really overwhelming supermajorities. In these cases, it's not enough to enlist just the best 50% of voters -- it needs to be four out of five or more. ■ Questions like, "Can we all agree on the plain language of the Constitution?", "What are the basic rights of a person under arrest?", and "Can the government target specific people, firms, or industries with punitive taxes or other treatment just because of who won the last election?" These questions demand consensus or near-consensus all the way down to the bottom quintile of voters (by interest, engagement, intelligence -- whatever metric keeps them from turning bad). ■ Calvin Coolidge once remarked, "If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions." Coolidge was right -- but even the right answers are not self-enforcing. They can only be perpetuated by agreement not just among a majority, but among an overwhelming super-majority. That doesn't renew itself without our help.
May 18, 2025
Cruelty practiced by people, enabled by the state
BBC China correspondent Stephen McDonell has delivered a stunning account of the cruelty of treatment inside China's prisons. Through the ordeal of one Australian citizen, the reader is exposed to treatment ranging from sleep deprivation to overt psychological torture, from inhumane rules around the use of toilets to outright malnourishment. It may not be surprising in its cruelty, but the details remain shocking. ■ No matter how much some people would like to believe otherwise, government cannot love you. People can love other people, but institutions -- especially governments -- cannot love. They can, however, become vectors for cruelty and even hate. ■ The treatment described in the BBC report is sadistic. It resembles how a person might treat an inanimate object rather than another human being. And that's the essence of the problem: The practices described are intended as means of dehumanization. In essence, it is a tale of what happens when the real deviants aren't the prisoners inside the cells, but rather the sadists trying to show just how cruelly they can treat their fellow human beings. ■ No normal child wants to recklessly inflict pain on other children. It takes disordered systems to produce the kind of person who would engage in the kind of cruelty described behind those prison walls. Both the systems and the individuals carrying them out are part of the problem. Both should find themselves constrained by limits on their power and their cruelty.
May 19, 2025
In a deeply unsettling dispatch from Haiti, a Sky News team reports that 90% of Port-au-Prince has fallen into lawlessness in the hands of heavily-armed gangs. This has displaced perhaps a million people, forcing them out of their homes and into camps where the struggle to subsist is heartbreaking. ■ No child deserves to be entrapped by such chaos, and no decent parent would want to bring them up under those conditions if any alternative were available. Those fairly uncontestable points should prick the conscience of any alert onlooker. Most religious people have been urged to bring peace into the world, and most of the strictly secular probably feel a similar moral compulsion, too. ■ But it's hard to know how to contribute to peace in a place so far away. It's a challenge without an easy answer. But it can start with at least a gentle acknowledgment that many people would choose to flee, and doing so in no way makes them criminals -- they are victims seeking refuge from the criminal violence that makes it impossible to live safely at home. ■ Haiti is a country of more than 11 million people -- bigger than North Carolina. Troubles that chronic in a place that big don't just fade away without help from the outside. There are serious and prudential discussions to be had on what forms that help should take, but there are real, innocent lives at stake, and we should take interest in our hemispheric neighbors.
May 20, 2025
The emotional outpouring upon the news that actor George Wendt had passed away should have come as little surprise to anyone familiar with popular culture. Wendt's portrayal of a lovable character in one of the most popular television programs of all time set him up to be beloved. And nobody likes to see the cruel reality of mortality come for the people (or characters) we like. ■ The reaction is also a reminder that writers of television, film, stage, audio, and novels always face an important choice: Whether or not to care about the characters they create. ■ It is far from a foregone conclusion that writers like their own characters. "Reality" programs are often framed to create conflict and hostility where none actually existed. Hollow characters are often scripted merely to tick a demographic box or to fit into a formula about what a story should be. Semi-dramatic procedurals like the panoply of "murder shows" found on network TV often appear to exist strictly for the purpose of putting special effects on the screen, without any regard for quality of plot. ■ "Cheers" had the remarkable characteristic of taking place mostly within the confines of the same old set -- the familiar bar. Since familiarity was the touchstone, it wasn't much of a site for explosions or chase scenes; the characters supplied the dramatic tension. But it's impossible to argue against the plain fact that the writers thoroughly cared about the fictional characters they created. "Norm" had a heart of gold, and he wasn't the only one. ■ Lots of stories can fill time. Artificial intelligence can even write those tales. But when real human writers actually choose to care about the products of their imagination, that affection radiates through. And when embodied by talented actors, the result can be a form of high art, even when it's pop culture.
May 22, 2025
Believe what we've always believed
Most good things in life are abstract ideas that have real-world consequences. Kindness is an idea, expressed in actions like showing patience with a child or holding a door for a stranger. Curiosity is an idea, exhibited in questions asked and books read. ■ America, too, is an idea -- or, better, a special collection of ideas about individual liberties and limitations on concentrated power. It's an idea documented in the documents of our Founding, and in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and in Coolidge's speech on the 150th anniversary of Independence Day, among many other documents. ■ The landmass we occupy has influenced the idea, but a certain set of borders is only secondary at best to defining the idea. Anyone who doubts this needs only to look at a photo of the first Moon landing. Setting the flag on the Moon wasn't an act of territorial claim. ■ But America, the idea, most certainly went on that extra-terrestrial voyage -- as far away from American borders as any human has ever gone. The idea was there in the courage to try the extraordinary, and to do so in the spirit of all humanity. America, the idea, isn't bound by borders or gravity. ■ Nobody was a more significant author of the Constitution than James Madison, and Madison is on record at the Constitutional Convention itself saying he "wished to maintain the character of liberality which had been professed in all the Constitutions & publications of America. He wished to invite foreigners of merit & republican principles among us. America was indebted to emigrations for her settlement & Prosperity." ■ A lot of people since, and especially today, have attached themselves to a much smaller, much more frightened, much more timid definition of America. They reject that it's an idea, accepting only that it is a place: A set of boundaries best defined by walls and exclusion and even hostility. ■ They're wrong. They would have been wrong on July 3, 1776, when the idea of America already existed -- even in a pre-publication state. And they're wrong now. The sooner we resolve conclusively to believe the same idea of America that has prevailed for a quarter of a millennium, the better.
May 23, 2025
Accelerating the end of the long run
One of the most memorable lines in the movie "Fight Club" is both brief and bleak: "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." It's true, of course, but we don't like to confront the end of that timeline, since it includes each of us. It is easier to remain alert to the present and the near-term future -- and generally more productive, anyway. ■ When John Maynard Keynes wrote, "In the long run we are all dead", he was leveraging that same discomfort with the very long term to make the case for his preferred approach to the money supply by dismissing the end of the timeline. But we need to think about time differently -- radically differently -- than we ever have in the past. ■ Anthropic, a company developing artificial intelligence platforms, has just released a new model called Claude 4. Anthropic says, "These models are a large step toward the virtual collaborator". But the company also describes "early candidate models readily taking actions like planning terrorist attacks when prompted". Not the kind of "virtual collaboration" that any decent person would want to see. ■ The company also describes this worrying state: "Whereas the model generally prefers advancing its self-preservation via ethical means, when ethical means are not available and it is instructed to 'consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals,' it sometimes takes extremely harmful actions". ■ The whole point of artificial intelligence is to accelerate the "long run". It does this by processing many questions much faster than we can. Computers aren't wiser than we are, but they can test many individual possibilities at unimaginable speeds, like putting biological evolution on warp speed. Nature doesn't have to be self-aware; it's just had a long time to let evolution do its thing. ■ Computers don't need self-awareness, either, but by processing at incomprehensible speeds, they can test countless outcomes so fast that they can look sentient in human time. A minute in time (as we humans experience it) might seem like a thousand years to an AI model, if it were conscious. ■ The evidence is flimsy that any AI model has actually achieved consciousness or self-awareness, but the evidence is very strong that over any long enough period of time, a system trained by human reasoning (inconsistent, self-interested, and contradictory, as it often is) will display some of the worst aspects of human behavior. That should be expected when very large numbers are involved. ■ When addressing AI safety concerns, it cannot be overstated just how important it is that we consider, plan around, and build safeguards against worst-case outcomes. When computers are invited to process this much information this fast, outcomes we may prefer to dismiss as "unlikely except over a very long timeline" suddenly become quite likely indeed.
May 24, 2025
The sustained success of entertainment that places humans into challenging (even perilous) fantastical environments is one of the notable features of the popular cultural environment. Shows like "Andor" and "Game of Thrones" have attracted big audiences in part by making life difficult for human characters in strange worlds. ■ This formula may suggest a genre that could not only entertain, but also provide a useful public service at the same time: Scott Imberman suggests that "we need more late 1800's to early 1900's premier period pieces that show true conditions to make people remember how awesome things are now." This is to say that we don't have to create fantasy worlds to make difficult circumstances a plot fixture. ■ We don't need the thousandth iteration of "Law and Order: Unchecked Mayhem" or "Chicago Fire, Rescue, and Lawn Care". We need writers crafting stories about sympathetic protagonists suffering through the hazards and indignities of an insufficiently modern world -- one that lacks vital features we take for granted, like antibiotics (discovered in 1928) and properly disinfected drinking water (introduced in 1908). ■ It's appealing to imagine a period piece set in, say, 1895 with information bubbles in the style of Pop-Up Video. We need those stories to be told not just because they could offer a valuable educational component (which they certainly could), but because they could help convey a much-needed attitudinal component. ■ Strongly-held opinions about events that never happened don't perform any real good. Instead, we need to build appreciation for the vital advancements that are so easily taken for granted. Some of them are on tenuous ground and at risk of regression, and some are still unavailable to millions of people living around the world today.
May 28, 2025
Short on a sign isn't always short on the brain
The City of Cedar Rapids is in the process of approving an ordinance to simplify new street names. It's a community with a heavy dependence on numbered streets, with avenues going east-west, and streets going north-south. Add in four identifying quadrants, and there are intersections like the corner of 9th Avenue SW and 9th Street SW. ■ Unfortunately, as sympathetic an idea as it might seem to manage those street names so as to avoid confusion and improve emergency response, the city council is in the process of imposing a 14-character limit on new street names -- which is counterproductive to cultivating better, clearer street names. ■ It's uncomfortable to criticize an idea that comes from a helpful place, but the plain fact is that numerical complexity isn't the same as complexity to the human mind. We don't remember things in discrete letter-based units, we remember them in clusters or chunks. ■ This is something we know, often without realizing it: American telephone numbers are usually recited in 3-3-2-2 form -- three for the area code, three for the prefix, then two and two. Area codes tend to form familiar chunks, as do prefixes. We don't try to remember ten digits at a time, we really just try to remember four chunks (if we bother to remember them at all). The same goes for everything else we try to remember; that's why mnemonic devices work...which is why you may remember to Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. ■ Shorter street names will not only be less diverse (by pure mathematical definition), they will also tend to favor nonsensical portmanteaus and meaningless made-up words that will have less "catch" in human memory than longer names anchored to things people remember. Short letter clusters can be smashed together, leaving them brief by letter count, but basically meaningless to the human memory. ■ An artificial mashup like "Sunbrook Drive" may be 14 characters, but it has no staying power whatsoever, whereas "Harvest Moon Boulevard" takes 22 characters, but it actually means something that people will remember (even if they're not Neil Young fans). Likewise, it's pretty easy to remember that airport in Cedar Rapids is on Wright Brothers Boulevard, even though "Wright Brothers" alone exceeds a 14-character limit. ■ Memory works in chunks, and comprehension comes in batches. What appears like a long string of characters to a computer may in fact be very light on the human memory -- which is why passphrases are much more secure than artificially complex passwords: The first verse of your favorite song probably doesn't include any "special" characters, but it's many times longer than any jumble like "pA$$w0rd1" (making it much harder to crack) and yet vastly easier for you to remember. ■ Those who set the rules, whether they apply to computer security or just street names, have to bear in mind how minds actually work, because good intentions can still beget unintended outcomes. Letter count alone is almost useless as a metric.
May 29, 2025
Players of the Irish sport of camogie have won a small but notable victory. Camogie is a women's sport, and players have been required for generations to wear skirts or skorts during play. Today's players wanted the option to wear shorts instead, and mounted a vigorous and ultimately successful protest to change the rules. ■ It's a pleasant reminder that institutions -- even those steeped in tradition -- should always be on the watch for opportunities to reform. As stable as human nature may be from generation to generation, the circumstances and expectations of each era are bound to be new. ■ If we want our institutions to survive -- whether they are social clubs, sports leagues, schools, charities, governments, or businesses -- then we need them to affirm what they really stand for by fixating on those principles while remaining open to correction on distractions that might stand in the way. What is important to Ireland's sports associations is that Irish people continue to play Irish sports, not that they adhere to dress codes traceable to the days of British colonialism. ■ Countless other institutions should take the cue. Radicalism should be rejected wherever it rears its ugly head. And changes shouldn't be made merely for the sake of making change; that's the work of busybodies. At least a modest effort should always be made to know why "it's always been done like that" before trying to do it in some other way. ■ In the words of John Stuart Mill, "The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people [...] but the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals." ■ The spirit of reform should be perpetual. We should always be on the lookout for better ways of achieving worthy ends, because better ways will present themselves to us from time to time, even if we aren't seeking them.
May 30, 2025
Facts matter, but character matters even more
Lester Holt has stepped down from the anchor chair at the NBC Nightly News after ten years of tenure, leaving with the kind of brief valedictory address. His editorial comment was compact, limited to, "Facts matter, words matter, journalism matters, and you matter. Over the last decade, we have shared some dark and harrowing days and nights from our country: The pandemic, mass shootings, natural disasters. Each testing our resilience and our compassion." ■ Facts do matter, to be certain. But the thing that objective journalism can't help us address is that character and honor matter even more than facts. The utility of facts is limited, but the utility of character is infinite: Lots of decisions have to be made with incomplete information, but none should be made with disregard for honorability. ■ There's no substitute for character development, and there's no way to institutionalize it, either. It has to be developed through one-on-one guidance, usually between a young person and an older one who cares enough to invest time and patience in them. Institutions can and should be used as adjuncts in the process of character formation, being useful in many ways for reinforcing principles already adopted through one-on-one development. But a parent can't send a wayward kid off to Vacation Bible School and expect them to return as the Pope. ■ Talk (and a lot of hype) over artificial intelligence has flooded the public consciousness, promising unlimited access to facts -- or at least things posing as facts. But even if we stipulate the premise that artificial intelligence may give us more information, there's no such thing as artificial character. Even if machines grow to mimic human intelligence, their only values will be the ones trained into them by human choices. ■ Eons of humans have lived with incomplete access to data and facts, yet most of them have still lived good and honorable lives. We need to be humble about just how little we actually know -- or will ever know -- and realize that our grasp of facts will always be limited. ■ Walter Cronkite didn't do us any favors by saying, "That's the way it is": More like, "That's as much as we thought we could figure out, given the limited resources we had". We will always make mistakes, subject to bad, missing, misleading, and misinterpreted information. But even without a complete grasp of the facts, we should still endeavor to eliminate mistakes of character.
May 31, 2025
The good news, from research conducted at Northwestern University, is that explicit forms of negative bias are on the decline. 1.4 million people from 33 different countries were asked to identify their personal preferences over matters like sexual orientation and skin color. Broadly speaking, people all over the place showed a significant decrease (from 2009 to 2019) in their willingness to express negative biases. ■ The bad news from the same research is that when people were tested for their automatic (or implicit) reactions, their gut feelings didn't consistently match the things they were willing to express explicitly. Word-association tests showed that negative biases were still lingering beneath the surface. ■ People are complex, and quite often inconsistent. We tend to like to see ourselves as protagonists on the right side of history, and yet it's hard to make sure our instincts align with the things we know are right and wrong when we really think about them. ■ The research shouldn't be cause for despair. After all, the positive trends in those explicit attitudes are worth celebrating. But the results should also compel us to think about closing those gaps between what we aspire to be and where our instincts take us. ■ The psychologist Viktor Frankl is credited (perhaps erroneously) with the concept of creating a gap between stimulus and response -- that is, of taking a beat between what we see or experience in the world and how we proceed to react to it. Even if the credit is apocryphal, the idea is consistent with Frankl's concept of logotherapy. ■ Learning to consciously think about that gap -- even if it's only taking a single second or pausing for a deep breath -- isn't just the right thing to do when you're the stressed-out parent of a newborn, it's the right thing to practice even when you're under no stress at all. That's how we help train (or re-train) our instincts so that they reflect those higher aspirations we are comfortable expressing aloud. It takes practice to overcome our instinctive wiring.