Gongol.com Archives: 2025 Second-Quarter Archives

Brian Gongol

April 2, 2025

Gains from trade

One of the best ways to understand America's phenomenal prosperity is to see the United States as 50 smaller countries, all bound together by an enormous free-trade zone. Individual states can pick and choose their own taxes and regulations, of course, but exchanges among them are bound, by the Constitution, to a prevailing free-trade regime. ■ Under these circumstances, it's possible to identify certain surpluses and deficits that some states have with others. Iowa runs a substantial surplus in the production of pork, well beyond what it consumes. California has a big surplus in movies and television shows. Washington runs a considerable surplus with the other states in the production of passenger airplanes. Florida generates a one-of-a-kind and insurmountable surplus in Disney World vacations. ■ With free trade, the market nudges each state to specialize in the production of what comes easily to its comparative advantages. Nobody gets upset that Idaho doesn't produce a lot of oceangoing freighters or that Hawaii doesn't build a lot of snowblowers. And while some states are, on average, more prosperous than others, even the state with the lowest per-capita GDP is still competitive with a rich country like Canada. The big free-trade zone doesn't drag down the high performers, nor does it exploit the laggards -- it raises the economic condition of every state. ■ Without the Constitutional guarantee of interstate free trade, Iowa might try to box out Washington's airliner production with import taxes and subsidize its own. It might try to punish California by taxing Hollywood movies and create domestic protections to get people to visit Adventureland instead of EPCOT. But those wouldn't be good uses of anyone's money or efforts. Even if Georgia comes along and subsidizes TV and film production within its borders, Iowa should still stick to a few of the things it does best. ■ Taxes on imports (or tariffs) don't enrich society as a whole. They can line some well-connected pockets and maybe run cover for some industries in some places that aren't competitive on their own. But what they give to producers they take from consumers, all while distorting the choices that people would make by focusing on their comparative advantages. ■ The US economy has been a more than 200-year natural experiment in free trade -- we just don't often see it that way. But what free-flowing interstate trade has wrought is the most robust economy in the history of the world. To recognize the gains from trade, we only need to be smart enough to see the evidence right in front of our own eyes.

April 3, 2025

Get your assumptions in order

The state of one's starting assumptions can have an overwhelming effect on the conclusions one ends up drawing. If, for instance, one were to assume that American economic might reached a peak at some point during the heavy industrial era, then that assumption could easily frame the conclusion that some form of "return" to heavy industry might also bring about a "return" of economic glory. ■ But those assumptions would be faulty for two reasons. First, by any reasonable measure, there has been no peak in American economic success: It's grown from generation to generation. That doesn't mean the growth has been evenly distributed; some people, and even some geographic areas, have stagnated. Addressing that stagnation with a good underlying base of growth and some well-targeted policies could do a lot of good -- as could promoting conditions that encourage people to move to where the opportunity is. ■ The second fault in the assumptions would be to think that heavy industrial work is somehow infused with magic. Consider this under-appreciated fact: Roughly since the end of World War II, a majority of American workers have been employed in the service sector. Not just some, and not just a rising number. A majority. ■ This is a natural economic progression. Automation makes it easier to make things. That's been the case on the farm and in the factory alike. Machines do repetitive tasks well at scale, and the amazing productivity of the American agricultural and industrial sectors should be regarded as a massive success story. ■ Services, though, are much harder to automate. And in many cases, they can only be made so efficient: A string quartet doesn't get better by playing Brahms twice as fast or by cutting out the cello. There's only so much by which automation can make a haircut more efficient (otherwise, more people would be buying Flowbees). And if you want to talk to a counselor, your life will not be improved by them conducting sessions with two clients at a time. ■ It's natural, then, for employment in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors to decline, while the service sector expands. Finding ways to make prosperity reach more people in more places isn't a matter of trying to revive a fictitious past. It's a matter of dealing with the facts as they are, which means concentrating on matters like the dignity of work, life-long learning and skill development, and transitional assistance when old jobs fade and new ones need to be found. ■ America has been a majority-service-sector economy since the 1950s. Before that was the mobilization for a great war, and before that was a Great Depression. There are no glory days at any point in the last century when industrial employment led the way. Any assumption leading otherwise is a path to false promises.

April 4, 2025

Watch your predictions

Projections in the natural sciences have mainly been on a long upward trend towards greater accuracy. Weather forecasts are a shining example: The Storm Prediction Center has really been nailing their forecasts lately, in a way that would have been purely a dream half a century ago. ■ This has tended to give people the impression that anything that is quantifiable can be accurately projected. This confidence has been badly misapplied to the social sciences. Individual things can be well-known about topics within subjects like political science or economics, but a whole lot of macro-scale projections are still firmly within the grasp of fickle aspects of both individual psychology and group dynamics. ■ Anyone who makes confident, sweeping predictions about the economy should be viewed with overwhelming suspicion. There are far too many human-based variables involved for anyone to know with certainty how things will go. ■ Central to this is the knowledge that factors may line up in favor of a turn of events in one direction or another, but what we simply cannot know ahead of time are what timing and what triggers will be involved. This doesn't stop certain overconfident types from profiting by selling products like "market forecasts" -- but it should. ■ A sudden 10% downturn in the stock market has just resulted, ultimately, from the impulses of a single individual human being. There are those who saw the conditions coming together for what has happened, but nobody predicted outright what actually has come to pass. Humans remain the wildest of wild cards, and unless and until we perfect a great deal more of the psychological sciences, timing and triggers will remain the elusive aspects of every plausible economic forecast.

April 5, 2025

Don't let it be a cyber D-Day

Wired reports that a White House-empowered team is planning a "hackathon" at the IRS in order to create an application programming interface (or API) to permit data to be moved more freely from one software system inside the tax agency to another. ■ There are very good reasons to be concerned about any large-scale effort to break down barriers that otherwise kept sensitive information (like taxpayer data) siloed and firewalled. Even in the best of circumstances, so much of that data is potentially so sensitive that it rises to the level where background checks, security clearances, and a whole lot of legal counsel ought to be involved. ■ But even if everything were to be conducted according to the strictest possible internal controls and safeguards, there is a bigger problem with the reported plan. A "hackathon" is a fine model to use when trying to assemble a group of smart, creative people in a single place to achieve a narrowly-defined goal. There are even charity hackathons that invite people with computer skills to donate their abilities to solve problems for public-benefit causes. ■ The IRS, though, maintains watch over one of the biggest troves of high-value sensitive personal data anywhere in the world. The Office of Personnel Management breach in 2015 and the cyberattack on Equifax in 2017 were huge. A successful breach of coordinated data at the IRS would be bigger than both events combined -- since nobody escapes the notice of the IRS. ■ The nature of a "hackathon" means that products -- perhaps incomplete, certainly not fully vetted -- will be tested, quite possibly on live data. And that means defenses will be lowered: At the very least, people whose job it is to watch for suspicious server activity will be expecting unusual activity to be taking place. There could be no more ideal time for an adversary to try to attack. ■ Just as Eisenhower took the weather into account when carrying out D-Day, a skilled cyber-adversary looks for exactly the kind of "hackathon" conditions that would offer cover for conducting their own operations. There is a time and a place for the "hackathon" approach -- but the servers and systems affecting every American taxpayer, in the days just prior to the deadline to file tax returns, is most certainly not it. ■ It's possible that the report is erroneous or flat-out wrong. It's also possible that something far more benign than a "hackathon" -- like a strategic planning meeting or a project kickoff -- is planned instead, and someone is using the wrong terms. But it's also possible, particularly based on what's happened at other Federal agencies, that "shock and awe" are indeed in the works.

JP Morgan says odd of global recession now 60%

The ingredients for trouble have been put into the bowl. Now we have to make sure nobody stirs the thing.

Yet another day of high weather danger

People in the Lower Mississippi Valley just can't catch a break from the severe weather right now. That's an extremely serious problem when National Weather Service offices are going badly under-staffed because of rash spending cuts.

April 6, 2025

Making air travel look glamorous again

Some people like to look at the promotional advertising of airline travel from the pre-deregulation era and imagine that all such travel was freshly-carved roast beef and ladies dressed in pearls. But to imagine that all air travel was that way is to surrender both to an ignorance of the facts (like the fact that airliners crashed much more often back then) and to the gauzy lens of marketing. ■ Someday, people might look at promotional videos for today's airline cabins and think that everything we experience is equally glamorous. We know that it's often much grittier than plush seats and private "suites" -- even if those are the experience for some, they're not exactly representative of the travel experience for most people, most of the time. But those are the artifacts that are likely to survive into the future. ■ It's a great illustration of a much broader picture: Just because you see or read something from the past doesn't mean that you're getting the whole story. Even when it's authentic documentation, there's always a form of selection bias about what is kept long enough to be seen in the future. ■ Photos are often staged or selectively taken. The people whose stories get told rarely reflect a true cross-section of public experience -- most people didn't get to fly aboard Pan Am "Clipper Ships". And what we see on the surface doesn't necessarily tell the important facts of the tale -- like deadly crashes, frequent hijackings, and in-flight smoking. ■ The study of history is extremely important. Without it, we are prone to making the same stupid mistakes over and over and over again. But that study needs to be performed with a critical eye and a healthy skepticism. What's missing from the historical record is often just as important as what we can see. Those who only see things from the past and want their "golden ages" back are often the most easily duped of all.

Trillions in paper wealth destroyed

Something like $5 trillion in stock market valuation has gone up in smoke because one person is obsessed with tariffs and a completely fictitious notion of what was or is good for the American economy. There's nothing more substantial to it. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution says taxes are the job of Congress, and that includes import taxes (which is all tariffs are). A self-respecting institution would assert its authority over those taxes instantly. Government must be limited in order to be good, and letting the wrong branch of government do whatever it wants is not "limited".

Abducted 17-year-old rescued at Omaha truck stop

A truck-driving couple thought something seemed wrong, so they dug deeper and identified a criminal incident in progress

April 9, 2025

The wrong way to stand out

As measles outbreaks continue to spread in places like Texas and Ohio, what should be unthinkable has become the tragic reality: At least three people, including two children, have died of a disease so utterly preventable that it was thought to have been eradicated 25 years ago. ■ The persistence of a pernicious anti-vaccination movement is in no small part to blame: MMR vaccination rates among school-aged children have dropped to 92.7%, and the Texas outbreak is spreading almost exclusively among the unvaccinated. But, as a root cause, a fundamental problem about self-understanding shares at least a fraction of the blame, as well. ■ Every human being is unique. We are constructed out of both nature and nurture, and the combination makes everyone different. This uniqueness is, paradoxically, the thing we can all be certain that we share -- no two of us are the same, which creates a foundation for celebrating both our similarities and our differences. To be human is to be unique. We all are. ■ We can also be special, though being special is different from being unique. To be special is a relational experience: One can be special to a grandparent, a teacher, or a minister, for example. One can also be special for a time -- like being the center of attention on a birthday. Most everyone is special to someone, somewhere, sometimes, but it's different from being unique; being special naturally ebbs and flows, depending upon who is around to express it. ■ And then, a person can be exceptional. The exceptional person is different -- so different that we make exceptions for them to the ordinary rules and customs. The exceptional person is, in some way, set apart from everyone else because their difference overwhelms society's capacity to make ordinary way for them. ■ These three definitions -- unique, special, and exceptional -- have been confused for one another far too much for our own good. Everyone is unique, and most everybody is special to at least someone out there. But there are those who are unsatisfied with being unique and unfulfilled by how special they feel, so they insist on being treated exceptionally. Some people truly are exceptional, of course, but a lot of people try to feel unique or special by forcing others to treat them as exceptions. ■ Strident anti-vaccination behavior often falls into this category. There certainly are those who have real immune complications that make them authentic exceptions: They cannot be safely vaccinated, and their safety depends upon everyone else getting vaccinated so that herd immunity can shield them. ■ But others reject the obvious best practices at both the individual and community levels and refuse remarkably safe, effective, and well-established vaccines. Many seem to do so merely because claiming a right to act in an "exceptional" way appears to scratch an emotional itch for them that being "unique" or "special" does not. That impulse is turning out to have dire consequences for children, and it needs to be turned back.

April 10, 2025

TechCrunch claims to have a scoop on photos that document an electric pickup truck from Slate Auto seen in the wild, witnessed on a flatbed in Los Angeles. What is attention-grabbing about the discovery isn't the vehicle's styling, but rather the expected price. Slate is reportedly on a mission to make a $25,000 EV truck. ■ That would be a fascinating and worthwhile goal, if true. Ford, the biggest truck-maker in the country, is proud of turning its massively popular F-150 into the F-150 Lightning -- with a starting price of $62,995. ■ Technologies that cross over from premium products to mainstream sellers and even low-cost leaders are the ones that really create useful change. It's no secret that Americans drive trucks out of proportion to their actual utility: The cab-to-bed ratio is basically the inverse today of what it was even into the 1970s. Meanwhile, many of the best-selling truck models have gotten obscenely tall -- too tall for drivers to see pedestrians, increasingly deadly even at lower speeds, and too tall to make them cargo-friendly. ■ A product that could both shrink the pickup truck's physical profile and come in at a price point competitive with even some of the most modestly-priced cars out there would be a double benefit to society. And if it could displace rival vehicles that create more air pollution, that would be a significant victory, too. The futurist ID Pearson once noted, "If we want a world where everyone can have a good lifestyle, we need to accept and even encourage rapid obsolescence, driving the technology quickly towards low environmental impact." An electric truck at the price of a Kia sedan would very much fit the bill.

April 11, 2025

The price of uncertainty

For the last full budget year, the Federal government spent all $4.92 trillion it brought in, and borrowed an additional $1.83 trillion to cover spending over and above taxes and other revenues. All of the accumulated deficits, plus interest, bring us up to a total of $36.2 trillion in debt. It's a sum far too large for anyone to really comprehend -- even divided among a population of 341 million people, it's nearly $106,000 per person. ■ Changes to the rate of interest we pay on that debt are hugely consequential. And the interest rate on long-term loans to the US Treasury went from 4.42% on April 4th to 4.90% on April 11th. ■ It's hard to see that kind of a change -- an increase of more than 11% in a week -- outside of the context of disruption to the world trading economy in which it happened. Uncertainty is expensive, and there's no better place to see the cost of uncertainty than in the change in interest rates. ■ Comparisons from day to day or week to week might sometimes be misleading -- lots of factors affect supply and demand on a daily basis. But there are signs that confidence in the Treasury has taken a durable hit. Chances seem good that rates will still be elevated 90 or 180 days from now. ■ And if the prevailing uncertainty means we are going to pay interest rates on our debt that are half a percentage point higher (or more) than what we were paying before, then the pain is going to be around for a long time to come. Interest on the debt is already more than 10% of all Federal spending. Higher interest rates will make those costs larger. ■ Taken together, what we spend on priorities that really can't be cut (like Social Security, Medicare, and interest) amount to nearly half of our spending. This means we don't have a lot of options to soften the blow on the spending side. There's only one other side of the equation where change is possible, and that's on the revenue side: Higher taxes. And in an environment where higher government interest rates push up interest rates on private citizens, too, a lot of people will find themselves paying more, twice over.

April 12, 2025

Wrong number

Go back in time to just before Y2K, and you encounter a time when it was possible to register just about anything as a domain name -- the gold rush was just beginning. But it cost $119 to register a domain name with Network Solutions, with a hard limit of 26 characters (including the top-level domain). So the temptation to register and squat on desirable names was high, but it was tempered a bit by the up-front cost. ■ But as enthusiasm for the Internet grew, people who might have previously squatted on a domain name to capture something like "pets.com" before selling it to others found that it could also be lucrative to squat on typo names, too -- like "ptes.com". Google (itself a website with a funny name) was only starting to emerge, so a lot could be gained from catching human beings making wrong guesses. ■ Fast-forward to today, and people are surrendering their thinking processes to artificial intelligence everywhere you look. Some of it just means jumping on the latest fads, like generating your action-figure avatar. But many others are using AI as a surrogate for more serious processes, like writing computer code. ■ Coding can often be tedious, so resources have emerged to make developers' lives easier -- resources like code repositories, where libraries of existing code can be copied, pasted, stored, modified, and retrieved. This is a great system if everyone involved can be trusted. But developers are using artificial intelligence tools to help generate new code, and artificial intelligence has a serious problem with hallucinations -- nonexistent things the AI "imagines" because of the way its predictive nature behaves. ■ There's a real hazard in this development, because code-generating AI is hallucinating the existence of nonexistent code packages. That's bad enough, because it produces programs that don't work. But just as typosquatters came for domain names with bad intentions in mind, now crooked parties are putting malicious software in the destinations where AI has been hallucinating the existence of code packages. So when the AI-written code goes looking for real code in a library that doesn't exist, it ends up finding malware instead. ■ The first thing any security-minded person should do when a technology is deployed in a new field is to imagine the ways in which it could be abused. It won't necessarily stop the abuse from happening, but it might at least begin to raise red flags around the circumstances where we need to apply more careful, cautious thought. We've known for more than a quarter-century that people looking for the right things in the wrong places could end up in dangerous territory. Now we need to realize that AI "helpers" may be just as prone to looking in the wrong spots as the humans they're supposedly assisting.

April 13, 2025

The Financial Times has put a spotlight on a curious paradox: some 80% of Americans seem to think that the country "would be better off if more Americans worked in manufacturing", while only 26% of people currently working outside the manufacturing sector believe that they, personally, would be better off working in manufacturing. The numbers come from a 2024 survey by the Cato Institute. ■ Things never seem to go particularly well when Americans start trying to think of ways to tell one another what to do without committing themselves to doing the same. The mythical beliefs around manufacturing jobs are a flagship example. ■ If we want to make people in 2025 economically better off, then we need to base our priorities and policy-making on 2025 realities rather than the imaginary world of 1955. There are great jobs available in manufacturing today, to be sure. But they are not for losers or the lazy; the good manufacturing jobs belong to people who can adapt and learn at work. Creativity and problem-solving are high-reward activities on the shop floor just like they are in an architectural firm. ■ But having an advanced economy means having a lot of workers in the service sector -- the ratio is roughly seven service-sector workers to one manufacturing-sector worker. One isn't better than the other, but one vastly outnumbers the other. ■ Good policies have to reflect that ratio, rather than ignoring it. The preponderance of job-training and job-development efforts should focus on the service sector, because that's where the work is -- and we have 75 years of data saying that's where the work is going to stay.

April 16, 2025

Personal safety shouldn't be threatened

The attempt to kill Pennsylvania's governor by throwing Molotov cocktails into the governor's residence deserves the most widespread condemnation that Americans can offer. The attacker's motivations appear to have been political, which causes the incident to meet the strict definition of terrorism: Violence committed with the intention of achieving a political outcome. ■ Engaging in politics can certainly come with a variety of risks. Plainly, a person who engages in politics runs a reputational risk: In seeking office, one puts their good name out to be judged by other people. What is said and done both in campaigning and, for the victors, in governing, can come back to either enhance or diminish the standing of that good name. ■ Related to that reputational risk, a politician invariably runs an income and occupational risk. If one runs for a full-time job with a full-time effort and falls short on election day, then the day after election day can be the first day of unemployment. That is risk enough to keep many people from even contemplating a run for office. ■ But no pursuit of office or term of service should bring with it a real risk to life and limb. There are far more than enough factors already discouraging decent people from running for office as it is. A sober concern for the safety of self and family shouldn't need to be layered on top of them.

April 17, 2025

For what seemed like the longest of times, to have an Apple computer was to think oneself impervious to cyberatttack. It was a fair enough assumption; Windows computers were much more susceptible for a variety of reasons related to their operating system architecture. ■ The resulting hazard, though, was that many Apple users took no interest in security issues and left themselves vulnerable by their sense of impunity. The recent discovery of sophisticated attacks that could compromise Apple devices illustrates the danger of over-confidence. ■ We know of the Apple vulnerabilities because they were documented by the CVE program, which provides a common clearinghouse for monitoring major computing vulnerabilities. It's a program whose very existence has come under attack, and even though it looks like the status quo will prevail for now, the scramble to establish a durable institution to house that research indefinitely is underway. ■ Having well-coordinated research and surveillance programs for cybersecurity vulnerabilties is one of the best large-scale steps a society can adopt. America's problem right now appears to be that not everyone realizes just how consequential these vulnerabilities can be and just how important a steady hand can be in the face of gray-zone threats. ■ Whoever imagined that cuts to the CVE program would be worthwhile "savings" is a person not to be taken seriously.

April 18, 2025

Absence of evidence

Projections currently in circulation indicate that four giant American tech firms will, altogether, spend $320 billion just this year on computing resources related to artificial intelligence. China-based companies and others are out to spend tens of billions more. Perhaps not since the Y2K crisis has so much money been spent on a single computing goal. ■ There is lots of reason to be optimistic about some of the potential found in neural networks and machine learning, but any time there is such an evident arms race underway, it's worth taking a step back to make sure that sound principles are going to prevail. One such area where there ought to be lots of cause for alarm is in the basic framework being used to build these computing systems. ■ The promise of artificial intelligence, beyond in performing impressive visual stunts, is that it could be used to enhance and improve upon human decision-making. That's why, for instance, it has lots of appeal in medical research. But if, in essence, the premise of artificial intelligence is that it does very well with pattern recognition and predictions, then it is improbable that it will give us especially good anti-worst-case reasoning. ■ It's one thing to be very good at seeing patterns in the data sets that are present. But life is often a matter of avoiding the worst possible outcomes and steering clear of unlikely but awful events. Doing that well requires a combination of moral imagination and a tolerance for improbability. Always making the best decision is less important than being sure to avoid colossal mistakes. ■ But with it emerging that some people are willing to trust artificial intelligence with extremely high-impact decisions, we need to think carefully about the consequences of overconfidence. It's one problem if Google tells people to put glue on their pizzas. ■ It's a much bigger problem if AI is being asked to enact policies (or even write laws) that have enormous effects on people's lives without a due procedural regard for the simple question, "What's the worst that could happen, and how are we insuring prudently against it?" ■ That just isn't the strong suit of a computing philosophy that assumes the only thing standing in the way of getting answers right is a shortage of data. Catastrophes averted rarely show up in the data. That creates an enormous systemic blind spot which we might never expect artificial intelligence to see.

April 19, 2025

$28 million and what to show for it?

Some of the tallest and most recognizable private structures in Iowa City will be sold at a sheriff's auction after the developer behind them defaulted on some $28 million in loans. It's certainly not what city officials had in mind when they backed some of the developments with millions of dollars in TIF financing. ■ Iowa City is unusual in that its downtown really is the University of Iowa, the school has been effectively landlocked as enrollment has grown and the city's population has grown by even more. These factors make the real estate surrounding the campus disproportionately valuable and create economic incentives to build taller buildings than would normally be found in a city of 75,000 people. ■ But, as ever, the risk is higher with large individual projects than it would be when spread across a larger number of smaller individual developments. Cities are forever falling in love with blue-sky promises of tall, eye-catching buildings. While the allure is understandable, it's also nothing new for big dreams to fall flat. ■ Even though the city says it is not on the hook for any bad debts, it's a good reminder that picking winners is extremely hard to do right -- and public programs are very rarely equipped to do so better than the banks and credit unions with real risk capital on the line. Just because something looks nifty in the architectural drawings doesn't mean it's going to work out profitably once the walls go up.

April 20, 2025

People aren't production targets

The extraordinary (and bizarre) fascination that the world's present-richest man seems to have with high-volume procreation has raised all kinds of strange issues of paternal responsibility and bewildering suggestions of abandonment. ■ The situation also puts an important value judgment about parenthood in the spotlight. It's undoubtedly better to bring a small number of children into the world and furnish them with an abundance of love and affection than to approach them as outputs to be maximized. The psychotherapist Philippa Perry put it sagely: "[Y]ou are creating a person to love, not a work of art." ■ That verb, "creating", is widely imbued with a sense of meaning that reaches into the spiritual. Even for those who do not observe any particular religious or spiritual practices, "creating" is still a much better word than "making". It suggests an intentionality that may not always be true, but which deserves the presumption nevertheless. ■ A due respect for the dignity of each individual life requires treating people -- even the tiniest newborn -- as a complete person, entitled to the full array of human rights and liberties that belong to all others. Treating births as some kind of production target to be maximized undermines that presumption of dignity.

April 21, 2025

Pope Francis and movement in the right direction

Anyone who has given the matter any serious consideration can certainly come up with some way in which Pope Francis disappointed them in his time as Pontiff. It comes with the territory; the Pope, whoever he might be, is one of the world's most prominent voices on moral questions, and yet he remains a human being. It creates a tension between the aspiration towards the divine and the fallibility of human nature that inescapably highlights the shortcomings more than for almost anyone else on Earth. ■ With the Pope, as with any other person, we are best served by assessing their direction rather than their destination. The question that counts is not, "Did he manage to perfect the Catholic Church?", for that is an unattainable goal. If humans are involved, it cannot be perfected. ■ The question that does count is, "Was he moving in a good direction?". Francis himself offered a gentle test of self-assessment in this regard in his encyclical, "Fratelli Tutti": "Each day we have to decide whether to be Good Samaritans or indifferent bystanders." ■ One doesn't need to be Catholic, Christian, or even religious at all to appreciate that the parable of the Good Samaritan is about making a right choice in light of the circumstances before you, knowing that the circumstances will change with each step along the path. ■ The Good Samaritan doesn't make things perfect, but he does right by the victim he discovers in the moment, makes a provision to continue the victim's care, and promises to look in on the victim again when he returns. He makes a series of choices in pursuit of doing right, which is better than remaining indifferent. ■ Pope Francis was never going to be perfect, nor was he going to make every right choice. But he made a number of prominent choices that were visible, important, and directionally right. Over the last 12 years, the world could have done far worse.

April 24, 2025

What's the plan?

In commerce as well as in statecraft, deterrence can be much cheaper than conflict. Convince your rivals that they don't have the wherewithal to take you on, and you may not have to engage with them at all. One prominent way to advertise plans for deterrence is to talk openly about how much planning has been done or what preparations have already been made. ■ China has long profited from the belief that its government operates according to a 100-year plan. Prominent people have fallen for the myth time and time again, and it's quite the tool of psychological leverage. ■ However useful it may be, the 100-year plan is a false myth, easily disproven by the colossal failure that was China's One Child policy. Introduced in 1979, ruthlessly enforced, relaxed in 2013, repealed in 2015, and then replaced by active encouragement to have children today. It was a policy that defied even basic arithmetic, and one that any team looking just five or ten years ahead could have seen going awry. ■ China's government doesn't have a 100-year plan, it merely has the myth of one. Even if it tried to observe such a plan, the exercise would be for naught. In Dwight Eisenhower's words, "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." ■ The act of thinking through a course of action is of enormous value, but feedback is what keeps "planning" from becoming a calcified plan. A free market works because pricing is a giant feedback mechanism that tells planners what to change. Democratic voting acts the same way. It's clear those feedback mechanisms are unwelcome under Communist control. There is much good to be said for a long-term perspective, but it's only a mirage if it doesn't open its eyes and ears to respond to reality.

April 25, 2025

Vocational dignity

With more words at our disposal than is the case for almost any other language, it's generally a shame and an unforced error when someone says something in English but fails to use a precise word. The public consciousness is crowded with talk about "factory jobs" right now, but it's largely a misuse of the language to describe what people are actually seeking. ■ To be more precise, what most people want aren't really jobs on an assembly line. What they want are jobs that are dignified, and the distinction is important. ■ Work itself is inherently a pursuit of dignity: One exchanges their time and effort in return for compensation. But there are several layers of dignity embedded in the exchange. ■ People crave a sense of usefulness. It is dignified to be needed by other people. Nobody wants to feel disposable. ■ People also tend to seek opportunities to solve problems. We didn't get to be apex predators by our size or brute strength. We got there by outsmarting and out-persisting our prey. That same instinct needs to be satisfied through on-the-job use of our knack for puzzles and problem-solving. If the only stimulation a working person's mind gets is playing a game of Sudoku or finishing a crossword puzzle, then their job isn't landing them in front of enough opportunities to solve problems. ■ And people need to feel like they've been compensated fairly. The best way to get there is by maximizing the gap between a job's compensation and what the worker gives up to get it. Compensation can take non-money forms, of course; lots of work comes with social status or respect, or it is rewarded with gratitude from a customer or client well-served. The key is to get the input and output lines as far apart as possible. ■ Preemptively focusing policies on a specific type of work (like hourly factory line jobs) rather than on the factors people are really pursuing is a mistake we should be alert not to make. Dignified work looks a little bit different for everyone.

April 26, 2025

Technological change has a way of bending the mind of a certain kind of techno-enthusiast -- such that they see only how the new development will replace what came before it, rather than existing side-by-side with the old. Prudence dictates that we beware of such forecasts, even when they come from people who appear emphatic. Take, for example, Elon Musk's confident assertion that "Crewed aircraft will be destroyed instantly by cheap drone swarms". ■ It's a sweeping prediction, and one that flies in the face of the history of warfare. Perhaps the only thing that has ever really made a warfighting technology permanently obsolete is a change in propulsion. Ships once went to sea under sails, then coal-powered boilers, then diesel engines, and then (for some) nuclear power. Yet even then, sometimes what's old is new again. ■ While old propulsion may be permanently displaced by new, basically everything else simply adapts to the presence of new technologies, including drones. There's no doubt that Ukraine has revolutionized drone warfare as it seeks to repel the Russian invasion, but that doesn't mean fighter jets themselves are obsolete. "Destroyed instantly"? Certainly not. ■ It's dangerous to make plans under assumptions of obsolescence that do not match reality. Even soldiers on horseback sometimes make the difference in combat, even today. Blind faith in what's new can be just as hazardous as a rigid adherence to the old. What matters is seeing the whole scope and using any and all of the appropriate tools available to settle the matter at hand. In the words of Dwight Eisenhower, "The trained American possesses qualities that are almost unique. Because of his initiative and resourcefulness, his adaptability to change and his readiness to resort to expedient, he becomes, when he has attained a proficiency in all the normal techniques of battle, a most formidable soldier." Limber minds are what win in the long run.

April 27, 2025

Trusting the forecast

The Storm Prediction Service, one of many enormously valuable components of NOAA, has sounded the alarm in a most serious way about the prospect of a dangerous tornado outbreak that could materialize in the Midwest on April 28th. Their forecasts have been flagging the event for days, and local meteorologists have been amplifying the message despite idiotic and occasionally nasty public feedback. ■ Something dramatic is quite likely to occur, but some people in the alerted regions will experience it and others won't. Then the painfully predictable complaints will ensue: "Why did you get us so worked up about this thing that didn't happen [to me, even though it still happened near me]?" ■ A cultural value we have plainly done not enough to cultivate is an appreciation for the bad things that don't happen. Modern, advanced civilization does a great deal to shield us from horrors that were utterly commonplace in days gone by. There was a time, not long ago, when tornado forecasts were practically unheard-of, and even warnings of verifiable events happening in real time were haphazard and poorly disseminated. ■ It's not just the case with weather, either: Go back to 1850, and well over 20% of deaths in the US were attributable to contaminated drinking water, a problem given next to no public thought today. We fixed the problem, and now bad things don't happen -- but nobody's counting. Likewise, routine childhood vaccinations have likely saved more than a million young lives in the last 30 years -- but it's hard to give anyone credit for the bad thing that didn't happen. ■ This is a cultural problem worthy of some attention, because some people are insistent on touching the hot stove. In our midst, we have vaccine fabulists, "raw water" advocates, and jerks profiting off fictitious weather forecasts on social media. All of them undermine work being done by responsible professionals. ■ There isn't enough time in the world to explain to everyone why every safety practice or prevention step has emerged over time. Even if time weren't a factor, audiences rarely have the patience to listen -- and the least patient are the ones who need to hear those messages the most. ■ It's truly a matter of establishing and enforcing cultural norms around professionalism: Good professions must police themselves scrupulously, and the rest of us amateurs need to heed what they tell us. Their successes will often take the form of bad things that don't happen (to wit: people not dying of vaccine-preventable diseases, of waterborne diseases like cholera and typhoid, or of injuries from surprise storms) -- but the last thing we should do is assume that those disasters avoided don't count for something good.

April 29, 2025

Computing and conceptual cul-de-sacs

Many, if not most, people are familiar with the phrase "Garbage in, garbage out", which is an idea that has guided computer programming since its mechanical origins. People tend to be much less familiar with another principle which deserves equal notoriety: That all computer coding embeds human assumptions and values, even if we aren't aware of it. "Beware algorithmic bias", unfortunately, isn't quite as catchy as "GIGO". ■ California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced statewide plans to put generative artificial intelligence ("Gen AI") to work within state government. In particular, he seeks fanfare for wanting Gen AI to help fix traffic congestion in the notoriously traffic-heavy state. ■ This, regrettably, sets up a case study in the problem of assuming that we just need to get the code right in order for all of our problems to be solved. It's possible, of course, that data analysis and clever algorithms might shave off a few minutes of travel time on the margins. But the fundamental problem in places like Los Angeles is that California has a deeply-embedded car culture and even the most obvious places for good mass transit options to be delivered (like Dodger Stadium) are still effectively designed to be hostile to pedestrians. ■ There is no way for artificial intelligence to conclusively resolve the underlying problem, and any assumption that it can is an assumption that stands in the way of making things better. Induced demand, or the new traffic that shows up to fill new lanes of roads, only compounds the issue. Suppose AI really could make car commutes faster -- that would only encourage more people to commute by car. ■ Technology can do ever so many things to make life easier, better, and safer. But it can't overcome human judgment, particularly if we use technology to mask bad assumptions and values with perverse consequences. We have to be willing to admit that we need to critique our own basic principles before hoping that a computer will program its way out of a conceptual cul-de-sac.

May 2, 2025

A place for real friends

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

An apostolic succession

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

Do the heavy lifting

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

No looking away

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

Be careful with credit

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

Reverse-engineer the end

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

Reinforcing good behavior

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

Crossing over

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

Always on

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

Final answer

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

A dispatch from Haiti

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

Norm goes home

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

Good character

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

A change of clothing

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

Triumph over gut feelings

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.

June 1, 2025

Today's weather, yesterday's graphics

A computer developer has produced a website to almost perfectly recreate the analog-era Weather Channel "Weather on the 8s" screen, using the current conditions for wherever the user happens to be. Like the people who recreate classic teletext services and reverse-engineer old split-flap displays, the people who revive familiar old electronic services like the classic Weather on the 8s are good at finding small but deep cuts into the nostalgia centers of the brain. ■ But to give credit where it is due, it's not just nostalgia that makes those services appealing. A current-generation iPhone has a display rendering an area measuring 2,556 by 1,179 pixels, and there are designers who seem compelled to make something happen inside each and every one. The basic weather app is rich with statistics and color, but it does impose upon the user the burden of selection: "Am I here to see the current UV index, the 'feels-like' temperature, or the current wind map?" It takes some executive function -- just a little bit, but still some -- just to stay on task. ■ Stripped-down, "retro" user interfaces don't require the same amount of self-control. Analog, standard-definition television in the US was produced at 720 by 480 pixels -- not enough room to get fancy. Due to limited real estate on the screen, the information contained in "Weather on the 8s" rotated through a series of screens instead. Each item had its turn, and the viewer had to take what was served. ■ That's not necessarily a bad model, even if it's possible to share much more on a modern screen. It's not just attention that is finite -- so is self-control. The craving for a today's best available information, but delivered in yesterday's formats, makes an unexpectedly large amount of sense once we begin to account for the amount of mental commitment required to navigate daily life. Sometimes it might just be more pleasant to let someone else do the data scrolling for us. Art is found in the constraints.

June 4, 2025

Far from over

The principled reason for the United States to furnish support to Ukraine -- generously, not stingily -- is that Ukraine is a fledgling democracy still emerging from the dark history of its 20th Century subjugation by a powerful neighbor. If Russia can storm in and take Ukrainian territory and people by force and attack civilians at will, that should offend anyone who believes that people have an inherent right to self-determination and a right to pursue their own development interests in peace. ■ The legalistic reason for the United States to support Ukraine is that the US agreed in writing that a post-Soviet Ukraine was guaranteed independence and sovereignty in exchange for surrendering its nuclear weapons. Any such agreement either has to be sustained in perpetuity, or it and any other agreement like it is worth nothing more than the personal honor of the individuals who signed it. ■ The purely self-interested reason for the United States to support Ukraine is that skilled allies are a tremendous resource, and Ukraine's audacious attack on Russia's bomber fleet shows that its military is among the most ambitious in the world. The combination of complexity and innovation involved in the attacks is notable -- not to mention potentially destabilizing. If alliances like NATO required tryouts, this one would have been a clear success.

June 5, 2025

Make your own name

In pursuit of her cinematic career, Malia Obama did something unusual: She omitted her famous last name from the credits of a film. It isn't as though people couldn't have worked out her connection to the project, but the names cited in credits have always mattered a great deal. ■ Benjamin Franklin once advised, "'Tis a shame that your family is an honor to you! You ought to be an honor to your family." The language may seem quaint, but the sentiment is as fresh as ever. ■ We don't count on family names quite as much as our ancestors probably did: In the days before credit ratings, for instance, your parents' creditworthiness with the local store probably stood in quite a lot for your own. Today, we have Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. ■ Notwithstanding that modernization, it should still be each person's individual goal to leave their family name better than it was bestowed on them. "Better" doesn't have to mean "more famous" or "more accomplished". It really only has to mean that a person put more into the world than they took out. ■ Being the young child of a President has taxed more than a few of the people who have grown up inside the White House, so it wouldn't have been a travesty for Malia Obama to have used her birth name in the movie credits; she could make a defensible case that what she lost in privacy and family time was owed back to her with a gentle head start toward notoriety. But it's more honorable that she avoided the recognition.

June 6, 2025

If any blame or fault attaches...

Good hiring practices are a challenge for almost every institution. It's hard to know whether someone is a good fit without a real battery of tests and a dry run of some sort. But it isn't all that hard to see what ought to be important everywhere. ■ Warren Buffett has long advocated for the trinity of intelligence, energy, and integrity -- with integrity being the keystone: "If you hire somebody without it, you really want them to be dumb and lazy." ■ The thing about energy and intelligence is that they tend to be self-rewarding. Go-getters will almost always find a way to make their spunk pay off. Smart people typically start with a leg up in school and can navigate life and its adversity with the advantage of cleverness. Integrity is the only one of those three characteristics that is guaranteed to cost the person who has it. ■ Energy alone isn't a virtue (or else certain forms of drug addiction would be praised). Intelligence alone isn't either (or else we wouldn't have the phrase "evil genius"). But integrity is always a virtue, and it is fully independent of the other two. It is learned by the individual, but its importance is only realized and sustained when institutions celebrate it. ■ On D-Day in 1944, Dwight Eisenhower had a message ready to go in case the assault failed. It read: "Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone." ■ "Any blame or fault...is mine alone". The successful invasion was result of sacrifices by thousands. But Eisenhower was prepared to accept sole responsibility, had things turned out wrong. There may not be a better singular example of integrity from a modern leader. ■ And there is every reason for us to call attention to it even now, 81 years later, because energy and intelligence will almost always find a way to thrive -- but integrity is the necessary virtue that needs our aid and promotion in every generation. Anyone without it should be kept miles away from even the shadow of power.

June 7, 2025

No cheating off others' work

The way artificial intelligence work has been treated like a gold rush shouldn't go unexamined. There is reporting to suggest that major technology companies could spend more than $300 billion on hardware alone, just in this calendar year. Everyone involved seems to be haunted by the possibility that someone else will achieve some kind of insurmountable dominance first. ■ The high-stakes approach has also led to a lot of disregard for the nature of the data being collected to "train" the artificial intelligence models. It has gone so far that in one (pre-publication) report, the US Copyright Office notes, "making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries." ■ Into this melee enters an effort called "Common Pile", which seeks to train an artificial intelligence model exclusively on text that is either in the public domain or licensed for open use. Philosophically, the team behind it makes the case that "One of the core tenets of the open source movement is that people should have the right to understand how the technologies they use -- and are subject to -- function and why. Training data disclosure is a key component of this." ■ In an encouraging note, the Common Pile team reports that their model "performs comparably to leading models trained in the same regime on unlicensed data". If it's possible to demonstrate that work can be done in this hot field without violating long-established principles of intellectual property protection, then Common Pile may provide a highly valuable proof of concept that good work can be done within the bounds of the rules.

June 9, 2025

Worry about those who believe in nothing

A teenager from Oregon was arrested late last month after the FBI received a tip that he was planning a terrorist attack against the people inside a mall nearby in Washington. The FBI noted that the suspect -- someone not even old enough to vote -- "shared nihilistic violent extremist ideology and the plans in online chats." ■ It has always been the case that parents (and society generally) have to give young people something affirmative to believe in, helping to guide them towards a healthy understanding of their place in the world with others. Whether it takes a religious, philosophical, or secular-ethical form, there needs to be some form of input. ■ It doesn't have to be monomaniacal or oppressive -- indeed, it expressly should not be -- but there has to be some kind of engagement with a framework that says something in the world is worth shaping into a personal code of belief. As long as it adheres in some general way to a Golden Rule and is generally benign, the exact shape of the belief isn't all that material. ■ Though this has always been so, what's new to us today is that the consequences are magnified when that process fails. The evidence is strong that there have always been nihilists; history gives us many examples of people who rose to notoriety through destruction that doesn't make sense to rational people. That's what people might do if they think that nothing really matters. ■ But for "nihilistic violent extremist ideology" to take hold of a child -- someone still too young to rent a car or enter a bar after dark -- requires exposure and compounding by something else. The suspect didn't get lost in a dark corner of the public library. There were online chats, presumably with and among people sharing the same dark view and perhaps even offering suggestions about how to do evil things. ■ That's the danger: Someone, convinced they believe in nothing and possessing too little impulse control, found the resources to turn a sinister worldview into a way to harm others. And they were only stopped by some fortunate intervention. ■ For the most part, the adolescent mind is already geared toward skepticism and rebellion against conformity. That should give even-keeled adults some comfort; even if we don't agree with what our neighbors might be teaching their children about belief, whether religious or secular, there's a good chance it won't be passed along unaltered anyway. What we should worry about instead is the hazard that some young people are being left to believe in nothing at all.

June 10, 2025

There are no good vandals

Vandalism has nearly always been the refuge of the hopelessly outnumbered and the pathologically insecure. It takes effort to build, to maintain, to fix, or to reform, but it also takes a certain amount of moral clarity: At least enough to say, "I think that things can be better, and that the work of humanity is worth salvaging." ■ Mere vandals don't take that step. They break rather than repair because repair comes with commitment -- to fail sometimes (but with honor), to face resistance (but to meet it with gentle persuasion), and to persist in hard work without tiring. It takes steadiness to be worthy of taking custody of something good, whether it's a place, an institution, or an idea. ■ Every generation is challenged by vandals in one form or another. It's important to recognize them, no matter how they're dressed, what resources they possess, or what stations they occupy. Vandals can come in street clothes, but they can come in uniforms, too. Some are anarchists, and some occupy the power of the state. ■ A vandal is one who breaks what belongs to others or what belongs to the public. And vandalism is forever unfaithful to the idea that either humanity is a constructive and cooperative enterprise, or we are no better than the wildest beasts. It would be hard to improve upon the words of Booker T. Washington: "When one takes a broad survey of the country, he will find that the most useful and influential people in it are those who take the deepest interest in institutions that exist for the purpose of making the world better."

Technology from an alternate timeline

Someone has hacked together a miniature computer running on a Raspberry Pi processor and a Sony Watchman screen. The creator says, "And yes it is the stupidest thing I've created, but it has a hell of a lot of charm and I adore it." As well they should. Technology should be frivolous, playful, and joyful sometimes.

The best introduction to Menards you'll ever read

"Like Home Depot?" "Well sort of, but you can get everything you need to build a house. Oh and groceries."

It's just a religion

A sage observation from Sasho Todorov: "The underlying issue is that, post Kosygin and Deng, being a marxist leninist is being an obvious adherent to a secular utopian religion." ■ One minor addendum: Not just a religion, but one so awful it doesn't even produce good music.

June 12, 2025

Unforgiven

As a rationale for entrusting the President with the power of the executive pardon, Federalist Paper No. 74 argues that a swift and decisive pardon may be the best available tool for ending an insurrection. In the word of "Publius" (Alexander Hamilton), "[I]n seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth; and which, if suffered to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall. The dilatory process of convening the legislature, or one of its branches, for the purpose of obtaining its sanction to the measure, would frequently be the occasion of letting slip the golden opportunity. The loss of a week, a day, an hour, may sometimes be fatal." ■ The utility of this power depends upon its exigency: It is not a power of reconciliation or healing, merely one that can usefully help to end an armed rebellion faster than other tools. It isn't a power to be used tomorrow; it's a power to be used when the alternative is that there may not be a tomorrow without it. ■ Robert E. Lee applied unsuccessfully for a pardon after the Civil War. He was one of a tiny handful of individuals not to be pardoned. He was, however, paroled and signed an oath reinstating his allegiance to the Constitution. The logic is plain: It was safer for a fragile nation to bring a tactically skilled military leader back into the fold of loyalty to the Constitution than to have him available for hire on the outside. ■ But it was a practical act, not a principled one. Lee not only took up arms against the country of his birth, he did so with the skills taught to him at West Point and cultivated in his long career with the US Army. It wasn't just rebellion; it was betrayal of the people alongside of whom he had learned his profession. ■ So, too, of the other officers who rebelled beside him. And to the extent they were recipients of a blanket pardon by Andrew Johnson, we should only see that today as a necessary act in a fragile moment. It should not absolve them of their betrayal of country and Constitution. ■ They are all dead now. It no longer serves any useful purpose to forgive them. That was for the generation who lived through the Civil War, not for those who see it in retrospect today. Forgiving -- or, worse, celebrating -- those who betrayed their country would be an act of madness.

June 13, 2025

Signals and security

One of the reasons that markets work is that they offer people an unending stream of opportunities to put their knowledge to work, and to wager on the quality of their own judgment. Think interest rates are going to rise? You might act on taking out a loan sooner rather than later. Think you've discovered a breakout artist? Buy the paintings while they're cheap and flying under the radar. Think the produce department at one grocery store has an unusually good eye for quality? Make a special trip there to stock up on tomatoes and bananas. ■ Sometimes the call will be right, and sometimes it will be wrong. But when lots of people make intersecting choices, prices start to send signals. ■ The same goes for alliances in the world. One of the reasons it's better to engage with allies than to go it alone is that different allies will obtain information and process it differently. Some will then signal important judgments like their confidence in the seriousness of a threat by their actions. Seeing the same information filtered through different lenses helps to sort which threats and circumstances should be taken seriously. How much is "bet" in terms of real resources (like troops or munitions or diplomatic intensity) can reveal a lot. ■ The foreign minister of Latvia has recently published a column in The Economist, arguing, "The Kremlin is also stepping up its non-conventional attacks against European countries [...] We in the Baltics did warn about taking them seriously. Now we all see the consequences of not pushing back." The Baltic republics are (literally) in a place where their judgment on this subject is more significant than most. ■ The forthrightness about the alarm emanating from these small countries isn't enough on its own to make them right. But their commitment to spending a very noteworthy 5% of GDP on defense represents a considerable wager that their analysis is right. It would be foolish to ignore or downplay the market-like signal they are sending.

June 15, 2025

Taking action

One of the hazards of living in a time marked by notable disruptive events in social, technological, and economic conditions is that some people who might otherwise be thoughtful or creative problem-solvers find themselves surrendering to hopelessness, despair, or anger. It's often called doomerism. It shows up in 4,000-word screeds and in 47-word social media posts. One example proclaims that we are at the mercy of "central planners" working at large investment firms who are no less powerful than the bureaucrats who tried to centrally plan the Soviet economy. ■ The problem is that the doom-saying narrative edges out constructive discussions about how to reform existing institutions and build better ones. Doomerism is, fundamentally, an ethos of helplessness. ■ The antidote isn't to merely dismiss the sense that something is wrong. Benjamin Franklin offered the advice that "One mend-fault is worth two find-faults, but one find-fault is better than two make-faults." Fixing what's wrong is a just endeavor. ■ What's needed is more of the honorable innovative spirit that drove Jack Bogle to start Vanguard, the investment firm. Bogle was compelled by the belief that ordinary people would benefit from participating in the investment sector through low-cost mutual funds, particularly index funds. And he didn't just conceive of the idea, he brought it to fruition. Bogle effectively created a cooperative arrangement. It was an honorable pursuit -- and it should be a model much more often, in many more fields, than it is right now. ■ Truly mutualized ownership, cooperatives, and employee-owned firms can offer answers to a lot of thorny problems. They should be easy to form (even for novices) and ordinary people should be given encouragement (and even inducements) to join them. It's good for a complex society to have a variety of firm structures well-represented in the economy, and it's vital for ordinary people to feel invested, both literally and figuratively, in the ownership of both problems and solutions. Whatever spurs more people to be "mend-faults" is worth a second or third look.

June 16, 2025

Putting hulls in the water

Someone with too much time on their hands and access to video production tools created a version of Smash Mouth's "All Star" that auto-tunes the phrase "and they don't stop coming" for ten straight hours. The sheer relentlessness of the loop is impressive in its own right, even if being subjected to ten straight hours of the song would be a form of psychological torture. ■ Reflecting on World War II, Dwight Eisenhower wrote, "There was no sight in the war that so impressed me with the industrial might of America as the wreckage on the landing beaches. To any other nation the disaster would have been almost decisive; but so great was America's productive capacity that the great storm occasioned little more than a ripple in the development of our build-up." Allied victory in that war was the result of many factors, but one of the most significant was the ability of the United States to ignite an industrial machine that couldn't be matched, with outputs like 2,711 Liberty Ships -- a production rate of more than one a day. Like the Smash Mouth gag video, they just didn't stop coming. ■ That historical knowledge is already widely-held, so it's marginally surprising that it has taken so long for modern militaries to re-engage with that old knowledge. Denmark, though, has launched its first "uncrewed robotic sailboats" for a trial in the North Sea -- and, probably more crucially, in the Baltic Sea. The drone-like sailboats will be used to conduct surveillance where it's been hard to do so up until now. ■ There will always be a place for big, powerful tools in combat. But it's unwise to dismiss the knowledge that producing low-cost tools in massive quantities may well be not just the key to victory in the past, but in the present and future as well. There will likely always be some things that only an advanced fighter (like an F-35) or an aircraft carrier can do. ■ But whether you're in a strategic position like Denmark, or maintaining a presence across a third of the Earth's surface like the Pacific Command, thinking in terms of relentless volumes of small tools is probably one of the chief ways forward. If managed well with good technological results, Denmark's four sailboat drones ought to be only an extremely modest start to a much more ambitious effort.

An unusual weather watch

It's not often that Iowans are under a single severe thunderstorm watch that stretches from Des Moines all the way west into Colorado.

Internet Archive updates a giant collection of vintage .gif files

It is going to be extraordinarily hard to explain to future generations growing up with augmented reality on their phones just how innocently charming it was to stumble upon the Ham[p]ster Dance for the very first time, back when the public Internet was new.

June 17, 2025

Have you no shame, sir?

If you had a friend, an acquaintance or a co-worker who were for some reason utterly without shame, it might be entertaining for a while. There's a reason why "No Shame Theater" spread from the University of Iowa to twenty other college campuses: Sometimes lifting the constraints of ordinary propriety and social niceties gives room for amusing, entertaining, and sometimes even significant ideas to break through. To be literally shameless can be liberating -- for a time. ■ But after a while, living in the shameless friend's orbit would lose its luster, because a real lack of shame causes people to make decisions that can be consequential for others -- sometimes in a painful way. Someone living and acting without fear of consequences and conscious of no shame about the harm they bring upon others could quickly morph into being a verifiable sociopath. ■ We should probably apply the very same lessons to artificial intelligence before we go too far down the road we are presently traveling. It has become a gold rush in every sense, and otherwise serious people are starting to believe that large language models have something equal to real spontaneous cognition, comparable to what we experience as carbon-based life forms. ■ They don't, and we can know that because there is no way to make a computer capable of shame. And this is dangerous because, if the computer is incapable of shame, it won't feel bad about making a mistake or, worse, misleading the user. Instead, we get confidently wrong outputs, because that's what predictive language modeling creates. ■ Shame can be taken much too far within human institutions, but when appropriately moderated, it acts as a social preservative. Acting honorably matters if we wish to gain and maintain others' esteem. For artificial intelligence, this lack of shame will be consequential in ways that we can't really imagine right now. ■ Those consequences will be wholly troublesome if we haven't anticipated them and built rules, regulations, and safeguards into our own human processes to protect ourselves from shamelessly wrong answers. It's bad enough to have humans in powerful roles who never apologize, never back down, and never express shame -- those people are dangerous to us all. But to have computers masquerading as human-like actors doing the same thing? The consequences could be devastating.

June 18, 2025

How to count votes

With the New York City mayoral primary election just around the corner, it's interesting to watch how people respond to the incentives and triangulations that go into a method like ranked-choice voting. This is only the second time a ranked-choice ballot will be used in New York, so there's still a lot of fresh strategizing underway. ■ Any time something other than a conventional first-past-the-post, winner-take-all election gets underway, a predictable cadre of people get worked up about how this or that method of counting votes is the One True Way. They are right that there are shortcomings to whatever the incumbent system might have been; they are wrong to believe that theirs is ideal. The reality is that no method of vote-counting satisfies everyone completely. ■ That's the essence of the democratic deal: We enter it knowing that it's imperfect and that nothing is going to completely satisfy everyone. The key is to broadly distribute the dissatisfaction -- better that 100% of us get 60% of what we want than an outcome wherein 60% of the people get everything and the rest get nothing. Compromise is factored into the system by design. ■ There are both good and bad in alternate methods of vote-counting. But we shouldn't imagine that the "how" of vote counting is the only thing that matters. So does the "who" -- the basic allocation of votes. ■ We mostly decide representation by defined geographical spaces: Wards, precincts, Congressional districts and the like. But there would be nothing inherently undemocratic about divvying up representation by, say, occupation. If seats in a legislature were still allocated proportionally to population, but drawn by job types rather than geographical borders, outcomes would probably be different. ■ The outcomes of that different approach might be better or worse than what we get from allocating by geography. But if the representation were still truly proportional to population (with retirees voting for one set of seats, students another, service-sector workers in another, and so on), then the process would still be democratic in nature. Some outcomes would probably improve, some would probably become worse. ■ In theory, the more diverse the methods of allocating representation going into different legislative houses, the greater should be the ability of that legislative system to filter out really bad ideas. ■ For some of us, at least, that property would be appealing -- in the words of Calvin Coolidge, "It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones." Above all, though, knowing and acknowledging that democracy is designed to leave people less than fully satisfied -- that it really cannot work any other way -- is the first step towards avoiding the fantasy that any one way of counting (or allocating) votes is the only "right" way.

How about some vegetable innovation?

A meme circulating on social media cracks, "Potatoes give us French fries, chips, and vodka. It's like the other vegetables aren't even trying." Funny, yes -- and it's well worth acknowledging that the potato punches far above its weight, nutritionally, when it isn't drowned in oil or buried in salt. ■ But the truth revealed by the wisecrack is that we really haven't done enough to crack the code to making vegetables more widely appealing. If we are to trust the "My Plate" messaging that replaced the traditional "food pyramid", then vegetables should occupy more than a quarter of the normal person's diet, at least by volume. ■ For most people, loads of steamed broccoli just aren't going to do the trick. So what is the answer? To some extent, the simple availability (or lack thereof) of quality fresh vegetables will bias the outcomes of routine eating. Food deserts are real, and there may be policy choices that could help relieve them. ■ Some of the answer also belongs to the research done to make existing vegetables either marginally more appealing or to find new methods of preparation and delivery. Aside from Popeye, not many people are racing to put more canned spinach down their gullets -- at least not without masking it with so much sour cream as to render it nearly undetectable. ■ But if Brussels sprouts can be bred to make them much tastier than they were a generation ago, certainly other vegetables can be improved through science, too. New vegetables could even be invented and varieties diversified. Of all the forms of "innovation" that seem to have captured the world's attention, maybe some of that energy should be directed at our foodstuffs. ■ These kinds of steps require research that may not always have obvious private-sector payoffs, even though the social benefits can be considerable. If outcomes like reducing meat consumption are desirable goals, then some worthy investments could stand to be made less in browbeating people about their current choices and more in inducing more demand for the alternatives taking up real estate on the plate.

TV stations on the chopping block

After reversing course on a phenomenally stupid plan to lay off the local meteorology team and parting ways with an anchor who had been a station fixture for 51 years, the owners of KWWL-TV in Waterloo, Iowa, have given up and put the "For Sale" sign on the station. ■ Allen Media Group has only held the station for four years, but the plans to sell are being spun as a means "to significantly reduce our debt". KWWL was one of seven stations in a $380 million sale at that time, and it's part of a 25-station clearance sale this time, so it's not clear exactly how the station is individually valued. ■ But for a station in a top-100 US market with a population somewhere between 750,000 and 1,000,000, it seems like a lot of unproductive turmoil. The on-air shakeups earlier in the year, followed now by a station sale, gives the impression that perhaps the future is even unsteadier than it is already perceived. ■ America stitches together a patchwork of media markets, in which local ownership was quasi-mandated because large group ownership was prohibited not that long ago. It's not clear that the kinds of disruptions going on at KWWL and elsewhere would be any better if local ownership were more prevalent. But it also isn't clear that large-group ownership has been of any real use to the quality of the broadcast product. ■ Metaphorically, at least, broadcast and print news outlets are the campfires around which a community gathers to tell the stories of the day. And if some serious effort doesn't go into finding an economically sustainable way of continuing to "gather" in old or newer ways, the extent of the trouble is going to be much more than just a few local celebrities who find themselves ousted.

A wave of technologists is leaving us

With the passing of Bill Atkinson, the Apple Computer technologist whose credits include the popular application of the hyperlink, the number of surviving technologists who can fairly be said to have witnessed the personal computer revolution first-hand has dwindled yet again. ■ There is a time in the history of every technology when important pioneers are still to be found -- until it is over, often with little fanfare. There was a time when pioneers of aviation were still around -- Orville Wright lived to see the invention of jet engines, and Charles Lindbergh saw a man land on the Moon. But then they were around no more. ■ Considering the profound consequences and inescapable extent of the spread of personal computing devices, society should be conscious of trying to capture the stories and the explanations of the people who launched the digital world. Some have written down their tales in autobiographies with names like "Idea Man" and "Source Code". These are good to have around, but autobiographies are often much better at myth-building than at giving readers durable advice. ■ Before they are all gone, it would be very good to capture more of the technology pioneers' explanations about how they made their choices along the way. Books about "how" and "why", more than just "who" and "when", give us context about the hastily-constructed digital universe we now occupy. But we are running out of time to get those written down. While there may be future David McCulloughs waiting to retrace their steps and reconstruct those decision trees, we ought not to wait for them and should instead nudge the surviving pioneers to document their work now, while they can still be found.

We should show more love for accounting

It is to our debit that we do not.

June 19, 2025

What's a cut between friends?

Even without anyone prominently second-guessing him, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has an unenviable job: In the midst of high uncertainty about everything from the Federal budget to trade and tax policy to geopolitical uncertainty, he's charged with figuring out how to gently maneuver the world's most important money supply through the twin goalposts of low inflation and high employment. ■ Because the Federal Reserve mainly depends upon managing interest rates as its tool for action, caution and predictability are the keys. The business sector likes certainty -- but so do families and individuals and all the other actors in the economy. If a church, for example, is fundraising to build a new sanctuary, its leaders will want to have a fairly good forecast of the available interest rates for when they borrow. ■ It does not make Powell's difficult job any easier when he is second-guessed from the bully pulpit and heckled for not cutting interest rates by 2.5 percentage points. Every rate change comes with unanticipated and second-order consequences, but a change of 2.5% (ten times the size of a more conventional quarter-point move) would not only forcibly reorder much of the investing universe, it would also introduce lasting and punitive uncertainty into perceptions of the economy overall. ■ The outbreak of the first serious pandemic in a century was cause for swift and dramatic rate-cutting -- it was the boldness of the reaction in a moment of extraordinary crisis that gave confidence to a panicky world. Today's circumstances are in many ways the opposite: Government policies are creating much of the meaningful uncertainty, and if the Federal Reserve were to start counter-programming against government policies, the result would be chaos, topped with a heavy layer of angry polemic against unelected Federal Reserve bankers. For now, slow and steady is the only way.

There is no human perfection, only a direction

In an apparent outburst of frustration, an individual blasted out a message to hundreds of thousands of social-media followers, lamenting that they "don't care anymore if this country destroys itself and burns down to the ground". The language is sufficiently inflammatory that the post itself was deleted, though Google confirms it once existed. If cooler thinking prevailed, then so much the better. ■ The radicalism of the outburst, though, highlights a gravely misguided principle for which everyone must keep perpetual watch in themselves and in others. It is the belief, conscious or not, that a utopia exists and can be reached. ■ Nothing is so exhausting as the perpetual fight against the utopian mindset. There is no perfect end state, nor will there ever be. Every social or political system built on the utopian fantasy has ended in tears or terror. Just within modern history, the Soviet Union never became a workers' paradise -- but it managed to murder hundreds of thousands directly at the hands of the state and millions more through systemic failure. ■ There is no "cleansing fire" to be had from burning down imperfect but aspirational institutions (like America's Constitutional form of government). There is only ever the slow, hard work of building, reforming, and caretaking along the way. Our greatest victories are often celebrated over the eradication of our own worst shortcomings. That is the very point of commemorating Juneteenth: The evil of slavery was overcome, much later and much harder than it should have been, and ultimately those too long denied their liberty were finally emancipated. ■ Something better is always possible, but to fantasize over something perfect is a path to terminal frustration. The Constitution correctly promises only a "more perfect union". Not an end state, but a striving towards better. It's a lesson everyone has to internalize, both now and in the future.

June 21, 2025

A striking display of atmospheric energy

Merging storm fronts and a derecho all in one amazing radar loop

June 24, 2025

Remarkable rainfall in Southern Iowa

A 6.16" storm total was recorded at Ellston, Iowa

June 25, 2025

Who's to stop summer learning loss?

Around this stage of summer each year, parents, teachers, and school administrators tend to engage in a complex dance wherein each group frets about summer "learning loss". None among them really has a meaningful plan to prevent it, nor even a clear understanding of which losses really matter. We seem to know little, other than that standardized test scores slide backwards during summer break. ■ Teachers can point at parents and say they should impose discipline around learning habits and practices at home during vacation. Parents can question whether school-year learning was as effective as it should have been if just a couple of months off can do so much damage. Administration, meanwhile, may well worry that every day off equals lower standardized test scores. ■ We're very poor at framing what aspects of learning really matter. Do the facts matter more, or do the habits? Does ability to follow instruction matter more, or does intrinsic motivation to learn? ■ Virtually all learning is about scaffolding, of course: Connecting old learning to new concepts is what most progress is all about. So to some extent, retaining old facts matters. But perhaps even more, it matters whether the child develops some state of curiosity that allows them to build their own scaffolding. ■ For one kid, the subject may be dinosaurs; for others, it could be horses or graphic design or space exploration. Enough "Why?" and "How?" questions related to a topic of interest, and invariably a broadening of applicable academic tools become useful in order to learn more. ■ There's a lot of research yet to be done, but it seems likely that parents can worry less about the exact details and facts that their children learn and pay more attention to encouraging kids to find something they can sustain a high degree of interest in learning. Real intrinsic enthusiasm for a subject (even when it's not part of a bigger curriculum) is a great source of motivation to learn academic topics.

June 27, 2025

To be outcharactered

Ordinary language reveals a certain set of prejudices that shine a lot of favor upon raw intelligence: Everyone knows what it's like to be outsmarted. Along with that comes a sort of two-fold assumption: To be outsmarted requires that the other person not only possess more intelligence, but also that they use it to their own advantage. ■ It's fairly obvious why a society would respect and admire intelligence, since intelligence is often the best tool for solving the problems that nature throws at us. Within the classic models of narrative conflict, we usually need intelligence to solve "man versus nature", "man versus man", and "man versus the gods". ■ It remains telling and instructive that we don't have a similar word for when two individuals are unevenly matched for character. We simply don't say that someone "outcharactered" another. Perhaps that's because one of the essential elements of good character is that one wouldn't use it to gain personal advantage. ■ But perhaps it's also because we don't sufficiently appreciate the role that decision-making in social and interpersonal affairs draws not on intelligence, but rather on "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind". If you're fighting the stormy sea, there's a good chance you need engineering skills. If you're navigating human issues, though, you need to draw on characteristics that aren't easily taught from a textbook. ■ In times when technological marvels are not only streaming forth in a torrent, but also enriching certain smart people in seemingly unreal ways, we have to be careful not to conclude that intelligence is the only character trait worthy of respect. ■ Warren Buffett is renowned for offering variations on a piece of advice that says leaders should recruit for intelligence, drive, and character, but that the last one is essential since a person with intelligence and drive but low moral character is destined to cause disaster. That's some worthy all-purpose advice, not just for hiring managers, but for us all.

June 30, 2025

Defense Department and NOAA to break data sharing

At least on the surface, this seems like a taxpayer-hostile development with no evident gain

The virtue of disclosure

The suggestion arises that academics ought to disclose whether or not they used artificial intelligence in their work. Especially in cases where academic integrity is an issue, some kind of disclosure should probably emerge as a norm, since it's often unclear and non-transparent (even to the user) on which data sets the artificial intelligence was trained.

Locked into lies

There's truth in this observation from Bellingcat's Eliot Higgins: "The danger isn't just that people believe lies. It's that entire communities become locked into belief systems that can't be challenged, where loyalty replaces evidence, and disagreement feels like betrayal. That doesn't just distort truth, it breaks trust."