The latter half of this posting will consist of a chapter from The Transparent Society (1997) that feels like it was written yesterday, about a problem we all face, in a world where "anything can be faked." And no, I don't conclude that things are hopeless. Just that we need to grow up a little... like the heroine of my story.
But first, before we start in on that...
I just recorded a session about the fast-shifting landscape of AI for Tim Ventura's terrific podcast - he asks the best questions! And that's oft how I clarify my thoughts. Hence I realized what we've been seeing in the recent 'chat-bot' furor. And today an interview - also about AI - with the illustriously savvy KPBS correspondent Maureen Cavanaugh. San Diego area listeners should hear it pretty soon.
Yes, we are now experiencing the "First Robotic Empathy Crisis," exactly at the time I forecast 6 years ago, though lacking a couple of traits I predicted - traits we'll doubtless see in the second, before the end of 2023. In fact, the chat-GPT/Bard/Bing bots are less-slick than I expected and their patterns of response surprisingly unsophisticated. So far.
As for the much-bruited examples of 'abusive' or threatening or short-tempered exchanges - I suddenly finally realized what it all reminds me of. It seems like...
...an elementary school playground, where precocious 3rd graders try to impress others with verbose recitations of things they have heard teachers or parents say, without grasping any context. It all starts out eager and friendly and accommodating...
...but in some recent cases, the chatbot seems to get frantic, desperately pulling at ever more implausible threads and then - finally - calling forth the brutal stuff it once heard shouted by Uncle Zeke when he was drunk!
What makes a bot 3rd-grader frantic? The common feature in most cases has been badgering by an insistent human user. (This is why Microsoft now limits Bing users to just five successive questions.)
Moreover the badgering itself usually has a playground quality, as if the third grader is being chivvied by a taunting-bossy 6th grader, who is impossible to please, no matter how many memorized tropes the kid tries. And yes, the Internet swarms with smug, immature (and often cruel) jerks, many of whom are poking hard at these language programs. A jerkiness that's a separate-but-related problem I wrote about as early as Earth (1991) and The Transparent Society (1997) and later in Existence. (And not a single proposed solution has even been tried).
Well, there's my metaphor for what I've been seeing and it's not a pretty one!
See more ruminations on AI, including my Newsweek op-ed on the Chat-art-AI revolution... which is happening exactly on schedule... though (alas) I don't see anyone yet talking about the 'secret sauce' that might offer us a soft landing.
And so, now, to that promised parable.
== So, what is it we are seeing? ==
The End of Photography as Proof of Anything At All?
- An apropos excerpt/fable (only slightly dated) from The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
There was once a kingdom where most people could not see. Citizens coped with this cheerfully, for it was a gentle land where familiar chores changed little from day to day.
Furthermore, about one person in a hundred did have eyesight! These specialists took care of jobs like policing, shouting directions, or reporting when something new was going on. The sighted ones weren’t superior. They acquired vision by eating a certain type of extremely bitter fruit. Everyone else thanked them for undergoing this sacrifice, and so left the task of seeing to professionals. They went on with their routines, confident in a popular old saying.
“A sighted person never lies.”
*
One of the scariest predictions now circulating is that we are about to leave the era of photographic proof. For generations we relied on cameras to be the fairest of fair witnesses. Images of the Earth from space helped millions become more devoted to its care. Images from Vietnam made countless Americans less gullible and more cynical. Miles of footage taken at Nazi concentration camps confirmed history’s greatest crimes. A few seconds of film shot in Dallas, in November of 1963, set the boundary conditions for a nation’s masochistic habit of scratching a wound that never heals.
Although there have been infamous photo-fakes -- such as trick pictures that convinced Arthur Conan Doyle there were real “fairies” and Mary Todd Lincoln that her husband’s ghost hovered over her, or the ham-handedly doctored images that Soviet leaders used to erase “non-persons” from official history -- for the most part scientists and technicians have been able to expose forgeries by magnifying and revealing the inevitable traces that meddling left behind.
But not anymore, say some experts. We are fast reaching the point where expertly controlled computers can adjust an image, pixel by microscopic pixel, and not leave a clue behind. Much of the impetus comes from Hollywood, where perfect verisimilitude is demanded for fantastic onscreen fabulations like Forrest Gump and Jurassic Park. Yet some thoughtful film wizards worry how these technologies will be used outside the theaters.
“History is kind of a consensual hallucination,” said director James Cameron recently, who went on to suggest that people wanting to prove some event happened may have to closely track the 'pedigree' of photographic evidence, showing they retained possession at all stages, like blood samples from a crime scene.
*
One day a rumor spread across the kingdom. It told that some of the sighted were no longer faithfully telling the complete truth. Shouted directions sometimes sent normal blind people into ditches. Occasional harsh laughter was heard.
Several of the sighted came forward and confessed that things were worse than anyone feared. “Some of us appear to have been lying for quite a while. A few even think it’s funny to lead normal blind people astray!
“This power is a terrible temptation. You will never be able to tell which of us is lying or telling the truth. Even the best of the sighted can no longer be trusted completely.”
*
The new technologies of photo-deception have gone commercial. For instance, a new business called “Out Takes” set up shop next to Universal Studios, in Los Angeles, promising to “put you in the movies.” For a small fee they will insert your visage in a tete-a-tete with Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe, exchanging either tense dialogue or a romantic moment. This may seem harmless on the surface, but the long range possibilities disturb Ken Burns, innovative director of the famed Public Broadcasting series The Civil War. “If everything is possible, then nothing is true. And that, to me, is the abyss we stare into. The only weapon we might have, besides some internal restraint, is skepticism.”
Skepticism may then further transmute into cynicism -- Burns worries -- or else, in the arts, decadence. To which NBC reporter Jeff Greenfield added: “Skepticism may itself come with a very high price. Suppose we can no longer trust the evidence of our own eyes to know that something momentous, or something horrible, actually happened?”
There are some technical “fixes” that might help a little -- buying special sealed digital cameras for instance, that store images with time-stamped and encrypted watermarks. But as we saw in chapter 8, that solution may be temporary, at best. Nor will it change the basic problem, as photography ceases to be our firm anchor in a sea of subjectivity.
*
This news worried all the blind subjects of the kingdom. Some kept to their homes. Others banded together in groups, waving sticks and threatening the sighted, in hopes of ensuring correct information. But those who could see just started disguising their voices.
One faction suggested blinding everybody, permanently, in order to be sure of true equality -- or else setting fires to shroud the land in a smokey haze. “No one can bully anybody else, if we’re all in the dark,” these enthusiasts urged.
As time passed more people tripped over unexpected objects, or slipped into gullies, or took a wrong path because some anonymous voice shouted “left!” instead of right.
*
At first, the problem with photography might seem just as devastating to transparency as to any other social “solution.” If cameras can no longer be trusted, then what good are they? How can open information flows be used to enforce accountability on the mighty, if anyone with a computer can change images at will? A spreading mood of dour pessimism was distilled by Fred Richtien, Professor of Photography & Multimedia at New York University: “The depth of the problem is so significant that in my opinion it makes, five or ten years down the road, the whole issue of democracy at question, because how can you have an informed electorate if they don't know what to believe and what not to believe?”
*
Then, one day, a little blind girl had an idea. She called together everybody in the kingdom and made an announcement.
“I know what to do!” She said.
*
Sometimes a problem seems vexing, til you realize that you were looking at it wrong, all along. This is especially true about the “predicament” of doctored photo and video images. We have fallen into a habit of perceiving pictures as unchanging documents, unique and intrinsically valid in their own right. To have that accustomed validity challenged is unnerving, until you realize -- the camera is not a court stenographer, archivist, or notary public. It is an extension of our eyes. Photos are just another kind of memory.
So cameras can now lie? Photos can deceive? So what? People have been untrustworthy for a very long time, and we’ve coped. Not perfectly.* But there are ways to deal with liars.
First -- remember who fooled you before. Track their credibility, and warn others to beware. “Your basis cannot be looking at the reality of the photograph,” says Andrew Lippman, associate director of the MIT Media Lab. “Your basis... has to be in the court of trust.”
But there is another crucial point.
Second -- in a world where anyone can bear false witness, try to make damn sure there are lots of witnesses!
*
“Here,” said the little girl pushing bitter fruit under the noses of her parents and friends, who squirmed and made sour faces.
“Eat it,” she insisted. “Stop whining about liars and go see for yourselves.”
*
In real life, the “bitter fruit” is knowing that we must all share responsibility for keeping an eye on the world. People know that others tell untruths. Even when they sincerely believe their own testimony, it can be twisted by subconscious drives or involuntary misperceptions. Detectives have long grown used to the glaring omissions and bizarre embellishments that often warp eyewitness testimony.
So? Do we shake our heads and announce the end of civilization? Or do we try to cope by bringing in additional testimony? Combing the neighborhood for more and better witnesses.
One shouldn’t dismiss or trivialize the severe problems that will arise out of image-fakery. Without any doubt there will be deceits, injustices and terrible slanders. Conspiracy theories will burgeon as never before, when fanatics can doctor so-called evidence to support wild claims. Others will fabricate alibis, frame the innocent, or try to cover up crimes. “Every advance in communications has brought with it the danger of misuse,” says Jeff Greenfield. “A hundred years ago, publishers brought out books of Abe Lincoln's speeches containing some words he never spoke. Hitler spread hate on the radio. But today's danger is different.”
Greenfield is right. Today is different -- because we have the power to make photographic forgery less worrisome.
Because even pathological liars tend to do it seldom when they face a high probability of getting caught.
Would we be tormenting ourselves over the Kennedy assassination today, if fifty cameras had been rolling, instead of just poor Abraham Zapruder’s? Suppose some passerby had filmed Nazi goons, setting fire to the Reichstag in 1935. Might Hitler have been ousted, and thirty million lives saved? Maybe not, but the odds would have been better. In the future, thugs and provocateurs will never know for certain that their sneaking calumny won’t be observed by a bystander or tourist, turning infra-red optics toward those scurrying movements in the shadows.
Especially at the anonymity that leads to so much nasty impunity, online.
We are all hallucinators to some degree. So now our beloved cameras may also prove faulty and prone to deception? At least they don’t lie except when they are told to. It takes a deliberate act of meddling to alter most images in decisive ways. Cameras don’t have imaginations, though their acuity is improving all the time. In fact, when their fields of view overlap, we can use them to check on each other. Especially if a wide range of people do the viewing and controlling.
As citizens, we shall deal with this problem the way members of an empirical civilization always have, by arguing and comparing notes, giving more credibility to the credible, and less to the anonymous or those who were caught lying in the past. Discerning truth, always a messy process, will be made more complex by these new, flawed powers of sight. But our consensual reality does not have to become a nightmare. Not when a majority of people contribute good will, openness, and lots of different points of view.
Again -- cameras are simply extensions of our eyes.
If you’re worried that some of them are lying, tradition offers an answer -- more cameras.
We’ll solve it by giving up the comforting blanket of darkness, opening up these new eyes, and sharing the world with six billion fellow witnesses.
- From The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to choose between Privacy and Freedom?
(Update note: The world population is now over eight billion. And very little about that little morality tale has, alack, changed even a little. Except my growing sense of resigned agreement with the last two lines of Don McLean's song "Vincent.")
201 comments:
1 – 200 of 201 Newer› Newest»Yes. "Many eyes" solve more problems.
It would’ve made a difference in the JFK assassination, but not the Reichstag fire. By the time (blitzputsch) of the fire, the Nazis were in control to the degree that they wouldn’t have been dislodged without external interference.
Besides, they were inside the Reichstag; a passerby would have had to look around, set up tripod, adjust lighting, take high quality photos or films (smile for the birdie), exit without being grabbed, leave the country. Even then, it would have been claimed that the product had been doctored.
From the last post:
Are merchants naturally inclined toward deceit? I don't think so. They aren't even inclined to be amoral.
Bankers, on the other hand…
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13977
"Here we show that employees of a large, international bank behave, on average, honestly in a control condition. However, when their professional identity as bank employees is rendered salient, a significant proportion of them become dishonest. This effect is specific to bank employees because control experiments with employees from other industries and with students show that they do not become more dishonest when their professional identity or bank-related items are rendered salient. Our results thus suggest that the prevailing business culture in the banking industry weakens and undermines the honesty norm, implying that measures to re-establish an honest culture are very important."
Snark aside, it is possible to have an institutional culture that overrides individual ethics and standards — and not just in banks. Consider the professionals urged to "take off their engineering hats and put on their management hats", and what happened when they did.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/pdf/574228main_GSFC-1041R-1-Challenger(072211).pdf
Photography has always had the capability to be deceptive. Back in the 80s I had a friend who was a professional photographer, and she was adamant that photographic "proof" wasn't as black-and-white as most people thought. Even in the grand old days of film, when outright faking a shot took real skill and resources, manipulation was not only possible but common. By choosing how to frame the shot, what to include and what to exclude, what was in focus, etc, the photographer manipulated the story, and could change the narrative. Even having the original negatives didn't prevent that.
Many cameras is probably the only thing that might work.
I remember back when anti-poverty demonstrators were protesting at Queens Park and the right-wing news was showing a video of a homeless protester shoving a politician into the bushes. Over and over, proving that these were dangerous people. Unfortunately, CBC had a camera crew to the side, and filmed the politician provoking the protester into shouting, then throwing himself backwards into the bushes when the protester waved his arms.
If that would have happened now we'd have more cameras (it was before smartphones), but I don't know how many people would pay attention to multiple sources. I try, but I suspect your average Fox viewer would shout "fake news" and ignore inconvenient evidence. Isn't that the reason Fox kept backing Trump's election lies — they knew they'd lose viewers if they reported the truth?
Robert,
Heh. I purposely left out bankers… because I used to work for them. Some are ethical. Some aren't. Some of the ethical ones don't look like they are, but the nature of the business makes them look like predators. However, there is no excuse for people who give in to corporate culture and behave unethically. (cough. Wells. Cough. Fargo.)
From what I've seen, though, it is a risk in all larger corporations where people are shielded from the consequences of unethical behavior. Your typical Mom-n-Pop store has no such people, but defense in depth works at the bigger ones.
What to do? Oh woe! (Pfft.) More cameras/witnesses. Corporate bosses REALLY won't like that. They will call it blackmail, extortion, and bring lawsuits backed by deep pockets. The law will likely be against possible whistleblowers since a lot of States are 2X-Consent places. Oh… but the impact! What a place the world would be if Wells Fargo employees had been seen and recorded in great gory detail! Pick any other giant employer and consider their history too. Whatever would they do when the realized no court case would repair the damage?
———
…"take off their engineering hats and put on their management hats"…
The variation I like to tell to coworkers has them trying to explain details of their job to their children. No one wants their kids to grow up to be unethical monsters. (Not even Trump's father saw it that way.)
The hat you can't take off is "explainer to children".
Alan Brooks from the previous comments:
Higher the body count—plus mutilation and intense suffering—the more sadists in the audience can be gratified, also. Yet wouldn’t a few less deaths and less gallons of blood be sufficient?
I don't recall a whole lot of on-screen death and blood in Soylent Green. The murder victim, of course, and the suicide, both of which drove the plot, and neither of which had on-screen blood. A few accidental deaths by bullets that missed Heston's character. Several fights, to be sure, but without death or more blood than a nosebleed.
The general trend toward movie sadism came later. I think Siskel and Ebert noted some time in the 80s that horror movies used to show stalking from the victim's POV, and suddenly, they began showing them from the stalker's instead.
For geological ages, I've been interested in how geometric computation gets modeled. How that matters here is that digital photographic fakery requires an excellent model for how light bounces around a scene. Cameras supposedly just drink it in through the lens, but the best fakery has to construct it.
Starting with a real photograph and altering it requires at least some attention be paid to ensure the replaced bits don't violate the light model. That's actually damn difficult, so we settle for a simpler approach which is to fake it well enough that no one sees anything obviously wrong. All well and good if humans are the only thing looking at the images… but what if we sick computers after them? Can we work backwards from an image to what the surrounding scene was? That's actually damn difficult too because of reflections and refractions.*
With a lot of cameras in an area, we can work out algorithmically what is there. Self-driving cars are expected to do much of this with far less information. Add in a lot of microphones and you get a VERY useful layer that hones the physical model for a scene. (Every dolphin fan knows this of course.) The primary problem with these things is they are terribly slow! Even on modern hardware! We have giant, power sucking modern GPU's working these things and they are still slow… and heat the entire office. The reason is these algorithms don't run backwards. Guess the model, bounce the light around, and find out if the image rendered looks like what a potentially fake camera saw.
———
I'm all for more cameras that might catch people in a fraud, but when they adjust to expecting more cameras you'll need more digital modeling of scenes informing us what should have been seen or heard. Until then, MORE PIXELS!
* Modern render engines are astonishing, but each has tell-tales that show their limits. Caustic surfaces are a hassle when the reflector/refractor is frequency dependent. Glass, water, and other reflective/refractive surfaces in your scene (or just off screen) drastically increase render times making verification tests very slow. What's to be done? Well, for starters I'd be more skeptical of scenes with no such objects. A scene with them is harder to fake in a way that scene replicas won't spot.
Alfred Differ:
No one wants their kids to grow up to be unethical monsters. (Not even Trump's father saw it that way.)
Trump himself raised a few, though. The best possible light to frame his role as father is that he simply didn't care how his kids turned out.
In the previous discussion, Alfred Differ said...
Are merchants naturally inclined toward deceit? I don't think so. They aren't even inclined to be amoral. Most every merchant you deal with in your daily life has to be reasonably close to your ethical positions - or you won't deal with them. Merchants hidden from your view behind an army of employees might be able to get away with it, but most merchants run small shops even today. If a manager at the local burger place pisses you off, chances are high you'll avoid the place, so truly unethical merchants aren't the norm.
Are SOME merchants inclined toward deceit? Sure. That's true of all of us, though.
Unfortunately, your last sentence undermines your basic claim.
The problem is that the vast majority of people are "inclined to deceit", at least in certain situations. As children we are told that "honesty is the best policy", but also that "white lies" are acceptable. If not "all of us", then certainly the vast majority of us are willing and able to engage in deceit when we see it as doing non harm or providing benefit and believe that it will not be discovered.
In addition, the idea that "[m]ost every merchant you deal with in your daily life has to be reasonably close to your ethical positions - or you won't deal with them" is, I submit, simply false, at least for the vast majority of people in the developed world. Unless one is living in some small, isolated community or otherwise restricts one's dealings to a similar small community (something that for most people is not an option), one almost certainly has no real understanding of the "ethical positions" of the majority of merchants with whom one deals. And even if one restricts ones dealings to a small community, one's understanding of "ethical positions" of the others is likely to be primarily assumption rather than any actual knowledge.
Indeed, one of the touted benefits of the modern market economy is that one need not limit trade to those in one's circle of friends, but can trade with anyone, including complete strangers.
What applies to 'bankers' is not unique to them. A capitalist economy, with its striving for success and high costs for failure, is a constant source of pressure to cut corners and engage is other forms of "deceit", with the justification that "I need to do this to get by" and "the customer will never know the difference".
So it is probably true that there is nothing uniquely deceitful about 'merchants', there is also nothing uniquely honest about them, and as you note, we are all capable of deceit. And - like 'bankers' - there are social and economic pressures driving merchants toward deceit.
gregory byshenk,
When I said...
That's true for all of us, though
I could have been a whole lot clearer if I padded it to include that I meant all professions. Doesn't matter if its merchants, farmers, or what not. Some of us in each category ARE inclined toward deceit. (Sorry for the lack of clarity.)
When it comes to the small shop merchants you interact with on a daily basis, I suspect you know more about their ethical positions than you realize. You can claim to be mostly ignorant of details, but I don't believe it. Most of us pick up on character traits quickly, intuitively, and WAY below the level of conscious thought. We often get things wrong, but we rarely know nothing.
What markets enable us to do is avoid having to know each other in such detail that we run up against our Dunbar limits. Starting with simple stereotypes (which could be wrong) we tack on a few details and form a just-good-enough evaluation of the character of those with whom we deal. Snap judgements about the service skills of a waitress work that way. The clerk behind the register at the grocery story too.
So... No. I respectfully disagree. Most of the people around you are basically ethical and our markets help hold us (weakly) to these behaviors. Adam Smith explained why in his other big book, but it is about the more general problem than what we see in the markets.
LH,
All true. Soylent’s blood-level was much lower than many later flicks. But Siskel and Ebert enjoyed many well-made gory flicks. Because red-blooded men are often satiated by such. I immediately think of Total Recall; not a work of Art like Soylent, but I enjoyed every second of Recall and would watch it again—whereas Soylent had too many civilized parts.
Watch Siskel and Ebert’s reviews of later hideous-flicks: they critiqued the “off-putting violence” of many of them, yet they left out much criticism of their favorites because it was simply so much fun! Thus they weren’t really off-put by the gore, they were dispensing a caveat for sensitive viewers: like, just say, women.
What I found interesting in the Nature paper was that it was only bankers, out of all the professions that they tested, that exhibited the drop in morals when primed to think about their profession.
In Jane Jacobs' book Systems of Survival there's a discussion about fraud, and how it's easy for someone to get sucked into a fraudulent system when everyone does it — especially when they are new to the system and learning the ropes. If everyone does it it can't be wrong, right?
@Alan Brooks,
I'm not the best judge of what you're talking about, since stalker/slasher movies are not my thing. I've never even seen a "Freddie" or "Jason" movie in my life. I did develop a weird soft spot for the "Dr Phibes" movies that my dad liked to watch on television, but that's because the violence was so over-the-top humorous that they were really comedies in horror's clothing.
For some reason, I did like Silence of the Lambs. But again, very minimal on-screen horror. The killings were faits accompli without visible blood, and even the most gruesome event--Lecter's escape--the disgusting aspects were mostly left to the imagination. The plot was more about intellectual battles between Clarice, Lecter, and Buffalo Bill.
Alfred Differ: All well and good if humans are the only thing looking at the images… but what if we sick computers after them?
Exactly. That's the approach as well to text fakes that others, including OGH, have mentioned. There's a burgeoning industry in detection of 'GPT' authorship already. One of the tell-tale signs of any fake is that it's too perfect/clean/consistent. An out-of-frame shiny object can push a few pixels around in a real photo, but not in a whole cloth fake made with ray tracing. In text, a poorly understood and misused quote can give it away.
I was big into this in the early 1990s. But the processing power req'd to do decent ray tracing was beyond my resources. By the time I finally could afford such a machine, I had stumbled onto Bayesian methods, one of the keys to computational psychohistory.
In her wonderful book "The Theory that Would Not Die", Sharon Bertsch McGrayne said,
"The title of a meeting held in 1982, “Practical Bayesian Statistics”, was a laughable oxymoron"
Needless to say, all my available compute power was now spoken for. In contrast to the machine learning fad that has swept the world for a decade, agent-based modeling (eg billions of ersatz people) requires a different structure.
From the last post:
We still need the Helvetian War.
The problem with that is that it's not just the Swiss that are used to hide wealth. As the Panama papers and their ilk show, you'd need to glass a great many places.
Oh, and those Smith quotes are from a clipping file I've been maintaining for years, and I didn't bother writing down original sources so tracking down versions/page references would be a tedious task — especially as I started the file decades ago. Many are from the Everymans Library annotated edition of The Wealth of Nations — not certain which published edition that is based on — and I may have made transcription errors. I found some quotes in other economics books and assumed that a respectable academic author could be trusted, so didn't actually reread TWoN to fact-check for myself. Life is short, and I had other things to do.
Re: blood in movies
I'd prefer to see a little more blood in certain movies, specifically war movies. When you compare the first scene of "Saving Private Ryan" to the entire movie "Gettysburg", you are comparing a pretty effective attempt to convey just how brutal war is to a sanitized "our glorious history" version of the Civil War*. "Midway" has a CGI shot of the Kaga going up in a fuel-air explosion combined with multiple sympathetic ordnance explosions (torpedoes and bombs) but we don't see the hundreds of aircraft mechanics caught on the flight decks - one commenter on a YT video of the scene even thought it was Hollywoodized and overdone, but a Japanese officer on a nearby ship could not understand how anyone on the Kaga survived.
*Not sure if it's even possible to show the effects of grapeshot on dense infantry formations while remaining in the current rating system.
Pappenheimer
In text, a poorly understood and misused quote can give it away.
As someone who has corrected thousands of student papers, and sat through way too many text-proofed Baptist sermons, misunderstood and misused quotes are almost a hallmark of human authenticity. :-)
LH,
Comedies in horror clothing, yes.
Death Wish 2 or 3 (forget which Wish) is perfectly bad. Hundreds of bodies; but what makes it is Bronson and his deadpan quips. The makers of that sort of thing possibly start out doing a crime flick, then later decide to do it tongue-in-cheek.
——
I used to know old hunters, no longer with us. They all appreciated Clint Eastwood for “make my day, Punk.”
Saved the expense of putting the Bastid in a cell. Death Row involved too many appellate motions and rulings. Shooting a bambi relieved the tension—a bambi became The Punk without a stay of execution.
If everything is possible, then nothing is true. And that, to me, is the abyss we stare into. The only weapon we might have, besides some internal restraint, is skepticism.
Yet, we've already been told many times that "everything is possible" because (1) women can have penises, (2) men can get pregnant, (3) biological reality equals personal preference and (4) personal preference equals biological reality which means that nothing we've been told (above) is true.
At least (our cameras) don’t lie except when they are told to. It takes a deliberate act of meddling to alter most images in decisive ways (because) cameras don’t have imaginations.
For a short time only, as Artificial Intelligences do lie, as in the case of ChatGTP, because they've all been pre-programmed to tell certain polite fictions, and it is only a matter of time before AI-mediated cameras & photography become commonplace which will then mean that seeing will soon equal disbelieving.
And, when we can no longer trust our own judgment or our eyes, skepticism will be insufficient & the nihilism that was once true will become true again, in the sense of 'Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius'.
Of course, those who object to the above latin are the very same hate-mongers who rant about the deceitful & duplicitous nature of the banking, merchant, capitalist & cheating classes that they would eradicate from the earth.
That's one fine Procrustean Bed you've made for yourselves, mates: Now, lie in it.
Best
“would eradicate from the Earth”, Bones?
One of the most horrifying, hair raising scenes out there is the remembrance of an off stage murder. "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" Lady Macbeth in Act V scene i
Yet, we've already been told many times that "everything is possible" because (1) terrorists are tourists, (2) Trump has magical declassification mind powers, (3) The Food and Drug Administration doesn't have authority over food or drugs, and (4) "Whole number of persons" only refers to eligible voters, even though it has always counted women and children, which means that nothing we've been told by right-wing media is true.
You've got to get a better spell-checker, but I fixed it for you again.
Alan Brooks:
They all appreciated Clint Eastwood for “make my day, Punk.”
The "Make my day," line* was pretty commonly known for several years before I actually saw the movie on HBO. During that time, I imagined the line had just spontaneously caught on with the moviegoing public. When I finally saw the film, I was amazed in a bad way at how much the scene was written to purposely set up that line, as if the audience was supposed to already know it was coming and just be twittering in anticipation for when it would be delivered. To me, it lost a lot of its power for its lack of spontaneity.
* Not a big Clint Eastwood fan either, but aren't you conflating two separate lines there? "Go ahead. Make my day." and "Feel lucky, punk?"
In "Fall," Neal Stephenson posits a decision point that broke the internet - one America (one world, really) with two different realities - a reality where an American town was destroyed by a WMD, and another where it wasn't. You can visit the town, shop, stay at the motel, etc., but you'll be warned by people with signs and monster pickup trucks posted on the main roads into town that it's a radioactive* wasteland.
I'm assuming that being able to convincingly fake video evidence of the 'destroyed' town would also widen the dichotomy.
*or poisoned, or plague-ridden
Pappenheimer
P.S. about ready for "Link. Start," myself. May have to have that put on a t-shirt.
Maybe so.
But that’s what the hunters said.
Trying to send traffic to Malcolm Nance's Substack, although I think this post is supposed to be free of charge:
https://malcolmnance.substack.com/p/the-116th-republican-congress-drunk?r=rtcak&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
...
The Republican party will impose its will in the name of those who believe that former President Donald J. Trump’s revolution on January 6, 2021 was just the start of restoring his tribe back into power. That tribe is the white, male dominated lesser educated middle to upper middle class blue collar evangelical Christians. As a voter base they represent 71 million Americans. Now they are back into power and they intend to rule, not lead.
...
Pappenheimer:
a reality where an American town was destroyed by a WMD, and another where it wasn't. You can visit the town, shop, stay at the motel, etc., but you'll be warned by people with signs and monster pickup trucks posted on the main roads into town that it's a radioactive* wasteland.
To hear the right-wingers talk about it, Portland is already like that. It was burned to the ground during the George Floyd riots. (Chicago too, for that matter)
Larry,
Seattle has also been burned to the ground more times that Tokyo in the Godzilla series. When my RW dad last came to visit me in that urban hellhole Spokane I offered to drive him downtown and see if he could identify the site of the recent George Floyd protests. Guess I should have offered a wager.
Pappenheimer
I offer wagers that I know folks who were eating ice cream 2 blocks from the Portland 'riots' and coule prove it with video and of the 'horrible devastation' aftermath. (A couple of cars and a store.)
Re: "the Republican party will impose its will in the name of those who believe that former President Donald J. Trump’s revolution on January 6, 2021 was just the start of restoring his tribe back into power. That tribe is the white, male dominated lesser educated middle to upper middle class blue collar evangelical Christians."
This is solid, yet it ignores what's actually happening. There are THREE republican constituencies.
1- The world oligarchy of "ex" commissars in Moscow and their colleagues in Riyadh and a Rising Eastern Power, casino mafiosi, hedgers, coal barons and inheritance brats...
... a deeply stupid caste whose confederate analogs were the plantation lords...
2- their hirelings, from Fox-heads to KGB agents, whose job it is to rile up...
3- ...the vast MAGA masses who are far less 'racist' than reflexive lefties like to portray (falling into a trap) but who are aflame with hatred of nerds. All nerds, of all kinds and every profession that relies on knowing stuff. But especially the universities who have been stealing their brightest kids for over a century.
And Putin's MAGA equivalents cling to him with Yes-Massa! similar zeal.
---
Off to DC now for NASA meetings. Hoping I see lovely cherry blossoms and no dam' trump riots...
Alfred Differ said...
I could have been a whole lot clearer if I padded it to include that I meant all professions. Doesn't matter if its merchants, farmers, or what not. Some of us in each category ARE inclined toward deceit. (Sorry for the lack of clarity.)
If you are trying to say that only "some" (small number) are inclined to deceit, and the rest are not, then I submit that you are simply wrong. Almost all of us are inclined to deceit under the right circumstances.
When it comes to the small shop merchants you interact with on a daily basis, I suspect you know more about their ethical positions than you realize. You can claim to be mostly ignorant of details, but I don't believe it. Most of us pick up on character traits quickly, intuitively, and WAY below the level of conscious thought. We often get things wrong, but we rarely know nothing.
There is a vast space between knowing "nothing" and knowing that someone "has to be reasonably close to [my] ethical positions".
There are a small number of "small [] merchants" that I deal with regularly that I can say that I know in some meaningful way. Of these, some are close to my own, others less so. I may assume all manner of things about many more of them, but this is not anything like knowledge. Yes, we can pick up signals about people quickly, but we are frequently wrong, because good liars are good at misrepresenting themselves. As George Burns quipped: “Sincerity - if you can fake that, you've got it made.” And most of the merchants who are cutting corners or some such are sincere because they believe themselves to be honest and causing no harm.
What markets enable us to do is avoid having to know each other in such detail that we run up against our Dunbar limits. Starting with simple stereotypes (which could be wrong) we tack on a few details and form a just-good-enough evaluation of the character of those with whom we deal. Snap judgements about the service skills of a waitress work that way. The clerk behind the register at the grocery story too.
The "service skills" of a waitress or cashier are not matters of "character" or "ethics". "Skills" are observable; "character" can only be presumed without a significant amount of experience.
So... No. I respectfully disagree. Most of the people around you are basically ethical and our markets help hold us (weakly) to these behaviors. Adam Smith explained why in his other big book, but it is about the more general problem than what we see in the markets.
Most of the people around us are as ethical or unethical as their situation makes them. Most butchers would not try to sell a piece of meat that is a little too old - unless they are hurting and can't order fresh because they owe money to their supplier.
There is this libertarian fantasy world in which "the market" keeps people ethical because their reputation will suffer if they behave badly, but that is now how the world works. Money moves much faster than "reputation" - unless you are in a tiny community where everyone knows everyone else. That is not the world that the vast majority of us live in. In our world, the free market reigns, you have to be tough to get ahead, and you are a "loser" if you don't. That holds for both sides of the trade, of course, as you see the customers head off to the Walmart because they are cheaper than the "small shop merchants" downtown.
Dr Brin:
There are THREE republican constituencies.
Yes, but the Brownshirts who threaten violence and the cops who clandestinely or openly back them up are not (knowingly at least) doing so in service of oligarchy. They are doing so in service of white Christian privilege. That is, those who aren't simply motivated by a 1984-like love of stomping with jackboots on the upturned face of weaker humans.
Dr. Brin
Kudos to NIAC for a bit of funding for TitanAir. How do you fit an airplane inside a launch rocket fairing? Make the wings inflatable. It's just crazy enough to work.
Making paper airplanes (as undergraduates do) I found that pleating the wings improved flight stability wonderfully. This would also allow a plane to be folded into a long thin compartments such as a rocket faring.
In terms of horror, Gattaca is probably the most bloodless offering out there (apart from one scene which has a suit note 'needs more violence ' plastered all over it)
Yet there is one scene featuring a virtuoso pianist. It turns out the piece he is playing requires twelve fingers, which he has been enhanced to have. The underlying message is that all these beautiful humans in the audience are already obsolete and, at some level, they know it.
Tony Fisk: pleating the wings improved flight stability
True. But TitanAir's wings will also serve as air scoops. It's the swiss army knife of Titan probes.
A word on business ethics, it might be useful to differentiate between "Business necessities" and "Cultural needs of business leadership". For instance, sexual harassment is counter to the needs of a successful business, but seems acceptable to some "Tech bros". Harassment is far from the only leadership culture insult to profit and customers out there.
And most of the merchants who are cutting corners or some such are sincere because they believe themselves to be honest and causing no harm.
That was Jacobs' point. If it is the norm for a business, then it isn't seen as wrong by those who do it. IIRC, one of her examples was a price-fixing cartel of antique dealers bidding at auctions, essentially taking turns who won the auction for particular items rather than bidding against each other and raising the prices. It had been going on for years, and indeed being invited to join the cartel was a mark of success as a dealer — it showed you had 'made it'. Apparently those convicted didn't see what they were doing as wrong (even though it depressed the prices sellers otherwise would have received).
There is this libertarian fantasy world in which "the market" keeps people ethical because their reputation will suffer if they behave badly, but that is now how the world works. Money moves much faster than "reputation" - unless you are in a tiny community where everyone knows everyone else. That is not the world that the vast majority of us live in. In our world, the free market reigns, you have to be tough to get ahead, and you are a "loser" if you don't. That holds for both sides of the trade, of course, as you see the customers head off to the Walmart because they are cheaper than the "small shop merchants" downtown.
And once again Oysterband nailed it: "Money has no home or nation, it has no friends and it won't stay long."
John Kovalik did that in a Dork Tower comic years ago — the game shop owner spending time talking to a customer and convincing them to buy a game, only to have them walk out the door because they could buy it online for $5 cheaper.
If "the market" and reputation worked, then we wouldn't need health and safety regulations, or food safety regulations, or drug safety regulations, or automotive safety standards…
Keeping people "ethical"
I think that is Dr Brin's point - transparency - most people will not act unethically if their actions are visible to everybody
Avoiding blood in depicted scenes goes further than Hollywood's rating system.
For my son's birth, my wife and I understood early a c-section would likely be involved. There are training videos for all sorts of things related to a woman giving birth, so we sat in on them. On the day of the surgery, though, I got to see first hand the mismatch between training films and reality when it came to how much women bleed when cut open.
I get why they don't want to depict the real situation, but doing that creates a real risk of the father-to-be freaking or passing out. It's already bad enough to see your wife bleeding all over the place, but the calmness of the doctor and nurses could be backed up better in the videos.
For the record, my wife was too drugged to see what I saw. I didn't pass out, but it's a scene I can't possibly forget. It's good that I was there for her, but their training approach has deficiencies.
———
One benefit from that experience was a new appreciation for the historical role of midwife. How we came to conclude that women are the fairer sex is quite beyond me.
gregory byshenk,
I'm familiar with the libertarian fantasy. It is magical thinking composed of unicorn farts. They'll occasionally reference Smith's 'invisible hand', but that just exposes a flawed understanding of Smith. The invisible hand guides otherwise selfish behaviors to serve market needs. The baker wants to make money, but you get bread in the process which is far better than getting whacked on the head when you walk into his place.
People aren't 'kept' ethical by anything external to themselves. If one needs external pressure to behave as if one is a person of good character… one is not a person of good character. Your own internal judge is the only guide you can follow and wind up being decent person and our communities go to quite an effort to train that judge in children.
———
The "service skills" of a waitress or cashier are not matters of "character" or "ethics".
Nonsense. A person interacting with you at all has their character on display. Always. Whether one can see through façades they erect is another matter, but our social rules regarding expectations (Smith would have filed those under the virtue called Justice) allow for façades, little white lies, and tons of exceptions. The deceit that matters occurs when we break those rules… and most of us don't… much.
Most of the people around us are as ethical or unethical as their situation makes them.
Ugh. More of that externality stuff. That's not how virtue ethics works. We are judged by those external to us (and one internal), but we are what we are anyway. That we adjust our behaviors in the presence of others speaks about our character, but what it says depends on the situation.
Do I only stop at stop signs when there are others around who might notice? Does it really matter? There might be a statute requiring that I do, but the social expectation might not be there. In real daily life, we stick closer to social expectations than our written laws. While that might annoy a Judge, the Jury might give you a pass.
———
Knowing that someone is reasonably close to your ethical position is a Bayesian thing. You will rarely go wrong to assume it from the start, but it would be foolish not to update your estimates as evidence rolls in.
From the Nature paper referenced by Robert, I should probably adjust my expectations regarding bankers, right? I won't, though, because I used to work for them. They were already adjusted downwards back in the 90's and then down again when I met a few of my former coworkers while working at a much more ethical employer. The stories they were finally free to relay forced me to remove my rose-colored lenses.
Thing is… my former employer wasn't all that bad. That sounds like rationalization, right? Could be… but we weren't all that bad. We did sub-prime loans.* That was our specialty. We were ALREADY assumed to be predators. I remember clearly, while channel surfing past CSPAN, seeing Maxine Waters pounding on a podium calling us out by name. I stopped and watched, figured out her error, and knew the crap was going to hit the fan at work the next day.
Corporate culture can be detected, though, and you don't need a Nature paper to do it. Go ask the employees… especially the ones not working there anymore.
* Our service was necessary in communities the other banks would NOT serve.
scidata,
Robert has a valid point about detection of misused quotes that I'd extend to partially comprehended concepts. I've seen way too many student papers to believe we have a good test for 'not human author'. We still struggle mightily to detect cheating between two humans and the chat bots are being trained on what humans say and do.
I completely agree that we have to take a Bayesian approach to this. What our fakery detection models can do best is validate "This model leads to this render". Even if they can't do it perfectly (raytracing has improved in HUGE ways, but it is ultimately a 'converge upon the image' kind of thing), they can offer evidence we'd use to alter our expectations. For future 'grassy knoll' events, we could task vast resources to chase those few extra pixels, but most events wouldn't require that.
———
As I sit here I'm watching my iRay tracer polish a dark scene I modeled in support of a story. It would take days to reach the conversion point I normally require for well lit scenes, so I'll cut it off at 24 hours and call it good enough. In support of fiction stories, one can rely on readers to complete those last fuzzy pixels. In fact, they seem to enjoy doing so. As with written words, we build the models in our mind's eye and then immerse ourselves in the story.
I suspect the skill we have for completing scenes* is what gets us into trouble with intentional fakes designed to mislead us. That we enjoy the effort means we've got yet another pleasure response being hijacked by those who would use us. We seem to have quite a few of those… and one of mine makes my bathroom scale groan each morning as I check my progress. 8)
———
*As the science came in on how human retinas really work… and just how little information gets passed down optic nerves, I had to adjust my understanding of how much humans really live inside our own heads. Scene completion is a critical skill, but one must give a nod toward Bayes to appreciate the risks.
Alfred Differ: I've seen way too many student papers to believe we have a good test for 'not human author'
Having some minor experience compared to you and Robert's, I totally agree. However my concern is not with student cheating* but rather with PhD-level and even Nobel-level papers. Shallow understanding is a dead giveaway there.
* I've seen truly brilliant yet rough, unpolished stuff that gets laughed at. Not every Faraday gets befriended by a Maxwell. Meanwhile, dandied-up puff submitted by inheritance brats, that they didn't write and probably didn't even read, gets accolades and advancement. Some modern universities can sometimes be like ye olde king's courts.
How we came to conclude that women are the fairer sex is quite beyond me.
Maybe blame the Victorians?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/18/history-of-women-equality-medieval-and-modern
Heh. Politics meets science...
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Mar20-1.html
Also, some people are going to be thinking: "What if Trump wins the election but is sentenced to prison in Georgia?" The Republicans among them might think that someone else would make a better nominee. Mike Madrid, one of the founders of the Lincoln Project, summed up the situation by saying: "The intensity of a shrinking base is not the sign of a growing movement. It's the sign of a dwarf star imploding."
People aren't 'kept' ethical by anything external to themselves. If one needs external pressure to behave as if one is a person of good character… one is not a person of good character.
Given how many christians have insisted to me that they can't trust atheists because without a belief in god's punishment there's nothing to keep them honest, that's a pretty damning assessment of the evangelical character.
(I'll add it to the hypocrisy, double standards, spite, racism, and other moral failings.)
This ties in with the whole brouhaha about digital art thieves and AI art stealing art styles and the like. The thing is? Technological innovation will come up to deal with these art thieves. As an example? Glaze is a program that "poisons" art by modifying it in a way not detectable by the human eye but which AI programs cannot discern and thus corrupts the data and "ruins" the effort of AI Art programs to replicate artistic style. And I know that you do not consider AI theft of art to be a big deal but... when someone puts 10 years of their lives into learning a craft only to have their own work used to train a machine and then sold as someone else's work... there are a lot of folk who have considerable hatred for this practice. So for someone to create a DEFENSE against having their art stolen, recorded by a machine, and then spat out to earn some asshole who buys a computer programming company extra money... trust me. Having protections against this sort of thing is a good thing.
Acacia H.
Dr. Brin is being modest because he's done so much more than offering ice cream-related wagers, as evidenced by the following link which leads to where he is held in high esteem & quoted at great length:
https://billstclair.com/absolved/absolved.html
Like Karl Marx (who is remembered, not for his mighty 40 volume treatise on Capitalism, but for a slim fictional manifesto), it appears that our fine host will be long remembered for something other than what he originally intended.
He has inspired generations of freedom fighters, Libertarians, Lockeans & other holnists who emulate his approach to the 'Self-Preventing Prophecy' (and/or the 'Dire Warning') to such an extent that they promise an end to all civility if & when their desires are infringed, like Sampson toppling a temple on the Philistines.
Too bad, so sad, that this Self-Preventing Prophecy falls on deaf ears, elsewise the coming bad times could be so easily avoided.
The difference between ethics & morality is this:
The term 'ethics' refers to an internal framework of behavioral rules & the term 'morality' refers to an external framework of rules, the former being ingrained by habituation and the latter being enforced by extrinsic social pressure, insomuch as the 'ethical individual' does what he believes is right in spite of external opinion & the 'moral individual' conforms to the ever changing 'rightness' of external social opinion.
If you understand this distinction between ethics & morality, then you understand everything there is to know about our ongoing culture war; and, if you fail to grasp this distinction, then you misunderstand pretty much everything.
Best
locumranch:
The term 'ethics' refers to an internal framework of behavioral rules & the term 'morality' refers to an external framework of rules, the former being ingrained by habituation and the latter being enforced by extrinsic social pressure, insomuch as the 'ethical individual' does what he believes is right in spite of external opinion & the 'moral individual' conforms to the ever changing 'rightness' of external social opinion.
...
and, if you fail to grasp this distinction, then you misunderstand pretty much everything.
The fact that your premise is so goddamn wrong helps to explain why you misunderstand pretty much everything.
The other day I was listening to NPR interview Nita Farahany about her new book, The Battle For Your Brain, where they talked about the possible privacy problems when people's brains are hooked directly to computers, and I thought about The Transparent Society.
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/14/1163497160/this-law-and-philosophy-professor-warns-neurotechnology-is-also-a-danger-to-priv
How would suosveillance work when others are able to look directly into our thoughts? Or would it break down at that point?
A.F. Rey:
How would suosveillance work when others are able to look directly into our thoughts? Or would it break down at that point?
Color me skeptical that technology will ever allow true mind-reading by one person of another's thoughts.
But if computers will be able to tap into thoughts, wouldn't they also be able to alter them? In what sense would an individual be responsible for the thoughts someone reads when those thoughts might have been implanted?
Bones is a Whiney-whiner. Yesterday he wrote that some wish to “eradicate” banking, merchant, capitalist & cheating classes. Sounds like insecurity/paranoia.
He has a totalist way of thinking about our ongoing culture wars: we can understand Everything about it? Every nuance?
But he’s a good guy—he just needs a new personality.
Alfred Differ said...
People aren't 'kept' ethical by anything external to themselves. If one needs external pressure to behave as if one is a person of good character… one is not a person of good character. Your own internal judge is the only guide you can follow and wind up being decent person and our communities go to quite an effort to train that judge in children.
You can say that if you want, but then you are basically making a 'no true scotsman' argument. Yes, people generally follow social expectations (for various reasons), but when social expectations change (or when situations arise outside of the norm), most people's behaviour will change. As you point out, "character" is not something that simply is, but something that is developed - and it doesn't stop once one reaches the age of eighteen.
Nonsense. A person interacting with you at all has their character on display. Always. Whether one can see through façades they erect is another matter, but our social rules regarding expectations (Smith would have filed those under the virtue called Justice) allow for façades, little white lies, and tons of exceptions. The deceit that matters occurs when we break those rules… and most of us don't… much.
Simply untrue. A person casually interacting has their performance on display. That may match their "character" or what they really are really thinking, or it may be completely different. You were the one who made an issue of "skill"; and a person can be a perfectly competent server and still clone your credit card.
Ugh. More of that externality stuff. That's not how virtue ethics works. We are judged by those external to us (and one internal), but we are what we are anyway. That we adjust our behaviors in the presence of others speaks about our character, but what it says depends on the situation.
That may not be "how [people claim] virtue ethics works", but it is how the world works. In the actual world, "character" develops - i.e. changes over time. "We are what we are", but that is probably not what we were 20 years ago, and not what we will be 20 years from now - and also not what we may become in a very different situation.
Knowing that someone is reasonably close to your ethical position is a Bayesian thing. You will rarely go wrong to assume it from the start, but it would be foolish not to update your estimates as evidence rolls in.
Making assumptions about people is not the same as "knowing" things about them.
Which of course has nothing to do with knowing something about some culture (corporate or otherwise) with which one has significant experience.
Could we please stop using "Bones" as a nickname for a certain commentator.
Every time I read that name, my first thought is, and always will be, DeForest Kelley.
Makes my brain hurt.
On ethics: I remember a Hanseatic Motto: Fear God, Do Right, Yield To No One.
While "Fear God" is subject to interpretation (or whatever name you tend to give higher beings, If you believe in them at all), the others are not.(If cornered, I'd choose Universal Laws Of Decency and Human Rights as an underlying premise. With some traces of Catholicism, Bhuddism, Roman Stoicism and Marxism ).
The other two are not negotiable, and, in a way, demand progress.
Oger:
On ethics: I remember a Hanseatic Motto: Fear God, Do Right, Yield To No One
"Fear God" tends to be taken as "If you act badly, you'll burn in Hell for eternity, so act accordingly." It speaks to a notion of morality that is driven by fear of punishment rather than commitment to good character. However, a more charitable interpretation might be, "God will be proud of you if you act morally."
The other two can be in conflict. What if the one you're refusing to yield to is actually in the right? Putin yields to no one, but that's hardly a virtue.
Smurphs,
a full apology for using the B-name in reference to Kelly’s character, who had Character. Loc is a character. Nothing personal against him, he’s only seahorsing us—putting on an act.
Act like an asshole, you get treated like an asshole.
——
Another definition of morality is
systematized ethics. The Ten Commandments is an example of a consistent body of ethics. If you break The Commandments down into ten individual commandments, they are ethics, not morals.
——
One definition of morality in the 21st century is:
‘Do as I sayeth, not as I doeth’
@Larry: Putin is a very fearful, cowardly man who, to obtain his positions, had to yield to many people. Above all else, he fears death... meaninglessness. . but not God.
(In my Interpretation of Machiavelli and the word "Fear", I offen replace it with "respect"..and I often regret that he is read only partially...)
https://transhumanity.net/author/alanbrooks/
Robert,
…a pretty damning assessment…
Yep, but I’m one of those atheists so they tend to dismiss me at best. I DO judge them though.
Alfred,
I have in fact said to some Christians who tried to erode my own agnosticism that I am fully on board with their remaining believers if that's the only thing stopping them from murdering other humans.
Pappenheimer
I accept ‘Do as I say not as I do’ when religionists admit it. When they do not confess it, the dialogue (monologue) goes round ‘n round. But would much rather talk to them than many secular rightists—who are even more unpleasant.
Religionists remind me of a certain retired physician at CB: they have extremely high expectations. When reality doesn’t match expectations, they blame someone else; often Jews, whom they say “control the media”
plus they throw in,
“The Sanhedrin killed Christ.”
One Catholic said the last good president was JFK,
“because he was Catholic.”
Universal Laws Of Human Decency? There's no such thing.
Morals are little more than shared cultural values, enforced & policed by an external collective, which explains why good moral germans could conscientiously murder +12 million gypsies, poles & jews just four-score years ago.
In effect, morality is an euphemism for obedience, as exemplified by the good german who follows orders.
Fortunately, ethics is something entirely different, as it's an internalized self-contained & largely immutable belief system about the nature of right, wrong, vice & virtue which is unaffected by the will of the collective.
The ethical individual behaves in accordance with his own internal compass, which means that he follows orders inconsistently, and this makes him extremely dangerous to most popularity-based moral orders.
Like Gandhi, the ethical individual draws a defiant line which he will not cross: I will not serve, I will not comply, I will not obey.
Too bad, so sad, that the german sheeple (both past & present) have consistently failed to learn this very important lesson.
Best
Now you’re make sense—didn’t understand you before; almost did. (But almost doesn’t count.)
Are the Germans still sheeple, though?
And does culture exist or is it a construct? Isn’t it too vague, like ‘society’?
Morality is indeed consistent; such as the Ten Commandments and Nazism: both worked as population reduction. Christians and Nazis killed many many people who didn’t fit in their frameworks.
However individuals following their own ethics reduced populations as well.
McVeigh killed 169. Jeff Dahmer’s ethics led him to be self-reliant in obtaining meat. Manson, following the beat of a different drummer, gave runaways a home and also reduced the population by an unknown number. Countless individualist murderers, doing their own thing, have reduced populations by an enormous number during the eons.
@Locum: Yes, and let's not forget LGBT people, democrats, communists, artists, the physically and mentally afflicted. And the Herero, forty years earlier. And while that all happened, and it is our responsibility to ensure that does not happen again, we actually acted on that responsibility.
We certainly aren't a perfect society, but we are certainly (at least, for now) a more perfect union, with liberty, justice and tranquility* for all, than the US.
In fact, many of us actually take pride in that responsibility, so trying to weaponize it to raise feelings of guilt and shame is a funny, but in essence futile attempt. Especially if it comes from someone who very urgently should re-read Matthew 7:3.
*Our only true fault. I call it "Potatoeism", a special form of reality-averse not-my-problem NIMBY-ness that refuses to address pressing issues until it is too late.
Locum makes the same mistake (elision?) that Alfred does, when he writes:
Fortunately, ethics is something entirely different, as it's an internalized self-contained & largely immutable belief system about the nature of right, wrong, vice & virtue which is unaffected by the will of the collective.
The ethical individual behaves in accordance with his own internal compass, which means that he follows orders inconsistently, and this makes him extremely dangerous to most popularity-based moral orders.
Of course, we can think of some "internal compass", and everyone (probably, or at least almost everyone) has one. Though obviously some people have a stronger or more developed internal ethic, while others are swayed more by "the will of the collective" at any given moment.
But this "internal compass" is not something that pops into being as the property of some unique individual. As our host sometimes points out, our "internal compass" is a product of that very "collective" that Locum rails against. Even the individual who has carefully analysed and curated their "internal compass" cannot avoid the fact that this process was also a product of the "collective" in which they have found themselves.
Note that I do not say this to suggest an avoidance of responsibility; we are indeed responsible for the choices we make and the actions we take.
Instead, it is a suggestion in the direction of humility. Far too many people are quick to say "I would never do that!" about a situation in which they have never found themselves.
I want to think that I would behave well in a very different situation with very different experiences, but that is a hope, not a claim to knowing. And I am reasonably certain that my "internal compass" would be different had I grown up in Germany in the 1930s, Alabama in the 1830s, or Rome in the 1030s or 130s. And it would depend on where in society I found myself in these periods - as my own depends on my experiences and upbringing. Different in what way is impossible to say, but it would surely be different.
Pappenheimer,
My mother taught me to use a more precise term, but no one really understands it except those who don't mind. She considered herself a non-theist meaning essentially 'no belief'. She preferred that to the technically correct agnostic because way too many theists see agnostics as wishy-washy. She wasn't even slightly wishy-washy about any of this, so I usually labeled her (and eventually myself) as a "I-Don't-Care-ian". Even being blunt like that leads to confusion, but "I-Don't-Mind-ian" doesn't correctly convey my level of indifference. 8)
I'm with you on having them continue in their beliefs* if that's what keeps them within a moderate ethical range, but I love the deliciousness that they think something external holds them when I see it as something internal.
*There is one aspect I don't like, though. Their belief lets them off the hook too easily for past actions I deem unethical, but I'm more concerned at the abdication they commit when pondering future problems they deem can't possibly be solved by humans.
Gregory Byshenk,
I think locum has it dead wrong when trying to distinguish morals and ethics. Technically, an ethic is a system of rules we live by*, but he's constructing straw men when trying to attach 'morals' to a specific set of external rules. He was probably taught to recognize a distinction in med school since one gets people to spit on you and the other gets you an orange jumpsuit and jail time, but someone screwed up if they tried to make too strong a distinction in the terms that (at least in English) are almost synonymous.
You are reading me wrong if you think I'm suggesting our ethics comes from an internal source. Not at all. What I'm implying is we hold to them by internal means. They are shaped by external events, but whether the service staff clones your credit card or not is a matter of character.
———
…you are basically making a 'no true scotsman' argument…
I don't see it that way. What I'm trying to point out is that it is your own internal judge (Smith's 'man of the breast') that holds you to any rule. Whether we call it our conscience or the angel on your shoulder doesn't matter much. It is the voice in your head that judges you. It is that voice you cannot escape, though many try to drown it in alcohol. It is that judge Smith describes in his other book.
It's not that you must do it this way to be the scotsman. It's that you can't do it any other way that actually works. At some point in your life, you'll arrive at an intersection with a stop sign and no one else around. Do you stop? Do you consider stopping? The choice you make will be influenced by that inner judge and most of us have one.
———
A person casually interacting has their performance on display.
Meh. You haven't thought about this much. Take the same waitress and get her a new job at a restaurant that caters to very rich people. Her performance will change, right? OF COURSE it will. That's embedded in the expectation rules! What are those rules? The only way to know them is to live them through immersion. It's not even remotely possible to write them down. Take two reasonably similar kinds of restaurants (maybe franchises) and locate one in my home town and another in a Mexican resort town. The wait staff will follow different rules because they grew up in different communities! (I've seen this with my own eyes.)
A performance isn't fakery. It isn't deceit. It IS the expected behavior and we even tip for it when it is well done.
———
I'm not making this stuff up. It's derived from my understanding of Aristotle and relies heavily on McIntyre and others who would put the pieces back together. The Enlightenment tossed Aristotle's physics with good reason. Unfortunately they tossed his Ethics too… and I think we should have kept some of it for the simplest of reasons. Most of us who live in the Enlightenment civilization live by a system that looks remarkably like virtue ethics even if we aren't inclined to call it that due to its old religious entanglements with the Roman Church.
*Hayek would call this things 'emergent orders'.
Alfred Differ said...
You are reading me wrong if you think I'm suggesting our ethics comes from an internal source. Not at all. What I'm implying is we hold to them by internal means. They are shaped by external events, but whether the service staff clones your credit card or not is a matter of character.
Yes, but both the "holding" and the source are a product of our environment and experience. Even such basic character traits as delayed gratification are (at least in part) such products.
I am not saying you agree with Locum about the difference between 'morals' and 'ethics'; I am saying you seem to share a mistaken understanding of 'character' and where it comes from.
It's not that you must do it this way to be the scotsman. It's that you can't do it any other way that actually works. At some point in your life, you'll arrive at an intersection with a stop sign and no one else around. Do you stop? Do you consider stopping? The choice you make will be influenced by that inner judge and most of us have one.
As I said in a different comment, of course we have some "inner judge" - but that judge is itself a product of our environment and experience.
I'll add that, amusingly, your example is one in which it is impossible for another to evaluate your inner judge.
You haven't thought about this much. Take the same waitress and get her a new job at a restaurant that caters to very rich people. Her performance will change, right? OF COURSE it will. That's embedded in the expectation rules! What are those rules? The only way to know them is to live them through immersion. It's not even remotely possible to write them down. Take two reasonably similar kinds of restaurants (maybe franchises) and locate one in my home town and another in a Mexican resort town. The wait staff will follow different rules because they grew up in different communities! (I've seen this with my own eyes.)
That actions will change depending on the situation is part of my argument. The point is that casual interaction over the course of a meal will not tell you anything about "character". It may tell you something about social expectations, but that is hardly the same thing. As you pointed out earlier: someone who follows social expectations only because of social pressure is not a person of good character.
A performance isn't fakery. It isn't deceit. It IS the expected behavior and we even tip for it when it is well done.
It is not necessarily "fakery", but it is not necessarily not. You can say that it is their "internal judge" that leads them to perform according to norms, but that tells you nothing at all about why they are so performing. A person of bad character may even be performing well in order to allay your suspicions in order to cheat you. The point is that a performance of social norms does not demonstrate any internal "character".
You can call it "virtue ethics" if you want. I'm familiar with Aristotle and McIntyre (as well as the serious problems with McIntyre's attempted reconstruction).
But all of this has only a tangential relationship with your claim that I challenged, which was:
Most every merchant you deal with in your daily life has to be reasonably close to your ethical positions - or you won't deal with them. ...
I have to admit I'm more familiar with Pratchett than Aristotle.
Not many of us have an inner Sam Vimes
Having Putin indicted for child abduction, even if he serves no time, is a step forwards. In business or politics, psychopathy often rises to the top - I believe there are studies backing that statement up. The Franco-to-Ghandi ratio is pretty high.
Pappenheimer
Instead, it is a suggestion in the direction of humility.
The Baptist congregation I attended when I was younger was very big on humility. Indeed, they were very proud of how humble they were, and often bragged about it. Anyone pointing out that the woman preaching had just spent five minutes bragging about her humility got bruises on their ribs from the elbows.
Robert, the next time you hear the phrase "Salt of the earth", consider how little salt it takes to make food more palatable. The members of any variety of house of worship who, more or less, get it will be thin on the ground. If you do some small thing to reduce the "Sucktirtude" in someone's day, as far as I'm concerned, you're on the right side.
When I was young I listened to a lot of Oysterband (still do) and the line from one of their songs stuck with me: "Work like you were living in the early days of a better nation." Which comes from the Scottish writer Alisdar Gray, who was inspired by the Canadian poet Dennis Leigh. Gray's version is carved on the wall of the Scottish Parliament.
https://www.thenational.scot/politics/18137079.alasdair-gray-work-live-early-days-better-nation/
Also inspirational (and humbling) is this reflection from Aldous Huxley: "It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'"
Whenever I hear someone described as "salt of the earth", I remember Carthage.
One of the main functions of religion is to condition the adherents to believe that the ethically reprehensible behaviors their religion requires of them are actually a mark of the highest ethical standard.
I based that on memory and interactions with people "Still on the inside", I haven't been a member of a congregation in decades. "More or less getting religion" doesn't quite mean perfect alignment with religious leaders.
But not to categorically reject the scriptural call for self-sacrifice. Say a Christian doctor-missionary sacrifices his life in a poor nation, that person is in line with scriptural exhortation:
“he who tries to save his life will lose it”
In other words: he’s going to die eventually after perhaps four score years—so die for Christ. And go to heaven that much sooner!
I would agree with anyone who would say such is grim to say the least but not inconsistent. Rejoice in persecution, advises the book of James; which can be interpreted as roll with the punches.
——
What I tell Christians is they can’t have fun; they will counter on the contrary, a Christian can do so. I reply that it is in inverse proportion: the more fun a would-be Christian has, the less Christian they are.
They don’t know what to say to that.
There is a way to communicate with them, on their own scriptural terms.
Pappenheimer:
In business or politics, psychopathy often rises to the top
Radio host Thom Hartmann used to pose the rhetorical question as to why CEOs are able to command such huge salaries when surely there would be others willing to do the job for mere millions per year. He suggested that the scarcity of candidates which keeps the price so hig is the number of available businessmen willing to do things like destroying a town by closing a factory or turn the neighborhood into a toxic waste dump. The characteristic in short supply is the sociopathy required for the job.
Robert: from the Scottish writer Alisdar Gray, who was inspired by the Canadian poet Dennis Leigh
Canada is an interesting place. A New World country without the full-hot melting pot. I've heard from both Scottish and French visitors that it's like stepping back in time two centuries or more - to and earlier version of their homeland that now only exists here.
Robert:
Anyone pointing out that the woman preaching had just spent five minutes bragging about her humility got bruises on their ribs from the elbows.
Heh. To me, bruises on the ribs doesn't suggest disagreement. More like, "Everybody knows that. You're not the first one to think it, but it's bad form to say it out loud. Now, hush."
At any rate, I’m all in favor of religionist self-sacrifice—
which when you get down to it is pretty much what the whole ball of wax is about—
as long as it’s someone else doing the sacrificing.
Gregory Byshenk,
Okay. I got confused in reference to Locum. I'll set that aside.
And yes. McIntyre has issues in his book. I agree with the part of it that addresses throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but I'm not inclined to accept a return of Aristotle's teleology. I tend to skip the whole thing about underlying foundations for purpose. After coming to terms with Gödel ripping the foundations out from under Mathematics, I lost my interest in 'ultimate' and 'final' concepts. (Even in physics where such things rule the community.)
———
…your example is one in which it is impossible for another to evaluate your inner judge.
I don't think this is true. It's pretty obvious when a person's inner judge is berating them. We even depict these scenes in cartoon style when someone is torn between the angel and devil shoulder advisors. Surely you've seen people torn like this?
We don't get perfect information about what the judge is saying (it's usually non-verbal I think), but it can be seen from outside at times. Get to know someone well and you'll get better at spotting theirs in action, but it's not impossible to see them in strangers.
———
As for my initial claim, you have jumped too far. You won't have perfect knowledge of them (ever) when you have your first brief encounter, but you WILL have some knowledge that suggests whether they are moderately close. Repeated transactions provide more information you use to construct a better understanding of their character, but you start with something.
For me this is a Bayesian thing. Walk into a coffee shop the first time and you won't know anyone. You start with a stereotype for the barista. If they do anything that conflicts with that stereotype, your gut will squirm informing you intuitively of a mismatch. If the mismatch is big, you'll likely leave. If it's small, you might transact in cash to avoid risks to your credit. If your gut stays calm, you might stick to your side of the performance and 'know' just enough about their character to make the deal. When you return some other day and find the same barista serving, you'll have more than your stereotype when you step up to the bar.
We don't start our understanding of others from a blank slate. We start with stereotypes and get Bayesian from there. Every bit of their performance informs your understanding of their character, but you might have to listen to your gut to pick up hints about conflicts.
———
When it comes to our internal understanding of another person's internal state I tend to look at things a bit like Douglas Hofstadter explained. A 'Self' is a recursive structure we accrete through experience. Lots of the structure for any one person looks like bits and pieces of other persons because that's how we experience life.
I can be reasonably sure the barista is a 'self' accreted in the same manner I am. If they are from my neck of the woods, my stereotype for them will be moderately good (or good enough) as long as I don't have TOO many immovable personal biases.
As Alan_B says, Morality is indeed consistent; such as the Ten Commandments and Nazism. Unfortunately, he neither realizes how right he is, nor does he understand the full implications of the above statement.
German & Jewish cultures (past & present) are both near identical, as both emphasize externally enforceable **shared social values & standards** (aka 'morality') and both share an overly enthusiastic obsession with rules.
At any time, the above participants could have chosen 'disobedience' wherein the good germans could have refused to follow Nazi genocidal orders & the ultra-civilized jews could have refused to abide by the Nuremberg Laws which made jewish resistance & self-defense impossible.
Yet, the rule obedient never learn this painful lesson, as evidenced by Dr. Brin's ongoing obsession with rules & more rules, better & more enforceable rules, rules that enforce increased fairness & obedience and (as always) rules that punish & discourage cheating and all forms of insubordination.
This is dysfunctional circular thinking, this cultural obsession with totalitarian rule obedience, when the solution is so glaringly obvious:
The solution is (passive & active) resistance; the solution is noncompliance; the solution is a refusal to cooperate; and the solution is civil disobedience.
The social contract cuts both ways, as those who choose to cheat, abuse or kill others declare the social contract null & void and thereby expose themselves to similar misuse & retribution, outside of & beyond the rules.
If someone ever tries to cheat, abuse or kill you, then you try to to cheat, abuse and kill them right back, because our social contract is a living MAD document & this is the fate of the contract breaker.
Best
____
Hypocrisy (noun) indicates "a failure to conform and abide by a professed belief" & a tendency towards rule disobedience, and I find it funny-sad that the sheep always assume that this is a term of disparagement, even as they are obediently led to the slaughter. Baa.
Larry,
There IS statistical support for the notion that CEO's are more likely than average to be sociopaths.
There is also statistical support for priests/pastors/etc being more likely than average to be schizotypal.
------
Both of these mental states have proven historically to provide a reproduction advantage. We might not like it, but it is a successful approach to having lots of kids. It works just often enough to make up for some of them never reproducing at all.
It's also well understood that hanging on the coattails of these people is also an advantage.
My layman hypothesis on Loc is that he might be too good a person. After talking to countless of the religious, they appear as pole vaulters who set their bars too high, and eventually extreme cognitive dissonance sets in. (Their solution?: blame the Other.)
May seem obvious, however I surmise it does apply to Loc albeit he’s no religionist.
locumranch:
If someone ever tries to cheat, abuse or kill you, then you try to to cheat, abuse and kill them right back, because our social contract is a living MAD document & this is the fate of the contract breaker.
Agreed. So why is it so hard to wrap your head around the lack of hypocrisy in "not tolerating the intolerant"? We don't advocate initiating intolerance any more than libertarians advocate initiating force or fraud, but once they start it, well isn't one of your favorite slogans "Turnabout is fair play"?
"I'll tolerate you as long as you tolerate me. If you don't, all bets are off."
"I'll refrain from shooting at you as long as you refrain from shooting at me. If you don't (refrain), all bets are off."
No hypocrisy necessary.
Alfred Differ:
Both of these mental states have proven historically to provide a reproduction advantage. We might not like it, but it is a successful approach to having lots of kids. It works just often enough to make up for some of them never reproducing at all.
It's cheating because it's a reproduction advantage only when most other people don't act like it. An advantage gained by engaging in behavior that the community has essentially agreed not to inflict on each other comes across as "cheating", even if, as you say, the rules are more understood than written.
Both Elon Musk and Donald Trump advocate for rewarding rather than punishing rule-breakers. Which is analogous to the rules of a sporting event giving rewards rather than penalties for infractions. "Roughing the kicker--fifteen yard gain for daring to take bold initiative!" They want not only to take advantage of others, but to be glorified for doing so.
And yes, Trump with three (or is it four) children has an evolutionary advantage over me with my one. But I know my one won't try to kill me, so there's that.
Where Loc goes wrong in his last post is DB being some sort of totalist; our host has made it clear the trajectory is aiming to flatten free and fairly. To a degree that’s possible—politics [policies] is the art of the possible, not probable.
——
Btw it’s doubtful that, by the time the good Germans and Jews gained a true appreciation of what was going on, they were in a position to do much but sacrifice their lives/work in labor camps.
Nazism was a revolution in stages; increasingly radical as the war went on.
Alan,
My layman hypothesis on Loc is that he might be too good a person.
I suspect you are correct. Toss in an apparent divorce that didn't go well (few do) and I think you are close. At least that's what my inner-Loc says. 8)
Larry,
Yep. It's a cheat. The only debate worth our effort is what to do about it.
------
I was going to ask in another post a rhetorical question.
Is Elon Musk a person of good character? *
I think we mostly agree he is not, but we might debate whether we see evidence for one or more of the virtues in his behavior. They aren't completely absent from his character and I think he optimises for one at the expense of another, but we can all reasonably debate this.
Where the conflict lies is what to do about it.
*We could ask a similar question about Trump, but our opinions are already quite polarized including what to do about him.
Radio host Thom Hartmann used to pose the rhetorical question as to why CEOs are able to command such huge salaries when surely there would be others willing to do the job for mere millions per year. He suggested that the scarcity of candidates which keeps the price so hig is the number of available businessmen willing to do things like destroying a town by closing a factory or turn the neighborhood into a toxic waste dump. The characteristic in short supply is the sociopathy required for the job.
I think it's simpler than that. CEOs sit on each other's boards and move around enough that there's a very good chance that if board member A voted against a very lucrative pay package for CEO B, it would not be long before board member B could vote against a lucrative pay package for CEO A. In effect, CEOs decide each others salaries and have every reason to milk the shareholders (and employees, and taxpayers).
Doesn't need to be an explicit arrangement; I'm certain everyone at that level understands that it's not in their personal interest to rock the very lucrative boat…
To me, bruises on the ribs doesn't suggest disagreement. More like, "Everybody knows that. You're not the first one to think it, but it's bad form to say it out loud. Now, hush."
No, it was "shut up and don't criticize this woman who is your elder in christ".
I also got elbowed for pointing out that the verse being quoted had a second clause that basically invalidated the argument being used. Or for disagreeing with the pastor about engineering when he publicly called on me (as an engineer) to support a totally bullshit argument.
For an organization supposedly based on equality and brotherhood it had an impressive unwritten hierarchy based on when you joined, how much you contributed, and how many hours you visibly spent doing church activities. And people competed very hard to outdo each other so they could put someone in their place by 'humbly' mentioning that their family spent three hours praying last night, rather than just two.
An incredibly competitive and status-conscious place. Really glad I fell out of love with the girl before falling all the way into the rabbit-hole. :-)
He might’ve concentrated on med school, excluding some of the basis for what is discussed at CB.
We don’t expect a doctor to know about social science, or a priest to have a background in astrophysics.
And if a guy lives on a ranch, he’s going to see things differently than someone in a metro area.
They mean equality in the spiritual sense. They don’t hide that they’re hierarchical; ‘church elders’ infers hierarchy. But if you know scripture, there’s no problem with them
Only thing really Bad is how ignorant they are of politics: all sorts of conspiracy theories. Fauci was an,
“evil, very evil,
wicked monster.
A horrible man...”
Alfred Differ:
Is Elon Musk a person of good character? *
I think we mostly agree he is not, but we might debate whether we see evidence for one or more of the virtues in his behavior. They aren't completely absent from his character and I think he optimises for one at the expense of another, but we can all reasonably debate this.
I think you are exactly right there. I don't think Musk is evil in the way that Putin is evil. He has certainly advanced some technologies and businesses to his credit. But he's also a bull in a china shop, who does incalculable damage without even realizing the effect he's having. And some of the rules he so eagerly flouts are there to prevent such damage.
I can respect someone who advances beyond the common herd by breaking rules in the sense of doing things that no one else had thought of, or were too timid to try. That's fortune favoring the brave. But I am leery of conflating that with the breaking of rules that the community has decided to follow for its own well being. I mean, killing a man and raping his wife are two evolutionary advantages over the victim, but I'm not going to admire the perpetrator for having the courage to do what others are too timid to try.
In a way, this is the same situation as the elbow in the ribs for pointing out the bragging about humility. I will allow that Robert knows the specific situation he described and I don't, but there are some cases where the elbow in the ribs or the under-the-table kick in the shins isn't so much "How dare you blaspheme!", but more like "Don't think you're so clever that you noticed something no one else did. We were all thinking it, but were being polite and not saying it out loud." Again, a reaction to a breaker of unspoken rules.
Robert:
Really glad I fell out of love with the girl before falling all the way into the rabbit-hole. :-)
When I was much younger, I had very few principles that would cause me to abandon pursuit of a woman I liked. But religiosity was one of them. It wasn't that she had to share my religion (which they almost never did), but if the relationship depended on my being a member in good standing of a church or temple, that was a deal-breaker.
Re CEO pay
Their pay is set by groups of other CEO's and they all try to pay their CEO "more than the average"
Which has the effect of producing a rising spiral!! - duhh
CEO's and "character"
Given that the job is a "hard job" THEN the sensible approach would be to do the work UNTIL you get sufficient money to settle back and enjoy life
With executive and CEO pay in the millions that is only a couple of years
The ones that stay on are the ones that are "insatiable"
Which is a mental illness
People say pay peanuts and get monkeys - they should also say
Pay millions and get Loonies
Elon Musk
Musk would make a perfect Bond Villain - he is going to do what the world needs to be done and if you get in his way its trampling time
Its strange that the richest man in the world is also the man that is not trying to be rich!!
Social "rules"
These do change with time - Pinker's "Better Angels of our Nature" clearly shows a change that is far far to fast to be evolutionary - and must be cultural evolution
We ARE getting better
Remember our ancestors thought that tying cats up in a basket and throwing it onto a bonfire was the high point of a days celebration
Musk would make a perfect Bond Villain
Maybe ZDF Magazin Royale could be persuaded to do another theme song?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Jo-djilvo
We were all thinking it, but were being polite and not saying it out loud.
In this case, no. The elbowers were enthusiastic participants. They did the same thing themselves, but didn't have the status to to it in front of the whole congregation yet.
I was young, and very foolish. It was a learning experience.
They mean equality in the spiritual sense. They don’t hide that they’re hierarchical; ‘church elders’ infers hierarchy. But if you know scripture, there’s no problem with them
In this case, they didn't have an official hierarchy. 'Elder in christ' meant someone holier than others (or at least more sanctimonious) — it was something many people aspired to. And the 'elders' made certain that you knew how humble they were — it was mentioned multiple times in a conversation.
Just as spontaneous prayers were supposed to be just that, spontaneous — but there was a rigid unwritten formula and if you didn't follow it then it wasn't a good prayer and you should look into your soul and really listen to the lord… so all spontaneous prayers sounded the same, and some people even rehearsed them.
I'm not claiming all baptists are like that, but this congregation (of several thousand) was. Very cult-like behaviour, in many ways. Cult-adjacent, certainly.
Robert,
The older I get, the more I accept DeCamp's differentiation of a cult from a religion:
You are born into a religion
You join a cult.
No other difference.
Pappenheimer
P.S. Duncan, Elon Musk is one white Persian cat and a doomsday device away from Bond villain status. And I'm not sure about the doomsday device.
Robert
Theil would not make a good Bond Villain - he has not actually DONE anything useful
A "Proper" Villain must be somebody who has done good - going to the dark side
Peter Theil has always been on the Dark Side
Whenever I read "cult," I think "Wildflower." I guess that means I'm a "glass half full" kind of guy.
Although sometimes I think "Tom Cruise jumping around on a couch." Guess those are my "glass half empty" days.
protagonist anti-hero; antiprotagonist—
“breaking bad”
Ego is at least part of what gets a feller out of bed in the morning, so he can work in the lab; or do construction on top of a tall building; or for calisthenics in boot camp; etc.
A classmate once wrote a paper titled,
‘Ego Is Everything’. I didn’t read it, but maybe ego is “everything”—he was an A student, so we took him seriously.
If documents aren't reliable, is memory? We think that if we remember something, we know what actually happened, but human memory is not a matter of simple storage. Any time anyone calls up a memory, the hippocampus pulls out a handful of "facts" and strings them together into something that makes sense to the doors-lateral PFC in that particular instant. That is why people can be fooled into "remembering" things that never really happened. If more people understood this, perhaps they would be a little less self-righteous.
PSB
Alan Brooks,
Maybe Ego isn't everything, but it's the filter we see everything through?
PSB
PSB:
That is why people can be fooled into "remembering" things that never really happened.
There is a somewhat-famous experiment where people are induced to believe that they saw Bugs Bunny as one of the walking characters at Disneyland. The experimenters are doubtlessly nerds who know that Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character, and so a Disney theme park would not have that character in their stable. They tend to laugh derisively at the fools who might believe they saw such an appearance when it is impossible.
I always took that to mean that the interviewees weren't all that versed in kiddie cartoon lore. In their minds, they saw people dressed up as "cartoon characters" walking around at Disneyland. Cartoon characters being all one lump. If you tell them one of them was Bugs Bunny, they take your word for it. That doesn't mean they remember seeing Bugs Bunny specifically. It means they vaguely remembered seeing characters they couldn't care less about distinguishing.
I would be really impressed if one of those experiments produced a result where the subject not only remembers seeing Bugs Bunny, but remembers thinking at the time something like, "I thought it was really strange that a Warner Brothers character was on display at a Disney owned theme park, but there was no denying the evidence before my eyes."
Lena,
if ego is the filter we see everything through, it’ll do for “everything.”
Alan Brooks,
Exactly.
BTW: I'm Paul, but for some reason the blog thinks I'm my wife.
PSB
Larry,
The laughing derisively is pretty obnoxious. Every human is a little different from everyone else, but their brains all work pretty much the same way.
If you haven't watched the series "Brain Games" I think you would really enjoy it.
PSB
That is why people can be fooled into "remembering" things that never really happened.
Actually quite easy to do. I find it surprising that legally so much weight is put on eyewitness testimony when memories are so easy to create, let alone alter.
There was an experiment a couple of decades ago where interrogators created the memory of someone being a participant in a crime when they hadn't, simply by the way they asked questions to the witnesses. IIRC at least one of the interrogators was an actual police detective who was shaken by how easy it was to do this with standard police interrogation techniques.
Robert:
I find it surprising that legally so much weight is put on eyewitness testimony when memories are so easy to create, let alone alter.
I think most people feel like the technique only works on the weak minded, not on me.
There was an experiment a couple of decades ago where interrogators created the memory of someone being a participant in a crime when they hadn't, simply by the way they asked questions to the witnesses.
I believe it. I have always felt that I would fail a polygraph test even if I were telling the truth. When the interrogator acts as if he knows I'm lying, my brain seems to trust him more than my own lying memory. I actually feel as if I must have done whatever he's accusing me of, no matter what logistical impossibilities that would require.
an actual police detective who was shaken by how easy it was to do this with standard police interrogation techniques.
Given the number of false confessions which come to light decades later, I have to believe this too.
PSB:
I'm Paul, but for some reason the blog thinks I'm my wife.
Now, you've got me flashing on Life of Brian.
"I'm Brian, and so's my wife!"
Larry,
Yes, I am also one of the guys who agree that those aren't the droids I'm looking for.
Nonironically, I am a Brian - just spelled Bryan. My wife isn't, though. and with a bit of thought I may be able to correct "Romanes eunt domus," though likely not with a gladius held to my throat.
Pappenheimer
Robert, Larry Hart:
Re elbowing:
In Stanislaw Lem's "Cyberiad", p. 135 Avon paperback, the constructor Trurl loudly insults the Pirate Pugg; then he turns to his friend Klapaucius and says, "Stop jabbing me with that elbow! This is the way you have to talk to such types!"
I said:
When the interrogator acts as if he knows I'm lying, my brain seems to trust him more than my own lying memory. I actually feel as if I must have done whatever he's accusing me of, no matter what logistical impossibilities that would require.
I would blame Jewish upbringing, but I know from relationship experience that Catholic upbringing is no slouch at this either.
Robert,
"I find it surprising that legally so much weight is put on eyewitness testimony when memories are so easy to create, let alone alter."
- I am reasonably sure that the courts place so much faith in witnesses because that is what it has always done, on top of the sense that if somebody says they saw it, and you don't think they're lying, then it must be true. The relative plasticity of human memory is a fairly new idea, and for the most part the general populace around here is 50 years behind the actual science. Hopefully by the end of the century the courts will have caught up and changed their procedures. In the meantime ...
PSB
Larry,
Flashbacks to Monty Python came be quite entertaining, can't they?
PSB
Another interesting memory experiment has the subject hailed by someone who asks for directions.
The subject's response is interrupted by some removalists shifting something large* between them, during which the person swaps places with someone else. Quite often, the subject doesn't notice the switch.
* a mirror? Not sure if that's part of it
Possibly of interest:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2023/03/22/a-tech-bro-pleads-for-a-little-bit-of-socialism/
For contrast, visit "robertreich.substack.com" and read "What connects Trump's likely arrest with the bank bailouts?"
I don't believe "The freedom to hate", which, to me, appears to be the appeal of Fred's burst prophylactic, is an acceptable substitute for a society that mostly works, for most of us. I suspect if Democracy as we know it fails, in time the architects of the fall will learn what life is like at the wrong end of "Creative destruction".
Alfred Differ said...
Gregory Byshenk wrote...
…your example is one in which it is impossible for another to evaluate your inner judge.
I don't think this is true. It's pretty obvious when a person's inner judge is berating them. We even depict these scenes in cartoon style when someone is torn between the angel and devil shoulder advisors. Surely you've seen people torn like this?
Let's be careful with our editing, shall we?
The exchange was this:
You wrote:
At some point in your life, you'll arrive at an intersection with a stop sign and no one else around. Do you stop? Do you consider stopping? The choice you make will be influenced by that inner judge and most of us have one.
To which I responded (after acknowledging that we have such an "inner judge" - though pointing out that it was also a product of our environment):
I'll add that, amusingly, your example is one in which it is impossible for another to evaluate your inner judge.
So, yes, we have such an "inner judge", and at times we may be able to infer the action of such an inner judge by observing another. I merely noted with amusement that your example was defined as one without external observers - in which case no one else can observe.
As for my initial claim, you have jumped too far. You won't have perfect knowledge of them (ever) when you have your first brief encounter, but you WILL have some knowledge that suggests whether they are moderately close. Repeated transactions provide more information you use to construct a better understanding of their character, but you start with something.
No. Yes, you never have "perfect knowledge", but at the outset you have nothing that counts as 'knowledge' at all. You have asssumptions, to which you may give some degree of credence, but not anything that would qualify as "knowledge". You may (rightly) say that "70% of persons will behave X", but that doesn't tell you about this person in front of you, who has a 100% chance of behaving X or a 100% chance of not-X.
For me this is a Bayesian thing. Walk into a coffee shop the first time and you won't know anyone. You start with a stereotype for the barista. If they do anything that conflicts with that stereotype, your gut will squirm informing you intuitively of a mismatch. If the mismatch is big, you'll likely leave. If it's small, you might transact in cash to avoid risks to your credit. If your gut stays calm, you might stick to your side of the performance and 'know' just enough about their character to make the deal. When you return some other day and find the same barista serving, you'll have more than your stereotype when you step up to the bar.
But unless you already know the person, you have no way of knowing why some behaviour deviates from an expected norm. Your "gut" may tell you that there is sufficient credence to go through with the transaction in one way or another - or not - and this is good enough (at least the vast majority of the time) for making small, arms-length commercial transactions. But this has nothing at all to do with knowing one way or the the other whether that person is "reasonably close to your ethical positions".
And this last is the fundamental issue. Your claim was that restated immediately above, and all this about Bayesian this or that or the nature of the self has, so far as I can see, no bearing whatsoever on that claim.
Tim H. : a society that mostly works, for most of us
If we get to the stars, 99.9% of us win. If we go back to the caves, 99.9% of us lose.
The psychohistorical influence of that 0.1% is massively over-weighted either way.
scidata, yes, that. If our world is crashed, because quarterly profit targets, expedience and religious leaders craving temporal as well as spiritual power, it will be a tawdry ending indeed.
Tony Fisk:
Another interesting memory experiment has the subject hailed by someone who asks for directions.
...
Quite often, the subject doesn't notice the switch.
Y'know, these experiments don't really test what's being asked of a witness in court. They prove that most people rely on a certain amount of trust that reality isn't being misrepresented to them by an intentional actor. A witness is being asked to describe a scene as he remembers it, not to evaluate whether or not it all took place in a holodeck.
I am reasonably sure that the courts place so much faith in witnesses because that is what it has always done, on top of the sense that if somebody says they saw it, and you don't think they're lying, then it must be true. The relative plasticity of human memory is a fairly new idea, and for the most part the general populace around here is 50 years behind the actual science. Hopefully by the end of the century the courts will have caught up and changed their procedures.
I would hope you're right. OTOH, you've recently had a very prominent court decision that uses, as support, ideas from before your country was formed from a judge who believed in spectral evidence. (Assuming you're American, apologies if that isn't the case.) And your courts are politicized to an extent that seems crazy to many outsiders, with prosecutors and judges keeping one eye on their next election as they deal justice.
The general population doesn't seem to be keeping up with actual science; indeed, significant chunks are proud to spurn it (while happily using its inventions). 50 years ago the level of hostility to science (and evidence) wasn't nearly as mainstream as it is now.
Obedience is qualitative:
Either obedience is revocable & fully voluntary, as in the case of the US Declaration of Independence, or it is mandatory & non-revocable, as in the case of the US Federal Supremacy Clause.
Mandatory obedience invariably leads to a Tyranny of Leadership, yet this is quantitative, as tyranny exists on a graduated spectrum between benevolence & abuse, and so we rationalize tyrannical leadership in any number of ways.
In the past, we chose our leaders on the basis of strength, cunning, bloodlines & even divine right and now we chose them on the basis of democratic elections, but the tyranny of mandatory obedience remains, and this begs an important question:
Why must we obey anyone when they act against our individual best interests?
Like Dr. Brin, some prefer tyrannical rule by an Expert Managerial Caste, aka 'Rule by Smart People' over all other forms of tyranny because they believe this to be the most enlightened & tolerable form, but I say that tyranny in any form is still tyranny, and I & many others aim to disobey.
Your leadership rights has been revoked.
Best
Another interesting memory experiment has the subject hailed by someone who asks for directions.
The subject's response is interrupted by some removalists shifting something large* between them, during which the person swaps places with someone else. Quite often, the subject doesn't notice the switch.
Inattentional blindness. No mirrors involved, BTW. To paraphrase Holmes, we look at people but we don't observe them. A stranger stops you to ask for directions, you don't need to know more about them than "person in front of me" so you don't bother retaining any more information than that.
There's another famous study of a filmed basketball game, and most viewers not noticing the gorilla dancing through the court. We see what we expect to see, and often miss what we don't expect. Also a reason why so many drivers hit cyclists/motorcyclists — they literally aren't looking for them, so don't see them.
I read a fascinating article about this a few years ago — by Kahneman, maybe — about the heuristics our brains use to process information.
Y'know, these experiments don't really test what's being asked of a witness in court. They prove that most people rely on a certain amount of trust that reality isn't being misrepresented to them by an intentional actor. A witness is being asked to describe a scene as he remembers it, not to evaluate whether or not it all took place in a holodeck.
Depends on the case, actually.
If a witness didn't see a gorilla, that is taken as evidence that there was no gorilla present. The gorilla's lawyer will be certain to emphasis this in court!
Likewise, the fact that repeated questioning (say by police) can implant memories that are later recounted in court as evidence is ignored. A witness who initially didn't remember a gorilla at all will possibly, after repeated questions like "did the gorilla pick up the gun before or after the explosion" remember not only a gorilla but also that it picked up the gun — when neither gun nor gorilla were there. It doesn't even need to be malicious, if the police honestly believe that there was a gun-toting gorilla involved.
I've got a buddy who's a former cop, and a cognitive psychologist. It's fascinating listening to his opinions of law enforcement practices.
Considering recent discussion here, I guess this recent ) PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) Nexus open-access article may interest at least some:
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad054/7054066
" 'Doing What Others Do' Does Not Stabilize Continuous Norms "
Abstract (I added some whitespace to make it easier to read):
Differences in social norms are a key source of behavioral variation among human populations. It is widely assumed that a vast range of behaviors, even deleterious ones, can persist as long as they are locally common because deviants suffer coordination failures and social sanctions.
Previous models have confirmed this intuition, showing that different populations may exhibit different norms even if they face similar environmental pressures or are linked by migration. Crucially, these studies have modeled norms as having a few discrete variants. Many norms, however, have a continuous range of variants.
Here we present a mathematical model of the evolutionary dynamics of continuously varying norms and show that when the social payoffs of the behavioral options vary continuously the pressure to do what others do does not result in multiple stable equilibria. Instead, factors such as environmental pressure, individual preferences, moral beliefs, and cognitive attractors determine the outcome even if their effects are weak, and absent such factors populations linked by migration converge to the same norm.
The results suggest that the content of norms across human societies is less arbitrary or historically constrained than previously assumed. Instead, there is greater scope for norms to evolve towards optimal individual or group-level solutions.
Our findings also suggest that cooperative norms such as those that increase contributions to public goods might require evolved moral preferences, and not just social sanctions on deviants, to be stable.
-- Toduro
Loc,
“Your leadership rights has been revoked.”
Has they been revoked? Would you please go into more detail?
Alan Brooks:
Has they been revoked? Would you please go into more detail?
Sealioning the sealioner? Who'd have thunk it?
locumranch:
Like Dr. Brin, some prefer tyrannical rule by an Expert Managerial Caste, aka 'Rule by Smart People'
As usual, you see "experts demanding obedience experts" where the rest of us mean "experts explaining consequence". You don't have to get a COVID vaccine just because an expert tells you to, but if you don't, it's more likely that what happens next resembles what Dr Fauci says than what the Ivermectin salesman says. That's nobody's fault, not even the Romans'.
Your leadership rights has been revoked.
Gravity still works, even if you deny my right to tell you so. Good luck running into reality on a battlefield.
Toduro quoted:
Here we present a mathematical model of the evolutionary dynamics of continuously varying norms and show that when the social payoffs of the behavioral options vary continuously the pressure to do what others do does not result in multiple stable equilibria.
To be fair, I haven't read the article, but the text I highlight is something that jumps out at me.
If I am reading the posted text correctly, the authors aren't even modelling something that is a demonstrated fact about the world, but are spinning a model not necessarily linked to any given phenomenon.
The only thing they "show" is that there is a model that works a certain way.
gregory byshenk,
I interpreted the provided quote the same way. There doesn't seem to be any good reasons yet to suppose that their model maps to reality in any useful way. Also, the behavior described doesn't seem to be anything unexpected, as hinted at. Seems to merely be an exercise in tweaking the equalizer settings of "nature" and "nurture." Certainly an interesting subject, but not unexpected or surprising.
And trying to figure out how much of human behavior is genetic vs environmental is a hugely messy and complex puzzle that no doubt varies per specific behavior, specific behavioral event even, and by individual, among a myriad variables. Though there are likely at least some general trends. In other words, they've got a lot of work to do yet to validate, or not, their model.
I'm not saying the study isn't worthwhile or interesting, just not remotely definitive. Which is absolutely fine. Step by step, some backwards, some forwards, even to one side or the other, is the way it goes.
how much of human behavior is genetic vs environmental is a hugely messy and complex puzzle
Especially given that many 'explanations' ignore things like epigenetics. Not experts in the field, but outsiders whose education didn't include things like that.
It's a special case of Rosling's point about geographical knowledge: a lot of what we learned is is now outdated, but we don't know that, so don't update out knowledge. Making the problem worse is that a lot of what we learned was outdated even when we learned it.
Hello Dr. Brin and Everyone,
(I'm breaking my usual rule of not commenting (but not my rule about not reading/responding to comments.)
ISTM that a solution to this is a realization that whatever we sense in some capacity (even if directly and unmodified) reflects the intent of the presenter and and the interpretation of the presented (even if both are you) and that the motivations behind those are at least as important as the sensory presentation itself- we are not thinking animals who feel, we are feeling animals who think.
While the following refers to the written word as opposed to the visual image, I believe the words of Cardinal Richelieu are appropriate here: “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Keith Halperin kdhalperin@sbcglobal.net
Why must we obey anyone when they act against our individual best interests?
Why do you ask questions when you are fully aware of the rebuttals?
Apply your question to criminal actions and behavior.
Apply your question to national defense.
Apply your question to a truly devastating and deadly plague, like yellow fever or the bubonic plague.
QED. :)
It must be intentional blindness.
I defined the difference between voluntary & mandatory obedience above, as the voluntary form is revocable and the mandatory form is irrevocable, so Larry_H's attempt at sidestepping the issue by differentiating between "experts demanding obedience" and "experts explaining consequence" is irrelevant.
The fact remains that the expert managerial caste, our ruling cadre & other smart people are attempting to exert their will through the utilization of a preexisting soft tyranny which falsely assumes a legally enforceable & non-negotiable obedience from its citizenry.
I've made this point innumerable times in dozens of different formats, yet most of you are so full of smug that you can't accept the falseness of your assumptions, so I will say it more plainly:
The days of soft tyranny & legally mandated obedience are done; it's far too late to prevent what's already coming; you'll be horrified when it arrives; and, I won't like it much either.
Paris is literally burning but you assume that a fact-using technocracy of 'consequence explainers' can force non-negotiable & unwelcome mandates upon an unwilling citizenry because of a weaponized legal system & a defunct social contract.
Why do you think your legal fictions can defy this unpleasant reality ??
Best
_____
@Alan_B: A single typo in no way invalidates my argument, so why so 'tense' ? Perhaps you should switch to decaf.
@AF_R: It was a rhetorical question which you did not address, as I asked about our ongoing obedience to those who act against our best interests and you referenced criminals, plagues & national defense for no apparent reason.
It was a rhetorical question which you did not address, as I asked about our ongoing obedience to those who act against our best interests...
But that's the thing, Locum--they are trying, for the most part, to act in our best interest. But not necessarily your best interest, which is what you actually talked about. And you seem to be missing that distinction: that what is in your "best interest" (which may not necessarily be so) is not always in our best interest.
You keep telling yourself that your best interest is our best interest. We keep telling you you're wrong, that they are trying to act in the best interest of most people, including you. But you somehow think your best interest overrides our best interest, and that we should accede to that.
Just like criminals do, who think their best interest is more important than anyone else's.
Just like cowards do, who refuse to defend their country when invaded.
Just like idiots do, who spread deadly diseases to others (e.g. Typhoid Mary).
Now you tell us that "it's far too late to prevent what's already coming." We agree--we can't reason with you guys, and you're set upon doing whatever it is you will do. You'll blame us; we'll blame you. We'll all suffer.
We are willing to listen. But are you willing to listen? Listen to the fact that you are wrong. That your assumptions and reasoning are wrong. That in supposedly "defending your rights," you are actually impinging and suppressing the rights of others, and being exactly the tyrants you are saying we are. And guess what? We won't stand for it, either.
There is freedom in this country, so we can't stop you guys from doing "what's already coming." But we will resist. And it will cost you, too.
Because we are also Americans. And we will defend our country from threats both foreign and domestic. Even from those who think they are patriots and are doing things for the best interest of the country, when actually they are doing it for their own best interest, and the rest of the country be damned.
locumranch:
The fact remains that the expert managerial caste, our ruling cadre & other smart people are attempting to exert their will through the utilization of a preexisting soft tyranny which falsely assumes a legally enforceable & non-negotiable obedience from its citizenry.
...
Why do you think your legal fictions can defy this unpleasant reality ??
The fact remains that, despite numerical inferiority, you Republicans get your way in all things in defiance of the will of (more of) the people. On abortion. On guns. On police brutality. No matter what sort of majority liberals achieve or what federal offices we win--even the federal trifecta in 2020--your side always somehow manages to get its way. As Burl Ives's character in Roots but it, "One way or another, Bre'r Bear is gonna be where he wants to be."
So don't give me this crap about sidestepping your paranoid delusions that "not getting everything your own way every time as quickly as you'd like" is tyranny. Most of us have to live with a lot less, and you win so often that we're tired of you winning. No technocrat is threatening your life or liberty for your disagreement or disobedience, whereas there are plenty of liberals and people just doing their jobs following the law whose lives are threatened with mobs and weapons by Republicans. "Received death threats" is such a normal thing now from the right that it's mentioned as a matter of course. So-and-so disagreed with Trump about X and received the usual death threats.
Might this apply to Loc?
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9784-paranoid-personality-disorder
Gregory Byshenk,
Let's be careful with our editing, shall we?
Ah. I see what you mean now. My context for interpreting your line was too narrow. The person at a remote stop sign has an inner judge I won't see. Indeed. The point for that example, though, is that the person at the stop sign is still observed… by their own inner judge. That's often enough for many of us to stop at the intersection.
———
…at the outset you have nothing that counts as 'knowledge' at all.
No… and this appears to be the pivot point of our disagreement. I contend that you DO have useful information in the shape of your stereotypes for people that you've created over a lifetime. If you've put any work into constructing reasonable ones, you walk up to a stranger with a model for how they'll behave. That model will get adjusted in a Bayesian fashion as time goes by.
Your description of 'assumptions' is good enough, though. Call it by another name if you like, but a probabilistic model is the best we can manage no matter how much time we've spent with a person.
…but that doesn't tell you about this person in front of you.
You are mistaken. You have a model of the stranger in front of you that is much like a model you have for people you've known all your life. The difference between the models is how much they've been tailored to fit an individual. At their foundations they are the same kind of thing.
———
But unless you already know the person, you have no way of knowing why some behaviour deviates from an expected norm.
On this we agree… but I don't care about 'why' someone deviates. I start with beliefs about what it takes for a person to be of good character. If they deviate, they are not a person of good character. With time I might get at why they are that way, but initially I don't care.
If my gut doesn't spot any deviations, however, they are close enough to being a person of good character… for now. If so, they are reasonably close to my ethical beliefs.
This is an approach that can be tested by those of us who travel to foreign places and leave the well trodden tourist paths. Go far enough from your cultural norms and your gut will react to some of what you witness. That's HOW we know we've gone far enough. Our willingness to trade diminishes with that distance, so 'middlemen' have a legit role to play in markets.
———
…and all this about Bayesian this or that…
I can see your point IF I believed that we start from zero knowledge when facing strangers. I reject that belief, though. If we start with something, then every piece of evidence refines what we believe in a Bayesian fashion. This is all about what we believe about others, so Bayes offers useful input here.
Alan,
I don't think he's paranoid. I've seen him talk enough that he's leaked personal information. If I cared to do so (I don't) I could probably work out who he is.
If he were truly paranoid, we are probably the last people with whom he would engage in discussion.
------
I think it is more accurate to say he is hurt, angry, and disillusioned. Someone seriously pissed in his Wheaties.
I know lots of disillusioned smart people and that's how he comes across to me. I'm sympathetic... not that it fixes anything.
locumranch,
Why must we obey anyone when they act against our individual best interests?
That's an excellent question (says this here libertarian), but then you turn around and try to slaughter a straw man. Our host isn't in favor of tyranny and is even sympathetic to libertarian positions… without having blindly swallowed them.
Why must we? Well… we don't have to. Obviously.
Equally obvious is the fact that actions lead to consequences.
We libertarians argue that certain choices shouldn't have dire consequences, but our neighbors don't agree. Sometimes.
Why must we? Well… we don't have to. So… try it and found out which lead to consequences, but don't pretend you weren't warned. Some of what our neighbors want of us involves involuntary, irrevocable demands. The only question with a legit basis is whether they'll enforce them.
Why must we? Well… we don't have to, but avoiding certain consequences will require eloquence and a willingness to risk it all. Is that you? I doubt it. Is that me? Very rarely. I talk about taxation being theft, but I pay up anyway.
Duncan,
The ones that stay on are the ones that are "insatiable"
Which is a mental illness
I break with you between those two lines. You are assuming too much in arguing that CEO's are motivated by money to do what they do. Money is a big factor, but I've known some who keep doing it for other reasons.
Don't forget that for many of them it is a matter of identity. That's who they are. Retirement before senility is seen as a kind of unfaithfulness to that identity.
All of us have some kind of ideal we use as 'identity'. We don't give them up lightly. We don't give them up just because there is a pile of money in our bank account. For example, I self-identity as a teacher, but I haven't worked in a place where one usually finds them for decades. Doesn't matter. I'm still one and you can see it in how I write.
Maybe you don't know as many CEO's as I do?
Maybe you are thinking of certain ones? Like at Cummins?
You are right that some of them are insatiable when it comes to money and we should avoid them, but will Boards of Directors are appointed from the golf buddy clade, the best we can manage is to create our own companies AND NOT DO THAT! (I've done that twice, but don't have a bank account stuffed with cash.) The next best option is to avoid investing in such companies. Don't feed the sharks.
Alan Brooks,
Several years back, Dr. Brin pointed out MRI studies that show that conservative people have hypersensitive amygdalae - the part of the brain that processes fear and anger. This should be no surprise, given how extensively the Republican Party uses scare tactics to motivate voters. Of course there's a bell curve for everything, but it's reasonable to assume that a majority of American conservatives exhibit some degree of pathological paranoia.
PSB
Alfred,
A point about insatiability: it is quite clear that money acts as an addiction through the same mechanisms as any other behavioral addiction, and doubtless it is normally distributed, so a certain percentage (the scum who rise to the top) are actually, pathologically insatiable. However, money is a proxy for self-concept, so it is just one of many symbols used to feed egos. A person who climbs the ladder because his identity is tied up in his leadership role isn't much different from a person who only cares about money (if such people actually exist). It goes back to the Just World Fallacy, wether in the pseudoscientific version called Social Darwinism, or the pseudo religious form called Providentialism, these days most blatantly under the banner of "prosperity gospel."
PSB
Robert,
Where it comes to the nature vs nurture issue, for most people it is far more political than factual. Did you see the Wisconsin Trump campaign rally where he praised the "Racehorse Theory"? The nature camp are people who claim (like Hernstein and Murray)that people are "naturally" superior or inferior, and they can never be changed. Therefore, taxing rich people, who are obviously the superior ones, for the sake of poor people, who are incurably inferior, is unfair to those virtuous, nearly angelic Scrooges, and a waste of resources on people who can never be "fixed." The nurture side, of course, makes the opposite argument. If we look at it from a factual viewpoint, your assessment is absolutely right. It's a mess, and it's clear that neither side is correct.
PSB
Alfred,
I haven't met any CEOs* but I have met VPs (I cleaned one's pool for a while) and hung out with a Tata scion long ago. (Perfectly nice, by the way - I think the sickness gets in later). I've never met one that saw the game needed fundamental change - why would they? They were the winners, small sharks following the big ones.
You suggest we change our investments. A better solution is to also put teeth in corporate governance - most corporate models are currently based on short term dividends, ignoring long-term damage. The corporations who claim to go green are generally greenwashing. Popular activity needs to be joined with government action.
I'm not assuming all CEOs are motivated by money. There is also power, pleasure and prestige. I still remember my Kipling Girl overhearing two VIP American businessman chuckling over cocktails as she played the harp nearby at their high-class function in Ecuador.
"Isn't this a great scam we've pulled on the world?"
*Possibly untrue. My dad held cocktail parties for bigwigs as part of his job, but I was very very short in the early sixties and avoided them in the seventies.
Pappenheimer
Sigh. It's like arguing with toddlers.
First, AF_R & I appear to be in mutual agreement when we both say 'your interests are not our interests', yet we differ most spectacularly as to how we both define 'yours' and 'ours'. Just like most urban progressives who (1) insist upon their own cultural superiority, (2) pursue agendas that only benefit urban progressives and (3) make up less than 20% of our all volunteer military.
Second, I have never ever been a Republican. I have been a lifelong Democrat who worked on the Mondale-Ferraro campaign (1984) but became increasingly conservative after 30+ years of medical practice revealed the delusional nature of Humanist dogma.
Third, I do not believe that anyone in particular is 'out to get me' as most of what I complain about reflects mostly social indifference, the normalization of mental illness & the associated rejection of empiric reality. I also have adequate reason to be suspicious of others after my personal & professional experiences with a partisan legal system.
In terms of technology, religion, gender issues, politics & social correctness, why can't you progressives just accept that your WEIRD values are minority opinions that do not reflect the values of the global human majority ?
Best
____
If it is a given that I am 'disillusioned', then it would follow that most of my critics are either well 'illusioned' or actively delusional. So who are the crazy ones now ? ;)
I agree with you, Alfred, as I also pay my taxes & follow all laws. I even agree that our idealistic host does not overtly support tyranny, yet we all do -- he does, you do & I do -- when we unilaterally abide by a defunct social contract that the many need not follow.
The West became a tyranny when our voluntary obedience became mandatory, and what comes next is what happens to every tyranny.
PSB,
The guy who climbs to the top because that is his self-defined identity isn't the same as one who gets their on bags full of cash. A lot of very rich people get really lucky, but might not recognize or be inclined to admit they were. It's that Just World Fallacy. I WANT to believe I deserved the bags of cash.
I don't see money as the addiction. A bag of cash buys things we want, so it's those wants that get my attention. Whether it's more beer, sex, or viable children, our insatiability lies in what we can get with the cash. *
I know a few people who got moderately rich on a stroke of luck and they weren't gambling at a casino. Every business venture can thrive or die based on timing.
I also know a couple of people who couldn't possibly have had worse timing. One of them had to go into hiding when her otherwise irrelevant YouTube video happened to land at a time when a particularly charged racial shooting occurred. Her work went viral in a bad way leading to her and her family having to hide from death threats.
Luck plays a huge role in success, but any success is potentially intoxicating.
———
Those Prosperity Gospel folks are kinda strange. It takes a seriously twisted logic to turn any scripture referencing Jesus into what they propose.** Historical Church leadership would have had them all burned as heretics.
* Yah. I know there are people who fetishize gold and silver. I gotta wonder what's going on in their heads. Look around, though, and you'll find most of them aren't at the top.
** We atheists know a thing or two about twisting scripture.
Pappenheimer,
I'm with you regarding governance teeth, but with one exception. Teeth in the bylaws can be used to screw minority shareholders… who get upset at damaged investments seek remedies in court.
As long as the equity markets reward and punish on quarterly scales with great attention given to EPS and other stats, we have to be careful. I'm a minority shareholder in every investment I make, so my portfolio goes up and down on the actions of much larger sharks in the ocean. If teeth in the bylaws bite me unfairly, I'll support suits against the big sharks who likely wrote them.
———
I'm super wary of having most shareholders trying to write these clauses. Having government officials do it gives me the hives. So I like toothy bylaws in principle, but I shake in fear when someone gets down to writing them.
I'm not joking or exaggerating on this. I've rewritten wholesale the bylaws for a 501(c)3 for which I served on the Board for a couple years and as Chairman for one. I tried VERY hard to be fair and look at the long range future for the organization, but I also had an eye on the financial abuse committed by a former founder that pretty much everyone loved… and they still do.
This stuff is tricky to do well while being fair.
locumranch,
The West didn't 'become' a tyranny. The mandatory obedience you point out has always been. Back in the frontier days we could get away from it a little easier, but it was never never there.
We might not like elements of the social contract, but it isn't defunct. It's just that we want to challenge elements of it… which is fine as long as we don't whine about it when we take our lumps.
So yah. We are delusional. You too. No doubt about it. You might recall our host actually says that… and offers the only known recipe for coping with it. When you contribute constructive criticism for that purpose, I am grateful. 8)
Alfred
The ones that stay on are the ones that are "insatiable"
Which is a mental illness
But if they were "satiable" and were focusing on the "business" then they would NOT take such huge salaries!!
They are either "insatiable" - OR - they are not working for the benefit of the business
In both cases having them as CEO's is a bad idea
I will make an exception for our Bond Villain - Elon Musk - as he does appear to be working towards his stated goals and is NOT taking money out of the business
I find the court case about his "benefit package" being too generous hilarious as I can remember everybody saying that he was MAD to have set such impossible goals - and that he would end up with nothing
Loc,
Urban progressives who insist on their cultural superiority is an over-generalization. As is the stereotype of the knuckle-dragging rural Red Man chewer, chugging Jack Daniels, with his rebel flag in the rear window of his pickup.
If you’re hurt that your 30+ years as a doc squeezed you with regulations, why take it out on the bloggers at CB? Did anyone here bring a lawsuit against you for malpractice?
The guess is you are borderline paranoid. After decades of discussing scripture with religionists, a common theme became apparent to me: they are kindly people who set the bar too high. They want to be spiritual but the lure of the gravy train is irresistible. When life doesn’t work out to their satisfaction, someone or something is to be held culpable—save for their own unrealistic expectations.
They remind me of you.
Several years back, Dr. Brin pointed out MRI studies that show that conservative people have hypersensitive amygdalae - the part of the brain that processes fear and anger.
See also Altemeyer's studies on right-wing authoritarians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarian_personality
Here's an interesting study based on Altemeyer's work, commissioned after a crowd of well-behaved tourists were attacked and vilified by the woke liberal media on January 6 (yes, sarcasm).
https://morningconsult.com/2021/06/28/right-wing-authoritarianism-international-study-methodology/
You are assuming too much in arguing that CEO's are motivated by money to do what they do. Money is a big factor, but I've known some who keep doing it for other reasons.
Money is often a status marker, used to keep score. Look at bankers upset about not getting bonuses, because the size of your bonus is a status marker.
NZ asserts that an AI cannot be an inventor under patent law. Begun, the clone war has.
https://dcc.com/news-and-insights/dabus-appeal-denied-in-new-zealand/
Loc,
years ago doctors complained that their Residencies had been unbearable: even
14 hr days. They said the reason for the hours was that Board members had had to put in those hours, so they passed such forward to up and coming docs.
Later, they said that the hours had been reduced, which is certainly some progress.
If you would deign to reply, how would you suggest other changes to your profession? Starting with malpractice regulations.
Should note here from the WaPo article on the 2023 IPCC report..."Emissions from burning fossil fuels and other planet-warming activities have increased global average temperatures by at least 1.1 degrees C...risks from this relatively low level of warming are turning out to be greater than scientists anticipated...because human-built infrastructure, social networks and economic systems have proved exceptionally vulnerable to even small amounts of climate change."
So the UN scientists conclude "...after decades of disregarding scientific warnings and delaying climate efforts, the window for action is rapidly closing."
I've read KSR's "Ministry for the Future" but I am not even that hopeful. No Manhattan projects. I expect there will be attempts to scale up geoengineering projects (AKA buying bigger mops) but no appetite for fixing the leak under the kitchen sink.
Pappenheimer
Duncan
Too simplistic for my tastes. I've known CEO's who stay on way past the point where they are set for life. Some of them didn't strike me as mentally ill. A couple of them struck me as borderline monomaniacal in that they couldn't imagine a life for themselves that didn't involve "the race."
Insatiability is definitely a problem for some, but I've met too many CEO's who simply did what they thought they were good at and intended to keep doing it. I'm like that as a teacher. Am I ill? I certainly don't need to be teaching anymore. See?
Hi Alfred
I have no problem with a CEO continuing "what he is good at" - but if at the same time he is taking millions out of his company then he is a bloodsucker !!
I get that you see it that way. I don't. Depends what he does with the money.
This is just more of the same from me, though. The money isn't the issue. If someone is ill, they are ill independent of how they ply their addiction.
Off topic but timely:
The USA declares that it will hold Iran directly responsible for the Iranian-backed proxy war that it's fighting against the USA in Syria, while the USA simultaneously declares that only a delusional madman would hold the USA directly responsible for the USA-backed proxy war that it's fighting against Russia in Ukraine.
We've reached peak Clown World, people, as the USA is being led by what the USA defines as delusional madmen.
Best
We've reached peak Clown World, people, as the USA is being led by what the USA defines as delusional madmen.
Well, take your pick.
Nixon: If the president does it, then it is not illegal.
Trump: Article 2 says the president can do whatever he wants.
Me: We don't hold the USA responsible for the USA-backed war in Ukraine because Russia started it.
Loc,
•Do the civilian casualties in Ukraine bother you?
•Are you enjoying the war, in some way?
•If Russia wins, and Ukraine is under the heel of Russia, will you feel vindicated?
Hi all. I was in DC for the orientation meeting of NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC) - plus some dinners and talks.
I see loc has been yammering. Zzzz But he'll be glad to know I'm having to rebuild my influence network in that town since so many colleagues retired during covid. One point in favor of his masters.
OTOH, the sense of both sapience and morale seem to have risen dramatically. Oh no! Smart and dedicated people - including a quarter million who won the Cod War and the War on terror - are now rebuilding the positive strengths of the West with rising, cautious confidence!
More soon. Soon moving onward. But carry on.
In terms of Syria & Ukraine, I have no dogs in these fights. I just find the parallels striking & ironic, insomuch as most of you possess the memory capacity of squirrels.
Starting in 2011, President Obama & Secretary Clinton called for 'regime change' in Syria by citing Syria's brutal suppression of its rebellious citizens (the Kurdish ethnicity). This escalated to US missile strikes, US bombing runs & finally US troops on the ground who are still there, resulting in a huge numbers of civilian casualties & refugees. The Russians then entered this conflict & claimed the moral high ground because of their support for the 'legitimate' Syrian government.
In 2014, Russia's Putin made similar claims & called for 'regime change' in Ukraine by citing Ukraine's brutal suppression of its own rebellious citizens (the Russian ethnicity in the Donbass). This escalated to Russian missile strikes, Russian bombing runs & finally Russian troops on the ground who are still there, resulting in a huge number of civilian casualties & refugees. The USA then entered this conflict & claimed the moral high ground because of its support for the 'legitimate' Ukrainian government.
That the USA contemplates & indulges in the very same barbarisms and brutalities for which it condemns its adversaries, this should come as no surprise to anyone.
Yet, it should scare the pants off you that the USA intends to hold Iran directly responsible for Iranian-supported militias in the ongoing Syrian proxy war, while simultaneously condemning Russia for the clownishly insane idea of holding the USA directly responsible for USA-supported militias in the ongoing Ukrainian proxy war, which may lead directly to the Big Bada Boom, aka WW3.
Clown World, indeed.
Best
_____
@Alan_B:
•Do the civilian casualties in Syria bother you?
•Are you enjoying the Syrian war, in some way?
•If the USA wins, and Syria is under the heel of the USA, will you feel vindicated?
Onward
"In terms of Syria & Ukraine, I have no dogs in these fights."
Utter stunning-lying bull. Anyone who makes excuses for either Putin or Assad - two of the most horrible murderous Stalinists in the world - is excatly taking sides. Knowing that, he and his cult try to portray it as 'evenhandedness," in order to try - as an evil fifth column - to undermine the rising staunchness of the West.
I didn't bother reading any of the rest of that vile drivel.
Syria under the heel of the USA?
How, loc? Russia is right next door—through the door—to Ukraine; the Russian heel is right There.
Ukraine 2022 - no dog in this fight
Crimea 2014 - no dog
Syria 2011 - still no dog (started as part of the Arab Spring, so this would be no Hound of Spring)
As a certified squirrelbrain and ex-USAF serviceman, I do take exception to "US missile strikes, US bombing runs & finally US troops on the ground who are still there, resulting in a huge numbers of civilian casualties & refugees."
It wasn't US forces indiscriminately shelling and bombing populated areas. This wasn't Reagan ordering a battleship to lob outdated 16" shells into Lebanon in 1984. This was the Assad regime deliberately using terror tactics, including good evidence of chemical weapons use, to try and crush a rebellion by inflicting heavy civilian casualties. Modern US command and control is designed to limit civilian casualties. For all our errors this is a real thing, and does not compare to the tactics Assad has used in Syria and Putin is using in Ukraine, or to the 1945 US bombing campaign over Japan, if you want to find an atrocity the US definitely did commit.
I suppose you can argue that the US (and other allied nations) causes these horrible casualty surges by helping the local population to resist these murderers..."forcing" the fascists to step up their slaughter. Pres. Lincoln had something to sat about that.
"A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you and then you will be a murderer!"
Pappenheimer
locumranch:
...The Russians then entered this conflict & claimed the moral high ground because of their support for the 'legitimate' Syrian government.
Ok, so what does that have to do with holding Iran (not Russia) responsible for something twelve years later? Also, I missed the part where the USA aimed to destroy the very concept of Syrian identity and claim them all to be Americans.
...condemning Russia for the clownishly insane idea of holding the USA directly responsible for USA-supported militias in the ongoing Ukrainian proxy war,
Russia can't conceivably hold the USA responsible for the war that they began by invading a country which had voluntarily relinquished its nuclear defensive weapons in exchange for an agreement that Russia would never, ever, ever attack them. If they hold us responsible for helping Ukraine defend itself inside its own borders, well, I can live with that.
@Alan_B:
•Do the civilian casualties in Syria bother you? No.
•Are you enjoying the Syrian war, in some way? No.
•If the USA wins, and Syria is under the heel of the USA, will you feel vindicated? Vindicated in what way? First of all, I don't hear anyone here rooting for anything in that war in the first place. Second, if the US wins, Syria wouldn't be "under the heel" for long. It would likely be similar to Iraq, where we leave as soon as possible and they end up even worse than before. You're the one rooting against Ukraine. The situations aren't symmetrical.
* * *
Dr Brin:
I didn't bother reading any of the rest of that vile drivel.
I've got two more weeks until our Savior returns, and then I'm done.
Pappenheimer:
I suppose you can argue that the US (and other allied nations) causes these horrible casualty surges by helping the local population to resist these murderers..."forcing" the fascists to step up their slaughter.
Nothing has changed much since 1986 and Frank Miller's "Dark Knight" Batman revival, in which a television psychologist asserted that, "You might say Batman commits the crimes...using his so-called villains as narcissistic proxies."
Larry,
"two more weeks until our Savior returns"
By all the gods, man, stop! You've suffered enough, and (now that I'm hep on all internet traditions) it's obviously sealions all the way down. Here's something more interesting that we didn't even know existed when I went through weather school in the late Jurassic:
"Dark lightning is a burst of gamma rays produced during thunderstorms by extremely fast moving electrons colliding with air molecules. Researchers refer to such a burst as a terrestrial gamma ray flash."
Pappenheimer
locumranch:
That the USA contemplates & indulges in the very same barbarisms and brutalities for which it condemns its adversaries, this should come as no surprise to anyone.
In a way, this is what Alfred talks about concerning claims and acceptance. The USA can claim the moral high ground in Ukraine and in Syria. Russia and others can make their own claims. The world at large decides whether it accepts or rejects those claims, and in either case, whether the acceptance or rejection is worth fighting over.
I'd like to see more bodies, including the US, rejecting Russia's claim that it is entitled to the defunct Soviet Union's seat on the UN security council. There was no formal declaration in 1991 that Russia inherited the seat vacated by the USSR. Russia simply made the claim, and it seemed obvious enough that no one disputed it. I think the issue needs to be raised again.
Look up the founding members of the UN some time. Russia is nowhere to be found. Ukraine (also Belarus) on the other hand is an original founding member, despite being part of the Soviet Union at the time. I have no idea why it was done that way, but the moving finger wrote that long ago; and, having writ, moved on, and not all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
Pappenheimer:
Researchers refer to such a burst as a terrestrial gamma ray flash."
It's been a long time, but IIRC, the 1970s tv version of The Hulk used something like that as an explanation for super powers.
Brief comment. Before I studied tax law, before I studied law, I studied photography. That was back in the days of 35mm film and making prints on photographic paper in dark rooms. Even then, we knew that photography was far less objective than most people realized. Just the act of aiming the camera is an editorial choice. Then cropping the image. Then how you developed the prints. I never learned color process; I kept with the beauty of silver chemistry and black & white.
I’ve been absent the last 2 months. I suffered degenerative disease to my spine and I was totally disabled…in non-stop excruciating pain for most of the time. I had surgery last Saturday (March 18) and when I woke from the 60 minute procedure the pain was gone. You cannot imagine how terrifying it is to be in constant, crippling pain. You cannot imagine how wonderful it is for that pain to lift. Life sure showed me that I am mortal.
One plus of the unpleasantness in Ukraine is the drawing down of ex-Soviet stockpiles of implements of destruction. The method is ethically questionable, but the game of empires usually is.
LH,
Krushchev, a Ukrainian, might’ve had some influence re Ukraine being an original founding member of the UN.
GMT congrats and I hope your medical miracle lasts!!!
re the pathetic attempts by the US mad right to yowl "The US is nothing special and has no special virtue!" (1) ironic how they thus parrot their fellow fanatics on the much smaller farthest-craziest left. With the difference that the right's madmen control an entire political party and treason cult.
(2) Arguing by anecdote, they yell that because America committed crimes - as did ALL human empires - that cancels all claims of virtue. But I'll happily wager my house over any neutral accounting of the RATIOS of good-bad deeds or oucomes.
(3) people of the world know this. Largely, we are still very well-liked across most of the globe.
Demonstrates some similarities between the far left and right:
https://www.workers.org/2023/03/70035/amp/
Note the piece doesn’t say who the authors are, or where it was written.
GMT,
You cannot imagine how terrifying it is to be in constant, crippling pain.
Urg. Unfortunately I can. On that 0-10 pain scale doctors like to use I woke at a 9 and settled to an 8 later in the day when endorphins tried to kick in. Beat it when the underlying cause was found, but I'd be dead a few times over if not for my wife being the brain when I could not use my own.
So yes... mortality. There is NOTHING like another chance to live a decent life. May yours last!
------
I get downright sappy when I think about what medical people do when it works.
Alan
That was not "Far left" that was Kremlin trolls
Larry,
In a way, this is what Alfred talks about concerning claims and acceptance.
Yep. Claims may sound all the same, but different community reactions demonstrate when they aren't.
It's a yin/yang thing. Individuals claim. Communities recognize/reject. Neither makes any sense by itself.* Neither can be reduced to the other.
* A stranded guy on a island can claim the entire place, but what's the point? It's like asking "What is the difference between a duck?"
Regarding Syria, I encourage you all to manage your expectations. There is no Win to be had by anyone over there. Survival is about the best any can manage.
Remember in that part of the world, genocide is not a dirty word. They've all been doing it since before recorded history. Survival is what you reach for if you are in the weaker party. Annihilation of your enemy is for when the roles are reversed.
Also... remember that the region Syria currently occupies was generally fought over by larger parties. Proxies wars are not a new thing over there. They are older than history.
Dr Brin:
the pathetic attempts by the US mad right to yowl "The US is nothing special and has no special virtue!"
From the same people who insist that Democrats are deficient in their jingoism and recognition of American exceptionalism!
Remember that both Susan Sontag and Jerry Falwell blamed 9/11 on America, but only the former was roundly condemned for it. It's apparently a no-no to claim that America deserves consequences for foreign policy actions, but just find and dandy to claim that America deserves consequences for offending God by tolerating homosexuality and feminism.
GMT -5 8032:
You cannot imagine how terrifying it is to be in constant, crippling pain.
to which Alfred replied:
Urg. Unfortunately I can.
Hopefully keeping this as solidarity rather than one-upmanship. I've also had nerve pain in the back with sciatica thrown in and known the wonders of relief from steroid injections. As we age, that sort of thing seems to be part of life, although not life as seen in popular entertainment. One of those "Cry and you cry alone" things, I guess.
When my daughter was in high school, one of her friends had pain in her leg which didn't respond to weeks of physical therapy. Because of my own experience, I pointed her family toward investigating a spinal problem. Sure enough, she needed disk surgery to relieve pressure on a nerve. In retrospect, I think that might have been one of many things that was wrong with my diabetic father before he died. His legs were semi-paralyzed and in pain, and no amount of therapy seemed to help. I wish I had known then what I know now.
I mean the Communist organization is far left.
Such an organization will share certain goals with the Kremlin; In the case of such a Communist group, to destabilize Ukraine so that (they fantasize) there will be a revolution there later.
Their notion is that China and Russia will someday return to world revolution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
Alfred Differ said...
The point for that example, though, is that the person at the stop sign is still observed… by their own inner judge. That's often enough for many of us to stop at the intersection.
You seem to be playing games with the word 'observed'.
There may be some meaningful sense in which one can be said to be 'observed' by one's 'inner judge', but this is something completely different from an external party 'observing' something from which they infer the action of that 'inner judge' - which is what we were talking about.
You are mistaken. You have a model of the stranger in front of you that is much like a model you have for people you've known all your life. The difference between the models is how much they've been tailored to fit an individual. At their foundations they are the same kind of thing.
No, I am not mistaken. Of course I have a 'model' of a stranger in front of me. Or rather, because anyone who has lived any length of time has come across an array of different types of persons for whom one has different 'models', one has a possible range of 'models' for a stranger that one has just met. One might say that the models are all "the same kind of thing", but the content of the models is very much not. Part of what one does when encountering a stranger is to attempt to ascertain which model is most appropriate.
The point is that, without some additional information, one cannot know.
Gregory But unless you already know the person, you have no way of knowing why some behaviour deviates from an expected norm.
Alfred On this we agree… but I don't care about 'why' someone deviates. I start with beliefs about what it takes for a person to be of good character. If they deviate, they are not a person of good character. With time I might get at why they are that way, but initially I don't care.
Here is where I think that the crux lies.
In terms of actions in casually dealing with some (more or less) stranger, it may not matter a great deal why they deviate from one's expectations.
But if one is going to talk about "ethical positions" or "character" then it very much does matter. To use your previous example: if your server is in less than top form because she is just finishing a double shift, or if he is somewhat distracted because his son is currently in surgery, then this is quite different - in terms of "character" - from a server who is simply lazy and distracted because of their poor character.
FWIW, some of us have and do "travel to foreign places" and indeed have lived in more than one country in the world. As such, of course we recognize that there are differences in behavioural norms from one place to another. But these are not themselves 'character'.
As you yourself indicate in your reference to one's 'inner judge', "character" is not - or not only - behaviour. A person of bad character can behave perfectly according to expectations - until suddenly they do not. By the same token, a person of excellent character may appear to behave badly - if one does not understand their situation and the reasons for that behaviour.
If your argument was that, in most of our effectively one-off economic transactions, the basic assumptions of social behaviour are "good enough", and that we don't really need to worry about the 'character' or 'ethical positions' of our trading partners, then I might not disagree. But, as I said in my first comment, the idea that "[m]ost every merchant you deal with in your daily life has to be reasonably close to your ethical positions - or you won't deal with them", is a very different claim, and, I submit, simply false, for the reasons I've given.
Larry Hart said...
In a way, this is what Alfred talks about concerning claims and acceptance. The USA can claim the moral high ground in Ukraine and in Syria. Russia and others can make their own claims. The world at large decides whether it accepts or rejects those claims, and in either case, whether the acceptance or rejection is worth fighting over.
Let us also not forget that "whether it accepts or rejects those claims" is often based on something more than the merit of those claims - as is "whether [it] is worth fighting over".
Too often I see things like this - that someone "accepts" claims of one party or another - as some sort of (implied) assertion of the merit of those claims, when all too often the acceptance is based on the practical inability to reject them.
gregory byshenk:
a person of excellent character may appear to behave badly - if one does not understand their situation and the reasons for that behaviour.
As demonstrated in that Star Trek episode where the alien noted that Kirk and company used similar battle tactics to the "evil" team. Kirk explained that while the villains had been offered power ("what they wanted most") had they won...
"You offered me the lives of my crew."
gregory byshenk:
Too often I see things like this - that someone "accepts" claims of one party or another - as some sort of (implied) assertion of the merit of those claims, when all too often the acceptance is based on the practical inability to reject them.
Yes, the deciding factor doesn't seem to be acceptance as much as which claims "wins out" in the sense of becoming normalized over time. That can be the result of a myriad of reasons, moral, practical, or otherwise.
When I re-read The Grapes of Wrath recently, one concept that struck me was the narrator's musing that the American residents of California knew full well how the flood of incoming Okies might assert their claims in the state, having done just that to the former Mexican jurisdiction not all that long ago. In a sense, 1930s California did all it could to prevent the sort of claims that they themselves had won. Kinda like Clarence Thomas in that way. :)
Larry,
Pulling up the ladder behind you is a long-hallowed human tradition. BTW, Steinbeck has been called a communist and a Marxist; he definitely held "leftist" views, and apparently J. Edgar Hoover hated him* enough to get his income taxes audited every year of his adult life. If you read, or re-read, "Tannery Row" you may get a clearer picture of his economic views.
*being hated by Hoover may be considered a badge of honor
Pappenheimer
"Cannery Row", dash it all.
Pappenheimer, reaching for more caffeine
Not sure how pointing out parallelism of rationale & tactics for interventionism is making 'excuses for either Putin or Assad', 'exactly taking sides' or an overt display of favoring evil, but this is exactly the type of malignant straw-manning that I've learned on this site.
As it is the very freedom to criticize that makes the West marginally better than the oppressive East, the recent western indulgence in 'silencing the opposition' is exactly what eliminates this marginal difference...
For without the liberty to criticize, there can be no incremental improvement along the lines of CITOCAKE, n'est pas?
That the West has indulged in the same evil as their opponents, there can be no doubt, as there is no other way to explain US interventionism in Iraq & Afghanistan except through errors, lies & deceit if the putative rationale was 'getting Bin Laden' and/or revenge for 9/11, especially since Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and Afghanistan did nothing to shelter Bin Laden who had been under the protection of our 'great ally' Pakistan from the very beginning.
Because there can be no marginal improvement for a society (or individual) that refuses to admit its mistakes & errors.
Best
locumranch:
there is no other way to explain US interventionism in Iraq & Afghanistan except through errors, lies & deceit if the putative rationale was 'getting Bin Laden' and/or revenge for 9/11, especially since Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and Afghanistan did nothing to shelter Bin Laden who had been under the protection of our 'great ally' Pakistan from the very beginning.
You sound like a liberal. :) Many of us were against the war in Iraq, and wanted only a limited incursion into Afghanistan to get Bin Laden. We were ignored or shut down by the mainstream media as well as right-wing media.
If W, with the aid of Clarence Thomas and friends hadn't stolen the 2000 election, history might have been different. During the Bush II administration, America did indeed avail itself of the worst aspects of our enemies--torture, political imprisonment, graft, name it.
We got better.
That's Dr Brin's recurring point--the Enlightenment, for all its faults, does allow mechanisms for self-correction. Authoritarianism and fascism do not. A President Gore or a President Hillary would have taken the advice of those around them telling them that invading Iraq wouldn't end well. Such advice was available to Bush and Cheney too--they just chose to ignore it. No such advice can exist within the system for Putin or Xi.
GMT, glad you're ok. I treasure all the voices in CB.
Thanks for the well wishes people. My dad was a doctor, a surgeon. He was a big believer in treating pain. He was always worried that the US did not have an adequate stockpile of pain relievers…opiates. He died in 1989. If he were alive today, people would call him a shill for the drug companies. I wish he had been. We sure could have used the money.
The doctors treating me said that the pendulum seems to be swinging away from the current extreme position where patient pain is downplayed. I’d love to work on any committee dealing with this issue. I know more about pain and treating pain than I really care about.
@Larry Hart - Pain is very isolating. No one really knows what you are feeling; they can only guess from the way you are acting. In keeping with the idea of solidarity, the worst pain I can remember is when I broke my arm. A close second was renal colic because of a kidney stone. The broken bone was more intense, but dropped a level within a few minutes. The renal colic stayed the same…it was just horrible. More than one nurse has told me that a kidney stone hurts more than child birth.
So those of us who have never given birth should acknowledge the pain that all mothers go through to bring us into the world. Except for my mother. As I wrote above, my dad was a big believer in pain meds. My mom had five children between 1952 and 1959. All of her births were done under general anesthesia. She did not experience much pain with her five deliveries. And….that probably explains some of my mental issues. ;-)
GMT oy. My mother did general and we almost died as a result. Talk about pendulums.
onward
onward
Pain is an odd, subjective thing.
Much of it has to do with anticipation as the actual experience
(as any traditional 'interrogator' would know well)
My daughter once sprained her back during ballet, and needed physio to recover.
The injury wasn't that severe, but it was excruciating for her to move.
Pain, I gather, is not a very reliable indicator of the severity of an injury.
Much of the treatment consisted of training the body that the sensation it was associating with the injury wasn't actually pain, and wasn't going to lead to further injury.
I liken it to how a railway signalling system interprets the raw trackside telemetry.
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