Heading off to the annual orientation meeting of NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC) in my last year on the external advisory council... but meanwhile...
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.")
99 comments:
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
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