Sorry, late start today, which is unfortunate, because there are a lot of ethics fires breaking out…
That video above is a Halloween decoration, believe it or not. Amanda Peden and Sam Lee are a South Carolina couple who are obsessive about elaborate Halloween displays. Since 2023 they have been featuring a “burning house” theme complete with rising smoke; it’s completely safe, and their family goes happily about the day while passersby think there is real fire in the neighborhood. Apparently it fools a lot of people and the fire department is now accustomed to getting calls about a house fire. Amazingly, the firer chief says its all in good fun and he doesn’t mind. I almost made this an Ethics Quiz. The article I first read about the extreme “decoration” said that some members of the community think such a display should be illegal. I’m not far from that belief as well, but ultimately it’s art. As long as no one tries to claim it’s a symbol of democracy under Trump, I’ll support the impulse.
Now burn up the internet with your ethics commentary….
Ethics Alarms 
Hopefully, the house never actually catches on fire during the month of October.
I am reading a fabulous book that I learned about by reading another book. Odd how that happens a lot to me. I’d previously read a book Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt by Charlotte Gray. In it, she cited a book called Sara and Eleanor: The Story of Sara Delano Roosevelt and Her Daughter-in-Law, Eleanor Roosevelt by Jan Pottker as the inspiration for her own work examining the character of FDR’s long-considered infamous formidable mother.
Sara and Eleanor questions the decades-long accepted narrative that Sara Roosevelt was a mother hen so unwilling to cut the apron strings tying her to her only child that she tried to keep Franklin and Eleanor apart before they were married, interfered in the Roosevelt marriage and the raising of the Roosevelt grandchildren and overall made Eleanor miserable in a home that Sara herself bought and paid for.
What’s interesting about this narrative is that the only source for it is Eleanor Roosevelt herself. And who would question an American icon’s version of events? Apparently, no one because every book I’ve ever read on the Roosevelts has taken Eleanor’s word for it.
I have read endless accounts promoting this position and so, I’m sure, has anyone who has studied the Roosevelts for any brief amount of time. It’s part of the public consciousness when it comes to FDR: the challenging triangle of him, his wife and his mama.
I’ll give you one example because I don’t want to ruin the entire book for those interested in reading it. It’s long believed that Sara taking Franklin on a cruise to the West Indies shortly after his engagement was intended to separate him from Eleanor, help him schmooze with other eligible women and give him a chance to change his mind. In this book, it is revealed that Sara came across a biography of Franklin written during his Presidency that she corrected with notes for him to read, including a note that the West Indies tour was Franklin’s idea, not hers.
Further, it would appear that Eleanor’s own letters and diary entries contradict her public articles, interviews and writings about her relationship with Sara. Roosevelt children and grandchildren alike dispute that Sara resented or tried to control Eleanor. Quite the contrary as it was Delano money that helped Franklin campaign, it was Sara who handled the house management and it was Sara who hosted the grandchildren which gave both her son and daughter-in-law the ability to spend a tremendous amount of time on their own public campaigns and interests.
Whether true or not – and when it comes to public personalities, isn’t it always the case that we cannot never know for certain what goes on behind closed doors? – I am finding it fascinating to imagine Eleanor Roosevelt looking at the past through a faulty lens. Her understandably unhappy childhood appears to have given her a tendency toward self-pity that created an image of herself as being someone no one wanted.
Perhaps, this book, more than any other, shows the need for historians to do their due diligence when writing about historical figures, particularly when it comes to recognizing the biases of their sources. Even if their source is an otherwise impeccable one like Eleanor Roosevelt.
As an aside, I’m also grateful that this book, written in 2004, had no opportunity for gratuitous Trump slurs. Not so the previous book I read about the year 1964 which, despite focusing much of its content on England, managed to call Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater a “proto-Donald Trump”.
Ethics values: competence, thoroughness, recognizing biases.
One of the problems with AI is how often it is confidently wrong. This manifests itself all over the place. One of the most troubling is in the news industry. The news industry under tremendous financial pressure, and the appeal of moving towards AI generated content opens them up to completely BS stories spreading.
There are several great recent examples.
One is the widespread distribution of a claimed cause of the Iberian Peninsula power outage last spring. Suddenly pretty much all news agencies ran with a story about weather causing earth oscillations that spread to the power system. That one is embarrassing and points out that none of the reporters who ran with the story and filed stories recalls basic 7th grade science. As an aside, there is also political based misinformation regarding the cause. It is accurate to say that a very badly implemented transition to wind and solar was a huge contributing factor. Anti-renewable people were saying it was cause by the transition to renewable power; pro-renewable people were saying it had nothing to do with renewable power. Reality was actually somewhere in the middle, but the government played politics and dismissed any claim of the impact of renewables as AI misinformation.
Another not long after is the Air Inida 171 crash. AI took the actual events of the LATAM flight 800 where an accidental push of the seat controls by a flight attendant in flight while giving the pilot food pushed the pilot into the control yoke and created a sudden altitude drop, and using that to create a very realistic looking India Accident Investigation Board report claiming that is what happened in Air India 171. AI lacks any actual intelligence and runs with an idea in full vigor and effort. It created a very detailed forgery, using Indian lingo English in the IAIB official format. It fooled many, including even professionals in the industry. Quite a few pilots running social media accounts had to apologize for being duped, getting caught up in the fervor and not stopping to realize that a report simply can’t happen that fast.
Now I’m seeing complete AI generated news websites. They’re making their way to the google news feed. The first I noticed was in the renewable energy space (where I work). They’re absolutely 100% AI slop, and making my task of being informed of trends in my industry harder as they’re replacing good reporting. This article is a great example: https://www.energy-reporters.com/industry/213-foot-nuclear-giants-czech-plants-terrifying-breakthrough-shatters-energy-limits-with-unstoppable-power-revolution/ . The entire website is bullshit. I suspect the reporter is a fake AI generated persona. No LinkedIn bio, which is standard for reporters. But to a layperson, I bet they fool them. I suggest looking at the picture in the link, and seeing the ridiculous picture hallucinated by AI. For comparison, here is the actual turbine: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/nuclear-plant-to-get-turbine-generators.
Now yesterday I saw two different articles claiming that the full retirement age for social security are soon to raise to 68. It is a complete hallucination, nothing based in reality. Both appeared in Google’s news feed. The best I can figure is that congress is in discussion with relabeling the terms used as many are confused what they really mean. Zero serious discussion right now about adjustment of benefits, just relabeling what 62, 67 and 70 are labeled. (Proposed is 62 being labeled as “minimum benefit age” and 70 as “maximum benefit age”.) Any discussion about benefits changes are being kicked down the road. Yet these two stories confidently reported that people are going to be switched to 68 from 67 imminently. The two are: https://easi.cc/social-security-retirement-age-67-changes/#respond and https://indicators.report/goodbye-to-retirement-at-67-in-the-united-states/ . Both appear to be freshly created AI websites, and have loads of links to filler content.
I don’t have great hope at this being addressed, as frankly many in the news industry are not the most intelligent. Wokeness is valued over all other attributes and it attracts the less than competence. News was already on a downward trend, and this only makes it worse.
My workplace AI chat bot that we’re supposed to use to ask questions has a disclaimer that the information might not be correct.
In which case, I have no motivation to use it.
Comment of the Day. In fact, I think I’ll post it as a guest column.
Your Pazuzu post got me thinking about signature significance and how it should be applied with the idea that someone can learn about proper behavior and install ethics alarms. I was thus wondering, what is the time limit on signature significance, or how can one determine an appropriate time? I ask this with two significantly different scenarios in mind, because I am trying to set up a set of guidelines in my head, knowing that there are various scenarios.
My struggle with the concept of signature significance has always been the idea that people can change, if they really want to, have an excellent reason, and find what, for some, may seem to be almost superhuman strength to do so. I have a friend who was a raging alcoholic who is now more than a decade dry and has no difficulty saying no to a drink. I say this not to claim that all alcoholics can do the same, but to show that for some people, they can overcome a major hurdle, even that of addictive drugs. With that in mind, there are people who can overcome their stupid choices in their youth, who turn what was a life-altering event into something that changed their lives for the good. How can signature significance be fairly applied to that kind of person, who really does learn from choices? I know that not everyone overcomes their past mistakes, but there are many who do, even if it takes decades. I also have a strong personal belief that everyone deserves a chance to overcome the follies of the past, whether or not they take advantage of the opportunity. If such a chance does not exist, how can we ever expect people to get better? We might as well kill all people who commit any crime or major faux pas. With this in mind, consider these two examples.
For example, I’m going to make a fake criminal. We have a 20 year old man who has sex with a 14 year old girl (at these ages, consent means diddly, so it’s rape either way). The first thing we consider is that this person has shown significant behavior to not be trusted. He is sent to prison, and does his term. He takes advantage of all the therapy he can get, both in prison and on parole. He also works hard to get a college degree and becomes an actuary, a well paying job with little enough chance to harm anyone again. He gets off of parole, and never has so much as a parking ticket again. He donates time, talent, and treasure to his community, and gets married and has kids. He abides by every rule, every restriction, lives on the registry for the rest of his life, and works hard to never be that person he was in his youth. By definition, this man has a stable and good life, even after a horrible choice at a young age. What amount of time do we need to say that the past is in the past and someone is a different, and better, person? 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, etc?
In a slightly less hypothetical scenario, what happens when Katie Porter, X years down the road, after cleaning up her speech and no longer saying horrible things to staffers, says that she has changed? What time limit is there before we should actually believe her?
Where do we draw the line between forgiving the sins of the past and holding behavior as signature significance? This seems like a balancing act.
The factors I’m thinking of are the age of the person, the severity of the offense, how they view said offense, and the likelihood of re-offending.Regarding age, with what we know about how the brain develops, one can be a different person after their 20s than when they are a teenager or younger, which is why the legal system is softer on youth. But even youth tend to know better than commit heinous crimes like murder, which is why they’re often tried as adults for such crimes.When a person looks back at a previous offense, if they speak of it with remorse that would indicate they’ve repented. If they make excuses or laugh it off, then they haven’t really changed.
You can also forgive someone and wish them well, but not give them the same opportunity to hurt you again. In my church, an excommunicated person can repent and be re-baptized, but it’s my understanding that certain sins mean a certain forfeiture of trust. Your hypothetical sex offender could be baptized and given full fellowship, but he would never be given a calling that involved working with children. Likewise somebody who excommunicated for stealing from the church could come back, but would never be given a calling or job working with money again. Regarding Porter, I might consider working for someone like her if she put out a statement addressing her behavior, saying she understood it was unacceptable, was working with a therapist to find better ways of dealing with difficulties, and there were no more leaked incidents for at least a year.
https://overcast.fm/+AAH-3iZ0Wtw
An excellent listen