You should know the name Geoffrey Hinton by now. To the extent that any one scientist is credited with the emergence of artificial intelligence, he’s it. He was among the winners of the prestigious Turing Prize for his break-through in artificial neural networks, and his discoveries were crucial in the development of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) software today like Chat GPT and Google’s Bard. He spent 50 years developing the technology, the last 10 pf which working on AI at Google before he quit in 2023. His reason: he was alarmed at the lack of sufficient safety measures to ensure that AI technology doesn’t do more harm than good.
And yet, as revealed in a recent interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Hinton still believes that his work to bring AI to artificial life was time well-spent, that his baby was worth nurturing because of its potential benefits to humanity, and that—-get this—all we have to do is, for the first time in the history of mankind, predict the dangers, risks and looming unintended consequences of an emerging new technology, get everything right the first time, not make any mistakes, not be blindly reckless in applying it, and avoid the kind of genie-out-of-the-bottle catastrophes that world has experienced (and is experiencing!) over and over again.
I guess it’s that time on a sweltering Friday afternoon that I am not quite up to finishing any of the more substantive posts on the runway, and only feel like tackling the stupid stuff. (These are the posts long-time critic/commenter Neil Dorr prefers. This one’s for you, Neil!)
Tara Berry just set the Guinness Book of Records record for “‘most tattoos of the same musician on the body.” She has 18. ( The former record-holder has 15 portraits of Eminem tattooed on her body.) A big Madonna fan from the beginning of The Material Girls’ pop-culture ascent in 1983 ,Tara only started her Madonna tattoo collection in 2016 when she was looking for fans who had Madonna’s image tattooed on their bodies to feature in a video. I guess she’s suggestive (or <cough> or something): she had an overwhelming urge to get her own Madonna tattoo. Once she started, she couldn’t stop.
Well, bless her heart. It’s her skin and her body: this is one example of “choice” that doesn’t hurt anybody except the chooser. Hey, if she wants to go for 20, or 50, I won’t criticize.
I do hear a bit of a ping one of my smaller ethics alarms about the Guinness Book of Records. Why does it even have a record in this category? I’ve touched on the issue in the past: the GBOR seeds the needs of narcissists and sad, insecure people searching for some level of fame or notoriety with records that can only be set or sought with some danger to the aspiring record-setter. There were “the Biking Vogels,” the various children endangered by their parents to have them be the “youngest” to achieve some pointless and dangerous goal, and my personal favorite, Sheyla Hershey, who ended up with size M breasts to set the Guinness record for “largest breast implants.” I concluded that 2010 post by stating that it was unethical for Guinness to publish “records” that can only be achieved by risking long-term harm.
And yet…blaming Guinness for Tara Barry mutilating her body is like blaming hip-hop records and violent TV shows or movies for people doing in reality what is only sung about or shown on a screen. It was her choice, albeit a crazy one. Tara is supposedly an “artist,” so maybe being festooned with pictures of a washed-up and aging pop-star won’t harm her at all, as long as she doesn’t seek employment at a school or a bank. Or with me.
As I said, that ethics alarm isn’t pinging very loudly. The GBOR doesn’t make anyone do anything. But the alarm has been pinging, however faintly, for 13 years.
“When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”
That, in a nutshell, is the holding in United States v. Rahimi, the SCOTUS decision handed down this morning.
I’m a hardliner regarding “pre-crime,” and I am unalterably opposed to measures removing citizens’ rights without a finding of guilt in a criminal prosecution. However, Justice Roberts’ majority opinion is well-reasoned and carefully limited, with “temporary” being the key word. I also think it is crafted in such a way that so-called “red flag” laws are not going to be able to use this case as precedent to survive constitutional challenges. I have not yet read all of the concurrences, of which there are many.
What is perhaps more significant than the decision itself was the vote: 8-1 in favor of the law in question. (Anyone who can’t guess who the lone dissenter was, as well as the basis for his dissent, has not been paying attention.) This, along with the less consequential decisions handed down yesterday, powerfully counters the false Democratic narrative that the current Supreme Court is an ideologically biased body unalterably allied with the far right, as three heroic and caring progressive women futilely battle for the soul of the nation.
This unethical framing has been concocted to justify an assault on the legitimacy on the Court and its decisions, all as part of the “Stop Trump or it will be the end of democracy!” campaign. In reality, the characterization is garbage, and has always been garbage. The lie is still effective because the percentage of the public that reads SCOTUS decisions, never mind understands them, can reliably be estimated to be in single digits.
None of yesterday’s decisions split along the supposedly frozen-in-granite 6-3 blocs, and today’s decision infuriating Second Amendment absolutists even had the hated Justice Alito voting with the majority.
Of course, I suppose he should be expected to favor red flag laws….
See if you can make any sense of things, ethically of course.
Everywhere I’m looking today, I see insanity and chaos. Conservative activist Scott Presler is being applauded for saying,”If every Christian voted, we would never lose another Presidential election ever,” noting that many evangelicals are not even registered to vote. This same statement could be made about almost any group imaginable: it’s not news, it’s not remarkable, its not perceptive, and its not useful.
Then, in a “Great Stupid” incident that shocked even me, Fani Willis toy-boy Nathan Wadeappeared on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” in its feature “Choppin’ It Up With ‘Quon,” where he was interviewed by satirist Marlon Wayans playing ‘Quon. (The character Quon has been described as a “Hip-hop Borat.”) Yeah, this will help the case that he was hired to help Willis prosecute Donald Trump on his merits as a serious, qualified lawyer! Wade apparently thought he could defend his sexual relationship with Willis in the appearance as Wayans, who is approximately 6.78 times smarter than Wade, used his improvisational talents to make Wade look like the idiot he is.
“How can you not hit that?! How can you not?!” Wayans/Quon declared, as Wade laughed. “We spending that much time together, we doing everything, we might as well!” Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University College of Law, tweeted, “This is gross. Nathan Wade should be embarrassed. And Fani Willis, whatever her mistakes, deserves better than this. As do the people of Fulton County.”
How does Willis “deserve better” if she’s the one who hired Wade, almost certainly sabotaged her own dubious prosecution of Trump by mixing her prosecution duties with nookie, and, like Wade, has continued to argue that using a high-profile case for personal benefit is no big deal? How does Fulton County “deserve better” if its voters elected someone that incompetent?
Louisiana became the first state to mandate that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom. Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, showing poor judgments and no spine, signed this foolishness into law. Louisiana is the first sate to do this because no others state is this stupid, apparently. The law is obviously, flagrantly unconstitutional, a bright-line First Amendment violation. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other organizations are going to sue, they will win, and a lot of time and money will be wasted so Louisiana Republicans can grandstand.
Brilliant! The Democrats are basing their 2024 election hopes on painting Republicans as anti-democratic fanatics who would just love to live in a theocracy, so the GOP does this.
An exchange between Republican Louisiana state Rep. Lauren Ventrella and CNN host Boris Sanchez illustrated just how dim-witted the Louisiana GOP’s reasoning is—and Sanchez isn’t exactly Clarence Darrow; a sharper interviewer could have made metaphorical mincemeat out of Ventrella’s lame arguments.
Ventrella began by stating that faith, as represented by the Ten Commandments, are a significant historical component to the founding of the U.S. OK, but that’s not the issue. If schools are going to teach that, the lesson has to be faith-neutral, and using the central religious code of Christianity and Judaism as a centerpiece isn’t neutral.
“Sure, but do you also recognize that the Constitution of this country, its founding document, doesn’t include the word God or Jesus or Christianity and that’s for a reason and that’s because the founding fathers founded this country as a secular one,” Sanchez said. “You don’t see that?”
Ugh. Stay on point, Boris! All that matters is that the Supreme Court has held emphatically that the Constitution forbids the state from dictating religious beliefs. Where the line should be drawn is still a live question, but that the Ten Commandments are over that line is not.
“Boris, I bet you CNN pays you a lot of money. I bet you got a lot of dollar bills in that wallet,” Ventrella replied. Ugh again. She’s after the old “In God We Trust” motto. This is like the open border activists who cite the poem on the Statue of Liberty as evidence of a national policy. Both the motto and the poem are irrelevant.
“What does this have to do with the network that I work for or what I’m getting paid?” Sanchez asked. “Don’t make this about that, answer that question. Why did the founding fathers not include God in the Constitution if they wanted this country to be the way that you see it?”
Boris apparently didn’t see the silly motto argument coming. Well, you know: CNN.
“In God We Trust. We’ll make it about me. I’ve got a dollar bill in my wallet. In God We Trust is written on that dollar. It is not forcing anybody to believe one viewpoint, it’s merely posting a historical reference on the wall for students to read and interpret it if they choose,” Ventrella explained, making no sense. What is stamped on money isn’t the equivalent of highlighting a particular religion in schools. Sanchez then stated the obvious, that the Ten Commandments are more than merely “historical” and obviously advance specific religious beliefs. Of course, and Ventrella and her ilk know this, which is why the party wants the Ten Commandment in the classes rather than the Magna Carta. Her argument is completely disingenuous. And stupid.
“This is a very valuable document. Look, this nation has gotten out of hand with crime, with the bad, negative things that are going on. Why is it so preposterous that we would want our students to have the option to have some good principles instilled in them? If they don’t hear it at home, let them read it in the classroom,” she said. “Which is different than the Mayflower Compact which is mentioned in the document as well. I don’t understand why this is so preposterous in that litigation is being threatened. It doesn’t scare us in the state of Louisiana, we say bring it on.”
Wow. What a moronic rant. Has she read the Ten Commandments? The first one tells readers not to have any other god, and the next three are purely religious edicts. That’s 40%! A poster stating the messages of the next six commandments would be harmless and constitutional, but this law’s intent is promoting juddeo-Christian religious beliefs, despite Ventralla’s posturing
“Because if someone has a home in which they choose to believe something different, which is welcome in this country. It’s literally why people fled to come here to found this country to begin with. Then they should be allowed to. And it’s not really an option if you’re requiring it to be put up in the wall of the classroom,” Sanchez said. To this, Ventrella shrugged that students, parents and teachers who don’t share the “religious views” of the Ten Commandments should just avoid looking at it.
Ooooh, good one, Lauren.
The CNN host compared the Ten Commandments poster to hanging up the Five Pillars of Islam in public school classrooms. That is an excellent analogy, and, of course, all the state rep could do was babble. “This is not about the Five Pillars of Islam. This bill specifically states the Ten Commandments. It is a historical document …” Boris cut her off, since she was ducking the issue or, just as likely, too dumb to comprehend it.
“Sure, but I’m presenting you with a hypothetical that would help you put yourself in the shoes of someone you may not understand and their point of view,” he said. “How would you feel if you walked into a classroom and something you didn’t believe in was required to be on the wall? You can answer that question.” Ventella had no answer, because, again, she knows the objective of the law is religious indoctrination.
“I appreciate you, Boris. I cannot sit here and gather and fathom … you could give me a thousand hypotheticals. But again, this specific bill applies to this specific text. The Quran, or Islam, that is a very broad statement. We’re specifically talking about a limited text, on mind you, a piece of paper that’s not much bigger than a legal sheet of paper. Some kids might even need a magnifying glass to read all of this. This is not so preposterous that we’re somehow sanctioning and forcing religion down people’s throats. I’ve heard the comments and it’s just ridiculous,” Ventrella answered. Translation: “Huminahuminahumina…” She’s got nothing.
She also kept calling the Ten Commandments “historical.” Inigo Montoya has an observation:
There is no justification for calling the Ten Commandments a “historical” document. There is no historical evidence that Moses and the Ten Commandments as stone tablets ever existed, or that the Exodus occurred. These are religious stories, and Moses has the same “historical” status as Adam and Eve, Noah, and other Old Testament figures. A school even calling them “historical” is a religious assertion.
Neither the Constitution, nor precedent, not common sense backs her “it isn’t what it is” blather. Sadly, the conservative media immediately fell into line defending the law, wounding their own credibility in the process. Newsbusters:
This story is ultimately less about the actual Ten Commandments than about what they represent in this particular instance: a challenge to the left’s monopoly on what can be taught in schools. Said differently, Louisiana challenges the (secular) religious orthodoxies of the public education system as run by left-wing administrators in unison with the teachers’ unions…. The media have no problem with kindergarteners being taught on gender, or on third and fourth-graders having access to graphic sexual materials in school libraries. But the Ten Commandments are a bridge too far.
One final Ugh. The story is about the Ten Commandments, and Louisiana’s transparent effort to force a religious code on students in violation of the Establishment Clause. There’s nothing in the Constitution prohibiting public school indoctrination regarding sex. There is very clear prohibition against public schools promoting specific religions.
How ironic! A post spawned by a banned trolling commenter who called your host a “Trump-supporting fascist” generated excellent commentary and two outstanding Comments of the Day. Thus a disruptive and unethical visitor here actually helped to enrich the discussion and enlighten participants. I know I learned some things from Sarah B.’s excellent Comment of the Day on the post, the first of the two earning the honor.
While I cannot answer for lawyers, there are plenty of Trump deranged engineers, and we sure get trained in logic, critical-thinking, and evaluation of consequences of our thought processes. This training does not inoculate us from our own biases. Indeed, biases manage to short circuit the training.
Jack is fond of saying biases make us stupid, and certainly today’s society proves it. I cannot tell you how frustrated I get when a trained engineer tells me that electric cars will solve all our problems. No one with the training I went through should say that electric cars are a universal solution. They should be able to calculate life cycle pollution, understand vehicle weight issues with roadways, realize the limitations of battery technology, mineral scarcity, and electrical grid load. However, by the time we get our intensive training in logic, critical thinking, and more, we have also been inundated in “global climate change” mass hysteria. The biases I saw my fellows come out with was amazing, even as I was standing there with the damn numbers.
Jennifer Sey, once a competitive gymnast on the U.S. Women’s Olympic team, has launched a new clothing line focused on the threat to women’s sports by the woke-driven incursion of “transitioned” or “transitioning” biological males.
Today I'm launching my own clothing brand. It's the only athletic brand to stand up for female athletes and the protection of women's sports.
Stephen Colbert is really is beneath contempt. His late night show proudly promoted the guest appearance of Anthony Fauci last week, which is roughly the equivalent of cheering for the Sackler family. This is one of the subtle ways—not so subtle, really—that the media pimps for Democrats and the party’s agenda (“The Government knows best, proles!”) Colbert only has guests that align with the Axis; Nancy Pelosi was another recent guest, and the producers obviously have no interest in presenting anyone who isn’t fully part of the “team.” They also don’t have any interest in entertaining audience members who, having paid attention and having not been brainwashed, know the likes of Pelosi and Fauci for what they are.
Fauci, however, is a far more nauseating and unforgivable object of fawning idolatry than even Pelosi. He’s a certifiable, no-contest ethics villain: incompetent, irresponsible, dishonest, hypocritical, an abuser of power, position and influence, and the perfect poster boy for the fake “Trust the science!” mantra that the Left has weaponized for political gain.
Regular readers here know about both my passion for baseball and my disgust with how many games are determined by obviously wrong home plate calls on balls and strikes. Statistics purportedly show that umpires as a group are correct with their ball/strike edicts about 93% of the time, representing a significant improvement since electronic pitch-tracking was instituted in 2008. What explains the improvement? That’s simple: umpires started bearing down once they knew that their mistakes could be recorded and compiled. In 2008, strikes were called correctly about 84% of the time, which, as someone who has watched too many games to count, surprises me not at all.
Even 93% is unacceptable. It means that there is a wrong call once every 3.6 plate appearances, and any one of those mistakes could change the game’s outcome. Usually it’s impossible to tell when it has, because the missed call was part of a chaos-driven sequence diverging from the chain of events that may have flowed from the right call in ways that can’t possibly be determined after the fact. Sometimes it is obvious, as in several games I’ve seen this season. An umpire calls what was clearly strike three a ball, and the lucky batter hits a home run on the next pitch.
Before every game was televised with slo-mo technology and replays, this didn’t hurt the game or the perception of its integrity because there was no record of the mistakes. (Sometimes it wasn’t even a mistake: umpires would punish batters for complaining about their pitch-calling by deliberately declaring them out on strikes on pitches outside the strike zone.) Now, however, a missed strike call that determines a game is both infuriating and inexcusable. As with bad out calls on the bases and missed home run calls, the technology exists to fix the problem.
Baseball only installed a replay challenge system after the worst scenario for a missed call: a perfect game—no hits, runs or base-runners—was wiped out by a terrible safe call at first on what should have been the last out of the game. The game was on national TV; the missed call was indisputable. That clinched it, and a replay challenge system was quickly instituted. I long assumed that robo-umps would only be instituted after an obviously terrible strike call changed the course of a World Series or play-off game, embarrassing Major League Baseball. For once, the sport isn’t waiting for that horse to leave before fixing the barn door. It has been testing an automated balls and strikes system (ABS) in the minor leagues for several years now. Good. That means that some kind of automated ball and strike system is inevitable.
[This is Jack:I have to insert an introduction here. Curmie’s headline is fine, but it would come under the Ethics Alarms “Is We Getting Dumber?” or “Tales of the Great Stupid” banners if I had composed it. What he is describing is a culture-wide phenomenon that is far more insidious than its effects on scholarly book reviews alone. I also want to salute Curmie for slyly paying homage in his section about typos to one of my own most common and annoying typos. I know it was no coincidence.]
I published my first book review in an academic journal in 1991. In all, I’ve written about 30 reviews on a wide range of topics for about a dozen different publications. In some cases, I was only marginally qualified in the subdiscipline in question. In others, especially more recently, I’ve been a legitimate authority, as well as being a full Professor (or Professor emeritus) rather than a grad student or rather green Assistant Professor.
The process has changed significantly in recent years, the biggest change being the increased level of editorial scrutiny. A generation or more ago, I’d send in a review and it would be printed as written. That was back when I was an early-career scholar, at one point even without a terminal degree, often writing about topics on the periphery of my interests and expertise. My most recent reviews, when I was a senior scholar writing about subjects in my proverbial wheelhouse, went through three or four drafts before they were deemed publishable. Note: I didn’t become more ignorant or a worse writer in the interim.
Some of the changes came indirectly, no doubt, from the publishers rather than the editors: I received the same stupid comment—to include the chapter number rather than a descriptor like “longest” or “most interesting”—from book review editors from two different journals published by the same firm. Actually, one of those “corrections” wasn’t from the book review editor himself, but was a snarky comment from his grad assistant. You can imagine how much I appreciated being condescended to by a grad student. Other changes were just kind of dumb: one editor insisted that I change “whereas” to “while” (“whereas” was the better term).
But these are the kind of revisions at which one just shakes one’s head and shrugs. The ones that actually affect the argument are far more problematic. One author was writing about the production of a play by a female playwright from the 1950s. There’s no video footage (of course), and if literally anyone who saw that production is still alive, I think we could forgive them for not remembering many details. But the author decried the (alleged) sexism of the male newspaper reviewers who weren’t impressed with the production. Nothing they said, or at least nothing the author quoted, struck me as anything but a negative response to a poor performance.
Remember, they’re not talking about the play as written, but as performed, so the fact that the text isn’t bad (I’ve read it) doesn’t render the criticism of the acting and directing invalid. I said that in what amounted to my first draft, but was told that I needed to say that the allegations of sexism could have been true (well, duh!), but weren’t necessarily. In my view, declaring suspicions as fact, even if there’s some supporting evidence, might cut it as a blog piece, but it isn’t scholarship. But whatever…
In another review I suggested that the mere fact that male dramatists wrote plays with specific actresses—their “muses”—in mind for the leading roles doesn’t mean that those women should share authorship credit any more than Richard Burbage should get co-authorship credit for Shakespeare’s plays. I was ultimately able to make that point, but in a watered-down version.
More recently, I was asked to “tone down” a comment that several of the authors in what purported to be an interdisciplinary collection of essays were so committed to discipline-specific jargon, incredibly complex sentences, and sesquipedalian articulations (see what I did there?) that readers, even those well-versed in the subject matter—me, for example—would find those chapters unreasonably difficult read, and might be tempted to conclude that the authors were more interested in strutting their intellectuality than in enlightening the reader.
I stand by the analysis, but the editor was probably right to ask me to temper the cynicism. I did so, but I kept the rest in a slightly revised version. She seemed pleased, and told me she’d sent it off to press. When it appeared in print, only the comment about jargon remained… and the verb wasn’t changed from plural to singular. Sigh.
Perhaps the most telling episode was when I said that a book was extremely poorly edited and proofread. I’ve never written a book, but I have published several chapters in collections of scholarly essays. The process varies a little from publisher to publisher, but for one recent chapter I sent a draft to the book editor, who made editorial suggestions and proofread, and sent it back to me. I approved some of the changes he suggested and made my case for not changing other parts of the essay. After about three drafts, we both pronounced ourselves satisfied, and the essay went off to the series editor, who requested a couple of very minor changes. And then it went to the publisher. And then the professional proofreader. And then back to the publisher. And then back to me. At least five different people proofread that chapter, some of us several times.
It’s still almost inevitable that some typo will still sneak by. Of course, some publishers will cheat and rely on spellcheck, sometimes without even checking the final product. I once encountered a textbook that intended to reference the 19th century playwrights Henri Becque and Eugène Brieux, but rendered their surnames as Bisque and Brie—a nice lunch, perhaps, but hardly important dramatists.
But this book, published by a prominent academic press, was ridiculous. There were four and five typos on a single page, inconsistent formatting so it was impossible to tell when quoted material began and ended, at least two (that I caught) glaring malapropisms, and a number of instances of sentences or paragraphs so convoluted it was literally impossible to tell what was intended. We’re not talking “teh” for “the” or accidentally omitting the “l” in “public,” here.
I was insistent on making the point that the book was not yet ready to be published. A lot of the scholarship was really excellent, but the volume read like a first draft, neither edited nor proofread. Finally, the book review editor had to get permission from the journal’s editor-in-chief (!) for me to go ahead with that commentary.
So what’s going on, here? I can offer no firm conclusions, only speculations… “conjectures,” to coin a phrase.
