No, Dr. Gelman, Just Because You Think Your Toaster Is A Lawyer Doesn’t Mean What You Say To It Is Privileged

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Its continues to amaze me whom the New York Times will give a platform to. Take Dr. Nils Gilman (please!), a historian who “works at the intersection of technology and public policy,” whatever that means.

He has written a supposedly learned column for the Times [gift link] claiming that human beings should have something akin to attorney-client privilege when they shoot off their mouths to their chatbots. His cautionary tale:

On New Year’s Day, Jonathan Rinderknecht purportedly asked ChatGPT: “Are you at fault if a fire is [lit]because of your cigarettes?”… “Yes,” ChatGPT replied…. Rinderknecht…had previously told the chatbot how “amazing” it had felt to burn a Bible months prior….and had also asked it to create a “dystopian” painting of a crowd of poor people fleeing a forest fire while a crowd of rich people mocked them behind a gate.

Somehow the bot squealed to federal authorities. Those conversations were considered sufficient evidence of Rinderknecht’s mind, motives and intent to start a fire that, along with GPS data that put him at the scene of the initial blaze, the feds arrested and chargeed him with several criminal counts, including destruction of property by means of fire, alleging that he was responsible for a small blaze that reignited a week later to start the horrific Palisades fire.

To the author, “this disturbing development is a warning for our legal system.” You see, lonely, stupid people are using A.I. chatbots as confidants, therapists and advisers now, and the damn things cannot be trusted. “We urgently need a new form of legal protection that would safeguard most private communications between people and A.I. chatbots. I call it A.I. interaction privilege,” he pleads.

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Note To ABC News: “Live By The Bias, Die By The Bias!”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

ABC News got its just desserts on Sunday, when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made an appearance on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” to discuss with George the government shutdown and correctly characterize it as the Democrats holding the innocent Americans hostage while they try to refuse to acknowledge that they no longer run the country.

Bessent made it clear—because, you know, it’s the truth— that the Democrats’ aim was to sabotage Trump’s record going into the midterm, as he described the “human costs” of the Left’s tantrum including holiday air travel, cargo transport and supply chain disruptions. When Stephanopoulos acted as he always does, as an advocate for his political party, Bessent pointed out his hypocrisy.

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No Surprise: Prince Harry Is An Ethics Dunce, and Also an Idiot

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

On the superb Showtime series “Ray Donovan,” actor Dash Mihok played Ray’s sad, stupid, easily manipulated brother, “Bunchie.” I always thought self-exiled Prince Harry was disturbingly Bunchie-like in appearance and intellect, and he proved the latter resemblance spectacularly in recent weeks.

As I discussed in an earlier post, Prince Harry attended one of the World Series games in L.A. with he and his insufferable wife wearing blue-and-white Dodgers caps. Harry’s father, King Charles, is the official ruler of Canada, a part of the British Commonwealth, and given that the Dodgers’ opposition in baseball’s ultimate series was the Toronto Blue Jays, many Brits and Canadians were upset that a member of the royal family would publicly favor the American competitor over the Canadian one. Of course they were. Imagine the scandal if one of Trump’s sons ostentatiously cheered on a Russian athlete in the Olympics.

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Comment of the Day: “Comment of the Day: ‘Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani’”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Gee, we haven’t had a Comment of the Day on a Comment of the Day for quite while around here. This one was especially satisfying. Reacting to Extradimensional Cephalopod‘s discouraged coda to his COTD on Mayor-to-be Mamdani’s scary-stupid victory rant, Old Bill registered commentary that should have been already featured on or in every legitimate news source. Unfortunately, there are no legitimate news sources, and the fact that OB’s point has been so far almost completely ignored by the Axis media has been making me doubt my own sanity. Am I missing something? How is a President supposed to actually lower grocery prices after inflation he had no responsibility for hit 9% under his predecessor, particularly after less than a year in office? How dare the Democrats choose “affordability” as a rallying cry against Trump when the affordability crash happened on their watch? Do they think the public is that stupid? IS the public that stupid?

Please don’t tell me that you really can fool all of the people all of the time.

It was high time for Old Bill ( we once had several Bills among the commentariate, now all among the missing; maybe they are hanging out with A Friend, Curmie and Charles Green somewhere….) to have another Comment of the Day. He is among the most attentive and prolific commenters Ethics Alarms has, and we should be grateful for him. I certainly am.

Here is Old Bill’s Comment of the Day on “Comment of the Day: “Comment of the Day: ‘Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani.’” I know its mostly a quote, but it is the right quote, I hadn’t seen it, and maybe you haven’t either.

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“I was hoping from what I’d heard about Mamdani earlier that he was standing up for legitimate concerns of the people regarding the government and the economy.”

This is the “affordability” talking point Dems have surfaced and harped on over the last few months and during the off-year elections. Remember when everything was “income inequality” and everyone pretended they’d read Thomas Piketty’s book.

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Comment of the Day: “Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Extradimiensional Cephalopod gets a Comment of the Day for making a good faith effort to justify Mamdani’s absurd quote that is also the essence of totalitarian reasoning. Here it is, in reaction to “Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani...”:

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“We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

This statement is stupid enough that I consider it signature significance.

Arguably, it almost makes sense that there’s no problem too large for government to solve, but it would be more precise to assert that there’s no problem too large for people to solve (which I happen to agree with, but even I think it’s beyond the purview of a politician to officially assert something so absolutely optimistic). Government is just the process of establishing and enforcing rules if the solutions that people come up with need those rules in order to work, or to protect the solution from interference.

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“Right To Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution” and the Duty to Remember

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

So much of the nation’s cultural health and societal values rely on our fulfillment of the duty to remember. Thanks to our incompetent and unethical education system and the increasing estrangement of American history from our popular culture, recent generations share so little important historical and cultural touchpoints as Americans that effective cross-generational communication is becoming impossible. Television could be a nostrum for this dangerous phenomenon, if only finding the constructive and informative programming were not a task akin to finding, as the saying goes, a needle in needle stack.

I was thinking about this after I stumbled upon the 2022 Starz documentary, “Right to Offend: The Black Comedy Revolution,” a two-part series that I only saw because I am briefly getting Starz free on DirecTV. I missed it entirely when it was new, and have never read or heard anything about it. I haven’t seen the whole series yet either, and only watched an incomplete stretch of Episode One. But that was enough to trigger several thoughts, and to make me schedule a serious viewing of the whole thing from beginning to end.

Among those revelations,

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Breaking: The Pro Sports Gambling Mess Just Got A Lot More Ominous…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Another metaphorical shoe dropped in what promises to be a veritable centipede-level shoe shower as the major league sports leagues finally get what they asked for by greedily getting into bed with online gambling interests. Let’s’ count those shoes, shall we?

In this 2023 post, I wrote in part,

The theory is that players make so much money that they won’t be tempted to engage in the addictive activity their own teams are promoting with the general public. It is a stupid, naive and ignorant theory. Rich gamblers don’t gamble for the money. Athletes, moreover, are not generally known for their intellectual acumen, ability to resist temptation, or skill at navigating mixed and contradictory messages.

Sports leagues can’t have it both ways. They can’t make millions off of gambling, and simultaneously insist that players gambling threatens the integrity of the game. If the team owners really cared about the integrity of the game and wanted to avoid the betting and game-fixing scandals that surely are coming (baseball will have a team in Las Vegas next year, and Moe Green is licking his metaphorical chops), it would stick to the policy that sports and gambling is a volatile mixture that must be avoided.

This will not end well. You can bet on it.

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“Google, Google On The Screen, What’s The Best Ethics Blog You’ve Seen?”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The answer I got in my most recent test of where EA ranks in Google searches was discouraging if not surprising. Ethics Alarms used to pop up on the very first screen when you searched for “ethics websites” or “ethics blogs.” Now it’s buried so deep that I got tired clicking and gave up. “Nah, there’s no Big Tech ideological bias!” Yes, I do believe that the marginalizing of Ethics Alarms is substantially based on politics.

My clicking did turn up something useful and provocative, however. Feedly has a page titled The Best Ethics Blogs and Websites, though, like Donald Trump and others, it conflates popularity with quality. It ranks the top 50 “most popular” ethics blogs and websites.

I can’t figure out what its criteria are, but one way or another Ethics Alarms ranks #5 on the list. Even that honor is an apples-and-oranges conclusion. Ahead of EA is “The Ethicist,” #2, which isn’t a blog but a Sunday Times newspaper column with a website. “Everyday Ethics”(#3) and “Practical Ethics” (#1) are both UK websites, and #4 is the narrow range “Business Ethics.”

My favorite aspect of this listing however, was the description of each site’s output. “Everyday Ethics” has one article a week; “Practical Ethics” has an article a month. “The Ethicist” features two articles a week. “Business Ethics” also has just one new piece a month.

Ethics Alarms averages, the site says, 23 articles a week, behind only #50, “Corruption”( with 564 articles a week from around the world) and #12, bioethics.com, which has 35 articles a week. After these three, the most prolific ethics site has just 6 articles a week.

A Law Student Production of “Hamlet”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The Georgetown Gilbert and Sullivan Society is the now half-century old theater organization I inadvertently spawned as a first year law student (before they were called “1Ls”) at Georgetown University Law Center. Right now, the group, which calls itself “The only theater group with its own law school,” is nearing an all-time peak in student participation, interest and talent, making this old lawyer-theater guy proud and happy indeed.

Last night I attended closing night of the group’s ambitious, full production of “Hamlet,” which most community theater groups wouldn’t dare attempt. It was a modern dress version (period set “Hamlet’s” are the exception rather than the rule and have been for decades) with an “emo” concept that worked just fine. The student director staged with skill and intelligence, the casting was spot on, and it even gave me some new insights into the work despite having see the play too many times to list. Yes, a woman played the Danish prince, but the 1L actress was excellent, and female Hamlets first appeared in 1899, when the great Sarah Bernhardt played the role.

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Sunday Morning Ethics Thoughts…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I’m having trouble waking up this morning sufficiently to write a full post, so I’m going to break form and just issue some random observations:

One reason I suspended the tradition here of giving out year-end ethics awards was that “Most Unethical Profession” never changed. It was always a tie between educators and journalists, and both their race to the bottom.. In the post-debacle analyses of Zohran Mandani’s election as mayor, two themes keep surfacing. One is that young college-educated voters strongly favored Mamdani while young non-college grads did not. “It’s almost as if going to college now makes people stupid,” a guest on Fox News said this morning. Yes, graduating from college without learning that communism never works and gets people killed is evidence of a failed educational system. President Trump’s efforts to force universities to eschew progressive indoctrination for actual education is one of the most important and crucial aspects of his Presidency. Regarding our “enemy of the people” news media, Prof. Glenn Reynolds wrote today of Mamdani, “He’s an ignorant, angry leftist, who believes what ignorant, angry leftists always believe. The press should have been pointing this out all along. I mean, the leftist press, but they don’t do this kind of thing to leftists.” Bingo! The biased and unethical educators are making our rising generations stupid and ignorant, and our biased and unethical news media is aiding and abetting by refusing to enlighten them.

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I sure wish Curmie, the erudite, once open-minded progressive-ish columnist here would shake off his Trump Derangement and return to offer EA readers perspective on issues like the one above. He would be welcomed with open arms. I continue to be amazed at the stuff he posts on social media. Curmie is trapped in the same state of mind as Jimmy Kimmel’s wife (pity her!) who says that she can’t abide being around family members who voted for President Trump.

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