Category Archives: ethics

No More Thinking Outside the Box

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It’s bad enough that targeted advertising, including—but not at all limited to—algorithm-driven targeting, limits our choices when we go looking for products or services. That targeted advertising limits us to our “preferences” that advertisers create from our early choices and hinders our ability to see things beyond those early decisions, hinders our natural tendency to evolve our actual preferences as time, circumstance, and age progress. Those actually are weak hinderances, though.

Far more serious is this bit about the coming AI “advances,” as expressed in a Wall Street Journal article:

Agents will understand context, learn your preferences, and interact with you and other software to get stuff done: booking travel, ordering food, shopping for those new sneakers, etc.

No, I don’t need AI, nor any other software package, especially one of high sophistication and capability, acting for me on the preferences it thinks I have. I don’t need AI straitjacketing me in my thinking, keeping me within the bounds it thinks it’s identified based on those preferences.

Years ago, a bookseller centralized its inventory management system and limited all of its branches to carrying the inventory that the central office decided those branch customers customarily bought. Which limited what the branches had available to buy regardless of what the customers wanted. As a result, the customers didn’t buy, so the books weren’t available, so customers couldn’t buy—even as their tastes and interests changed, even as an individual store’s customer base itself changed. Sales fell, franchises folded, and bookseller itself folded.

I don’t need AI similarly limiting me to what I customarily (it thinks) think or want; I don’t even want its “suggestions” regarding what that software says might interest me. I prefer being able to think outside the box occasionally. Nor am I interested in wasting time and resources acting randomly just to break the AI’s hold.

“Agents” can help me solve difficult problems, but I’ll be the one identifying the problems to be solved, and I’ll be the one choosing among the solutions, most especially including the solutions I work out independently of that…help.

Spare me the convenience. It’s too limiting, and that’s no benefit. It’s not even convenient.

Congressional Term Limits?

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Sure, but only sort of.

Texas Republican Congresswoman Kay Granger has been absent from duty in Congress since last July. The discovery of that shirking (or coverup of disability) is leading to renewed calls for term limits for Congressmen. For instance,

Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee on Sunday…claimed Granger’s absence made a “compelling case” for term limits….

Yes and no. I remain adamantly opposed to Government dictating to us, in anything resembling absolute terms, who we might or might not choose to represent us in that government. I am just as adamantly opposed to one generation of Americans attempting to dictate to future generations of Americans who they might or might not choose to represent them in government.

Rather than hard and absolute limits, Article V of our erstwhile Articles of Convention has the optimal application of term limits.

…no person shall be capable of being a delegate [to Congress] for more than three years in any term of six years….

That Congress was a unicameral body, but that relative limit is easily adaptable to our bicameral Congress. It would be easy enough, too (as easily as enacting any Constitutional Amendment…), to add the requirement that no Congressman, during a period of non-Congressional service, can serve on any government staff, whether for pay or pro bono, nor can such a one work for or with any government lobbyist during that period.

Separate from that, and additional to it, former Department of Education Press Secretary Angela Morabito:

WOW: Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX), who hasn’t voted on a bill in six months, has been living in a nursing home in secret. Records show she has a staff of 25. If any of them knew—and it would be hard not to know—they are complicit[.]

Granger’s, or her staffers’, concealment of her incapacity and absence from Congress should suffer serious consequences from their deception. Those consequences should begin with Granger forfeiting her Congressional pension, if she was/is of sound mind during this period, and should include every single one of her staffers forfeiting any pension they might have accrued along with the barring of all them, including unpaid staffers in DC or in her district, from Federal and Texas government service for life.

That group openly and dishonorably and in a most unamerican fashion deprived Granger’s constituents of their Congressional representation for a quarter of the just concluding Congressional session.

Food Stamps and Consumer Choice

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A Wall Street Journal article on soda companies and their lobbying efforts to keep their drinks eligible for the Federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and related programs closed with this bit:

The Republican Party has long been divided over policing what people on food stamps eat. Some GOP lawmakers favor consumer choice.

For instance, Congressman Frank Lucas (R, OK), of the House Agriculture Committee:

I believe in educating consumers on what is in their best interest. I’ve always had a hard time telling people what they cannot have.

I agree with Lucas regarding Government dictating to consumers what they can—or must—buy and what they cannot or must not buy. However, Lucas and his ilk need to better understand who the consumer is in the present case.

The consumer in the milieu of welfare programs like SNAP is not the welfare recipient. That person merely is picking out welfare package handouts. The consumer, the one who’s actually doing the buying, or not, of those package contents, is us taxpayers. We’re the ones paying for—buying—the food stamp products, in the particular case, with our tax remittals. That food stamp recipients can pick and choose among the variety of food packages we purchase for them in no way alters this fundamental fact.

It’s absolutely the case that we should be the ones deciding what we buy with our tax money, what we buy for inclusion in those package varieties, not the recipients of our welfare packages.

Schools in Contempt of Court

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Despite a variety of court rulings, including from the Supreme Court, far too many still schools are using race and gender in their admission standards and for other performance criteria metrics.

The Equal Protection Project, founded and led by Cornell professor William Jacobson, has released a deep-dive report on the prevalence of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training at Ivy League universities.
In his comprehensive report, Poison Ivies: DEI and the Downfall of the Ivy League, Jacobson examines programs the eight Ivy League institutions use and require for students.

Jacobson:

The review of Ivy League practices by our CriticalRace.org project reflects substantial efforts by Ivy League schools to purport to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, while maintaining work-arounds and DEI practices that continue the obsession with racial identities

One set of TL;DR findings, focused on our oh-so-cool Ivy League schools, as summarized by Fox News:

  • Four require DEI training in student orientation programs (Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale)
  • Six require faculty or staff DEI training in some capacity (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Princeton, and Yale)
  • All eight have DEI offices at the institutional and/or department level
  • Five have a strategic plan devoted to DEI or anti-racism (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Yale)
  • All eight have DEI or CRT (critical race theory) topics in classes and curricula
  • All eight have bias reporting systems

For those schools—not just the Ivy Leaguers; the report highlights 26 schools—so evidently contemptuous of court rulings, the Federal government should cut off all Federal funds to those schools and reduce funds transfers to the States in the amount of their own continued funding for those schools until the schools cure their functional contempt of court status by complying with the rulings rather than weasel-wording their way around them.

Pick One

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section wrote that FBI Director Christopher Wray is a good man, but that he was wrong for the job he had as Director.

Stipulated, arguendo, the first part.

Then, though, he closed with this:

Mr Wray should have been the insider who reformed the FBI and restored it to its former place of respect. Having missed that chance, the bureau may now be treated as another institution in need of disruption and a significant reset. This may or may not work out well for our nation’s premier law-enforcement agency.

An agency that is an institution in need of disruption and a significant reset due to its senior leadership’s involvement in interfering with the election of a politician of whom they personally disdained, as the letter-writer noted, cannot possibly be a premier law-enforcement agency.

On the contrary, the FBI is an agency badly wanting a thorough and widespread purge of upper and senior management or an outright disbandment and replacement with an entirely new agency completely devoid of the FBI’s existing upper and senior management personnel.