Author Archives: eehines

This is Naïve

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Perhaps it’s even disingenuous. Roland Fryer, of Harvard University, wants to bring algorithms into college/university admissions offices under the claim that it would help reduce endless, unproductive battles over race- and class-based affirmative action.

Of course, they would do no such thing. Algorithms are nothing more than software packages written by humans as tools to speed decision-making in narrowly defined areas in accordance with equally narrowly defined criteria. Inescapably, though, those decision-making software packages and their defined criteria have embedded within them the personal biases and world views of those human programmers, software testers, and their supervisors. The databases on which those algorithms are trained also are written by humans and so themselves contain human biases and world views. On a (slightly) higher level, there’s another layer of human bias and world view: it’s humans who select the databases to be used for algorithm training.

The presence of these biases and world views is inescapable and wholly independent of the intentions of the humans involved. Even those with the purest of intentions and the strongest efforts to control the impact of their biases and world views will have those leak into their algorithms and training databases. Even efforts to balance to net zero those biases and world views by using a political and social cross-section of humans in those production efforts are subject to the same shortcomings via the selection of those humans and the definitions of what constitutes a suitable cross-section.

That all of this still could lead to strong bias in the algorithms, despite the best of intentions, is amply demonstrated by Alphabet’s overtly racist Google Gemini AI package (which Alphabet claims has been corrected, but only after the fact, not before the AI was released and in use), Robby Starbuck’s suit against Meta over that company’s AI smearing him as involved with the J6 riot and an extremist organization, and Mark Walter’s suit against OpenAI over its ChatGPT smear accusing him of embezzlement.

Colleges and universities, despite Supreme Court rulings banning consideration of race in their admissions decisions, still do that under other names and rationalizations. Using these human-written and so too-likely biased algorithms in their admissions decisions would merely give those institutions another way to disguise their admissions misbehaviors.

Blue Slips

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Blue slips are a Senate piece of paper the withholding of which enables a single Senator to block a nominee from the Senator’s State or for a position in the Senator’s State from Senate consideration for confirmation. The blue slip process is not binding on anything; it has only the force of Senate custom.

Senate Minority Leader and Progressive-Democrat Chuck Schumer (NY) has withheld his blue slips for two nominees for US Attorneys for New York’s Southern and Eastern Districts of New York. Chuck Grassley (R, IA), Judiciary Committee Chairman, says he’ll honor Schumer’s blue slips.

Why?

On what basis should a single Senator preempt and wholly block from exercise the will and judgment of 22 Senators on the Judiciary Committee? Why should a single Senator be allowed to preempt and wholly block from exercise the will and judgment of 99 other Senators in the Senate as a whole?

Because the Senator whose State the nominee is from knows that nominee best? Because the Senator for whose State position a nominee is proposed knows his State best?

Maybe that close personal knowledge springloads the particular Senator to a biased position against that nominee, whereas the Senators of a committee or the other 99 Senators as a whole are better disposed to an objective, or a more balanced political, assessment of the nominee.

It’s long past time to get rid of this archaic blue slip tool of obstruction, one abused by both parties with equal abandon.

More than that

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President Donald Trump (R) fired Progressive-Democrat EEOC commissioner Jocelyn Samuels over her refusal to follow Trump’s instructions and EOs, among other things, rescinding the Biden administration’s EEOC rules requiring employers to pay for, or to pay insurance coverage for, employee hormone and surgical treatments to resemble the opposite sex, in violation of their [employers’] religious beliefs.

Naturally, Samuels is suing over the effrontery of firing her. Her lawyers are making this argument in court:

Because the Commissioners perform predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative functions, these restrictions on the president’s removal authority are constitutional[.]

On the contrary. Because Commissioners perform predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative functions from inside the Executive Branch, they’re violating bedrock Constitutional separation of powers requirements. Those requirements are articulated in so many words in our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, which mandates legislative functions can occur only within the Legislative Branch, and again in so many words by our Constitution’s Article III, Section 1, which mandates that judicial functions can occur only within the Judicial Branch.

It really is that straightforward. Those broad authorities claimed by the EEOC are themselves wholly unconstitutional.

A Good Start

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President Donald Trump (R) has signed an Executive Order that sets up a mechanism for the US to mine and harvest minerals and metals from the ocean floor under international waters. It’s for more than just international waters, but this is the part of importance to me.

Environmentalists and legalists don’t like it, the former because they don’t want the pristine sea floors disturbed at all. It seems unimportant to them that the metals and minerals are critical to our nation’s economy and our defense establishment and that without them, we’d be unable to provide any sort of environment within which environmentalists could environmental.

The latter don’t like it because there’s no international law that regulates or even permits such mining. It’s apparently lost on these that the lack of regulation or permission means that the mining and harvesting is entirely legitimate to do.

At least one mining enterprise, The Metals Co, a Canadian firm that’s still interested in doing business with the US, has said that given the EO and a 40-ish year old American law, the Deep Sea Hard Mineral Resources Act, it can start mining in a year or so.

Given that, the first mines should be set up in the Gulf of America, and done so promptly. The second mines should be set up in the South China Sea, and done so just as promptly.

Merit-Based to Depoliticize

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The Trump administration is moving to consolidate Federal employment/termination decisions in the OMB and out of the several separate Departments and agencies.

[DOGE personnel embedded in OMB began issuing] orders that have weakened other agencies’ control over their own workforce, in many cases bringing hiring, firing, and performance evaluation—which for some employees, will soon be based primarily on execution of the president’s agenda—under the purview of OPM.

Previously,

Most of the government is made up of mid- and low-level civil servants whose jobs have historically been sheltered from political hiring decisions.

That’s the problem that badly wants fixing.

Government hiring and firing, at any level of government, needs to be politicized to an extent in order to maximize the likelihood that government employees work to carry out the policies of the incumbent President, Department Secretaries, and agency heads. This does not require a return to full-up patronage, but it does require that what constitutes an assessment of merit include how hard and how effectively that employee works to execute those policies and how well a prospective employee can be expected to do so.