Category Archives: culture

Pressmen and Press Secretaries

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Katie Zacharia was appointed President Donald Trump’s (R) White Press Secretary last week. Immediately the press began hounding her over her use of the term “lawyer” to describe a part of her history, even as many of those same pressmen tacitly acknowledged that the beef was a minor quibble: By some definitions, the term lawyer can also mean someone who graduated law school.

The press’ decision to devote so much energy to conducting opposition research on and publishing dirt, however trivial, about a press secretary or to hounding her at press conferences rather than focusing on the news of the day and the President’s actions demonstrates pretty conclusively just how intellectually and journalistically bankrupt are members of the press.

Last Friday, Zacharia was out as White House Press Secretary. Almost as unfortunate as the press’ bankruptcy is the decision by Trump and Zacharia to allow her to be hounded out of her job by the baying press.

School Fraternities and Sororities

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In their WSJ article regarding Fraternities at Cornell University and school management teams’ efforts to “reign them in,” the news writers had this remark:

…fraternities that are both a disproportionate source of trouble and a fixture of campus life.

Neither of those need to be. Schools have no intrinsic obligation to host fraternities or sororities, and neither fraternities nor sororities have any intrinsic right to a presence on campus. It’s completely straightforward, if requiring more courage than school managers seem to possess, to ban these organizations altogether and thereby eliminate that particular disproportionate source of trouble.

Of course, that would move the misbehavers that so heavily populate and take advantage of those fundamentally insular organizations into the school’s dormitories or to off campus locations, including to fraternity and sorority houses that might set up off campus. Frat and srat houses, after all, collect a fair amount of dollars in the form of dues and donations, so they’re likely to hang around nearby, never minding the troublemakers in their membership.

Dormitories, though, are much easier to monitor, inspect, and control, than are these houses. Off campus, on the other hand, gives the city and State police direct access and better ability to deal with the criminal behavior that’s all too common in frat and srat houses. The authorities possessed by campus police are severely limited by those too timid school…administrators.

If a fraternity or sorority wants onto a school’s campus, let it demonstrate its worthiness first with several years of trouble free operation off campus and on other schools’ campuses.

Fixing Itself

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A question arises: can France fix itself so it can fix its economy so it can get its debt under control and on a downward path to a sensible level?

That answer depends on whether it can fix its national method for settling questions and the disputes that give rise to those questions.

A free democracy has one primary method for settling national questions and disputes: debate, argument, and then voting for one or another of the politicians the people want to represent them and to lead the government, or voting against another or one of those politicians.

France is unique in that it has a second method of settling national questions and disputes. This method has been in prominent use since the months and days leading into the Revolution of 1793: rioting in the streets, destroying businesses, attacking police personnel. Over the course of the Fifth Republic, extant since the 1950s, the technique of rioting and destruction has become elevated to the same level as voting. That elevation has resulted from the French government’s inability to quell the rioting and to restore order—an inability that results, not from a true lack of capacity, but from utter cowardice on the part of the men and women in charge of the government, especially the President, Prime Minister, and members of the National Assembly and the Senate.

So far, the rioters have succeeded in intimidating the government personnel into backing down and giving them what they demand, however bad for the nation as a whole over any timeframe beyond tomorrow. See the Yellow Vests riots of 2020 and the current “student” and “teacher” riots today.

Macron’s government men and women, including Macon himself, were intimidated into significant watering down of economic reforms that Yellow Vesters disapproved, and his government today is on the verge of giving prima donna pupils and (union) teachers whatever they want.

The answer to the question, then, at least for what France is confronting for its future, is…No.

What’s In A Name?

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Lately, cutesy names seem to have become more important than the work being done under those labels. “Digital ninja.” “Storyteller.” (At least today’s cutesy pluses up the work. Yesterday’s cutesy deprecated it: “Guy that operates the other seat’s equipment.” “Guy in back.”)

Now we’re getting “marketing engineer” in the world of AI. James Cadwallader, Co-Founder of Profound:

This person is going to be part builder—meaning they’re able to understand this technology and build and deploy and tinker with these agents—but part marketer, in that they’re very human and they have good taste and judgment[.]

So do used car salesmen need to understand their product and display taste and judgment. And salesmen and -women in any department store. No one there, though, dilutes the useful meaning of “engineer”—a person who actually designs and then carries out the execution of some thing—by attaching it to a job title.

So, what’s in a name? In this case, not much. A marketer is still a salesman, no matter his title. How he smells depends on what he does, too, not how he’s called.

Own the work, my man, and let the names and titles fall where they may.

AI Development and Testing, and Humans

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OpenAI has decided not to release its latest iteration of ChatGPT, which it had labeled GTP 6.1 Astra. The company had safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing.

The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

But.

GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: it wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

This tale demonstrates pretty conclusively the criticality of humans having controlling involvement in AI sandbox construction, isolation, and enforcement and in testing. It also demonstrates the importance of corporate culture—i.e., corporate human managers—in creating and then enforcing the internal culture that supports and drives dedication to that human control of and involvement in development and testing.

It also proves that we humans are up to the task if we care enough about our responsibilities—closely akin to Madison’s and Franklin’s remarks that our republic requires a moral, virtuous people in order to survive.