Category Archives: ethics

Land Acknowledgments

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We stole your land. Sucks to be you. That’s what the Left’s precious land acknowledgments said at their core. As Kyle Smith put it in his WSJ Free Expression piece,

It’s as if a robber announced, “I took your jewelry and feel bad about it, but no way am I giving it back.”

Or, sucks to be you. Either way.

At any rate, it seems this particular bit of Leftist guilty bodice grasping (it’s not like they’re prepared to actually rend their YSL blouses) is beginning to fade to black. Some universities are quietly dropping them, and plays are making jokes of them in their preludes to their Acts 1.

Land acknowledgments, used so studiously by progressive do-gooder wannabes, were never more than expressions of contempt for the indigenes supposedly the addressees of the acknowledgments and insults to the intelligence of the rest of us, who also knew how we came into possession of lands that were variously bartered to us, taken by us, occupied by us where it was owned by no one. And especially those of us who recognized the arbitrary line in the dirt that the acknowledgments so carefully drew so as to ignore inconvenient history: that the indigenes whose land we’d allegedly taken had themselves bartered, taken, or occupied those same lands from their predecessor occupants all the way back to the original migrants coming across the land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska those 10s of thousands of years ago.

Crocodile Tears

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Journalism organizations that heretofore pooled resources in order to cover Presidential events that occurred in venues lacking space for all of the journalists have chosen to refuse to cover President Donald Trump’s (R) small-venue events in response to Trump’s decision to bar three of their number from the White House press pool over those three’s dishonest reporting on administration matters. (Notice that: the bar is over dishonest news reporting, not over opinionating and commentary, as the pressmen have been arguing, thereby demonstrating the reporting dishonesty being sanctioned.)

“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting,” the pool members, FOX News Media, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News, said in a joint statement.

That’s just it, though. CNN‘s, MS NOW‘s, and Politico‘s news reporting has long been dishonest, and they’re not alone; they’re just the most egregious. That dishonesty begins with refusing to report all of the news—all of the facts underlying a news story—which is nothing more than lying by omission. This is a technique the broadcast outlets use especially broadly (viz., spiking the Hunter Biden laptop revelations of the New York Post). The outlets’ dishonesty extends to writing/broadcasting unattributed rumors—sourced to “anonymous,” or to “officials familiar,” even to mere “persons familiar.” That leaves us in their revered public with no means to check on those sources in order to evaluate for ourselves those sources’ qualifications on the subject matter, much less their actual presence in the alleged discussions. We can’t even evaluate whether those sources actually exist or if they do whether their claims are being accurately reported.

Overarching all of that is my long-standing question. Years ago, editors required at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate anonymously sourced claims. Journalists have long since walked away from that requirement, raising the obvious question: what concrete, measurable, publicly accessible standard of journalistic integrity do today’s journalists use instead?

Journalists’ silence on that question is a loud, clear answer.

In the end, Trump is right: journalists have no intrinsic right to enter the White House. They have all kinds of sources and means of ferreting out news regarding the administration and its doings without being inside an office building, however big a deal the building might be. If nothing else, they can interact with their anonymous sources and officials/persons familiar as those folks come and go from the office building.

Silly

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To the point of idiotic. Yet, that’s the nature of the position of Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei. He has said that

he hoped Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, when they meet later this month, could reach an agreement to ban the use of AI to develop biological weapons, an area of concern for researchers and national-security officials.

Yet he also said,

“The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress. I think that’s going to be very difficult” because of the military incentives of moving AI forward[.]

Which demonstrates the idiocy of his “hope,” even though he’s oblivious to it. The People’s Republic of China has as its avowed goal replacing the United States as the world’s hegemon. It’s been rapidly expanding its military capability pursuant to that end.

Actually, the “hope” is beyond idiotic. It’s national suicide to depend on an enemy nation to honor an agreement to not use AI for weapons development. How would we enforce such an agreement? How would we even detect violations of the agreement before the outcome was used against us? AI, after all, isn’t a nuclear weapon whose testing is easily detected, and was easily detected even with the technologies of the 1950s. AI development and testing, when done by researchers who take security seriously (which Amodei’s and Sam Altman’s researchers evidently do not), is done behind firewalled and air gapped barriers. Aside from preventing AI from escaping, it also prevents outsiders from getting in to watch.

Mishmash

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In a WSJ article about the Great AI Freakout, centered on fears of a supposedly coming AI apocalypse, there was this bit, which illustrates the press’ involvement in potentiating the freakout, all gathered up in one mishmash of…error.

Opposition to the widespread network of Flock Safety AI-enabled surveillance cameras in the US took hold this summer, just as details about OpenAI’s autonomous hacking of the company Hugging Face became public. In the background was a drumbeat of pushback against data centers and worries that the technology could result in widespread job loss.

Laying all of these at the feet of AI is the article’s news writers’ disinformation (and they’re not alone in perpetrating this).

Opposition to Flock Safety’s cameras has very little to do with AI and very much to do with opposition to widespread and spreading government surveillance of us ordinary Americans.

Opposition to data centers has very little to do with AI and very much to do with the data centers’ need for water and electricity at the expense of rising water and electricity costs to us ordinary Americans and to the potential for polluting potable water. (As an aside, while those concerns were, early on, largely justified, data center designers’ and builders’ increasing emphasis on recycling the water they use and including their own power plants in the construction designs largely eliminates the basis for those concerns.)

Buildout of the data centers, further, creates a myriad of construction and ancillary jobs, and the operation of the centers still leads to increases in employment, if only modest ones.

Even the autonomous AI hacking of Hugging Face is overblown. The hacking capability itself is a legitimate concern, but the escape of the AI hackers wasn’t executed by AI so much as it was allowed by the human AI developers’ negligence in maintaining an air gap between their development facilities and the Internet.

At bottom, AI is like any other tool: highly useful when used properly, highly dangerous when used carelessly or misused deliberately.

We’re not all going to die in 10 years, as a colleague of the disgruntled, or panicky, ex-Anthropic employee howled. Far more likely, we’re going to prosper once we grunt through the transition, just as we have done during and after all our prior technology leaps.

Revisionist History and Political CYA

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Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Congress from Michigan’s 7th Congressional District William Lawrence has been busily deleting politically inconvenient social media posts he’s made in the past. The smaller problem is that his deletions are nothing other than a coward’s attempt to revise his history. It’s the smaller problem because such revisionism is widely spread and all too common, even though that in no way legitimizes the misbehavior.

The larger problem here concerns those deletions and his rationalization of them. The deletions include posts pushing for such things as

police and prison abolition, called for nationalizing fossil-fuel companies to end their production, attacked moderate Democrats, and argued for a “fundamental overhaul” of the Constitution.
…
“f**k” the nuclear-family home and calling it an “isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society,” envisioning “a world of free and open migration,” and calling to “Abolish the Senate.”

That’s about as un-American as it gets. His rationalization, though….

Lawrence said that he currently does not support defunding the police or open borders despite what his earlier posts suggested.
“Like many millennials, I’ve done a lot of thinking out loud on the internet[.]”

That’s an illustration of Lawrence’s dishonesty. He spoke from his heart in those since-deleted posts. His deletions and his rationalizations are nothing more than him covering his political behind. What concrete actions has he taken, after all, to illustrate, if not demonstrate, his alleged evolution of his thinking?