Category: Deep Thoughts

If You Don’t Use It…

Deep Thoughts, Technology

…of course you’re going to lose it.  This post on Musk-X triggered a train of thought from me:

Just had a fascinating lunch with a 22-year-old Stanford grad. Smart kid. Perfect resume. Something felt off though. He kept pausing mid-sentence, searching for words. Not complex words – basic ones. Like his brain was buffering. Finally asked if he was okay. His response floored me.

“Sometimes I forget words now. I’m so used to having ChatGPT complete my thoughts that when it’s not there, my brain feels… slower.”

He’d been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain. And now his internal one was getting weaker.

This concerns me, because it’s been an ongoing topic of conversation between the Son&Heir (a devout apostle of A.I.) and me (a very skeptical onlooker of said thing).

I have several problems with A.I., simply because I’m unsure of the value of its underlying assumption — its foundation, if you will — which believes that the accumulated knowledge on the Internet is solid:  that even if there were some inaccuracies, they would be overcome by a preponderance of the correct theses.  If that’s the case, then all well and good.  But I am extremely leery of those “correct” theses:  who decides what is truth, or nonsense, or (worst of all) highly plausible nonsense which only a dedicated expert (in the truest sense of the word) would have the knowledge, time and inclination to correct.  The concept of A.I. seems to be a rather uncritical endorsement of “the wisdom of crowds” (i.e. received wisdom).

Well, pardon me if I don’t agree with that.

But returning to the argument at hand, Greg Isenberg uses the example of the calculator and its dolorous effect on mental arithmetic:

Remember how teachers said we needed to learn math because “you won’t always have a calculator”? They were wrong about that. But maybe they were right about something deeper. We’re running the first large-scale experiment on human cognition. What happens when an entire generation outsources their thinking?

And here I agree, wholeheartedly.  It’s bad enough to think that at some point, certain (and perhaps important) underpinnings of A.I. may turn out to be fallacious (whether unintended or malicious — another point to be considered) and large swathes of the A.I. inverted pyramids’ points may have been built, so to speak, on sand.

Ask yourself this:  had A.I. existed before the reality of astrophysics had been learned, we would have believed, uncritically and unshakably, that the Earth was at the center of the universe.  Well, we did.  And we were absolutely and utterly wrong.  After astrophysics came onto the scene, think how long it would take for all that A.I. to be overturned and corrected — as it actually took in the post-medieval era.  Most people at that time couldn’t be bothered to think about astrophysics and just went on with their lives, untroubled.

What’s worse, though, is that at some point in the future the human intellect, having become flabby and lazy through its dependence on A.I., may not have the basic capacity to correct itself, to go back to first principles because quite frankly, those principles would have been lost and our capacity to recreate them likewise.

Like I said, I’m sure of only two things in this discussion:  the first is the title of this post, and the second is my distrust of hearsay (my definition of A.I.).

I would be delighted to be disabused of my overall position, but I have to say it’s going to be a difficult job because I’m highly skeptical of this new wonder of science, especially as it makes our life so much easier and more convenient:

He’d been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain.

It’s like losing the muscle capacity to walk, and worse still the instinctive knowledge of how to walk, simply because one has come to depend completely on an external machine to carry out that function of locomotion.

P.S.  And I don’t even want to talk about this bullshit.

Just Visitors

Deep Thoughts

The other night I re-watched the brilliant Matt Damon movie The Good Shepherd, and as I’d forgotten a great deal of the dialogue, this little exchange between Damon and Joe Pesci hit me hard:

It is a brutal yet honest summary of our American society.  (And no doubt, the Usual Suspects will indulge themselves in their typical Fainting Goat hysterical response to anything brutal yet honest.)  Here’s what Wilson is saying:  at the heart of our American society and way of life lie the bedrock principles of our Anglo-Saxon heritage, as embodied by the Mayflower settlers, their behavior and government.  Much later, of course, these principles evolved into the still-better bedrock of our nation:  the Constitution.

Another of those principles was that of the family.  Yes, in reading the above script, we can say that family per se  is not at all the sole provenance of White Anglo-Saxon heritage, as witnessed by the gangster Palmi’s little aside about the Italians.  But think about what Palmi’s “family” has been twisted and perverted into:  the Mafia — hardly the stuff of the White Anglo-Saxon concept of family, is it?

Consider the picture I posted on Thanksgiving a couple days ago:

And likewise, the very epitome of American life is the institution of Thanksgiving — a holiday unlike any other in the world (although often copied), it can truly be called the most sacrosanct of our social institutions.

But let me differ from one aspect of Wilson’s little statement above:  Thanksgiving is not the sole preserve of of White Anglo-Saxons, although the tradition was certainly begun by them.  All kinds of people celebrate Thanksgiving:  Blacks, Jews, Italians (just to mention the groups mentioned above) as well as most of the rest of this vast patchwork of peoples that this wonderful country encompasses.

Now let’s look at the people in America who don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.  Who are they?

They don’t believe in the freedom of speech, unless it’s speech they (and by extension, the State) approve of.  Everything else is lies or fake news and / or dangerous because individuals can’t be trusted.  Recognize the Constitutional Amendment this involves?

They don’t want the public to be armed — only the State and its minions — because individuals can’t be trusted to possess firearms.  Don’t let that silly outdated Constitutional Amendment tell you otherwise.

In fact, go right down the Bill of Rights, and the chances are that they want to abolish every single amendment — because of course that irrelevant old document is a brake on State power, so of course they want no part of it.

These are people for whom the very concept of Thanksgiving is rooted in wrongdoing:  the colonization of America, the “stealing” of the land from the peoples whom they call “Native” (but whose only claim to the land is that they arrived here earlier than the Pilgrims), and you know the rest of the dreary diatribe because it’s screamed at us constantly by these people every year at this time.

But it’s not just that.  Unsurprisingly, when you follow a socio-political system that posits that the State is everything — more important than family, than friendship and all the ties that bind a society together — and actively work to institute that horrible system here in the United States, anything that embodies tradition and family is fair game for destruction.

Think I’m exaggerating?  Try this one:

”A Yale psychiatrist suggested that leftists ditch Thanksgiving and the holidays with family members who voted for Trump — and members of my generation are buying into this nonsense. They can’t stand to be around their Trump-supporting family members. I don’t know, the turkey’s not vegan, Grandma’s house isn’t a safe space — so Gen Z is saying that they’re ditching it.”

My only quibble is that I’m pretty sure that it’s not just Gen Z;  given the depth of the hysteria from the Left, it’s a multi-generational thing.  In other words, Thanksgiving is just another political instrument for them to show their frustration and childish rage, and not a beloved institution.

And this is what Edward Wilson is talking about when he talks about “just visiting”:  these people have no roots in our society, and they’re trying to undermine those of the rest of us who do.

It’s not a group of “Italians, Jews and niggers”;  in fact it has nothing to do with race or ethnicity at all:  it’s a pathological segment of our society who are “just visiting”, a segment that is linked not by race or heritage, but by their failed, broken ideology.

It is they, and not we, who are on the wrong side of history (as they so often scream at us).

They’re not Americans.  Just visitors.

In Pursuit Of A Dream

Deep Thoughts

I was watching some Eeewwchoob show about the evils of the lottery and how it’s just a disguised tax on stupid people and the poor and yadda yadda yadda.

One of the statements was that if you were to win a lottery with an advertised value of, say, $100 million, if you chose to take the lump sum payout instead of the annual payout, you’d end up with only $26 million, after taxes and so on.  ($100 minus the “lump sum penalty minus income tax.)

“Only” $26 million.  (Here’s where the “opportunity cost” canard, so beloved of finance people and con artists, comes into play.)  In other words, you’d be “losing” $74 million dollars because It’s All A Big Ripoff, Man.  Except of course that you wouldn’t be losing anything, but gaining many millions that you never had before.

And I don’t want to hear the old hackneyed saying about whether you buy a lottery ticket or not, you still have about the same chance of winning — which would be true if nobody had ever, ever won a lottery prize.  But as the newspapers are full of stories about how X won a lottery and then went broke after only a few years boo hoo, we have to assume that at least some people hit the jackpot.  So while the odds against are cripplingly high, they are not impossible.

So I play the lottery every week.  I only drop a few bucks at a time, because my feeling is that a $2 ticket is the cheapest dream you can get, and in any event I don’t live close to a casino where the odds are better but the payout is pathetic.  And if you know how the stock market can be and is being manipulated by huge institutions and giant index funds like Blackrock and Vanguard, you’d forget trying that form of legalized gambling too.

And I’m not saying the following is true in my case, not at all.  But something has occurred to me, as I’ve watched the economic news get worse and worse (thank you FJB) and the outlook becomes gloomier and gloomier, with prices skyrocketing and incomes remaining stagnant or even decreasing, with more and more hints that Social Security will end at some point, etc. etc.

I can’t help wondering that if all that shit really does hit the fan:  how many truly desperate people will not just turn to crime, but might take (in Tammy Keel’s immortal words) a sack lunch and a Mauser to the roof of a tall building, in the ultimate expression of nihilistic fatalism and despair.

And I wonder too how many people right now are being held back from doing so by having just the faint hope of that little lottery ticket in their pocket.

Marking Time

Deep Thoughts

Am I the only one who’s in a mood of suspension, here?

Of late, I feel myself facing the tide of daily events with a sense of either indifference or irritation — in the latter case, that whatever happens before the November elections will turn out to be irrelevant.

More than ever before, this election will be a watershed of some kind in this nation’s history.  If Trump wins the Presidency, perhaps he can do all the things — or at least most of the things — that could begin to turn the ship of state around, away from the looming catastrophe of Socialism that would most certainly be cemented in place should Harris and her Communist vice-president win.

I have to say that I felt the same way before Obama was elected, but not as keenly as I do now.

Is this what faces us, in the foreseeable future?  A perpetual cycle of eight years of socialism, followed by four years of slight correction, followed by another eight years of socialism?

I leave it to others — I have to leave it to others — to decide what happens from now on.  I am but one vote, one voice, and my age and failing health will prevent me from participating in what so many conservatives are calling a “revolution”, an upheaval so cataclysmic that for the first time in my life, I am afraid not just of that, but of the consequences thereof.

I have made all sorts of preparations, taken all sorts of precautions, but I fear that no matter what I have done, it will not be enough.

Conundrum

Deep Thoughts, Rights

The old saying goes, “Those who choose security over freedom deserve neither.”

And yet… you have a situation like this one:

The man who transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest, President Nayib Bukele, is despised by liberals.

When he won reelection in a landslide, liberal media outlets ran headlines stating that democracy had ended in El Salvador and that the country had become a one-party state. However, El Salvador is not Cuba.

Bukele did not eradicate opposition parties, nor did he imprison them or seize control of the press. Instead, he delivered on his promises. He made the country safe by locking up criminals.

And how did he do this?

In 2022, after a gang war resulted in the deaths of 87 people over a period of just three days, Bukele took action against crime. He constructed the country’s largest prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT), with a capacity for 40,000 gang members. And he began filling it.

Human rights groups, who live in safe, wealthy Western nations, have criticized Bukele for violations of the rights of suspects.

But the logic is flawless. Only gang members have gang tattoos. If anyone else gets a gang tattoo, they will be killed by the gang. The same is true for tattoo artists.

They would be killed for giving gang tattoos to non-gang members. Additionally, part of the initiation to joining a gang is to commit a serious crime, often murder. Once they become a member, their full-time job is to commit crimes. So, logically, anyone with a gang tattoo is a gang member and has committed crimes.

If this makes one think, “That sounds like the foul MS-13 gang”, then one would be correct.

I have often thought about doing this right here in the U.S. of A., as whole areas of the country have become terrorized by gangs like MS-13.  And as the gang members proudly wear their clan tattoo, why not just arrest them as self-confessed criminals?

Because that’s wrong — basically, it’s un-Constitutional, and on more than one level.  And here’s how it was done in El Salvador:

Bukele decided to let logic prevail, arrest the gang members, and put them in prison. He was more concerned about the rights of street vendors, business owners, school children, working people, and ordinary citizens than he was about the rights of violent criminals.

The state of emergency he declared in 2022, and has renewed several times since, suspends the constitutional rights of the gang members and bypasses the corrupt courts and justice system, which had allowed the criminals to reign for decades. Since then, 75,000 gang members have been arrested, and 7,000 have been released.

Believe me, there’s a lot to be said in support about measures like those of Nayib Bukele.  After all:

Bukele claimed that his country went 365 days without a murder. And while the exact number has been called into question, it is an indisputable fact that the country now has the lowest murder rate it has seen in 30 years, plummeting by 70%, and now stands at only 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023, making it the second lowest in the Americas, just behind Canada.

Okay, maybe that worked in El Salvador, which started off being a shithole country, and just dug itself a deeper one over decades of corruption and your standard Third-World degeneracy.  Desperate measures were called for.

But the U.S. has never been a shithole country, in no small part because of the protections that our Constitution affords everybody — and not just non-gang members, either.

I am profoundly disturbed by the tone of articles such as the one I’ve linked to and quoted from in this post.  Of course I can see the benefits of actions like that of Bukele.

But I can also see how that kind of thing can be turned around and used against, oh, people like MAGA supporters or, for that matter, gun owners.

And to quote a wise man (not a politician, but a playwright), who saw where this could lead:

“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

— Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons