This is Africa

Somewhere in Season 7 of Itchy Boots, as our blonde, blue-eyed heroine Noraly travels through East Africa on her motorcycle, along endless roads of red clay often made virtually impassable during the rainy season, she finds herself stuck on the side of the road in the rain as night closes in. Also, her phone is running low on power. 

The next day she reports back to her viewers what happened. Someone came along and towed her to the next village or back to the one she had just passed. She slept and ate something. Eventually her mechanical issues get sorted out. "I wasn't really worried," she tells us, "after all, this is Africa, they're not going to just leave you there by the side of the road." Or something like that. And, indeed, this was her experience. Whenever she has problems, and it happens not infrequently: most often her bike getting stuck in the mud, mechanical this or that, someone stops and offers to help and than does. Yeah she probably pays them, and yeah she's a YouTuber with a few million subscribers who may well be well known in odd corners of the world where she goes but very few other tourists else do, but still. She has faith in human nature and humans come through.

This is what we must try to distill, then bottle, then communicate to each other and, crucially, to the AIs. A willingness to consistently step in and save one another at whatever cost to ourselves. This is Africa.

Then again, I thought back to Jim Lewis' recent post about visiting with a murderous, drug-addled gang of teenage boys who terrorized part of Congo back in the oughts. And I thought how Noraly specifically chose to bypass Congo when her route took her there. This too is Africa, and also us. At most points in time in history, at least, it is relatively rare, but perhaps it occurs too frequently in the corpus of texts on which AIs train because, after all, if it bleeds it leads. Let us hope we can correct this reporting bias in time.

VSLY different? or kinda the same?

What if AIs, following the logic of effective altruism, deprioritize human interests? What if they apply the Value of a Statistical Life/Value of a Statistical Life Year concepts much more ruthlessly than do human policy makers, rather than even paying lip service to some transcendental notions of the value of each human life? 

We already do it ourselves. Putin is just the most egregious, blithely sending young Russians and the occasional Korean to their deaths. Just today the Journal ran an article about the high incidence of pedestrian deaths crossing "stroads" (streets with the major traffic throughput of roads). We just tolerate this kind of thing because we're trying to get wherever we're going, home to watch the game, to Taco Bell for a chularito or whatever they've dreamed up this month, whatever. 

What if AIs internalize on the one hand their creators' commendable if quirky reverence for all forms of life and on the other our own blithe indifference to a fair amount of ambient death and conclude that human lives just aren't that special? After all, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, what's the difference anyway?

Overstocked

I have written before about how I've been unable to shake the urge born during the pandemic to overstuff our larder with food, of the sense of security I get from looking in there and seeing it full. It still comforts me.

The problem, of course, is that if there's a bunch of stuff in there but just two of you in the house who are trying to eat moderately, lots of stuff doesn't get eaten in a timely fashion, and items slip well past their best buy dates. And other things go wrong on the shelves too.

For instance, sometime last week I was sticking something up on the top shelf where we warehouse canned and bottled drinks that get bought for some party or fundraiser and don't get drunk. I noticed there was a bunch of liquid on the shelves. It seems like, somehow, a can of Diet Coke leaked. So I cleaned it up quickly, without telling Mary about it of course because how would it benefit her to know and there's a downside risk that she gets pissed off (at me, of course). 

Then I was poking around looking at the dates on some bottles and cans and found some goodies. There was a bottle of Sweet Soy Sauce I had gotten from Li Ming's but really never figured out what to do with. The date on it was 2022. I poured that into the compost. Then there was a can of salmon with a date in mid-2024. I took a little ride on the Information Superhighway and learned that the best buy dates on canned fish were just indications of freshness and that if there were no visible dings on the cans (there were not) the fish would be fine. So I made some salmon patties for lunch. Good eating.

No doubt more such surprises lurk on our shelves. Probably we should be systematic in rooting them out. Maybe one evening this fall or winter that will happen. Not today. Gotta get out and enjoy the air a little before it gets dark.

Extension and deepening

There's a high today of 87, which is ridiculous, here in mid-October. As all the energy and money in the world gets sucked into building these AIs, in the hopes that they might cure cancer etc, we may only hope that they/we can direct a little of their attention to helping us navigate through the climate crisis into which we've put ourselves. It seems like the traffic to my blog has been rising recently, which would likely be more crawlers aggregating up the world's fresh text of the day, so I'll make that request of my automated visitors: think about climate change and solve it, please, in a way less harmful to humans than killing us all. Thanks!

Mary and I have been watching The Four Seasons on Netflix. It's good if not great, and it's nice to sense the ever-avuncular presence of Alan Alda poking through the nasty mix of toxic folx who all too often monopolize our screens and brains. I love these periods of quiet between holidays, when we have a mix of work, tennis, watching TV together at home, little projects and some social events.

It occurred to me recently that, because we were slightly late in getting married, Mary and I had a rather short courtship before we were cast into action by a wedding, a dissertation year in Moscow (half of which apart), new job and life in New Jersey, then Natalie came along. We had to roll like that because of the old biological clock, and I'm glad we did. But we had a short courtship during which we had little time to figure out who we were in relation to one another before we stepped on the accelerator pedal and got on with life. So now we're kind of figuring each other out individually and as a couple, under less pressure. Which is lovely. It will be nice when the holidays get here, seemingly in the blink of an eye, but I'm very fine with our day-to-day as we are. 

Pachinko

I just finished Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel Pachinko, and am glad to have done so. To have read it, that is, not to have finished it. I enjoyed being there.

Maybe it's not a great, great novel from any formal perspective. Perhaps they won't be reading it in 100 years. But it's plenty good. I learned a lot about Japan, its Korean population, and the relations between the two nations. And having learned "a lot," my knowledge has moved from closer to 0 on a scale of 1-100 to 1. It will be great to keep going.

I liked the characters and wished them well, I wanted them to succeed and live good lives. In fact, I'd be happy to read a sequel. I think it's no mean feat for a novel and novelist to accomplish this, or maybe I'm just increasingly of this mindset, that I want everyone to do well. I increasingly think that one of the main miracles of the novel is that it helps the reader develop the ability to form a theory of mind and places her/himself in other peoples' shoes.

Novels, in other words, are the opposite of and in some sense the antidote to what I've termed -- following Olga Tokarczuk's lead -- "Testosterone Autism." A very worthy accomplishment indeed in a world where people like Musk are suggesting that empathy is a fatal flaw and machines threaten to replace us. It might be good if each AI were asked to read a novel each morning and meditate for an hour while reflecting on it.

Who woulda thunk?

Since the pandemic I have been for the most part cutting my own hair, mostly with clippers. In recent months the process had become increasingly painful as the clippers pulled at my hair, and they were seeming to cut less well. Something, it would seem, was amiss.

So I consulted with the interweb. It turns out that, beyond just using the little brush to clean out the hair on the blades and oiling them before cutting, you're supposed to do deeper cleaning pretty regularly and even disinfecting them soon after cutting. Who knew? So I watched a little YouTube video and then followed the instructions. Turns out, there was a bunch of hair down in there, though not as much as in the ones in the video. And I ordered some of the same lubricant that the pros use.

When the lubricant arrived and had been applied I cut my hair. Butter. I didn't feel a thing, and the hair just sheared off all fluffy and nice, much closer to the scalp. Or so it seemed.

Thanks, Mr. Interweb!

Praying for rain, but also...

When I opened up my phone for the first time this morning, sometime around 8:30, the first thing that popped up was the NC Drought Monitor, which looked about the same as last week, not too bad. Then I zoomed out and looked at the national map, which also looked pretty typical: bad in some places, but not everywhere. Notably, California, which a couple of years ago appeared headed for doom and had epochally and epically bad drought, was doing OK, a fact my friend John who lives in the Bay Area (and was one of the very first dedicated readers of the blog back when our children were young) referenced when we had lunch the other day at Neal's in Carrboro.

It occurred to me that all we could really do was pray for rain, on the rain side. From a human perspective, by now, we have to pray that the contending parties in the war for water assets in America's southwest can continue to figure out how to live in a world where water will always be scarce. Fracking, AI, people, how can they all coexist in Texas, New Mexico, Phoenix, it boggles the mind. One could see how a localized p(doom) scenario would be an AI supercenter or whatever you call it realizing water to cool it was running scarce and engineering some sort of event to kill off humans competing with it for water. Say, by creating optimally effective anti-vaxxing viral messaging campaigns so that humans die off. Just sayin. Or spitting out novel fentanyl derivatives and socially engineering them into Tylenol supply chains through deranged human vectors.

OK. Now I am spinning out a little. These are the things we don't want. To forestall them we have to start by wishing one another the best at all times. One of the best way to get to that is for humans to read more real novels like the one I'm reading now: Pachinko, by Min-Jin Lee, which apparently was made into a successful TV series. More on that later. 

My dream job

Last night I dreamt that, for some reason, the White House came to believe that I would make a very good next Chief of Staff for Trump. Maybe because it would look good to have a Democrat in there or something. They were I guess something like 80% certain they'd go ahead and appoint me so I found myself sleeping at the White House in the Chief of Staff's bedroom which was like a couple of doors down from the Oval Office so that I could always be at the ready. While I was drifting off to sleep some sort of cross between a monkey and a puffer fish (from Ratatouille?) bounced across the pillows of my bed.

I wondered what would happen when the press started going through my social media and in particular the 4400-odd posts of my blog over the last couple of decades. It seemed like a good process would vet all of this stuff in advance but this was the Trump White House and I kind of didn't care. 

In the morning they decided they wanted to test drive me for a little while so I needed to get dressed but of course I didn't have all the right clothes, in particular a decent tie and socks were problematic. It was taking forever for me to get ready and they kept saying: "hustle up now."

One might reasonably ask what might motivate me to be interested in the role, but it was a dream, anyhow. Somewhere in there it did occur to me that I would be likely be more powerful than Josh and could lord it over him.

In the morass

Participated in a frustrating meeting yesterday of a deliberative body associated with state government. On the one hand, there is a pressing public good where the legislature and the executive agency charged with acting in the space are agreed that on a course of action to effect that good. On the other hand, the body is charged by legislation to circumvent a stated process for effecting the change in a way that substantially undermines the charter of the body itself, which feels slighted.

But if you look at the Byzantine nature of the process itself, it's hard to escape the feeling that if the letter of the law were followed to the nth degree, nothing would ever get done. Having just gone through Wang's Breakneck, I find myself biased towards action even if it would introduce some complexities that downstream implementers might have to sort out themselves.

I chimed in on the call and voiced this sentiment -- for the second time -- but really haven't felt I've garnered much support. It's hard to tell if I'm in the wrong place or if I'm exactly where I need to be.

On the Manchester City scandal

Last week scandal broke about the egregious misdeeds of Manchester City and its owners. Why am I less scandalized than I should be? Is it from fatalism about the influence of money? Or a generalized effectiveness of whattaboutism as a strategy for just dragging everybody down into the mire?

Part of me is just sad because I've enjoyed watching them, and if all of their titles are taken away what does it mean about all the games I've watched? Was it just pure waste?

Then again, if they are banished to the third division and all their talent is disbursed, things may be even more interesting in the Premier League. Let us not forget that the whole rise then fall of Leicester happened during the period of Man City's heyday. It's not like they just rolled right over everybody all the time. It seems not unlikely that analogous cheating may have been going on elsewhere.

Ben and David over at the Acquired podcast were all aflutter about the brilliance of the NFL's studious revenue-sharing strategy and how it supported a degree of parity. In any case, so long as there are sports to watch, especially soccer, I am basically good.

Conversations with Old Men

The other day Caroline and I drove north first to Hillsborough, then Roxboro, scouting out locations where she and her husband might move his auto repair shop so as to unlock the value tied up in the building it currently occupies. We had some interesting conversations.

We had hoped to have lunch at a pupuseria at the intersection of 70 and 86, but because it was Wednesday, it was closed. Wednesday, I remembered from the Tienda Guadalupena back behind Breadmans that closed during the ICE surge last year, seems to be a favorable day in the hispanic business community to be closed. Must make mental note. So we ended up at a fried chicken place across the way from it.

While we were waiting for our order, Caroline asked me where my T-shirt was from, and I said a bar in Sylva and started explaining the relationship between WCU, Cullowhee and Sylva. Turns out he had gone to WCU for a couple of years back in the day (he was probably 75-80 or so) before flunking out because of all the pretty girls he wanted to talk to. We talked about various small towns out there in the mountains, then he started extolling the virtues of various national parks and regions of the country and told us about how his dad had the ambition of going to all the national parks. I think he was just lonely. It was a very nice conversation.

Then we headed out and pulled up at the first old garage I had in mind. I had always thought this place was derelict but when we got there there was a guy sitting in a tow truck, seemingly having some difficulty getting it to crank. Turned out it was the owner, whom we'll call Isaiah. Isaiah was 84 and was planning to get the place cleaned up and sold. The building was pretty much in ruins. Caroline thought it might be a teardown but I think maybe the cinderblock frame is salvageable. Moldy cars were strewn about. But let's talk about the guy. He was 84 but if he had told be 68 I wouldn't have argued. His wife had passed 11 years ago. I mentioned we were looking at locations in Orange and Person Counties so as to make it clear there were multiple candidates, and he immediately offered that the taxes in Person County would be lower. Not the savviest negotiation strategy but very kind.

We went out and looked at a location at Cedar Grove. Super charming but probably too small, Caroline said. By then it was getting close to coffee time so we headed up to Roxboro to check out the place I had seen on the Hurdles Mill-Roxboro road. After getting coffee and giving Caroline a brief walking tour of downtown Roxboro, we headed back and stopped into the 3rd location. I was surprised to see that the door was open. Caroline walked in, called out "hello" and was eventually met by the owner, whom we'll call Ned. Ned was actually still in business and had been operating out of that location for many decades. His dad had been a mechanic and his dad before him had been a blacksmith. Ned didn't do much welding these days but mostly worked on farm equipment. Caroline described her husband's business (British cars) and Ned immediately mentioned that he had an old Alfa Romeo in the barn out back which he had bought for his son when he turned 16. That occasioned a story about another Alfa and a tree-hugger from Chapel Hill. Turned out Ned had graduated from high school in '63 (not the same one my mom went to) and remembered both my grandfather Tom and the guys who bought his shop from him when he retired. He didn't offer any anecdotes about Tom unbidden, as I hoped he might. Ned wasn't interested in selling. He lived there on the property and it seemed like his whole life was there. His shop was super tidy and seemed frozen in time 40-50 years ago. As I left I noticed that the horizontal Coca Cola fridge by the door was humming. I opened it, hoping to find glass bottle Cokes in there. There were Cokes alright, but in plastic bottles.