Captain Obvious

We are no longer viewing news.  It is mostly views … personal viewpoints and opinions, reflecting personal bias.  It is now indistinguishable from propaganda.  It is so lopsided and ludicrous that even the news media themselves are aghast.

If you check the definition of propaganda, you will find it is defined as biased to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.  While it may be satisfying to some, it does permanent damage to society.  The consequential loss of trust is going to haunt journalism for decades.  It doesn’t take much to destroy trust, and they have proven themselves untrustworthy.

Just watch any of the three major network TV news programs for the following recipe:  Report several positives about the Democratic candidate with the best images they have from a recent event, shift to a gloomy tone to spin up something negative about the Republican.  Include adverbs to what the Republican said, like “falsely” or “unsupported.” 

What makes me especially concerned is that the scientific community has similarly lost their moral compass.  The phrase “follow the money” is always a good guideline, but the willingness to lie to get people to do things crosses a line in my mind and heart.  Yes, I understand the “fake it till you make it” bias in Silicon Valley, but the underlying ethic should still be that you don’t overpromise.  I have already blogged about this so I will let this rest.

I grew up with warnings that some things would stunt my growth, which of course were either “old wives’ tales” or simply ignorant beliefs at the time.  Religious leaders were guilty of using fear tactics to keep people loyal and obedient.  Postmodern critical thinkers don’t accept the fires of hell or eternal damnation.  Religious leaders haven’t yet come up with a new twist on the idea.  So, they are resorting to performances rather than true worship.

Who doesn’t like a good concert?  Recent party rallies prove that point, and the natural backlash when celebrities show for token time slots and then bolt. Bait-and-switch is far from a new idea, but I am sensing many who were party loyal are worn out by it all.

Perhaps this is all a result of the proliferation of media all seeking their share of our minds.  We have become numb, cynical, and distrusting.  We are tired and suspicious of just about everyone and everything.  But most of us can detect propaganda, and we resent it.

We all agree we need to reset the conversation.  Personally, I want apologies as part of that. 

We all realize the world we live in is driven by political correctness and political expediency. Hard decisions requiring sacrifice are simply not on our political agendas, community agendas nor certainly in our national priorities. The prevailing mantra is that we will solve the world’s problems using intellect, our collective wealth, and by banning fossil fuels, which no knowledgeable energy professional will openly agree with. No one seems to want to pay any attention to the elephants in the room screaming we can’t get there with continual and expanding growth in consumption.

Now we hear that AI is going to solve problems that have eluded the greatest minds for decades including how to solve the footprint civilization has on the planet. Sure, we will hear from the magic AI code that microgrids, micro houses, and micro cars are important ideas, but the code, if honest and politically insensitive is going to produce this result:

“The human species is on an unsustainable and irresponsible quest to provide endless uses of raw materials and energy to sustain irresponsible goals that everyone on the planet must come up to the modern standard of living of the major cultures on the planet. It is politically unacceptable to face the options that truly solve this problem, so the only near-term answer seems to be to continue to delude the citizens of the world that there is such a solution without restraint and sacrifice. Either limit the population of the world or limit consumption.”

Pundits claim the latest generation of AI tools can learn on their own and that this does raise the concern that they could start generating answers no mere mortals can understand. As a developer of AI tools for about 60 years, I will let you in on something. Code that supposedly learns on its own will undoubtedly start to produce answers that are politically unacceptable.

Just look at the recent shifts in European countries and even in the US about who can and should enter. Think about the shrinking populations of the supposedly smartest countries on the planet and where the growth in world population is coming from. Then, look at the list of atrocities committed by previous and current world leaders about how they want to solve these problems. Then, remember that all AI systems require “training sets” to give them the optimization logic of how to solve problems. All of history is now being coded into these AI algorithms. Do you really think AI is going to come up with something comfortable if and when asked to solve these problems?

Movies like Hunger Games, Ex Machina, Her, and a host of others will look like child’s play if AI is let loose to decide what we need to do because we as a society are not ready to hear we are on the wrong paths. We still have time, but not a lot of it.

An article in the New York Times by Nicholas Confessore about the struggles to implement DEI at the University of Michigan offered a rather stunning review of how superficially appealing notions like DEI have unintended consequences.

What went wrong at Michigan? One answer is that programs like Michigan’s are confused about whom — and what — D.E.I. is really for. The earliest versions were aimed at integrating Black students who began arriving on college campuses in larger numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. But in subsequent decades, as the Supreme Court whittled down the permissible scope of affirmative action programs, what began as a tool for racial justice turned into a program of educational enrichment: A core principle of D.E.I. now is that all students learn better in diverse environs.

That leaves D.E.I. programs less focused on the people they were originally conceived to help — and conflicted about what they are really trying to achieve. Schools like Michigan pay lip service to religious or political diversity, for example, but may do little to advance those goals. Along the way, they make ambitious commitments to racial diversity that prove difficult to achieve. As a result, many Black students at Michigan have grown cynical about the school’s promises and feel that D.E.I. has forgotten them.

Earlier in the article, the author points to something that struck me is at the core of much of society today.  Perhaps the DEI efforts have increased tensions rather than seeking understanding.  Some of that change reflects a growing willingness to challenge ugly behavior that might once have been tolerated. But people at Michigan also argued that the school’s D.E.I. efforts had fostered a culture of grievance. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students said, were cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding administrative intervention.

We must lower the temperature of our conversations.  There is way too much violence on campus and in our communities.  It seems that DEI has increased these temperatures rather than lowering them. 

I decided to dig a bit deeper and learned that a culture of grievance has been published in the paper on Microaggression and Moral Cultures by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning published January 30,2014.  Here is a summary:

Campus activists and others might refer to slights of one’s ethnicity or other cultural characteristics as “microaggressions,” and they might use various forums to publicize them. Here we examine this phenomenon by drawing from Donald Black’s theories of conflict and from cross-cultural studies of conflict and morality. We argue that this behavior resembles other conflict tactics in which the aggrieved actively seek the support of third parties as well as those that focus on oppression. We identify the social conditions associated with each feature, and we discuss how the rise of these conditions has led to large-scale moral change such as the emergence of a victimhood culture that is distinct from the honor cultures and dignity cultures of the past.

Victimhood vs. honor and dignity.  Boy those labels sound right in this context, so let’s look at each of them to see if we have more proof or clues to where the truth does lie.  So, with almost no effort I found this wonderful article: Honor, Dignity, Victim: A Tale of Three Moral Cultures by Kevin McCaffree with this summary:

“In contrast to honor cultures that expect victims to be strong and stern enough to defend themselves, and dignity cultures that expect victims to be calm and charitable when in a dispute or disagreement, victim cultures emphasize how complainants are emotionally or physically fragile, vulnerable, and weak. In order to have high status in a victim culture, one must perfect and dramatize a personal “narrative of suffering.”  Confidently espousing one’s own weakness, frailty, and suffering might seem, perhaps, dishonorable or shameful from an honor culture perspective, or gratuitous and self-absorbed from a dignity culture perspective.”

Why aren’t we having this conversation more generally?  Are we so driven by an ideologically liberal mindset that honor and dignity have been deemed wrong?

Seems so to me.

Our recent trip to Clearwater right after Hurricane Helene flooded most of Florida’s Western shore highlighted the fragility of life there. The damage was mostly due to storm surge flooding, which devastated the barrier islands per a prior blog that just published. It was unimaginable damage brought about by floating debris acting as battering rams.

Staying at a hotel nearby overrun with people displaced from their homes brought an interesting portfolio of humanity. The free breakfast entourage at the hotel made it abundantly clear that people are not just trained to be efficient in their behaviors, especially when it comes to pouring their cup of morning coffee.  To be fair, I have observed the same behavior at church during the morning coffee service Susan leads, affectionately called the Caffeine Ministry.

People stand in line, pour their cup of coffee and then take their sweet time doctoring their personal formula for sweetener and cream with total disregard for those standing right behind them waiting to get their coffee … which in many cases they will drink black. Since I am a black coffee drinker, I am more sensitive to this waiting step and want to say: please take your cup and move out of the way so people behind you can pour theirs. You are blocking traffic!

Ironically, I have observed the exact opposite behavior at the supermarket when I show up to check out with just a few items in my cart and the person in front of me has a full cart of groceries. In most cases, they see my handful of items, smile, and suggest I get in front of them, which I sometimes do, but in every case their concern for me is heartwarming. Maybe they think I am a feeble old man. Not sure I want to know the answer to that.

So, what is it that makes people insensitive in one case and the opposite in others? Is it that coffee is essential to breaking out of that early morning haze and people are just insensitive at that time of the day before their first cup? That would explain part of it. Or is there something different in perspective here about time itself? Not sure.

What does baffle me is that I have never, ever had a person who was concocting their perfect morning brew realize they were holding up traffic … ever … anywhere. You would think they would notice the people waiting behind them at some point and move aside.  My wife Susan works carefully to put these additives to the morning brew alongside so that stepping aside can be easy, yet I have observed no one else to date doing that.

If any of you have any insights here, please email me. I am dumbfounded.

We all have grown up with the painful awareness that there were always areas in our towns that were less desirable than others to build a house. We used terms like the wrong side of the tracks, low country, or even outrightly fearful descriptions like flood zones. The admonitions in the Bible were to build your house on the rock, on solid foundations, rather than shifting sands, and to seek higher ground.

Those of us with choices do precisely this and there are costs and benefits. Hurricane Helene that just came ashore in the Big Bend area of Florida is a chilling lesson in whether we are soberly aware of the situation. The massive and predicted storm surge swallowed millions of homes all along Florida’s west coast. We might build “hurricane proof” houses and build them above expected high water to accommodate storm surges, but have we built them fully hardened to withstand the battering ram effects of objects from others’ homes who didn’t build to our standards.

Everything would have been fine if everyone had built to these standards, but they did not. Those lower quality homes often without insurance fall apart and their debris fields become battering rams on all the neighboring dwellings. There have been some spectacular videos posted of homes on the east coast of the Carolinas that were once protected by high ground, but that ground was eroded away after decades of storms.  To make matters worse, people who should have set standards in these areas did not.  Take a closer look for yourself at this: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/03/climate/north-carolina-homes-helene-building-codes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.PU4.9y7U.cEDQx-j8SzRD&smid=url-share

This summer, we took our boat from Mystic, Connecticut, to Watch Hill where Taylor Swift’s mansion stands in stark contrast to her neighbors with about $1 million in riprap protecting the hillside behind it. You can already see her neighbors’ cliffs eroding away … slowly of course, but eventually the result will be either they too put riprap in or lose their homes to the unrelenting forces of nature.  Here is a picture we took of Taylor’s home illustrating my point.

It is a bit ironic that we saw another example of this at the restaurant last night.  A segment of another dock had broken free and become impaled on the dock at this restaurant as you can see in the picture below:

So, where is higher ground? Can we really protect ourselves from the whims of Mother Nature? Or are we playing Russian Roulette and eventually there’s going to be a bullet in the chamber? And is it right to think that we are owed protection from the government for taking the risks?

As you follow this intellectual trail to its roots, you start to realize we are all living in this Russian Roulette game in large part because of our affluent lifestyles living in large homes built in places that should have never been approved. But here we are in this gigantic maze of risk-profiles stretching seemingly everywhere. As you drive through most of the country, you see miles and miles of miles and miles of uninhabited land and then, when we get to our seaside destination, we see mounds and mounds of people and structures built precariously close to statistically improbable but possible total financial ruin, and we delude ourselves into thinking that our insurance policies will protect us.

Then, when the companies we counted on file bankruptcy because they too did not cover their risks completely, we are shaken into the harsh reality that we were deluded into thinking we had achieved higher ground.

Based upon the widespread destruction we just saw in an area that did not get hurricane winds but did get the storm surge, delusion is widespread for both the rich and the poor.