On Writing and AI

The sad thing about chatgpt killing essays is that essay writing is a very effective way to learn.

I remember the main ideas of every research essay I wrote in undergrad but only a fraction of what I was tested on.

— T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) September 6, 2024

From an essay on Inside Higher Ed, writer and professor John Warner wrote:

“The difficulty of writing is the point. If students don’t find the writing hard, something has gone wrong.”

As someone who writes for a career, I am of course conflicted about ChatGPT. It is great at giving me a first draft similar to something I would have taken days to write. Then I just have to edit and revise and now I have something that would have taken me much longer to produce alone and is probably better.

Over the years I have gotten much better at editing other people’s work to improve their writing. Like most people, I’m not good at editing my own work and with ChatGPT I don’t have to. But I feel like the reason I have gotten better at editing is from all my years of writing and revising and getting feedback. I have a better sense of what makes for good writing. In other words, the process of writing—from blank page to the final print—has made me better at editing and revising other people's work (and my own work if it's been a while since I've looked at it).

I Imagine John Warner and Tanner Greer would agree with me that if the next generation of students learn to produce essays via entering a prompt into ChatGPT and editing it, they probably will not be as good as what I am producing simply because they will not be good editors because they’ve never written from scratch.

But maybe we’re asking the wrong question here. Shouldn’t the question we’re asking be: Do student want to be good writers? And if the answer for one student is yes, then wouldn’t they follow their professor's advice and start writing from scratch rather than using ChatGPT?

The answer seems obvious. Most students are not interested in writing. And those that might be are more interested in getting a good grade as efficiently as possible. Chalk up another victory for Bryan Caplan and his theory that education is not about building human capital (ie writing skills) but about signalling (getting a degree, graduating with honors, etc.).

So as for the question of what has gone wrong, the answer is the model of college.

I want to return to a quote from Michale Lind in which he suggests breaking up colleges as others wanted to break up the Big Banks. 

"Why not just break up Big U? Why not apply the logic of antitrust to the bloated, wasteful nonprofit academic sector? Let corporations do their own vocational training, like McDonald’s with Hamburger University, or contract with free-standing trade and professional schools. Let research be done by independent science and engineering institutes, with apprenticeships for young scientists and engineers. Let gender and ethnic studies departments be left-wing nonprofits..."

A signaling device is still necessary for employers so they can tell how competent you are. But I wish that the process of obtaining that signal was not tied up in developing skills.

Imagine a world in which a student interested in journalism scores a high SAT score. The New York Times hires them in some apprentice program and pays for them to attend a writing workshop to improve their craft. Do you think that student is going to use ChatGPT to aid in their first assignment? I’d say hell no.

At that point they will actually be interested in being a better writer, a better thinker, and more open to the idea that the difficulty might be the point. And I know: that is what college is supposed to be. But, for a growing percent of students, it's not. When getting a good grade as easily as possible conflicts with building skills, most students will opt for the easy grade.

(It's also possible that none of the difficulty that Warner and Greer go through in the writing process actually matters at all and they are just doubling down on meaning.)

Review: Civil War (2024)

I love everything Alex Garland has done so far. I’ve come to expect two things from his work: gorgeous cinematography and tackling Big Ideas. Civil War stuck to the former, but I’m unsure of the latter.

While I was a little underwhelmed, I still want to rewatch this if for no other reason than to spend more time marveling at shots like this:

Source: https://clutchpoints.com/civil-war-review-alex-garland-controversy

For a movie called Civil War, you would expect this to be a story about war. It wasn’t. It was a story about journalism.

I don’t know if this has been done this way before.  A quick Google search reveals that The Killing Fields is about war journalists, but it seems that it is still a movie about war that the viewer sees through the eyes of the journalist protagonists. What’s interesting about Civil War is how much of the war is in the background. None of the four main characters are concerned with which side wins or what they are fighting over. They just want to be able to break a story.

There are several scenes where the journalists are following a group of armed men and women shooting at another armed group. It’s never clear what side is aligned with the president and his military and which is a secessionist group. There’s even a scene where one of the reporters asks a sniper who he takes orders from. The sniper dismisses the question as superfluous and basically says he’s just a guy trying to kill the guy who's trying to kill him. This was one of the most important parts of the movie.

The other important part comes at the end. When Jessie, the aspiring photojournalist, is pushed out of the way of gunfire by Lee, the well-established journalist. Lee is shot, and as she falls, Jessie takes her photo. Jessie gets up and the camera lingers on her as she looks back at Lee before leaving her dying mentor to get a photo of the president before he is executed. Whatever Big Idea Garland wants us to know about, it takes place in that scene.

I think there are two ways to interpret that moment and the Big Idea it reaches at. One is that Jessie became wrapped up in a cause that overwhelmed her ability to see the humanity in her fellow citizens. This would apply to the soldiers on both sides of the conflict as well, whose cause became putting their respective people in control of the government. Jessie’s cause was journalism, getting the story, informing the public, etc. It became more important to get a photo of her dying colleague than to her camera down and hold Lee's hand in her final moments.

The other interpretation is that Jessie had a hero complex. She admired, almost worshiped, Lee and her work as a photojournalist. Jessie could even recite Lee’s Wikipedia page. Jesse became so obsessed with wanting that level of status that it became more important to get a great shot than to be there for Lee, who had just saved her life.

Either way, I think Garland is trying to say something about human connection. A common criticism I read about the film was that it resisted explaining how things got to be the way they were. Maybe, to Garland, the answer isn’t an over militarized police state, soft-on-crime politicians, runaway inflation, massive inequality, loss of natural resources, capitalism, communism, or some other poor policy choice. Maybe what leads to civil war is when we stop seeing one another as our brothers and sisters, all deserving of respect and dignity, and instead see them as means to an end.

The Lindy Case for Believing in God

There is an exchange in Braveheart between William Wallace (Mel Gibson) and Hamish (Brendan Gleeson) that goes like this:

Hamish : Your dream isn't about freedom. It's about Murron! You're doing this to be a hero, 'cause ya think she sees ye!
William Wallace : I don't think she sees me. I know she does. And your father sees you, too.

For context, Murron is Wallace’s wife who was killed early in the movie. If you recall, the final scene is Wallace lying on the executioner's block and staring into the crowd and thinking he sees Murron walking among the citizens cheering on his death. The sight of her puts him at peace.

I remember talking to an older man in his 70s who, although he probably mostly voted Democrat, gave a rather old-guy conservative take on youth and crime. He thought the problem was a lack of faith since young criminals didn’t believe there was someone in the sky watching and judging their actions.

I thought of the disproportionate number of atheists in the science and engineering community, and how they manage to hold back their impulse to rape, murder, and steal so they can design sky scrapers and discover the cure to terminal diseases, but I said nothing.

And yet, I kinda think the idea has merit.

First, let’s talk about Lindy. Yes, most religions probably have their roots in farming culture. People performed rituals to please the Gods so they would have a good harvest. But for a really long time now, religion has been wrapped up in morality. Religious people believe they are supposed to behave a certain way and someone is always watching, judging.

This general belief has been around for a while now, making it very Lindy and Chesterton Fence-y. In other words, let’s not tear it down just because it is irrational. Let’s try to understand it first, as that might explain why the idea has lasted as long as it has.

When you believe that a God is always watching you, you are incentivized to perform good behavior in public and in private. But when you don’t believe, the private incentive goes away.

Secular humanists are correct. You can absolutely be “good without God.” You can derive your moral code from any of the philosophical traditions. But we are social creatures and we are wired to WANT others to know that we abide by a particular moral code. So we must always be monitoring our statuses within this public square so that others know “I’m with These Guys and I stand against Those Guys.” Another way of saying this is that being “good without God” incentives virtue signaling.

The Chesterton Fence of theistic belief is that it builds a structure that prevents virtue signaling. You don’t need to perform your prescribed moral behavior in public because you know that God is watching you and his opinion matters the most.

So I can give money to the panhandler even if no one is watching me and I get no tax write-off since I know Jesus said “Blessed is the poor,” and God will reward my Christ-like behavior in the next life.

But if I am a secular adherent of Social Justice ideology, I need to put a Black Lives Matter sign in my yard and make Facebook posts every time Trump does a racism. People need to know “I’m one of the good guys!” because there is no man in the sky to see my private deeds of social justice. I need the social validation.

Religion, such as Christianity, is at its worst when it becomes too public and people virtue signal their faith to one another in public. The private virtue signaling pulls back some non trivial portion of theists that would otherwise do things that range from annoying—like protesting outside soldier’s funerals—to dangerous, like shooting up abortion clinics.

But in the absence of a belief that incentives private virtue signaling to some deity, you get a much higher percentage of public virtue signaling that is a net negative for society. This behavior ranges from annoying—like telling people to check their privilege—to hurtful—like getting someone fired because you thought he was making the white power sign.

So while you cannot rationalize your way into believing in God just because you think it provides good public value, you can at least leave alone the faith of a harmless theist who performs his behavior in private.

Updating my Priors: Short Takes 6/2024

I’ve been confused as to why the Palestine activists have made college presidents the target of their ire, demanding they divest the college's endowment from profiting from the war in Israel. Divesting from any organization tangentially related to the IDF seems unlikely to have much of an impact on the lives of Gaza citizens. But then I remembered an old post of mine. 

“The next time you roll your eyes as some Gen Z student goes on about the need to create a safe space for vulnerable populations, try this experiment. Replace the word 'safe' with 'sacred.'

This isn’t about censoring speech, it's about sacredness, the moral foundation of sanctity. These don’t students don’t want the speech to take place on their campus. Move it to a conservative church and watch the activists go home.”

This isn’t real action; its purging dissidents, trying to purify their community. They want their college campus to reflect their values, and that means making it a sacred place free from "oppressors" like the Israelis. 

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Derek Thompson said something that made me think of an old post. In the early 20th century, when everyone got their news from the same 3 sources of TV, we had a shared reality for the first time. Before, everything was local. You heard things from your neighbors or the local paper. Nothing was shared on the national level. Now, we have a million sources and can choose our own reality.

This is the simplest explanation for Putnam's Upswing. We were communitarian because the source of news became consolidated. What if, rather than being a communitarian/individual pendulum—where we were individualist in the 19th century, communitarian in the mid 20th century, and individualist once again—the 20th century upswing was a rare outlier that will never repeat? This unified "we" was an outlier and individualism is our natural state.

In my blogpost I suggested that big tech companies could censor the news on their platforms, leading to a more controlled message. And you could argue that the dissolution of local papers and the rise of national ones like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are turning the tide. But I think newspapers are just less influential, especially among conservatives.

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I’ve often wondered what caused the trend of serial killers in the 60s and 70s. Paul Skallas has an interesting theory. These people have always existed. They just never thought they could get away with it before.

The eyes on the street were gone. People didn't know their neighbors as much. The organic lindy prevention of serial murder was gone

All of a sudden we can live in a society where you could murder people randomly over and over and get away with.

These guys weren't masterminds.… pic.twitter.com/AcaTP92MeW

— LindyMan (@PaulSkallas) May 30, 2023

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Another thread that speaks to my belief about the hero complex. 

Can’t stop thinking about this Francis Fukuyama paragraph from The End of History. pic.twitter.com/wmvVKS10lg

— Spencer Cox (@SpencerJCox) May 2, 2024

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Interesting paper about meaningful work, and how women are killing men in this area.

Economists care more and more about meaningful work! But who has more meaningful jobs in the labor market? Some key patterns from our recent paper in Management Science using nationwide Swedish survey data (N=121,000) (https://t.co/xBnrXENawD). 1/8 https://t.co/3pjPkVNuau pic.twitter.com/2Hw8kJW2HV

— Johanna Rickne (@johannarickne) March 25, 2024

The Life and Death of an Industry

Photographer Name: Greg Henshall

 

On the Ezra Klein Podcast, he recently had a conversation with Hannah Ritchie about the challenges of growing a green industry.

From the podcast:

"for a lot of the history of the environmental movement ... we had to get people to stop doing things or we had to add new technologies to things we were already doing, like the scrubbers for sulfur dioxide.

And now we have this capacity to substitute with solar panels and wind and electric vehicles and heat pumps. And it requires a huge amount of construction, transmission lines. And so you have this movement and this politics that for a lot of its life was about trying to get human beings to do fewer destructive things and now needs them, very rapidly, to do far more constructive things."

For all his insanity, James Lindsay actually made a really salient point on The Joe Rogan Podcast. In one of his rants about critical social justice studies, he talked about how much of postmodernism was about tearing things down, and how it is much easier to tear things down than it is to build them. There is a reason more people work on demolition crews than in architectural firms.

There is a cycle that industries seem to go through. When a new industry arrives, it attracts builders. People are anxious to be the first to arrive to build the new thing. Sure, there is money involved. But the real draw is that builders like to build, and this allows them to do that. Plus, it's something new and there is a lot of room to move fast and break things.

Over time, the industry gains traction and becomes more established. It attracts attention, investment, and wider adoption. This is when the building phase typically plateaus, as the industry stabilizes and becomes more prevalent in society.

The next stage deals with the fallout of the broken things created by the builders. The industry has stopped attracting builders and is now attracting building inspectors—people who don't actually build anything, they just point out all of the flaws in the buildings.

This stage was ready made for people like Ralph Nader. If the US government was an industry that attracted builders, Nader was the most hard-assed building inspector you could ever imagine. He lead a movement of new liberals who had lost their faith in government through the Vietnam War and Watergate.

From a book review: 

"it wasn’t simply a matter of getting the right people into power, as the very act of getting into power would mean they were no longer the right people. The only way to stay pure was to operate outside the system."

The only branch of government Nader trusted was the judicial one. He put his faith in the courts. Nader and his followers filed lawsuit after lawsuit until government agencies were blanketed in layers of red tape.

This leads to the next stage in the cycle: The HRification of the new industry. Now the companies that hire the builders have to staff legal teams and HR staff to prevent them from getting sued by Ralph Nader and the other building inspectors of the world. To address the concerns raised by critics and mitigate potential harm, the industry starts attracting experts who specialize in areas like compliance, risk management, and responsible practices. These experts work to ensure that the industry meets regulatory requirements, follows ethical guidelines, and minimizes any negative consequences.

In Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sustein make a suggestion for reducing health care costs: allow patients to waive their right to sue for malpractice. Think about this for a second. One of the largest chunks of your medical bill goes to paying the hospital's legal team and covering the costs of other people's malpractice suits. The cost of building inspectors shows up in nearly every transaction of our lives; so much so that we hardly even notice it.

Before I go too far down the road of libertarianism I feel like I need to say this: the building inspectors aren't bullshitting. They are pointing out legitimate concerns: manufacturing's impact on the environment, the internet's impact on fraud and children seeing explicit content, AI's potential to kill everyone, etc. 

I am only here to point out tradeoffs, namely that builders want to build. And when they are prevented from building, everyone is deprived of potential opportunities for prosperity. And when a whole coalition that has dominated most of a society's powerful institutions builds its identity around being a building inspector and purges builders, or at least does a poor job of attracting them, they become incapable of building. And there will come a time when we need to build. And that time is now. And unfortunately, the leftists are unprepared to do it. 

But this isn't just a leftist thing. The rise Nader also explains the popularity of Trump and RJK Jr. They are building inspectors from outside the system like Nader, but unlike him, they are trying to get inside it (although Nader did run for president). For all his talk about deal making in the private sector, Trump has no experience building as a politician, which is very different running a business. 

My general take is to leaving building to the builders, which is why I like boring politicians like Joe Biden. I also happen to like his industrial policy based on strategically building things the private sector will not provide (like solar panels and micro chips). It just sucks having to watch his efforts get hamstrung by the building inspectors who, I'm afraid to say, hold way too much institutional power.

The Scam to Force Your Kids to Play More

Jonathan Haidt released his new book, The Anxious Generation, and it has been receiving a lot of attention. With this attention comes status, and as the Gossip Trap theory suggests, when a crab tries to status-climb his way out of the bucket, society responds by pulling him down with us.

The book attempts to show how smartphones are causing the decline in youth mental health.

I am partial to Haidt so I have trouble decoupling criticism of him from my admiration. So take what I write with a grain of salt.

Without digging too deep into the Nature critique of his work, my impression is that it’s trying to say that the evidence Haidt presents isn’t particularly strong. Others have suggested alternative causes and when Haidt or Jean Twenge respond they seem to do a good job of showing that the alternatives are always weaker than the smartphone theory.

So now we have the funnel problem. How do I know what is true when the process for truth-finding produces conflicting results?

This is where I have learned to throw everything aside and ask: What does common sense tell me?

Let’s go back to our priors, our base rates before we knew anything about smartphones.

The year is 2006. Everyone still owns flip phones and logs into Facebook from their laptop. A portal opens and someone from the year 2024 steps out. You ask him: What is the future like?

“Donald Trump becomes president. Then he loses reelection and tries to overthrow the government. Then he becomes indicted on 91 criminal charges. Then he gets reelected.”

“No, seriously,” you say.

“Well, Apple invents a phone that has the internet on it. Every teenager in America gets one and joins Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.”

“What’s a TikTok?” you ask.

“Forget I said that. Just understand that kids flock to whatever new, cool social media platform that developers come up with.”

“Oh, just like they do with video games?”

“Sort of. Only the market share is much higher than video game users, like 95%. And they are on it all the time: when they are in bed, during class, while eating meals … always. Plus, the algorithms are designed to keep you on as long as possible and they heighten the most outrageous users with the most polarizing opinions. Teens spend less and less time meeting with one another face to face and more time using their phones.”

Now, knowing nothing more than this information—nothing about the coming recession, climate change worries, global conflicts, or any other coming disaster— would you predict that teen mental health would increase, decrease, or stay the same over the next 15 years?

Better yet: forget about smartphones for a minute. Imagine the time traveler shows you this chart. 

The number of hours a 12th grader spends with friends per week is 2.67, almost exactly what it was 25 years earlier in 1981. Then he tells you that in 2020 it will drop to 1.89, a 29% decrease. Do you expect there to be any second order effects from teens spending so much time alone in their bedrooms?

I get that some people require a high threshold for updating their priors but is it really that absurd to assume the second order effects of kids spending time reading comments on their Instagram feed instead of building a treehouse would have some negative consequences? And Haidt’s suggestions aren’t exactly draconian—no phones during school, age verification for social media to screen teens, more time for recess at school, etc.

Are we really worried that Haidt is in the pocket of Big Recess and wants to trick us into letting kids play more? It’s beginning to sound like this:

Privilege Paralysis

Scott Paul is the associate director of peace and security at Oxfam. Here is his view on Gaza aid:

US is considering airdrops of aid into Gaza. My statement:

"Oxfam does not support US airdrops to Gaza, which would mostly serve to relieve the guilty consciences of senior US officials whose policies are contributing to the ongoing atrocities and risk of famine in Gaza.

1/

— Scott Paul (@ScottTPaul) February 29, 2024

Jeff Brooks is a fundraising writer. This is from a blog post he wrote titled “Worried about “donor as hero” fundraising?”

“One of the most common edits … relates to the perception of white saviourism. The idea that charitable donors are only helping people in a self-serving way reinforces patriarchal, colonial, and white supremacist attitudes and systems.”

A blogger who writes about school and race wrote a post about pandemic pods. She addresses the question "Would it be more socially just to invite families with fewer resources to join our pod?", saying, 

"This entire conversation is largely an exercise in privileged people trying to feel better about their own complicity in generations of inequality and injustice."

There is an idea behind these statements that I have seen enough to pique my curiosity. I am going to do my best to try and articulate this idea, which I’m calling Privilege Paralysis, and then do a little bit of speculating.

Privilege Paralysis starts like this. Imagine a person, we’ll call him James. James is a person of privilege: white, male, rich, married, inheritor of old money, etc. James feels guilty about his privilege. James decides to give some of his money to help disadvantaged people. Maybe he gives to UNICEF, or the ACLU, or his local food bank. It doesn’t matter where. What matters is that when he gives, it resolves his guilt.

The people who hold Privilege Paralysis DO NOT want his guilt to be resolved via this act of charity. If they are in a position to do so, they will take away his ability to make this donation that resolves his guilt.

So far, I am 90% confident that I have passed the ideological Turing Test. Now comes the speculating part.

The reason the adherents of Privilege Paralysis do not want James to resolve his guilt via his donation is that they want him to hold onto his guilt. They believe that the way to solve the BIG PROBLEM that they care about (Capitalism, White Supremacy, Patriarchy, whatever) is not by small acts of kindness but by tearing down entire systems and building equitable ones in their place. Therefore, they need James and his guilt to help accomplish this. And the only way to do this is to get enough powerful people to feel that guilt and for it to propel them to tear down these systems.

Now I’m more like 65% confident that I am passing the Ideological Turing Test.

Jeff Brooks’ blog post, which I quote above, also tries to steelman Privilege Paralysis. He writes: 

“The idea is that donors unfairly get to feel good about helping those who are less fortunate than themselves. Because donors are part of and contribute to an unfair system — even if it’s unconsciously done. It’s this unfair system that keeps people in need in their disadvantaged state … But when we use these messages, we may be propping up a patriarchal, white, colonialist system.”

As someone who also works in fundraising, I am beginning to come across people who follow Privilege Paralysis. And while Brooks uses his blog post to try and find common ground, I am going to use this post to put my foot down. 

Because this is mission creep.

The people espousing this idea have lost the plot of their organization’s mission. Instead of helping people they are trying to solve a global problem with a solution that lacks consensus. And in the process of solving the global problem, they are denying care to the very people they are supposed to be helping.

Instead, their thinking looks like this:



And that’s fine if that’s what you want to do. But then leave your goddamn organization and start a new one because there are people who want to help those in need and your idealistic ass is getting in the way.

And when you start your anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-racist organization to create your vision of utopia, don’t forget that every fringe ideology is trying to do the same thing and none of you are good at building anything. It always ends up looking like this:

Happy Friday, everyone!