Andy Kessler

WSJ: Lay Down Your Weaponization

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/lay-down-your-weaponization-bad-word-use-media-misinformation-claudine-gay-7a1bfbe5

If I had a nickel for every time I read that something is “weaponized,” I could buy my own bazooka. We may have reached “peak DEI,” but we’re not even close to “peak weaponization.”

Last week President Biden accused Republicans discussing the open border of “weaponizing an issue to score political points.” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: “By weaponizing the DOJ against his Political Opponent, ME, Joe has opened a giant Pandora’s Box.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, along with many other publications, suggested that the “weaponization of plagiarism” led to Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation. The New York Times says that by attacking Ukraine’s power grid, Russia weaponized the cold. Really?

“Weaponized information” is all the rage: fake news, disinformation, propaganda. The University of North Carolina at Charlotte defines it as “an attack to create harm, change beliefs or behavior and support the goals of the attacker.” We used to call it lying, but oh well, this new term sounds like something that could receive massive research grants. The RAND Corp., a think tank with annual spending exceeding $350 million, published a paper titled “The Weaponization of Information: The Need for Cognitive Security.” See what I mean?

In 1939 the scholar Max Lerner wrote the book “Ideas Are Weapons,” by which he hoped to inspire exiled writers—he was a refugee from Russia—to use their writing against fascism. Never mind that Sherman tanks and howitzer artillery actually defeated fascism, Lerner opened the door to nonweapon weaponization. The rush through that door has become a thundering herd.

A headline blares: “Weaponized Narrative Is the New Battlespace.” Author Clifford Bob complains of “weaponized rights.” By blaming addiction for your bad behavior, you can “weaponize your mental health.”

I’ve seen people accused of both “weaponizing the climate crisis” and “weaponizing the vulnerability to climate change,” though I run a little hot and cold on which is dumber.

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WSJ: Pop Goes the DEI Bubble

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/pop-goes-the-dei-bubble-affirmative-action-claudine-gay-harvard-esg-blackrock-39c77d13

Have we reached peak DEI? The unraveling of “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives had already begun—five states banning DEI programs; Google, Facebook and others cutting DEI staff; Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—well before Harvard President Claudine Gay was demoted.

Author Christopher Rufo, echoing 1960s student activists, called the rise of DEI a “long march through the institutions”—a 50-plus-year ideology infiltration into universities, K-12 schools, government, media and corporations with the goal of telling us all how to live. That’s why I enjoy that the word “rot” is back in style to describe what is happening inside the walls of academia.

Like everything based on the writings of Karl Marx—seeing oppressors and colonial struggles everywhere—DEI was doomed to fail. The uniformity of thought known as intersectionality, fostered by DEI, meant all oppressed people must support all others who are oppressed. But that idea burst on Oct. 7 when Hamas raped, murdered and kidnapped Israelis. Many liberals, especially Jewish ones, couldn’t support genocidal “colonized” terrorists. Pop! The long march is in retreat.

By the way, ESG, or investing based on “environmental, social and governance” principles, peaked last June, when BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said he would stop using “the word ESG anymore, because it’s been entirely weaponized.” Never mind that performance of ESG funds has been sketchy and that BlackRock had been adding the label “sustainable” or “ESG” to funds and charging up to five times as much. Then a study published in December by Boston University’s Andrew King found “no reliable evidence for the proposed link between sustainability and financial performance.” Pop!

Most offensive to me was DEI’s devious underlying agenda: societal design. Blinded by fanatical devotion, activists were pawns for the cause of reshaping the world into a collective utopia to be run, of course, by progressive, self-identifying elites. That was the “my truth” that Ms. Gay invoked on her exit. Critical theories and Marxist techniques would take power from you and me, using big government as the enforcer.

The new societal design, embedded in DEI and ESG, envisioned idyllic communal progress. History shows this never works because power corrupts.

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WSJ: SBF Faces Prison, but ‘Effective Altruism’ Lives On

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/sbf-faces-prison-but-effective-altruism-lives-on-philanthropy-biden-administration-827d03f2

While you were distracted preparing for the frolic and fun of New Year’s weekend, the Justice Department on Dec. 29 mysteriously announced it would no longer pursue campaign-finance charges against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Too bad. I was looking forward to the March trial and seeing the politicians who accepted the convicted fraudster’s donations squirm like worms.

What influence was SBF seeking to buy? Beyond trying to stave off crypto regulations, he was shoveling millions to the effective-altruism movement, which continues to infiltrate governments more than most people realize. With SBF facing a long term in the big house, has effective altruism landed on the ash heap of history? Sadly, not yet. Did you know proponents of the movement basically wrote the Biden administration’s recent executive order on artificial intelligence?

What drives these folks? Humans have an almost infinite capacity for self-inflicted dread, distress and dismay. We simply must have something to worry about: global cooling, global warming, a zombie apocalypse, eternal damnation. The end is always near. We are Chicken Littles running around with our heads cut off.

Effective altruists thrive off such fear-mongering. Their roots are in the rationalism movement, whose followers say actions should be based on truth, not on beliefs or emotion. That sounds fine in principle, but effective altruists take this a step further. They try to apply a probability number to everything. In his book “Going Infinite,” Michael Lewis explained that SBF applied “expected values” to everything: Should he attend a meeting? Should he continue dating co-conspirator Caroline Ellison? He even calculated he had a 5% chance of becoming president. Sounds more like emotion than truth, like hedging your bets by building an underground apocalypse shelter.

Rather than becoming monks to await the end of time, effective altruists practice “earning to give,” meaning they are willing to work within the capitalist system to earn as much as possible so they can give most of their earnings away to solve the future problems that they estimate will have the highest expected values, the largest probability of happening. Mr. Bankman-Fried obviously took the “maximize earnings” thing too far by venturing into fraud. You can imagine him thinking: But it was for a good cause. With the help of his family, an increasing chunk of his giving was to politicians to influence policy.

Effective altruists have also talked themselves into “long termism”—giving money away today to save distressed people 100 years from now.

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WSJ: No, AI Machines Can’t Think

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-ai-machines-cant-think-and-arent-going-to-kill-us-all-c6942878

Be ready for it. Sometime soon, the digirati will declare that artificial-intelligence machines have passed the Turing test and thus the era of superintelligence and sentient computers has arrived. The promised land is artificial general intelligence: AGI. Don’t fall for it. Your cranial cavity’s inner voice and self-awareness explain why.

In 1950 computing pioneer Alan Turing proposed a simple “Imitation Game” test to answer the question, “Can machines think?” If an interrogator blindly connected to a machine and a human can’t tell the difference based on their answers, then the machine can think. Turing thought that by 2000 machines would be able to imitate humans 70% of the time after five minutes of discussion. He then brushed off his own analysis by saying, “The original question ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.” Instead, the Turing test simply measured if machines could fool humans. Look up the verb “ape.”

Nonetheless, fear-mongers are out in force. In Silicon Valley, what goes for cocktail-party conversation now includes the question, “What’s your p(doom)?” This is a geek-class measure of the probability that AI will existentially wipe out mankind. Many answer over 30. Mine is zero.

There are so many flaws in a simple Turing test. You think AI hallucinates or makes stuff up? Many real-life thinking machines, (you know, the ones with skin) also sound unreal: Men can get pregnant, Bored Ape NFTs are valuable, man buns, peaceful protests.

Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Inflection AI and a co-founder of DeepMind, which Google bought, recently proposed a new Turing test. Provide a machine $100,000 and see if it can turn it into $1 million, perhaps using Alibaba and an e-commerce site. It’s silly because by this measure a decent spambot is intelligent!

Ada Lovelace, the 19th-century mathematician, was ahead of her time. Of Charles Babbage’s early computer, invented in 1837, she wrote a few years later: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” A Lovelace test might be, “Can AI generate something truly original?” And enjoyable, not the proverbial novel typed by a thousand monkeys. Same for movies, music and art. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Selmer Bringsjord proposed a “(Better) Lovelace” test in 2001 to detect creativity.

What’s really needed is solid definitions of thinking, intelligence and sentience. Computers are already better than humans at many tasks.

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WSJ: The Lesson of 1975 for Today’s Pessimists

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lesson-of-1975-for-todays-pessimists-new-year-3349098e

On Dec. 31, 1975, I drove into Manhattan with a few friends to see the New York Rangers play at Madison Square Garden—“The World’s Most Famous Arena.” We sat in the blue nosebleed seats and a cigar smoker a few rows down—yes, this was before they banned smoking indoors—would sometimes block our view with smoke rings. There were more fights in the stands than on the ice. Anyone remember the Atlanta Flames? They won 8-1.

Afterward, we walked to Times Square. I remember it well because it was nasty cold and fogged in. We could have used some flames. We went into the Playland arcade with its cling-clang of pinball machines and early blocky video games to try to warm up. We walked some more and visited one of those touristy stores selling cameras, watches and T-shirts until they threw us out for not buying anything.

There were, at most, a few thousand folks in socked-in Times Square that night—certainly not the million who show up these days. It was way too cold. Even Guy Lombardo, playing “Auld Lang Syne” at the Waldorf-Astoria, wasn’t dumb enough to be out in that weather. Back in 1972, the first “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” on ABC was hosted by the band Three Dog Night with Dick Clark anchoring from Times Square. If he was there that cold evening, I didn’t notice. The ball dropped at midnight and few paid attention.

Maybe it’s because of that experience that whenever I think of the ’70s, I shiver. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed that afternoon at 852.41. Four years later it was basically the same. The skies were always gray and smoggy. Beyond air pollution there was destitution in 1975: 8% unemployment. And while inflation was dropping, it was still running hot at 7%. Garbage piled up on the streets. New York City was bankrupt. In October, the Daily News ran the headline: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” Punk bands would soon be singing “No Future.” They were desolate times. In vitro fertilization, stents and recombinant DNA human insulin were still years away.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, on the way into New York we took the Pulaski Skyway over the industrial wastelands of Jersey City to avoid paying tolls on the New Jersey Turnpike. Back then, the skyway was often enveloped in smog and always smelled. No one knew why. It turns out that from the late ’60s until 1985, underground fires burned in the PJP Landfill on the south side of the bridge. If ever there was a metaphor for the ’70s, there it was: a smoldering garbage-dump fire.

Back in Times Square, it was definitely a three-dog night. Did you know the band’s name comes from how many dogs need to climb into your bed to keep you warm? Forget Jeremiah, at the start of the ’70s, Three Dog Night sang in “Good Time Living”: “Air pollution, revolution, you know I’ve had my fill. Advertisin’, computerizin’, don’t understand it and I never will.” If you squinted hard enough through the smog and cigar smoke you could see the computerizin’ digital future. But no one wanted to believe it.

Intel had invented microprocessors only four years earlier.

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