"What else could go wrong?"

"Don't ask."

   

 

Lake Lure, NC in the wake of Hurricane Helene. That is just jaw-dropping.

Thousands of people still missing across the multistate area impacted by the hurricane.

Other exigent news? Israel vs Hezbollah major regional escalations, U.S. national dockworkers' union strike pending, Donald Trump calls Kamala Harris congenitally "mentally impaired." Disgraced, now-seditious former general Mike Flynn calls the sitting vice president “an enemy of America” with whom "we are at war."

UPDATE

 

More Ellie Pavlick on AI.

Excellent podcast interview (transcript here). Goes to my September 18th post.

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Vote early if you can.

We just did.

We dropped them off ni person this afternoon.

SEPT 26TH UPDATE

40 days to the November 5th elections. Will we have one of more significant "October Surprise(s)?"

• Putin hits UKR nuke plants?
• Israel and Hezbollah throw down all the way, perhaps dragging us in?
• Jack Smith J6 revelations that move the needle?

And so forth. My anxiety will only grow.

Two new Kindle edition resources I just downloaded:

I have long had both in print. Have gotten much use out of the Oxford Dictionary.

 

 

But, the 78+ yr old eyes are getting increasingly bad. I've increasingly purchased Kindle editions of hardcopy books I already have.

 

More in a bit. Gotta go run and pick up Calvin...

I'M BACK

apropos of the prior post—in particular the Ari Berman book Minority Rule—it became clear that my end-to-end familiarity with The Federalist Papers was significantly lacking. Consequently, I will slog attentively through all 544 pages / 85 Volumes of them. I've repeatedly studied the entirety of the U.S. Constitution with great care. Aspects of it were central to my 1998 Ethics & Policy Studies Graduate Thesis (large PDF: judge my cred for yourselves). 

 

Can't say the same about the Federalist Papers. If you're gonna thrust & parry with "originalist" advocates, being well-read in the FP seems warranted. I am remiss in that regard.

Similiarly, I will study every page of the 433 pgs of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

 

Also, re: the prior post, I can see that the "AI Artificial Arguments to Combat Conspiracy Thinking" is gonna require a good bit more close evaluation prior to proffering any conclusions (however tentative). With less than a month and a half to election day, this kind of thing will have no impac anyway. Other exigencies elevate, 'eh?

Off-topic: Just watched S4-E4 of "Slow Horses" on Apple TV+. Wow.

Fixin' to go to bed.

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

"Owning one puts you in a very exclusive Club."

Lordy, Mercy. 

ALSO, FOR YOU LADIES

xoxoxo

 

More to come...

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BREAKING: New at @ScienceMagazine

OK, we're gonna ChatGTP our way out of Gish Gallop BS? Steve Bannon—Mr. Flood-the-MAGA-Zone—didn't get The Memo.
  

 

On deck. Pardon my reflexive dubiety... For one impulse, I reflect on my 2019 post "A Science of Deliberation?" And, "Information Overload and Artificial Intelligence."

Also, a question obtains: Could AI do accurate "Argument Analysis & Evaluation?"

 

 

BACK TO SCIENCE MAGAZINE

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs

through dialogues with AI

Thomas H. Costello, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand

ABSTRACT

Conspiracy theory beliefs are notoriously persistent. Influential hypotheses propose that they fulfill important psychological needs, thus resisting counterevidence. Yet previous failures in correcting conspiracy beliefs may be due to counterevidence being insufficiently compelling and tailored. To evaluate this possibility, we leveraged developments in generative artificial intelligence and engaged 2,190 conspiracy believers in personalized evidence-based dialogues with GPT-4 Turbo. The intervention reduced conspiracy belief by ~20%. The effect remained 2 months later, generalized across a wide range of conspiracy theories, and occurred even among participants with deeply entrenched beliefs. Although the dialogues focused on a single conspiracy, they nonetheless diminished belief in unrelated conspiracies and shifted conspiracy-related behavioral intentions. These findings suggest that many conspiracy theory believers can revise their views if presented with sufficiently compelling evidence.

And, oh yeah, "Gish Gallop?"

 

For some AI-related thoughts, I advise Shannon Vallor and Leslie Valiant.

 

    

Stay tuned... 

SEPT 21 UPDATE

There's a lot of detail in the Science Magazine "Artificial Arguments" related articles. Trying to restrain my skepticism until after I've plowed through all of it

apropos of thte pressing political timeline—45 days to the 2024 presidential election—any useful disinfo/ conspiracy-thinking mitigation applications they can sustain via replication will be on a much longer time scale.

I got on to this book this morning via Joyce Vance White's Substack:

Click

Deep into to it. Time is short.

A comment I left at Joyce's post:

Thanks for this. It goes almost verbatim to my long-standing concern about how 2024 may well play out. We are now only 45 days out from the election. I have downloaded Ari’s new book and begun reading it. I encourage everyone else to do it likewise. The prologue alone will blow your mind.
 

Remember that if Trump’s principal focus is denying 270 to throw it to the House, he starts out only needing Supreme Court backing of three justices should a supportive SCOTUS intervention be necessary; he doubtlessly already has Alito and Thomas in the bank. He will of course go through all the melodramatic motions of filing every lame objection in every venue possible just like he did in 2020, but all of that stuff to me is now just requisite sideshow noise. Denying 270 is the last-resort key. IMO it explains his lackluster final approach dilettante campaigning and bizarre ALL CAPS bleatings.

45 days. Ugh.

UPDATE

 

SEPT 25TH UPDATE

I finished Ari Berman's book. An excellent read.

UPDATE, BACK TO THE AI/LLM TOPIC

 

An Atlantic Monthly article led me to Quanta Magazine and to this imposingly bright young scholar:

 and

 

UPenn Phd, Computer & Information Science, Hopkins, Bachelors in ECON and Music Performance (she's a sax player!)

 

Stay tuned. More shortly...

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Offshore Stealth Wealth

Dr. Brooke Harrington's newest book just released.

   

 

Eagerly awaited. Just released. Diving right in.

 

I also thoroughly enjoyed her prior book Capital Without Borders.

 

“He is surrounded by a mysterious halo of family confidences, of which he is known to be the silent depository.” With these words, Charles Dickens introduces one of his most memorable characters: Mr. Tulkinghorn, the villain of Bleak House. Tulkinghorn is a lawyer specializing in trusts and estates, making him privy to the private lives of Britain’s nobility. A master of legal intricacies, Tulkinghorn’s emotionless, unreadable façade gives him a reputation much prized by his clients for protecting their secrets, as well as their fortunes.

Though he is their employee, Tulkinghorn wields a power that quietly controls the lives of his clients. This distinguishes him from the legion of other professionals and servants in the novel: unlike the family physicians, butlers, and governesses who serve the nobles, Tulkinghorn’s knowledge of the families’ innermost workings makes him their master. Such “inside outsiders” deserve more scrutiny than they have received, given their role in managing large capital flows at the boundary of private family life and the public worlds of law and the market. This is a gap in knowledge that I aspire to fill here.

In a sense, Bleak House can be read as a story of the triumph of professionals over nobles, and of knowledge over wealth. Dickens’ description of Tulkinghorn as the “master of the mysteries of great houses” is reminiscent of what Max Weber once wrote of the court accountants of the Persian shah: they “made a secret doctrine of their budgetary art and even use a secret script” to consolidate their power and ensure the shah’s dependence upon them through obfuscation.3 This is one way of characterizing elite professional work, particularly in the domain now known as “wealth management”—the business of deploying legal and financial expertise to defend the fortunes of high-net-worth individuals and families…

Harrington, Brooke. Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent (pp. 1-2). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

OFFSHORE
 

Hmmm... "Offshore?" Ring any bells here? Sam Bankman-Fried, anyone?

 

Brooke has done a ton of fine work. Read some of her related Atlantic Monthly pieces.

The American Con Man Who Pioneered Offshore Finance
How a now-obscure financier turned the Bahamas into a tax haven—and created a cornerstone of global plutocracy

The Broligarchs Are Trying to Have Their Way
The antidemocratic politics of having it all

UPDATE

 

I finished Brooke's book. Excellent. Very engaging. Let me leave you with this for now.

More to come...

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Truth Social down 80%? $399 Trump Sneakers not selling? $69.95 Trump Bibles not selling? $99 Trump NFTs? What'choo gonna do?

I know! Start a crypto business! Yeah, that'll work!

   

 

   

You can't make this stuff up. Stay tuned...

  

Sept 16th, 8:00 pm EDT

 

UPDATE: SOME NEWS DETAIL

Former President Donald Trump plans to deliver remarks next Monday about cryptocurrency and the launch of the company World Liberty Financial, a crypto platform controlled by the Republican nominee's sons Donald Jr. and Eric.

His speech will come 50 days before Election Day, an extraordinary use of dwindling campaign time to promote a personal business. The Republican former president has long mixed his political and business interests and marketed sneakers, photo books and Trump-branded Bibles during his 2024 campaign.

"We're embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind," Trump said in a video posted Thursday to X, the social media site that will also host his address on the subject at 8 p.m. EDT on Monday from his Mar-a-Lago home.

As part of his presidential campaign, Trump has pledged to turn the United States into the "crypto capital of the planet," raising red flags that he could use the federal government to help support a business tied to his family…

I'd seen repeated Trump posts across the past month or so on the topic. I thought "man, yoo can see this one comin' from a mile away.."

 

One time, he exhorted that crypto would henceforth be "made in the USA."

Yeah, I know. 

I've had my blog Sport with the crypto canard multiple times.

 

 

Recall our boy Sam Bankman-Fried and his jive family? See here too. Recall also "Beauty and the beast?" Michael Lewis, anyone?

FROM TECH TIMES

The widely-hyped crypto platform of the Trump family is planned for a launch next week. World Liberty Financial is only one of the multiple crypto businesses that they position as the "future" of America, with ludicrous promises once he is in office.

It will be led by his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, but much remains unknown about the new crypto platform from his lineage…

This oughta be swell. Like his other tacky stuff.

 

Yeah, sure.

 

UPDATE:

WORLD LIBERTY FINANCIAL TOP EXECS POSE FOR A PHOTO

  

 

UPDATE, FROM CRYPTO NEWSZ

Chase Herro’s involvement in the [Trump WLFi] project raises significant concerns due to his questionable business history. Herro has been linked to selling dubious products like marijuana, colon cleanses, and various get-rich-quick schemes. He also operated “mastermind” groups, which charged hefty membership fees in exchange for vague networking and business strategies.

Additionally, Herro has a background as a pick-up artist under the alias “Zack Bauer.” He co-founded Date Hotter Girls, a platform that offered seminars teaching men how to “become the ultimate alpha male.” This venture, like most of his others, looks opportunistic and exploitative. In the cryptocurrency space, Herro has been involved in failed ventures like Pacer Capital, a trading firm that no longer exists, and Subify, a content platform marketed as an alternative to mainstream services like Patreon. These past activities have raised concerns about his role in the Trump family’s latest crypto endeavor.

Although, the vision of World Liberty Financial is appealing and addresses real needs in the decentralized finance space. However, the timing of this project appears suspicious, especially considering the involvement of the Trump family and Chase Herro, both of whom have reputations for questionable business ethics. Their history adds an air of skepticism to what could otherwise be a promising project…

OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

 

My friends in Las Vegas have a live streaming show this week. Best band in the nation. Thia will be off the chain.

OTHER TRUMP ERRATA

_________

  

Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump live debate on ABC News

POST-DEBATE ANALYSIS

UPDATE

_________

  

Everybody Must Get Stoned

Marcia Bjornerud rocks!

  

OK, yeah, lame jokey plays on words, I know...

I have about 6 other book ts currently in play, all of them excellent. But, a new piece in the New Yorker by my journalistic hero Kathryn Schultz turned me onto this.

Divert.

 

I will have much to say. This will take a while. For now, let me simply note that Dr. Bjornerud personifies the word "scholar," in its best sense. 

 

And much more. We are lucky to have her.

SO, LET'S BEGIN WITH NEAR-THE-END IN MIND

…I want students to perceive of themselves as Earthlings, wholly dependent on the planet’s sacraments—and to realize that any rational society would align its practices with those of the system that sustains it.

If I do not always succeed, perhaps I can be forgiven. By the time students come into my classroom, they have long since absorbed prevailing societal conceptions about the relationship between humans and Earth. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously defined culture as the constellation of stories that groups of humans tell themselves about their place and purpose in the world. In the United States, where capitalism has become the de facto religion, the stories we tell about who we are mostly exclude Nature. The natural world is simply a passive backdrop against which the “real” stories unfold. So when I try to convince students that the soils they’ve never thought about, the natural landscapes that are obscured by urban infrastructure, the rocks they assume to be deaf and dumb, are actually in charge of everything, it’s no wonder that they look away, unconvinced.

In the Western world, our shared rituals are no longer sacred but merely transactional—buying, selling, influencing, tweeting, endorsing, sponsoring, lobbying, and above all, consuming. At this point, it is hard to find our way back; our worship of novelty is in fundamental opposition to the “eternal return.” Most of our technology is predicated on subverting the Earth’s rituals rather than participating in them; we cannot become “contemporary with the gods” if we believe we’ve replaced them. The cosmos is now the global economy, and the titans who rule it believe they are exempt from natural law. Some of them imagine that humans are destined to live on Mars—that we could transform a planet with no oceans or soils or tectonics into an Earth-like Eden in a matter of decades—or that we will, for some unexplained reason, be better off in the “metaverse.” Even if we could homestead on a new planet, or wanted to live in a virtual world, we would still be us—the same flawed creatures expelled from the first Eden.

We understand far more about Earth than we did when I first became a geologist, yet we seem no closer to wisdom about ourselves. When I finished my PhD, my advisor gave me a biography of Charles Van Hise,3 the structural geologist who mapped the Baraboo Hills and would have known this very outcrop. The volume sat on my bookshelf for thirty years before I finally read it and became a Van Hise groupie. Van Hise was a colleague of T. C. Chamberlin, the eponym of our Svalbard valley, who also served as University of Wisconsin president. Both geologists felt called to public service because they believed that science would lead society into a more enlightened age. Van Hise used his post as university president to advance strikingly progressive causes: not only public education but also conservation, women’s suffrage, and limits on corporate power. He was a friend of Wisconsin’s populist governor “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, and together they promoted the utopian “Wisconsin Idea”: a vision for workers’ rights, income redistribution, and access for all citizens to the resources of the university. Today, that would be labeled a socialist agenda. Van Hise believed it was the path that a scientifically advanced society would logically follow.

I’d love to spend an afternoon with Van Hise on this outcrop and catch him up on what we know about the geology of the Baraboo Hills, rock deformation, and plate tectonics, but I’d be reluctant to tell him how far we are from his vision of the future. And I wouldn’t share with him my conclusion, based on my own career in academe, that knowledge and rational thought alone cannot leverage social change—without an accompanying cultural revolution. Free-market economics has permeated too deeply into Western habits of mind, making behaviors that are considered pathological at the individual level acceptable at the scale of society as a whole. In fact, the so-called dark triad of personality traits linked with borderline psychopathy—self-centered grandiosity, calculated exploitation, and lack of emotion5—are, in the corporate world, just good business sense.

I sometimes wonder whether, at this point in the history of human civilization, it would be possible to create a fresh new kind of secular spirituality free from both the narrow orthodoxies of traditional religions and the venal dogmas of capitalism. The primary texts would be the rock record and the book of nature; lullabies would reassure infants that they were in the care of a wise old planet; children would grow up knowing about planetary superheroes like carbon-gobbling dolomite and plate-moving eclogite; holidays would celebrate sandstone aquifers and stable granitic continents; the central principles would be wonder, gratitude, connectivity, collectivity. After a few generations of such reacculturation, an egalitarian ethos would emerge as we came to think of ourselves as Earthlings with deep bonds of kinship with one another, and all components of nature. Humans would aspire simply to blend in. Within this worldview, amassing disproportionate wealth, oppressing other humans, or degrading the environment would be seen as both unnatural and immoral. My utopian reveries are interrupted by a cynical voice in my head: Yeah right, fat chance…

Bjornerud, Marcia. Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks (pp. 266-269). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition. 

 

Particularly engrossing for me were her personal candor regarding her sometimes fractious private life from her childhood through her current time (early 60's now, a widow, and a tenured professor), and her experiences with the often carnivorous, often predatory, and misogynistic culture of post-secondary academia—especially acute in the male-dominated sciences such as geology.

I also loved her discussions about Norway, ancestral home of her forbears. I have some Scandinavian musician friends. Only one from Norway. Ole Borud. 

 

In 2011, he sat in with my friends' band in Las Vegas (They bring Ole up at 37:30). As we musicians say, "that dude is SICK!"

That was off the hook.

The cats in thst band remain among my closest friends.

____

 

More to come. I also bought Marcia's prior book. I'm never gonna get caught up.

  

Equally fine. to wit,

BAD AIR DAYS
The study of mass extinctions became a distinct and fashionable subdiscipline within paleontology in the decade after the end-Cretaceous impact was proposed. To those who embraced the newly “legalized” catastrophism, it seemed likely that all mass extinctions could eventually be blamed on extraterrestrial impacts. A brilliant paleontologist Jack Sepkoski of the University of Chicago, who was the first to recognize the potential of Big Data in paleontology, believed he had detected a 26-million-year cycle in extinction frequency through an analysis of thousands of fossil catalogs. In a strange kind of neo-uniformitarianism, he speculated that episodic die-offs might be linked with Earth’s periodic passage through the spiral arms of the galaxy, which could destabilize the orbits of comets.22 This inspired eager searches for evidence of large impacts at the times of other mass extinctions, and moved the study of impact cratering from a fringe field into the geologic mainstream. But three decades later, no other major biological crisis has been convincingly linked with the crash landing of a comet or asteroid. We are left with the sobering fact that sometimes things can go horribly wrong for life on this planet, for reasons completely internal to the Earth system.

Besides the end-Cretaceous cataclysm, the other great extinctions include, chronologically (1) the Late Ordovician event about 440 million years ago, which was the first major pruning following the Cambrian explosion; (2) a closely spaced pair of die-offs in the late Devonian Period (about 365 million years ago), by which time macroscopic life had moved onto land; (3) the end-Permian holocaust 250 million years ago, the mother of all mass extinctions, which John Phillips aptly marked as the close of the Paleozoic Era; and (4) the Late Triassic event, a cruel blow just 50 million years after the Permian debacle. Depending on how one measures the severity of these massacres (by numbers of species or genera or families vanquished), the dinosaur extinction is the fourth or fifth in rank.

Although the victims and the circumstances of these calamities differ in detail, they share some striking similarities (appendix III). All—including the end-Cretaceous event—involved abrupt climate change, and all, with the exception of the Devonian event (when tropical seas turned cold), are linked with rapid warming. Second, all involved major perturbations to the carbon cycle and carbon content of the atmosphere, either by unusually effusive volcanism (Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous) and/or through an imbalance between carbon sequestered by the biosphere and carbon released from stored hydrocarbons (Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic). Third, all entailed rapid changes in ocean chemistry, including acidification that devastated calcite-secreting organisms (Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous) and/or widespread anoxia (dead zones), which asphyxiated almost everybody except for sulfur-loving bacteria (Ordovician, Devonian, Permian). All the extinctions, in fact, were followed by a period of time—hundreds of thousands to millions of years—when microbes alone thrived while the rest of the biosphere struggled to get back on its feet (or into its shells). The great mass extinctions challenge any conceit that we are the triumphant culmination of 3.5 billion years of evolution. Life is endlessly inventive, always tinkering and experimenting, but not with a particular notion of progress. For us mammals, the Cretaceous extinction was the lucky break that cleared the way for a golden age, but if the story of the biosphere were written from the perspective of prokaryotic rather than macroscopic life, the extinctions would hardly register. Even today, prokaryotes (bacteria and archea) make up at least 50% of all biomass on Earth.23 One might say that Earth’s biosphere is, and always has been, a “microcracy,” ruled by the tiny. When larger, arriviste life-forms falter, infinitely adaptable microbes, whose evolutionary timescales are measured in months rather than millennia, are always eager to move in and reassert their long-held dominion over the planet.

Perhaps most importantly, none of the mass extinctions—even the relatively “clean” Cretaceous disaster—can be fully attributed to a single cause; all involved rapid changes in several geologic systems at one time, which in turn triggered knock-on effects in still others. In some respects, this is reassuring; it means that it takes a “perfect storm” of convergent causes to destabilize the biosphere. Nevertheless, many of the malefactors—greenhouse gases, carbon-cycle disturbances, ocean acidification, and anoxia—are uncomfortably familiar to current residents of Earth. And if a looming catastrophe has multiple origins, there will be no precise predictions and no silver-bullet solutions.

The story of the atmosphere reminds us that the sky over our head is not the only, or ultimate, one to shelter the Earth. When there is change in the air, even after long periods of stability, it can blow through with breathtaking suddenness, as Svalbard’s withering glaciers attest. In the aftermath of these winds of change, upheavals in biogeochemical cycles ripple through ecosystems at all levels. Organisms that have invested everything in the old world order will suffer or even be extinguished while microbes quietly clean up the mess and decree a new set of rules for the survivors. Tinkering with atmospheric chemistry is a dangerous business; ungovernable forces can come out of thin air.

Bjornerud, Marcia. Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (pp. 122-125). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. 

UPDATE: Finished it. Lovely writing. Laser acumen. Great technical / scientific stuff. This is one fine scholar and astute, empathic citizen.

apropos of our current cultural-socioeconomic polarizations, e.g., as they manifest in issues such as "anthropocene" climate change, I'll just leave you with this for now.

'eh?

 

As I finish updating this post, we have 57 days until Election Day.

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