The Triage Problem

Setting the stage

I need to give a name to something, a name for a problem I keep waiting for the “AI” community to solve. I'm not sure that community even knows the problem is there. Maybe. Maybe they're just calling it something else. But I call it “The Triage Problem.”

If you go to the hospital emergency room (ER), it might be because you are bleeding to death. Or are having a heart attack. Or any of a number of other things that require rapid expert intervention. And yet, at no ER I've visited am I greeted by that hospital's finest doctors. First I see a triage nurse. Why is that?

Truth is, people go to the ER for many reasons, not all of which needs the hospital's highest paid employees. The triage nurse who meets you is not incompetent. Quite the opposite. They are highly specialized to the specific need of rapidly deciding whether you need advanced care, or just something simple, so that easy problems can be handled more cheaply and urgent problems get used only when needed.

Childish antics and world resources

There's pressure these days to do everything with “AI”. Some are just curious to try, many have fear of missing out (FOMO). It's almost as if “AI” tech is trying to compete single-handedly with all other tech in the world. FOMO has become a specific marketing strategy by the “AI” industry, in order to grab market in a realm that is really a missionary sale, an attempt not just to push product but the very idea of a product, where there is not a specific immediate need.

While I get the fun involved in this, and the immense number of dollars, this seems wrong to me. The virtual gold rush that is the “AI” industry is also, sadly, a rush to consume planetary resources at enormous scale at a time when humanity can least afford it (and without paying for it).

A huge amount has been said about the potential benefits alleged for “AI” use, so I won't waste our time here talking about that. My concern at this moment is not about whether it's potentially useful in a bunch of places, but rather whether it's efficient in all of those places.

Efficiency would only hold them back, entrepreneurs might tell you, if they weren't utterly engrossed in the activity of putting us all at risk. Competition on efficiency comes later.

The alleged cost of capability

What's bothering me is not an issue of raw capability, even though the public brawl between tech giants trying to out-macho each other seems to always go to there. The issues are several, different, and subtle.

Let's start with power consumption. I feel strongly that Large Language Models (LLMs), the core technology that many today call “AI”, take too much power overall. This is a strong claim for me to make, seated off to the side while others work hard on this issue day-to-day. So why do I think it?

I'm going to offer a couple of examples that influence my intuition so you can see why it might not take detailed knowledge of the industry to challenge the claim that an enormous computer is needed to do this:

First, a lot of what these “AI” systems do, even the hard parts, could probably be done by a tool with not a huge amount more smarts than a squirrel in my yard, who seems happy to run on sunflower seeds meant for birds. No tool yet devised by the best minds the world can throw at it has made a device that will assure the birds get those seeds and the squirrels don't. Those squirrels may not speak English, but they are very smart. Honestly, I think they probably could speak English, they just don't see the need. So are they smarter, or am I? They seem happier in their world than many of us are in ours.

Second, and similarly, a 2-year-old child, fed only things like applesauce, manages to learn language from examples with no training. Humans are smart from day 1. They do not learn to be intelligent. They learn to use the intelligence they came with. They lack knowledge, but not capability. They do not ask us to deplete the world's resources building data centers in exchange for showing their potential. And humans already know how to compute many algorithms efficiently, so telling me that LLMs are just as good if we'd just burn more of the world's precious resources to let somebody prove it does not impress me.

Examples like this are why I'm convinced that even if more giant data centers help make “AI” smarter, that cannot be the only way to do it. And it isn't a good price.

A hatred of syntax

It's important, too, that we understand why people want natural language. It isn't just one reason. Part of what they want is to describe complex problems and have the answers by some intelligent magic. But part of it is that they just hate command syntax. These are actually two different things.

There is an almost-obsession with overcoming programming syntax, as if command line and programming syntax is some sort of cruel torture that callous programmers have inflicted on the world and this finally is the chance to put them in their place. I actually think there's something to the ire, but the proposed cure comes with a lot of issues.

Syntax may not be the world's biggest computational problem, but it is an impediment to access and non-programmers really do place great value on not having to deal with it. Never mind that by some accounts, human language has syntax far more complex than the things they're getting rid of. The point is that our human brains are well-evolved to dealing with natural language syntax and not similarly evolved to be happy with more formal syntaxes, in spite of the utility skilled programmers find in them.

It's a problem that non-programmers see clearly, but that experienced programmers find almost invisible. Users are comforted by natural language.

Formal languages still matter

Formal language syntaxes create important efficiencies exactly because they are precise, reproducible, and useful. But the market signal is clear: It needs to be behind the scenes. Natural language does not make a good programming language, but it makes a good requirements language. And prompts are really more about requirements than programming.

I can tell you for sure that we are not better off if we discard mathematical notation and say “whatever LLMs do internally is better.” There are few things I take such a strong stand on, but the issue of how to express ideas is something I've spent a lifetime thinking about, so I am not going to equivocate on this. There is room to disagree with me, certainly, but I am ready to take on that challenge if anyone wants to.

My posture is this: Let the LLM figure out interesting ways to write programs, but then after that make sure the thing they write is precise, deterministic, reproducible, and testable. You do not want to fly an airplane whose wing is designed by an LLM. You might, however, want to fly an airplane whose wing was designed by a program that had an assist from an LLM during writing. That's very different.

Generations of programmers did not learn algorithmic complexity just as a bridge strategy to LLM-speak. We learned it because the time and space complexity analysis it provides creates a kind of informational physics that no amount of LLM hype can overcome. It matters to do a database access with an index, not without. It matters to prefer O(n) or at least O(n*log(n)) solutions over O(n^2) solutions. LLMs cannot change that. They might sometimes get faster answers, but if so only because of excessive resource consumption—far too much computation thrown at problems that, in most cases, are unlikely to merit it.

Triage is too fundamental to “fix” later

But now we come to the crux of the matter.

In essence, The Triage Problem exists because an LLM both solves a human factors problem in the design of user interfaces (a desire to use familiar language, not formal language) and implicates the need for higher-than-necessary capability in the triage nurse.

A decision about whether to use the world-resource-consuming engine as the initial triage is not something that can be easily changed later. That sets a certain expectation, risking that the entire design will build in presumptions of this much power. Imagine if early triage nurses were senior surgeons.

It wouldn't just make them smarter, the entire architecture of the waiting room might change to take advantage of things they might want to do right there while waiting. And if someone later suggested that was inefficient, it might be hard to remove because by then other parts of the hospital might be relying on not seeing things they thought that early doctor would filter out.

Any decision to use the most advanced LLM as a triage element would call into question what triage was. There would be pressure to do serious intervention earlier in the system, and with different available information and tools. It would enable use of and perhaps come to actually need knowledge of or permissions for APIs even before resolving the simple question “can this be done more simply?”

Among other things, such an architecture violates the conventional wisdom of assigning roles the least necessary privilege to get their job done.

If enough consideration is given to the problem, my hope is that something less expensive could do the initial dispatch. Perhaps something with more modest capabilities, but still focused on the need. That doesn't sound impossible.

But, possible or not, it won't happen by accident. Someone will have to see The Triage Problem as its own kind of issue with special constraints and take those constraints seriously.

What's being questioned

When people like me say “you're not doing it right,” all the “AI” moguls hear, or maybe all they seem to want to respond to, is “you won't get there from here.” Perhaps it'd be too embarrassing for them to admit, that we might be saying “going the way you're going is too risky, or too expensive, or both.”

Risk is almost their compass arrow. They have more taste for it than we do. Ethics and prudence is a game for the weak, they would surely tell you. So a dangerous overuse of resources continues.

And as they proceed in this dangerous direction, they say, in a voice that carries no more believability than a small child who is very proud of an achievement but oblivious to its horrifying cost, “See? See? I can do it this way!”

But it was never an issue of “can you?” It was an issue of how. At this point we're in a position to say more specifically that The Triage Problem is really about this set of constraints:

• We want to solve simple problems without invoking the fully general engine and fall back to fully general solutions only if cheap solutions fail.
• We want something on the front that understands natural language.
• If the thing on the front end is an LLM, then we can't get cheap access to an efficient problem solver. You can't wrap simplicity around complexity. You can't take something that always expends many resources and have it pretend to be the cheap things.

The stakes are high and the clock is ticking

The solution the industry has converged on is just “Send everything to an LLM. Let it call out to something cheap if it feels that's best.” As far as I'm concerned, that's not a solution because it doesn't satisfy the constraining requirements we've laid out for The Triage Problem.

Many are working on different harnesses that call LLMs in other ways. Maybe one of those will solve the triage problem. I'm not saying they won't. I kind of hope they will. I'm just naming the thing that I'll get excited about if they do it.

Because somewhere in my life, someone taught me that when you see a problem, you do these steps in this order to solve it:

• See if there is a cached solution. If so, use it.
• See if there is a well-known method. If so, use it.
• Having exhausted on-hand information and on-hand techniques for cranking out information, only then invoke general-purpose reasoning.

This small program is everything about minimizing expenditure of resource. So invoking general purpose reasoning to execute it misses the point.

I honestly feel human survival depends on understanding that smaller solutions are needed, not bigger ones.

 

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Author’s Notes:

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The images were generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT Image 2.5), with light post-processing in Gimp to produce a tighter thumbnail of one of the graphics and to reduce the fuller images in size for faster web download.

Dogs in our Midst

Rhyme, and reason

In the early days of the World Wide Web (WWW) cartoonist Peter Steiner created a cartoon depicting a dog seated at a computer console talking to a dog nearby with a caption that read “On the internet, no one knows you are a dog.”

There are parallels between then and now, between emergence of the dot-coms and the emergence of “AI”-enabled applications, so my gut impulse was to say, “There should be an updated version of that cartoon that says ‘With “AI”, no one knows you are a dog.’ ”

Where things diverge

With a few minutes of additional reflection, though, I realized that the situation was quite a bit more complicated, and such a trivial update isn't appropriate. As is aptly said by someone, “history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” In other words, it's on us to learn lessons, yet not overgeneralize.

To start with, there was a kind of collective innocence in our society at that time that this cartoon captured. We had not yet been exposed to the deluge of pretenders and many saw opportunity in that statement, not cynicism. It seemed that with the power of the internet, and the emerging web, individuals at home could finally become whoever they wanted to be.

But the more I looked, the more I saw bigger differences. For example, the dot-coms were democratizing the world, not centralizing it, creating a collective whole that represented distributed opportunity for a lot of people. The “AI” industry is the opposite—a consolidation, almost like the inverse of the dot-com bubble, taking back the product of all that democratized tech and saying “we can do it all now, thank you very much.” A tech that has trained on the generously offered intellectual wealth of an entire planet now offers to replace that wealth with a single access point to that wealth.

Maybe not all. But they waste no effort saying that with each passing year, it will be smarter. They tell us that if we are not using the tech, we will be left behind. While the dot-coms presented a kind of joy in trying things out, this era is characterized more by a panic, what has been dubbed “FOMO” (fear of missing out), a sense that if you don't join up, you'll be forever left behind.

Never mind that it's the vendors who have the real fear. If “AI” fails, we'll all have to go back to our regular jobs and feeling valued in a globally competitive market again, and they will have nothing to show but a very cool toy—and a lot of debt.

Past promises

In the 1950's, we were promised that The Future was a bright thing with automation that would bring everyone leisure, but now we see a dystopia where jobs are ever at risk and we have to race ever faster just to not get behind.

This tool that does everything is not offered for people to own and develop individually in the way the Internet was. This tool is something very few people are qualified to build themselves, one almost has to rent the service and become completely dependent upon its capability and subservient to its restrictions and pricing. It is extractive, in other words.

The big players market “AI” as something that cannot be done without. Yet if that happens, every company will use this same tool for fear it cannot compete without it, and yet, even as it does this, it will know that its competitors are using the same tool, because no one can afford not to. Is that competitiveness, or the death of competitiveness, or does it even matter?

Clawing forward

And even the issue of “on the internet, no one knows you are a dog” is not the same. Everyone knows. Certainly everyone seeking a job knows “AI” can be asked to puff up their resume, and everyone receiving resumes knows that “AI” can be asked to remove the puffery.

Once it's on both sides, it's not a competitive layer. It's arguably just a tax. You can't not do it, but it may provide little value.

Larger raw capability? Maybe. But that's an untested claim. The public is doing the “research and development” (R&D) here. And not always voluntarily.

Some say there are more products that can be reached. Others counter by noting that the risks along the way will be greater, so there may be bigger problems. Certainly we're not doing a lot to plan for and manage the possibility of such problems.

If history is the Great Teacher, it seems to be asking us to learn from the absence of rhyme where we expect it. Perhaps to expect a different punch line. Something more like, “With ‘AI’, everything has gone to the dogs.”

 

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Author’s Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post began as part of another essay I was writing. As sometimes happens, it took on a life of its own, so I spun it off as its own post.

The image generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT Image 2.5), with light post-processing by me in Gimp to reduce the resulting image in size for faster web download,

The Real AI Experience

Putting on the brakes

I try to always put “AI” in quotes because I do not personally think Large Language Models (LLMs) are artificially intelligent. That's someone else's word, and I use it, but grudgingly. But the conversation we need to have here doesn't hinge on issues of intelligence. It's enough that they are capable of making stabs at plausible things. And we're letting them.

Hopefully the part about stabbing is just metaphor, but that's part of the problem. We're handing them things that have the power to hurt us and hoping they will use such power “judiciously.” There are a lot of natural intelligences, humans, who don't do well with sharp things. And even if you believe the whole “AI” narrative, these things are in their infancy.

Before things have gone too far, we need to establish some power, some rights of action. A hold we retain over these “AI” systems that sets boundaries and regulates the flow of events. We would do this with children who are not yet experienced enough to see customary boundaries on their own.

Fairly-regulated rights are not rights denied

Even with adults, many situations are important or dangerous enough that humans apply safeguards routinely. For obvious reasons, we require specific authentication and authorization to have money withdrawn from our bank accounts. You have a right to take money from your account, but a bank may have a right, and responsibility, to assure that you are who you say you are and that the request is valid. For example, a check might get lost in the mail and you may have stopped payment on it so you could write a second check without overdrawing.

Airports and other buildings with security checkpoints are another example of carefully regulated rights of entry balanced against a right to make sure the person entering is safe. Even traffic law gives us a right of motion that is provisional on a green light, in order to efficiently keep cars that are crossing each others' paths from colliding. We might bristle a bit at having to wait for a light to change, but we would do more than bristle if we were running into other cars all the time.

The right rights

There is phrasing that is sometimes used when talking about rights, but just seldom enough that I'm not sure everyone uses it. We talk about rights against an entity. This sounds contentious, and in some contexts where the rights are challenged, it can be. But there are many ordinary situations where “against” does not imply conflict.

Freedom of speech, for example, is said to be a right against the government, but not because the government has any reason to fuss. It just tells you that, for example, it is not a right against a private company. The government may not justly censor you in most cases, but private companies more easily can. So it matters who the rights are against.

And, of course, it matters that rights be usable rights, not just pretty rights. Your rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness may be with you in spirit, but are not particularly usable otherwise. So I've informally adopted Emily Hartstone's definitions of what she calls rules “written to work,” from her book The Third Voice as a reasonable approximation to what I think rights must achieve to be usable.

Hartstone makes an impassioned and convincing case that such rules must have “an enforcement mechanism, a named party responsible for it, a consequence attached to violation, and a person who can invoke it who is not the party being governed.” It's quite an ambition, actually, but I see no reason to pre-compromise in such a goal. If we ask for less, we'll surely get less.

In each of her several books, Hartstone ties these asks to frustrations working against corporate systems that are faceless and unaccountable and have made critical decisions about medical options affecting treatment of her leukemia, and her response is unabashedly a response to that. Her indignance speaks for all of us.

And some may find it odd that she relates problems with health care to coming problems with “AI” but I, for one, do not. This is as directly relevant as one can be, and here I want you to see it through my eyes because once you see the issue, it won't seem even slightly off topic at all.

The first “AI”

Some time back, before all the modern uproar about “AI,” I wrote an essay called Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics. In it, I made the point that if corporations are legal people, then if they are required to be single-mindedly focused on shareholder needs, they are effectively also required by fiduciary duty to be “legal sociopaths.”

Implicitly, this also means that the attention to a corporate charter and shareholder needs means corporations were what I think of as the first AI. Note I am not using quotes here because they were fully capable of real reasoning, unlike LLMs, which might yet lack capabilities humans have. In the case of a corporation, the “program” they are executing is the corporate mission, the by-laws, etc. The processor on which this program runs is the group of people running the corporation, its C-suite as it is now called (the CEO, COO, CFO, etc).

What makes this an artificial intelligence and not a natural one is that while it has access to the full reasoning processes of the people that make it up, it is a new entity with an agenda potentially at odds with any or all employees, and hence its own identity defined by that separate quest. And that entity is not human, hence artificial.

Reality coming into sharp focus

So we can now see that this is not a metaphor, but actually a description of a realized set of machines that have existed in the world for quite some time. They interact with us, and they do some things we like and some things we do not. But they are not mere abstraction. And as a consequence, we have some data about what an “AI” really does. We know that at least some such things will do things in the corporate interest, that is, in the interest of the “AI” that are not in the interest of the clients, the customers, that they allegedly serve. We know that notwithstanding the sometimes well-meaning nature of the people who built them, they can be anything from annoying to frightening.

We know that we wish we had more rights against them.

Hartstone says she has experience with a medical system that did not feel like it respected her needs or was properly responsive.

She says she wanted to ask questions and had no one to ask them of.

She said there were actions ordered that affected her that she could not countermand.

Suturing it all together

And so when Hartstone wants to use this experience to guide her ideas about what “AI” we should be building, and what rights we should demand, she is not just telling a vaguely related story. In my mind, because of my own thinking about corporations as the first AI, although these are not her words I'm quoting, but my best personal attempt to hear her in my dialect and translate them for you, I hear “I have experience with AI that some people do not. I am not predicting what it will do, I am telling you what it did. Past tense. This is not a hypothetical. This is something I have lived and that I have no protections against living again. And I have dedicated my life to trying to help others avoid this already-lived and real AI experience.”

Her response is to have written some books (several of which I have now read, and they are good). It is to pursue business ideas that have real ethics with real teeth at their core. And to create a site that proposes some very strong rights. You should read runtimerights.org. Another day I'll comment on that. But for now, don't trust me to summarize it. Her site speaks for itself. Take the time.

And if you like the ideas, don't come away saying “it will never happen” or else the reason it will never happen will be your choice to set low expectations. Allow yourself the right to say “I want this.” Do not prematurely foreclose the idea.

As with all aspirational things, it might fall short. But it will not succeed better by aiming lower. It will just fall short of that. Give the ideas their due. That's why I am writing this right now. Maybe she won't succeed. But at least I won't be the cause.

 

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Author’s Notes:

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Emily Hartstone's book, The Third Voice, is available here. Her proposed standard for automated decisions, A Bill of Runtime Rights is available here.

The image generated at abacus.ai, using ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT Image 2.5). I did light post-processing in Gimp to add some desaturated false color and to reduce the resulting image in size for faster web download.

Pretty Rights and Usable Rights

Rights to relevance in a changing world

The world is difficult enough these days, and then along comes “AI.” Just the presence of this tech in our world seems to stand everything we know on its head and call for us to rethink what we already know, finding new ways to make sense of things we thought we already knew.

Increasingly, too, we've moved from just programs you chat amiably with to programs that do things. Smart things, allegedly, although that is often disputed. But meaningful things, and most meaningful things are double-edged, bringing potential benefits but with certain risks. There is pressure to turn over control and power to these entities, and debate about how well-tested they are, or what it would mean to trust them.

It's bad enough that rights are always under attack, but occasionally—and perhaps now—there is a need to create new rights as a way of retaining agency in a changing world. So let's be sure any rights we decide to make end up saying something useful. What might that mean?

Things we promise ourselves

The making of rights is not something we do every day. That happens for a number of reasons. For routine issues, we make laws instead.

I've elsewhere characterized rights as “just laws with a higher vote threshold,” but that was more a lament about the fact that we haven't found a better way to implement them. Qualitatively, in terms of use, they perform a completely different function.

Laws are rules we vote on, a kind of public consensus about what's sufficiently good that it's worth enforcing. Rights, by contrast, are rules about what kinds of laws we may write. That's very different. It's a kind of public consensus about what's sufficiently bad that we must not do, or even not write laws about.

Laws and rights may look like a sort of yin and yang of public consensus, or two ends of the same spectrum, but really they are not. Rights constrain laws, and not vice versa. And even though they operate in the same space, and are sometimes made by the same people, I like to think of rights as commitments we make on our better days to protect us from ourselves on our worse days.

Mob rules

Laws, after all, are ever at risk of dissolving into mob rule, what has been called the tyranny of the majority. Rights, on the other hand, have been criticized by some as being just the opposite, a tyranny of the minority. But they are not really that. To say that it's a tyranny to have rights is a misunderstanding of why rights are there.

Good rights, well-written rights, are an acknowledgment that sometimes in the heat of political battle, or the furor of rage whipped up over a hot-button issue, we will not leave reason aside and punish individuals merely for being different than we expected, because that is what mobs are prone to do.

Something happens. People in a mob are outraged. Their rational side is suppressed for a while. They want immediate satisfaction. They create coarse-grained descriptions of an evil, any evil. All that matters to them is that the evil's description is not a description of themselves. As long as it is someone else, other, the fact that it may err, may implicate or even injure a few innocents, is not a big deal to them in that heated moment.

We, on our calmer days, when not in rage, need to say “no, you must calm down first, even if it is a voting majority of you who are enraged, this is still not fair to individuals.” In part, but not entirely, because we might one day be one of those individuals, those others.

At minimum, we need the right to ask that everyone first calm down. We often phrase our rights in other ways, but many other phrasings come down to that, to the right of any individual to stop a much larger group from imminent allegedly-righteous but not well-thought-through action.

This is our right to due process. We are due specific processes that allow us time and place to assert other rights in a thoughtful way.

The right to differ

Or sometimes it's not even something so grandiose. We might just want to criticize the government. That's necessary, or law can never change. In a free society, the standing law was the result of some prior vote by the populace, a consensus of the majority, or at least a plurality, since not everyone might care to vote.

And yet, every change in law has started elsewhere, as a minority. Someone made a case for change by criticizing a prior consensus. If you don't have the space in which to think, in which to discuss, in which to find a proper consensus, you'll never get a new one.

So some of our rights come down to that. Just holding public criticism at bay. A right to differ harmlessly.

We would, after all, prefer that people discuss things politely, not pull out guns. It is surely not accidental that speech is the first in the bill of rights, and guns second, not vice versa. And note, too, for all the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights have had an extraordinary effect on the way humans interacted with one another over the last 250 years, these documents said nothing that changed the passions people felt, only the valid mechanisms by which they might reasonably act on those passions.

What accommodates change

The issue, then, is not really competing tyrannies (minority vs majority). The issue is self-restraint. Rights tend to be strong promises we make to ourselves on our better days about what actions are so extreme that they may not indulge them on lesser days.

Our system, after all, involves a lot of writing of laws and enforcing laws. Rights are a kind of meta-law, not rules that tell us what to do, but rules that control what other rules we can make or what enforcement we can do. Rights create the framework in which all the rest is built.

For one thing, we aren't infallible. And it's hard to write good law, so reserving the right to change law is not a terrible thing. I went through a lot of drafts writing this essay, more than I usually do. Neither you nor I would have been well-served by my just shipping the first version.

Editing matters, and in the public discourse of a free society, the editors of our laws are our citizens. Laws are the rules we live by, but they are also, especially initially, sometimes a rough draft. Drafting, lived experience, court cases, and revisions are a sort of coarse-grained “inner loop” that society endures because the rules we live by involve a sort of give and take.

Let there be rights

I say inner loop because there is an outer loop. We could break out of the law-making, change our Constitution, and then go back to law-making in the inner loop. But that would be very disruptive. Better to set things up right the first time because the Constitution and its Amendments (including the Bill of Rights) is the very foundation of our democratic process, our nation's very own laws of physics, you might say. A physics of laws, not of heat or light or gravity, but foundational in the same way as physics to what is built atop it.

A rule written to work has an enforcement mechanism, a named party responsible for it, a consequence attached to violation, and a person who can invoke it who is not the party being governed. […]

A rule written to be seen has a launch, a framework document, a set of principles beginning with words like transparency and accountability, an advisory board, and no mechanism by which anyone can be told no.

 —Emily Hartstone, The Third Voice
   (bold added here for emphasis)

In her book The Third Voice, Emily Hartstone makes a contrast between two kinds of rules—rules written to work (i.e., written to function meaningfully) and rules written to be seen (i.e., written as mere theatre—sometimes inspiring theatre, but not always something you can reliably invoke to stop something bad or achieve something good).

I find this a really useful distinction because it articulates something I think most people want from rights, that they be usable.

That then immediately cleaves off a number of discussions about rights that occupy philosophers, that are pretty but aren't really usable in day-to-day life because they are not designed to be invoked.

So I will use these terms “usable” and “pretty,” but in doing so I mean to invoke this clean partition Hartstone has usefully offered. That will let me say succinctly something that I have been searching for words for.

It's not enough to be pretty

Much good has come of pretty words, so I don't want to nix the idea entirely. But I want more of rights than the aspirations and inspirations they evoke in us. Those things are necessary, but not sufficient to a healthy society.

Rights said to have been given by God, important rights, rights to Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness are perfect examples of pretty rights—rights that are lovely to think one has, phrases to quote in a debate, but things that in everyday life, when it counts, are not really usable rights.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
—US Declaration of Independence

At best such words set a mood or have indirect, diffuse effect—good, sure, but not reliable. Nothing forces the good effect, and it can fall dramatically short. And at worst, such words may gaslight us, suggesting a right that isn't there, teasing us with elusive promises that slip out of sight when called upon to apply. I want something specific enough to be used in precision circumstances, in precision ways, with precision effect.

What makes rights relevant

If you pull the trigger on a gun that's pointed at someone, can they say “Wait! I have a right to life?” If a kidnapper hauls you bodily from your home, can you assert that your captors must let you free because you have a right to liberty? And don't even get me started on asserting a right to happiness.

If rights are not usable, cannot be enforced, then aren't we back to where we started? In what sense are they rights there at all? If we're going to make some rights for this new age, let's make them usable ones.

If we want to stay relevant in a rapidly changing society, let's make sure now that we have the power to insist on that. That's what good rights are about.

 

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The image and its thumbnail were generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT Image 2.5 [Edit]), with light post-processing by me in Gimp to correct some detailing I didn't like, adjust the saturation, and reduce the resulting image in size for faster web download,

Taking Rights for Granite

Language is power

We go to dictionaries to settle disputes about the meanings of words. And yet, oddly, we didn't learn language from those dictionaries. We learned by observing use. When we challenge someone to look something up, we often don't ourselves know what we'll find there. We hope our own use is common, or at least supported.

We hope dictionaries will side with us because people consume and store thoughts as sentences, even when they don't know or agree precisely on the meanings of the words that make up such sentences. If you tell yourself “I am a good person” and I can convince you that “good” means “someone who washes their friend's cars,” maybe I can get you to wash my car—just because you want to be a “good” person.

If you can control language, you can direct its power. Sometimes it's harmless fun like that. Maybe I get a free car wash. Other times the stakes are higher, and it's more serious.

War of the Words

This jockeying for terminological control has become fully integrated into the societal conversations we call politics. When they can't change what's in someone's mind, well-funded political groups lately seem comfortable trying instead to change the meanings of the words others are holding onto so tightly.

“The pages of dictionaries are the battlegrounds upon which many modern wars are fought.”

That's me quoting myself. I make this observation a lot. I figured I should, at least once, put it on the record.

A glaring example is that the US Constitution creates certain supermajority requirements to change what the Constitution says. For a long time, those requirements have done their job. The Constitution seldom changes, and it requires a lot of people to agree when it does. But, in recent years, those who pretty clearly wish they could change our Constitution, yet can't muster the broad consensus to do it, seem focused instead on changing who interprets it.

Why change the words when it's easier to change the meanings of those words?

The ability to say what words mean is an enormous power, with huge implications. When we go assigning meaning to existing words, we need to keep in mind that we are not just creating new tools for future expression, we are also potentially affecting the meaning of existing beliefs that are expressed in terms of those words. Some see that as a sacred responsibility, others as opportunity—an invitation to power just waiting to be exploited.

The substance of rights

I once said to a friend that rights are just laws with a higher vote threshold for changing them. They looked at me in horror. “No!” they insisted, pushing back. “Rights are just there. That's why they're rights.” They are different than laws, they went on to explain. Not subject to edit or repeal. Inalienable, one might even say.

Philosophers have weighed in on this from a variety of points of view on rights. There are disagreements on how to conceive them that are broad and deep. And yet. And yet.

You can build all the fanciful rhetoric you want around them, to make them sound like they are vast and solid. But if someone is motivated, they will try to take them away because within those rights is the power to stop things, and there are people in the world who would rather not be stopped.

And those are sometimes very determined people. People willing even to ignore flowery rhetoric, if necessary. People who think what matters is power. The power to take those rights from you. The power over you that comes of denying those rights.

In other words, what rights we have seem doomed to perpetual attack. So we'd better be realistic about whether they are protected, and how.

Our societal prayers

Powerful as God is said to be, “rights” given by Him (or some say Her) seem to me most vulnerable. If we're going to use religious metaphors, perhaps prayer is better.

For those among us who are religious enough to think such prayers are regularly and reliably answered, this may be reassuring. And to those people, I wish all the very best, as I expect they may then find their faith severely challenged by such reliance.

For those of us who are not religious, prayer may still be a good metaphor. It underscores the need to see there's nothing backing such prayers that we do not arrange for.

“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” it is said, though precisely by whom seems subject of considerable question. True, nonetheless—provided such vigilance is active. Passive observership seems insufficient, exposing solid-sounding words as the paper-thin protection they really are. Only we, as the words' committed allies, can give such rights their rightful substance.

Life is a calm room,
hurricane raging outside,
paper walls between.
 —Kent Pitman, Tenuous Tenacity (June 2016)

 

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The Messy Middle

The world we study for

We ask children to spend a dozen or more years in school, preparing to live life out in the world.

We separate the things they learn into modular classes on different subjects. Math. Physics. History. Logic. The building blocks of adult existence, we tell them.

We give them tests to make sure they understand the material. We want correct answers. We make sure there are correct answers. We want to be able to defend that we're asking good questions so we can demand good answers. Answers that are clear and precise. That's how we score success. Numbers of correct answers.

The logic we teach is equally precise. It's not enough to know things. One must be able to start with things that are known, apply rules of implication, and conclude new things. It's impossible to know everything about the world, so you need some way to infer new things from existing things. Logic is key.

The world we're left to confront

Alas, the actual world is nothing like what most schools prepare kids for. It is not arranged in neat little packages, everything is mixed together. There are no clear right or wrong answers, everything seems a jumble. Even logic itself seems sometimes to lead crazy places.

That last part, about logic, comes as a surprise to many, but it really shouldn't. It turns out that the logic we learn in school is not as applicable to the real world as we are led to believe. It can sometimes help, but it can sometimes play tricks. Let's look at why that is.

On constraints and overconstraint

I'm going to use some terminology here that some people might know, and some might not. They aren't hard concepts, but I want to just make sure we're all on the same page.

If I speak of constraints, I mean the things that you might see in the right hand column of a shopping page like at Amazon where you're searching for a toaster and you can click boxes saying that you want it to be green, no more than 14 inches high, and under $30. Whatever comes back to me should satisfy those constraints.

You might specify constraints at a dating site, too. Maybe it gives you a chance to specify things like that the person should be the same height as you, good looking, funny, smart, high income, humble, kind, and likes long walks on beaches. So you punch all that in and nothing comes back. That's called overconstrained. It means you specified so many things that you're being unrealistic.

Our world is regularly overconstrained

Constraints are ways of saying what we want, but only certain constraints are possible to satisfy at the same time as others. We can't have everything. It's not about the number of constraints, and yet if you're not paying attention to which constraints are compatible with which others, the more constraints you add, the less likely it is that you'll be able to satisfy them.

• We want a house in a nice neighborhood that is also cheap, has a big yard, and is downtown where it's close to restaurants.

• We want politicians that are able to get elected but also don't take special interest money, are going to make disruptive change, and are not going to be kept from being elected by entrenched powers.

• We want restaurants that offer delicious food but that are super-cheap, pay their servers well, are not too crowded to be easily seated, and yet don't go out of business while they're never full.

• We want a diverse world, yet somehow also always one that specifically agrees with our own sensibilities.

So often, the things we demand of the world are not even themselves consistent. In effect, the world is overconstrained. It could not even exist in a form that matches our own constraints.

Our inconsistent world

Physics isn't bothered by such inconsistency because Physics isn't built on our descriptions, our descriptions are built on Physics, sometimes badly.

Also, Nature does not name things. Nature does not describe things. Nature just is. And nature is consistent. It is just Physics played out. And Physics is consistent.

It's our language, our culture, our personal preferences that are inconsistent. So when I speak of “the world” or “our world,” I usually mean to imply “in the way we have conceived and spoken of it.” And when I say “I usually mean,” I mean just that—sometimes yes, sometimes no. Please don't ask me to be consistent. 😀

Descriptive inconsistencies by themselves are harmless. People enjoy books of fiction all the time because they do not confuse what happens in stories with real life. The only problem comes when description, especially inconsistent description, is asked to do double duty, to also be statements of fact that can be reasoned about by logic.

It's not all terrible

But let's give ourselves some credit. We are born into a world where we receive a mass of nerve signals as our only initial input, yet somehow from that we infer that language is going on around us, and we figure out how to learn it just by watching and listening. We are helped by society to study what is already known about the world, and within our all-too-short lifespans, we find that vast complexities, from genetics to the far reaches of the Universe are within our grasp. And we navigate disciplines like psychology, sociology, economics, the weather, and even the arts, even as none of these lend themselves to precise formulas.

So I think we can be forgiven a bit of approximation, overgeneralization, and, yes, inconsistency. To ask better might put all such ambitions out of reach. Frankly, it's stunning we can do any of that in so short a time, so we owe ourselves a collective pat on the back before we stress overly.

Our disappointed children

And yet, a world full of overconstraint and inconsistency is one where that logic we taught in school does not apply. In traditional logic, the way you often prove something is to show that thinking the opposite would lead to a contradiction. But if contradictions are already there waiting, that means you can prove anything.

Contradiction is table stakes in our world. It's the beginning of the story, not the end. It can't be a proof technique because the contradiction was there before you started your proof.

We teach children that contradiction implies a problem, and then we turn them loose on a world full of contradiction. Is it any wonder that upon being thrown unprepared into a world that is nothing like the world we prepared them for, the first thing they do is call adults hypocrites? It's what we trained them to do!

It takes our children time to figure out the world they end up in. And by the time many do, they're the adults the next crop of kids will arrive to despise as hypocrites.

The gaps we've left

We never taught them a Philosophy of Inconsistency, but they needed something like that before we turned them loose on the world. Inconsistency is everywhere and we should have prepared them for that. And for the fact that the answers might not be easy. Instead, right down to the bitter end, we require modular, teachable concepts with measurably right answers.

There are even common memes that mock people for just showing up and participating, as if that is not award-worthy. And yet “just trying hard” or “keeping things in perspective,” is literally the best you can do in many arenas of human endeavor.

Parenting is often said to be that. Just showing up day after day, even if the rest is not perfect, counts for a lot.

Preparing for the real world

Perhaps the final year or two of school should not be about modular topics, grades, and correct answers. Maybe it should be about confronting a messy world where all the subjects are mixed together in a blender, and where there are not always answers. They're going to be forced to cope anyway, better it should happen with a teaching staff still handy to help in the transition.

Politics, especially, is full of contradictions. If people are not careful, they'll fall victim to politicians using logic against them. “We can't do that,” the politician may say, “because that will lead to a contradiction.”

Lead to a contradiction? The contradiction was already there, waiting to be exploited! But people new to the game may be easily tricked if they don't realize it, or its implications. We need to teach not just how to use logic, but when not to use it, lest they be tricked.

Hypocrisy can't be used to disqualify people, or everyone will be possible to disqualify. Instead, we need to learn to manage hypocrisy, to keep it to a minimum in various thoughtful ways.

And I've lost track of how many times as a manager I've said to my reports that sometimes sense of humor is what gets you through the hard days, especially when you can see an excess of constraints makes the requested form of success literally impossible. Would it be so bad to have a class in things like that?

The problem to be solved by all this would be to properly set expectations for these kids—emerging adults really—so when they're out in the world, they know what success looks like. Because right now, some of our best and most hard-fought outcomes look like failures to them, like giving in or selling out.

Rethinking Virtue

And while we're rethinking the curriculum, I have one very specific nit to pick, because it follows from everything we've just discussed and it will give us better terminology to talk about what success really looks like in an overconstrained world.

There is a body of thought begun originally by Aristotle with his “Nicomachean Ethics,” the more modern rendition of which is “Virtue Ethics.” I'm a big fan of this idea. Most of it, anyway. I just think we have to make some adjustments to it in order for it to make sense in this inconsistent world we've built. It's got some cool ideas, but it sets us up to be confused in precisely the way learning traditional logic does.

So, of course, I have my own variation that tries to preserve the parts I like and be more realistic about the rest.

The problem with Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics speaks of virtue as “the mean between unreasonable extremes.”

For example, it reasons that “spendthriftiness” is unreasonable for being too careless with money and that “miserliness” is similarly unreasonable at the opposite extreme, so it concludes there is some mathematical ideal, a “mean,” that exists in between these unreasonable extremes, just waiting for us to zoom in and locate it precisely.

I don't agree. It's just not that simple. There is no such place, I would argue. Because we have an inconsistent world, any simple rule that comes of mathematics or logic will be seen to have exceptions. The world is just too messy.

Dreaming impossible dreams

But does the fact that the goal is unachievable mean it's improper to try?

No, I don't think so. It's OK to dream the impossible dream. It gives life purpose and dignity and honor, actually.

I just think it should not be described as some pristine mathematical thing, waiting to be proven, lest we pass straight by it when it presents itself not in regal threads but in peasant clothes. We should instead drive a stake into the ever-shifting sands at a plausible place I call the Messy Middle, chosen to best accommodate any facts we know or reasonably expect. Then, when materially new information arrives—and it will—pull up that stake and find it a better place. Wherever that stake is at any given time, that's the Messy Middle. Always defend that.

Dynamic curve-fitting is a better mathematical metaphor than golden mean, if one insists on sounding mathy but only because, to some degree, curve-fitting has an implicit “Philosophy of Messiness” deep in its design. It is one of the ways mathematicians confront chaos and pretty it up, quite as we are doing here.

And the reason I say “dynamic” is that I'm pretty confident that whatever place we stake out, initially or later on, will keep moving as more data comes in. There will be no easy answer that works for everything. And it won't be approaching some well-defined spot like a mathematical limit might. It will probably just wobble about chaotically.

In other words, compromises will be made to absorb new cases, and we just have to be prepared to defend them. It doesn't matter to be 100% perfect. What matters is to be committed to caring, and to always be doing the best we can.

Justice, and what just is

This is how what passes for Justice works in our inconsistent world. We can't totally define it because the world is just too complex. All we can do is commit to a Theory of Justice and then when faced with new data, revise the theory and try again. There will never be true Justice, alas. But what matters is that we don't stop trying.

Justice is not a place on a number line, between unreasonable extremes. Justice is instead a hygiene, an ongoing process of managing things, that compensates for the elusive nature of a concept we can't quite define precisely, yet that we still value immensely.

Justice, and other virtues, must be ever defended against incompleteness, and also against claims of hypocrisy. No easy task. But it starts by understanding that the hypocrisy arises not from the application of Justice but from the problem description. Once we understand that, we're better positioned to manage it properly.

Recap

Borne of overconstraint, there could be no other ending to this story.

The Messy Middle is not, in the Aristotelian way we're taught, some pristine “mean” waiting to be uncovered, but more just a stake in the ground at a place we must accept and defend in spite of its messy origins. We must learn to live with it there, even as we must also commit to pulling it up and adjusting its position when, inevitably, the need arises.

What's really vexing about maintaining the Messy Middle is that it becomes hard to distinguish weasely people from heroic people. Both require shifting. But the ability to distinguish weasels from heroes is not something the Universe offers a clear path to. If one is going to be a hero in such a world, they'd better be prepared to navigate the mess, and to defend right from wrong on some basis more solid than citation of ever-present contradiction.

Not a fairytale ending, but a believable and workable one, I think. And it seems clear to me that the Universe doesn't offer us a better option. So stand by that mess proudly. Commit to defending against what criticisms inevitably come. Be that hero—to young and old alike.

 

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Author's Notes:

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This essay began as a post on Mastodon, but has been very heavily edited since then.

I used a public domain image of a nautilus shell from publicdomainpictures.net to produce the two graphics: one that shows the shell in its original form, and another edited by me using Gimp to replace the crisp center of the nautilus spiral with a fogged out center, representing the Messy Middle.

I used Claude Opus 4.8 as a syntactic, grammar, and editorial cross-check on my writing as drafts evolved, but not to do any of the actual writing.

Metaphor Matters

Metaphor is a craft of language, but helps us organize concepts in our head. That symbiosis is ethically fraught and we're occasionally vulnerable to being tricked, so I want to explore that a little here.

Shift of metaphor can be helpful to understanding. But we conceive of understanding as involving perceived truth, and metaphors are tricky because parts of them, by design, are not literal truth. In a metaphor, you have to know which part is the intended structural truth and which other part is just along for the ride.

An impromptu metaphor

If you and I are out in a forest and have brought a picnic lunch, you might say “Where do we eat? There's no table or chairs.” To which I might respond, pointing to a fallen log with two large, well-placed stones, one on each side, “Pull up a chair.”

The stones are not chairs. They probably cannot even be pulled. To process this metaphor, you must sort out which parts I intend (that a chair can be sat upon, that the arrangement of the stones and the log is such that they might suffice to accommodate an impromptu lunch), and which parts I don't intend. Pulling up a chair is again metaphorical. I just mean “sit down” but have worked the idea into the prior metaphor. The sense of the log as a table might work for sandwiches but if we'd brought soup, which requires a more level surface, it might not have.

We use language to play these games routinely. You are not tricked by this metaphor because you see the context, what it's being used for. It will be gone soon enough. All good.

The “Facebook friend” metaphor

But there are situations that are more complicated, that persist, that have very powerful implications. Facebook offers us the ability to have “friends.” You may not see this as a metaphor. Many people enumerate their friends and assume the terminology is literal. But it is not. It's a metaphor.

A friend arrives, someone you like well enough, but they do not socialize well with your other friends. Are they not then your friend, if you do not add them at Facebook? If someone is annoying after they're added and you remove them, are they no longer your friend?

I have come to see the Facebook paradigm as a bad metaphor, even an obfuscated one. It's hard to notice that it's a metaphor at all. This leads to problems. People feel bad about “unfriending” someone because it seems like they are telling the person they are not their friend. That was avoidable, I think, by better choice of metaphor.

I think of “Facebook friends” not as the role of “friend” but “party guest.” I find this makes things easier. Facebook could have used such a metaphor. It's OK that it didn't. But it matters that you see that they could have. Because then you can think about “Facebook friends” in a way of your choosing.

Once you see it's a metaphor, you realize only parts of it apply. Not all of it. Rather than “unfriend” I think about kicking a guest out of a party. It's hard sometimes, but it's not friend-level hard. And it explains why some people that are Facebook friends are not in fact my friends. Sometimes parties have extra people along. It's not a commitment.

Metaphor is important. It helps us understand new situations. Facebook got a lot of mileage out of using the friend metaphor because people immediately understood the space of how to use the system. A lot didn't have to be explained.

The “computer desktop” metaphor

The same success happened when computers adopted the “desktop metaphor.” People knew about file folders and about organizing things in groups, so the older idea of a hierarchical file system organized in other ways, like as a book outline, was suddenly the less interesting way to think about things. The graphical view had immediate appeal.

But sometimes the desktop metaphor breaks down. I was once helping my mom understand the Apple desktop and she said “so when I open a folder, that means I have it in my hands and no one else can look at it, right?” Well, no, it doesn't mean that. But maybe that's a misdesign. The metaphor certainly suggests that's a reasonable interpretation. So there are limits to even benign metaphors in what they can do for us.

The “membership” metaphor

If you're a member of a club, you can join it online and talk to its members. But have you wondered why your gas station wants you to join? It's because in competition in marketplaces, they've figured out that people like to do things with things they feel part of. So they have a better chance of you going there because “you're a member.” Never mind that there are no meetings, and you have no interest in talking to anyone that works there. That one fact will do something in your mind that changes your perception. Metaphor at work.

It also explains why charities want you to join them. Isn't it enough that you gave them money? No, because it might have been a one-time thing. If they want more money later, it lands differently if a stranger says “hey, you gave me money, so you have to give me more” or if an organization you joined says, “hey, we haven't seen you in a long time, old friend. how about a bit of support?” And yet those are pretty much the same except the latter is through the membership metaphor. It makes you less mad at a communication being unsolicited.

So watch for metaphors. Understand their implication. They offer powerful good, and they risk tricking you. You even might find that being a member of a religious or political organization makes you feel like you need to get along with and support others in that organization, even when that organization gets captured. Membership metaphor at play again. Beware. It might still be an organization you're caring about. You might want the contact. You might want to help. But do it by thinking, not by reflex.

Final Thoughts

So I'm saying metaphor matters. Whether metaphors, or their employers, are friendly and helpful or trying to trick us is hard to cleanly define. I'm not trying to tell you how to do that. I'm saying it's worth knowing you might need to. Life is a jungle. Sometimes it helps to have a map or guidebook, sometimes a machete—metaphorically speaking, of course.

 

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Author’s Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post began as part of another post I was writing. After a while, some of these get long, so breaking them off and giving them a life of their own seems like the way to go.

The image generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8 as primary assistant and for vision/analysis, Nano Banana Pro for image generation), with light post-processing in Gimp to do cropping, prefer grayscale, and add back desaturated color, and finally to scale things down for reduced image size and ultimately faster web download, The image analysis was needed because there were some editing errors that Nana Banana Pro kept making, and I had to show them to Claude for it to see what instructions to give to repair them. That only sometimes worked, which is why I had to do more of the final parts by hand than I usually do.