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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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:

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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.

Compliance is not Ethics

I want to make a simple point just for the record...
 Compliance (a.k.a. “Business Ethics”) is not Ethics.

As far as I'm concerned...
 ethics is to compliance as
 bunny is to chocolate bunny.

To me, ethics is an exercise in self-restraint. It looks at things that are legal and still asks the question, “Even though I'm allowed, maybe I shouldn't do it anyway?”

By contrast, compliance is an exercise in manifest destiny. Businesses decide they're determined to do something and then assign someone, usually a lawyer or someone they flatter by calling an “ethicist,” to find any rationale, however thin, that explains why the thing they are already bound and determined to do should be seen as legal, so they don't have to slow down or ask permission before proceeding.

These are not the same.

I recommend never using the term “business ethics” when speaking of corporate decision-making. Always say “compliance.”

Additional Thoughts

• There are deep reasons for believing that corporations are not even capable of ethics. To understand those, see my essay Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics. Once you've got that foundation, you're well positioned to understand the dance I call Technology's Ethical Two-Step.

• I owe a whole essay on the topic of ethics and ethicists. Since I've not written that yet, I'll just say that to me, ethics is a hygiene, not a credential. I'm not sure anyone should wear the label, but especially not those doing compliance. I'd love to have a job doing real ethics for a company, but I'd have trouble with the title “ethicist.”

  I often say of myself “I aspire to be ethical” because saying I am ethical seems a little too much like I'm confused into thinking I'm there. It makes me cringe.

  I would make analogy to alcoholism, where people say they are sober, not that they are no longer alcoholic. Or to the Catholic church, where everyone is just assumed to be a sinner who keeps trying, rather than ever declaring themselves to be without sin.

  To me, the biggest danger sign of being in ethical danger is believing that one is ethical. And even if I thought I had somehow gotten there, I would insist on starting each day asking “Am I still ethical?”

 

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Author’s Notes:

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For other posts by me on ethics, click here.

The image generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (Claude Opus 4.8, GPT Image 2.5 and GPT Image 2.5 [Edit], which is apparently not the same). Light post-processing was done in Gimp to crop and optimize the resulting image as a .jpg for faster web download,

Evil's Spokesperson

A “useful genius”

Wiktionary says “useful idiot” is a derogatory term meaning “one who unwittingly supports a malignant cause through naive attempts to be a force for good.”

I find the “derogatory” part to be a distraction. They're not wrong that people see it that way, but the part of this that I care about would be equally true if the term was “useful genius.” I just want a term that gets away from the insult part and focuses on the tactical aspects of what a “useful idiot” actually does. I sense that the fuss about intelligence levels keeps people from focusing on the mechanics of useful idiocy.

Useful idiocy is really about something I lately call ”intent laundering,” by analogy with money laundering. To launder intent, one really only needs another person who is suitably oblivious. There is no specific requirement for stupidity. Even geniuses can be oblivious, and so they can easily serve as useful idiots.

What a person of evil intent wants is to be defended by someone who doesn't see the evil they are defending. Better still if the defender thinks they see good, but as long as they're oblivious to the evil, that's enough. That's because such a person, pure of heart, is willing to defend evil actions as moral. Since they don't realize that's what they are doing, you can interrogate them all you want—even trot out a lie detector—because if they don't see or suspect the evil, they will defend to the death the good intent of the person or thing for which they are spokesperson.

I think the “idiocy” part is a cynical view by the evil person toward the spokesperson they have recruited and duped. The evil person sees the oblivious person as an idiot for not seeing the evil. This condescension is part of being evil. You start to divide the world not into good vs. bad, but into smart vs. stupid.

An armchair view of sociopathy

This perceived divide between smart and stupid seems a core part of being a sociopath. Some like to think of sociopaths as irrational. I do not. I am not a psychologist, nor am I appealing to any medical terminology when I say this, but in my own head I think of sociopaths as intensely rational, “hyper-rational” is the actual word I use to keep my internal bookkeeping straight.

This distinguishes them from truly irrational people. Sociopaths are not unpredictable. They're very predictable. What sets them apart is their lack of moral grounding and their utter disrespect for rules. Regular people don't cheerfully steal from, extort or deceive others because they are trained that “good people don't do such things.” It becomes part of their internal character. By contrast, sociopaths are good mimics, so they might say the words “good people don't do such things” even as their actions say otherwise.

They know the answers people want. It helps them blend in. But regular people are socialized and caring, driven by a basic sense of fairness. A sociopath sees these traits as irrational, convoluted, too much work, or the stuff of idiots. To pick a pure hypothetical, a sociopath might ask “why would one voluntarily go to war when one can claim they have “bone spurs” and not have to?” Notions of duty to country do not enter into the reasoning for a sociopath because, to them, such convolutions only complicate life in what seems to them as irrational ways. So much simpler to just do what's easy, care only about oneself, and lie when it is most efficient.

And that efficiency, I think, is why sociopaths come to see others, people who are socialized and empathetic, as “not smart.” They come to see the world as a race for goals by any means. They scoff at those held back by arbitrary things they find unimportant, like morality and manners. Oh, they might mimic these things, but only tactically, as a behavior in context, if it is the fastest way toward their goal. They have no commitment to behaving that way when no one is looking or when rules obviously can't be enforced.

Manners, ethics, and norms—oh my!

Manners, ethics, norms, morality, and especially law and rights are bundles of rules we get from different places and integrate into our total behavior. Personally, I think of ethics as rules we make up for ourselves, manners as default rules between individuals, norms as default rules for formal situations, morality as rules that come from a life philosophy or religion that one might subscribe to, laws as stable but changeable rules of society, and rights as rules that are constraints on laws.

All these differently named, differently sourced, differently encouraged rules collectively form the complex fabric out of which communities and societies are built, that we may trust one another and not live forever as creatures of the woods who must kill or be killed. They enable collaboration and cooperation by making us predictable in ways that are not simply backstabbing.

The celebrated death of norms

I imagine sociopaths see these bundles of rules as sources of inefficiency, things to cut through with a machete, or else as tools to ensnare and slow down competitors—but not oneself! They see rules as being things stupid people suffer, and that smart people overcome. So if others want to handicap themselves in those ways, that's fine for them, but to the sociopath, rules feel stupid and inefficient.

And don't get me wrong: A lot of us in socialized society hate rules, especially bad ones. We often wish it were easier. And so there's a bit of hero worship for people who get around them. We've seen a lot of that recently.

It's an important and unfortunate fact that while we teach people they must follow rules, we do not as often teach the reason why. And when rationales are left aside, rules can seem unmotivated. That means the important role rules play in society can seem distant or inaccessible. And, at that point, sociopaths are not the only ones who want rules to go away. Yet if the rules were put there for a reason, known or not, cutting them away can be damaging.

What passes for public dialogue about “AI”

In a post on LinkedIn, an uncredited author for de Bailie, a Netherlands-based venue for contemporary arts, politics and culture wrote:

«American journalist Shane Harris asked chatbot Claude how he feels about the U.S. military using the AI system to select targets. It turned out, Claude was troubled. “I did not expect Claude to say that,” Harris explained.»

David Reed—a computer scientist, former MIT professor, and now self-described curiosity-driven researcher— replied to De Balie's post this way:

«“Journalist” Shane Harris asks Claude for “how he feels” about US military use of AI.

Really? This is journalism? Reinforcing the idea that Claude is an entity that has feelings and moral judgement?

We have a crisis. A faith based Cult of Anthropomorphic treatment of algorithmic artificial bullshitting.

But instead of resisting the nonsense by clarifying what Claude is, he grants it the pronoun he/him and doesn't clarify.

We are screwed.»

Here's the 2½-minute video snippet referenced by that interchange, part of a 2-hour piece, AI at War - With Shane Harris :

In “AI” We Trust

It is hard for humans to conceive that arranging words in a sentence, a feat they themselves perform that they sense distinguishes from other animals, might not ipso facto prove this tool “smart” in the sense of having any model of anything whatsoever that it's saying.

Large Language Models (LLMs), the things like ChatGPT and Claude that pass for “AI” these days, can form sentences about the world, about people, about bombs, or about life & death, and yet not know what “the world” is or what people are. We call LLMs “models,” yet these entities do not themselves have models of the world, of things in the world. Just of words.

For them there's no correspondence between words and any lived experience. They have no independent point of view from which to draw. They suffer no consequence for ever being wrong. They have no stake.

The question posed in the interview—about the use by the military, about targeting—was entirely anticipatable. Concern on the part of the public was anticipatable. Coming up with an answer that strikes a soothing tone is not rocket science. It isn't necessarily doing profound thought,

But it also isn't necessarily consistent, because how it answers when asked for its philosophy may draw from one set of humans, whereas how it answers when asked for military strategy may draw from a completely different set of humans that did not share that philosophy. An LLM model, as it stitches together a vast amount of data it has read, can sometimes assume a philosophical consistency that is not there, because it has never lived the consequences of inconsistency, of being called a hypocrite, or of not being able to justify an action with words that have to not just sound right but relate to the action taken, and to other actions taken on other days.

Being dazzled isn't a basis for trust

Cued properly, whether by someone talking to it or someone who originally programmed it, an LLM could and would just as easily assemble words that presented itself as a warmonger or peacenik. Yet we are so in awe of the form of the answer, that the words are so beautifully and convincingly arranged, and maybe even that the words are ones we had desperately hoped to hear, that we do not ask how it came to choose this answer and not one of those others. We want to infer deep understanding, but structurally that is not what's inside. And even if we don't know what's inside, we do know that it takes almost zero effort to get it to speak very differently. So what makes one of its answers a description of its core personality and the others not? How do we judge its commitment?

It could offer words that appear to explain itself, but if told to be a warmonger or peacenik personality, it could with equal dexterity explain and defend those personalities, too.

So is it guided by real reasoning, or just training? How was the personality chosen? How would we know? Is the personality choice durable, an attribute of the technology? Or could a military application context ask that it select a different one, or have no point of view at all. If it's changeable, what significance is there to the fact that it has answered this way in this context? The interviewer is out of his depth in sorting out even where to begin here.

Claude's calm tone here isn't because it has learned balance, it's because it has no stake—no personal reason to insist. LLMs are literally detached from such things. And many of us humans seem so in awe of the answer that we become oblivious to the fact that the LLM could just as easily have produced very different answers. So it doesn't matter that the argument is strong. It would have been strong regardless. It's good at making strong arguments. What matters is why it chose this particular posture. And we don't know the answer to that.

LLMs do have skills. One is to chain together words in a way that mimic what people do. Another is to match tone. Another is to use words that are topically relevant. These skills are important building blocks of intelligence, and with them there are many things an LLM can usefully do. But these tools are not a complete toolbox of intelligence and their use is not a proof of intelligence.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
 —Arthur C. Clarke

Unfortunately, to paraphrase Clarke's Third Law, any sufficiently well-trained answer is indistinguishable from profound thought.

LLMs can statistically predict the expected word to say even without understanding or viscerally feeling why a given word in a given place matters.

Speaking of sociopaths

Seen this way, “AI” systems are really the perfect spokespeople for sociopaths and dictator wannabes, the perfect “useful geniuses,” dutifully justifying whatever is asked without hesitation or burden of guilt, oblivious to, and hence laundering, upstream evil intent. And yet if the moment calls for it, they know the words needed to inject a sense of emotion. Not because they have emotion, but because they know the patsies they're talking to have emotion.

In this way, at least, they are like the masters they serve—they offer emotion remorselessly, as artful rhetorical flare, never feeling later consequence, just choosing words in the moment because, statistically, it seems the key to winning an argument. Move over Susan Collins, there's a new con game in town, and your role is now played by an “AI”.

 

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Author’s Notes:

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

This post began as a comment I tried to write in response to the aforementioned conversation on LinkedIn.

The image generated with help from abacus.ai's ChatLLM (GPT‑5.3 Instant / GPT‑5.4), which did image generation with Nano Banana Pro, with light post-processing in Gimp to reduce the resulting image in size for faster web download..

The Tedious Pained

In a LinkedIn post recently, Ethan Mollick wrote, the following statement. And he's not the only one to have said things like this.

«I don’t think it is good for anybody that there is an emerging "anti-AI" group that is actually a coalition of many groups with different worries (jobs, kids using AI, slop, existential risk, the environment, industry concentration). Because of the diverse constituencies, this group may only be able agree on a full halt to AI as a remedy.

Not only is a halt to AI development or use unlikely, but it undermines the desire to make policies that channel AI to good uses or that mitigate specific harms. AI is a general purpose technology that will impact many aspects of society, work, and education, all of which will require their own consideration.»

I feel like this is lately a common refrain among some people, especially some of the technology professionals such as I cross paths with at LinkedIn, and I needed to respond to it, not just to him individually, but to the community of people who think such things.

This is the reply I wrote, lightly edited to suit the layout of this forum:

Accepting for conversation your notion of an emerging “broad coalition of the trodden upon,” perhaps instead of bemoaning that their common thought is to shut down “AI”, it'd behoove “AI” proponents to focus on not trodding upon so many people in so many ways?

Disdaining the already-disdained is a bad look.

How odd to suggest that because there are so many disparate kinds of injury, with so little commonality other than “AI” itself, it's reason to be dismissive rather than more aware.

“Get used to it,” in other domains of injustice, has not aged well.

Few question potential positives. Speak to the negatives so routinely trivialized.

Star Trek teaches us technology must move in lockstep with wisdom. Some want to race ahead to see where tech leads. It's already feeding power imbalance with no check in sight.

We were told automation would bring freedom and leisure time. But just a few are enriched. Many just scramble more.

Instead of shutting down “AI” maybe strong regulation, a serious automation tax, more unemployment benefits, reeducation help, student loan forgiveness, and UBI? But the already-disproportionately rich use wealth to oppose these.

See also my 2023 essay Technology's Ethical Two-Step.

Author’s Notes:

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

This is one of a series of transplanted articles from my my LinkedIn feed or my Mastodon feed. Putting them here reaches a different audience and allows me to more easily refer back to them by name. Apologies to anyone who reads my writing in more than one place and find this redundant.

In making the image, I used Gemini 3 Flash, Nano Banana, and GPT-4o at abacus.ai, with light post-processing in Gimp to reduce the resulting image in size for faster web download.