Reaching San Francisco's Limit

Ousted: Alison Collins, Faauuga Moliga, and Gabriela Lopez

In 2020 the seven-member San Francisco Board of Education was preoccupied, not with re-opening classes safely, but with the renaming of 44 schools that bore the monickers of flawed human beings like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.

The school board in early 2021 removed merit-based admission for Lowell High, the crown jewel of the public school system, in order to make Lowell like the other 14 mediocre high schools in San Francisco. Again, there was little focus on re-opening.

Liberal San Franciscans had reached their limit and "overwhelmingly" voted yesterday for the recall of three Board members:

The landslide decision means board President Gabriela López and members Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga will officially be removed from office and replaced by mayoral appointments 10 days after the election is officially accepted by the Board of Supervisors.

Supporters of the recalled commissioners blamed the usual suspects: whites, billionaires, and Republicans.

Board of Supervisors President Shamann Walton slammed the recall as being driven by “closet Republicans and most certainly folks with conservative values in San Francisco, even if they weren’t registered Republicans.”

“Trump’s election and bold prejudice brought a lot of that out, even in our Democratic and liberal city,” he told The Chronicle in the days before the election. “There are a lot of people who do not want people of color making decisions in leadership, even though the voters said that is what they want.”

In the 2020 Presidential election Joe Biden won 85% of San Franciscans' votes to Donald Trump's 13%. According to Progressive politicians and educators, Donald Trump and "closeted Republicans'" exerted sufficient power in 2022 to win a San Francisco recall election.

The perspicacity of this political analysis is only matched by the competence of San Francisco's governance.

The Last Mile is the Hardest

Alan Turing (biography.com)

Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science, proposed in 1950 a way of distinguishing human from artificial intelligence in what has become known as the Turing Test. Though the Test is highly structured (typewritten communication in a laboratory with a human being and a computer), it has been popularly simplified to the question of whether one can tell if one is talking to a computer or a live person.

Alan Turing predicted that by the year 2000 a computer would have a 30% chance of fooling its interlocutor. We're a few years behind schedule, but his prediction has been fulfilled:

GPT-3 can work out analogy questions from the old SAT with better results than the average college applicant. It can generate news articles that readers may have trouble distinguishing from human-written ones.

And it can do tasks its creators never thought about. Beta testers in recent weeks have found that it can complete a half-written investment memo, produce stories and letters written in the style of famous people, generate business ideas and even write certain kinds of software code based on a plain-English description of the desired software. OpenAI has announced that after the test period, GPT-3 will be released as a commercial product.

GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer, third generation) seems to "understand" fairly complex texts. Example:

(WSJ image)

I copied and pasted the first paragraph of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address: “The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.”

GPT-3 gave me its translation: “I am not going to run for president.” Take a bow, HAL 9000.

Nowhere in the Washington quote does the word "president" appear. Scary.

But the GPT-3 isn't perfect.

Yet when I gave it the famous first line of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”—the AI was puzzling to watch. In the course of my first four tries, a few of its answers were sort of in the ballpark without being quite right. (For instance, “A man with a lot of money must be looking for a wife.”) Then on my fifth try, it seemed to crack up: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man with a good fortune must be in want of a wife, because men are very vain and they want to be seen as wealthy, and women are very greedy and they want to be seen as beautiful.”

I took satisfaction from knowing that the artificial super-intelligence had as much trouble with Jane Austen as I did. It is a truth universally acknowledged that female communications are still too complicated for the presumptively male programmers to figure out. Eventually, the AI suffered the fate of male brains: "it seemed to crack up."

Independence Day, 2020: I've Stopped Looking For a Pony

(Business Insider image)

The headlines about President Trump's speech on Independence Day eve were uniformly negative, so I decided to exercise my right to independent thought by reading his speech in its entirety (after the break at bottom) before checking out the reviews.

A generation ago you wouldn't have blinked at most of the speech: praise for American exceptionalism, the words and deeds of the Founders, the great inventions and triumphs ("electricity, split the atom, and gave the world the telephone and the Internet. We settled the Wild West, won two World Wars, landed American astronauts on the Moon"), and a recitation of the accomplishments of the four Presidents on Mount Rushmore.

The latter allowed the President to transition to a condemnation of those who tear down monuments (he was careful not to mention Confederate symbols). He then levied a much broader attack against

“Cancel Culture"— driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values...

In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.

Throughout his term the President has been called every name in the book, including Nazi and dictator, so his opponents won't like it that he's calling them the Fascists and totalitarians.

Actually, I've decided not to read the reviews because I know they're going to say what they've been saying for the past 3½ years: the President is divisive, he's firing up his base, he's a racist and white supremacist.

From Russian collusion to the Ukraine-whatever-that-was to the emoluments clause to the Logan Act to the climate denialism to the #MeToo movement that toppled mostly Democrats to the Trumpian over- then under-reaction to the coronavirus the media has been shoveling a lot of [stuff] since 2016 and affecting outrage throughout.

I used to trust their profession of journalistic principles to believe that they had something, but frankly I've stopped looking for a pony.

President's Day, 2020

Former G.W. Bush speechwriter Jonathan Horn has filled a gap in popular history by writing about George Washington's post-Presidency (March 1797 - December 1799): [bold added]

Washington retired at a time when heads of state usually only relinquished power upon their deaths. His successor, John Adams, recalled looking around the room during his inauguration and seeing people in tears.

He knew those tears weren’t for him, but that everyone was so moved by Washington surrendering power. They knew they were witnessing history.

Jonathan Horn on Washington's ownership of slaves:

It was a disappointment to Washington, I think, that he could not find a way to provide eventual freedom for all of the men, women, and children held in slavery at Mount Vernon. The will he left when he died in 1799 provided eventual emancipation for all the slaves he owned but could not do the same for the so-called dower slaves, who had come to Mount Vernon only as a result of his marriage to the widow Martha Custis. As a result, Washington died knowing that Mount Vernon had a destiny similar to that of the country he had created. Both, in a sense, would be half-slave and half-free.

(Photo from ncpa.org)

George Washington is on Mount Rushmore because he defeated the vastly superior British Army and set numerous precedents as the first Executive, including relinquishing power when Americans would have acclaimed him king.

By our standards he did not do enough personally or politically to eliminate slavery, but it's easy enough to criticize him now since there would have been no Constitution and no United States without the toleration of that peculiar institution.

I hope that those who look back on us 230 years from now will do so in context, with sympathy, and not judge some of our choices as irredeemably evil.

How Quickly We Condemn

(Image from MountVernon.org)

Many of the Founding Fathers were slaveowners, among them Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison. (Those who didn't own slaves include John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Alexander Hamilton.)

The biggest Founding Father, George Washington himself, was also a slaveowner and at least for part of his life threw himself into the activity: [bold added]

When Washington was 11, he inherited 10 slaves from his father; when he died five decades later, he owned 123 of the 317 slaves who lived and worked at Mount Vernon. In that time the estate grew from a fairly modest farmhouse with 2,000 acres to a 21-room mansion and nearly 8,000 acres. It was in this way that the first president became rich: by buying, owning and sometimes selling people and by forcing them to work for him, under pain of flogging, beating or being sold away from their relatives and friends.

What George Washington did over 200 years ago is morally reprehensible now, but I wonder how many of the things we do today will be found to be beyond the pale in 200 years? There's a good chance that some of the following will be viewed as barbaric by distant descendants:

Eating meat from slaughtered animals.

Related: treating animals, including pets, as property.

Treating A.I. machines, such as robots, as property.

Burning fossil fuels, especially for flying to climate-change conferences.

Having an abortion.

Letting people die because it's illegal to purchase a kidney or liver.

Not letting people choose the manner and timing of their own death.

Imprisoning criminals instead of changing their behavior.

Behaving hypocritically (easy to check on the permanent record).

Letting people die instead of prolonging their life indefinitely.

Obviously, some of the above cannot co-exist.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. - Matthew 7:1