So I set it down to try one of the novels, and it turned out to be more
of a page-turner than the faux-Clancy novels my friend sent me from Kansas
four months ago. Michael Palmer has written a dozen
or more medical procedurals, but this library only stocks up on female
authors, I think they have maybe four of these (like the Bo Tully novels).
Oh well.
What they don't say -- women writers don't ask these questions, and
the proponents of LLM AI don't encourage them -- is that the LLM training
data includes vast amounts of textual dialog from the internet, and the
online text includes all manner of human knowledge (like nuclear physics
or programming problems and their solutions), and almost certainly included
also discussions about Theory of Mind tests and their answers, which the
LLM engines simply memorized and regurgitated under suitable prompts. Small
wonder they performed as well as the (online) human responses, no actual
understanding of another human mind needed.
The church I chose when I moved to Ore-gone expelled me in the height of Covid. It was the most cruel and mean-spirited thing any pastor could have done to me, short of getting arrested for it, but God is Good, and when the Ban was lifted, I found a better church where the pastor preaches the whole counsel of God -- and the church is much larger, so I'm less visible. Both senior pastors preach the text, but one of them clings to a dogma that limits his view of Scripture to a few books of the New Testament; I take my direction from Scripture itself, "ALL Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for [a whole bunch of things]," so when this pastor claimed (without evidence) that I "have a different belief system than [they]," I realized he was right. I was pretty unhappy that it happened during the Ban, but getting out of there was on the whole a Good Thing.
The church I arrived at is too large for their downtown building, and (before I came) efforts to find a larger site failed, so now they have five campuses, mostly nearby towns, mostly much smaller than the home church. Downtown is walking distance for me, which I prefer -- the first church was a couple blocks closer, another (smaller) church only two blocks away didn't want me -- so here I am. The vast majority of American pastors are Feeler-Judgers, which I guess leads the senior pastors to seek out associates with less homiletic horsepower (so they are no threat to their dominance) -- at least that's what I observe. Anyway, the senior pastor here, who does most of the preaching at the home church, preaches the text; the others (who rotate through occasionally) are less so.
When you have a cluster of churches in a region sharing the same name and leadership, the senior pastor feels the need to exert his dominance over the others, often by video-linking his sermon to the other campuses, here by one annual unified service. The pastor chose his sermon topic as "unity" (which he sort of explained as all campuses sharing the same theological umbrella), and since the summer sermon series was selected Psalms, he chose a Psalm, the only Psalm that mentions the topic, a single verse in a three-verse Psalm of Ascents. That's hardly enough for a whole sermon (preaching the text), so he had opportunity to stray from Scripture. sigh.
Although the attendees at this unified service probably could have fit into the main church auditorium, the service was held outdoors at the campus with an outdoor hillside that serves as an amphitheater. We were invited to bring our own chairs, and I brought a fold-up chair I bought a couple years ago for the purpose. The ground is soft and sloping, so the first time I sat down the chair tipped over, and I rolled over down the hill. No harm, other than slight chagrin. I'm not an extrovert, I don't do well in crowds of people I don't know, so a mashup of the five campuses is not high on my personal agenda.
I could have chosen -- and I contemplated -- going to another church that day, but it seemed like too much trouble. So much for the negatives.
There are lots of positives -- nobody is firebombing churches in this city, I actually have a choice of where to go, this joint service only happens once each year, the pastor mostly preaches the text -- but I need to work harder at seeing the positives, and sooner.
Today's Psalm started off "it is fitting for the upright to praise [God]."
Better late than never.
Everybody still believes in moral absolutes (just not always applied to themselves), which came out implicitly in some of this week's library haul: "The Post" wanted the press to have the freedom to tell the truth -- when their party was out of the White House, like in 1972 when the Pentagon Papers came out, and again in 2017 when Trump was Prez. No mention of their preferred party's misdeeds.
Jackson Pollock was notorious for splattering paint on canvas laid out on the floor, and in this eponymous flick, clearly stated that art reflects the "aims" (value system) of the artist, and he had none, so also his "art."
Pokemon Pikachu and the Postman both offered up (in their own way) a substitute Christian ethic, no mention of where they got their religion from (nobody would recognize it anyway).
A few more years and I'm outa here, plus I have no grandchildren to
worry about. But I read the last chapter of the Book, and the USA i not
in it. Already we are rapidly moving in the direction of becoming a third-world
country, but we have a long way to go before it gets as bad as the other
80% of the world or the first century Roman empire, which was dominant
when the Christian Manifesto was written. I mean, we had 400+ years of
being taught to read (and obey) the Bible, which made the USA the richest
country in the whole world and in all history, but that motivation went
away four decades ago. There are still enough Christians around to be "fumes
in the gas tank" but it won't power the engine to pull any kind of load.
See how it works, playing in your local theater since the turn of the millennium.
Fast forward to DVD technology, where the laser read head flies over the surface of the DVD without touching it. In principle the DVD should never wear out, but the whole recorded surface is exposed to finger grease and coffee spills and scrapes across it from whatever. Before I play it, I eyeball the surface to see if there are bits of crud that can be removed (scratches are harder). But the "Let's watch that again" scenes, they should have no effect.
Except they do. The most popular movies I check out of the library, the bad spots on the DVD come almost always on the "Let's watch that again" scenes.
Unlike VCR tapes which degraded gracefully with wear, when a DVD is damaged (for whatever reason) the digital technology just stops. The player freezes up for a minute or so -- remember, these are Unix programmers writing the player code, and Unix makes people (especially including programmers) stupid -- so it sits there retrying and retrying instead of keeping on playing with whatever it can. It still skips over the bad spot, but viewers sit there waiting for it to decide.
So where does Blu-Ray come in? I have no use for Blu-Ray, this library
does not stock them, but I inherited this player from somebody who passed
on to their eternal reward, and it proudly announces that it's Blu-Ray.
It's supposed to be compatible with ordinary DVDs, but I think the vendors
paid some behind-the-scenes money to the player makers to wear out the
discs faster (so they could sell more). Maybe the blue laser slowly destroys
the recorded surface as it plays, I don't know, but the "Let's watch that
again" scenes are where it freezes up most often.
The June issue of ComputingEdge (it's not very high in my "must read" priority) features three articles on "Green IT" = reducing the carbon footprint of computer usage. It's a lost cause, primarily because labor costs more than electricity, and all three articles promote high-labor replacements for electricity. The Western economy is driven by profit first, and ethics -- Green IT is largely understood as an ethical issue by those who care, nevermind that the logic behind that thinking is largely political -- is considered only secondarily or if the government insists. All three articles are speculative pondering by academics at universities in low-profile countries (United Arab Emirates, Norway, Holland); nobody is going to pay any attention to their ideas, certainly not the big-spending computing industry.
The first of them is not even particularly logical -- you can expect
that of Arabs -- offering multiple incompatible goals to be achieved by
Green IT. But this is ComputingEdge, not known for being the cutting
edge in anything.
Once every few years CT (like every other publication) do a make-over... I missed their regular quarter-page "Euticus and His Kin" cartoon, which they dropped several decades ago. For a long while Chuck Colson dominated (or perhaps alternated with some lesser light, I don't remember) for the coveted back page. Then they replaced it with a first-person "Unshackled" style testimony, which grew from the initial single back page to three in the last couple years. But they were running out of breathless stories.
The current issue is a major overhaul, with a wrap-around graphic image for a cover, and a new enigmatic cartoon filling the back page. It's still standard magazine size, but it feels bigger. And like everybody else, they have toned down on the news and replaced it with opinion, more (both in number and in page count) than everything else combined. I tell people "I have plenty of opinions of my own, I don't need to read other people's opinions." But if I must read opinions, CT's are better than the usual lot. One guy did a historical essay on President Nixon's faith and the feebleness of the pastors (including CT's founder, Billy Graham) who counseled him. Another talked about political violence, another about the imoportance of sexuality in the body of Christian theology (he's solidly Biblical, which doesn't always go without saying).
I'm only halfway through the section, but the one that grabbed me focussed on "community," specifically its absence in one woman's life. Like most women -- and almost all Evangelical Christians of whatever gender -- the author is what I call a "Relationshipist," a person who values getting and giving unearned affirmation above all else (see links to various blog posts and essays on the subject under the topic "Relationshipism" on my website home page). The majority American cultural value has taken its direction from 500 years of being taught to "read the Bible and obey it." The First Great Commandment dropped out some time in the last century, but the remaining values -- Truth, Justice, and Duty -- remain strong among the rich and the powerful (or at least they fake it). More than anything else, those values made the US of A the richest and most powerful country in the whole world and in all time (Solomon's kingdom possibly excepted). But the values are antithetical to Relationshipism.
Pre-adult American girls are given a mixed message, but the dominant side is the drive that leads to positions of power, and Sophia Lee drank the Kool-Aid with her classmates. Now she finds herself "without community." In other words, her female need for affirmation is unfilled, and she doesn't know why. The church is no help. If she read her Bible -- and really believed it -- she would understand, but she is unwilling to give up the power and perks of her journalistic career. None of this comes out in her essay. How could it? The American church is run by and exclusively for the benefit of Relationshipists, real guys need not apply.
I know this because I am not a Relationshipist. Yes, I like affirmation (preferably not unearned), but Truth, Justice, and Duty are more important. Yes, like Ms. Lee, I am "without community" at this time, but I celebrate in its place the values Jesus (actually) affirmed over the Relationshipist narrative taught in the church.
Enough for one blog posting.
Case in point: 20 years ago, after I got my (not quite as usable as God's original) bionic eye, I asked for bifocal lenses with the near focus portion covering 90% of the lens area, because that was what I spend 90% of my time looking at. The optician said "Yes, it's called Executive," and made up a pair for me. After 20 years of daily use the frame hinge broke, so I looked around for an optician who could do Executive bifocals, and most of them said "Not available." One said "Yes, we can do that," but it was a lie.
I wear glasses, and I always bought a clip-on polarized sunglasses to reduce the glare outdoors. The cheap versiion is plastic, and it doesn't attach securely. The best kind is a one-piece spring frame (no moving parts to break), but that has been replaced by a flimsy 3-piece frame with a tiny little spring holding the two other parts together. The high-quality version is just gone.
Five years ago I needed to replace the Low Grade Korean flip phone with something that works with modern cell towers. Nobody makes anything as smart as the expired Korean model (see "Progress"), but I kept it as my alarm clock. Six months ago they turned off the last 3G cell tower, and the phone itself stopped keeping time. Many decades ago I could buy a pocket alarm clock (just a clock with a single alarm, no other features), but then the internet arrived and pocket timepieces no longer exist. I could buy a wrist alarm, but I don't like things on my wrist, and the straps don't seem removable, and some of them -- hard telling, the spec sheet doesn't say -- you can't change the battery, which will run down extra fast due to all these exposed buttons getting bumped in my pocket.
I think I had another example, but I forgot.
Shakespeare's art form combined a sensible story with rhyme and meter. Four centuries later, rhyme, meter, even sensibility is gone from poetry -- and now it seems, even from fiction. The first stages of this downward spiral was page after page of inner turmoil, the lead character (and others) rehashing their imagined supposition of an alternate but completely unknowable "reality" with no basis in the story line.
This week's library haul, six books hoping for one or two with a genuine plot and story, half of them spent their ink in inner turmoil. The second half could have been written by ChatGPT: there was no plot nor story at all, just endless jabbering about topics unrelated to any plot or story. At least they are still whole sentences, each with a subject and a verb, but I expect that will go away also. Anyway, the authors are paid by word count, and if they haven't got a story or plot, they can make it up with empty words and meaningless drivel. Until the readers push back.
I'm back to reading faux-Clancy, a breath of fresh air compared to this
week's library haul.
It's a four-letter word suitable for expressing extreme displeasure, where other, less educated people might threaten sexual assault or fecal contamination, or else utter a short prayer to a deity they hope is not listening.
As displeasure goes, this is pretty mild. Faux-Clancy may be a page-turner, but it's not binge material. His chapters jump around erratically between some five different sub-plot threads. Where I normally would skip ahead to read a single thread for several chapters, these are so disorganized I got lost in my skipping ahead.
So I set it aside for one of the three library books I brought home. I should have brought home a dozen. The first on the stack was one of the "British Library Crime Classics" series, which in the past I found to be quite good -- probably why this library has so few of them -- so I neglected to notice it was a female author. Yup, the first chapter was filled not only with the first-person lead character's continuous inner turmoil, but also turmoil projected on everybody else in hizzer (what do you call a guy who thinks like a woman?) view.
The second book had a very male author's picture one the inside back cover flap, but his protagonist "Jake" turned out to be female, complete with inner turmoil and adolescent bickering.
The third book had a male author and a male lead, but the inner turmoil exceeds the other two combined. The NY Times critic blurb on the cover brags "A keen storyteller who writes in a style that's boldly his own." In other words, unreadable. Any kind of praise from a critic seems to be the kiss of Judas. sigh
So I'm back to Gibbon and Clancy clone. Or blogging about my own inner turmoil instead of doing the job set before me.
Make no mistake: The coding errors I get to spend all day trying to discover and fix are nothing like the crazy stuff these novelists invent for their readers to get unhappy about. Even digging up lions in the back yard -- you know, the "dandy" variety -- a couple half-hour shifts in the cool of the morning and all I have left in the yard are volunteer California poppies (probably my favorite flower) and volunteer tall grass. When I first moved here some eight years ago, the back yard was filled with pink and blue regular poppies. The next year half of them were replaced by the yellow California kind, and subsequent years it was mostly tall grass. Zero maintenance except for maybe three mowings each summer (see prior blog postings "No Lions Are Dandy" and "Chinese Junk Considered Harmful"). In the State of Misery, and later in Taxes, I had to pay somebody to come mow.
When I was a kid old enough to notice such things, I was in South America,
and "Labor Day" (when everybody stops working) was May 31. It was also
true in France when I was there. Only the USA puts it in the Fall, and
we kept May 31 for some other holiday -- until (again, only the USA) we
moved all of our "holy days" (same word, older spelling) to serve the wishes
of the national deity (self) by making them into 3-day weekends. So now
today is just another labor (working) day. I labored out in the yard for
an hour. What I do in front of the screen is mostly fun. Sometimes I get
paid for it.
That, ladies and gentlement, is the evil of the Feminazi agenda. It cannot work, and it does not work. The movie got that right.
You need to remember, this is fiction. The flick was very careful to say so prominently. Placing vulnerable women and children at risk is morally Wrong and evil, and the writer of this story knows that, which is why he put them (both women and children) into this story where Bad Things Happen to them. He wanted the audience to feel outrage. This is Feminazi fiction, the real world -- at least the USA, at least today -- does not work that way because it is Wrong. Only cowardly jihadists hide behind women and children, because they also know it is Wrong, and they are depending on their opponents (the Good Guys) to know it also. So yes, I'm saying this writer and director is giving us fiction to believe in which is on the same level as the jihadists. Remember that, and don't do Bad Things to women and children, not in Real Life, and not in fiction intended to educate us in moral values -- which this flick is clearly intended to do.
But this is fiction. Nobody is smart enough to think of all the angles, and certainly not this writer. The super-star Good Guy defense lawyer didn't get that way by being too stupid to outwit the Gestapo prosecutor. Nobody likes the Gestapo, and no jury wants to bring harm to innocent women and children. The Government Gestapo would have lost, if for no other reason than because he was being a jerk. Juries can do that, and smart lawyers know how to make that verdict happen. That's the whole point of having a jury. This is fiction (contrary to fact). Not recommended, except as a warning: Don't do that.
Oh by the way, I finished that second library book,
and the last ten or so chapters more than made up for any prior lack in
threats of sexual abuse and fecal contanimation and prayers to a deity
they hope isn't listening. I don't need to read such sociopathic filth.
Besides, the Bad Guys won in the end. The USA is now trying hard to help
the Bad Guys to win, but I don't need to join their cheering section. Not
recommended. Faux-Clancy #2 starts out a little slow, so I haven't lost
any sleep yet 
Anyway, my friend saw that his local library was dumping some Tom Clancy novels, so he bought up a bunch for less than it cost him to send them to me book rate, or at least less than the beer would have cost him if he and I were into getting drunk. It turns out, these were written (copyright date) after the real Tom Clancy died. This guy co-authored a couple with the real Clancy, so he got the suspense pretty good, but his President and Cabinet are not "Presidential" like The Real Thing; super-star authors don't make that mistake. Maybe they don't even know what they are doing (so they can't train their successor in how to do it). I've seen senior pastors who didn't have a clue why their churches had more men than women, so their associates got no training. The pastors certainly don't get it in seminary. They could, but they're all Feelers who can't imagine any men in their churches who aren't also Feelers. So two thirds of the American men never darken the door of any church. I wouldn't want to be one of those pastors on Judgment Day.
Anyway, these Clancy clones are still page-turners, and at 600+ pages,
I don't really want to lose that much sleep for a whole week, so I went
to the library to pick up some lesser fiction to alternate, and lesser
it was. The dust jacket on one of them boasts a "charming, evocative, and
sharply plotted Victorian crime series starring a detective duo to match
Holmes and Watson." At least this author got the "crime" part right, and
I see more books on the library shelf for the "series" part, but the only
match to Holmes and Watson is the word "duo." Otherwise it is a total waste.
I should have known from the "Victorian" part -- which it is not, except
the idiot hero and his apprentice with a red "S" on her chest must ride
horse-drawn carriages instead of Teslas through the streets of London (see
my comments in "Library Woes (Again)"
last month). So far from the promised "very, very funny," it is just plain
sad.
The second book survived the first 40 pages, but it's not a page-turner
like the faux-Clancy novels I got it to compete with. At 600+ pages it
might actually last out the week until my next library trip. If not, I
still have a couple hundred more pages of Gibbon to plod through. I should
have brought home four or more. Too soon oldt, too late schmardt.
The bottom line is that when I'm trying to recharge my batteries, reading
something where the hero does heroic things in a world that recognizes
(if not 100% obeys) Golden Rule ethics has the desired effect. A Feminazi
Manifesto tract like that faux-Victorian clunker fails miserably. Any book
that fills its pages with the vocabulary of sexual assault and feces and
prayers to a God they hope is not listening is even worse. The "Thriller"
category prior to 2020 is (mostly) the rejuvenating kind of fiction I'm
looking for, but this library on the left coast has no such category, and
the library where my friend bought the castoffs he sent me is obviously
trying to get rid of theirs. Both of us live in "fly-over" states that
will not be targeted when the Nasties of the world do what the recent books
are trying to educate them to do. This is a good time to not be living
in New York or Lost Angels or the Detroit of last week's
posting
By the way, the second book turns out to be readable. The author tries
to do inner turmoil, but he hasn't quite got the knack
He tries to do potty mouth, but like the rich black dude
last week, it's fewer than the number of chapters (so far
but zero would be better). The dust jacket blurb promises "sharp, comedic
prose" and while it's not as sad as the anachronistic pseudo-Victorian...
OK, there are a couple chuckles, maybe a half-dozen so far, but nothing
to write home about. It's not as soporific as Gibbon, but certainly not
a page-turner like the faux-Clancy books -- which is a good thing: I still
get to sleep at a reasonable hour, and probably this one book will last
until next week's library run (or close) which is what I got it for
The main reason for avoiding female authors is that they fill their text with inner turmoil. I want to read about heroic characters making the world a better place -- and this guy did that -- but inner turmoil is not a virtue I want to emulate. This guy engaged in inner turmoil for a page or two, three or four times in the whole novel, which (like going to the dentist) was annoying -- and then it was over for a while. I think (like potty words) it was a check-off item the author inserted into the text to please the critics, and not because he wanted to do it. I first understood critic's praise as a Judas kiss when TIME magazine panned the then-new movie "Air Force One": with Harrison Ford in the lead it had to be good, and I was not disappointed.
The two recent novels set approvingly in "Native American" reservations (and two more I abandonned after a few pages), and my previous experience with stories set in (and written by authors from) India, China, and Japan (see "Cultural Ethics" last month and "Liars Lie" eight years ago), this author is describing a culture I, by the grace of God, mostly didn't live in. And like the Native American stories, one is enough. It could have been worse than this one. The author clearly has abandonned whatever Christian faith he knew as a child, and while his first-person lead (and his Hispanic neighbors) were either nominal or observant Catholics, the author couldn't bring himself to make his hero observant rather than merely deferential. Oh well, it was better than the open hostility in most fiction that mentions religion.
I am reminded of the research in sub-Saharan African nations, some of
which experienced Catholic missionaries during their colonial period, and
others had Protestant (see "God Is Good for
You" ten years ago). The Protestant legacy there -- like that in the
USA -- left countries far more educated and wealthier than the Catholics
did. In this novel, the super-hero's father was a Baptist, but the blacks
in this country have spent so much of their intellectual capital feeling
victimized, that there's little left over for the innovatinve thinking
that creates wealth. That's true also in this novel: our hero got his wealth
by winning a $12 million lawsuit against the city of Detroit. Lawsuits
like that are contrary to the Golden Rule (GR)
of Christian ethics, which our author has already abandonned. In the Real
World money does not make Right, but this is fiction. Not even fiction
can make a poor person into a credible super-hero, so all of the super-heros
of fiction have independent wealth. The rest of the fiction must give their
heros Luck (aka still Supernatural, but without a Just God Who insists
on GR ethics).
In case you were wondering, a super-hero has a red "S" on his chest
that only he and the reader (by implication) can see. In other words, leaps
over tall buildings in a single bound and rescues fair maidens in distress
while killing seven commando-grade attackers all at once with only a small
flesh wound to himself. And gives hundreds and thousands of dollars (less
than 1% of his stash) away to poor people who just need a job. Instead
of buying a yacht or Gulfstream and/or mansion on the hill. In the Real
World, money glows green like kryptonite, and under its influence the guy
can't even leap over his single-malt scotch. Giving teenage drug dealers
hundreds of dollars to do fixup labor might make good citizens of them,
or it (more likely) will just feed their greed and larceny. But it's a
jolly good story, and we all wish there were more super-hero types like
him, only with less drunkenness and talk of sexual assault and prayers
to a deity they hope isn't listening.
The cover blurb hints that there may be sequels, but I won't be bringing
them home. His is a culture I don't live in and don't want to, and I cannot
hope to win an (unChristian) lottery lawsuit, nor do I believe that shooting
people is a better solution than being connected with God.
So, although CE did not, we begin with ethics. There is no such thing as ethics without moral absolutes, because the essence of ethics is what constitutes acceptable behavior without reference to mitigating circumstances. In other words, moral absolutes, obligations binding on all people everywhere and through all time without exception. Without moral absolutes, there is always wiggle room, ways to explain away our own evil behavior without accepting the consequences of such antisocial activity. Make no mistake, everybody believes that the other person should be bound to moral absolutes, but most of us prefer ourselves to be exempt from them. Apart that personal conflict of interest, it is this universality the makes them moral absolute, binding on all people everywhere and through all time without exception. This is explained with examples of universally accepted instances of moral absolutes in my essay so titled.
Anyway, so here's this article trying to discuss "An Ethical Framework for Smart Cities" without any mention of moral absolutes. It cannot be done. Well, the authors got something published, but it doesn't make much sense without ethical persuasion. They try to build their "ethics" on something called "Moral Foundations Theory" (MFT), which seems to be little more than an unstable collection of what a small group of ivory-tower thinkers (and their friends) decided is ethical, explicitly basing their reasoning on the the shifting sands of the failed Darwinist hypothesis -- that all complex systems came about by the accumulation over time of random events, selected only by their contribution to survival (see my essay "Biological Evolution: Did It Happen?"). So they have this jiggly collection of values, things that people who grew up in, or were trained in, a culture based on Christian ethics have come to accept as "good" values. They are indeed good values, that's why those values -- or at least the uncorrupted versions of them -- are promoted in the Bible. But they are not at all universal. There was no right to privacy anywhere in the world until the American Supreme Court invented it less than a hundred years ago. There is no need for privacy unless you are doing things that are unlawful or socially unacceptable, or if corporations are trying to unethically bamboozle you into parting with your hard-earned wealth using targeted messages. It's a right only in post-Christian nations and cultures. Most of the MFT values are similarly easily deconstructed. People in the tech industry are largely working in a Christian-influenced value system, so they cannot see that their "moral foundation" pontifications are not universal in the sense that they can be derived apart from their Christian roots.
There is a solid basis for ethical reasoning, but it must be based on moral absolutes, in particular, the Golden Rule (GR). Unfortunately, that kind of ethics cannot be explained from a Darwinist presupposition. "Lower-order" organisms without a central nervous system cannot do ethical reasoning, so if and to the extent that people are evolved from these organisms, there must be some genetic basis that evolved, one gene at a time, over millions of years, to enable and cause it. Unless you allow the exceedingly improbable (miraculous) simultaneous evolution of all the parts of an irreducibly complex ethical system, it must have first happened in one final mutation, one person capable of GR ethics. The trouble is, GR ethics benefits only other people, so that single ethical person is not selected for survival and dies without progeny. Even in the serendipitous (and impossibly improbable) case that you get several ethically inclined people simultaneously evolved in a genetically superior mutant sub-species, each individual instance of GR ethics never contributes to that person's own survival, but only to the survival of other group members, (mostly) not yet themselves fully GR compliant, and in particular without regard to whether they express that new gene or not. So Darwinist theory denies the possibility that ethics can evolve out of non-ethics. Aren't fairy tales (contrary-to-fact made-up stories) wonderful? So these authors and their colleagues pick random values that feel good, then force-fit them into the Procrustean MFT bed, or sometimes don't even try.
The other ethics piece tries to make a case for teaching ethics as an integrated part of the engineering curriculum. It's a great idea, but if they don't know what ethical thinking is all about, how can they teach it? Maybe if they get more people involved (yes, that's one of their arguments), but that only works if the people they choose are themselves ethically inclined. The careful atheists (correctly) argue that from their atheist presuppositions, there is no such thing as "altruism" (another word for the GR, which is the essence of all good ethics), so adding those people to the team will not generate credible ethical curricula. You need Christian ethics for it to work, but Christians are not welcome in academia. Later the same article tried to define their ethics in terms of not causing "harm," but who decides what constitutes harm? People engaging in unhealthy lifestyles bring harm to the public at large by being a disproportionate burden on the public health system, and yet our modern culture has determined that outlawing such behavior brings harm to that antisocial minority. Who is right? Ask most Americans today, they only see half the story. Majority vote does not define ethical behavior, as we can easily see (from our modern American perspective) by just looking at earlier history of the south-eastern states of this country.
One last ethics question: why all this sudden concern for ethics in the first place? Could it be that we live in a culture that has been fed a diet of "Read the Bible and do it" ethics for something over 400 years, and that cultural ethics has made the USA the richest country in the whole world and in all history, but for the last 50 years King SCOTUS has removed that ethical teaching from schoolroom walls, thereby telling school children all over the country that it's OK to behave unethically, and those children have now grown up and are running businesses and government agencies and software development shops unethically (as instructed), and we don't like the results? Of course the IEEE cannot print that, so we get drivel like these articles instead.
The first of the two "Trust" articles talks all around a single conclusion:
You cannot trust the supply chain used by many -- probably most -- software
developers, so you cannot trust the resulting software products. The biggest
scorpion in the supply chain honey pot is "open source" (OS) software,
to which any programmer, whether of evil intentions, or of good intentions
and poorly thought-out processes, nobody knows, anybody can offer updates
to any OS library routine, and nobody notices what other libraries that
update imports, so anybody building on these OS libraries could be importing
(literally) thousands of untested library library routines involving millions
of lines of code, and that (possibly malevolent) library code gets encorporated
into commercial products -- some of them thought to be "secure" and "safe,"
and nobody knows. Yes, real government and large corporation software users
have been stung by this bug. Not me, I don't use OS packages in anything
I get paid for, nor for anything I use on my own computer -- except for
the vendor's operating system and browser, which crash occasionally but
mostly predate the rise of OS software. In particular, the bugs in my compiler
are my own, I don't use other people's compilers (a particularly insidious
vulnerability mentioned in this article). I can do that, I wrote my own
The focus of the second article in this pair is "Placing Trust in Automated Software Development..." which starts out describing the productivity gains from using a high-level language compiler -- he mentioned FORTRAN, but not by name -- and eventually got to libraries being updated with added vulnerabilities, the "trust" problems that kind of harm brings. He
end[s] on an upbeat note, which is that companies are making progress toward devising frameworks, tools, and other software development automation to support explainable AI.Perhaps you read my take on "explainable AI" (see "AI as Religion" six years ago, and "Can a Machine Tell a Lie?" three years later, and "Neural Net Comeuppance" the following year). The bottom line for most of the next decade or two, is that you cannot and must not trust anything "AI", and the programmers seeing what is coming out of the machine are already saying so.
Those of us instructed by "the Manufacturer's Handbook" (aka the Bible) already know that any trust in humans or their artifacts is misplaced. Trust God, not humans, not even government ("princes"). It helps if you know what it is that God is inviting you to trust, which is not necessarily what the preachers tell you. Read it for yourself, the (human) preachers can't always be trusted, and you never know until you go to the Source and look for yourself.
The remaining two articles in this compendium deal with "Cyberattacks" and "Ransomware." There is a simple (but expensive) solution to prevent all that malware: If there is at most one door (and no windows) in your castle wall, and you keep that door locked and guarded, then the thieves and robbers cannot get in to steal your stuff. These two articles did not say that, nor did they point out that every one of the computers under attack ran either Unix (Linux) or Windows (pretending to be unix) operating system. The Unix security model is broken, and anybody who can guess your least secure password, or can connive or force it out of your most timid employee, can plant any nefarious software on your computer they want to. The solution is to have no way for a remote operator to install software of any kind, best by not using operating systems that encourage that kind of vulnerability. Both Unix and Windows can be fixed to disallow remote code installation, but both systems are huge and clunky, and the programmers who know the systems well enough to pull it off, don't want to. They (the programmers) are the first line of villains that you need to defend against.
Failing that, an "air gap firewall" = no data connection at all between the internet and your mission-critical computer data is a good second-best. I sometimes need to do work on a Windows computer, but it never gets on the internet. NEVER. I have an OSX (Unix) computer for occasional internet access to bad-mannered (encrypted) websites, but it never sees mission-critical data. Yes, Bad People could get on it and try Ransomware, but I would just erase the hard drive and re-install the system. Problem solved.
Both of these hand-wringing articles are trying to find a bandaid to stop the hemorrhage, when they should be calling for a vaccine to prevent the disease. But they're not computer people. The computer people see "job security" in the malware, they don't want to help. The ethical thing to do would be to fix the problem, but ethics left the country in the SCOTUS decision some 50 years ago. You get what you pay for.
Earlier this year / Later this year
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