Our country has prospered by providing individuals with the opportunity to get ahead and to enjoy the fruits of their success. Consequently, we have out-performed and out-grown every developed country on earth.
We must not allow today’s socialist fever to wreck the American dream.
I have to wonder what their point is. What do they think or are trying to imply about the consequences of a state having a good or poor grade? I think it is very telling they do not explicitly say anything about that.
I would bet they know that if they compared this to the violent crime rate this report card would be damaging to their agenda. Here is a scatter plot to give you a clue:
And if you want to get really geeky here are the correlation numbers and narrative from Copilot:
The Pearson correlation coefficient between gun safety grade (ordinal) and violent crime rate is about 0.13, with a p‑value of ~0.49. This means there is a weak positive correlation that is not statistically significant.
📊 What This Means
Coefficient (0.13): A value close to 0 indicates little to no linear relationship. Here, the correlation is weak and positive, suggesting that states with weaker gun safety grades (higher ordinal values) slightly tend to have higher violent crime rates, but the effect is minimal.
P‑value (~0.49): Since this is much greater than the common threshold of 0.05, the correlation is not statistically significant. In other words, the observed relationship could easily be due to chance.
Interpretation: Gun safety grades and violent crime rates do not show a strong or reliable linear relationship in this dataset. Some states with strong gun laws (A grades) still have high crime rates (e.g., Washington, Colorado), while some F‑grade states have moderate rates (e.g., Indiana, Georgia).
This is just another example of anti-gun people being unable say anything without it being a lie or at least deceptive.
And even if the numbers looked bad for gun ownership, that is irrelevant to the 2nd Amendment law. Rights are not subject to negation based on the misbehavior of criminals. We don’t throw out the 4th, 5th, and/or 8th Amendments because these protections make it more difficult to prosecute criminals. The same applies the 2nd Amendment.
Prosecutions are not in view, but I can see a map on a whiteboard in the Department of Justice on how to get there from here. I asked Grok and Copilot to speculate on the possibility of prosecutions under 18 USC 241 and/or 242. Here are the more interesting parts of the discussions:
Copilot:
Historical Use of 18 U.S.C. § 241
Conspiracy statute: § 241 criminalizes conspiracies to deprive rights. It was first enacted in 1870 to combat KKK terror against Black voters.
Election interference: Recently, it was used in prosecutions for conspiracies to suppress voting rights, including charges against Douglass Mackey (for online voter suppression) and in investigations tied to January 6.
Scope: It applies broadly to conspiracies against any constitutional right, but prosecutions are rare and usually tied to voting or racial discrimination.
🔍 Implications for Second Amendment Enforcement
§ 242 (individual acts): Could apply if police knowingly confiscate firearms without due process or target lawful gun owners. This parallels past prosecutions for unlawful arrests or excessive force.
§ 241 (conspiracies): Could apply if officials or agencies coordinate to suppress gun rights — for example, a conspiracy to intimidate citizens from exercising lawful firearm ownership.
Politicians: Legislative immunity makes prosecutions of lawmakers unlikely. Enforcement would more plausibly target executive officials or law enforcement carrying out unconstitutional policies.
Civil vs. criminal: Historically, DOJ has leaned on civil remedies (consent decrees, lawsuits) rather than criminal prosecutions. Criminal cases under §§ 241–242 are reserved for egregious, intentional violations.
📈 Speculative Outlook
Most likely: Expanded civil rights litigation against restrictive gun laws.
Possible but rare: Criminal prosecutions of law enforcement under § 242 for willful firearm rights violations.
Least likely: Criminal prosecutions of politicians under § 241, given constitutional protections and prosecutorial discretion.
Grok:
Pathways to the Docket: From Desk Jockeys to Brass
Picture this: The unit’s hotline lights up with complaints about a county clerk in, say, Chicago—deliberately burying CCW apps under mountains of “training requirements” invented post-Bruen, knowing full well the Supreme Court nixed such hurdles. If emails or depositions reveal the clerk’s motive (“Keep guns out of the wrong hands,” per internal notes), that’s prima facie willfulness: a solo deprivation under color of law. The LA County probe, already underway for backlog abuses, could morph into a § 242 referral if it uncovers a rogue supervisor greenlighting the delays.
For politicians, it’s thornier but not off the table. A mayor enforcing a local “sensitive places” ban broader than Bruen allows—say, prohibiting carry in all parks, willfully ignoring federal precedent—might qualify if they personally direct enforcement squads to harass permit holders. Legislators enjoy speech-or-debate immunity, but executive-branch pols (governors signing defiance-laden bills) could face heat if their actions cross into implementation. Gun rights litigators have floated § 242 for years in amicus briefs, arguing that unconstitutional seizures equate to Fourth Amendment deprivations intertwined with 2A. With Dhillon’s vow for “a lot more action,” a test case could drop by mid-2026, especially if the Firearms Policy Coalition (which lobbied for the unit) supplies the plaintiffs.
Tying it to § 241? These aren’t mutually exclusive: A sheriff conspiring with deputies (§ 241) while personally pulling triggers on denials (§ 242) could net dual charges, amplifying deterrence.
Hurdles Higher Than a Pistol Grip: Willfulness and Wiggle Room
§ 242’s killer requirement—willful intent—makes it a prosecutor’s nightmare. Courts demand more than negligence; officials must know their act violates a “clearly established” right. Post-Bruen, that’s arguable for “may-issue” holdouts, but gray-area regs (e.g., “assault weapon” definitions) give cover: “I thought it was legal!” The statute’s underuse in non-violence cases—fewer than 200 § 242 indictments yearly, mostly brutality—suggests prosecutors shy from 2A novelty.
Politically, it’s dynamite: Indicting blue-city cops under a red-led DOJ screams partisanship, inviting congressional probes or SCOTUS stays. And while the unit reallocates civil resources, criminal pursuits demand FBI muscle—scarce amid other priorities.
The Bigger Picture: A One-Two Punch for Accountability?
Layering § 242 atop § 241 could transform the unit from litigator to inquisitor, making gun rights a frontline civil rights battle. Near-term? Civil suits dominate, with § 242 as a shadow threat to coax settlements. But if a high-profile denial spirals into violence—say, a denied applicant victimized, traceable to official stonewalling—expect indictments by 2027. It’s a vision of equity: Treating 2A infringements like any other rights grab, potentially chilling overreach without mass arrests.
The emphasis in that last paragraph is my addition.
Indictments by 2027 is a pleasant thought. But that expectation is conditional upon the criminals being stupid as well as evil. We can only hope.
I would much prefer to bring them down as soon as possible. I think they’ve made the biggest financial mess that any government’s ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they’re now trying to control everything by other means. They’re progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people.
Margret Thatcher February 5, 1976
Bringing them down is easier said than done. The world has been struggling with them for over 125 years now. Even though socialists, and their ideological kin the communists, have murdered over 200,000,000 of their own citizens there are still 100s of millions of people clamoring for more. Then there is the tremendous economic and ecological damage these political systems add to the rivers of blood they create. No right-thinking person can defend this history. Yet this cancer is still gnawing away. It seems to never give up.
How much knowledge there is in a given society, and how it is distributed, depends crucially on how knowledge is conceived and defined. When a social justice advocate like Professor John Rawls of Harvard referred to how ‘society’ should ‘arrange’ certain outcomes, he was clearly referring to collective decisions of a kind that government makes, using knowledge available to surrogate decision-makers, more so than the kind of knowledge known and used by individuals in the population at large, when making their own decisions about their own lives. As an old saying expressed it: ‘A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him.’
Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, expressed the same sentiment spending probably an entire chapter on it. He described it as an information problem. People close to the problem are in the best position to solve the problem. Free markets and free minds outperform highly regulated markets and constrained minds.
The correctness of this should be obvious to almost everyone. The implications are broad and damning against central planners and big government in general.
The proverb “A fool may put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him” (or close variants) is a traditional Dutch proverb, first recorded in the 16th–17th century.
The earliest known printed source is in the 1621 edition of Carolus Tuinman’s “De oorsprong en uitlegging van dagelyks gebruikte spreekwoorden” (later editions more famous), but the saying already appears earlier in Dutch and Low German proverb collections.
The closest early attestation is in Jan Gruter’s “Florilegium ethicopoliticum” (1610–1612) and other 17th-century Dutch sources, where it is presented as an already established saying:
Original Dutch form (c. 1620s–1630s): “Een dwaas kan zijn jas beter aantrekken dan een wijs man hem die aantrekken kan.”
A very similar version also appears in German collections around the same time (e.g., Lehmann’s 1639 florilegium).
So, there is no single named individual who is the “first” to say it. It is an anonymous folk proverb that crystallized in the Netherlands/low German-speaking areas in the late 1500s or early 1600s, with the earliest surviving written records appearing around 1610–1630.
No evidence attributes it to any famous writer or philosopher before it appears in these printed proverb collections. Variants later spread into English in the 18th–19th centuries (sometimes misattributed to figures like Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain, but those attributions are false).
Copilot is adamant that Grok is wrong:
That claim is false. Let me break it down carefully:
Carolus Tuinman: Tuinman was a Dutch scholar who indeed published De oorsprong en uitlegging van dagelyks gebruikte spreekwoorden (The Origin and Explanation of Daily Used Proverbs), but not in 1621. His works appeared in the early 18th century (1710s–1720s). So the date 1621 is anachronistic.
Jan Gruter’s Florilegium ethicopoliticum: Gruter (1560–1627) did publish collections of sayings and moral excerpts in the early 17th century, but no attestation of the “coat” proverb exists in his florilegium. Searches of digitized editions show many proverbial contrasts of fools and wise men, but not this wording.
German collections (Lehmann 1639): Lehmann’s Florilegium politicum (1639) is a real work, but again, the coat proverb does not appear in it. German proverb collections of the 17th century contain many fool/wise man contrasts, but not this specific imagery.
The inch was seemingly given, so it is not surprising to see pursuit of the mile. Gun ban advocates are emboldened by their perceived victories in firearm production changes, and Ruger is the latest target on a list that won’t end until the firearm prohibition lobby decides what guns are allowed to be sold or courts step in to enforce the law.
But, of course, eventually we will have to start prosecuting these criminals before they will stop infringing on our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.
I do not know if Elon is correct or not. I suspect Elon knows that he doesn’t know that AI and robotics will actually work. I find the assertion plausible. But there will never be a proof. It may be that AI and robotics will do the job, but going down that path means we will not fully commit to any of the other paths, hence that the assertion of it being the only way cannot be tested.
I also find the assertion that is no way out plausible. We just don’t know. And don’t know how to figure it out prior to just trying it. The problem is that not only is our economic system a very complicated issue with many non-linear feedback loops, but it is also not repeatable.
Because of this no one on the planet can successfully defend a claim that an accurate model exists. Furthermore, I posit that no one will ever be able to accurately model the economy. I make this claim because the existence of an accurate model will itself be the addition of still another variable that the model must take into account. This addition of another variable disrupts the model.
Think of it this way, if people know the future, they will change their behavior to take advantage of that knowledge, which changes the future yet again. And it is not just one person who changes their behavior. It will be billions of people, millions of organizations, and thousands (including national, state, and local of the entire world) of governments. Each of these feedback channels, on their own, can cause the model to predict a different outcome. Each tweak of the model will require more tweaks once the output is known and feedback comes in. Only if the feedback has a lower amplitude for each tweak will the model reach equilibrium. And this is just for the design of the model. Running the model has the same type of problem. And the designers of the model have to do this for all practical situations.
In classical control system design this is described as the loop gain being less than one. This is requited to have a stable system*. To make the problem readily solvable the system model is generally limited to something no more complicated than linear differential equations. With the massive number of feedback channels in our economy, nearly all of which are nonlinear, you will have an incalculable number of opportunities in the N-dimensional space (with an extremely large N) for there to exist unstable situations. I assert such a model will not be possible in my lifetime and perhaps not ever.
We are going to have to take aim in a particular direction and roll the dice to find out if we chose a direction that has a solution.
* This is a necessary condition. It is not a sufficient condition. There also are requirements on the phase/time-delay of the feedback, but that is beyond to scope of this discussion.
While it is a matter of entrepreneurial judgment and not economic theory to affirm gold’s superiority as the ultimate “store of value” and potentially even as the preferred replacement for fiat monies (though silver has often been a strong competitor to gold for the latter role), I must agree with Lagarde’s assessment of the empirical facts concerning reserve asset competition, not with Powell’s dismissive attitude about gold—when the chips are down and the world is forced to turn to an unconditionally trustworthy reserve of purchasing power, the world will turn to gold. What soaring gold prices might indicate is that the world is now turning to gold.
The prices are certainly rising. This is just this year:
I see the stumbling of Bitcoin. I see Trump and Elon fail to get the U.S. deficit under control. I see the mounting U.S. debt becoming a huge, unstoppable monster. I wonder if the price of gold reflects a lack of confidence in the U.S. dollar. I think of the Zimbabwe dollar (I have trillions of them). Our country is not Zimbabwe, Argentina, or Venezuela so if someday we do have runaway inflation, it almost for certain will not be on the scale of those countries. But if it does happen, it could happen very rapidly. These events frequently have high emotional content. It is like someone shouted fire in a large room with not enough exits. A lot of people get trampled who would have survived had everyone remained calm.
And, of course, gold may not be the thing that saves people in a stampede. Maybe it will be guns and ammo to defend against the looters searching for food or even, as in the movie Doctor Zhivago, stealing the lumber from your home to burn for warmth.
If you do decide to buy gold, please remember my advice.
Published reports confirm that many Jewish New Yorkers have been arming themselves in worrisome anticipation of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani—described by the New York Post as a “Muslim radical socialist”—taking office and opening a floodgate of hatred toward the city’s Jewish population.
Even The Times of Israel is reporting how Jewish gun owners, firearms instructors and security professionals in the Big Apple are witnessing a major surge in demand for firearms training, and applications for concealed carry permits. Anti-Semitic rhetoric has led to increased violence against Jews across the United States.
Deep down, I think most people know you can vote your way in, but you to shoot your way out. This is just another data point confirming that hypothesis.
I would like to welcome all the new gun owners Mamdani has created over to the right side of history. I think the NSSF should send Mamdani a thank you card on behalf of all the gun manufacturers.
I don’t keep up, at all, with the latest firearm hardware and when I got an email from Mantis asking if I wanted a free TitanX to review I almost deleted the email without looking into what it was. I had never heard of Mantis. I am so glad I took a few seconds to look into them and conclude it was a real product and not a malicious link I was clicking on.
There were no conditions on my review. Just here it is and tell people what you think of it.
The TitanX is a Glock like training pistol with a built-in laser and rechargeable (USB-C) battery. It comes with a really nice case, and two properly weighted magazines. Surprising to me there is an app for your phone. I was skeptical of this. What are going to do with an app and your training pistol? Oh… Wow! It is amazing. The phone app provides all types of drills, watches your (slightly specialized) target, keeps score, and will playback the gun movement before and after your trigger pull. It is AWESOME!
You don’t have to use the app. And I usually don’t. It takes a little time to set up the target, mount the phone on something steady, and point the camera at the target. Most of my use has been just straight out of the case with targets from JV-Training (my son-in-law).
Here is a 15-second video of how I use it:
The gun and trigger is nothing like my STI 2011. But because with this tool, dry fire is now fun I don’t mind that it doesn’t feel like my match gun. I almost never did any dry fire before getting the TitanX. I would rather go to the range and shoot a few hundred rounds of .22 in a conversion kit for my 2011. The trigger resets and feels, pretty much, like a striker fired gun trigger.
To see the app in action, (very cool) watch this video. He is set up for far better videos than what I could do in a month:
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.
The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”
If you have been following the comments here you will already know the context for this, but I include some snippets for those not reading the comments:
Words were given and hands shaken that NATO would not move one inch east if the soviets collapsed.
…
all that in exchange for NATO not moving one inch east.
You could find many other such claims on the Internet that the U.S. and/or NATO agreed to no expansion of NATO toward Russia. The problem is, if you read the available documents (I have now spent several hours trying to figure out what happened) I cannot find anything than refutes the summations given by Copilot and Grok:
There was no formal, written treaty or agreement committing NATO to halt expansion eastward. The phrase “not one inch eastward” comes from verbal assurances given by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 during talks on German reunification. These were informal diplomatic assurances, not binding agreements.
🧾 What actually happened
James Baker’s assurance (Feb 9, 1990): In a meeting with Gorbachev, Baker said NATO would move “not one inch eastward” if Germany remained in NATO. This was part of broader discussions about Soviet security concerns during German reunification.
Other Western leaders: German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, British Prime Minister John Major, and others also gave similar verbal assurances about NATO’s jurisdiction not expanding eastward.
No treaty signed: Despite these assurances, no written agreement or binding treaty was ever concluded. NATO’s official position is that enlargement decisions are made collectively and were never legally restricted.
Russian perspective: Russian officials have long argued that these verbal promises were broken when NATO later admitted Eastern European countries. Gorbachev himself gave conflicting accounts—sometimes confirming he received assurances, other times saying no formal promise was made.
No, there was no legally binding commitment – neither written nor oral – by the United States, NATO, or any Western leader that NATO would never expand eastward beyond Germany in exchange for Russia’s consent to German reunification or anything else.
What actually happened in 1990 (the relevant negotiations)
During the “Two-Plus-Four” talks (1990) on German reunification, several Western leaders (especially U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and others) used informal, oral phrasing with Mikhail Gorbachev such as:
“NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position” (Baker to Gorbachev, 9 February 1990).
Similar wording from Kohl, Manfred Wörner (NATO Secretary General), and others.
These statements were explicitly about the territory of East Germany – i.e., NATO military structures (troops, bases, nuclear weapons) would not be extended into the former GDR after reunification. Gorbachev himself later confirmed in interviews (e.g., 2014) that the discussions were only about East Germany, not Poland, Hungary, or any other country.
No treaty, protocol, or written document from 1990 contains any promise about NATO’s future enlargement beyond Germany.
Aside, from the lack of a written agreement, it seems to me that a few representatives of NATO would not be in a position bind all of NATO, even temporarily, to not expand the organization. Baker could not bind the U.S. to such an agreement without the backing of at least an executive order, and, more likely, ratification by the Senate. And a similar thing would apply to all the other politicians from other countries.
I do not dispute that no expansion of NATO is in the interests of Russia. That they failed to get these assurances into a written agreement is on them. Not the U.S. of today or all of NATO. It is as if you were given assurances by a used car salesman of a never-ending warranty, paid for the car without getting it in writing, and then two years later complained when you find out you don’t have an infinite warranty on the car. If you were to take your compliant to a judge you would be laughed out of the court.
And I think laughter directed at Russia for claiming they had an agreement would be appropriate. They know better. They are just using that as propaganda to justify the violation of their written agreements.
It’s baffling that Americans are falling for such a dangerous ideology. But they are.
A recent poll of likely voters from The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports showed that 51% of young Americans, ages 18-39, would like to see a democratic socialist in the White House.
Mamdani and Wilson have put a shiny bow on their socialist ideas, and voters bought it.
Perhaps she is unaware of the state of government schools. How else could she be baffled?
Everyone with half a functioning brain knows what comes next. Hence, I do not believe the “beware” warning is needed for the Second Amendment people. This is more appropriately a warning to the socialists.
You can vote your country into socialism. You have to shoot your way out.
I don’t think you and I were ever in the position of, you know, asking grandfather, what did you do in the war, right? But if someone asked me that question later, I don’t want to go, well, I watched on TV and it was pretty cool, man.
…
The people at the Kev Independent were just like asking that question over and over was like, “Why? Why are you doing that? Why?” It’s like, “Because I hate bullies.”
Ry Jones November 2, 2025
If you don’t want to listen to the first 25 minutes to get the complete context the short story is Ry volunteers to drive “cars” (usually some sort of small truck or van) from Central Europe to Ukraine. They are configured as electronic warfare, command and control, medical transport, etc. You can participate via the fundraiser.
Ry was a huge technical and labor contributor to Boomershoot for many years.
The Civil Rights Division’s new focus on the Second Amendment, which is far outside its longstanding mission, is moving us even further away from our nation’s commitment to protecting all Americans’ civil rights.
Is she so “tone deaf” she cannot even hear her own words? She contradicts herself in a single sentence. How can the Civil Rights Division be moving away from protecting “all Americans’ civil rights” by protecting a civil right they have never protected in the past?
I would also like to point out the article authors don’t mention the contradiction either.
This is mental illness and/or a deliberate intent of manipulation.
I would like to emphasize the “former” in her title. She richly deserves it.
A few weeks ago, Barb and I were in Paris to meet the boyfriend (and probable fiancée) of my stepdaughter Maddy. We stumbled upon this strange structure:
I don’t really know what is for. But it is cool looking.
French-American here — spent 20 yrs in France, 13 in the US. Let me speak to this.
I think the only reason Europoors tolerate their miserable existence is because they tell themselves lies about what the rest of the world is like. They eat gruel in their AC-less social housing while the most awesome party in history is being thrown just next door.
If you hang out in France, you’ll routinely hear them say things like: “in the US, people die in front of hospitals” (they literally believe this to be the case) or “our social system is the envy of the world.”
Their image of the US is completely delusional, and they are often shocked to discover that when they visit here. Their Marxist media brainwashed them into thinking America is some Dickensian horror, with Monopoly-style fat capitalists running around with their top hats and monocles, exploiting dirt poor workers.
…
Now, how do Americans perceive the French (and Europeans at large)?
Well, the tragic reality is that they really, truly don’t think of them. They may cross their minds once a month, at most. Why would they think of that irrelevant backwater of a continent?
The few times they do come to mind, it is, at best, as a quaint vacation spot. A nice place to sip espresso and spend their American dollars — which go such a long way in these third world countries! The closest comparison is how Europeans think of Thailand or Cambodia.
That’s at best. At worst, they think they’re a lazy, entitled, smug, snobbish, rude people with a bright future behind them, who confuse regulation for progress, don’t realize their economies were left in the dust a very long time ago, simply stopped innovating because they’ve lost the will, ability, or both, and who would rather brag about their 60%(!!) public spending to GDP ratio than fix their communist shit hole of a system.
… the schools in China taught that in the U.S. there was lots of food but only the rich could afford it. And rather than let the poor people have food for an affordable price the rich would dump the excess food in the ocean. The fact that food is so plentiful and cheap that poor people in this country are obese apparently didn’t make it through the censors.
I am also reminded of something the president of a small company (about $25 million a year in the mid 1980s) told a small group of us once. Paraphrasing some, “People in other countries have no idea what it is like to live in the most powerful country in the world. Someone in a country that is number five or seven, might be able to come close to imagining what it is like living in a number two or three country. But even the number two country doesn’t know what it is like living in the number one country. And living in the number one country, we have no idea what it is living like in even the number two country.”
I didn’t really understand that then. I understand a little bit now. I have no reason to believe it is wrong.
Without real data, the human mind ceases to function, and its disparate parts begin hallucinating information that doesn’t exist, and which will often be confidently and violently defended. The modern political Left is a product of delusional psychology that’s hell bent on enacting the worst possible policies because its adherents are fundamentally neurologically broken… and they may not be fixable.
This is absolutely awesome article. I could pull many QOTDs out of it.
The quote above is just one of many dimensions of awesomeness.
It started out with me a little skeptical. The author does not seem to touch on The Alignment Problem, which I think is vital for anyone thinking about commenting on the problems of AI. But as I read further, I realized the author had insight into something much more fundamental than just AI training. Straying into the alignment problem would have been tangential.
I was totally hooked when he started writing about urban populations and their disconnects from reality. I remember growing up and when my urban cousins visited the farm for a week or two. Or working at Microsoft on Windows Phone 7 and people suggested we could just always assume the phone was connected to the Internet. Or people at my current job now asking if I had fun during my week-long vacation the previous week. “I moved 100,000 pounds of dirt, so it was ‘rewarding’ but not really ‘fun’.” They didn’t really know what to do with that information. They could not relate to what that could even mean.
I remember my first week at college in the relatively small town of Moscow, Idaho. There were a surprising number of students from big cities. They were almost disoriented and asked, “What do you do here?” I did not and could not understand the question. They were looking for clubs and social life. Growing up on the farm with anything representing a “big city” over 100 miles away, my reality only marginally intersected with their reality.
I remember about the second time Barb contemplated visiting my little corner of Idaho. Rather than ride with me on the drive over, she said she would fly over later and meet me at the motel. “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” I offered. “No, I’ll just take public transportation from the airport to the motel in Orofino,” she countered. I was confused. Was there really public transportation from one of the local airports to Orofino? After 30 minutes or so, it was Barb that was confused. “Why can’t I find public transportation from the airport to Orofino?” she asked. “Probably because it doesn’t exist,” I suggested. This, basically, did not compute in her version of reality.
The whole “Why do we need farmers when food just comes from stores?” joke has a little too much truth in it. People quickly have delusions about reality when they are disconnected from it. For me driving tractor in the field or a truck loaded with grain to the elevator and all the maintenance, repairs, weather, insects, weeds, four legged pests, and government nonsensical regulation is reality. How dare people who have never even worn shoes appropriate for walking across a field express an opinion on the price, quality, or any other fundamental aspect of food.
When people speak of “Locally grown!”, “Organic!”, “All natural!” I just roll my eyes. These people are not connected to reality. The same applies to electricity production and “green energy” in general, lumber, manufacturing, mining, “the trades,” etc.
If the disconnect of urban people from reality with their deep immersion in an artificial environment limits their capabilities and causes delusions, what can we expect from something trained entirely upon the content of the Internet?
