"AI" Hallucinations de-hallucinating Ayn Rand

 There is a special place in hell for people who make Ayn Rand look relevant. I haven't read Atlas Shrugs, but will concede that it is a fucking great title for a book, a trailer in two words that promises drama. I have read "The Fountainhead" was given a copy of it, enjoyed it, but even as I enjoyed it, knew it to be trash. A smut like reading experience, a guilty pleasure.

Looking up Ayn Rand, I found some quote saying "objectivism is stillborn as a philosophy" and while that quote and review may be an apocryphal artefact of my imperfect memory, I believe I could defend it regarding "the fountainhead" - It is an argument from accident, the whole story precedes from presuming a protagonist that is basically omniscient. 

There's a grain of truth, I myself have brushed up against. People by and large, so the modal person, is risk averse - they are not entrepreneurial, they work for a salary under contract, they are not experimental, they seek out vocational training and credentials, they are not ambitious they make consumption choices based on what everyone else around them is doing. 

These are fairly good strategies to survive in the world we live in, but if someone is risk-seeking they swim in a soup of people who actively discourage them from doing so. Even something as simple as booking an international holiday can be met with misgivings, advice to get shots, join tour groups, plan your itinerary, look up trip advisor to make sure none of your experiences touch a frontier.

Then we can turn to reality TV to better understand the reality that renders Rand's objectivism, and to some extent The Austrian School of Economics, philosophically stillborn. 

American Idol, or Master Chef, or So You Think You Can Dance, or The Voice, or even popping down to your local Comedy open mic night and you will be confronted with the spanner in the works of a philosophy based on "everyone should get the fuck out of creative people's way."

That spanner I call "delusion" relative to gigging as a musician, or apprenticing as a kitchenhand, or building up a social media following for your dance troupe, these reality shows throw open the doors to a frictionless audition process where anyone can come join a line that is kilometres long, in their nearest metropolitan area and queue all day for the chance to be given a chance by a production assistant to audition in front of a panel of celebrities, we still see a curated sample of the most delusional people in regards to their own abilities. 

What we don't see are the vast number of hopefuls that turn up that are neither good nor interesting. From establishing shots of a camera showing the lines, we know that this is approximately 90% of dreamers. I would also point out, that the liberal application format of these shows has also produced largely mediocre results.

Kelly Clarkson, inaugural winner of American Idol can probably be described as modestly successful, what needs must be considered is the incredible success of American Idol then as a publicity campaign. I believe Harry Styles came out of a reality TV process, and there's probably a few others. I'm located in Australia and our inaugural winner Guy Sebastian is a small market analogue to Kelly Clarkson. Later winners were nowhere near as famous, many go financially backwards due to the exploitative contracts they sign and routinely are outperformed on a global stage by people who write their own songs, gig, send demos to record labels, crowdfund tours etc. 

The biggest source of friction a talented and creative individual can face, are all the untalented and uncreative people out there that vastly outnumber them but nevertheless compete for the same resources.

All of which is to say, Ayn Rand, The Austrian School of Economics etc. that rail against state interventions like protectionism and regulation and taxation for holding great men back. Its stupid, these things hold back the 90% of us that aren't great from making life hell, a bulwark against stupidity like the human propensity to keep giving money to people who don't need anymore. 

I could go on. Hopefully I've impressed upon you, that I in no way endorse making the writings of Ayn Rand the cornerstone of your personal philosophy. To do so requires wilful ignorance of reality.

Bringing me to Peter Keating, Peter Keating is the initial antagonist in "The Fountainhead" an antithesis to Red, I think his name was Howard Rourke. They both go to architecture school, and Peter Keating follows an elite-career strategy, acing his assessment and getting an entry-level position at the most prestigious architecture firm, whereas Red is "too real" for trendy architecture and seeks an apprenticeship with an underappreciated maverick architect. 

Peter Keating, and this is the relevant bit, has a viable strategy for gaming his career advancement - he offers to take over the workload of a sleep deprived colleague. That collegiate draftsman simply appreciates the help, being able to collect his wages without doing work. He doesn't realise, presumably because Keating covers for him at no cost, that Keating is making him redundant and taking his position.

This is another area where Ayn Rand is describing a true phenomena - use-it-or-lose-it, though her allegory is a cautionary tale against letting someone else take over the value-producing work you do, the Large Language Model based generative "AI" products apply more to how our brains function.

Yes, this is a comedy segment, edited etc. Also, I literally only use LLMs when coerced to do so, I find them by and large useless and annoying as well as unconscionable in terms of the environmental cost for the benefit they produce.

I'm so out of touch, that the idea that people use ChatGPT as an alternative to google baffles me. I looked up and found a reddit post about how I could set my browsers default search engine to exclude "AI" summaries, I scroll through youtube videos and am genuinely confused as to why screen space is taken up by "AI Summaries" of the video, presumably were they any good they would spare me having to watch a video, from Youtube's advertising based business model, this makes little sense to me, but they are not good the general pattern is that a video with a thumbnail and title "Nikola Jokic is the best basketball player in the world" uses litres of water and causes brownouts in New England to produce the "AI" generated summary "In this video a man makes arguments that Nikola Jokic is the best basketball player in the world."

So full disclosure, I don't understand the minds that are excited by "AI" and actually use it daily. I do not understand why people are impressed by these chatbots in any other sense than comparing them to chatbots from 10 years ago.

In the Daily Show remote segment, the last question asked of ChatGPT is "where should I get coffee?" This is actually unconscionable if you are not ignorant of the environmental footprint. It is more appreciable of the dude who asked ChatGPT to devise a meal plan or whatever, to be confused into thinking complicated nutritional bullshit requires excessive computing power. People can easily be beguiled by the promise that if they gain control of what they put in their mouths, they will gain control of their lives, but Ronny Chieng's "stop eating food" I would argue, though played for comedic effect, is actually good enough considering his intelligence runs off something like 100W of energy, and that this guy if I had to hazard a guess, is trying to optimise his calloric and nutritional intake while still drinking excess amounts of beer like some kind of college student every week.

Rename ChatGPT "Peter Keating" and suddenly Ayn Rand looks like a veritable prophet. Here is something that you think is helping you, when in actual fact it is harming you. 

Regulatory processes are famously and historically slow moving. Few people alive today appreciate that last century there was a time when a doctor would prescribe you cigarettes for nerves, and it was easy for 12 year old's to smoke. The adverse effects of smoking were known to medical journals, I'm going to guess by the 1960's at the latest, but Australia, that leads the way in many ways on regulating smoking - took half a century before cigarettes could not be sold from vending machines, could not be sold to minors, bore graphic warnings about the health effects of smoking and required generic branding to a specific scientifically determined least appealing colour of diarrhea greenish-brown.

Then vape came in unregulated to the point that my friend enjoyed a few months being able to vape in the cinema and it has in a few short years completely undone all the gains made in half a century of cutting smoking rates.

Maybe by 2060, presuming the AI investment bubble doesn't short circuit the product market, people under 18 or maybe 25 will not be allowed to use AI. We will probably know by then, if regular usage of LLMs significantly increases risk of conditions like dementia, and early onset dementia and generally lowers life expectancy. Due to the environmental impacts, where we already face ecological crises, maybe by 2035 laws will pass that mean you cannot ask an LLM for trivial bullshit like "where do I get coffee?" which is seriously, like asking someone to drive an SUV to the Library and do a google search on "coffee near me."

I have raised it before, and maybe "when did tohm last mention Gordon Neufield on his unsearchable blog?" is a valid question for LLMs to be used, but I'm going to repeat it here so don't - Dr Neufield pointed out in a talk on peer-orientation and all the issues it causes children-come-adults, that by the 90s parenting hadn't figured out TV. TV posed a challenge to raising healthy adults and we hadn't figured out how to incorporate this new reality when we were hit with the internet, a decade later and the internet came on phones, then social media, like the tech sector has literally just been lobbing fucking grenades at parents every couple of years for 3 straight decades.

Alas, it is worse than that, because parents aren't having grenades lobbed at them, but instead they are giving their children grenades thinking it is somehow a good idea.

Peter Keating the LLM maybe bad enough when he is "helping" you lose your job and cognitive capacities, but its worse when you are rolemodelling "how to charge headlong into redundancy" for your children. It may be time to seriously reconsider pulling out your phone and saying "hey Siri, make a reservation at 5.30 for dinner at McCheesables Family Restaurant." because you are teaching your kids not to know shit, and not to do shit, only how to consume.

And what would be truly terrible, in making a prophet out of Ayn Rand thanks to these electronic Peter Keatings, is that Peter Keating is the minor antagonist of The Fountainhead. He is a tragic cautionary tale, as while he plays the game to attain honour and prestige and promotions in his architectural firm, he has no real interest in what he does, he fails to produce any social goods. He loses his glamorous wife and career and winds up trying to rekindle his creative spirit by taking up painting, taking it to the protagonist Red for hopeful validation, whereby Red-the-omniscient uses his fictional omniscience to scare the world by telling Peter that it is too late for him to get into art now. 

Red our protagonist "wins" in the end by marrying a horrible woman who was married to or shacked up with both antagonists of the novel, and finally getting the financing to build a skyscraper in Manhatten, the pinnacle of human accomplishment, you know like Trump Tower. Ayn Rand is trash, but the trap of convenience is real and I humbly beg, via a blog post that people stop stumbling into that trap it is getting embarassing.

A Naive Series Part 1: Chauvinism

 "Naïve" is something like French for "childlike" and in this series where I ponder the unanswerable question: "what are people?" I'm employing the prefix in the sense of being a default psychological disposition.

Intro over, let's get into part one - Chauvinism.

Naïve Chauvinism

In the prefix sense, I know "naïve" mostly from its use in "naive dualism" dualism basically is the belief in the soul. Slightly longer is to say dualism is a belief that self and body are separate, hence you can watch those movies like 'Freaky Friday' with suspended disbelief.

Generally it takes education to become a monist, people don't really default to that.

"Chauvinism" I'm going to be guessing, most English speakers would know as the suffix from "Male Chauvinism" and often "Male" can be dropped and people can just refer to "Chauvinism" as a synonym for "sexism" like in the title of the book "Female Chauvinist Pigs" which is about the rise of sex/porn culture and women participating in their own oppression. 

At this juncture, I should say, that I am not a pedant who believes dictionaries to be sacrosanct and that people can get language wrong. I think dictionaries do not define words but document usage, and that the standard of communication is understanding. So long as you are understood, frankly anything goes.

I just hope you understand that I don't mean that people are born sexist, though they may be. I mean people are born chauvinist in the older, and now less used sense of the word :

The unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people.

So let's get into that.

Your Grandma's Chocolate Cake

There's likely a generational divide here. I know chocolate cake still exists, but it was probably also a fairly 20th century thing. Reality show Master Chef came out when I was an adult already, and here in Australia (and I presume everywhere) at the height of its popularity, it produced a spin-off "Masterchef Kids" which was my introduction to a new world where even children can be fucking pretentious.

So maybe, shortly after publication and for so long as the internet endures, you will be reading this being someone whose family tree is white as alabaster but for some fucking reason you took "bento boxes" to school with a dozen compartments of crap prepared anxiously by your mother who you just euthanised because the pressures to keep up status in an economy that transfers wealth from the young to the old increasingly has rewarded her agreeability with MS or ALS, and you don't know what I'm talking about when I say "you're grandma's Chocolate Cake" because Grandma's of your era don't bake chocolate cake they bake shoe pastry and temper chocolate to make sure you have a pistachio croquembouche for your birthday or something.

But, as recently as last century naive chauvinism could manifest by a widespread belief that your Grandma made the best chocolate cake in the world!

Naive chauvinism is no more complicated than that. Most of us, prefer to be us even though this is largely irrational. 

A relationship will struggle, if you ask your mum for a recipe that is the epitome of comfort food for you and you serve it up to your partner and they are like 'it's not my favourite thing.'

If you travel, hosts will take you to some local spot and give you the local treat and if you are unlucky the local treat will be a) shit, b) offensive or worst of all, c) a pale comparison of something you find readily available at home.

To boot, naive chauvinism I feel is likely universal enough, that we all intuit that the polite thing to do is not disillusion others of their naive chauvinism. We eat the horse penis, the salmon sperm, the ox eye or the vegemite sandwich, smile and say 'mmmmm...' to their expectant faces.

Only actual children come home from a sleep over and share their confusion with their parents that "The Grosbys make grilled cheese sandwiches with Kraft singles in the microwave and they seemed to think it was a treat..."

George Carlin

-said "have you ever noticed when you're driving that anybody who goes faster than you is a maniac and anybody who drives slower than you doesn't know what they're doing?" 

I'm asserting this phenomena is both real and can be described as an example of naive chauvinism. If you think about it, it makes sense, you have to pick a point on the speed continuum to prefer driving at, and because you can't be wrong about your preferences you go on to assume that your preference is universal.

After that, everyone who doesn't share your preference is explained away by some sort of cognitive deficiency, either gross incompetence - they want to drive at your speed they just lack the know how, or some form of reckless disregard for the sanctity of life - this person knows driving faster than you is too dangerous but they just don't care.

Carlin's insight was that this worked as a bit because it is true of everyone no matter how fast they drive.

Even I, a cyclist who rides a single speed and thus never caps 30km an hour, experience this psychological phenomena. I despise 'safety Petes' who are cyclists that wont run a red light even in the absence of all traffic and who ring their bells for everybody they pass on a shared path regardless of whether the path is obstructed by peds or not. But I also disapprove of those riders who bike salmon and ride out into a busy intersection expecting other cars to stop or who ride up to lights and position themselves in front of me even though the last set of lights determined empirically that I have the faster take-off, acceleration and top speed.

The thing is, if you asked me why I break the exact right amount of road laws that effect cyclists, I would be tempted to confabulate an answer. And there are reasons, like the laws I break have never resulted in a collision or accident or any other kind of penalty, whereas the laws I observe when I haven't observed them have gotten me at least a talking to by the police.

But in my sobriety I understand that just because I observe a rule (generally) that you only wear a bike helmet if you are touching a bicycle, it doesn't really bother me that much if a friend of mine dorks it up and puts their bike helmet on before they reach their bicycle.

I also wish I could wait for tram doors to shut before advancing up to the lights, instead of simply waiting for all the passengers to get on and off but I can't because tram drivers seem to have a habit/be instructed to leave their doors open until the light changes to green, after which they shut their doors and then slowly accelerate and if one fucking straggler runs up to the tram in a place like Melbourne's CBD you can potentially get stuck behind a fucking tram with open doors forever. So I just ignore the law and watch for people. Other people, including car drivers, don't stop and I'm sure they are both maniacs and don't know what they are doing.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Effect

Just upfront, I rate MBTI as just above Horoscopes. I'm not a big believer, though unlike horoscopes mapping personality traits arbitrarily onto people based on birth dates, MBTI contains personality traits that are in robust personality models like OCEAN or 'Big 5' like extroversion-introversion spectrum of ambiverts, and one of the 4 axis from memory maps pretty well onto some combination of openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism such that I would be surprised if people with MBTI 'high S' is somewhat predictive of low openness to experience etc.

But even if not scientifically robust, nor particularly predictive of anything useful like career or relationship success, the MBTI is out there, it is popular and as far as I know career guidance counsellors and recruiters may still employ it. 

I think you could probably sub in as an exercise a "know your horoscope" activity, but in terms of naive chauvinism MBTI and also the more common and more useful 2 factor personality models (where you might be told you are a "Type A" or "Driver/Dominance" personality etc.) are a potential invitation out of naive chauvinism.

Think about it, you are sitting in a room of 40 people, and you learn that only a quarter of that room (or a sixteenth for MBTI) care about and value the same shit you do. What an opportunity for people on the job who are 'not there to make friends' and 'get results' to learn that many of their coworkers, don't give much of a shit about getting results at all especially if they and their friends hate the process of getting those results.

Simultaneously, an equal opportunity for somebody who cares about their coworkers weekends, relationships, children and pets to realise that they share a workspace with people that find such discussions tedious, boring, intrusive and annoying. That there's people outside the HR department that find 'mandatory fun' a gross infringement on their human rights and dignity.

But it has been my experience, that naive chauvinism overrides the empathic utility of such exercises, dubious or not. People more readily learn about their personality, than learn about the existence of personalities. The results come back for them as something akin to a disabled parking permit and a pro-forma rider for a rock star. They learn more about their own preferences and immediately begin explaining to others how to best accommodate them.

Remembering that chauvinism is "unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people" similar to how Jane Elliot's Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes produces results that are way less powerful than what we might intuit; most people on balance can't imagine having preferences other than their own. 

Helen Fisher a researcher into relationships that created a 2-factor model of relationship styles similar to MBTI but based on primary hormone drivers - dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins something else... relates assuming that some types would want to be 'cured' into another type and had the personal revelation that people's personalities tend to be aligned with what they already value and desire.

So there's two ways to react to discovering different people value and desire different things:

1. You take a chill pill, recognizing that there are many people and one planet and that life is going to be a series of negotiations.

2. You circle the wagons, inside the circle is "us" and outside the circle is "them", you remain sceptical that people actually desire and value different things, there's just people who "get it" and are good at it like you, and people who are dumb and ignorant and getting things wrong like "them" and realise that life is going to be a battle for your rightful dominance.

Why I think naive chauvinism is a thing, is that I have literally had a guy explain in excruciating detail, with diagrams his understanding of the theory of personality and how it effected his own life and what he learned from it, who rode his preferences roughshod over everyone and everything every time including in that very meeting where he explained personality to us.

Naive Chauvinism in the 21st Century

Our education system isn't that good. I suspect I am simply lucky to have come of age prior to Malcolm Gladwell's publication of "Outliers" which changed the paradigm from all-rounder to specialist. 

I remember in my late 20s meeting a guy who played in indie bands and identified largely as a muso who didn't want anybody knowing that he was into footy (AFL) for fear of being shunned. Being only slightly older than him I was incredulous, having gone to a school where one was expected by parents to land the lead role in the high-school musical production and be a member of the rowing first's crew.

A few years later and I met an increasing number of people in the arts scene who used terms like 'sportsball' unironically (though I'm sure they were trying to be ironic) and reinforced this arbitrary divide. 

A few more years and Brexit and Trump's first term happens and well, we've been living it so you and I know everybody went nuts. Crucially though, polarisation caused political identities to collapse onto a sounder foundation of naive chauvinism. 

I had the privileged vantage of being a white heteronormative male to observe becoming homeless on the left. Despite prominent leftist media figures being white men like Jon Oliver and for new media David Pakman etc. but these tend to operate a kind of "turn-and-point" progressive identity politics, if you know what I mean, which you probably don't but its where you turn and point to another white guy and sort of say "hey everyone look, that's a white guy over there! Do better white guy!" so you can still be host of the show and it seems a sufficient fiction to quash any questions of diversity and representation being applied to you.

But if you weren't already at the top when the right thing to do was pull the ladder up, the subjective experience of naive chauvinism on the left was one where there just was no place for you in the promised neverland. 

Historically marginalised groups went straight from being underrepresented, silenced and erased, to chauvinism. Tragically, many people on the left, faced with this surging chauvinism were not so much recruited by, as assigned to an increasingly chauvinistic conservative circle because few people can cope psychologically with being homeless tribe wise.

And now we see it, though if you've been indulging your naive chauvinism, algorithms may have assisted your blindness, in election results where people naively feel that anyone outside the chauvinistic political in-group can legitimately govern, so when the election outcome is announced no matter who wins or who is defeated roughly 50% of people who live in democracies around the world experience a kind of existential terror.

This is not to say that election results are arbitrary. Regarding the things that are broken everywhere like campaign financing, there is a degree of arbitrariness. With 2+ years now of weekly protests against the Israeli military offensive on the Palestinian Gaza strip (in which Palestine became recognized as a state by more nations) many people find in their own country no actual choice come voting time on foreign policy regarding Israel-Palestine foreign policy. But there's plenty of non-arbitrary meaningful differences.

Chris Rock once described George W Bush as "the first cable president" with previous US Presidents being I guess "network presidents" where even civil war president Abraham Lincoln, and post-war reconstruction presidents like Ulysses S Grant who accepted the surrender of General Lee, understood that they were the president in service to both the people who cast their vote for them, and all those that didn't, and even tried (and in Abe's case succeeded) to kill them. Bush, according to Chris Rock was basically like "Fuck everyone who doesn't watch Fox News" and while Bush was the first, I think we are observing now an even more extreme chauvinist administration as evidenced by where the national guard is deployed versus where crime is actually really bad.

Conclusion

Naive chauvinism is really really bad, because democracy is really quite good. Demonstrably so. It is so much better to live in a democracy and it is especially nice to not have constant civil wars. 

In the 20th century, or pre-internet age, the benefits of democracy could be imposed upon us without us needing to understand what strapped all that democracy together.

It kind of worked with zero-understanding among the general public because without the internet and smart phones it was so much harder to book ourselves a one-way ticket to chauvinistic crazy town. Globalization was hard, so people bought local newspapers because news had to be printed and shipped daily. 

Yes in the 1990s it was possible for Saddam Hussein to get all the major newspapers of the world delivered daily to Baghdad, Iraq, but most people in wealthy free democracies simply couldn't be fucked going the extra steps necessary to get a copy of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Asahi Shinbun and Neinkampf!

Then we built the confirmation-bias superexpressway and globalised the competition for media such that your local paper has to compete with all the resources of The New York Times and a much more dramatic and higher stakes political scene, as opposed to your local broadsheet's in-depth analysis on the debate in parliament about the proposed changes to the sheep tax.

Such that when I log onto my local broadsheet, it is full of clickbait headlines behind paywalls - global competition has dragged it to headlines like this: "Time and again, the men in my life fail me when it comes to this simple task" just shy of finishing with "You'll be shocked by what it is!"

Basically the attention economy is a petri-dish for growing the influence and impact of naive chauvinism and naive chauvinism basically makes bloody conflict inevitable because children create visions of the future that have no place for outsiders. If politics is beholden to naive chauvinism, then unless the superior values of the in group suit you - be that being a tradwife married to a white Christian nationalist husband, or passing as a pansexual to maintain your place in a polycule of fours, someone is going to resist. 

It's not even the diminished rights of individuals, but the suppression of whole communities through sheer neglect, thanks to the personal incredulity of why anybody wouldn't want to live beachside wearing athleisure to the local cafe when it's just a 2 minute drive in your german SUV/anybody wouldn't want to live in a gentrifying former industrial slagheap where you can deliver your genderless short-adults to a Steiner school on a dutch e-bike via the reclaimed rail-trail where the community got together to replace the graffiti piece by "Cuntzcrew '98" of King Neptune as a pimp paying his Mermaid hos, with a mural of a genderbent Paolo Freire, where what was really working for democracy 20 years ago was that there was space for all these subcultures to do their own thing, while sharing a common media and the real issues between progressive suburbs vs materialist narcissist suburbs being wealth inequality was less bad than it is now.

Democracy is good, and it can only be sustained where the electoral cycle doesn't begin with telling the people who voted the other way that they can go fuck off and die.

You've probably heard the legend of the inventor of chess in India having the Sultan promise him anything he wants for inventing such a marvellous game and the dude is like "a grain of rice doubled for each square of the chessboard" and the Sultan is like "how modest" and claps his hands or whatever, and then the treasurer comes back and says that he calculated it and to fulfil the request would more than empty all the granaries in India? Well naive chauvinism is kind of the same maths but opposite - that priests poem about "first they came for the communists and I said nothing, then they came for the jews..." 

In-groups are relative. No group can actually "win" which is why there's a general consensus that totalitarian regimes are inherently unstable. Intersectionality basically tells us this is the case. So if in a scenario of actual female chauvinism, Patriarchy was "smashed" and replaced with an equally chauvinistic matriarchy (as opposed to a new feminist egalitarian world), that victory would be cashed in for a further schism. 

Often enough, narcissism of small-differences takes effect faster than chauvinist attacks on the outgroups. 

So I'm just bringing a notional concept to your attention. I'm asserting that chauvinism a) has to be unlearned as a default, and b) is worth unlearning.