Israel: AI, The Vice-Presidential Debate, and Territory

Psychological Musings

The spirits that I summoned, I now cannot rid myself of again. Johann Wolfgang von Goeth in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, as quoted by Yuval Noel Harari in Nexus.

The dog barking at you from behind his master’s fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built; essentially, they both see the area as their territory and are protecting it, even if the dog doesn’t fully understand the concept of ownership like the human does. Robert Ardrey in The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (1966)

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image. Joan Didion in The White Album (1979)

Michele and I watched the VP debate last Wednesday. I know the debate was on Tuesday, but we had long-standing plans to see Yuval Noel Harari. I’m a big fan of Harari, though, to be accurate, I should really say that I am a big fan of Sapiens, Harari’s first book (I did not get through his second book).

Harari has a new book out, as do many of the other speakers in the same series of talks, and I think that is largely the reason for his being on the speaker tour. The book is Nexus, subtitled A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, and, from his talk, the book sounds interesting, if not very optimistic. One thing that Harari said that was both interesting and frightening is that Israel is using AI to pick targets in their wholesale killing of the indigenous Palestinians (I keep reading that it is called the Israeli-Palestinian War, but with the overwhelming superiority of the Israeli weapons, and an estimated death toll of about 1,706 Israelis to 41,431 Palestinians this fight can not be called a war). Harari pointed out that humans still pull the trigger, but only after AI tells them where to shoot. He did not say it like it was a good thing.

Watching the debate the next day, after reading the reviews, so to speak, was more like doing homework than “Oh boy! Let’s watch the debate”. Vance was very polished and has the ability to make some of his and Trump’s crazy ideas seem almost normal. It seems obvious to me that Vance has done a lot of debating. I kept thinking, Hum, I guess the elite schools are better; Yale, Vance’s alma mater, is better, at least in preparing people for debates, than Chadron State College, Walz’s alma mater.

The first question was something like, “Governor Walz, if it was up to you, would you support or discourage an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran?” Walz didn’t answer the question, saying instead that Hamas attacked first and that Israel has the right to defend itself, and Vice President Harris will provide steady leadership. I understand the Harris/Walz Campaign’s problem here; the Jewish population is a big demographic and a bigger donor pool. On the other side, Michigan and Minnesota, which are both swing states and could go either way, have a lot of Muslim voters, which the party does not want to lose.

Next, one of the moderators asked Vance the same question. The Republicans have a different problem; they lost most of the Muslim vote after President George W. Bush senselessly attacked Iraq (before Bush’s attack, a plurality of Muslims, who are pretty socially conservative, voted Republican). Vance, who is new to the national scene but already disliked for some of his past comments like, “Cat ladies are unhappy and trying to make everybody else miserable.”, said, “I want to answer your question, but, first, let me tell you about myself.” He came across as a nice, reasonable guy. At the very end, he said something to the effect that Israel can do whatever they want. I started to worry that this would be a bad day for the Democrats. Still, as the debate went on, Vance seemed to misrepresent various Republican and Democratic positions and, in the end, refused even to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election, leaving me feeling better. 

In the background, the threat of war in the Middle East is ramping up, and Israel is increasingly seen as the bad guy, which, in my opinion, it is. That’s not good. Not good for Israel or for Jewish people around the world who are mistakenly tarred with the same brush as Israelis. I say mistakenly because Jewish people who were born and live outside Israel and Israelis are not interchangeable, and many Jewish people, especially younger Jewish people who consider Israel the dominant power in the region, think the Israeli government is in the wrong.

I’ve been interested in human evolution for a long time, probably since 1966, when I first read The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations by Robert Ardrey. Robert Ardrey was not a scientist; he was a playwright and a screenwriter who was also interested in human evolution and became a science writer. He was a very controversial science writer in 1966, but most of what was then controversial, like humans evolved in Africa and not Asia, is now considered obvious. Ardrey also wrote that we evolved from animals and were still, in large part, run by our animal roots when the prevailing wisdom was that animals acted out of instinct, and we were different because we acted through our power of reasoning (which, of course, animals didn’t have).

Ardrey postulated that one of the instincts that we are controlled by is our animal instinct to acquire land and defend territory. He further postulated that the Nazis were able to round up and slaughter the Jews because they did not have any territory to defend, and if they did own territory, they would have fought back.

Now, both Israelis and Palestinians think that the land between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean is theirs, exclusively theirs, and both are willing to fight to the death to keep it. I think that it is a problem without a solution. One of my many doctors is an Israeli who moved here from Israel because she did not want to raise her children in a country that treated the Palestinians so cruelly. Off and on, when I have an appointment with her, we end up talking about Israel and Palestine, although neither one of us has a solution.

On one of those visits, I suggested that the only solution was for the Israeli people and the Palestinian people to learn to live together in a single state. She snapped back, “No way, we would never let that happen.” It was the most animated I’ve ever seen her. Much more animated than either Vance or Walz in the aforementioned Vice Presidential Debate.

That debate was, for the most part, a civil, lowkey affair. I don’t mean that as a compliment. It would be a compliment if Senator Vance or Governor Walz actually debated their different takes on the issues, but they didn’t. Both debaters were excellent at not answering the questions, although Walz did it better. I think Vance hurt himself when he started, several times, with, “I don’t want to talk about the past, I want to talk about  the future.” Maybe, in the end, that is the good thing about AI. I read that different AI programs make up answers – called hallucinating in the trade – but they haven’t yet learned to equivocate. 

Bernie Sanders, Jimmy Carter, and The Press, Still, Mostly About Carter

Americana, Current Affairs
Carter (1 of 1)

Summer is for dating, fall is for mating. Tamara Keith on NPR is a reference to Bernie Sanders not being a viable candidate.

President Jimmy Carter turned 100 last Tuesday, and I want to say something about it besides Happy Birthday, Jimmy, Congratulations. I wrote the paragraphs below in September 2015 when Bernie Sanders was running for President, but the core of it is President Jimmy Carter. 

What most pisses me off this primary season, even as the Bernie Sander’s crowds get bigger, is hearing a pundit say, Of course he can’t win, or even, get the nomination.  And the bigger the crowds, the louder they seem to say it.

As people – politicians, movie actors, athletes, even The Kardashians – move into the collective conscience, a sort of collective shorthand takes over. The press, but it is more than just the press, decides on one simple story, and all the complexities are washed away. Now it is the craziness of Donald Trump or the vague sleaziness of Hillary Clinton; it used to be the naiveté of Jimmy Carter.

My first and lasting impression of Jimmy Carter was that he was far from naive. I first heard him talk in January of 1975, about 21 months before the 1976 Presidential election. I was driving across Nevada on my way to Sun Valley, and just after Lovelock, it started to lightly snow. I turned on the radio, hoping to get a local station with a weather report, and what I got was what I thought was a random Southerner talking about US foreign policy. I kept driving, and the snow kept lightly falling – heavy enough so that the countryside became magically covered and light enough so the highway was kept clear by traffic – and I kept listening. The speaker, who had been schooled in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program, was brilliant, thoughtful and knowledgeable. As I cleared  Winnemucca, still heading east, I started to lose the signal, so I pulled over and listened to the final minutes by the side of the road, heater running, anxiously hoping it wouldn’t keep snowing.  It was so bizarre – sitting in the car by the side of the road, in a snowstorm, in the middle of Nevada, listening to a talk on how to change our foreign policy – that I still remember it.  In the end, I learned that the random Southerner was Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia, and I was smitten with him. I still am.

Part of my smitteness is that I am a sucker for Southern populists. I like Huey Long – Education and training for all children to be equal in opportunity in all schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions of training in the professions and vocations in life; to be regulated on the capacity of children to learn, and not on the ability of parents to pay the costs. Training for life’s work to be as much universal and thorough for all walks of life as has been the training in the arts of killing – even though I know a refined and educated person shouldn’t like somebody like Huey Long. I was and am a fan of Bear Bryant – If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win football games for you. And, as might be expected, before I turned on him for Vietnam, I liked Lyndon Johnson over the Kennedys.

But I also remember that speech by Jimmy Carter because it was the most coherent speech on foreign policy that I have ever heard. Carter had been an officer aboard a nuclear submarine, and he had obviously thought about foreign policy and about nuclear war with the total carnage it would bring. It seemed to me that Carter was a peacenik who had actually thought about the problem.  By the time I got back to the office a week or so later, I was telling everybody I knew that Jimmy Carter should be our next president.

The most common reaction I got was laughter, but Carter ran a brilliant, if sometimes very rough, campaign, making enough converts to become president. Starting as an almost unknown outsider, a born-again Christian outsider from the deep South, Carter surprised the establishment press, and I don’t think they ever forgave him for that. Today, partially because of the press’s simplified picture of him, Carter is considered a mediocre president at best, and his decency as a human is regarded as Jimmy Carter’s main legacy. But much of what people didn’t like in 1976 is now starting to seem like prophecy.

Even when we know better, much of what we were told and believe about the Carter presidency comes from the press simplifying a complex man. His honesty and his openness – he was the first, and maybe the last, president to be interviewed in Playboy and the first to wear jeans in the White House – were painted as weaknesses. We want our politicians to be transparent, yet we want them to be powerful as well, and power, even in the best of circumstances, means the management of information, as Nathan Heller pointed out in The New Yorker, and telling the truth is not managing the information.

We are given cartoons of complex people and complex situations, and all nuance is lost. Happy Birthday, Jimmy, and I wish we had listened to you more.

 

A Walk In The Dirt (Almost To The Beach)

Uncategorized

While we were staying at Tracy and Richard’s place at Point Reyes Station a couple of weekends ago, we hiked- maybe wandered is a better descriptor – to Abbotts Lagoon. I love being outside and, especially, walking on a dirt trail or on no trail. Still, I haven’t walked on a dirt path – except to cut through a parking lot border – in probably four years, and I’ve missed it. There are all kinds of reasons, from hammertoes to having trouble breathing. After I got my new replacement aorta valve, I started exercising by lifting weights and walking on a treadmill, which I still do, but neither one offers the satisfaction of being on the land.

The short hike to Abbotts Lagoon, in Point Reyes National Park, was harder than I expected. And more fun! And more interesting. When I am walking on a treadmill, once I get to a steady pace, I don’t think about the actual walking part, but walking on an uneven dirt path, I have to think about almost every step. That is not something I did fifteen years ago. Fifteen years ago, I had much more available bandwidth to look around and marvel at the scene around me. Not that this is a particularly spectacular landscape. At first, it is just dry grass and gentle hills. Still, it is full of detail.

Close to the end of the trail, well before the beach, is Abbotts Lagoon, which connects with the ocean by way of several lazy meanders. There is more wildlife here than I expected, and everybody seemed less afraid of humans. And why shouldn’t they be less afraid? Our species has gone from hunter to birdwatcher in most of the world -well, here at least – during the last century (plus or minus a decade). The fur traders and casual hunters have been replaced by people like us who are not looking for decorative feathers or otter pelts, and the animals have reacted to that.

Something is healing about being out on the land. Being on the land is primal; it touches our animal core. There are a lot of people on the trail and each one of us is singular. Each of us has our own personality. Just like the animals we cross paths with. That difference is the engine of evolution, and it runs deep.

As an aside, about seventy years ago, I tried my hand at raising snails. I had read about it in Sunset Magazine. The article was about taking common garden snails and putting them in a large container of cornmeal for a couple of weeks to clear their digestive tract, and then…that was it. Like magic, they were ready for eating. Except I couldn’t do it. When I took the top off to clean the container, some were on the cornmeal munching away, and some were sliming their way up the sides to see more of the word; one was even all the way to the top, trying to get out. Each snail had its own personality. Snails are pretty primitive, pretty basic, but even at that level, each one is different. It is harder to kill and eat an animal that has a personality, for me, at least. End aside. 

The Presidential Debate and Neoteny

Uncategorized
Otters frolicking in the sand.

Neoteny is the retention of the juvenile features in an adult animal. Genetic factors influence the degree of neoteny in individuals. Neoteny is manifested both behaviorally and physically. Temple Grandin, Mark J. Deesing, in Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals.

On the one hand, I am convinced that man owes the life-long persistence of his constitutive curiosity and explorative playfulness to partial neoteny that is indubitably a consequence of domestication. … On the other hand, domestication is apt to cause an equally alarming disintegration of valuable behavioral traits and an equally alarming exaggeration of less desirable ones. Conrad Lorenz in the forward to The Wild Canids.

Debating is all about dominance, and Vice President Kamala Harris dominated former President Donald Trump in last Tuesday’s debate. She doesn’t want to come across as an Angry Black Woman, but she can’t look weak; that’s a pretty narrow path to follow, and, after a shaky start, she pulled it off. Somebody with a much better political memory than I have said it was the first time anybody beat Trump in a debate.

When I repeated that to some friends on a Zoom call, they all said I was wrong, insisting Hillary won in 2016 and Biden won in 2020. That’s not how I remember it, so I listened to the second of three debates between Trump and Clinton. Ok, I didn’t listen to the entire debate – I’m not that much of a masochist – but I did listen to the first third. What I came away with was not so much about who the clear winner was but the impression that Donald Trump was way more coherent eight years ago. He was a much more formidable candidate then.

What I thought this blog was going to be about was neoteny and how it fits into Donald Trump’s persona, but I believe now that the most noticeable thing about Trump is his deterioration. Sure, he is an adult who acts like a three-year-old – a bad-mannered three-year-old who acts in a way most people would not want their three-year-old child to act like – but that is not as noticeable as the deterioration happening in front of us.

We are born, we grow up, and we – eventually – die. However, it is not a linear process. The change a human goes through in their first fifteen or twenty years is dramatic, and I believe the same sort of dramatic change takes place during the last fifteen or twenty years of our lives. We are comparatively stable during what I would call our middle years. Comparatively, the change that occurs in us at thirty to forty-five – or even forty-five to sixty – is pretty minor. But Trump is past those relatively stable years – stable not being a descriptor I would not normally use to describe Trump – and rapidly falling apart on live TV. If he were to win, I imagine that decline would on accelerate. That’s pretty scary.