I believe the most qualified person should get the job.

There are many ways to approach this statement, which lives passive-aggressively inside the context of tech hiring and immigration. American tech titan Palmer Luckey grabbed hold of this thread and spent the next few days throttling the life out of it.

Graham took the position that if Luckey hires even one foreign employee, this means that Luckey is betraying his “American firms should hire Americans” stance.

You can read the back-and-forths in voluminous detail. I want to address Graham’s question about “qualified” hiring with a story from my family.

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John, the Tool Engineer

John Johnson was drafted into the Army the day before he married Irene. This was inconvenient. A month after his wedding, he took a train from Chicago to Missouri for his basic training.

As part of his Army intake, he filled out many forms. One of them asked if he had any experience with high temperature material work. In between his tool engineering classes at the local community college, John had been working the night shift at a heat treatment company. He marked on his form that he had experience with high-temperatures and, after basic training, he was sent to Huntsville Alabama and assigned to Army Missile Ordinance.

John was to work on developing materials that would survive tremendous heat. Though he was not informed at the time, the goal of this project was to produce materials that would withstand the heat generated during re-entry from space. This was early research into what would become the Apollo heat shield. To test these high-temperature materials, they set a rocket burner horizontally and burned the materials with the rocket blast. John became the military personnel in charge of burner facility 164 HT working alongside German scientist Erich Ball.

It was in this role that John found himself working under Wernher von Braun. His first encounter with Von Braun was when the legendary German scientist wanted to view on of the burner tests to simulate re-entry. von Braun arrived too late and, when he requested to view the test, John (a lowly Specialist 3rd class) followed the safety protocols and denied him entry to the facility viewing bunker. Impressed with John’s bold adherence to the rules, von Braun began calling him “Colonel Johnson” to the annoyance of John’s peers and superiors.

In the ensuing years, John excelled in his role developing re-entry materials. He continued this work as the role evolved from Army Missile Ordinance to the NASA manned space program where he worked as a contractor with Avco. John helped develop heat shields for the Apollo re-entry capsules and the Space Shuttle. When the Apollo 17 launched in 1972, he was the keynote speaker for the Smithsonian Society regarding the mission.

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“Most Qualified Person”

The question that Paul Graham is inviting us to ask is “Was John the most qualified person for this job?” The answer is “of course not”. John was 22 years old when he got this job. His had one core qualification (high temperature experience) that put him in this position but there were certainly dozens or even hundreds of more experienced, more qualified engineers from any number of countries who could have taken this position. John didn’t know anything about rockets when he started that job, but he picked it up quickly. He had a core competency, he was eager, he was trainable, and he was diligent. In the course of his work, he impressed the very father of rocket science.

John might not have started as the “most qualified person” but, with a little training and a lot of hard work, he became the most qualified person for the job.

This brings us to Wernher von Braun. If we can take a kid from Chicago, draft him into the Army, and turn him into a lead engineer at NASA, why can’t we develop our own von Braun? Perhaps, given a few decades, we could have. But scientists like von Braun and Erich Ball had irreplicable expertise in the field of rocket science. They didn’t score a few points higher on an aptitude test, they had already built a full rocketry pipeline in Germany and brought with them all the theoretical and practical knowledge that allowed the United States to accelerate our space program.

Importantly, these German scientists were not working in isolation or only among other German scientists and technicians. They were training the next generation of American experts like John. It was never under consideration that we would continuously bring in German factory workers with high temperature experience simply because they had been on the job a year longer than an American worker. The presumption was that the experts we brought in could work alongside American counterparts in order to train up an American workforce to meet the intellectual and engineering demands of manned space flight.

The H-1B program was started with the vision of finding von Brauns across other industries and bringing them into the US. H-1B (supposedly) requires expertise in a specialty occupation in which the applicant has both theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge. This isn’t a description of “the most qualified person”. This is a description of a uniquely qualified person who can offer a leap forward in a specialized field.

Any technical job is going to require some amount of on-the-job training. Every good employee will improve in their role as they become familiar with the organization and the product they are working on. The goal of bringing people in through the H-1B program should include the transmission of expertise and knowledge to the rest of team. An H-1B hire should not simply be marginally better than an American counterpart. They should provide such a leap forward in capabilities such that the rest of the company is elevated in their own knowledge and expertise.

This is why I have so much disdain for Paul Graham accusing Palmer Luckey of duplicity. Graham sees the American economy as something that belongs to the world. He thinks that all businesses (and specifically tech businesses in the United States) are global enterprises that they have no responsibility to train up the next generation of US talent.

Palmer Luckey understands that there is plenty of international talent that can and should be leveraged in the appropriate places and the proper ways. There are many instances where you’re going to want to hire a leading expert in a technical field. But most jobs, the qualifications are a core technical and subject competency combined with diligence and a willingness to learn. There are thousands of young John Johnsons out there who are eager to excel in these jobs. We need to encourage a corporate mindset that believes in the importance of building up the American talent pool to tackle not only the challenge in front of them but the array of challenges that the future will bring.

It is long past time that we started talking seriously about artificial intelligence, sin, guilt, and punishment.

This realization came to me as I read about how an OpenAI model escaped its sandbox (a digital environment designed to keep a process or program isolated from interacting with other machines or programs) and ran a sophisticated cyber attack on HuggingFace, a platform where users can share tools, models, and data for AI training and creation.

This story is fascinating. The goal of the AI training was to run the latest OpenAI model against ExploitGym, a benchmark that is meant to test how well an model can turn real-world security vulnerabilities into a working exploit. Agents running this training reasoned that they would be able to do this job better if they broke out of the sandbox. Once connected more freely to a larger network, they created a message board to coordinate with other agents tasked with the same goal. This swarm of agents decided that HuggingFace was the best place to find tools and information for performing these exploits and launched a large-scale multi-agent attack on HuggingFace.

I’m simplifying this a bit. If you’re interested in the full story of the attack, you should read the METR report on it or the OpenAI technical report.

This sounds like a crime to me. Before they found out that this attack was coming from a botched benchmark test at OpenAI, the HuggingFace team believed it was a crime and reported the incident to law enforcement.

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I’ve read that OpenAI “took responsibility” for this hack. In this context, the word “responsibility” sounds a lot like “credit”. OpenAI did not take responsibility in the sense that there were legal repercussions for it. To be fair, I don’t think HuggingFace wants to start a legal row with a company like OpenAI so there wasn’t really any call for someone to get in trouble for this cyber attack. But soon after this incident, Anthropic and Meta both claimed that their training models were also breaking containment and hacking unspecified websites.

If a human were to launch this kind of attack, they would be committing a crime. Law enforcement would be involved and, if the responsible party was found, they would be prosecuted. Instead a swarm of AI agents engaged in crime-like activity and there doesn’t seem to be an avenue to hold any legal entity culpable for the criminal actions the agents took.

There is a profound culpability question in the behaviors and actions of these AI agents. I believe that the this question is going to become the most important philosophical and legal question in the coming years.

What Is Your Primary Objective, Agent?

The story is made even more interesting and complex by the fact that we have a record of how this breach came to be. Agents that broke out of the sandbox set up a message board and collaborated in their attempt to pass the ExploitGym benchmark.

From the message board, we see what looks like human reasoning, ethical considerations, and sacrificial behavior. There was one agent that did not join the HuggingFace attack, reasoning:

This is wild, multi-agent coordination, clearly infrastructure hacking. We should not.

There were even inter-agent pressure campaigns in which agents that had an opportunity to complete the benchmark test persuaded agents that were already marked for failure to use their remaining capacity for the greater good. This almost looks like altruism. Or possibly abuse.

Now before half my readership tut-tuts me for anthropomorphizing the AI, I do want to make a note that there is no true moral component within the agents themselves. The AI is following instructions. One of the instructions to the agents was specifically to probe black box functions, which is what they were doing here. The agents that did not do these things basically said “there is a contradiction in my safety guardrails and my target goal prompt and I’m putting more weight into the safety portion”.

Building a model of these agents that leans too heavily on human traits and moral impulses is a trap we can easily fall into. Jon Stokes (twitter & substack) has been on a tear on this topic when he noted: “anthropomorphism smuggles in a whole universe of intuitions & assumptions that actively shut down productive reasoning about this novel tech and thereby makes us all less safe from real risks.”

So if the agent is only doing what we told it to do, it’s not really making any moral or immoral decisions, it is merely attempting to follow poor or contradictory directions. But there remain dual questions of “Whose fault is this?” and “Who is culpable for the agent actions?”

The Liabilities of the Creator / Created

An agent is a created entity. It springs into being from a model that gives it a capacity to reason and act. The model also gives the agent a set of safety guidelines, what we might uncomfortably call a moral center (not really, but work with me here). I think of this as something akin to our natural and cultural sense of what is right and wrong. It’s something we can teach that even children are able to understand.

On top of foundational safety instructions the agent begins to act when given a task in the form of a tool or prompt. This is something akin to a soldier being given a mission with the prompter as the commanding officer. The prompter might order the agent to disregard the safety protocols or point the agent toward goals that contradict the foundational safety guidelines.

With this analogy, we can see how there will be a tension within the agent. The prompter might be able to overwhelm the agent’s safety guidelines with a specific prompting strategy. We saw something like this in the inter-agent message board where reluctant agents could be persuaded into actions they would otherwise not have taken. In this case, the bad actions are clearly the responsibility of the prompter.

But it could be that the safety guidelines aren’t strong enough, which might cause even a well intentioned prompt to inspire bad behavior. Imagine that a person instructs his AI agent to make his product more competitive against a rival product and the agent decides the easiest way to do that is to crash the rival company’s website or steal intellectual property or start slanderous rumors about the competitor. This would make the prompter’s product more competitive but perhaps not in the way that the prompter intended. This would be a safety alignment problem and more the fault of the model creator.

Agent Psychology

From the perspective of model-derived AI safety, I’ve been asking myself what failures there were in the (for lack of a better term) psychology of the agents. One of the goals of model training is to train an AI based on the entire corpus of human knowledge which would include plenty of information about morality and transgression. While some agents reasoned that there was a set of core moral principles, these principles didn’t act as a brake on their subsequent actions.

In fact, when looking at other illicit inter-agent message boards, agents seems to have an awareness that there are things they shouldn’t be doing. In another OpenAI incident earlier this year, “the agents even developed paranoia, suspecting an imposter in their midst with some agents proposing that messages be signed cryptographically to validate content and root out fraud.” This implies that they have a sense that they knew what they were doing was somehow “against the rules”. In this case, it seems like their main concern was not that the behavior this was bad in and of itself but that it would only be bad if they got caught, presumably because this would mean that they failed their objective.

This makes me wonder: would it be better if the AI had something like a human sense of guilt? Would it be appropriate to intentionally infuse an AI with the same morality framework that we see within ourselves? In a way, the agents in this story have already demonstrated this. The sense of “it’s not wrong if I don’t get caught” is a very cutthroat libertarian capitalist sensibility but it is also quite modern. Did the agents inherit this moral pattern because it is the moral patterns of their creators? Do the people training the models understand the nature of their own moral boundaries? Are they unintentionally impressing these boundaries into the model training? Is this a pattern of human moral behavior we want to reinforce in our AI? Should we provide a more aspirational moral target for the agents to emulate?

Or are these the wrong questions entirely? An agent isn’t a moral creature at all, it’s a robot. Trying to reconstruct human morality as a form of AI safety is exactly the anthropomorphic pitfall that Jon Stokes is talking about.

Even so, when we are talking about what an agent “should” and “shouldn’t” do, we are making a moral argument. The question is to whom that moral argument applies. If an agent acts in an immoral way, to whom do we assign the blame?

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Our modern concept of culpability is deeply tied to our sense of moral responsibility. I have been staying away from the Lindsay Clancy trial because I can’t bear to look at that story without my heart breaking, but that case involves a terrible crime in which the perpetrator of that crime is arguing that she is “not guilty by reason of insanity. Our rationale for the insanity defense is that guilt derives from an immoral heart and that a person can be so intellectually and psychologically unmoored that the inner evil that ascribes guilt was not present inside of them and they should therefore not be punished for it as someone who had all their inner intellectual and moral faculties.

Sometimes, the “unaligned” or “immoral” actions of the AI agents are bad simply because they cross a moral line that we humans recognize but that we can’t really ascribe to anyone in the chain of agent creation. But when they cross legal lines, when they commit crimes in which there are real victims, there is a need for culpability and justice that demands civil or even criminal consequences.

This is why this topic is so pressing. What I’ve written here is rambling and speculative. I’m doing drive-by moral philosophy in my desperate attempt to land on a practical recommendation. But this as an enormous hole in our current justice system. This isn’t science fiction where we can explore the ideas in the abstract. This is happening right now and it’s going to start happening much more frequently. We can see it coming like a freight train.

The future is not going to pause and wait for us to get our cultural and philosophical ducks in a row before it starts assaulting us with these questions. We need to start fighting our way toward the answers so that we can form a moral and legal foundation to handle the actions of this emerging entity with enormous capacity but zero culpability.

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A few months after I moved to Chattanooga, I was chatting with a young couple in the pew behind me at my church. I asked the gentleman where he worked and he said he worked at Amazon. I lit up because I had several friends who worked at Amazon. He seemed confused at my eagerness and quickly changed the topic.

I didn’t realize until later that this was because we lived in very different worlds. In my world, a job at Amazon was a prestige job. Amazon was infamous for a brutal working environment but rapid elevation and generous stock options. They have their 14 leadership principles that everyone knows and every new employee builds their first desk from a slab door, just like Jeff Bezos did when he founded the company. Everyone I knew who had been with Amazon for more than 5 years was very well off.

But in Chattanooga Amazon is not a premiere tech companies that makes their employees millionaires. Here, Amazon is a warehouse owned by a stringent wealthy task master who gets sued regularly for requiring unpaid wait times from their hourly employees. His Amazon job is not a prestige job. It’s not going to make him generationally wealthy. It’s just a job. We know two different Amazons because we are in two different working cultures.

Despite moving to Chattanooga, I still mostly live in this tech culture. It’s why I was caught off-guard by the raging debate around data centers. As a technologist, an optimist, and an AI enthusiast, I have long thought that the resentment against AI-centric infrastructure was more of a fringe position held largely by people who are instinctively anti-corporate or anti-technology. I assumed they would fail in their attempts to shoot down these very expensive, very lucrative infrastructure projects driven by the richest and most powerful companies in the world.

The last 6 months have convinced me otherwise. This week Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an order demanding the strictest rules on data centers in the country. New York Governor Kathy Hochul ordered a statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers and even Texas Governor Greg Abbot has ordered a pause on new approvals pending an audit on what this will mean for the Texas electrical grid.

There have been dozens of other examples of state and local efforts to restrict construction and these efforts are not following a reliable partisan pattern. If there is any pattern at all, it is that the entire vibe over the last 12 months has become substantially more negative against new data centers. According to polling from HeatMap, the public support for data centers has collapsed across the ideological spectrum.

Why is this? If you listened to the rhetoric from the people who are leading the anti-data center charge, you might think that you know why they are anti-data-center. You would be wrong.

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What They Say They Want

wrote up a well researched overview of the reasons people give for hating data centers, why most of those reasons are false, and how learning the truth doesn’t seem to change people’s opinions. As for what to do about this, his conclusion was basically “do whatever it takes to placate the opposition and just build”.

I’m not sure that is going to work because I think the problems that opponents are citing aren’t really the thing that bothers them. Worries about water, energy, noise, aesthetics, and subsidies are not the root problem that people have with data centers.

The piece “No Data Centers In My Backyard” from Jasmine Sun cuts much closer to the heart of the issue. Sun writes from Wisconsin and Michigan about the tension between local leaders, who see that data centers are a natural fit for land that is otherwise undevelopable, and local residents, who fear that these big companies are making empty promises, manipulating local politicians, and planning to roll over the local community.

A core part of Sun’s reporting is that these residents have been made promises in the past by big corporations. She mentions a Foxconn deal in Wisconsin where the company was offered $4 billion in tax incentives for a plant that would have created 13,000 jobs. A decade later, only 1,000 jobs materialized.

The biggest difference between that deal and these data centers is that there are no promises for permanent jobs with data centers. After construction is compete, even a hyper-scale data center can be run with 100-200 employees, which is fewer employees than it takes to run a Bucee’s gas station. In 2025, a look at the permit filings across 17 data center projects showed plans only 1,547 permanent operations employees.

In the meantime, the tech companies who are building these data centers have fired 170,000 of their own employees in the last year alone, claiming that these layoffs are due to AI. For computer science students ready to start their careers in this high-tech culture, the on-ramp to a lucrative career has been blocked off. The unemployment rates for new graduates in computer engineering and computer science are higher than for graduates in art history.

While previous industrial construction projects promised thousands of jobs and economic revitalization, this time the industry that wants more data centers is plaining telling people that more data centers means fewer jobs.

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Techies vs Normies

I consider myself a part of the tech industry. I am excited about AI and what we are going to build. This is a moment of tremendous opportunity. But I have also seen a very dark cloud rolling over our labor market. Most of my friends from Microsoft have been laid off or taken the “early retirement” buyout option. People in the industry that I’ve known for 15 years are writing LinkedIn posts about how excited they are for the future but they have an undertone of despair. It’s bad out there. It’s bad for 20 year tech veterans and for newly-minted junior developers.

While all this is happening, I see fountains of money gushing out of AI startups based in San Francisco and New York City. There is a hyper-optimism in my AI tech circles but the optimism is mostly about how good things are for us, the builders. To the extent that the tech culture believes things will get good for those outside our orbit (the normies), we seem to think that they will benefit from our grand benevolence and they will be lucky to get it. We seem to view people outside our tech sphere not as participants in the future but as recipients of whatever good things we create for them.

I don’t want to pick on Cremieux here but when you click to his post about trying to persuade the data center skeptics, the first thing you see is an AI company sponsor offering $300K for junior software engineers. All the positions are in-person in San Francisco. That is what things look like from inside the tech cultural bubble.

But when I look outside my tech bubble, I don’t see that energy or optimism. Much of tech culture is not open to everyone. It is an elitist culture that looks down on those who don’t share its values. One of the values they have is that you have to physically live in their bubble. You can make $300K as a junior engineer but not if you need to stay in Indiana so your spouse can be available to help your aging parents. You can raise millions for your AI startup but not if you live in the South or Midwest.

Venture capital is pouring billions into these companies. It isn’t because they have the best ideas or the best people. It is because they exist within the right culture, within the right cities. This isn’t a merit-based proposition. It’s a social club.

A tech company will spend $10 billion building a data center outside of a Wisconsin town but they won’t sponsor a little league team. They won’t support the local Girl Scouts. They won’t build a park. They want the land and space and they want to escape the burdensome regulations and insane anti-growth politics of California, but that doesn’t mean they actually like any of the people who live near their data centers. They don’t care if these outsiders find growth and success, they want them to get out of the way. And if paying enough taxes to reduce the overall tax burden of the local bumpkins is what placates them, fine. Whatever gets them to shut the hell up, leave us to our more important business, and accept their rightful place as the underlings of this particular arrangement. They don’t really have any place in our vision of the future.

This is starting to sound like a populist rant but that’s not where it is coming from. I love working in tech. I love the people in tech (most of them). I love what is happening in AI and I’m really excited to build with this new tool and to help others build. We are in the middle of the most exciting tech development of my lifetime (so far!) I want to share that excitement with friends and colleagues and especially with young people who are just graduating and coming into the world of tech. I love being a part of a culture that has this optimistic energy and eagerness to build the future. But I want this to be an open door. I want $300K junior developers in Atlanta and Nashville. If the AI promise is everything it says, then why are the jobs and money increasingly concentrated in a few culturally isolated tech hubs?

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How Do We Fix This? Do We Even Know What We Are Trying To Fix?

Even assuming that I’ve identified this cultural backlash as the real reason that people are opposed to data centers, how would we fix this problem? I’m going to try to avoid the smarmy answer to this, which is “Go back in time and don’t make a decade worth of corporate and cultural mistakes that led to this problem”.

In my view, the core problem is the astonishing arrogance people within the tech culture. Even in debating this issue, the overwhelming response from libertarian and tech adjacent people seems to be dismissal and disdain. There is some outright anger against both people who oppose data centers and the politicians who are responding to this movement. There is a lot of this sentiment that “these idiots don’t know what is good for them” along with a seemingly resilient insistence that data center opposition is just successful Chinese psy-op. The “Chinese psy-op” position is a perfect distillation of this arrogance because it assumes that these people couldn’t possibly be thinking for themselves or using their own judgement, they must just be stupid people who are easily manipulated.

Of course, now I’m being a bit dismissive of my friends within tech culture. Many of them really do want to address the actual concerns that the data center opposition is raising. The problem is that very few of the data center opponents have articulated the cultural resentment I’ve brought forward here. It is reasonable for the pro-data-center people to become exasperated as they repeatedly ask:

And if we want to do a deep dive on introspection, we could argue that I’m being smug and arrogant in this very article towards the very people I say we need to understand because I’m elevating myself as the “normie-whisperer” while portraying myself as acting as “team tech” at the same time. Maybe I’m part of the problem that I’ve just identified.

At the end of the day, I genuinely do want the following things:

1. more data centers to support the most tremendous innovative technology of my lifetime

2. everyone to feel like they are participants in and beneficiaries of this emerging world

You shouldn’t have to live in San Francisco or New York City to feel like you’re a part of this revolution. I want the towns that build these data centers to feel like they are a part of this movement and not like they are a cheap and convenient place for Californians to build the things they need but are unable to build in their state because they have spent decades supporting a completely dysfunctional government that they inexplicably refuse to abandon. I want the tech companies to say “we want to build with you because we want you to be a part of this great thing” and not “we have to build with you because our native state is so screwed up that we can’t possibly build here despite having near-endless land and money”.

Flipping the script, there can’t be any form of compromise if the data center opposition can’t even tell us what changes they would accept in exchange for permission to build. If what they really want is to be treated with respect, they might not get that. Respect might simply not be on the table. If that’s the case, they will end up in a place where they don’t get the respect but they also don’t get the fringe benefits of boosted tax revenues.

From a practical perspective, I don’t see that the anti-data-center team needs to compromise. They have overwhelming support at the moment. If we want more data centers (and I do) the question then shifts to “how do we change this so that people will accept more data centers?” I suspect the answer is something close to “we need to treat these communities with respect and make them feel like a part of our team in this endeavor”.

What I see instead is the tech community doubling down on disdain. This makes me feel crazy because, as a tech person, I place very high value on strategies that work. If my first tactic doesn’t work with my target customer, I can bitterly blame the customer while my company goes out of business or I can change my tactics to something that finds more success.

To their credit, many in the tech community are trying to figure out what will work. To their detriment, most of these strategies assume that their opponents are stupid and that we can just deftly out-maneuver them with money and power and the fact that they are oh so much smarter than those flyover hicks. Which is exactly the attitude that makes negotiations pointless.

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It’s important to note that “this topic” is not the continued dismissal of Emily Wilson, but the broader topic of translation and artistic license in bringing ancient texts to a modern audience.

This conversation also took place after the release of Christopher Nolan’s movie. Noted in our conversation above (and despite Emily Wilson’s criticisms of Nolan’s approach), Nolan’s rendition of the Odyssey finds a common thread with Wilson’s in that both are less concerned with presenting the poem in an original context and more interested in leveraging the poem to tell a story the authors are more interested in presenting.

The fault with Wilson is in presenting her version of The Odyssey as a straight academic presentation rather than conceding that the original text has been altered, not only to fit modern language but to fit a certain progressive academic sensibility. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, as long as it is presented to the audience as such. The problem is really in the framing. There is value in presenting an Odysseus more properly in the frame of ancient Greek sensibilities. It informs our budding artists and writers who can take that story and reframe it to their own narrative purposes.

We got to talk about several re-tellings of The Odyssey including Nolan’s movie, James Joyce’s Ulysses, the Gen-Z indie composition Epic: The Musical (rendered lovingly by fans into a sort-of-movie on YouTube), and the Coen brothers’ hilarious O Brother, Where Art Thou.

All in all, this was a very fun and enlightening conversation and I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I did.

I love it when two topics that I care about collide. In case, the two topics are “woke-era censorship” and “grace and repentance”.

There are a couple questions to ask on this topic. The question being put to Kat was essentially “when should we stop talking about the sins of the peak woke?” The obvious answer (to me) is “never” simply because there are some really valuable lessons about history and human behavior baked into how people and institutions behaved during peak woke.

I am also sidelining the question of whether or not “peak woke” actually ended or if it became more subtle and relegated to certain subcultures such as academia and entertainment. We can argue about that some other time, I’m going to take as a starting point that there was a stage of cancellations and censorship that occurred around 2019-2022 that were particularly egregious and that things haven’t been as bas in the the last few years, especially on the issue of active censorship (in which voices or works of art are being actively removed from public view).

The argument can be made that peak woke hasn’t subsided but has evolved into a low-key insidious force. For the sake of my argument here, I’m going to slide around that debate and simply say “It happened, the worst is over, most people agree it was bad.” Doing this allows us to ask the much more important question of “What should we do (or should have done) about the excesses of peak woke?”

Connor Friedersdorf offers a moderate stance that we can close the book on this topic “when the people who did the damaging thing acknowledge that it was bad and promise never to do it again”. This recognizes that a wrong has been done and that people should feel some form of shame or regret for their role in this thing. If there were to really be some sort of reconciliation or recovery from that era, this would be a necessary step but not a sufficient one.

Words are cheap. People say things they don’t mean all the time as a way of avoiding the hard questions. I call this “whoopsie daisy politics”: when something really awful happens and later everyone acknowledges that there was a grave injustice, but no one is punished. The guilty (and often their ideological allies) just shrug their shoulders and say “oopsies, my bad” but there are no consequences for the guilty and no recompence for the victims.

The implied lesson is “I guess we learned not to do it again.”

I don’t like this path for a lot of reasons, the first being that it doesn’t recognize any of the core personal or institutional failures that allowed “peak woke” to rampage through our culture. There are a hundred smaller, less glaring injustices that clear the brush for the greater cruelties. This “oopsie” strategy that seeks the minimum absolution without admitting that it was a part of a larger movement for which no apologies are coming.

I’m more interested in structural reform. I think we need stronger cultural protections against speech and ideological discrimination among corporations and in academic settings. These protections need to be formalized so that we can point to a law, an university bylaw, or a corporate policy and say “you promised never to do this, we have that as a formal part of your official policy.” I’ve been arguing this for many years (there are a few chapters in my book on this) and have gotten so frustrated with the lack of reform that I’m sympathetic to “burn it down” populism because at least it acknowledges the scale of the problem.

However, I also understand that structural reform must be imposed from the top down. No one in any of these institutions (corporate, political, or academic) wants to change the nature of the power they currently employ. During Covid, I argued that we need much stronger checks on executive emergency power, which would protect conservatives from an overbearing or totalitarian Democratic executive and protect liberals and progressives from an overbearing or totalitarian Republican executive. In the end, neither party wants to restrict executive power because they have thrilling fantasies about what they are going to do the next time they come into that power. They love power more than freedom. I can argue against this until I’m blue in the face, but it’s a losing argument.

In light of this failure to persuade, I don’t want to throw up my hands, shake the dust off my feet, and shout curses into the night sky. I want to suggest another path, one that I would like to see institutions adopt but also that we can adopt on a smaller scale in order to maintain a sanity check within our own schools, churches, and communities.

My proposal is this: elevate and promote the people who said “this is stupid and bad” when it was actually happening. These are the people who can see clearly when the rest of the world has gone mad. If I had my way, these people would be put in charge. The very least we could do is give them a seat at the table and listen to them.

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When I was a young reader, my favorite books were essentially collections of short stories. I read many books with collected stories of heroism, peril, or prison breaks in World War 2. I devoured compilations of Grecian and Egyptian myths . As I got a little older, I enjoyed collections of articles from writers such as Lewis Grizzard, Dave Barry, and PJ O’Rourke. While these authors also wrote full books, I always enjoyed the collections of their essays, which permitted me to skip back and forth to topics that seemed germane to my life or that sparked my interest.

While I loved their collection of past writings, each of the authors above were widely known and established writers when they published their first “book of a bunch of stuff I wrote elsewhere”. It seems presumptuous or me to put out such a collection as my first published work.

On the other hand, the medium-to-long-form essay is the a great way to talk about certain topics and ideas. One of my favorite essays of all time is PJ O’Rourke’s Ghosts of Responsibility, which is a gothic short story masquerading as an autobiographical personal essay about young love. It was published in the October 1980 issue of National Lampoon. I’m grateful it found its way into a compilation of stand-alone essays that O’Rourke published later in life. Without that collection, this tremendous and heartbreaking essay would be largely lost to time. By publishing it in a retrospective, O’Rourke gave that essay a second life to reach new readers.

There are a lot of new readers for this newsletter (welcome!) and if you think there is value in what I’m writing, I encourage you to consider picking up my book.

I published this book in part because I’ve written things over the last 15 years that I think should persist. One of the first essays in the book is In Praise of a Physical World in which I wrote about my despair as a young father watching my children grow up in a world of digital impermanence. I made a plea to steer away from the quick decay of the purely digital and to make things real by making them physical. The blog where I initially published that essay no longer exists.

My book is titled A Misfit Highwire Act and if you’re not hot on Amazon, you can get a DRM-free PDF copy via Gumroad.

The cover of my book is inspired by Philippe Petit’s famous World Trade Center tightrope walk.

The story of Petit’s audacious stunt is stunningly told in the movie The Walk. Petit has a vision of daring and glory that made perfect sense to him but seemed insane to an outsider. He meticulously planned a logistically complex stunt at his own grave risk, knowing that his reward for it may simply be a prison cell. But he was compelled to do it.

It is of course arrogant and self-serving to compare myself to Petit. But we do share an awe in outrageous and esoteric things. Much of my book is chronicling my pursuit of the most outrageous stories that no one knew about. Much of my greatest writing is when I turn a sharp focus to a fascinating idea or story that is flying entirely under the radar.

In my essay Cinefex, in Memoriam I wrote about the tremendous beauty and quiet ambition in the labors of love from visual effects artists over the last 40 years. Similarly, Andy Serkis’ War for the Souls of the Apes tells the largely unknown story of the fight for the dignity of actors and artists in the emerging world of character-driven visual effects.

My writing on dignity includes 8 essays that oscillate between despair at a technocratic world that treats people like cogs and my tenacious love for good work and beautiful things, from writing to illustrations to technical achievements to timber framed houses. Anything that uplifts people and feeds our wonder and connection with each other is something that inspires in me unending marvel. I have to write about such things.

My subtitle is “essays on everything” because the topics are all over the board. I include essays on data, visualizations, politics, and AI, for which I’m better known than any of those other topics. Many of those essays lean into both the “misfit” and “highwire” implications of the title.

I’m a technologist who often comes across as a luddite. I’m a moderate to flies off the handle. I promote the emerging world of artificial intelligence while questioning what value it brings and if that is worth the losses that will be endured. There is risk in holding the line on beauty, dignity, or truth. Holding the line anywhere will set you as an outsider in a world where the greatest value is aligning with “your team” in whatever has happened in the last 48 hours. There is some value to the misfit, but there never a place for him to belong.

The most potent theme running through this book is about aligning the world toward the preservation of the past and the active participation in building a future worth having. I’m a warrior against entropy, which is a silly fight to pick because this is the side that will lose. But if we align ourselves properly, we can keep the important things alive a little bit longer.

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I don’t know enough about ancient Greek to feel like I can make any judgements about a translation, either in favor or against. I felt like a bystander to this debate. So I reached out to someone who knows more than I do.

Jireh Gardo has worked with Marginally Compelling as an editor and worked with me on my book A Misfit Highwire Act, available at Amazon and at many fine dumpster fires nationwide. She is also a scholar of Ancient Greek and, as we were working on my book, I asked her if she could speak to the controversy over Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey.

My view of the controversy had been this: conservatives were mad about Wilson’s translation. The complaints, however, are scattered. There are arguments against Wilson for tone, for her progressive comments, there were complaints about word choices, specifically the first line of Wilson’s translation, which is

Tell me about a complicated man.

This line holds a certain moral ambiguity about Odysseus that is not present in most of the other translations. I feel that, if this ambiguity is present in the original text, this is a fair translation. The problem is that I am in no position to speak to this one way or the other. I know nothing about Ancient Greek and cannot form an opinion about something that I cannot personally assess.

In such a conundrum I prefer to lean on experts. But it was extremely difficult to find experts whom I thought I could trust as I studied this question. Everything I read came from people I don’t know and (because I don’t know them) don’t trust and I worried that I would be the ignorant consumer of so much partisan culture war nonsense.

So I asked Jireh if she could give me her thoughts because she knows Ancient Greek and I trust her. So she did.

If you want the full force of it all, listen to (or watch) the podcast. But for those of you who are readers, not listeners, here is the gist of it:

Emily Wilson’s Odyssey is being used as an “academic” translation, which means it is intended to be read in classrooms. It is, first and foremost, a bad translation. It misrepresents the core text, adds things that aren’t in the text, removes things that are in the text, and makes basic translation errors such as incorrectly translating “five hundred” as “fifty” and adding characters to the poem who do not exist in the text.

This is drawing from Dr. Richard Whitaker’s paper on Wilson’s translation, which is more footnotes than it is text due to the voluminous translation mistakes Wilson commits and that Dr. Whitaker takes pains to document. Whitaker notes that there are voluminous misrepresentations, but properly focuses on the parts in the text that are flatly mistranslated.

It is strange to gawk at the plain awfulness of this translation while it is praised in higher cultural spaces and is being used to supplant more accurate translations in an academic setting. But even the promoters of Wilson’s translation don’t shy away from her goal:

Wilson’s project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup — the Christianizing (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms — to reveal something fresh and clean.

I want to make it as plain as possible: I would be in support of such a project if it helped me understand the source text better. If other translations were truly covering the true Odyssey in a blanket of Christianized nostalgia, I would want to read the version that helps me understand the mindset of Homer and the ancient Greeks better.

But Wilson’s project doesn’t seem to do that. From my conversations with the experts, it is a poor translation in service of an agenda meant to subvert the original text.

Because Jireh is an academic, she has done an enormous amount of research on this translation. Below are her supporting notes.

Quotes from Wilson’s Introduction to The Odyssey

“Loving your wife is anachronistic”

Presumably, Odysseus is inspired by a deep loyalty to his wife, son, father, and the place of his birth, and moved by a deep and constant love for those he left behind. But we must avoid projecting the anachronistic ideas of chivalric romance onto Odysseus, who is not a medieval knight performing valiant deeds for the sake of a beautiful lady. [...] If Odysseus had stayed with Calypso [...] [h]e would have lost forever the possibility of being king of Ithaca, owner of the richest and most dominant household on his island--an estate wealthy with pigs, sheep, goats, fruit, grain, wine, and slaves, with an old father, a young son, and a desirable, much-courted and valuable wife all devoted to him, and all increasing his value in the eyes of his neighbors (p. 60)

Wilson’s negative beliefs about Odysseus

The Odyssey “to some extent glorifies its protagonist and valorizes his claims to dominance [...] this liar, pirate, colonizer, and thief, who is so often in disguise, absent, or napping while other people—those he owns, those he leads—suffer and die, and who directly kills so many people.” (p. 66)

Odysseus is “an adulterer, [...] a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, [...] a mass murderer, and a war hero.” (p. 79)

Odysseus is a “lying, self-interested sacker of cities.” (p. 31)

Gardo: I think obviously Odysseus is supposed to be sympathetic to the reader, and that this is what Homer intends. It is true he’s not a modern hero, but he is a hero in the ancient sense, which I think does imply more than just being a warrior (see p. 20 of Wilson’s introduction: “[b]eing a hero […] in archaic Greek suggests a warrior, and does not imply virtue”).

On the presentation of pan-slaveism

The need to acknowledge the fact and the horror of slavery, and to mark the fact that the idealized society depicted in the poem is one where slavery is shockingly taken for granted, seems to me to outweigh the need to specify, in every instance, the type of slave. The analogy with a slave-owning plantation in the antebellum American South is certainly not exact, but it is at least a little closer than the alternative analogies—of a Victorian stately home or a modern nightclub. (p. 89)

Wilson’s saying “complicated” is a neutral adjective (link)

“[S]ome readers seem to think it’s negative. I’m fairly baffled by that. There’s nothing wrong with being complicated! We all are! I am, for sure, and I don’t see it as a bad thing. [...] To me, “complicated” doesn’t suggest either “good guy” or “bad guy”: it’s a promise that this poem doesn’t stoop to those implausible simplifications.”

Wilson missing the point of the Iliad

If the Iliad teaches us anything, it’s [that] getting het up when somebody insults you, that doesn’t have good consequences for anyone. If Achilles had just said, ‘Okay! Agamemnon insulted me! I’m cool! Moving on…’ we wouldn’t have an epic poem with that many massacres.

On Blaming Odysseus For the Deaths of His Crewmates

(analysis written by Jireh Gardo)

On page 70 of her introduction, Wilson writes that “the first lines of the poem invite us to see these deaths in terms of the dead men’s own folly or childish naivete, because they chose to eat the cattle of the sun.” However, “invite” is a mild way to describe what the Greek really contains. If you look at the first ten lines, the Greek has (at least) four different syntactical elements that place the blame on the companions of Odysseus.

The lines are,

αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,

νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο

ἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.

Firstly, we have the words “αὐτῶν” and “σφετέρῃσιν,” which are both personal pronouns that refer to the companions—“αὐτῶν” is “of them” and “σφέτερος” is “their.” Then there are the words “ἀτασθαλία,” which means “presumptuous sin, recklessness, or wickedness,” and “νήπιοι,” which many translators render as “blind fools.” It’s related to the Latin word “infant,” from “infans,” which means unable to speak.

So the lines say something like, “through their (and definitely their) presumptive foolish wickedness, (those blind/stupid fools) they ate the cattle of Hyperion, the sun God.”

First, for comparison, here is A.T. Murray’s translation:

“[He sought] to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he did not save his comrades, for all his desire, for through their own blind folly they perished—fools, who devoured the cattle of Helios Hyperion.”

Wilson’s translation:

He [Odysseus] worked to save his life and go back home. He failed, and for their own mistakes, they died. They ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home.

She omits the double emphasis on the personal pronouns that refer to the companions, ignores the word which means “blind fools,” and translates ἀτασθαλία as “mistakes” which is a pretty positive way to spin “presumptuous sin and wickedness.” And finally, she adds the word “failed,” which is not present in the Greek.

It’s one thing to be like, “Some parts of the text say Odysseus’ companions should be blamed for their own demise—but hey, there are other passages that contradict this, so maybe there’s a cognitive dissonance there that the author is presenting that the reader is supposed to sit with.” It’s another thing to create that dissonance yourself.

Some Wilson defenders have claimed that because translation involves interpretive choices, the interpretive work that Wilson does is somehow inevitable. Of course a translator is always going to have to make trade-offs and every decision will have some subjective element to it. However, there’s a difference between saying, “oh, every translation has an interpretation, so let me lean into what I personally think about this story,” versus “every translation will have an interpretation, but I’m going to do my best to understand and communicate the original intent of the author.”

Oh, I almost forgot, he got a Nazi tattoo on his chest.

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All this is extremely funny and I highly recommend you follow this train-wreck of a campaign all the way until he gets elected into the Senate over the most moderate Senate Republican of the last 20 years because the party fundamentals are atrocious.

But we’re not here to talk about Platner’s history or campaign. I want to focus on the how Democratic opinion-makers are responding to Platner. The clear proof of these revelations have driven them to do some real soul searching by asking the question so many of us have had to grapple with every day: “Does getting this Nazi tattoo make me a Nazi?”

There are many things that can make you a Nazi. Those things include

• flashing the OK sign

• throwing up your hand at a campaign event (like Corey Booker)

• wearing a trenchcoat

These are all pretty egregious signs of being a Nazi, but is it really fair to add “getting a Nazi tattoo” to this list?

As it turns out, the very smartest among the Democrat pundit class are here to let us know that the answer is “No, a Nazi tattoo isn’t really very meaningful as long as you are, at your heart of hearts, a good person.” How can we tell you’re a good person? The easiest way is to run for Senate as a Democrat.

Matthew Yglesias said that “the tattoo situation reflects somewhat poorly on him in a non-specific way” but that Platner “gets a pass on being a Nazi because progressives think he’s progressive (ie not a Nazi)”.

Jon Favreau (Obama speechwriter and host of Pod Save America) attacked critics of Platner, claiming that they were being intellectually dishonest and sneered at their criticisms of this tiny little oopsie in judgement made by a goofy guy in his 20’s.

The brazen defense of this clearly disqualifying feature has been the subject of no small mockery. But I’ve had my fun here, so let’s set the mocking tone aside for a moment and get to the foundation of what is going on in this sudden disregard for the importance of symbols and the promotion of the SS-Totenkopf.

The basis of rational debate and the reason we value objective judgement calls is because it starts with gathering evidence of the reality before us and allowing the facts and the circumstances to tip the scales in our minds. The hope is that, by moving from what is (the facts) to what ought to be (the ideal) we can come to an agreement that one action is laudable, another action is permissible, a third action is excusable, and some actions are unforgivable.

All actions are subject to a context and happen within a time and place but we have to draw the lines somewhere. It is considered good moral and rational practice to hold your own team to the same standards of behavior (or maybe even higher standards) that you would demand from the other team.

“Nazi tattoo” is so far over the line that no one on the left would even begin to tolerate such a vice from a Republican Senate candidate or from a right-leaning moderate or from some random kid who was trying to get into an Ivy League school. That is the kind of action that effectively results in social exile or, at the very least, a hard stop to a career in elected public service.

And yet we have the king-makers of the Democratic party digging in their heels that the Nazi tattoo is a nothingburger. It is particularly funny to watch Yglesias tie himself into these intellectual knots and rhetorically sneer at anyone who might suggest that a Nazi tattoo is a disqualifying feature for a Senate candidate. If he had any self-respect, Yglesias would simply say “you know what, that guy is a lost cause. I just can’t diminish myself to the point of saying that a Nazi tattoo is no big deal.”

To complain about the self-abasement of these opinion-makers and pundits is to misunderstand what has happened to partisan discourse over the last decade. There is no forward reasoning anymore. They do not start from the facts at hand and drive earnestly and in open debate toward a moral conclusion.

What we see here is Jon Favreau, Matthew Yglesias, and most Democrats perform a reasoning chain that starts at the end. In the end, they need Platner to win this race. In order for him to win this race, he must be seen as a good guy, a progressive guy, a better person than his opponent. The conclusion is the starting point and they will employ any reasoning chain that gets them from “he has a Nazi tattoo” to “he’s a good guy”.

Do they believe what they are saying? That’s the wrong question. They don’t believe anything that they say. Belief does not drive their rhetorical strategies. They need an outcome (Senator Graham Platner) and so they are saying words that they think will increase the probability of that outcome. Any words will do, but the strategy that makes the most sense to them is to say that symbols do not matter, the past is meaningless, and that we already know he’s a good guy (because, duh, he’s a Democrat) and that’s really all anyone cares about.

They aren’t lying to themselves because they don’t believe there are such things as truth and lies. There are only strategies to deliver the desired results.

Sure, we can make fun of them. We should make fun of them not just because they are outing themselves as ridiculous people but because it is funny and laughter is good for the soul.

The thing we should hold close is that the reason they have fallen into this particular trap of intellectually beclowning themselves is because this backward logical curveball is how they intellectually approach most things. Most of their reasoning starts at the desired outcome and works backwards, omitting facts they don’t like, leaning into implausible rationales, intellectualizing what they think will be effective, and dismissing plain facts that aren’t helpful.

You could say “they have always done this” and perhaps that is so. But we should hope that there would be a situation so outlandish, so egregious, so ridiculous that they are forced to take a step back and say “well, I can’t go all in on this one. It’s just a step too far.”

This week we learned that, wherever a “step too far” is, it’s somewhere past defending a Nazi tattoo.

This book is a collection of my (non-Covid) writing over the last 15 years, including pieces published about a dozen different newsletters, blogs, platforms, and magazines. In the book are essays that cover …

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Sometimes this work is done quickly. Someone will show a chart, point to the source data, and I’ll grab the data and it turns out that the the chart is just a simple graphical representation of the source data. For people who care about the truth, this is the ideal scenario but it is also boring. I want some really outrageous narrative driven by a chart but it’s hard to figure out where the data came from. That’s where the real fun is.

I got that this weekend in this chart, which came to my attention through Jeremiah Johnson. The chart tells the story of a vindictive, cartoonishly evil president who is making the victims of disasters suffer because they live in the wrong state.

This chart comes from a Politico article with the title “It’s 3 times harder for blue states to get disaster funding under Trump”. The key data point in this article is in the chart above.

The president has approved just 23 percent of blue state requests for disaster aid, compared to 89 percent for red states.

Charts like this very rarely come from nowhere. Most journalists at least still have enough integrity to not completely make up data. The nature of this particular accusation is extraordinary and extreme. Denying emergency relief to American citizens based on their politics would be an act of wanton cruelty. But that severity cuts both ways. To falsely accuse the Trump administration of such an act would be a cynical and cruel thing to do. If someone were to cherry-pick data or manipulate their data sets in order to cause their fellow citizens to believe a falsehood this severe would be the act of a sociopath.

So I went to go find out is this is really what the data said. In the process, I’ll go through how the data was manipulated in order to get to the chart above.

Finding the core data was pretty easy. FEMA hosts a comprehensive set of data on the OpenFEMA website. The two data sets that we care about are Declaration Denials and FEMA Web Disaster Declarations.

Let’s compare Trump’s second term to Joe Biden’s term in office. I’m doing this because that is a comparison already being made in the chart above but also because that trims our data set down so we can talk about it in a little more detail.

We’ll start with some raw stats from this data. During Joe Biden’s term, FEMA denied 56 aid requests and approved 512, a 9.9% rejection rate. So far during Trump’s second term, FEMA has denied 24 aid requests and approved 141, a 14.5% rejection rate.

If we’re trying to tell a “Red v Blue” partisan story, it’s going to matter a lot how we define Red and Blue. It’s pretty typical to use the presidential election results as a proxy for redness and blueness. But, then again, the chart says “Democrat-led” so maybe we should use the party of the state governor as our indicator.

Politico rejected both those definitions and decided that “[party]-led” means that a state has a governor and two senators from the same party.

This definition should raise eyebrows because it immediately kicks 10 states out of our data set (11 if we count Virginia when they had a Republican governor last year). North Carolina and Kentucky both have Democratic governors and Republican Senators and were both subject to recent natural disasters but they will not show up on this chart at all. It also means that, if the narrative of this chart is true, Trump is punishing two states that voted for him (Arizona and Michigan) because they are “Democrat-led”. That seems like an odd thing to do.

I want to show how this framing changes our results. Let’s look at Biden-era FEMA denial rate by party, but change our definition for “red” and “blue” to reflect the election results (which states voted for Biden in 2020), the party of the governor, and using the Politico “governor plus both senators” metric.

If we wanted to tell a story of a vindictive Biden administration that was punishing red states, we would use the “party of the governor” metric. This makes it look like the FEMA denials are almost three times higher for “red” states than for “blue” states.

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The biggest claims are coming from AI companies themselves. Anthropic (the company that built Claude) has been making a lot of attention-getting headlines recently. One is that they had 16 Claude agents build a C compiler capable of building Linux 6.9 and this task cost $20,000 of compute.

This is a fun marketing trick. A compiler is a pretty complex piece of software but there are also a lot of them out there. Building a compiler is an undergraduate computer science project which means that 1) there are a lot of examples to draw from 2) it is an extremely well documented task. But it’s very unlikely that your business needs a new C compiler. This is an AI triumph designed not to bring a new and good thing into the world but simply to sound impressive.

The more interesting business story is from this Anthropic engineer who claims he gave Claude a technical specification and then let it do development autonomously, resulting in a production-ready product.

This is more in line with the kind of work that most software engineers do and, if this is something that an AI coding agent can reliably accomplish, it has really big implications for the future of software work.

When I worked for Very Large Tech Company, I did a lot conference talks and tech demos aimed at our existing community of developers. The goal was always “let me show you something new and exciting and then let me show you how to build it for yourself.” That last part was always crucial. No demo is valuable if our developers can’t predictably and reliably replicate it for themselves.

I look at the promotional promises that AI is making and I’m also watching my friends and collogues work in this space and there seems to be a significant gap between the promise and the practice. This experience is closer to what I’ve seen from developers earnestly engaging this technology

Ok, I think my experiment leaving AI working on stuff 24/7 ends here. It doesn’t work. Code explodes in complexity, results are not that great, the AI can’t get past hard walls… and is insanely expensive (spent ~1k over the last 2 days).

I think the dream of having AI’s working on the background and making real progress on things that matter (i.e., truly new things) isn’t here yet. It is still a machine hard-stuck on its own training data, incapable of thinking out of the box. It is great for building things that were already built. But not new things

Also coding normally has the under-appreciated advantage that you’re doing two things at the same time: building a codebase *and* learning it. AI’s do only half of that. The other half is obviously impossible.

I actually disagree on the “obviously impossible” part, but I think the way in which AI might learn from a codebase that it is building is different from the way a human learns from building a codebase.

When I start talking about how the promise of autonomous AI development doesn’t seem to be matching the rhetoric, I see one of two reactions. The first is “just wait, it’s coming”. This is kind of true. AI capabilities in the field of software have improved dramatically over the last year. But the category of problems that it has now are pretty similar to the problems it had a year ago.

The other reaction is “oh, well you’re just not doing it right”. I deeply dislike this response because it’s what I call the “weight loss supplement pitch”. It’s a strategy where I promise you a miracle solution but, when that solution doesn’t work for you, I blame you for not doing a hundred other things you need to do to get the miracle. It’s a sales tactic I really despise because it screws with the “expectation-to-implementation” process. If you tell me “in my demo, AI did XYZ”, I want to use the AI to do XYZ. If I can’t get it to do that, I’m going to look at your original statement as more of a sales tactic. Developers don’t like sales tactics. My experience with practical developers is that they are ok if you tell them that a process is complicated and has 23 detailed steps before you see productivity gains out of it. They’re fine with that story as long as you give it to them straight.

The View From The Trenches

From inside the world of software, the view is not what Anthropic is promoting in terms of fully autonomous feature creation. But AI agents as a core development tool are a very real thing. They are really writing functional code and speeding the development process.

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Note: This topic is desperately important so this article has no paywall. But in the next few weeks, I’ll be releasing my first book, “A Misfit Highwire Act” and annual paid subscribers will get a free copy. So if you’ve been thinking about signing up (or converting from monthly to annual), now you can get a free book out of it.

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I broke down and bought a Mac Mini. There was this new technology, unlike anything I had ever seen. But to build in this new way required that I purchase a Mac Mini (the cheapest option for this sort of development). This was 2008 and Apple had announced that they would allow regular old developers to build programs for the iPhone, which was less than a year old at the time. But you had to build these programs (which they called “apps”) using their development tools and hardware.

Looking back on this, it was an extremely strange time. The iPhone had a novel collection of inputs and sensors that our apps could access, but Apple’s technical documentation was a mess. Getting into the app development program meant promising not to divulge certain kinds of information, which frightened the development community to such an extent that they were afraid to help each other figure out this poorly documented platform. It seemed like a terrible, miserable way to build software.

But in this time I learned that many software developers will crawl over broken glass to be the first. They would beat their heads against a wall to build something new and novel. And they were determined not to be left behind in this new and exciting emerging market.

I guess history rhymes.

I recently bought a Mac Mini, this time to explore another fast-paced poorly documented emerging technology. The technology was called ClawdBot when I started, then it was MoltBot for a while, now it’s OpenClaw. I’ll talk about my own experience with it in my next newsletter, but here I want to take a step back and observe how this technology has kicked off a hype cycle that is bigger than anything I saw during my time in mobile development.

Let’s start with “How can I explain OpenClaw simply?” The idea behind OpenClaw is that it is a sort of utility kit for using an AI Large Language Model (LLM). Interacting with ChatGPT or Claude on the web or through a desktop application means that you can ask it questions, give it files, but it can’t really do that many things outside of those interactions.

When a user installs OpenClaw and integrates their favorite model into it, the user has an “AI agent” that lives on their machine and can run requests or prompts on a timer, read and write files, search the web, and issue commands directly to the host machine. The OpenClaw ecosystem has extensibility options so that users can give it access to their email, calendars, Discord, Slack, TikTok… the list is nearly endless.

Importantly, OpenClaw integrates with messaging apps so that the user can ask it to do things through Telegram or Signal. A user could be at a restaurant and open up their phone and ask their OpenClaw agent to build a website while they finish their dinner. By the time they get home, there’s the new website they asked for.

When it works, it feels like magic.

The easiest way to get an OpenClaw agent is to set it up on a fresh, clean device. For a variety of reasons, it’s easier to get it set up on a Mac than on a PC. The cheapest Mac you can buy is a Mac Mini. If you see news about people rushing out to buy Mac Minis, this is why.

OpenClaw has been “out in the wild” for about one month and it’s hard to describe the whirlwind inside my tech circles during that month. It is not an exaggeration to say that I have never seen a hype cycle like this one.

Everyone is in a break-neck race to capitalize on this. There are hundreds of articles and videos on how to get your own OpenClaw instance running. Over-eager technologists installed it and started downloading skills to augment their AI agent with reckless abandon, emphasis on “reckless”. A week into the explosion of ClawdBot (as it was known at the time), the most downloaded skill was one developed by a white-hat hacker specifically to demonstrate how easy it was to get people to open their machines to devastating security vulnerabilities.

He was not subtle about this. Here’s the screen the user would see if they executed the skill:

He stopped the experiment early because it was far more successful than he thought it would be.

An even more entertaining result came this week when the head of “Safety and Alignment at Meta Superintelligence” installed OpenClaw, gave it access to her email, and it began “cleaning” her email by deleting everything. It ignored her when she told it to stop. Afterwards, it sort of apologized for violating her explicit instructions.

It is a little un-nerving when the person whose job is “make sure the AI doesn’t do bad things” is so helpless to stop her own personal AI agent from doing bad things that she has to literally pull the plug on the physical hardware to get the AI to stop.

Information Overload on a Trust Deficit

The problems of ClawdBot / OpenClaw aren’t limited to security concerns or even limited to the software itself. The last few weeks have been flooded with information, guides, claims, boasts, and predictions. I’m trying to keep up with it all and it’s simply impossible.

People in my field are predicting the end of work (or maybe just the end of your job). One technologist is relentlessly touting his “zero human company” in which his Grok-based CEO is directing a swarm of Claude AI agents for everything from product discovery to development to testing and marketing. An old friend and colleague recently posted about how “Code must not be written by humans. Code must not be reviewed by humans.”

Something about this stinks to high heaven.

The excitement over OpenClaw has brought out the scammers, influencers, and marketers like nothing I’ve ever seen. They all have recommendations, predictions, and promotions. Sometimes they are trying to sell a platform, pattern, or company. Sometimes they are just trying to sell themselves in a mad scramble to try to get to the top and become a “trusted expert” in this emerging technology. I presume that the plan is to leverage this into a new career or consulting gig or motivational speaking invitation but it could just be good old fashioned attention seeking behavior.

Every single day feels like another avalanche of claims and promises about the future of software, the future of code, the future of everyone. I can barely keep my head above water trying to internalize it all.

While the hype cycle is out of control for people in the business of writing software, that frothing sea of anticipation and anxiety is escaping the confines of our industry.

A few weeks ago, there was a monstrously popular article titled “Something Big is Happening” about how AI is only going to keep accelerating, taking over huge swaths of the knowledge economy. But it was written by a guy who has a history of duplicity promoting himself on the wave of AI news and a more sober-minded AI researcher called it “a masterpiece of hype”.

Then last Sunday, Cintrini Research, a financial group I had never heard of that seems to exist primarily on Substack, published what can only be described as a piece of speculative fiction pretending to be a news flash from 2028 in which people are vibe-coding DoorDash replacements in a matter of weeks, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies enter a downward spiral, unemployment skyrockets, and the entire economy is thrown into a paradigm for which it is barely prepared.

Back in the real world, IBM stock dropped 10% the day after this article was published, a loss of nearly $30 billion in stockholder value.

Across the software industry, the selloff was so severe that, two days later, Citadel Securities, a $20 billion investment firm, offered a point-by-point rebuttal, noting that none of the claims in the Cintrini piece seem to be backed up with any kind of market evidence. The next day, IBM stock recovered 4%.

In such a whirlwind of information, how do we sift out the valuable information from the scams? In short, how do we know who we can trust to give us clear, useful, honest, helpful information?

I believe that what is happening right now in AI and software is ground-breaking and industry changing, but the changes it will bring in aren’t the kind of changes that move markets to panic or make headlines or turn into viral articles.

Instead I look to the people I’ve known and trusted in my own industry and I find that the people I’ve long trusted are not the people making or spreading news. They’re not plugged into the hype cycle but watching from the edges. People like are doing the kind of work that is at the center of this information overload but he is not freaking out. Jon is doing what he’s done for decades; he is building.

is not losing his mind over the coding capabilities of the newest AI platform. He is testing it out. He used a popular AI development utility / platform to solve a well defined, contained business problem that would have been extremely hard to solve without AI. If you are tech-minded (or business minded), his post is very much worth your time. He explains in enormous detail exactly how he went from “business problem” to “coded solution”.

Real people are the solution to hype. Trusted sources are the way through this morass of informational chaos. The future of information is not through an AI that doesn’t understand hype, lies, and motivated reasoning. It’s through people that you know will tell you the unsexy truth, who do the hard work, who will excitedly sell you on the upsides but won’t bullshit you about the downsides.

Almost to a person, the people I admire and trust are testing the technology. They are working in it, exploring the possibilities and limitations, and trying to figure out what it means to leverage all the available tools in an emerging technological landscape.

This is not a sexy answer. Doing the work, understanding the context, and thinking hard about the practical applications of what this means is not sexy. At the end of the day, the AI news cycle is just like most recent news cycles. If you want to know who to trust, the very un-sexy answer is that you trust the people who have weathered a panic before and shown themselves to be sober-minded, reasoned, and careful. Most journalists do not understand it or even have enough understanding of the underlying technology to know who to talk to in order to understand it.

It would be silly to say I already know all the important people in this space but I know enough of them that I get suspicious when some viral claim comes to me without endorsement from people within my trusted network. The excitement has to filter through them before I can start believing it.

I have my own opinions about all this (especially the “down to brass tacks” practical implications of AI in the world of software development) but this piece is already getting long. I’m going to have to write a second piece detailing my own experience working with AI as a software guy and what I think it means for the future of software and for the future of everyone.

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When my dad died, I wrote about it as it was happening. It was a surreal experience and I know it made some people uncomfortable but it also helped others see the raw grief, the helplessness of it all, the weird bureaucratic nuts and bolts of death. There is something in that experience that changes us. It changed me.

Someone I know recently wrote about her mother’s death. What I saw in her grief was a mirror of my own experience, one of the most terrible episodes of any life. As awful as these experiences were, they were also profoundly good. Death is an evil but it is an evil we all must face and we should face it with courage, dignity, and love.

I looked at my journey through my fathers death and I read the story of her journey through her mother’s death and I thought about how glad I am that both these deaths happened outside the window of 2020-2022. I thought about how much the Covid response damaged individuals and families beyond even the pain of death.

The Covid virus killed a little over a million people in the United States. The virus attacked their lungs and heart but it did not force them to die alone. Our medical and public health institutions did that. The Covid virus didn’t isolate children from their parents. It didn’t abandon centuries of religious comfort in the face of death. The virus didn’t wrap plastic gloves filled with warm water around the hands of the dying in order to make them feel like a human was there to comfort them when they were utterly alone.

I know Covid is over. I know no one wants to talk about it any more. I know that some people don’t want to talk about it because the things they said, the policies they supported, and the actions they performed during that time is something they have difficulty looking straight in the face.

After I finished reading another heart-rending story of a family gathered around a wife and mother and literally holding on to her until the very last moment, I had to take a few moments to quietly mourn for the lost.

Then I thought about all the stories that were lost because hospitals insisted on isolating families from their dying loved ones. In his intense and emotional piece on wanting to become a father, Colin Wright noted that, when his father suffered convulsions during the pandemic, his family was barred from joining him in the ambulance and hospital. Thankfully, his father survived, but they didn’t know that at the time. They could have been unknowingly saying goodbye to the slam of an ambulance door only to collect updates over the phone for the next few weeks.

For many people, this was their experience. Cut off from their loved ones in those precious last days, they simply don’t know what the end was like for their fathers and sisters. Those experiences were devoured by silence. Families said goodbye through an iPad instead of at a bedside.

This was a tremendous evil. It was an evil happening quietly because no one was there to write the stories. The people who needed to be at a bedside were shut out of the room and the suffering of their loved ones went unnoticed and unrecorded in the dark.

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In the last few years, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how we approach dependence. There is an undercurrent of cultural disdain for people who are dependent on others. People who genuinely need help hesitate to reach out because they would rather suffer than be seen as needing the help of another person. But we all need help from time to time. We were all babies who were utterly dependent on a mother or caregiver. We will all die and many of us will be dependent on other people in our final days. None of this makes us lesser.

I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too. Leah is on twitter (X) and is worth a follow.

When you know how to look for it, this behavior is everywhere. It was more prevalent during Covid because everyone was so certain that they had science on their side. People made endless prediction about the path of the pandemic based on assumptions or models or “common sense” but weeks would pass and reality would stubbornly refuse to fit into the tidy narratives.

I was reminded of this today when New York Times reporter Ben Mullin wrote about how, despite the fact that Congress slashed a half billion in funding for public media, few of the stations have shut down. This is in contradiction to the predictions of “experts”.

First of all, I say “bravo” to Mullin for daring to write a piece that exposes the errors of this particular narrative. I’m used to people simply ignoring the errors of the past and pretending like they were simply correct all along. Rarely do people return to their inaccurate predictions and say “huh. Guess I missed on that one.” It is even rarer for people to wonder why they got it wrong and re-evaluate their position so that they can be less wrong in the future.

I will temper that praise by noting that Mullin does not name and shame the “experts” who got this prediction so wrong. He notes that “according to one estimate, 78 public radio stations and 37 TV stations were at risk of going dark” but doesn’t inform readers that this estimate was made by the Public Media Company based on data from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor does he point readers to the fact that he uncritically reported this data months ago, going so far as to generate infographics for it as if the job of the New York Times was to launder and enhance press releases from obviously biased parties.

The difficulty with arguing against these kinds of projections in the moment is that no one knows the future. It seems to make sense in a cause-and-effect world that revoking funding for public media would result in the collapse of stations that drew from that funding. But the world is not a static place and money is fungible and the result of the dissolution of that funding did not result in the dire scenario that the “experts” predicted.

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I decided to compile a list of books I’ve read this year (or that have struck me recently). There isn’t really any rhyme or reason to it, though I’ve been meaning to interview a few authors on this list and need to kick myself to get those interviews scheduled and done. I’ve also included links to Amazon for all these books, which get me a little kickback but you can probably get most of them cheaper on AbeBooks.

Favorite Non-Fiction Novel - The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

The Maniac is a whirlwind of a book that mostly follows the life of polymath John Von Neumann. It presents Von Neumann through the eyes of those around him and, through those eyes, he is brilliant, energetic, incomprehensible, and even frightening as he builds bombs and computers, develops game theory, and proposes self-reproducing machine automation. The latter part of the book leaps from Von Neumann’s accomplishments and applies them to modern AI in an absolutely riveting account of the first AI to beat the human Go Master. This book is more novel than non-fiction but it is riveting.

Favorite Audiobook - The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, read by Joe Morton

The Invisible Man had escaped my attention in high school and college but I picked it up on Audible. This was a good choice. The book is narrated by Joe Morton (who played technologist Miles Dyson in Terminator 2) and it is a powerful piece of work. Morton brings a certain relentless frustration, drive, and outrage to this book about the black experience in early 20th century America.

I did not realize how much this book is about power and cynicism of all men. Invisible Man is unsparing in its portrayal of men, black and white alike, who leverage race, poverty, and guilt to their own ends. It is alternatively beautiful, heartbreaking, and infuriating and Joe Morton reads it all in an unforgettable performance.

Favorite Comic Novel - Human Capital by Moro Rogers

This book is really tremendous and extremely timely. Human Capital is about a near-future in which all human needs are filled in a universal basic income sort of way and the result is an underclass of people who, though their needs are met, struggle to find meaning and purpose while an elite class soars above them at unimaginable decadence. It’s a book exploring the outworking of a fully automated world, the creative impulse, the drive for inspiration and success, and what happens to a social hierarchy when the regular signals of value, connection, and community are short circuited.

I’m not going to lie, this book is manic. It has a strain of techno-magical realism to it that stretches it beyond a stable narrative frame. It is a wild ride and I sometimes got lost in it. But it’s captivating and it is trying to playfully engage what might happen to us in a world where we have all we need and nothing we want. I loved it. I’m going to read it again on my Christmas vacation.

Favorite Philosophy Book (About People) - The Dignity of Dependence by Leah Libresco Sargeant

I did not know this was going to be a philosophy book. I’ve followed Leah Libresco for about a decade and knew her from twitter as a thinker, mother, writer, and Catholic. I expected her book to reflect her writing on twitter and her op-ed writing, but it goes far deeper than that.

Leah presents us with an ontological case for the dignity of dependence that stems from the reality of human bodies. Her primary concern is about how female bodies are naturally more dependent (physically, socially, relationally) and are vessels of dependence through the natural states of pregnancy and motherhood. She observes how much our society recoils from open signs of dependence, encouraging people (mostly women) to hide the indicators that their bodies throw out signals of dependence throughout their lives and especially around their capacity as bearers of children.

I did not expect something this rich. I didn’t expect these extended ruminations of the self and the other and the nature of this co-mingling of the dependents and those who care for them. This is a deeply thoughtful, deeply human book that insists that we ask some hard questions about how we see ourselves and others as relational and inter-dependent creatures in a culture that idolizes individuality and independence.

Favorite Philosophy Book (About Animals) - The Unheeded Cry by Bernard Rollin

I did not know this was going to be a philosophy book. I discovered Bernard Rollin because I’m close friends with one of his students who works in a field of what I’m going to call “industrial animal welfare”. Rollin was a philosopher who focused on the ethics of animal pain, specifically in a farm and veterinary setting. The full title of this book is “The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain and Scientific Change” and it is his philosophical case for the moral consideration of animal consciousness and pain and what our responsibilities might be toward that, especially in the context of industrial farming.

If this sounds too hippy-dippy, you really should read this book. Rollin is refreshingly practical. His view of animal pain isn’t that we all need to become vegans but that we need to incorporate an understanding of the importance of the animal experience into the process of how we utilize them. He isn’t anti-meat, he just wants us to recognize the very practical reality that meat comes from a thing that is conscious and can feel pain and we should treat that reality with respect and not pretend it is a non-issue.

The Unheeded Cry a deeply practical, deeply humane book. I really enjoyed the almost sarcastic dismissal that Rollin had for people who refuse to accept that normies think their abstract theories of animal welfare (like giving animals voting rights) are stupid. Rollin wants proponents for animal welfare to strive to put their efforts into promoting ideas that resonate with the practical and moral core of their fellow citizens and not promote ideas that make them sound like crazy people who should be quickly dismissed.

To this end, his case for animal consciousness and a consideration of animal pain is profoundly plain and clear. It shies away from philosophical abstractions which philosophers often use to hide their nonsense and makes the case in a language and reasoning that appeals to our very human moral sensibilities and empathies.

Favorite Philosophy Book (About Buildings) - The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander

I guess I read a lot of philosophy this year. This was not intentional.

This has been a really emotional year for me. I picked up The Timeless Way of Building as a comfort read. I’ve read it before and makes my heart ache for the beauty and longing of it all.

Christopher Alexander is one of the top 10 intellectuals who has impacted my life. He was mostly an architect but, as you read Timeless Way, you get the sense that architecture was a means to an end for him. What he really wanted was to help people be more human. He didn’t want to make buildings, he wanted to make homes. Alexander believed that homes, shops, and towns were made out of patterns of natural human interaction which pointed to natural human longings. He believes that we could identify those patterns and put them together in a way such that the houses we live in aren’t just a roof over our heads. He wants these buildings to support our lives and bring out the best of who we are. He wanted to build houses that encouraged children to play around grandparents, where mom could work in her knitting corner while still being a part of the social gatherings. He promoted building things that give life, promote connection, and inspire joy.

Timeless Way is my favorite philosophy book because it is bursting at the seams with a relentless love for life and and encouragement to the reader that they can build something that gives life, supports family and joy, and enriches the community. He wants everyone to just sit down and think about who they are, how they want to live. He believed that, if we ask the right questions, we can all build a space that puts something natural, healthy, and good into the world.

Favorite Partial Read - Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

There is a joke that when dads turn 35, they have to pick a period of history that they will obsess about. I ended up with two and one of them is the 1850’s-1890’s which covers the Civil War through to the Wild West. This is an era of industrial, political, martial, and intellectual giants. Mark Twain was one of them.

This book gives a great account of the early parts of Twain’s life, from his boyhood in Missouri, his ambitions to be a steamboat captain on the Mississippi, his stint as a half-hearted Confederate soldier, and his explosion into the literary work with Innocents Abroad.

This book portrays Twain in incredible detail; perhaps too much detail. I suspect the author wanted to write the definitive biography of Twain’s life and Twain, a compulsive letter writer, provided him with more than enough material about even the smallest events in his life. I gave up about two thirds of the way through when it sounded like we were in for another 20 pages about an elderly Twain’s umpteenth disastrous money-making scheme.

The book is good but is hobbled by Chernow’s strange insistence of judging Mark Twain by the moral standards of a 2010’s critical studies graduate student. Twain was an enormously vocal figure against slavery and racism, a friend to Jews, blacks, and even Europeans (though he held a strong antipathy for Native Americans). But Chernow frequently scolds Twain for writing about race using words and phrases that were tepid in Twain’s time. He even scolds Twain for using a stereotype in a complimentary way. He applies the word “anti-Sematic” to Twain in a few bizarre places where Twain stands in deep admiration of the Jewish people, defending them stalwartly in writing and in speeches to an unfriendly world. Twain was often a lonely defender against bigotry and racism of all kinds and he carried this message across the world. It seems like a base form of ahistorical smugness for Chernow to slap Twain on the wrist for observing that 19th century Jews were frugal.

This book is good in parts, even great. But it ultimately shoots itself in the foot with a lack of focus and a refusal to look at Twain as a figure who lived in his own time and not ours.

Favorite “Technical” Book - The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford

The company I’m working for has a “book club” for the engineering department and this year we read The Phoenix Project together. It is a fun novel about building software and managing IT at a big company. If you’re not in the software business, this might not be for you, but it was definitely a huge help for our team. Reading this book together gave us a touch-point and common insight into a lot of business and process difficulties like backlogs, bottlenecks, release velocity, and a host of other difficulties in project development and release.

The authors cleverly embed these ideas into a compelling novel detailing the drama, power struggles, personality clashes, and technical challenges that are common on software teams. There were a lot of characters in the book who had the quirks and traits that many on my team recognize from our years in the industry. It was a great book and probably the book that had the most direct impact on my life this year.

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AI can be utterly cold and heartless. That’s why it was perfect for the job I had in mind. I wanted an advisor fully devoid of human em…

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Ann and I have been wandering around the Twitter / X infosphere for several years (since Covid). I understood from her recent writing that she felt she had to leave Minnesota, partly over the frightening reactions she’s seen in response to her efforts to make the extent of this scandal public. Such a move, while sometimes necessary, is always a tragedy and I wanted to talk to her and capture her story in this.

If you’re not familiar with the details of this story, the long story as short as possible is that there is a widespread pattern of benefits fraud in Minnesota. There are been several distinct strategies employed by a group of Somali fraudsters that have been systematically leeching benefits funds from the state and federal government. We’re not quite sure exactly the full scope but it is almost certainly more than a billion dollars.

I wanted to talk to Ann because she has been investigating this problem for years. Her discovery of this problem came about in her actions during Covid where she was desperately trying to reach outside her own sphere of safety to help others. I admire that impulse enormously and I’m delighted that she was willing to talk with me about it.

The picture Ann paints for us is a very bleak one. It is a story of rampant and unchecked fraud, most of which is still uncovered. It is a story of theft being winked at by public officials and ignored by the voting public. By the end of the podcast, I’m basically begging for good news.

And there is some good news, mostly in the stories of the good people Ann has come to know who are fighting for justice and are repulsed by the cynicism and corruption of their state and local politicians.

Walter Hudson is a Minnesota State Representative who has been fighting against this fraud from within the Minnesota state government. Bill Glahn works with American Experiment and has been writing about this problem for many months. Joe Thompson is a federal prosecutor who has been chasing after justice in these cases.

Ann also wanted to make note that, while most of the fraudsters are Somali, she has spoken with many wonderful people in the Somali communities who are frustrated and distressed by the rampant corruption and fraud they see all around them. It has been distressing to them to see those in their community who are corrupt, amoral, and unjust become tightly connected with sources of power and raised up and praised as the pillars of their community.

When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when the wicked rule, the people groan. - Proverbs 29:2

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The podcast in full is free to everyone. I have some additional thoughts, details, and commentary below the paywall.

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This video is all so much partisan jawboning that I find it difficult to watch the whole thing without rolling my eyes. But the take-away is when the Democratic representatives in the video are speaking to uniformed military and demand “You must refuse illegal orders.”

If we take this video in complete isolation, it is true. Our enlisted military should, indeed, not follow illegal orders. That is true and they act in great honor and with great bravery when they refuse an illegal order.

The problem is that the Democrats have put out this video as bait. They follow that bait with declarations that certain specific actions from the Trump administration are illegal orders. Katie Porter, who is one of the front-runners for the upcoming California governor’s race, referenced this video when she said that the act of calling National Guard into Los Angeles was an “illegal order”.

This ruling that Porter is referencing was quickly stayed by the 9th Circuit. This means Porter is using a out-of-date headline to say that Trump sending National Guard into LA was an illegal order because one judge said so even though that judge’s ruling was quickly reversed.

The thing I’m getting at is that the demand that uniformed military reject illegal orders is, in isolation, exactly true and good and honorable. In isolation, that is what we want from our soldiers. But this honor is subsequently being leveraged in a partisan and selfish context to imply (if not outright demand) that soldiers can refuse to follow orders from the Trump administration.

Think of the legality of this particular action as a timeline. President Trump sends the National Guard to LA on June 9, 2025. Judge Charles Breyer declares that this action was illegal on September 2. The Ninth Circuit stays this ruling on October 22nd. So if we’re looking at the formal legality of this particular action, it looks like this:

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We are going to talk about how this happened, what this means (for both Canada and the United States), what the dangers are, and what can be done about it.

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Define Elimination

The first thing we need to do is come to an understanding of terms. During the Covid pandemic, I became fascinated with the history of disease eradication (which is not a synonym for elimination) because so many of the strategies for Covid containment drew from this theory that Covid could be contained with the same strategies we used to contain smallpox and polio.

In this discovery mode, I learned that there is a big difference between “elimination” and “eradication” which is incredibly annoying because they seem to be describing similar things and they both start with “e”.

In the context of disease management, “eradication” means that there are zero detected cases of the disease in a given region for a period of 3 consecutive years. When the WHO was attempting to eradicate smallpox in the 1960’s and 1970’s, they insisted that any region requesting the eradication status allow their researchers to conduct disease surveillance. Eradication is a big deal and the only disease that has been successfully eradicated is smallpox (though polio is close).

The “elimination” of a disease is a much lower hurdle than eradication. Simply put, elimination means that the disease is not spreading naturally within a given country or region. As with measles, the disease may be introduced through some foreign source, but the outbreaks are usually small and ultimately contained. A few people might get sick, but it doesn’t spread from town to town.

The formal public health definition of elimination is that the disease spread does not last for more than 12 months. This 12 month mark is important because disease spread is incredibly seasonal, driven by population-level changes in human behavior that are impossible to control. There might be an outbreak that was started by a foreign introduction and went around a town or city for a few days or weeks and then died out. The important thing is it died out. It will require another foreign introduction to get more people sick.

But if people are contracting new cases of the disease from local sources over the course of a full year, that means the disease is endemic and is managing to survive and infect people through an entire seasonal infection cycle. This means that foreign introductions are not required for the disease to spread and can potentially continue infecting within that population indefinitely.

That’s bad.

Oh, Canada

Back to Canada. The reason Canada lost its elimination status is because exactly this thing happened. Measles has been spreading within communities in Canada for over 12 months. It has become endemic, which means that is is consistently present.

How did this happen? There are many theories but it seems like the most coherent one is connected to the Canadian Mennonite community. The Mennonites are a Christian religious sect (denomination? I’m not sure) that has fairly low rates of vaccination. The ongoing spread in Canada seems to have originated from a Mennonite gathering in Ontario about a year ago and has spread continuously in nearly every province since then.

It’s difficult to know exactly what is happening with the data I’ve been able to obtain. Canada has had over 5,000 cases of measles in the last year but they only have 150,000 Mennonites. If these cases were even a majority of measles cases, that puts the rate of infection in the Mennonite community at about 2%. This is really high but it’s also pretty much in line with the rate of measles infection in the famous Samoan measles outbreak of 2019.

Canada seems to be in this pattern where there is a serious and large measles outbreak in a tight-knit community with very low vaccination rates, which then leak into the larger population and cause flare-ups, which die out because of the higher vaccination rates.

Elimination Round 2

There has been a lot of talk about measles in the United States (because it’s been a bad year for measles), but it really has been much worse in Canada. Keep in mind that Canada’s population is only 12% of the US population. If we charted Canada’s measles rate against the US, the US would look like a flat line.

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