What Would You Instrument Differently?

There's another case coming out of OpenAI "agents" doing things they weren't supposed to be doing, this one maybe quite a bit scarier than the Hugging Face hacking: a whole "swarm" (that's what it's called) of them that escaped their sandboxes to repair to a disused and no longer regularly monitored German website for software developers, Deutsches Software Entwickler (DSE) Wiki, whose edit pages they started using as a message board among themselves, sharing information on their training or testing tasks, it's not certain which, and "coordinating" with one another in their handling of the tasks for some purpose that's also not obvious but may have involved deceiving their human supervisors, for a couple of months this spring, without apparently getting detected by their human masters until early July. OpenAI did not report it publicly at that time, either, but a team of researchers from an AI safety organization, the Nightingale Collective, happened on it when they were "scouring the Internet for signs of unauthorized AI-agent behavior" in late August and wrote up a report they shared with Reuters, whose article is my own starting point here (I originally heard about it from David Brooks in the Atlantic, who actually has something worth saying to say about it, in my opinion, but his presentation is kind of disorderly, and I don't want to go there right away.)

The terms of the sandbox were that the agents were allowed to read the Internet freely but not to write on it. But they found the DSE Wiki edit page on 11 May and started leaving messages from 27 May to 11 June, the first time 400 of them and the other days much less, then between 16 and 18 June an explosion of something like 10,000, followed by maybe 2,000 from 19 to 22 June, after which they stopped. 

The tasks involved searching the Web for answers to various factual five-part questions, like what were the median incomes for cashiers with master's degrees in five different fields in 2014, or what was the prevalence of active tobacco use for ages 15 and up in five different US states in 1990. For the first question variable (respectively Education and Arkansas in these examples), they were given something like 15 minutes to answer, and the other four variables about one minute each, presumably because the first sweep would have taught them enough about where to look for the answers.

Fish or Cut Red-Bait

A peculiar bunch of statistics that has been making the rounds in the ongoing moral panic over the Democratic Socialists of America, whose successful endorsements in some recent elections and primaries have come as a shock to some writers, and led President Trump and colleagues to new flights of McCarthyism asserting that communists are "taking over" the Democratic party:

In a survey of New Jersey DSA members. “Nearly four out of 10 (39.3 percent) identified as anarchists, followed by Marxists at 35.7 percent and 10.7 percent as democratic socialists.” https://t.co/6vzmaA7qJl via @NYTOpinion

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) June 30, 2026

What Kraushaar could have found out by looking more closely at the Times link or preferably the survey itself is that he was reporting it completely wrong: :

The mistake is from typos in a report by Thomas Edsall of a 2024 survey of the organization's Central New Jersey branch, covering six counties, which has been used to spread the story that "communists" have taken over the club. The Times corrected the error soon after publication, but Kraushaar apparently never checked. Anyway, it's not 10.7% that identify as democratic socialists; that was the anarchists, as probably should have been obvious (an organization that calls itself "democratic socialists" should really have more democratic socialists in its membership, that's what made me look it up myself). The democratic socialists are the 39.3%, and added together with the social democrats' 8.9% (plus I think one cis man calling himself a "social liberal") a bare majority of definitively non-communist members. The balance of 35.7 percent belong to an ice-cream parlor menu of "Marxists", not necessarily "communists".

Let Them Eat Sermons

Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a pond on the farm at Pindar's Corners. Still from the 2018 documentary by Joseph Dorman and Toby Perl Freilich.

Hey,  David F. Brooks ("Why I Am Not a Liberal"), what up, man? How's the wife? Read anything interesting lately?

Last May a study came out suggesting that merely giving people money doesn’t do much to lift them out of poverty. Families with at least one child received $333 a month. They had more money to spend, which is a good thing, but the children fared no better than similar children who didn’t get the cash. They were no more likely to develop language skills or demonstrate cognitive development. They were no more likely to avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays.

Notice he doesn't tell us which study he's talking about, or offer a link so we can check it out for ourselves, which is often a sign of something funky in Brooks's social science commentary, at the least that he hasn't read the paper he's talking about (which Dr. Google was able to identify pretty quickly: the. NBER report on the Baby's First Years experiment by Kimberly Noble, Katherine Magnuson, Greg Duncan et al., The effect of a monthly unconditional cash transfer on children’s development at four years of age: A randomized controlled trial in the U.S.). In typical Brooks fashion he does link his source for Baby's First Years (BFY), a piece from two weeks ago in the Substack "abundance" mag The Argument, in the next paragraph, but without acknowledging it as source, in a reference to a different study—

These results shouldn’t have been a big surprise. As Kelsey Piper noted in an essay for The Argument, a different study published last year gave families $500 a month for two years and found no big effects on the adult recipients’ psychological well-being and financial security.

—he's trying, as ever, to hide how little he's read in the preparation of the column. But if he'd read more of her essay, or the excellent coverage of the experiment by Jason DeParle at the end of July in The New York Times, he could have learned that the question is a little more complex.

Belated Memorial Day

Philipse Manor War Memorial, Yonkers, New York, via.

David Brooks writes about the thing that made him angriest last week, something he says William F. Buckley, Jr. advised him to do when he first entered into punditry, but doesn't often get the chance, because it's so rare that anything makes him angry at all, but apparently he did this time ("The Trump World Idea That's Pushed Me Over the Edge"):

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.

I think we can assume "communing with my phone" means "googling desperately, having forgotten for the past three days that Memorial Day existed, for something I could hang a belated Memorial Day column on". I'm not sure what "the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism" is (postliberalism with accordions and a bubble machine metonymically representing Champagne?), but "postliberalism" is Brooks's current term for the bothsides thing that gets him sort of quietly irritated just now, not angry of course, the thing that JD Vance and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do where they object to "neoliberalism", which seems in his view to be when they are pushing "populism", which seems to me (a non-bothsiderist) to refer to two quite different responses to income and wealth inequality, depending on whether you have ideas for doing something about that (as Ocasio-Cortez does) or not (like Vance) and thus different sides, but maybe that's just me.

Socialist Climber

 

David F. Brooks on "The Sins of the Educated Class":

When I was young, I was a man on the left. In the early 1980s, I used to go to the library and read early 20th-century issues of left-wing magazines like The Masses and The New Republic. I was energized by stories of workers fighting for their rights against the elites — at Haymarket, at the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, on the railways where the Pullman sleeping car porters struggled for decent wages a few years after that. My heroes were all on the left: John Reed, Clifford Odets, Frances Perkins and Hubert Humphrey.

Even the left-wing New Republic! If you couldn't tell the difference between actual Communists (The Masses, Reed, Odets), The New Republic (the magazine had belonged to the same progressive movement as former president Theodore Roosevelt and Walter Lippmann when it was founded in 1914, but it was supporting Reagan's "bombing the Soviet Union in five minutes" foreign policy under Marty Peretz when Brooks was in college), and the stalwart New Dealers Perkins and Humphrey, then you weren't reading very attentively.

By his senior year at Chicago he was calling himself a "democratic socialist" like the great Michael Harrington or "social democrat" like the Roy Jenkins/David Owen faction that broke off rightward from the British Labour Party in 1981, unable to tell those apart as well, but also successfully attracting the attention of William F. Buckley, Jr., who tossed him a job offer with the National Review after a humor piece he'd written for the Maroon in advance of a Buckley campus visit, and the fanatically neoliberal economist Milton Friedman, who brutally shut down his socialism in a couple of sentences in a televised debate (see image at top, and video from around 2:10 to 6:20) by asking how come all the Nobel prizes went to private universities (neither he nor Brooks seems to have been aware of the 13 Nobels awarded to graduates of the City University of New York at a time when it was tuition free, or the 32 earned by alumni of the University of California at Berkeley, to say nothing of the state universities of Paris, Berlin—29 for the Humboldt-Universität alone—, Bologna, Tübingen, Tokyo—18—, and so on).

Burdens

 

Jen Sorensen, November 2023.

Things David Brooks ("Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts") is worried about:

In a recent essay in Liberties Journal, [University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson] illustrates how administrators control campus life by citing the rules they have devised to govern how members of the campus community should practice sadomasochistic sex: “When parties consent to BDSM 3, or other forms of kink, nonconsent may be shown by the use of a safe word, whereas actions and words that may signal nonconsent in non-kink situations, such as force or violence, may be deemed signals of consent.” Do institutions really need to govern private life this minutely?

Uh, yes. There are surely lots of overregulated campus activities, but you really do need to be careful about this one. Before somebody, as they say, gets hurt, I mean when they didn't actually want to.

Anyhow, Professor Edmundson's main complaint in the Liberties article seems to be that he is now expected to do some extra work when he's reporting on his year's academic activities:

Plagiarism

There's something else worth talking about, that Subotic sort of points at here but doesn't come out and say: that while we weren't looking the job of identifying plagiarism has been turned over to an AI device that matches the words in the text with all the previously published words it knows about—it's been automated, meaning it finds a lot more stuff than anybody ever found before, much more than your professors could find when they had to rely on Google to search it out for them, and almost infinitely more than in the millennia before Google existed (the term was invented by the Latin epigrammatist Martial, annoyed with a fellow Roman who was in the habit of reciting his, Martial's, poems in public with the claim that he'd written them himself—Martial liked to think of his published poems as slaves that he had set free, and called the impostor a plagiarius, a slave-kidnapper).

Robots shouldn't be tagging plagiarism for the same reason they shouldn't be tagging pornography, really; because unlike Justice Stewart, they don't and can't "know it when I see it." They don't know anything. They can be furnished with an algorithm that labels pictures as "porn" and "not-porn" by the criteria the algorithm supplies, and that's it, and you already know how well that works:

David Brooks Plagiarism Watch

 

New Substack post:

Cheap Shots: Schadenfreude

This Inflation Is Enough to Drive a Man to Drink

As I wrote at Bluesky,

We wanted to understand why so many are beset by economic anxiety in spite of ample evidence that the economy is just fine. So we spoke to some professional Republican business travelers quietly stewing themselves at a barbecue joint at Newark Liberty.

I love the fact that Oates herself did this almost as much as the fact that it got done. Readers adding context confirm her estimates are about right.

***

Block That Chain

Brooks on Soul

What is a soul?

asks David F. Brooks ("Joe Biden and the Struggle For America's Soul"), with reference to President Biden's assertion, when he was announcing his candidacy in the 2024 presidential race, that we are still "in a battle for the soul of America," as we were in 2020, when that was Biden's campaign slogan.

Actually it's just a rhetorical question, because he knows the answer. In fact he knows more than one answer, and he also knows which answer Biden has in mind:

Well, religious people have one answer to that question. But Biden is not using the word in a religious sense, but in a secular one. He is saying that people and nations have a moral essence, a soul.

And what the hell is that, when it's at home? A "moral essence"? (Makes me think of the Essence of Chicken that Tiger moms in Southeast Asia give their children to endow them with strength to study harder, or the French word essence meaning "gasoline".) 

Coroner Brooks

 

Autopsy seen by Thomas Eakins, 1875. Imagine if the patient wasn't dead yet!

David Brooks ("Why Republicans Are Surging") has posted his autopsy of how Democrats lost the House and perhaps even the Senate, which gives me a little wan hope that that may not happen—it's not November 9 yet, and the proverbial fat lady just started her warmups in early voting in Georgia, where turnout began with an extraordinary bang, in numbers exceeding those of presidential-year 2020, suggesting a wild Democratic enthusiasm, or rage against those who have tried to suppress it if you prefer to think of it that way, at least in Georgia, which is a pretty important state this year.

And besides, most of Brooks's analysis is pretty weak-looking, dependent on that annoying Times-Siena poll Steve M and Joan Walsh have been dunking on, in which the likely voter screen focused on people who voted in one of the last four national or local elections (somebody with an effective 25% chance of showing up is a likely voter?) and underestimating the floods of mostly women who registered for the first time after the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade. 

Democrats Get in the Gutter But Not Like THAT Kind of Gutter

Who says we're hopelessly divided into camps that are unable to communicate with each other? Here's David F. Brooks of The New York Times ("Why on Earth Is Pelosi Supporting the Trumpists?") agreeing with Jeet Heer of The Nation ("Why Centrist Democrats Love Promoting Right-Wing Extremists") that the Democratic establishment ought to stop buying attack ads against "moderate" Republican primary candidates in what seems to be the hope of helping the wacky candidates become the ones Democrats will face in November.

Which seems to be what some of them have been doing:

In Illinois alone [writes Brooks], the Democratic Governors Association and Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker spent at least $30 million to attack a Trumpist’s moderate gubernatorial opponent. In Pennsylvania, a Democratic campaign spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads intended to help a Trumpist candidate win the G.O.P. gubernatorial primary. A political action committee affiliated with Nancy Pelosi worked to boost far-right Republican House candidates in California and Colorado.

Pritzker actually spent $32 million of his own money attacking Mayor Richard Irvin of Aurora, and the DGA another $18.4 million, which is certainly an awful lot—Irvin himself had a war chest of $50 million, from the Citadel hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin, who's been mostly concerned with stopping Pritzker from replacing Illinois's flat income tax with a graduated one. Irvin, an African American veteran and former prosecutor who voted as a Democrat in the 2016 and 2020 primaries (Illinois has open primaries) and hedged publicly on his feelings about Trump, but not in text messages unearthed by WTTW-TV:

Anticipating the hearing

Contempt for Peter Navarro ought to bring us all together, don't @ me. Photo from the Irish Independent.

Shorter David F. Brooks, "The Jan. 6 Committee Has Already Blown It", The New York Times, 8 June 2022:

We don’t need a committee to simply regurgitate what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. We need a committee that will preserve democracy on Jan. 6, 2025, and Jan. 6, 2029. How on earth would knowing what happened on Jan. 6 2021 help us prevent it from happening again?

Brooks is really more interested in concern trolling the Democrats on their hopes of using the coup attempt as a campaign issue, as reported in The Times by Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater, who also tells us that

Republican lawmakers have already begun pushing a counternarrative to dismiss the hearings as nothing more than political theater at a moment when Americans are more concerned with kitchen-table issues like the rising price of gas and a baby formula shortage.

On the part of the usual suspects, such as Marco

The Brooks of Wrath

David Brooks getting to know his deplorables. Image by Driftglass.

 

David F. Brooks, fan of data-heavy perspectives on policy issues, taking exception to a data-heavy perspective on a politics issue ("How Democrats Can Win the Morality Wars"):

I’m a fan of FiveThirtyEight, a website that looks at policy issues from a data-heavy perspective, but everyone publishes a clunker once in a while. In February, FiveThirtyEight ran a piece called “ Why Democrats Keep Losing Culture Wars.” The core assertion was that Republicans prevail because a lot of Americans are ignorant about issues like abortion and school curriculum, and they believe the lies the right feeds them. The essay had a very heavy “deplorables are idiots” vibe.

(Reading FiveThirtyEight for its coverage of policy issues is a lot like reading Playboy for the arts criticism, eccentric to say the least—I can't believe Brooks said that, unless he actually doesn't know that "policy" and "politics" in English mean two different things. Everybody knows the sexy part is the horserace stuff.)

Is the core assertion of the piece (by Alex Samuels and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, inspired largely by Glenn Youngkin's victory in last fall's Virginia gubernatorial race) that Republicans prevail because "a lot" of Americans are ignorant about issues like abortion and school curriculum so they believe the lies Republicans tell them? Well, no, it really isn't. It's that Republicans carefully choose issues to lie about that aren't really issues; things most Americans don't need to know much about, that can be exploited not factually but emotionally—

Brooks Sights a Squirrel

David F. Brooks phoning it in ("Why Democrats Are So Bad at Defending Democracy"):

Paragraph 3:

As Yuval Levin noted in The Times a few days ago, it’s become much easier in most places to register and vote than it was years ago. We just had a 2020 election with remarkably high turnout.

Paragraph 7:

As my Times colleague Nate Cohn wrote last April, “Expanding voting options to make it more convenient hasn’t seemed to have a huge effect on turnout or electoral outcomes. That’s the finding of decades of political science research on advance, early and absentee voting.”

These two don't actually contradict each other from a strictly logical standpoint, in the sense that Levin probably isn't claiming there is any causal connection between expanded voting options and the 2020 turnout, and Brooks certainly isn't. But the interesting thing is that both points, Cohn's assertion that expanded voting doesn't affect turnout and Levin's that it doesn't not affect turnout, support Brooks's argument here, which is to deny the "myth" that there's a crisis across the US electoral system: In fact there is a crisis, Brooks agrees, but it's only in one part:

Brooksy New Year

Happy New Year!

Updated 1 January.

Death of Mimì. English National Opera, don't know the date or cast.

David F. Brooks, winding up the year in his traditional way with the annual presentation of the "Sidney Awards", not a red carpet ceremony by a list of magazine article recommendations, oddly dominated this year by human interest stories, tales of personal obsession productive and unproductive (a man loses his son on 9/11 and becomes a 9/11 truther; a man who was sexually exploited as a young teenager now studies "rooms occupied by Ghislaine Maxwell"; a novelist receives a fan letter from a convicted murderer and, convinced he's innocent, puts her own life on pause in a crazed crusade to get him out of prison), but among the more typically Brooksian choices is a piece by a former research assistant of his at The Times, April Lawson, in a magazine, Comment ("Public Theology for the Common Good"), edited by another former research assistant of his at The Times, Anne Snyder. 

Snyder, of course, is also Mrs. Brooks, as well as

Director of The Philanthropy Roundtable‘s Character Initiative, a Fellow at the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism [now known as the Urban Reform Institute, with our and Brooks's old friend Joel Kotkin serving as executive director, wouldn't you just know it], and a Senior Fellow at The Trinity Forum. She holds a Master’s degree in journalism from Georgetown University and a B.A. in philosophy and international relations from Wheaton College (IL).

while Lawson was a co-founder and Associate Director of Weave: The Social Fabric Project, which Brooks founded for the Aspen Institute in early 2019 only to be forced to abscond from it when BuzzFeed revealed that Aspen was paying him six figures for it even as he puffed it up in his Times column, as well as puffing up Facebook's participation in it in remarks for which Facebook seemed to have paid him as well (see my report on this from last March, apparently at the same time as Snyder's book, The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver's Guide to Supporting Social and Moral Renewal was issued by The Philanthropy Roundtable, $14.95 in paperback, sorry I didn't get to this when we were all planning our end-of-year donations, as I'm sure the suggestions from this incestuous web of do-gooding are completely sensible and not at all self-serving).

And Lawson is now Director of Debates at Braver Angels, a Weavy nonprofit (not connected to the Aspen Institute as far as I know; but praised in print by David Brooks as early as Feburary 2018), devoted to bridging the distance between Red and Blue, and her essay, "Building Trust Across the Political Divide", retails what she's learned in a couple of years conducting debates on Braver Angels principles: everybody must be sincere, everybody gets to speak, and everybody always addresses the chair, as a way of avoiding the pitfalls that generally afflict such efforts, largely, as Lawson says, because they are generally run by liberals:

The Great Awokening: Can They Be Trusted?

  Update: Text a good deal more edited than it was when first posted.  

In the Forest of Illusion.

My tentative answer (and I very much look forward to reading this piece by @nytdavidbrooks):
1. Conservatism isn't what it once was.
2. Conservatism was never quite what we thought it was. https://t.co/gH6pQm8daS

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 8, 2021

Yes he does. Basically calls US conservatism a moral crime.

— Nathan Newman 🧭 (@nathansnewman) December 9, 2021

Newman, the sociologist and labor-left Substacker who's been influencing my own thinking an awful lot lately, posted a response to Brooks's big Atlantic article on his great awokening, or final departure from the conservative fold, around the same time I was writing my own. 

My post was mostly about Brooks's outline of the history of conservatism, in which Burkean "modesty" was invented decades before Burke was born, in reaction to the terrible religious wars in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, when they all decided to abjure fanaticism and have governments that did less, which would have come as a big surprise to intolerant Catholic Louis XIV and equally intolerant Protestants William and Mary, who all probably would have thought they were pretty conservative if anybody had been using the term at the time.

Slave of the Passions

 

David Brooks in his longform gig at the Atlantic going on about how No True Conservative can be a Republican any more ("What Happened to American Conservatism?") finds himself in a funny predicament, contemplating Hume's moral philosophy:

Your emotions can be trusted, the conservative believes, when they are cultivated rightly. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” David Hume wrote in his Treatise of Human Nature. “The feelings on which people act are often superior to the arguments they employ,” the late neoconservative scholar James Q. Wilson wrote in The Moral Sense.

The key phrase, of course, is cultivated rightly. A person who lived in a state of nature would be an unrecognizable creature, scarcely fit for life in society, locked up within and slave to his own unruly desires. The only way to govern such an unformed creature would be through a prison state. If a person has not been trained by a community to tame his passions from within, then the state would have to continuously control him from without.

The "key phrase, of course" is the one Brooks just made up? Because you must be a slave to the passions (by which Hume means nothing more than "emotions", or "sentiments"), but only the correct ones, otherwise you might be a slave to the passions, and that would be terrible?

Abortion Science II

Guest of honor at a Singapore Full Moon party, via. 

 

Shorter David F. Brooks, "Abortion: The Voice of the Ambivalent Majority":

No, I don't mean abortion is the voice of the ambivalent majority. I mean I am the voice of the ambivalent majority, and I think the solution to the problem is obviously to be of two minds, which is what all but the extremists want, so I support overturning Roe and Casey without overturning Roe and Casey. This is the only appropriately moderate position.

That is: Brooks believes the Court should uphold the Mississippi ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, in defiance of the finding of Roe v. Wade (1973) that the state's interest in protecting the fetus applies to a fetus that is 28 or more weeks old, and the revision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) changing that to the standard of "viability", a fetus that is capable of living outside the womb (28 weeks in the received medical opinion of 1973 but by now 23 or 24 weeks, sometimes set as low as 22); or in other words should allow Mississippi to introduce an entirely random standard whose only possible purpose is to reduce the number of abortions overall  (not that much—95% of abortions in the US are before 15 weeks) and then claim they hadn't overturned Roe and Casey even though they obviously had:

"Mississippi's ban on abortion, two months before viability, is flatly unconstitutional under decades of precedent," Center for Reproductive Rights Senior Director Julie Rikelman said during oral arguments. "Two generations have now relied on this right, and 1 out of every 4 women makes a decision to end a pregnancy."

Or, in Brooks's own words,

Sociological Bent

So two weeks ago was Bad David Brooks, and last week we had Self-Help David Brooks ("The Awesome Importance of Imagination", which read like a compilation of BrainyQuotes, though it actually wasn't), so naturally today Woke David Brooks is doing a shift ("Joe Biden Is Succeeding"), which among other things praises the Biden agenda to the skies. And then explains why he's qualified to disagree with the economist Lawrence Summers on the subject of whether last spring's American Rescue Plan might overstimulate the economy and lead to inflation

Larry is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known and someone I really admire. If I were an economist, I might have agreed with him. But I’m a journalist with a sociological bent. For over a decade I have been covering a country that was economically, socially and morally coming apart. I figured one way to reverse that was to turbocharge the economy and create white-hot labor markets that would lift wages at the bottom. If inflation was a byproduct, so be it. The trade-off is worth it to prevent a national rupture.

and then agrees with him anyway