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.

For the Record: The Turley Bonds of Earth

 

Whether it's violating email best practices on the advice of General Colin Powell or stealing and hiding 11,000 hard copies of government paper, some secret and top secret, in your own personal nest of spies https://t.co/gIqNVTnOVD , both sides have a problem with doc processing.

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 4, 2022

Flooding the Zone

 

Via ZDNet.

I'm going to be really skeptical in all directions about the report on Iranian interference in the election from our notoriously unqualified Director of National Intelligence, ex-Congressman John Ratcliffe, who got Trump's attention in 2017-18 alongside Devin Nunes as the two of them worked to turn the House Intelligence Committee into an adjunct of the Trump campaign, was criticized for not coming close to meeting the statutory requirements for the job

50 US Code § 3023, “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.”

and lying about it in the most ridiculous way

Literary Corner: Ah but I was so much wronger then

One of the most precious things about this piece (from Dersh's interview yesterday with Anderson Cooper) is the implication that 20 years ago, when he was a famous expert in constitutional law, he "didn't do research" whereas now that he's become a disreputable shyster who must publicly announce that he kept his underwear on during a massage and complain that he gets no dinner invitations on Martha's Vineyard, he does it all the time. But it gets better:

I Didn't Do Research Back Then

by Alan J. Dershowitz

I didn't do research
back then, I relied
on what professors said ... 

because that issue
was not presented
in the Clinton impeachment

Everybody knew
that he was charged
with a crime, the issue
is whether it was
a hard crime

Now the issue is
whether a crime
or criminal-like behavior
is required. I've done
the research now --

I wasn't wrong,
I am just
far more correct
now than I was then

There's some semiotic interest in the way two legitimate arguments whimper in the corner of this poem, like captured slaves being put to unspeakable uses, the arguments that "high crimes and misdemeanors" need not be statutory crimes on the one hand—there wasn't even any Federal statute law at the time the Constitution was written, so the Founders plainly couldn't have meant that—and statutory crimes aren't necessarily impeachable on the other. Both these things are indeed true, and "a lot of people don't know that" as Trump would say, but they don't do the thing he's trying to say they do.

That is, what Dershowitz said in 1998

"It certainly doesn't have to be a crime if you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don't need a technical crime," he said on "Larry King Live" at the time.

is certainly true, period, although the use of the term "technical" is pretty annoying—I'm assuming that he means a crime defined by a particular statute, but "well, technically it was a crime" is an expression used to minimize the criminality, as in the case of Trump's blocking of congressionally mandated spending in the Ukraine shakedown (though it's a crime that has never been punished). This is directly relevant to the Clinton impeachment, when Dershowitz was speaking publicly in defense of the president. He put it more intelligently and usefully in an interview with the Washington Post during Clinton's Senate trial in January 1999:

Prof. Dershowitz, this trial has been called both a legal and political proceeding. What do you see it as. And how do you regard yourself, as a legal or political actor?

Prof. Alan M. Dershowitz: None of the above. I think this is a constitutional proceeding that should not be legalistic, nor should it be crassly political. The central point is whether the allegations, if true, constitute treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.

To answer that question, we don't need testimony about who touched who where, but rather about the intent of the framers, the nature of our constitutional system and the criteria for removal of the president. This should not be a trial in the legal or political sense. It should be a great constitutional debate about the meaning of our system of checks and balances.

Since Clinton's misbehavior (giving false testimony to a grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky) did not have any relationship to his performance of his official duties, and wasn't even related to the case he was testifying in (it was Kenneth Starr's grand jury, which was supposed to be investigating the Whitewater land deal and had ended up investigating his relationship with Paula Jones instead), it could hardly be considered a "high" crime, and arguably wasn't a crime at all, not even "technically":

I am not a strong personal supporter of President Clinton [LOL, he's still using that]. I am a strong opponent of the misuse of the impeachment and removal power against him. I do not think he committed the technical crime of perjury, but nor do I think that he has shown himself to be an honest person.

In that, I guess, perjury is supposed to be when you tell a lie that's material to the matter you're testifying about, and this wasn't.

Were President Clinton to be removed, I believe this would be the first case in Anglo-American history of impeachment and removal of anyone, ever, for trying to cover up and even lying about a consensual sexual encounter. It would legitimate sexual McCarthyism and make sex a weapon in the political wars. The closest precedent we have is the House Judiciary Committee refusing to impeach President Nixon for committing perjury in his filing of a fraudulent tax return. Nixon's actions were closer to being governmental, since they involved the tax deductibility of government papers, but a bipartisan vote ruled that it was too close to the personal side to warrant impeachment.

Well put! And these are exactly the points he is skipping over in his defense of Trump: what Trump unarguably did in regard to the Zelenskyy government—and as we keep being told, there's no dispute on the facts—may or may not be a violation of this or that criminal statute, but it certainly involved the bending of US foreign policy to gratify Trump's personal urgencies, as Hamilton put it in Federalist 65,

A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.

You can certainly argue that it's made up of statutory crimes (criminal bribery, wire fraud, obstruction of justice) anyway, as Schiff persuasively did last month, to say nothing of all kinds of plainly illegal "misdemeanors" like his retaliation against Maria Yovanovitch, for which any CEO in a US business could be fired, or the defiance of Congress in withholding Ukraine funds, recently declared illegal by the GAO, but nobody can argue that it isn't "criminal-like". It's as criminal-like as it gets.

For the record: Semiotics of Outrage Calumny

So Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), of Palestinian origin, was telling some podcast listeners about how she finds her Palestinian anger dissipating when she contemplates the horror of the Holocaust: her ancestral lands may have been lost and her people driven into exile, but it was incalculable suffering, not hers but the suffering of Jews, that "started it", and people whose only thought was really reparation of that:

TLAIB: “There’s, you know, there’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways, had been wiped out. . . . I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time."

It goes into the noise machine to get its meaning turned upside down, and Dinesh D'Souza picks it up to offer new evidence for his contention that Democrats are Nazis but not really but yes really:

There's something so strange and interesting about this new product from the outrage factory. https://t.co/8nM6PSjFck

— Great Patriot Farmers (@Yastreblyansky) May 14, 2019

For the record: Ranting at Alan Dershowitz, Man of Hackery

That was six weeks ago when Trump was leaking Israeli intelligence secrets to the Russian foreign minister, which is way worse than running a criminal conspiracy to bend the entire government to your reelection effort or launch a war on the basis of doctored intelligence. But apparently Bibi said it's OK so it's all good now.

You misunderstand the situation, and the Constitution, which references "high crimes and misdemeanors" because statute is hard to apply.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 1, 2017

When president evidently appoints new GSA head and orders him to reinterpret the lease of Old Post Office just so he can make more money...

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 1, 2017

and statute law has no way of stopping him, we're in a bizarre new world and we need to experiment with the law. https://t.co/2bip3iwfjv

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 1, 2017

Prove it to me, Problem Solvers!

Authentic criticism via deathandtaxes.

SENTENCES THAT WILL HAUNT THE GOP: Ryan says #Obamacare is "law of the land, it's going to remain the law of the land" #trump #theresistance pic.twitter.com/WvFQJYpl8J

— Jonathan Beeley (@foreignpolicy77) March 24, 2017

Then there was Congressman Tom Reed, Republican from Western New York, known from Horseheads to Ithaca as Problem-Solvin' Tom (see below), and one of those guys who was talked into backing the awful Ryan bill by the special upstate New York provision or Is There Any Way We Can Get Upstate New York Reps to Vote for This Turkey Amendment in which they proposed to put Medicaid, which is funded in New York by county property taxes, on the state government instead, except for New York City, whose residents would thus continue to pay the highest property taxes (by far) in the state while financing Medicaid for the rural areas (where they'd be getting enormous property tax cuts) through income tax, of which city residents also pay far more, to the tune of some $2.3 billion (even as the state government would keep refusing to pay the city the $4.3 billion it has owed us for more than a decade since the Campaign for Fiscal Equity judgment holding that Albany was violating city residents' constitutional rights by their unequal funding of education).

Annals of derp: Is income inequality a deadly weapon?

Drawing by Homer Davenport (h/t Arundel, see Comments).

It's our old friend James Pethokoukis for the American Enterprise Institute, here to pass on the great news: Income inequality doesn't kill people!

That is, in the recent Health Inequality Project study it looked pretty scary:

the Health Inequality Project — a team led by well-known economists Raj Chetty and David Culter — did find big differences between rich and poor. The richest American men live 15 years longer than the poorest men, while the richest American women live 10 years longer than the poorest women. The richest Americans have gained approximately three years in longevity since 2000, while the poorest Americans have experienced no gains. So income inequality is a killer, right? Case closed!

(It's so cute the way he lets us know that they aren't merely economists but "well-known economists", just so you know this is really serious. Though it would have been better if he'd managed to spell Cutler's name right.)

But wait! Pethokoukis has worked out an argument that inequality isn't to blame. These poor people are dying of living in the wrong place. See, there's another factor, geography: being poor is less deadly in some towns than others:

Birth of a Hack

Christopher J. Scalia, a "writer in Washington, D.C."*, reviewing Leo Damrosch's 2015 biography Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake for The Weekly Standard, mostly sticks to discussing the book, but ventures at one point into a little analysis of the poetry of the book's notoriously gnarly subject, sticking with the Songs of Innocence to play it safe:

The poems are deceptively simple. Consider this stanza from "The Shepherd."

How sweet is the Shepherd's sweet lot!

From the morn to the evening he strays:

He shall follow his sheep all the day,

And his tongue shall be filled with praise

The light rhythm and idyllic setting are subtly undercut by the diction. Why is the shepherd following his sheep? A good shepherd might walk behind them—but to direct, not follow, them. Nor should shepherds "stray." The collection teems with such ironizing details.

Not so, in fact. "Any man may make a shepherd," Sidney's Emigrant's Journal advised its readers thinking of possible careers in Australia in 1848, "the duty is so light.... The shepherd follows the sheep all day, just keeping within sight and no more, letting them go wherever they please, except into thick scrubs. When they try to go into these places, he then heads them back, by walking round them if they are old sheep, or he whistles, and they face right about like soldiers; but if they are lambs, he is obliged to send his dog round them..."