Looking for moral authority in all the wrong places

AI companies have a poor ethical reputation — they’re wrecking the environment to build data centers, they disregard privacy, they steal our words to populate their databases, they’re run by billionaires. They’re beginning to realize that they should do something to improve their image, so what do they do? They decide to steal from religion.

As concerns mount over artificial intelligence and its rapid integration into society, tech companies are increasingly turning to faith leaders for guidance on how to shape the technology — a surprising about-face on Silicon Valley’s longstanding skepticism of organized religion.

Leaders from various religious groups met last week with representatives from companies including Anthropic and OpenAI for the inaugural “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable in New York to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into the fast-developing technology. It was organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, which seeks to take on issues such as extremism, radicalization and human trafficking. The roundtable is expected to be the first of several around the globe, including in Beijing, Nairobi and Abu Dhabi.

I don’t think Anthropic and OpenAI have anything to bring to the roundtable, but they they ignorantly assume that religions have the key to moral behavior, all evidence to the contrary.

“Regulation can’t keep up with this,” she said. But the leaders of the world’s religions, with billions of followers globally, have the “expertise of shepherding people’s moral safety,” she reasoned. Faith leaders ought to have a voice, Shields said.

She “reasoned.” I don’t think so. Those are the words of someone who has swallowed the propaganda that religions have always generated. Yeah, right, let’s turn to these guys for lessons in morality.

GIGO

I have a presupposition of my own, that essentially all people have equal capability and equal intelligence and equal intellectual processing power. We are all evolved to have these excellent, versatile computing engines in our skulls that are awesome in their ability to process inputs and draw conclusions and drive our behaviors as a function of those inputs. However, if these calculating engines are fed garbage, more garbage is what comes out.

One of the prime sources of garbage is religion. Take a young, naive brain and stuff it with lies and nonsense, and it produces even more nonsense, which we then feed to the next generation, and it gets worse and worse until you’ve got a population of gibbering slugs who can’t get anything right. We’ve got people who’ve been primed with a steady diet of bad Bible interpretations who struggle to analyze even the simplest phenomena.

Case in point: Perry Stone, a Pentecostal evangelist with a surprising number of followers for someone who is so thick. He has juggled together fantasies about the Rapture and UFOs to build an elaborate edifice of weird conclusions, none supported by any evidence.

I’m not going to go into great detail, but there were a large number of pastors that had been invited to go to a certain state to hear some men in the United States government and others share with them a concern that they had, said Stone, who did not identify his source in his April 27 YouTube video, but claimed the person has a great church.

Stone, whose YouTube channel has approximately 925,000 subscribers, said his friend told him that some of those in the meeting were telling us as pastors, ‘You need to prepare your people, and you need to get ready to answer them for what you’re about to hear being released.’

And some of it has to do with crafts that have been discovered that are not allegedly a part of our planet, and the materials they’re made of are not a part of our planet. Very strange, reptilian-looking creatures and other things that almost sound like something out of a sci-fi movie or an [H.G. Wells] book, he added.

Groovy. It’s a real mish-mash of bad sci-fi movies and bad religion fermenting in that man’s brain. The problem here is that the foundations of his reasoning are all garbage.

Stone went on to place the extraterrestrial phenomenon within the framework of his dispensational premillennial eschatology that features belief in a pre-tribulational rapture, an Islamic Antichrist and a third Jewish temple purified by red heifers.

Stop right there, I would like to get off this train to crazytown. He goes much much further, though, and starts ladling the right-wing politics and racism on top of his already rancid trash salad.

Stone claimed the officials in the supposed meeting warned the pastors that disclosure of UFOs and extraterrestrial existence will cause some Christians to question their faith and some non-believers to seek out pastors for an explanation.

Stone speculated that government fabrications regarding an alien invasion will eventually be used to explain away the rapture, attributing the theory to his son, Jonathan, who last year tweeted about former President Barack Obama being an advanced humanoid AI who used questions over his birthplace to hide that there was never any birth certificate at all.

This all supports my contention that these people have normal, healthy brains, but that their inputs are all garbled bullshit. It’s a real shame.

Is AI a bigger clownshow than creationism?

I spent many years debating stupid creationists, and I never ever got paid a nickel.* Nothing. For all that effort. I was in the wrong business, because apparently you can get paid $10,000 for debating AI-Doomer nonsense, and you can even show up for the online debate looking like this:

He was called to debate by this anonymous fellow, 47fucb4r8curb4fc8f8r4bfic8r, who coughed up the $10K for the privilege of telling Eliezer Yudkowski to stop making extravagant claims and stop threatening AI researchers with doom.

It is an utterly ridiculous debate between two clowns. Yudkowski wants to claim that research on AI is an existential threat to humanity (I think that’s silly, except in the sense that it is a waste of resources), while 47fucb4r8curb4fc8f8r4bfic8r is an LLM researcher who wants to grandstand and claim that Yudkowski is an existential threat to him, personally. I can’t take either of them seriously.

What I have learned is that if I want to profit from future debates, I need to invest in goofy hats.

*OK, Ray Comfort once sent me a fruit basket, but that was it. It was memorable because it was such an exception.

This is where we’re at

A scientist has been denied access to his lab…because he supported his Chinese students.

A faculty member at Indiana University (IU), who has sharply criticized the government’s recent prosecution of several Chinese scientists accused of smuggling biological materials into the United States, has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders.

IU plant microbiologist Roger Innes says the move Thursday evening is the latest instance of retaliation for a letter he wrote last fall on behalf of Yunqing Jian, a plant scientist postdoc at the University of Michigan who had pled guilty to smuggling biological material and making false statements. The letter to Jian’s attorney, intended to be used at her sentencing, argued that what the Chinese postdoc had transported was not dangerous, but she was still ultimately deported. Her conviction triggered an investigation of Youhuang Xiang, a Chinese postdoc in Innes’ lab, that led to Xiang also pleading guilty last month to smuggling loops of DNA known as plasmids. He was also deported.

Oh no, never criticize the US government.

This sounds like overreach by government agents trying desperately to find excuses to deport Chinese scientists, and taking out an American scientist as collateral damage. If I had foreign students, I would defend them without question, but apparently that will get you shut down in America.

I would love to know the rationale for excluding the PI from the lab, even if his post-docs were guilty of importing nefarious plants. Do they suspect him of plotting to attack the US from his lab in Indiana with evil weeds from China?

Interesting touch: the chair of Innes department is Armin Moczek, an eco-evo-devo guy I know of. He’s going to be watering Innes’ plants while he’s locked out.

Fun with knees

I’ve said before that I’ve got a tear in the lateral meniscus of my right knee, and that I’m supposed to get that patched up with arthroscopic surgery in less than two weeks. But my right knee is the good one, that until last summer never gave me any problems! It’s my left knee that has been a lifelong troublemaker: I dislocated it while shoveling rocks when I was 13 (child labor is bad, trust me on this) and again when I was in high school playing basketball against the Kent-Meridian High School varsity football team (they didn’t understand that tackling wasn’t part of the official rules.) Both were treated by wrenching my kneecap back into place, and putting me in a hip-to-ankle cast for 3 months. Kids, don’t injure yourself while living in the middle ages.

As long as I was going in for surgery on the right knee, the doctor figured we should check out the left. I had an MRI this week, and just got the text summary, which looks like it’s mostly normal, but with some minor funny business that I can’t tell if it’s in the normal range, or if I ought to get it repaired now, before I retire. I understand all the words, but lack the context to know what to do about it.

EXAM:
MRI KNEE LT WITHOUT CONTRAST

INDICATION:
Meniscal injury, knee,r/o meniscus injury,Internal derangement of left knee

TECHNIQUE:
Multiplanar multisequence knee MRI without contrast

COMPARISON:
Prior radiographs

FINDINGS:
Bones:Patella and trochlear subchondral reactive edema with small cysts.
Normal marrow. Minor patellofemoral osteophytes.

Ligaments, tendons:

ACL, PCL: Normal

Extensor mechanism: Proximal patellar tendinosis. Distal quadriceps normal.
Attenuated anterior fibers of MPFL suspicious for old proximal tear. Also
medial retinaculum. Minor thickening lateral retinaculum.

MCL and post/med corner: Distended bursa versus ganglion cyst along the
posterior/medial corner between pes anserinus and semimembranosus.

Lateral and post/lateral: Normal

Gastrocnemius tendons: Normal

Joint spaces:Small effusion. Minor reactive synovitis suprapatellar recess.
Diffuse patellar and trochlear cartilage loss mostly grade 2 and grade 3 with
small surface area grade 4 both sides. Small subchondral cysts.

Low-grade chondrosis medial, lateral compartments

Soft tissues:

No Baker’s cyst. Diffuse grade 1 muscle fatty infiltration

Tibial, common peroneal nerves: Normal

Menisci:

Lateral:Free edge surface fraying midbody. No definite tear

Medial: Normal morphology, signal

Comment: Abnormal MRI findings very common in asymptomatic volunteers,
frequently not a source of symptoms. Many studies demonstrate meniscal tears
in up to greater than 50% asymptomatic volunteers, cartilage defects >24%, bone
marrow lesions up to 50%, 21% tendon abnormalities, prevalence increasing w
age. Nearly all pain-free adult knees have at least 1 MRI abnormal finding, so
MRI findings must be interpreted under supervision of expert clinical
assessment.

Culvenor et al, Br J Sports Med 2019

Parkar & Adriaensen, Eur Radiol 2024

IMPRESSION:
1. Small effusion, reactive synovitis, patellofemoral cartilage loss
2. Mild patellar tendinosis
3. Suspected old partial tear MPFL retinaculum complex
4. Posterior/medial corner bursal distension versus ganglion or synovial cysts

That’s entertaining, and I appreciated that comment that “Nearly all pain-free adult knees have at least 1 MRI abnormal finding,” so I don’t feel any need to freak out. But I would raise my hand and say that I’m not pain-free, it’s been a chronic source of low-level pain for 50 years, and I don’t know what part of that is relevant to my situation.

I’ll talk to my doctor in the next few days to find out.

What kind of incompetent goofball would schedule maintenance for the last week of classes/finals week?

Yeah, sure, we all put our files/lectures/exams on this central server that we have no control over, and then they do this to us:

For those who don’t know, Canvas is the courseware many schools use for managing various essential class materials for our students.

Maybe I should rethink our reliance on this thing. You know, it used to be we didn’t use software for communications between students and professors.

Quit blaming Loxosceles!

Greg Laden has an excellent post on that Rittenhouse ‘spider bite’. It looked to me like he had a rash on his leg, which could be caused by any number of wicked little beasties — most likely a tick. Rittenhouse did brag about bravely killing a spider, but that could have been a scapegoat he found and killed without evidence, a common practice among right-wingers.

Greg makes a good point, that brown recluses actually are often scapegoats. They are reclusive (it’s even in the name!) and non-aggressive, and as one of the few spiders most people can name, it gets named without cause.

There was even an account on old Twitter to which you could send spider photos for judgment on whether they were a recluse or not. It was entertaining, because most of the photos sent in were not of recluses, and were mostly innocent, harmless spiders that were then murdered by ignorant people. Recluses and black widows are the witches of the spider world.

I had to wonder where Rittenhouse was running into recluses, because they sure aren’t found in Wisconsin. I guess he has moved to Texas. I think Texas is a black hole sucking all the notorious bad actors into it’s gravitational well, but it does have recluses.