What does Sam Altman do?

I wish he was saying goodbye.

I know that Sam Altman is rich, is controversial, is in charge of OpenAI, yadda yadda yadda, but I was wondering what his expertise was, what he actually does to earn attention, because it’s not as if there’s anything I can point to and say, “Sam Altman was responsible for that.” He just seems to have a lot of money that he spends on other people who do a lot of different things. The Washington Post ran a long and laudatory article that I read to find the answer.

Here’s the shortest summary I could find.

In a Silicon Valley milieu in which shooting star companies often give birth to cults of personality around firms’ founders, Altman has stood out. An investor with a dizzying array of interests, Altman might lack the singular focus of a Steve Jobs — or the sophisticated technical skills to create the products he sells — but according to fans and rivals, he has had since an early age an uncanny entrepreneurial energy and a force of will that inspires others to do their creative best.

Jesus. That’s a particularly vacuous bit of empty PR, isn’t it? So he has an “uncanny entrepreneurial energy” and “force of will,” and what he does with that is inspire other people to do the work he can’t.

Reading between the lines in the rest of the article, it becomes clear that what he has is lots of money, which he acquired by becoming best buddies with people like Peter Thiel, and that lots of people want to say nice things about him in hopes that he’ll give them some of his money. He’s a college dropout with no particular skills, other than money.

The article ends with this bullshit.

“He’s the kind of founder that can bend reality,” said Hemant Taneja, a friend of Altman’s and managing director of the venture capital firm General Catalyst, adding that Altman had invited him to invest in OpenAI but that he declined because he couldn’t understand the company’s complex structure. “By creating the fastest and most popular consumer application of generative AI, he showed us the art of the possible. … This is the first technology where every CEO of every company in every industry is now thinking about how to do AI in their business. He made that happen.”

So he’s a hype machine, aided by highly placed friends, who promotes the AI buzzword which people are already beginning to back away from. OK, got it.

One of our modern problems is that the structure of our society incessantly pushes money-shuffling assholes to the top of everything, rather than competent people with actual constructive skills. I’m not impressed by Altman or others of his ilk…which is, unfortunately, why I’ll die poor someday.

That’s not the right answer, Nikki

Nikki Haley got asked a straightforward question: “What was the cause of the United States’ Civil War?” She staggers back, stalls for time, and finally coughs up, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do. She just couldn’t spit up a statement about how slaves were denied those freedoms, and instead tried to turn it into some variation of a state’s right excuse.

The questioner was inaudible, but said something about slavery. Haley says What do you want me to say about slavery? and then fails to say anything…Next question.

It’s a perfect example of why the Civil War isn’t over yet, and how the Republican party has inherited the mantle of the Confederacy.

Oh, good. Someone transcribed the whole exchange, including the inaudible bits I couldn’t make out.

“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you’d answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery.'” That about sums it up.

Do I have to do this again?

I should warn you, I’m not in a good mood. The Xmas season does that to me, I’m soured on the ugly combination of raging religiosity and constant consumerism, and then the elevated expectations that the holiday never meets, and the fact that it’s just a brief break between labors that I have to spend getting prepared for the next semester. Just call me Scrooge, and I don’t believe in ghosts, so I don’t expect redemption.

Another thing that doesn’t help is other humans. See that grinning fellow on the right? That’s Richard Eggleston, retired ophthalmologist, and shallow Christian. Also a colossal motherfucking dumbass idiot who used his holiday to write a long cliched letter to his local newspaper in which he declared “We are seeing the last few gasps of macroevolution” and parrots the dumbest, most thoroughly refuted canards of the last 60+ years of creationism, failing to acknowledge even the slightest doubt his dogma.

Before I vomit all over it, let me say that I don’t think most Christians share his views. Most citizens of this country broadly accept the general idea that the Earth is very old and that life has changed over that long history, although many will try to vaguely credit some kind of god as having a poorly-defined role in somehow guiding it, and they may also have a reluctance to say humans are directly a product of that process. We’re special, you know. There is, however, a cult-like subset that actively and stupidly denies pretty much all of science in order to prop up their benighted beliefs about Jesus. Richard Eggleston represents these cancerous polyps growing in the feculent muck of intellectually impoverished Christianity.

He’s also a terrible writer who can’t maintain a train of thought for more than a sentence.

Here’s his opening argument, for instance.

Why do evolutionists spend so much time and effort attacking intelligent design? Not because they think it is wrong and want to “save science” but because they know it to be true and that it will demolish their humanistic world view beliefs. When questions are allowed, it is science. When not, it’s propaganda. True science is evidence-based, as is Christianity. Centuries-old prophecies, of which more than 300 about Jesus were fulfilled, and 1,500 others were mostly fulfilled. The rest are waiting for the apocalypse.

In sum: he knows what ‘evolutionists’ believe; we know that Christianity is true; we are afraid that our “world view” will be destroyed if we admit it. None of that is true. One of the hallmarks of the True Christianity is a complete inability to see the world from another perspective.

It’s the Christians who don’t allow questions…or rather, only tolerate one answer. In that infamous Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, it was Nye who was willing to change his mind given evidence, while it was Ham, who seems to be the source of most of Eggleston’s ideas, who refused to consider the possibility. Eggleston then wanders off into Christian propaganda, claiming that “predictions” from a holy book are evidence, rather than ambiguous claims that have been extensively reinterpreted by apologists, and somehow we’re supposed to believe in an upcoming apocalypse. Focus, man, focus. There are at least a half-dozen assertions in that one paragraph and he can’t back up any of them.

The rest of his long op-ed consists of a string of creationism’s dumbest hits: all of the animal phyla appeared in the Cambrian explosion, there are no transitional forms, quote-mines to claim that well-known evolutionary biologists, like Charles Darwin, Colin Patterson, and Jenny Clack denied the evidence for evolution, and gross misunderstandings of what evolution claims. For example,

They believe billions of years of DNA mutations from nonliving goo somehow spontaneously, in a magical moment, eventually brought humans into existence, a process termed abiogenesis. The evolutionists will cite examples of microevolution as being macroevolution to falsely support their position. Most mutations are fatal.

Nope. No one believes in his “magical moment” that transformed goo into humans.

It’s just too tedious to dissect. And then he ends on nonsense about abortions because, of course, he’s just regurgitating familiar fundamentalist bullshit, and that’s part of the litany.

I am so fed up with the never-ending flood of lies pouring out of stupid old farts like Eggleston, or young farts who have been infected with the pathological poison of this peculiar literalist sect that just shrieks the certainty of their dogma but never pauses to think, and evaluate, and question. A child could see through the entirety of his opinions.

Xmas plans…kaput!

My daughter is having a big Xmas party today, and she doesn’t sound thrilled about it — the in-laws are coming to visit, and she’s doing all the cooking. We’re not adding to the burden though, because she’s in Madison, and a 7 hour drive is just too much for us this week.

Middle son is really far out of reach. He’s in Korea for two weeks!

We were planning on visiting our oldest son in St Cloud, only two hours away, but then we saw the weather alert for Christmas day: “Mixed precipitation expected. Total snow accumulations of up to one inch and ice accumulations of around a tenth of an inch. Winds gusting as high as 40 mph.”

I think Mary and I are trapped together, alone in an icebound house for Xmas day. I don’t exactly have a Xmas feast prepared either, but I did make a simple lentil soup. It’ll help us stay warm.

Meanwhile, several of the webcomics I follow have a tradition of taking a week or two off this time of year, and they make low-effort filler strips that can be weirdly entertaining. Oglaf (NSFW!) has True Slut Adventures, Unspeakable Vault (of Doom) has a Mandatory Xmas Strip, and Questionable Content features a week of Bembo the Bembarian which, this time around, is perfect for me.

We’re all taking it easy (except for poor Skatje) today and this week. I hope you’re all enjoying some slack for the holidays!

Should I take attendance in my classes?

I’m working on my class policy for next semester. Last semester was rough — I had bent over backwards to provide maximum flexibility, with an online option and no mandatory attendance, and it was fairly typical to have only half, or less, of the class show up. I considered changing the policy mid-semester, but it was written into the syllabus, so I had to stick with it. There will be changes next term, I tell you what.

This little video illustrates my problem.

I really like the prisoner’s dilemma twist in the middle — if only one student shows up, they pass the course and everyone else fails. There was one day fall term where that could have been invoked.

To answer the question in the title: yes, I’m going to take attendance, and it’s going to count. My big class this spring is going to be heavily interactive, and I’ll need people to show up.

Merry Xmas to you, if you own a house

Last week at this time, I was back in the suburbs of Seattle, in the towns where I grew up. My sister lives in Kent, in the familiar neighborhood where my grandparents lived, where the church I attended was located, and also, where my wife-to-be grew up. My sister can’t drive anymore, so she let me use her car that week, and I drove out to Kent multiple times to pick her up and bring her to my mother’s place, and I’d drive through old familiar places and reminisce a bit.

Except…they all felt terribly cramped.

It wasn’t just that these were places I frolicked in when I was a small child, and now I’m all growed up, but because everything was walled off with barricades and police tape. In particular, the entire strip along the railroad tracks was cordoned off. This was one of my favorite places to play, because it was full of garter snakes and grasshoppers, and when I was very young, we’d walk along the tracks picking up coal that had fallen off the coal cars to bring to my grandmother, who’d burn them in a pot-bellied stove to keep her house warm. It never appealed as a place to camp, though, since all through the day and night the freight trains would roar through there, and the crossing would flash red lights and ding-ding-ding. You’d have to be truly desperate to want to sleep there.

Well, now no kid is going to want to play there because it’s taped off and there never were any toilets there, so I guess people would just go in the bushes, and they were strewn with garbage. It’s all very unsightly. Here’s a convenient map of homeless hot spots in Kent, and it’s disturbing because I knew the area well. #18 is right next to my grandmother’s house, and #33 is the Green River Road where I’d often go biking and swimming in the river and fishing.

So far it seems like the solution is to send the cops in to chase everyone away, and to ask local religious charities to help out. Remember, this is in the kingdom of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, where incredible wealth thrives, but at the same time many people are assembling cardboard lean-tos in rocky fields next to the railroad tracks. It’s a bit chilly out there, and it rains almost all the time. Too bad they can’t all build a mansion with a gorgeous view of Lake Washington or something.

Another solution: the NY Times ran a story about people in Oregon who were so distressed by all the homeless people that they fled to red Missouri, where apparently they do a more thorough job of rousting the layabouts and keeping them away from good Republican citizens. AR Moxon summarized the story, which is good for me, because I do not read the NY Times anymore and forevermore. The whole article is worth reading, but this is the hard nasty core of it all.

Anyway, everywhere around this country, cities whose governments (not always Republican government, I notice) have agreed to accept the underlying supremacist premises (even if they oppose various supremacist tactics), and have engaged in a policy of elimination of unhoused people, all in the name of safety, even while state governments pursue policies that ensure that more and more people will fall into poverty and lose their access to housing.

It seems to me that better, but more expensive, strategies than walling off portions of the town with police tape would be things like Universal Basic Income, and cracking down on predatory landlords, and capping and enforcing limits on rent, and taxing the hell out of McMansions and especially real mansions, and changing zoning laws to encourage the construction of low income housing. I imagine the people running those towns would panic over the hit to their tax base, but you’d think they’d realize that having refugee camps scattered all over town wasn’t particularly attractive, either.

There is more to that NY Times story, though, because it sure as heck isn’t about deploring policies that create a tide of homelessness. No, it’s about how the Huckins family of Portland was so disturbed by liberal Oregon policies, in exactly the same way that the Nobles family of Iowa was forced to flee to Minnesota because of red state policies. They’re exactly the same! Both sides are indistinguishable.

The Nobles moved because one of their children is trans, and the government of their home state of Iowa has decided that it would be better if trans people didn’t exist quite so much in Iowa, and have passed a law to make that happen. Iowa isn’t particularly special here. Pretty much every state controlled by Republicans has decided much the same thing, and has either passed a similar law or is planning to. There are a lot of intentions stated behind this: the desire for fairness in girls’ sports is one, for example—which is interesting, since Republicans have never been particularly interested in funding girls’ sports, and the actual impact of trans kids on high school sports in Iowa is best described as “undetectable.” The desire to keep girls safe in school bathrooms is another, which is sort of rich coming from the same people who refuse to make schools safe from gun massacres, and who insist on forced birth legislation that is making maternal mortality rates spike, and who pass laws that require genital inspection. The desire to make students comfortable is cited, which is interesting, since it gives away the clear belief that trans kids, who are being othered and excluded in the name of this comfort, are not considered students, or at least that their comfort is considered utterly immaterial, that their existence as students is something divorced from the general responsibility to create a safe comfortable environment for students—that their existence as students represents only discomfort and danger for others.

The NY Times pretended that these two families were exactly the same. They ignored the fact that what drove the Huckinses away were wasteful, destructive Republican policies that amplified the rich-poor divide and that have dismantled the social safety net, while what drove the Nobles away were hateful Republican policies that directly threatened their family. There’s a reason I don’t read that rag that props up the status quo.

The Nobles needed safety. They left their home state because they were being eliminated by their state government. The Nobles were, and are, in serious danger.

The Huckinses wanted to feel safe. They left their state because of insufficient elimination of unwanted and deliberately abandoned people, and came to a state where the people they would rather not see—people who are in the greatest danger—are nowhere to be seen, almost as if they had been pre-cleared away ahead of time, specifically for people like the Huckinses, who enable the danger that others are in, and still do.

I guess I can be thankful this Christmas that we don’t have a visible homelessness problem here in rural Minnesota — you can’t survive a Minnesota winter with a makeshift camp, it takes a serious investment in survival to build the kind of shelter you need here.

Although that makes me wonder — we still have a serious problem with poverty here, there are homeless people around, we just don’t see them. Where do they go? Missouri?

It’s not genes that make a family

Every once in a while, I get an email from 23andme to notify me that I have a new DNA relative. When a new person gets their DNA sampled, and if they have given permission to do so, they send out a message to all the people who have some degree of genetic relationship. There’s a limit, obviously — we’re all related to everyone, so they don’t want to have to send out a notice to all of their subscribers every time someone signed up. It looks like the limit is somewhere around 4th cousins, which is already pretty tenuous. I have over 1500 DNA relatives flagged on the site, most around the 4th degree cousin level of relationship, which means that we share about 0.34% of the DNA inherited from our last common ancestor. I know hardly any of them.

When I look at the list, yeah, I definitely know the top 2 names — they’re my kids. 50% of our DNA shared. I don’t have to go at all far down the list before descending into total mystery. I recognize a couple of cousins, some familiar family names, and then…who are these people? Once you’ve dropped below 4% shared DNA, you’re too distantly related for me to have known you, with some exceptions, not that I would mind knowing you. I’m sure you’re all lovely people.

What I see from these kinds of data, though, is that genes are not at all a good measure of relatedness. Every child of each generation throws away half of one parents’ DNA, so generation after generation “your” genes are rapidly and progressively diluted, unavoidably. If you’re hoping for some kind of genetic immortality, it’s not going to happen, because the mechanics of meiosis are going to steadily break up the particular combination of genes that make up the genetic “you”. You can draw up all the pedigrees you want to illustrate your family connections, but they aren’t particularly meaningful.

As you can see, a fourth cousin would share a great-great-great grandparent with me, but that connection is rather abstract. I personally knew two of my great-grandparents, but anyone before that is, at best, an old black-and-white photo in a dusty family album, or perhaps a line in a census record. 23andme tells me that we have less than a percent of shared DNA passed down from that great-great-great grandparent. Lineage really doesn’t matter all that much, because we’re all just a great sloppy gemisch, a random subset of a population, and it’s the population as a whole that matters in the long run. The unique combination of genes that make up me are going to be broken up and dispersed over time, and some will be lost.

I can’t even stress enough how trivial those genetic inheritances are: I am not the sum of my individual genes, but the product of all of my genes interacting with each other and the environment in complex ways. My kids may each have 50% of my genes, but they are not 50% “me” — each one is unique and distinct, and I can have no claim on them. Part of the pleasures of parenting is creating someone new and watching them become independent and express themselves in ways you wouldn’t have thought of — not as a reflection of yourself, but as someone completely novel in all ways. They may share 50% of my genes, but they’re marshalling them in different ways in different contexts in cooperation with my wife’s genes.

I have no patience with possessive parents who want to mold their children to their preferences. I also don’t have much sympathy for “royal bloodlines” or other such nonsense. The king of England and I might both be related to William the Conqueror, but that drop of blood has been attenuated and reduced to meaninglessness by a thousand years of gene juggling and recombination and drift and mutation and loss. We shouldn’t care any more.

There is something meaningful there, though. I started this post by mentioning my email from 23andme — they had a new member who, they said, was my second cousin. I recognized the last name as belonging to one branch of my family, so I contacted my brother and sisters and asked if they knew who they were, because I sure didn’t. Yes, they did. It wasn’t my 2nd cousin, they were my first cousin twice removed; they were the grandchild of my first cousin. We shared 2.65% of our DNA with my grandparent, their great-great-grandparent, which, as I’ve said is a bit trivial and not at all grounds for showing up unannounced at their house for Sunday dinner. But we do have a connection.

I knew their grandfather well — he was my cousin, we regularly met throughout our childhood and youth to engage in shenanigans at their ranch in Eastern Washington. We hiked, we went fishing, I called him a stupid redneck, he called me a liberal pussy, and he beat me up now and then. It was a sometimes prickly relationship. He got wilder as he got older, while I became more staid, and we drifted apart, which meant fewer bruises for me but fewer wild adventures in the back country. You know, he once killed and ate raw a red-winged blackbird in front of me to prove he was tougher than I was? Kinda grossed me out.

Their great-grandmother, my cousin’s mother, was a rock who earned our respect. She was a tough old bird who raised a sometimes fractious family with love, despite often struggling economically. She was my father’s older sister, and I think she helped hold that family together, too. We visited her a few weeks before her death from liver cancer. She knew it was coming. She was awesomely brave about it all, retiring to a little house on the Palouse, where she could appreciate the country in her last days.

I knew their great-great-grandmother, my grandmother, even better. I spent many happy days in my childhood at her house, which was a crumbling shack next to the railroad tracks, with one wall slowly peeling away from the rest of the house and floors that sagged in odd ways. She had been a widow since about 1939, and raised a family of six kids single-handedly, working as a fruit-picker in season and in a cannery in the off-season. She was always kind and generous with her grandchildren, which was good since she had a great milling mob of them running wild over the house all the time. Sometimes my cousin would visit to twist my arm and make me say ‘uncle’ while I was there.

Those are the ties that bind, the connections that really matter. Native Americans have the right idea — you aren’t an Indian if you have a pedigree that shows some distant relative gave you a dollop of tribal DNA (Elizabeth Warren was taught that lesson a few years ago), what matters is the personal associations, the actual sharing of the life of an Indian. As a biologist, you’d think I’d place more weight on the numbers and percentages and genetics, but no, I’m not at all impressed with a 2.65% genetic share in my twice-removed first cousin’s DNA…but hey, I knew their grandfather, and that matters far more to me. I’d probably enjoy meeting them and having a conversation about family.

Unless they decided to beat me up to prove how tough they were. I would hope that doesn’t run in the family.

Waiting for our snow

We were wondering if we were going to have a white Xmas this year — it looks pretty brown out there with a few small spots of crunchy snow here and there. The weather forecast looks like continuing brownness through next week. So we were wondering how often this happens…and the National Weather Service provided the history. We had brown Christmasses here in 2021, 2018, 2015, 2014, etc.!

I’m not worried. I’m sure we’ll get a white January and February.