Certification

The aristocratic elites always have a reason for their position at the top of society. Once upon a time it was “divine will” or “blue blood”. Now it is “merit” as if each child has an equal chance to become one of the people the elite are looking for in the next generation. What they are looking for mostly is people just like them …

In any system the extremely competent or extremely lucky have a small but finite chance to rise up a class or two. Until recently much of that ladder was financial worth, another favorite tradition of aristocrats .

Meanwhile, the lesser folks also sought some means of security, however humble. Once it was guilds, or the trade your father did. Recently, much was directed at “certification” .

Certification is simply a disguised guild system. In today’s economy and information age it is largely irrelevant. But legal requirements provide a useful barrier to entry to anyone trying to break into the club. Costs and time keep the riffraff at bay almost as well as “merit” insulates the wealthy. Mostly, it services the shrinking “middle class”. Oh, it all works, it seems. Always has. Society needs to use stuff like this to accommodate individuals. But a Martian ethnologist would surely have fun observing and writing its term paper .

Alfred the Great

And now for something completely different ,,,

Periodically I get an urge to read a biography or two. I just finished a long book about William Randolph Hearst, inspired by catching a flash of Citizen Kane on cable. Fortunately, I can borrow all this stuff from the library on my Kindle. Then I had a notion to learn more about Alfred the Great .

I like French history but I have always found the English equivalent to be more disjointed. Celts Saxons Romans Danes French _  cut-offs and new starts. So I searched the library – nothing but romantic novels. Books are available, of course, at a price – an electronic download now costs as much or more as a paper book. Fortunately there is project Gutenberg, which has massive stores of old writing (out of copyright) of just about anything. So I am using a nice nearly Victorian treatment of the subject .

I haven’t learned a lot about Alfred yet. But I have learned an awful lot about disentangling legend from fact. This historian is at great pains to do so. To be fair, so was the Hearst biographer, but he had only the movie to debunk. Alfred tends to be encrusted like Arthur, or – more appropriately – Charlemagne .

Legend has its place – Shakespeare used it to create immortal literature. But sometimes it is refreshing to sift into dry facts with a historian trying to carefully separate fact from fiction. We could use more of that with our current news .

Fragile AI Dreams

The WSJ and other media are filled with stories and predictions about the “AI revolution”. Some are utopian, some dystopian, some just weird and crazy. But all seem to have one glaring flaw .

That is the fact that AI – unlike life – is quite fragile. All the scenarios I have read assume that somehow things go on as now – lots of power, a connected grid, open communication, government power, social order, no electronic catastrophe (EMP blast, malware, whatever).

None of that is guaranteed, nor even likely .

I sense it as a lot like the advent of the internal combustion engine. Most dreamers saw it as a replacement for a horse. Some maybe understood it had advantages over steam. But nobody foresaw the social dynamics that ensued. Few even understood what it might do to transportation itself – for example to the road infrastructure .

Right now AI is free and exciting. But it can be easily wrecked. I’m not saying it will be, I’m not pretending I know what’s coming .

But I am sure it will be a lot different than what is currently predicted by both admirers and those who worry .

Immoral/Evil

This is an age of hyperbole. Everything is bigger, flashier, “more unique”. And there is a quick slide from what used to be gradients to absolutes .

This is easily demonstrated in the current description of “bad” things. We can all pretty much agree that “bad” means something we do not approve of (although what that may be might vary considerably). But there is a tendency for ‘“bad” to slip from “disapproval” to “immoral” to “evil” .

You can easily try it yourself. We may agree that illegal drug use is bad. Yet depending on circumstance, it rapidly becomes immoral, then evil. Then we must expend our energy to vanquish it.  We lose our center in an overbalance about something that may not be very important in the larger scheme of things _ trivial stuff like sex, rock and roll, clothing.

The world is complicated but except in special (personally defined) instances we prefer to understand it in binary black and white. Any other approach is too slow and confusing. I realize we are wired for this biologically. We are, after all, often confronted by clearly marked divisions – awake or asleep, fight or flight, be or not be.

We should always retain the flexibility to redefine, and to be aware that such clear judgments are in fact a continuum. Shades of gray. More than that, on a complicated matrix of interest of intersecting evaluations .

Everyone knows that. But time is short, life is frantic, and slogans are easy .

“Founders”

Kings justified themselves by “divine right”. Dictators claim “the will of the people”. In an era that worships wealth, billionaires claim “merit,” They are, simply, the best and brightest .

There is no doubt that many wealthy people work quite hard. As did many kings and dictators. As does, really almost everybody. And it is fair to believe that some work is good for society, and some irrelevant. Most of us want to believe that our tribe is best, and those who help our tribe should be respected .

Modern economics has become a high risk game requiring great access to capital and power. Like any gamble, it does require knowledge and perseverance. But on the increasingly overweight fringes of the bell curve of wealth distribution, it appears that luck rains supreme .

I respect brilliant people who toil for social good. I am less excited by “capitalists” who shoot dice in often rigged casinos. I do not think a “founder” is a god-like “maker” who always benefits society. I think he/she is often an extremely fortunate son of a bitch who began with a lot of advantages, thought only about winning money, and ignored most of their common humanity. Very like bad kings and evil dictators .

I don’t worry too much about wealth inequality. I do worry about idiots (kings, dictators, billionaires) who believe they are right about everything and should be worshiped by the rest of us. 

Lame Duck

Traditionally, “lame duck” has referred to a politician who for one reason or another cannot be reelected, but still remains in nominal power for the remainder of his term. It is a milder form of “dead man walking” .

Typically, it has been felt such people have lost most of their influence. Who will listen to them? And in this scenario (feared by everyone who grows old), the future seems less and less important, no need to care about consequences. So we have senile seniors living in a home filled with cats, for example. Or driving an automobile when addled on medication .

In politics, “lame duck” always implied impotence. But that was before the geriatrics took over. In an age of senile senior lame ducks, there is an increasing tendency for the official to “go rogue” and do anything, heedless of consequences, reputation, or advice .

This has,unfortunately, always been the pattern when emperors, dictators, or whatever have aged too much in office. But the US, until recently, was spared the antics of such as Tiberius, Stalin, or Mao. No longer .

It’s another effect of concentration of wealth. Wealth is power, power corrupts, and at some point a billionaire or trillionaire feels omnipotent, clever, and invincible and nobody can stop the madness .

An interesting phenomenon to observe, if one can stay out of the way .