The Sanity Project

Jetpack weirdness   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Administrative and tagged administrative jetpack on by

Jetpack just stopped working on this site. I don’t think it will affect your experience.

Jetpack is a plugin for WordPress websites that provides various services, including readership statistics. Yesterday, June 11, the statistics in my dashboard stopped working. There was a Jetpack update to install, so I accepted it, thinking it would fix the problem. Instead, Jetpack is now completely disabled for my site. A web search doesn’t find any evidence of a widespread change in Jetpack, so I don’t know why this happened.

This shouldn’t affect you, but let me know if anything looks weird or stops working.

Update: I managed to reconnect to Jetpack. Just a hiccup, I guess.

A note on Fanny Mendelssohn

This entry was posted in Music and tagged biography history music on by

Fanny Mendelssohn, also known by her married name Fanny Hensel, was a sister of the 19th-century composer Felix Mendelssohn. While she wasn’t nearly as famous as her brother, she was an excellent composer herself, and she doubtless would have been better known if 19th-century European society didn’t discourage women from professionally writing music. The website HenselPushers is devoted to publicizing her music and making it available in printed form. The site maintainer’s name isn’t given, but it’s been going for quite a while and appears reliable.

A recent article pointed out a common mistranslation of a statement by her father, Abraham Mendelssohn. Her biographer, R. Larry Todd, translated a sentence in a letter from Abraham to the 14-year-old Fanny as: “Music will perhaps become his [Felix’s] profession, whilst for you it can and must only be an ornament, never the root of your being and doing.” That sounds as if he was discouraging her from making music important in her life.

The actual quote, according to HenselPushers, is “Die Musik wird für ihn vielleicht Beruf, während sie für dich stets nur Zierde, immer Bildungsmittel, Grundbaß deines Seins und Thuns werden kann und soll.” The usual quotation has “niemals” (never) rather than “immer” (always), reversing the meaning, and omits “Bildungsmittel” (means of personal development). He recognized that the chances of her becoming a professional musician were slim at best, but he still regarded music as very important to her future.

This is just a short signal boost, so I won’t get into the reasons for the misquote, which HenselPushers thinks was an intentional alteration by her son Sebastian Hensel. I haven’t independently verified the analysis, but the translation of the German lines looks right to the best of my understanding. “Grundbaß” (spelled “Grundbass” today) means the “ground bass” or bass line of a piece of music; if it had a secondary meaning in the Mendelssohns’ time, it’s dropped out today. Abraham was using the word metaphorically.

Fanny is believed to have contributed to some of the compositions Felix published in his own name, though we’ll never know the exact extent.

Here’s a sampling of three of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words.

Tribalist thinking   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged psychology racism SanityProject on by

Tribal psychology, the tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them,” goes back to early human history. It gets its name because in earlier times, survival required loyalty to the tribe and suspicion of outsiders. In modern society, people of all kinds mix, but people still feel uncomfortable about those who are different from them. Sometimes they construct differences where there’s no real issue. Fan groups are a mostly harmless example. Red Sox fans hate the Yankees and Yankees fans hate the Red Sox, but it’s usually in fun. Science fiction fans disparage non-fans as “mundanes,” usually as a joke but sometimes with real disdain.

Problems arise when people use tribalist inclinations to treat outsiders as inferior or evil. That course can lead to violence, systemic discrimination, and legal persecution. It hurts members of the in-group as well, giving them fewer opportunities for valuable interactions and limiting them economically. It’s the antithesis of the liberal worldview, the idea that people should be regarded on their individual merits and have certain rights regardless of who they are.

People sometimes try to make sense of tribalism by reducing it to a single cause. Racism is an especially nasty form of it, but it’s only one of the foundations. Many on the left treat it as humanity’s Original Sin and ascribe all kinds of group hostility to racial attitudes, but it’s just one of the factors. Its influence has declined from past centuries. When it was acceptable, people used it to disparage groups that looked different. Today it’s less acceptable, so people define their groups in other ways.

Nationalism rose as a force in the nineteenth century, and it’s powerful today. Hostility based on foreignness is often considered acceptable, and many people have ferocious disdain for immigrants. People are often hostile to those with a different language or accent. Religion isn’t as powerful a factor as it was when you could be executed for heresy, but there’s a widespread view that (Evangelical) Christianity should get preferential legal status, and some countries still enforce state religions.

Irrational rage is useful for promoting hostility, the more irrational and enraged the better. This seems strange but makes historical sense. If an invading tribe posed a threat, the leaders had to stir the men up to fight. It isn’t easy to get calm, clear-headed people to march against people who want to kill them. The leaders of both sides needed fury to beat the other side. Today fury stirs people up even if they aren’t in combat. An enraged crowd is also good for electing candidates and forming mass protests.

It’s the “us vs. them” thinking which is at the core. The specifics of who’s “us” and who’s “them” vary with the fashions.

The expropriation of creativity   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged censorship liberty socialism on by

Socialist Bernie Sanders has proposed that the federal government seize 50% of the stock of businesses that are heavily involved in AI. It’s the classic socialist line that all creation comes out of “the people” and not specific people. It aims to expropriate not just wealth but credit for achievements.

Artificial intelligence was not created out of thin air. The data and language used by generative A.I. tools didn’t just pop into Sam Altman’s head or Elon Musk’s imagination. A.I. is built on our collective intelligence: our books, songs, artwork, journalism, computer code, scientific research, videos, conversations, images and ideas spanning generations. That is not just the opinion of Bernie Sanders.

 
For the most part, tech oligarchs have fed this knowledge into their A.I. models without permission, without acknowledgment, without compensation. In other words, the creative work of millions of people — writers, artists, musicians, journalists, teachers, scientists and ordinary citizens — has essentially been stolen by some of the wealthiest people in the world. It’s time for us to reclaim it.

 
Since A.I. is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity.

Face of a Borg of Star TrekThe first sentence is definitely true. AI software wasn’t “created out of thin air.” Nor was it created by some Borg-like “collective intelligence.” AI code, like any other, is created by people putting in long hours to turn abstract algorithms and data flows into code.

The term “artificial intelligence” is a vague one. Any software that does things that we previously thought only a human mind can do counts as AI. But eventually we get used to things like speech recognition, grandmaster-level chess, and self-driving cars and forget to call them AI. The current fad is large language models (LLMs), a brute-force technique that ingests vast amounts of information and spews it back out in new combinations. It’s encountered hostility because it’s shoved in our faces so much and isn’t especially reliable. Companies brag that they put “AI first,” which means that users are second at best.

There are legitimate concerns about LLMs grabbing up people’s research and creative work without credit or compensation. Many lawsuits have been filed over the matter. But the work they’re grabbing up isn’t the product of the collective hive mind either. It’s specific creations by specific people. When Sanders says “us,” he means the federal government, the monster which Trump currently exercises broad control over. Having the US government splitting the take with the companies doesn’t compensate creators or grant them credit. It especially ignores creators outside the US border. Advocates of the collective-mind hypothesis often regard the government as its embodiment, but a quick look shows how absurd that claim is.

Maybe Sanders thinks AI wasn’t invented till last year, consists only of LLMs, and works by stirring large amounts of information in a cauldron. Even assuming all those things, the pieces which go into software like ChatGPT are the products of individual efforts, not of the mythical mass mind.

Oh, and does the Borg mind exist only within the United States? How does the US grabbing companies help authors and artists in Europe, Asia, or Africa? Sanders’ proposal is really about giving the government control of information in the US. A government with 50% control of a business won’t have trouble censoring anything it doesn’t like.

The collective-mind claim expropriates not only creative work but the credit for doing it. It lets people who haven’t done anything special feel special.

Note on the LPNH   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged liberty New Hampshire on by

Just a quick note to say that the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire is a misnamed organization that I definitely don’t support. I call myself a libertarian or classical liberal, I live in New Hampshire, and I used to be involved with the LPNH when it was a much better organization. It got taken over by some people who don’t comprehend or don’t care about libertarian principles.

It’s been in the news because the national LP has revoked the state party’s affiliation. Carla Gericke, one of the founders of the Free State Project, described the state organization’s actions as “self-destructive, counterproductive, and increasingly unhinged.”

Several years ago, I was involved with LPNH Seacoast, a regional affiliate of LPNH. It has good people, with an emphasis on supporting everyone’s rights. It slipped away, and I lost contact with the people involved.

It would be nice if someone would start a new organization in the state. There are a lot of good libertarians and classical liberals in the state who are now homeless. I lack the skills to make it happen. Someone must have them.