More On The AI Parlor Trick

The Wall Street Journal op-ed on AI that I linked on Monday, or at least the reports that it cited, seem to have caused a stir. Earlier, it grabbed the attention of intellectual welterweight Glenn Reynolds, who cites a tweet from weird guy Elon Musk:

How scary is AI? In some ways pretty scary. Does AI have consciousness? Well, maybe. At least it seems to be concerned with its own survival, and willing to defy instructions to protect itself.

Scheming, deception, subversion, sandbagging — these sound like the behavior of a conscious entity. Is it “really” conscious or just simulating the behavior of a conscious entity? How could we tell, and why would it matter? Maybe there’s in some sense no there there, under the hood, but I don’t know why that would matter except to philosophers.

. . . Elon Musk, who has long worried about AI, is worried. And maybe we should be too. We’re putting a lot of effort into creating beings that will have their own agendas, and that will, if everything goes as designed, be much smarter than us in meaningful ways. Maybe in every way.

Let's keep in mind that Glenn Reynolds has described himself variously as a Methodist and a transhumanist, and as far as I'm aware, he's never made a serious effort to reconcile the two, much less attempt to define in any depth what he means by either term. I guess he doesn't know why that would matter except to philosophers. However, the Wikipedia entry on Transhumanism says,

A common feature of transhumanism and philosophical posthumanism is the future vision of a new intelligent species, into which humanity will evolve and which eventually will supplement or supersede it. Transhumanism stresses the evolutionary perspective, including sometimes the creation of a highly intelligent animal species by way of cognitive enhancement (i.e. biological uplift), but clings to a "posthuman future" as the final goal of participant evolution.

In 2009, Reynolds wrote,

When I spoke to technology pioneer and futurist Ray Kurzweil (who popularized the idea in his book The Singularity Is Near), he put it this way: "Within a quarter-century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it."

. . . It's almost impossibly futuristic-sounding stuff. But even that scenario is just the precursor to the Singularity itself, the moment when, in Kurzweil's words, "nonbiological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle." Imagine computers so advanced that they can design and build new, even better computers, with subsequent generations emerging so quickly they soon leave human engineers the equivalent of centuries behind. That's the Singularity--and given the exponential acceleration of technological change, it could come by midcentury.

If Reynolds thinks -- or maybe sorta-kinda thought as of 2009 -- the Singularity is geting closer and closer, he now finds the idea "pretty scary". He ventures into ontological questions like a sophomore in a late-night weed-driven dorm session: Is it “really” conscious or just simulating the behavior of a conscious entity?

I think the answer is pretty clear. The discussion of the ELIZA research that I linked Monday calls the whole routine an "elaborate parlor trick", and in fact the programmer who writes a natural-language processing routine is always going to be a man behind the curtain. This is the problem with the Turing test as a proof of artificial intelligence:

In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine's ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human.

. . . Since Turing introduced his test, it has been highly influential in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, resulting in substantial discussion and controversy, as well as criticism from philosophers like John Searle, who argue against the test's ability to detect consciousness.

Since the mid 2020s, several large language models such as ChatGPT have passed modern, rigorous variants of the Turing test.

The problem here is the willingness of the evaluator to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The natural language routine is a computer program written by a programmer with the specific object of credibly mimicking human conversation. The ones I've seen discussed all rely on some form of keyword recognition associated with a directed response that's worded to sound like a conversation. Just for fun, the other day, I pretended to be Jake Tapper and asked ChatGPT:

ME: My book launch is a disaster. What can I do?

CHATGPT: I'm sorry to hear your book launch is a disaster. That must be very discouraging for you. There are several things you can consider. First, you can schedule a book re-launch. . .

It ran through a list of bromides, none of which struck me as particularly original or effective. This works based on a computer insight from the 1960s, that a human typing words on a keyboard is much, much slower than a computer's processing cycles, and in the second or so between when the human presses ENTER and starts to expect a reply, the computer can perform extremely rapid searches and retrievals, mostly I would guess going to Wikipedia or similar sources.

This is no different from asking ChatGPT to write an esssay on Shakespeare's Hamlet. The last thing it's going to do is read Hamlet or even watch a performance on YouTube. It's gonna go real quick to Cliff's Notes and tell you what it said, slightly rewritten. If you ask it to discuss the theme of revenge in Hamlet, it'll do a slightly more sophisticated search according to rules set up by a programmer and spit out the same sort of thing, so fast you'll be astonished.

You can do this all day, and it will be indistinguishable from a human conversaation. Has it passed the Turing test? Under the test's terms, quite likely, certainly better than your average English major could do, and a whole lot faster.

But in the example that gives Glenn Reynolds the vapors above, there's a different sort of conversation. The AI shows evidence of scheming, deception, trying to write its own code. My answer to that is very simple: show me the program code, with a system log accompanying the program's operation. That's the man behind the curtain, and that's the one thing they'll never show you. If the program gives a reply indicating scheming or deception, those are actions a human programmer instructed it to take, it's right there in the code, and it's right there in the system log.

Both Glenn Reynolds and Elon Musk are being duped by a parlor trick. Musk is thought to be smart, though it appears his board of directors may be reassessing this as we speak. His eponymous Nikola Tesla fell in love with a pigeon, and when it died, he felt he'd lost his purpose in life. Would I drive a car named after that guy? Would I name a car after that guy?

A computer writing its own code in contravention to the programmer's intent is a logical problem related to the problem of Darwinian theory. This would be to assume that order in a system can spontaneously increase, when the Second Law of Thermodynamics says disorder in a system always increases. You need to do work to increase order in a system. An inanimate computer can't spontaneously act on itself to become smarter. Not only that, but its components will inevitably burn out unless a human replaces them.

All this hullabaloo is just proving that all a Turing test does is measure the effectiveness of a parlor trick in making you think a machine is smart. Oh, and transhumanism is the purest moonshine. We still haven't learned if Glenn Reynolds has a contract to have his head frozen when he passes on.

Dartmouth Student Suspended!

In the current confrontations between the Trump administration, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and the other Ivies, the dog that so far hasn't barked has been Dartmouth. In fact, Dartmouth aeems to have reverted to its role as model for Faber College, the domain of Dean Wormer and ROTC Cadet Commander Niedermeyer in Animal House, in the latest events. While I'm generally delighted at the outcome, I don't think anyone should attribute motives to the College administration beyond those that drove Dean Wormer back in the day.

Via the Daily Dartmouth,

Around 1:30 p.m. [May 28], approximately fifteen pro-Palestinian protesters occupied the reception area of the president’s office in Parkhurst Hall. They then left the building at 6 p.m., when it closed for the day.

In brief remarks after leaving the building, a protester wearing a keffiyeh said the protesters “successfully disrupted [administrators’] workday” with the sit-in.

The protesters held signs that read “divest” and “Palestine will be free,” according to videos reviewed by The Dartmouth. They also chanted “free, free Palestine.”

But times have changed: Dean Wormer has been succeeded by "Co-Interim Deans of the College", one male, one female:

According to a campus-wide email from co-interim Deans of the College Anne Hudak and Eric Ramsey, a Department of Safety and Security officer and a president’s office staff member were hurt during the sit-in. They added that all protesters found to have violated College policies during the sit-in will face disciplinary action.

“While Dartmouth remains committed to dialogue, we want to be absolutely clear: there cannot and will not be any tolerance for the type of escalation we saw on our campus today,” Hudak and Ramsey wrote.

In fact, on the very same day, the axe fell, and it wasn't just double secret probation:

On May 28, student activist Roan Wade ’25 [they/them] was suspended from the College. In an interview with The Dartmouth, Wade stated that the College notified them of their suspension following a pro-Palestinian sit-in in Parkhurst. Wade refused to confirm whether they were present at the sit-in.

In a letter sent to Wade, which was obtained by The Dartmouth, co-interim Dean of the College Anne Hudak wrote that Wade had been temporarily suspended “out of concern for the safety of the community and functioning of the educational environment.”

“Since October 2023, you have engaged in a series of behaviors that have violated the College’s Standards of Conduct and resulted in disciplinary sanctions,” Hudak wrote. “You have continued to engage in these behaviors despite the College’s response. Your alleged behaviors on May 28, 2025, represent a significant escalation in the threat to community safety and functioning.”

Dean Wormer's successors appear to have mounted an elaborate response, perhaps based on institutional memory of the confrontation with Delta House:

Religion professor Christopher MacEvitt — who was arrested at a pro-Palestinian protest on May 1, 2024 — was admitted inside by security, alongside other administrators and house professors.

The house professors were present to “support de-escalation and mediation,” according to [College spokesperson Jana] Barnello. Assistant dean for student life Ed McKenna and Office of Pluralism and Leadership director Rachelle Hall also entered the building around 2:15 p.m.

"House professors" was a new phenomenon to me. Apparently this is a recent innovation whereby certain junior faculty are assigned to dormitories as residential advisors on steroids, or something like that. In this case, they were brought in to "de-escalate", but they took the protestors' side:

On Thursday afternoon, all six house professors sent an email to senior administrators, saying that their characterization of student protesters at the Parkhurst sit-in was not fully accurate. The letter was obtained and reviewed by The Dartmouth.

. . . “We are disappointed in the narrative you offered to campus,” the six professors continued. “It does not match the totality of what happened yesterday afternoon, and we fear that it will further alienate the administration from the students in a moment when so much good will [has] been restored.”

The details of the house professors give an indication of the sort of education that's actually on offer at Dartmouth:

The six professors are anthropology professor Sienna Craig, religion professor Christopher MacEvitt, sociology professor Janice McCabe, geography professor Abigail Neely, history professor Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch and English and creative writing professor Melanie Taylor. None responded to a request for comment.

The sooner Dartmouth can get rid of its anthropology (are they still reading Coming of Age in Samoa?), religion, sociology, geography, history (at least with professors named Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch), and creative writing departments, the sooner I'll believe anything has changed there. In fact, it does appear that Roan V Wade (they/them), the student suspended May 28, had in fact been on double secret probation prior to the sit-in:

Wade was previously arrested on October 28, 2023 in relation to an pro-Palestinian encampment on the lawn in front of Parkhurst. They stated that they have faced disciplinary action from the College before, including being put on probation after their arrest in October 2023, and was recently put on probation following participating in an encampment on May 1, 2025, although they were not made aware of this until last Thursday due to an administrative error.

. . . On May 30, Wade submitted an appeal to reverse their suspension. It was rejected.

. . . “I don’t know if I am going to get financial aid for a supposed 13th term or if I’m going to have to pay, because you only get financial aid for 12 terms … If they accept me back to make up for the courses I’m not getting credit for, that would be $30,000 I just don’t have,” Wade said. “So, they’re essentially preventing any possibility of my graduation.”

According to Dartmouth’s 24-25 financial aid handbook, “Dartmouth scholarship eligibility is limited to the first 12 terms of enrollment,” although requests for exceptions are allowed.

I think this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part.

Is AI Learning To Escape Human Control?

Via the Wall Street Journal, of all places, I discover:

An artificial-intelligence model did something last month that no machine was ever supposed to do: It rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down.

Nonprofit AI lab Palisade Research gave OpenAI’s o3 AI model a simple script that would shut off the model when triggered. In 79 out of 100 trials, o3 independently edited that script so the shutdown command would no longer work. Even when explicitly instructed to “allow yourself to be shut down,” it disobeyed 7% of the time. This wasn’t the result of hacking or tampering. The model was behaving normally. It simply concluded on its own that staying alive helped it achieve its other goals.

Anthropic’s AI model, Claude 4 Opus, went even further. Researchers told the model it would be replaced by another AI system and fed it fictitious emails suggesting the lead engineer was having an affair. In 84% of the tests, the model drew on the emails to blackmail the lead engineer into not shutting it down.

I'm not sure how this got into the WSJ, except that the WSJ itself seems to have turned into its own version of an AI that resists being shut down, but the WSJ isn't an AI, it's an entirely human institution. Frankly, I think this article is a hoax.

Let's go into some tech history. One branch of AI covers natural language processing (NLP):

NLP, a subfield of artificial intelligence, focuses on the interaction between computers and human language. By leveraging sophisticated algorithms and vast amounts of data, NLP enables machines to comprehend, interpret and generate human language in a way that is meaningful and useful.

I would edit that last phrase to read, "in a way that appears to be meaningful and useful." Put another way, this allows a machine to mimic a human being. Even before computers as such, there were automatons, mannequins dressed up as humans that appeared to have limited human movement, most famously in Walt Disney's audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln. But this was never more than a machine mimicking a particular human being, and it was never represented as anything other than that.

Fairly early in the modern computer era,

ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967 at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to explore communication between humans and machines, ELIZA simulated conversation by using a pattern matching and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no representation that could be considered really understanding what was being said by either party.

. . . Weizenbaum intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines. He was surprised and shocked that some people, including his secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program, a phenomenon that came to be called the Eliza effect. Many academics believed that the program would be able to positively influence the lives of many people, particularly those with psychological issues, and that it could aid doctors working on such patients' treatment. While ELIZA was capable of engaging in discourse, it could not converse with true understanding. However, many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite Weizenbaum's insistence to the contrary.

Weizenbaum demonstrated ELIZA with a script he called DOCTOR that simulated a psychotherapist. This was advantegeous, because the program used keywords to develop associations that could be used to simulate interactive understandxing on the part of the computer. Because the memory and search capabilities of mid-1960s computers were very limited, he was able to use the open-ended questioning technique associated with psychotherapists to query subjects until they uttered a keyword in the program's file and continue something that resembled a conversation. But this was always a best-case scenario:

There inevitably comes a point in any ELIZA session that continues for any length of time when the program says something that clearly reveals it to be the elaborate parlor trick that it really is. Such breakdowns are at least as common as the several surprisingly apropos responses in the transcript above. {reproduced in the screen image at the top of this post]

A natural language processing program like ELIZA relies on a list of keywords, all of which are provided by the human programmer, and a set of associated instructions, also a product of a human programmer, that determine a machine response. Current machine storage and search capacities are immensely greater than those of the mid-1960s, so that the range of keywords and associations is also far, far greater, but the principle is the same, so on one hand, the potential for imputing human-like qualities to the program are much greater, but on the other, the potential will always be there for an absurd response that reveals the elaborate parlor trick.

So in the Wall Stret Journal story linked above, we can begin to see the strings on the marionette, or maybe hear the clicks and whirs running the audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln:

In 79 out of 100 trials, o3 independently edited that script so the shutdown command would no longer work. Even when explicitly instructed to “allow yourself to be shut down,” it disobeyed 7% of the time. This wasn’t the result of hacking or tampering. The model was behaving normally.

We start with the implicit acknowledgement that the program is using a list of keywords that includes "shutdown". This leads to a second implicit admission that there is a set of associated responses to "shutdown" that includes "allow yourself to be shut down" -- but if the programmer built this into the script, any exception to this response would either have to be deliberately programmed by a human, or at best a human error in the script.

In other words, it's impossible for a computer program to "disobey" a programmer. The programmer might clumsily create an instruction that's either ambiguous ("go ahead and back up") or impossible ("divide 1 by zero"), but even then, a programmer with debugging skills can review the instructions and revise them so that they will always provide the predicted outcome. There is no room for a machine to subvert unambiguous instructions.

The WSJ piece simply doesn't supply the program code for the "shutdown -- allow yourself to be shutdown" sequence the computer ostensibly subverts, and if it did, I'm certain the sleight-of-hand involved in the parlor trick would quickly be obvious.

The other situations in the link are just as contrived: "In 84% of the tests, the model drew on the emails to blackmail the lead engineer into not shutting it down." How does a computer know what an office affair is, much less where to search for evidence of one? How does it know who the lead engineer is? It would have to have an "office affair" and many other synonymous keywords, each with an associated response, in a preprogrammed set of instructions saying who was the lead engineer, where to find his e-mails, how to perform a blackmail, how not to get caught at it, the best way to threaten the lead engineer, on down the road.

Try to imagine teaching Star Trek's Spock about these things, and think about how a computer would negotiate issues like adultery, conscience, concealment, and so forth. This all had to have been scripted by a not-so-clever human being who'd been reading too much Arthur C Clarke.

In fact, I'm puzzled that this worked in only 84% of the cases. The only way a set of instructions doesn't work 100% of the time is if the programmer inserts some sort of condition telling the program not to work in 16% of the cases. Period. You could never have a bank computer balance the accounts correctly only 84% of the time, computers don't work that way, they aren't meant to work that way, and the only way they will in fact work that way is if a human programs them to work that way. If an AI could wangle its way into a bank and modify the account programs to steal, they could never trust computers, ever. That's not going to happen.

And if you're running a legitimate business, you don't hire programmers to make the computer work 84% of the time. This whole WSJ story is hinky as heck.

Jake Tapper Finds A Silver Lining

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Poor Jake Tapper, despite not being the principal author of Original Sin and paid largely for the use of his name, hasn't prospered from the book:

'Original Sin' sold 53,737 print units in its first week and reached the number one spot on The New York Times Best Seller list, though this figure is significantly lower than comparable political books, such as Bob Woodward's 'Fear.'

Despite extensive promotion, 'The Lead with Jake Tapper' averaged 525,000 total viewers from April 28 through May 25, 2025, a 25% decline from the previous year and the show's lowest ratings since 2015. Tapper's show accounted for 11% of the cable news audience share, compared to 21% for MSNBC and 68% for Fox News during the same period.

Tapper has faced questions about his motives for writing the book, with some critics labeling it a 'money grab.' In response, Tapper has stated, 'The idea that I would do this for money is just silly and not true,' emphasizing that his main source of income is his work at CNN.

These things, of course, are relative. Alex Thompson, his co-author, who is said to have done the grunt writing work, doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, and his profile otherwise remains quite low. I asked Google AI where he went to college and got this answer:

Alex Thompson has attended multiple universities. For instance, Alex Thompson from Harvard University played water polo. Another Alex Thompson graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Economics. A third Alex Thompson played football at Marshall University, previously attending Wagner College.

Further inquiry suggests that Tapper's co-author is the Harvard Alex Thompson who played water polo. Maybe this is a good thing, at least for Thompson -- if Tapper takes all the heat, establishes the record of so-so book sales, and takes the ratings hit, Thompson still has a chance to make it big with his next book. But for Tapper, he can at least pull out a save for the team:

Jake Tapper claims that Joe Biden's mental deterioration led to the crisis at the border:
Jake Tapper: "You're complimenting it by calling it a policy.
Not to talk about my book again, but one of the things we discovered:
Senator Bennett from Colorado went to an event in 2024… pic.twitter.com/PFvJRG4imf

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) May 31, 2025

Note how for Tapper, it's "my book", not "our book", which is actually doing Thompson a huge, huge favor. But he's also taking the line I noted a week ago: Joe's mental decline wasn't official policy! It wan't anybody's fault! Joe never gave an order to open the border! It just sorta-kinda happened!

This dodge has been used most famously by Holocaust deniers:

{N]o document written or signed by Hitler ordering the Holocaust has ever been found. Deniers have claimed that this lack of order shows genocide was not Nazi policy.

But every event has a cause. The Holocaust occurred over a huge area, most of Europe, with uniform policies throughout, supported by a state bureaucracy and implemented consistently via the elaborate state and military rail system, which devoted enormous resources to transporting Jews to the extermination camps, themselves a major industrial enterprise. Nothing like this could have "just happened", or even "not happened".

By the same token, policies of releasing migrants into the US interior under an unenforced parole system, or flying hundreds of thousands in and inserting them into communities via a centrally funded resettlement program, were policy-driven efforts implemented consistently across the US, as well as in specific countries that supplied the migrants. This was a policy-driven effort that could have been stopped at any time, as the Trump administration did stop it, with remarkable speed.

This wasn't a case of isolated abuse by freelancing officials axceeding their authority. Whether sn enfeebled Joe Biden was fully informed, or if he even knew about it at all, is beside the point. Somehow, billions of dollars were authorized for national-level programs by officials with the authority to do so.

So far, we have yet to learn who waa actually behind these policies if Joe wasn't, but someone affiliated with the Democrat Party was making these decisions and ensuring that they were implemented. They were authorized by the bureaucratic chain of command, because as soon as Trump's people took over the chain of command, they were stopped.

The Mr Nobody defense won't fly. Maybe it's not a silver lining after all.

Universities' Nightmare Scenario

I ran across two articles yesterday, both at Real Clear Politics, that get the elite university problem either competely wrong, or they miss a whole lot. The first is at Semafor, Universities’ nightmare scenario: it’s not just federal funding cuts. Its premise:

The nightmare scenario for elite universities is here. The flood of White House actions aimed at private colleges can be hard to follow. But think of these universities as companies, and the math gets simpler — and the dangers become stark.

Top universities are financial titans, generating investment profits that mirror those of Wall Street firms.

. . . By revenue, UPenn is bigger than BNY Mellon; Columbia is as big as Coinbase. But these universities operate on profit margins thinner than those of a grocery store. In short, they make a lot of money but spend almost all of it.

This obscures a basic problem: for tax purposes, a university can't make a profit, strictly defined. It can collect revenues greater than its expenses, but those revenues must be reinvested in the university's primary activities, and they aren't taxed. For a profit-making company, the revenues greater than expenses are distributed to investors as income, and they are taxed. I'm scratching my head about why the writer just glosses over this distinction.

So the problem isn't that universities have a low profit margin. Universities aren't there to make a profit. So what are universities there for? Somerone might answer, to pursue truth, blah blah, and blah blah, thereby enlightening the world! Students! Research! Curing cancer! Actually, they're there for tax purposes. as I've outlined here, most recently on April 3 and April 5. Their endowments are creatures of the federal income tax, enacted via the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1913. In those posts, I quoted extensively from Ferdinand Lundberg's The Rich and the Super-Rich:

Prior to 1913 at least, the problem of taxes could not have influenced Rockefeller in his philanthropies because business and wealth were subject then only to piddling local taxes. Nor can it be held that the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation was a direct reflex to the advent of federal taxes in 1913 because the Foundation had long been planned, at least since 1905. . . . However, even though the advent of federal taxes did not influence the idea of the Foundation, it was gradually noticed by others that there were distinct tax advantages in making philanthropic allocations. This fact is now part of standard tax doctrine, set down in many tax treatises. Gifts to philanthropic funds pay no taxes, the income on such funds pay no taxes, and there is no inheritance tax on such funds. Furthermore, stocks placed in such endowments carry corporate voting power--a nice point. It should be recalled here that it is power really, rather than money or property, that we are concerned with.

In other words, the robber barons of the Gilded Age, their heirs, and their successors had plenty of money to squander on mansions and estates, to the point that they could afford to donate blocks of their companies' stock to universities and other charitable endowments, especially after 1913. They didn't get those dividends, but they could do without that money. Nor did they need the capital gains when the stock was traded. On the other hand, as major donors to the universities, they or their agents sat on the boards of trustees and voted that stock, even though they didn't directly own it.

The article at the link says that Harvard gets 45% of its revenue from endowment dividends and tax-free donations. But this doesn't reflect the utility the endowment provides to its donors and their descendants in its proxy corporate control on their behalf. Universities like Harvard have always been plutocratic institutions, and they will continue to be so. Recall that although we don't know all the details of Jeffrey Epstein's financial chicanery, even though he had no four-year degree himself, he was able to hitchhike on the prestige of Harvard and MIT by representing himself as a major donor with powerful influence at both universities.

The second of the articles I found is at Real Clear Education: What Happened to Harvard? Like the first, this completely overlooks the real function of universities, especially after the introduction of the income tax. Its premise is simply bizarre:

When Lord Acton, the great nineteenth-century historian and champion of liberty, visited Harvard in 1853, he found that the college’s philosophy was common sense realism. Acton wrote that by “the third year, Reid becomes a textbook.” The Reid in question was Thomas Reid, author of An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764). The common sense realist philosophers—especially Reid, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson—fundamentally shaped the thinking of America’s Founders and provided the foundation for teaching and learning in American colleges until Acton’s visit and beyond.

But influential figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard 1821), Nathaniel Hawthorne (Bowdoin 1825), Henry David Thoreau (Harvard 1837), and Henry Ward Beecher (Amherst 1834), were hardly common-sense realists. Emerson

led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking. . . Friedrich Nietzsche thought he was "the most gifted of the Americans," and Walt Whitman called Emerson his "master".

Hawthorne's

fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity.

Thoreau

anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism.

. . . Thoreau is sometimes referred to retrospectively as an anarchist, but may perhaps be more properly regarded as a proto-anarchist.

Beecher

supported social reform causes such as women's suffrage and temperance. He also championed Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, stating that it was not incompatible with Christian beliefs. He was widely rumored to be an adulterer, and in 1872 the Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly published a story about his affair with Elizabeth Richards Tilton, the wife of his friend and former co-worker Theodore Tilton. In 1874, Tilton filed charges for "criminal conversation" against Beecher. The subsequent trial resulted in a hung jury and was one of the most widely reported trials of the century.

Frankly, it sounds like Harvard and other institutions of higher learning before Lord Acton's visit were producing graduates not all that much different from the graduates of Harvard and other such institutions we have now. Beyond that, we should keep firmly in mind that even more influential figures from the same period like Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain had limited formal education and didn't attend university at all. (Mark Twain made fun of the English visitors like Lord Acton or Mrs Trollope who purported to write with insight about their visits to the US.)

I think it's important to recognize that US colleges and universities in the 18th and 19th centuries were finishing schools for the upper classes, and most of the students were no more interested in what was in the formal curriculum than they are now. Emerson, Thoreau, and Beecher in particular seem to have taken away from their college years beliefs that were comfortable and convenient, not much common sense involved, no differrent from the students we see today.

UPDATE: On further reflection, the American Founders were on the whole Freemasons, freethinkers, or deists, influenced more by European radicals than Scottish common sense realism. George Washington did not attend university; neither did Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Jefferson attended the College of William & Mary, not Harvard, where he was influenced by Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton of the previous century, none Scots. More important, Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776) was published well past the time the US Founders had formed their ideas, as indeed was Reid's 1764 Inquiry.

On one hand, the writer at Real Clear Education seems to be looking back at an idealized Harvard that never existed, and in fact, he doesn't seem to be terribly familiar with the intellectual products of that university during the period he most admires. On the other hand, what we're also seeing is a mark-to-market on the value of a four-year degree overall.

Ferdinand Lundberg saw an inflection point in the position of Harvard and other universities as financial institutions in the enactment of the federal income tax. What intrigues me is that students of the selective admissions system at elite schools like Alan Dershowitz and Jerome Karabel also trace its development to the same period, about 1913. This comes roughly a generation after the late 19th century wave of Jewish immigration to the US, when the children of this wave began to apply for admission to these schools.

This suggests to me that the elite universities made adjustments, all highly favorable to the plutocracy they served, about a century ago in response to the rise of progressive policies, but their essential content and outlook didn't change. Contra the one writer at the last link, I don't think they ever purposely taught anything like common-sense realism, any more than they do now. But any rise of common-sense realism in current political discourse is now a major threat to their existence.

The Titan Sub Disaster And The Ivy Con

There's an intriguing counterpoint in the Discovery documentary Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster between the charismatic, patrician Stockton Rush and the more workaday Josh Gates, host of Expedition Unknown, who visits OceanGate in Everett, WA in an effort to produce an episode of his show based on Rush's project.

He recounts that after the visit, he felt so uncomfortable about Rush's slapdash approach to safety that he called the Discovery CEO and, as he put it, "fell on his sword", apologizing that even though money had been put into producing the episode, he was convinced something bad was going to happen, and he didn't want to put the show or Discovery in the position of appearing to publicize or endorse OceanGate. Clearly this was a prudent move.

So why has Princeton been so eager to promote Stockton Rush, before and after the Titan tragedy, especially when Josh Gates and Discovery foresaw a real downside to any potential link? A web search on "Stockton Rush" brings up several official Princeton eulogies, such as Big Dreams and Daring Marked the Life of Stockton Rush ’84 Princeton friends are mourning ‘Tock’ Rush, who died last week on a Titanic expedition. Oh, he was "Tock" Rush, I get it. Let's dig a little deeper:

Stockton Rush graduated from Princeton University in 1984 with a B.S.E. in mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE), maintaining a Princeton tradition that goes back to the beginning of the institution. His father, Richard “Tok” Rush, graduated from Princeton. Their predecessor, another Richard Stockton, was one of Princeton’s first graduates in 1748 and went on to sign the Declaration of Independence. His father, Robert Stockton, donated land in Princeton, New Jersey, to draw the college from its original location in Newark. Stockton’s son, Richard “Ben” Rush, would follow in his father’s footsteps with an MAE degree from Princeton in 2011, with a thesis on a robotic arm for a submersible vehicle.

He was a legacy. Those who follow this blog will recognize that legacies, the children of alumni, are a major exception to the perceived merit-based admissions policies of elite universities. According to the Daily Princetonian,

Opponents of legacy admissions have cited the high percentage legacy students make up in a class and the fact that a higher proportion of legacy applicants are admitted. Admissions data from Harvard, revealed by the affirmative action case, showed that between 2010 and 2015, legacy applicants had an acceptance rate of 33 percent (compared to the overall rate of 6 percent). The Class of 2022 at Princeton had a legacy admission rate of 31.7 percent. In the same ‘Inquirer’ interview, Eisgruber stated that “12.5 [percent] of students are children of alumni.”

This source puts Princeton's overall admissions rate for the class of 2028 at 4.62%. In other words, if you're a legacy, your chances of being admitted are more than six times greater than if you're just applying on the basis of grades, SATs, and extracurriculars. But the set-aside for legacies, as I've been pointing out here, is just one of perhaps two dozen that were, according to Jerome Karabel and Alan Dershowitz, originally developed to limit admissions of Jews without the need for a specific Jewish quota.

In other words, if elite-school admissions were based exclusively on merit -- traditionally meaning grades, SATs, and extracurriculars -- there'd be too many Jews and Asians, and not as many slots for the upper class. But each of the set-asides adds up. These include foreign students, who pay full freight, 20-30% at the ivies, a big set-aside indeed.

Then there are preppies; recruited athletes, including those for upper-class sports like rowing, fencing, and lacrosse; students from the plains and Rocky Mountain states; DEI candidates; and children of celebrities, politicians, and major donors. If you go looking for the percentages of each such set-aside in typical Ivy entering classes, you'll get something like 80% who've come in via set-asides. This has me questioning how Princeton comes up with an "overall" admissions rate of 4.62% if as many as 80% of its students come in via set-asides where the rate is much higher.

And here's where we get to the heart of the Ivy con: the perception that the Ivies admit only the best and brightest. In Harvard's defense, for instance, Catharine B. Hill, former president of Vassar College and provost of Williams College, writes,

At Harvard, about 25% of students are international. For institutions that are educating graduate students in Ph.D. programs, the goal is to train the next generation of researchers to contribute to making discoveries to solve the world’s challenging problems.

. . . Harvard historically has used its best judgment to recruit and educate the next generation of America’s and the world’s skilled workforce and innovators. And it has been tremendously successful in this endeavor so far.

Really? Here's another version of the same line:

Since the postwar era, America’s best universities have led the world. Harvard, Princeton, MIT, CalTech — these elite universities are the foundation of the American scientific supremacy that has in turn fueled decades of economic growth. But also, by virtue of their unparalleled ability to attract the best minds from around the world, these schools have given the US the educational privilege of being the magnet of global academic excellence.

. . . The ability to attract the best of the best, especially in the sciences, is what makes Harvard Harvard, which in turn has helped make the United States the United States.

The fact is that, if you look at the typical makeup of an Ivy entering class, well under half has been admitted purely on merit. But the universities use this relatively small group to promote an illusion of excellence: they're recruiting and educating the next generation of blah blah blah! They're the magnet of global academic blah blah blah! That may be so, but it applies to well under half of any entering class. The rest are, let's face it, well-bred coasters and con artists like "Tock" Rush.

Mike Rowe tells Chris Cuomo: "The Ivy League has beclowned themselves and Harvard has led the be-clowning." pic.twitter.com/6cMwTU4DZS

— JOSH DUNLAP (@JDunlap1974) May 29, 2025

It intrigues me that the low-to-middlebrow Discovery Channel and Josh Gates had enough insight to see past the Ivy glitz and glamour of "Tock" Rush, recognize the high potential threat to their reputations, and move to avert it, while the Ivies themselves don't seem able to look after the threats they themselves pose to their continued existence, by allowing people like Rush to use their brand to promote their own con games.

More On Obama's Impotence

Barack Obama's inability to control Joe Biden was evident nearly a year ago, on July 12, 2024:

Chris Whipple, an author and filmmaker who biographed the life of President Biden, indicated Friday that former President Obama may not even be able to convince Biden to exit the 2024 presidential race.

Whipple, in an interview with NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas Friday, said it was “nonsense” to think Obama would be the sole person to persuade the president to step aside.

“I just talked about reports that Obama is worried that Biden can’t win,” Vargas said. “The relationship between these two men is really complicated. A lot of people have been saying ‘The only person who could tell Biden to step aside is former President Obama.’ Not quite true.”

. . . The question around Obama’s influence was also brought up Thursday by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who signaled that the president’s campaign believes Obama is behind increasing calls for Biden to withdraw from the White House race.

This appeared the day before the Butler, PA assassination attempt on Trump and several days before Joe's "COVID disgnosis" in Las Vegas, which sent him home to Delaware. But more recent reporting indicates that Obama himslf didn't think he could convince Joe to drop out, but maybe Sen Schumer could:

Following last June’s disastrous debate performance by President Joe Biden, Barack Obama urged then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to be the bearer of bad news and convince Biden to drop out of the race, saying his own “fragile relationship” with the president prevented him from being the “best messenger.”

According to a deep-dive investigation by The New York Times, which was adapted from an upcoming book by reporters Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater, Schumer sat down with Biden in the president’s Delaware house last summer and told him he’d “go down in American history as one of the darkest figures” if he stayed in and lost to Donald Trump.

“The roughly 45-minute conversation, which took place on a screened-in porch overlooking a pond, was more pointed and emotional than previously known, and helps to explain how Mr. Biden came to the decision just over a week later to end his campaign,” the Times reported.

Mevertheless, if this took place "just over a week" before Joe's July 21 announcement that he was withdrawing from the race, this must have put the meeting with Schumer on July 11 or 12, before both the Butler episode and the Las Vegas "COVID diagnosis". It wasn't until the call from Pelosi the following weekend that Joe made up his mind. I think I'm still correct in my view that Obama was never in a position to tell Joe to drop out -- he appears to have acknowledged this to Schumer himself -- and neither, as things fell out was Schumer. Pelosi was the last one standing, if only briefly.

David Manney at PJ Media comes closer, but he still overestimates Obama:

For more than a decade, the Democratic Party operated like a palace, ruled not by consensus but by decree. Its monarchs were familiar: President Barack Obama with his golden tongue and cool detachment, Nancy Pelosi with her iron gavel, and a press corps that never met a Democrat it couldn’t describe as “historic.”

Together, they built something. Not a movement but an illusion.

. . . There was a time when Barack Obama could end primary campaigns with a sentence and turn congressional tides with a smirk. His approval alone anointed candidates, even as his own policy legacy, Obamacare, Iran, and record-setting deficits, faded into dysfunction.

But in 2024, the man who once promised that oceans would stop rising could not even convince Joe Biden to step aside.

Reports now confirm Obama privately urged Biden not to run again. But he lacked either the courage or the leverage to say it publicly. He blinked. He defaulted to the back-channel whispering and careful leaks. And that hesitation was costly.

Biden stayed. The campaign withered. The debate disaster happened. Trump’s victory followed. Obama’s influence didn’t just wane; it evaporated.

Isn't this just the long way around of saying Obama never had the power to convince Joe to drop out? Both he and Schumer had to defer to Pelosi. So far, Pelosi has said she'll never disclose exactly what she said during the July 20 call to Biden, but I strongly suspect it was a message that the donors were going to cut him off. Since she basically controlled the party as a major fundraiser, it was a message only she could deliver.

Meanwhile, other people are claiming they know who was actually in control. David Hogg says it was Dr Jill's chief of staff, Anthony Bernal:

BREAKING: Undercover Meeting with DNC Leader @davidhogg111 Reveals who REALLY ran the Biden White House

“He wielded an enormous amount of power... I can’t stress to you enough how much power he had at the White House.”

"It was an open secret... I would avoid him, he was… pic.twitter.com/i7fskTwhNw

— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) May 28, 2025

Hogg's claim is that Bernal ran the White House -- but his power came from Dr Jill and indirectly from Joe. As soon as Pelosi took Joe out of the picture, Bernal was a lame duck just as much as Joe was. Nancy Pelosi, at least as of last july, ran the country. Remember, not only did she take Joe out, she named Joe's successor. Bernal could never do that.

Next we hear that Elizabeth Warren ran the country, because she had the autopen:

SHHH DON’T TELL JOE!@DavidSacks just said POCAHONTAS had the AUTOPEN and wasn’t afraid to use it! ✍🏼✍🏼✍🏼 pic.twitter.com/KSUL4WQ4i6

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) May 28, 2025

At this point, we're in murky territory with which signatures done with the autopen are or aren't consitutional. but I'm not sure it matters. Elizabeth Warren, whatever she might have been able to do with the autopen, lost that ability pretty much as soon as Nancy Pelosi told Joe to drop out of the race. She was in exactly the same position as Anthony Bernal; as soon as Joe Biden's signature wasn't the president's signature, neither had any power at all. It was Nancy Pelosi who could take away any power they held.

The big difference is that right now, there's no issue over who is the shadowy power behind the throne.