Jason Arday Found Dead, Apparent Suicide

One of the more thoughtful reactions from UK commentators is in the YouTube video embedded above. At 0:53, he says,

It should be a reminder that many people who do act in bizarre ways in public normally are quite fragile beneath that, maybe quite unwell. We can forget that sometimes, perhaps, maybe forget that with everyone. But that said, I think the inquest will now begin. And by inquest, I mean the liberals reworking the narrative to suit them. And I daresay it will be something like, you know, innocent black man hounded by vicious anti-white right-wing media. I'm expecting that line from everyome from the BBC to the Guardian to James O'Brien as well as Owen Jones and every academic and wokey from SOAS to Berkeley. Won't be much #bekind and tolerance from them. Anywayh, the central question here is who is responsible for this man's death, cause it's an interesting question of paternity, of course.

Now as I said at the top, you know, I'm sure many people will just say, "Well, it's Arday. He's the only person you can say, you know." If of course this is as it seems, which is obviously the likely outcome. And in a brute sense, tbat would be true. Not only did he presumably take the final act, but he didn't help himself by getting in the mess he was in. You could say he was unwell, maybe he was, I don't know. But it seems to me, if I was to hazard a guess, clearly this is somebody who's a little bit unhinged and has an almost very deep craving to be worshipped and loved and celebrated, as if his identity depended on it.

And when all of that falls away, probably what's revealed is a very lost and traumatized boy, and a lot of S-H-I-T was coming at him from every angle.

The Guardian's reaction was actually even-handed:

Arday’s rise to a prestigious professorial chair was remarkable. Arday said he had been nonverbal until the age of 11, requiring extensive speech and language therapy, as well as being illiterate until 18.

That life story contributed to him being made a torchbearer for the 2012 London Olympics flame.

After leaving school, Arday went on to further study before completing a doctorate in education at Liverpool John Moores University in 2015. That was followed by a string of academic posts culminating in a professorship at the University of Glasgow and a professorial chair at Cambridge.

Arday was initially accused of plagiarising another academic’s work for his PhD thesis. But he denied the accusations, and an investigation by Liverpool John Moores University earlier this year upheld its decision to award him a PhD.

But other elements of his life story were increasingly questioned, including claims of prodigious money-raising for charity and feats of long-distance running.

He was also challenged about whether he was nonverbal as a child.

However those claims meant little in the world of academia. After initially defending Arday as the victim of a smear campaign, as further questions arose about his academic career, the university began to temper its support.

Real Clear Politics ran only a three-hankie weeper from Alex Berenson:

May God welcome Jason into His company and give him the peace he clearly did not have -- for the fabulist is the best example of the “peaceless person” running from the world and himself -- and may God save us from the quasi-religion that contributed so much to his fall.

There's a DEI culture, especially as it relates to people of African descent, on both sides of the Atlantic, but at least from what I can observe from halfway around the world, it's become even more exaggerated and bizarre in the UK. The closest comparable episode in the US is the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, who was briefly president of Harvard, but resigned:

In response, Gay said she stood behind the integrity of her work and requested an outside review of it. The Harvard Corporation reported that the review found "a few instances of inadequate citation" and "duplicative language without appropriate attribution" in her work, but "no violation of Harvard's standards for research misconduct." Analyses by The Harvard Crimson and CNN contested Harvard's statement, finding that Gay had likely violated the university's policies on plagiarism and academic integrity. Gay requested seven corrections to add citations and quotation marks to her dissertation and two of her articles. Academic Joseph Reagle opined that media reports that Gay "plagiarized" implied that she had stolen the central ideas in her work, saying "I don't think this is the case" but that the work "contain plagiarized prose. This is a lesser but still significant infraction." Academic William Arighi, writing for the Journal of Academic Freedom, later characterized the events as "an attempt not at promoting truth but at grinding a political ax".

In response to the allegations, the congressional committee that held the hearing on antisemitism said it would examine Gay's work, and asked the university to produce related communications and documentation.

On January 2, 2024, Gay announced she was resigning her position.

However, Gay retained her posiition on the Harvard faculty. The instances of plagiarism in her case appear to have been far fewer than those in Arday's case, and there were no equivalent fantastic claims of running marathons with a broken leg or Stakhanovite fundraising achievements. Her fall was from a much lesser height, and her prior career was much less enabled by the media. There seems to have been something in the UK water that required Arday to be magnified to a much greater extent.

Why is this? The public justification for privileging people of African descent in the UK appears to have something to do with guilt over colonialism, but this is a much more venial matter, it seems to me, than guilt in the Americas over slavery. My current thinking is that the current liberal UK immigration policy began with the Labour/Fabian program after World War II that nationalized transport and the coal industry and socialized medicine, while at the same time making this affordable by importing third-world labor to keep wages in all these industries down. This effectively wrote the UK native working class out of the equation, solving the problem of the 1926 General Strike for good.

I think the ruling-class guilt in the UK stems in large part from this; DEI is just a distraction.

Heidi Beirich Arrested For Fraud

From the US Department of Justice:

On August 11, 2026, a federal grand jury in Montgomery returned a second superseding indictment adding a defendant and additional charges in the case involving the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The second superseding indictment, which was unsealed today, charges Heidi L. Beirich, 59, of Palm Springs, California, along with the SPLC, with new charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank. The new indictment also adds Beirich as a defendant to the previously charged count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering and charges the SPLC with an additional count of concealment money laundering. Beirich was served with an arrest warrant this morning in the Central District of California and is expected to make her initial appearance in federal court there this afternoon.

The charges arise from an alleged scheme involving the use of donated funds and financial accounts associated with fictitious entities. As previously alleged, the scheme involved efforts to conceal the source, ownership, and control of funds and to make false representations concerning the use of donated money and the operation of financial accounts.

The second superseding indictment expands the case to include the alleged participation of Beirich and additional conduct involving the movement and concealment of proceeds.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was previously charged in an 11-count indictment returned in April 2026 with wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The second superseding indictment alleges that, between 2007 and 2023, more than $4 million in donated funds were secretly funneled to individuals associated with various violent extremist groups.

Via the New York Post:

A former Southern Poverty Law Center finance officer was charged Wednesday for her leading role in having the left-wing nonprofit secretly pay informants to participate in white supremacist groups.

Heidi Beirich of Palm Springs made her initial appearance Wednesday in federal court in Riverside, California, according to her attorney, Michael Proctor. CNN reported she had been arrested earlier that day.

. . . FBI Director Kash Patel said Beirich “was at the center of our ongoing investigation into SPLC,” which found the nonprofit “knowingly misled donors, who believed their money was being used to dismantle violent extremist organizations – when in fact, part of those donations were instead being used to pay senior leadership within those extremist groups.”

Wednesday’s superseding indictment accused Beirich of helping to funnel $1.2 million in SPLC donor money to an informant in the white supremacist group National Alliance — who was also purportedly her lover.

. . . The June 2 indictment had named the “person who would become Director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project” as “Employee-2.” Beirich served in that role from 2012 to 2019.

In 2014, that employee paid off an informant known as F-9 to break into National Alliance headquarters and steal 25 boxes of documents — only to later use the materials to author an article for SPLC’s blog “Hatewatch.”

. . . Beirich, as an SPLC employee, was also alleged to have been “in a romantic relationship with F-9,” where the two shared joint bank accounts and a house, according to the indictment.

Over a 20-year period, F-9 received more than $1.2 million from SPLC donor funding.

Another informant known as F-39 was also paid $6,000 in donor cash “to falsely take responsibility for the burglary,” per the indictment.

According to Beirich's Linkedin profile, accessed by Chrome AI mode, she worked for the Southern Poverty Law Center from 1999 to 2019. Her jobs there were:

Senior Writer: September 1999 – July 2004

Deputy Director, Intelligence Project: July 2004 – January 2008

Director of Research: January 2008 – February 2012

Director, Intelligence Project: January 2012 – December 2019

She went on to co-found the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) in early 2020. According to the GPAHE,

Heidi Beirich, Ph.D., is an expert on the American and European far right, including white supremacist, anti-immigrant, antigovernment, and other extremist movements. In 2020, Beirich co-founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) to monitor and counter increasingly transnational hate movements, particularly in areas of the world where capacity is limited to combat far-right movements that threaten human rights and democracy.

. . . Beirich has written extensively on far-right movements and is the author of numerous academic publications on extremism. She co-edited Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, published by the University of Texas Press. A frequent speaker at conferences on combating hate and extremism, she has been interviewed by hundreds of outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, WIRED, and the Financial Times. She regularly appears on major television networks, in documentaries, and on radio programs focused on the dangers and growing threat of far-right extremism to democracy and human rights.

The New York Post report quotes National Alliance chairman William White Williams,

“I think some of those cluckers wanted to get out of the movement and they went to the SPLC for help. But instead of helping them, [the SPLC] said, ‘Why don’t you stay in and get paid?’” he said of informants. /p>

The superseding indictment alleges that, between 2007 and 2023, SPLC quietly gave $4.1 million in tax-exempt donor money to violent extremist groups through a series of bank accounts and sham entities. /p>

Some of that funding went toward costs for the wood and fuel required for cross-burnings, publishing racist pamphlets or extremist literature and other work to maintain the SPLC’s network of “field sources.”

This could potentially be delicious.

Polling

🚨 HOLY CRAP! Democratic socialists were OVERESTIMATED by the polls by nearly 25 points in Wisconsin

Francesca Hong loses to David Crowley in the governor's primary by just a few thousand votes, a fraction of a point

2AM ballot drops solidified the socialist's loss, and… pic.twitter.com/Yyc3fFn1z1

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 12, 2026

I've been checking Real Clear Politics, and notwithstanding the sites's prestige comes from its polling aggregate, so far, there's not a peep about how wrong the polls were. And Frank Luntz, a silly individual, minimizes the problem:

Luntz said the math doesn't work with low voter turnouts that happen often.

"How," he explained, "when you get turnouts of 15% electorate, you can't make a conclusion or a projection. And pollsters need to stop doing this."

Luntz posted about the issue in the early hours of Wednesday in connection with the Wisconsin governor's race, where democratic socialist Francesca Hong had been declared as carrying large, double-digit leads over eventual winner David Crowley.

"I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of primary polling in the Midwestern United States," he wrote, "until we can figure out what the hell is going on."

But then he turns around and says low turnout isn't the problem:

Luntz told Henry that he was among those pollsters in 2016 who went all-in on Hillary Clinton winning the presidency.

"I believed that Hillary Clinton was going to win," he admitted, "based on the exit polling of all the networks.

.. . "And so, I put out a prediction that said, what makes you not understand the words President Hillary Clinton? I got it wrong because I believed those numbers. And I fixed it," Luntz said.

But that wasn't a low-turnout primary. And what did he fix? But let's get back to Real Clear Politics. I asked Chrome AI mode, "How accurate has the Real Clear Politics average been in predicting the 2026 primary cycle?" It answered,

The RealClearPolitics (RCP) polling average has seen a mixed but highly scrutinized performance during the 2026 primary cycle, facing notable accuracy challenges in key swing-state primary races. While the tracking averages effectively mapped broad national moods—such as an unfavorable macro-environment for the governing party—the final primary results in states like Michigan and Wisconsin exposed widening systemic errors.

In highly contested races (especially within Democratic primaries in the Midwest), standard polling models failed to properly weight low-propensity progressive or anti-establishment voters, leading to surprise double-digit margins on election night.

Primary polling naturally suffers from low sample sizes and a high volume of undecided voters who break late. RCP’s method of strictly averaging available public data meant that low-quality or outdated polls frequently dragged down the accuracy of the final metric.

With the primary cycle wrapping up, attention has shifted to the general election, where the RealClearPolling 2026 Generic Congressional Vote tracker currently shows Democrats holding a modest single-digit lead. However, given the primary misses, forecasters caution against relying too heavily on early general election averages.

Put more concisely, RCP averages garbage polls and gets garbage results, but it still has prestige. I asked Chrome AI mode a related question, "Do polling errors consistently overestimate Democrats?" It answered, predictably,

No, polling errors do not consistently overestimate Democrats, despite a recent run of high-profile presidential elections where they did. When looking at the full history of modern polling since the 1930s, polling errors are historically unbiased, underestimating Democrats and Republicans about equally often over the long term.

However, the perception of a permanent pro-Democratic bias exists because polls systematically underestimated Republican support across consecutive presidential election cycles involving Donald Trump.

But that leads to the question of why the polls were inaccurate when Trump was on the ballot, as well as why the Wisconsin and Michigan polls were so inaccurate this year, when Trump wasn't on the ballot. And the big question is why Real Clear Politics isn't reexamining why its polling averages simply pass the inaccuracies of individual polls into the aggregate, when the assumption ought to be that they would present a more accurate total that discounts outliers, Instead, the outliers skew the results.

But that seems to be their whole philosophy: post one piece from Victor Davis Hanson or Roger Kimball against another by Robert Reich or Harold Myerson and think you can mix them together and get a golden mean.

The UK Mega Dinghy

It looks like the UK is getting a new national humiliation each week lately: The migrant mega dinghy is a national humiliation. Well, if yesterday's post here is any indicator, if your ruling class has people with names like Sebastian and Zanny in it, you deserve every national humiliation you get. (Full disclosure: there is a squirrel in our back yard that hadn't been named until yesterday. Zanny it was.)

It looks like Andy Burnham has achieved what his predecessors could not. He has found a solution to the small-boats crisis. . .

In the early hours of Monday morning, a 49-foot dinghy carrying 230 illegal immigrants arrived on British shores from France. It is by some margin the largest number of migrants to have arrived in a single vessel. It surpasses by far the previous record of 165, a feat of human trafficking achieved late last month. As many people have already pointed out, the ‘small boats crisis’ may now technically be over, as we enter the era of migrant cruise-liners.

The UK Guardian has more detail on the new trend:

Last year, 106 people were reported to have crossed the Channel in a single dinghy in August and 125 in September. The emergence of mega-dinghies coincided with the announcement in July 2025 of the UK-France “one in, one out” deal, under which a person arriving in the UK from France by small boat can be returned in exchange for another person being brought legally to the UK to claim asylum.

On 12 July this year, a mega-dinghy carrying 128 people arrived in the UK, followed by another carrying 165 people on 23 July. On 4 August, a dinghy carrying 173 people capsized after the engine caught fire. All those onboard are believed to have been rescued, with 11 sustaining minor injuries and three taken to hospital in Boulogne.

The use of mega-dinghies poses an even greater risk to life than smaller vessels, which have recently carried an average of between 50 and 60 passengers, according to NGOs working with asylum seekers crossing the Channel. When small-boat crossings began in 2018, only a handful of people typically travelled in each dinghy.

Each new national humiliation in the UK leads me to undertake a new effort to understand civics there. The first question that popped up for me was, "Where is the UK's Coast Guard?" The answer is that the UK doesn't have one, at least as most contries, including the US, understand the term:

His Majesty's Coastguard (HM Coastguard or HMCG) is the section of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency responsible, through the Secretary of State for Transport to Parliament, for the initiation and co-ordination of all maritime search and rescue (SAR) within the UK Maritime Search and Rescue Region.

. . . His Majesty's Coastguard is a uniformed service that fulfils six of the nine functions required by the International Maritime Organization (IMO):

Hey, six out of nine functions is pretty good, right, at least for a third-world country? The six are Search and Rescue, Pollution Response. Vessel Traffic Management, Maritime Safety, Accident and Disaster Response, and Maritime Security. What's left out?

The other three IMO functions; Customs/Border Control, Fisheries Control and Law Enforcement, are undertaken by the UK Border Force, Marine Management Organisation and local police forces, respectively. . . . HM Coastguard is a civilian agency, unlike other coastguard services around the world, as the duties traditionally associated with a military coastguard service are spread around the UK Civil Service and British Armed Forces.

However, UK efforts to limit migration via dinghies small or large appear to be feckless. According to the House of Commoms Library:

The number of migrants crossing the English Channel has increased in 2021, with the BBC reporting that 12,600 people have made the journey so far this year.

Recent news reports have confirmed that UK Border Force are being trained to use certain “turn around” tactics to intercept and return migrants crossing the Channel.

The Government has said that any plans will be “safe and legal”, but France and other interested parties have suggested such tactics could violate international law.

However,

the UK Government has decided not to implement its plan to use pushback tactics for small boat crossings.

Instead, it appears that migrants who are detected arriving in small boats are taken to processing centers. At that point, about 99% apply for asylum in the UK and are housed in migrant hotel facilities. Most wind up remaining in the UK, whatever the legal disposition of their cases:

Around 2,600 people who had first arrived in the UK by small boat were returned to another country in 2025. In total, there were 7,500 such returns between 2018 and 2025 – around 4% of all arrivals during this period.

It remains unclear how many of the 193,000 people who arrived by small boat between 2018 and 2025 are liable for removal, or are likely to become so in the future. By the end of 2025, around 48,000 small boat arrivals had been refused asylum at the initial decision stage, though some of these individuals will eventually be granted status on appeal and hence be able to remain in the UK. Another 33,000 had their asylum application withdrawn or administratively decided.

For now, the UK appears to lack the political will to control its borders, which has had the effect of institutionalizing smuggling networks:

Smuggling groups have become larger and increasingly professionalised in recent years, and were able to capitalise on their initial experience as enforcement measures were progressively tightened. There is some evidence that the price of crossing the Channel declined over time, although estimates are uncertain and can vary significantly. According to some sources, prices had fallen from around €14,000 in 2018 to well under €4,000 by 2024. Media investigations indicated prices of around €1,500 in early 2026.

There won't be another national election in the UK until 2029.

AI And God

Yesterday I noted that Glenn Reynolds's fundamental problem is that he never got an education. Certainly, if he ever took Philosophy 101, he must have cheated. One of the basic issues covered in an introductory philosophy course is the "mind-body problem".

The mind-body problem is a philosophical issue that questions the relationship between mental states, such as beliefs and desires, and physical states of the brain and body. It explores whether the mind and body are distinct entities or one interacting component, a debate primarily characterized by dualism and physicalism. Understanding this issue is crucial for fields like psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, as it influences how we perceive consciousness and self-awareness.

According to a UK study guide,

Physicalism (sometimes called materialism) is the view that everything that exists is ultimately physical. This includes mental states, which physicalists argue can be fully explained in terms of physical processes.

According to this view, consciousness, thoughts, and emotions are not separate from the body but are instead the product of brain activity.

. . . Unlike physicalism, dualism argues that the mind and body are fundamentally different kinds of things.

The most famous dualist, René Descartes, believed that the mind is a non-physical substance that is completely separate from but interacts with the physical body.

. . . If the mind is non-physical and the body is physical, how do they interact? How can something non-physical cause physical changes (like deciding to raise your hand and then actually doing it)?

Reynolds, because he either never took Philosophy 101 or he cheated, endorses the physicalism of the quack Ray Kurzweil; both believe it's possible to upload consciousness into a computer:

Kurzweil notes that computational capacity alone will not create artificial intelligence. He asserts that the best way to build machine intelligence is to first understand human intelligence. The first step is to image the brain, to peer inside it. Kurzweil claims imaging technologies such as PET and fMRI are increasing exponentially in resolution while he predicts even greater detail will be obtained during the 2020s when it becomes possible to scan the brain from the inside using nanobots.

Hey, right, it's the 2020s, so we've already scanned the brain from the inside using nanobots, right? He goes on,

Beyond reverse engineering the brain in order to understand and emulate it, Kurzweil introduces the idea of "uploading" a specific brain with every mental process intact, to be instantiated on a "suitably powerful computational substrate".

In other words, every mental process is a specific physical state that can be uploaded onto a computer. This is an absurdity. But the AI boondoggle takes this a step farther: we don't need to wait until we can upload Glenn Reynolds's brain into a computer to get consciousness, it's going to pop into existence on an AI data center ab nihilo! This is a version of the neo-Darwinian theory that a certain type of primeval goo came along, and hey presto, life started! But where did math come from? It isn't physical, it can't have just evolved.

Another exponent of this weird AI-will-generate-consciousnmess (even though the brain is entirely physical) school of thought is Sebastian Mallaby, son of Sir Christopher Mallaby, who was Ambassador of the United Kingdom to Germany (1988–1993) and Ambassador of the United Kingdom to France (1993–1996), educated at Eton and Oxford, and husband of Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor in Chief of The Economist, lately known for trying to debate Elon Musk. Just the guy to address the mind-body problem, woudln't you think? And he does it, in all places, at Foreign Affairs:

[C]ontemplating a technology that seems unfathomable in scope, humans reach for the lexicon that exists to describe mystery: that of religion. Nearly a decade ago, Anthony Levandowski, an early actor in Google’s self-driving car project, started a church called Way of the Future, whose IRS filings state that it is devoted to “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence,” according to Wired. Encountering an early chatbot that appeared eerily sentient, the Google engineer Blake Lemoine wrote, “Who am I to tell God where He can and can’t put souls?”

. . . It was only a matter of time before the Catholic Church waded into this maelstrom. Following industrialization in the late nineteenth century, the rise of mass media in the mid-twentieth, and the birth of the knowledge economy in the late twentieth, the church responded with encyclicals, papal letters laying out how Catholic doctrine applied to each upheaval. Now the Vatican has stepped in again, defending its conception of human dignity and the purpose of creation in the face of the AI revolution. Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), the first encyclical of his pontificate, is nothing if not ambitious.

. . . As technologists debate whether AI systems’ possible consciousness warrants a machine version of human rights, the pope insists that humans and machines differ fundamentally. AI systems “merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence,” the encyclical states. “Even when these tools are described as capable of ‘learning,’ . . . it is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity.”

. . . Whether the church’s assertions withstand analytic scrutiny is a different question. By postulating that AI systems “merely imitate” human intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas rejects the long-standing claim that imitating intelligence is the same as possessing it. Far from suggesting an absence of intelligence, that theory goes, imitation may be a facet of it.

But now he gets to Philosophy 101, the mind-body problem, and the Chinese Room Experiment, which like the pope's encyclical gets things all wrong:

The best case for the Vatican’s opposing view dates to 1980, when the philosopher John Searle proposed what became known as the “Chinese room argument.” The goal of Searle’s thought experiment was to refute the famous Turing test, which holds that a machine should be judged only by its output. According to the test, if the system’s output appears intelligent to humans, then the system is indeed intelligent. By way of a rebuttal, Searle imagined a lone man in a room receiving messages under the door. The messages are written in Chinese, and the man passes back messages in Chinese, convincing his correspondent that he, too, is fluent in the language. But this persuasion is a con. The man composes his responses with the help of a manual that instructs him on which incoming string of Chinese characters should be answered with which other string of Chinese characters.

But that argument, like the pope, is now out of date:

Searle’s rebuttal was powerful during the years before the modern AI revolution. Machines based their outputs on rules that resembled the instruction manual in Searle’s scenario. Although they begin by ingesting words and treating them as statistics, they emerge from their training with a fine grasp of meaning.

Ah, OK, that settles it. But here's a study guide that explains how large language models work:

The key idea is that an LLM isn't "thinking" or "understanding" in a human sense. It's making a statistical calculation: based on the sequence of words (tokens) it has seen so far, what is the most probable next word?

. . . An LLM is often described as a 'stochastic parrot' that predicts the next token.

Let's go back to the lone man in the Chinese room. As of 1980, he was following specific if-then conditions regarding which Chinese message to pass out in response to whatever Chinese message he received. As of 2026, he's been doing this long enough that he has a good general idea of which Chinese message to pass out, and he's at least reaching for the one he's most used to passing out in response to the next one that comes in. But that doesn't mean he understands Chinese any better in 2026 than he did in 1980.

He still can't read a word of Chinese, even if he's now passing out messages that say, "I'm sorry to hear that", since he himself still doesn't know what the message says. But Sebastian Mallaby -- you can't make up a name like that, any more than you can make up Zanny Minton Beddoes -- hasn't been reading his study guides. He goes on,

Today, modern AI systems, trained on text including novels, social media posts, and human emoting of all kinds, recognize anger, joy, shame, sadness, and anxiety. And they don’t merely recognize emotion. Their behavior can be made consistent with particular emotional states or personalities. By tweaking its settings, researchers can make a model upbeat or negative, honest or sycophantic. Unlike calculators, spreadsheets, or autocomplete systems, large language models can acquire what one might call temperament.

No, in the words of LLM experts, all an LLM does is calculate the statistical likelihood of one set of words appearing in the context of another set of words. If I pass words to it that are statistically related to sadness, it will return equivalent words in its answer, but it has no idea what those words actually mean. It only appears to acquire temperament via large-scale statistical association.

In my post on August 7, I got AI to write a micro fiction piece that looked as though Lydia Davis had written it, and it did a brilliant job looking at the contexts of her subjects, grammar, structure, and vocabulary. In fact, it did such a brilliant job that it unintentionally turned out hilarious satire. AI has no idea what satire is, and it has no idea what contexts can be unintentionally funny. In this case, however sophisticated it may have seemed, it was just a guy in a Chinese room.

But now Sebastian reveals his basic lack of any sort of education:

The human brain is a physical object, composed of biological material that obeys the laws that govern the rest of the universe, computers included. Human brains, like computer brains, work on trickles of electricity; when they form an opinion or conceive a plan, they are processing information. The idea that the gooey mass inside the skull contains some ineffable, nonprogrammable essence—consciousness, spirit, or something else—may be intuitively appealing. But as an analytic matter, the idea is flimsy. And it will become even less convincing as AI continues to advance.

In other words, he's a physicalist. A machine brain is no different from a human or animal brain. If you upload Sebastian Mallaby's brain scan into a computer, you have the full Sebastian Mallaby. If the pope says that's not true, the pope is wrong. In effect, Sebastian is saying there's no moral difference between a human and an AI computer, because soon enough, they'll be the same thing. Contra the pope, who makes "slippery claims about human exceptionalism" everyone is basically a machine, especially if machnines can convince humans they're human. Or something like that, because in the end, I don't think he understands he's arguing against himself.

The final conspicuous gap concerns the debate over the nature of machine intelligence. The extent to which AI algorithms generate the equivalent of human thoughts and feelings is a philosophical question that may never be resolved, but understanding exactly how AI systems work is a practical and urgent goal.

But he's just spent 1600 words insisting it doesn't matter whather AI algorithms generate the equivalent of human thoughts and feelings, because they appear to, and the Chinese Room Experiment is beside the point. Now he's saying we have to go inside the Chinese Room and figure out what the guy is actually doing:

Magnifica Humanitas claims that we cannot know the thinking inside the machines, because there is no thinking in them worth knowing. But the opposite is true. Machines will never join our moral universe, but if humans aspire to control them, we must first understand them.

The best I can offer is this is what you'd expect from someone named Sebastian Mallaby who's married to someone named Zanny Minton Beddoes, neither of whom took Philosophy 101, or if they did, they cheated.

Glenn Reynolds's Main Problem Is He's 25 Years Older, But Not A Day Younger

And for that matter, not an IQ point smarter. He's congratulating himself for 25 years of Instapundit, and he's apparently grateful for Dr Fauci's example of how to do this:

Along the way there were podcasts — the late, lamented Glenn and Helen Show, which I really enjoyed, several years with PJTV, and various columns for TechCentralStation, the Washington Examiner, USA Today, nearly a decade of columns in Popular Mechanics, and now the New York Post.

But always there was the blog. Behind everything there was the blog. Most of my ideas came from the blog, even when they appeared in columns, podcasts or TV shows. Many of the ideas on the blog came from readers who emailed me, or, later, commented on posts. And it’s still here. As I said in my brief anniversary observation on Saturday, I never expected to do this for 25 years, and I can’t promise I’ll still be doing it in 25 more. But I can’t promise that I won’t be, either.

I started following Instapundit in the mid-2000s, and the version of what it was that he gives in this piece is misleading to say the least:

In the early days the blog was more focused on tech and pop culture. I remember linking to an article on who had the best abs at the Video Music Awards — I backed Alicia Keys — and similar stuff. However, some later InstaPundit themes appeared: I had a post titled “Blood and Iron” about donating blood and life expectancy, and there were numerous posts on FBI and Secret Service incompetence and wrongdoing, which are themes that persist to this day.

Oh, by the way, there was a little bit about "life expectancy". That's not the Instapundit I was reading. I asked Chrome AI mode, "When was the last time Glenn Reynolds mentioned Aubrey de Grey?" (This, by the way, is where AI really shines.) It replied,

The last major, documented instance of Glenn Reynolds directly highlighting Aubrey de Grey in his professional writing was in March 2008, when he penned an article titled "The End of Aging?" for Popular Mechanics.

March 2008: Reynolds features de Grey's life-extension theories in his Popular Mechanics column.

March 2006: Reynolds publishes his book An Army of Davids, dedicate an entire chapter ("Live Long—And Prosper!") to a comprehensive text interview with de Grey regarding biological "escape velocity".

December 2004: On his blog Instapundit, Reynolds links to a profile of de Grey, noting that he was "seeing this guy Aubrey de Grey all over the place".

Aubrey de Grey is a quack. It took Reynolds some years to recognize this, and although he's never posted anything to the effect that he was taken in at any point, he seems to have dropped the guy by 2008. As of 2008, this was de Grey's line:

To encourage people to take his ideas seriously, Aubrey de Grey, the originator of the strategies for engineered negligible senescence, has organised a competition. He is offering a prize for the development of what he calls a Methuselah mouse. There are actually two prizes to be had. One is for longevity, the other for rejuvenation. The prize for longevity can be won by a new strain of mouse - one bred or genetically engineered to live a long time. That for rejuvenation requires treatment to begin when the mice are already in middle age. ... The winner establishes a record that others have to break. At the moment the records for longevity and rejuvenation are five years and almost four in an animal that normally lives for three.

According to Chrome AI mode, this prize has been awarded many times, for example,

Dr. Andrzej Bartke (Longevity Prize): Awarded for breeding a genetically modified mouse that lived for 1,819 days (nearly 5 years), which is the equivalent of roughly 180 human years. His research involved altering a gene that controls responses to growth hormones.

Except that without any special life-extenmsion measures, genetic or otherwise, a mouse lived for nine years at the San Diego Zoo:

Wikipedia's entry on de Grey suggests that almost as soon as he began to achieve a high media profile, thanks in some measure to Glenn Reynolds, he began to be debunked:

In 2005, MIT Technology Review, in cooperation with the Methuselah Foundation, announced a US$20,000 prize for any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that SENS was "so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate." . . . The judges concluded that none of the challengers had disproved SENS, but the magazine opined that Preston Estep's submission was particularly eloquent and well written, and awarded the contestant US$10,000. The judges also noted "the proponents of SENS have not made a compelling case for SENS", and wrote that many of its proposals could not be verified with the current level of scientific knowledge and technology, concluding that "SENS does not compel the assent of many knowledgeable scientists; but neither is it demonstrably wrong."

. . . A 2005 article about SENS published in the viewpoint section of EMBO Reports by 28 scientists concluded that none of de Grey's hypotheses "have ever been shown to extend the lifespan of any organism, let alone humans".

According to the Wikipedia entry, de Grey has a contract to have his head frozen at the time of his putative "death", on the assumption that future technology will be able to cure what ailed him and reattach it to a new body, or maybe just upload his brain data to a giant computer or something, the same thing Glenn Reynolds believes. Nor does Reynolds mention his enthusiastic support of another quack, Ray Kurzweil. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Was Glenn Reynolds a major promoter of Ray Kurzweil?" It answered,

Yes, Glenn Reynolds was a major early promoter of Ray Kurzweil and his techno-futuristic visions.

Through his highly influential blog Instapundit, as well as his mainstream media columns, Reynolds served as a crucial bridge between the niche transhumanist subculture and the broader public. He consistently amplified Kurzweil's ideas regarding exponential technological growth, nanotechnology, and the coming artificial intelligence revolution.

Key Ways Reynolds Promoted Kurzweil

High-Profile Book Reviews: When Kurzweil released his seminal book The Singularity Is Near in 2005, Reynolds wrote a prominent, glowing review for The Wall Street Journal titled "Here it Comes: Technology's progress will soon accelerate — exponentially. You have no idea how much. Ray Kurzweil does." He revisited this advocacy by promoting the 2024 sequel, The Singularity Is Nearer.

The "Instapundit" Effect: During the peak influence of Instapundit in the early-to-mid 2000s, Reynolds frequently blogged about "The Singularity," regularly pointing his massive audience toward Kurzweil's essays, interviews, and predictions.

Integrating Kurzweil into His Own Philosophy: In his 2006 book, An Army of Davids, Reynolds relied heavily on Kurzweil's projections of decentralized, democratized technology empowering individual citizens to take down massive corporate and government hierarchies.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "Is there any similarity betwqeen belief in the Singularity and belief in the Great Pumpkin?" It answered,

Yes, there are striking psychological and structural similarities between belief in the technological singularity and belief in Linus’s Great Pumpkin from Peanuts. While one stems from computer science and the other from a comic strip, both function as modern myths.

The Chosen Prophet: Ray Kurzweil acts as the singularity's chief prophet, tracking its arrival with charts. Linus van Pelt is the sole, unwavering prophet of the Great Pumpkin.

The Promised Date: Singularity believers often pinpoint a specific timeframe (like 2045) for the transformation. Linus waits every year on a specific night: Halloween.

A Benevolent Savior: The singularity is often predicted to solve all human problems, cure diseases, and grant immortality. The Great Pumpkin is expected to fly through the air and deliver toys to good children.

Reynolds is a transhumanist who still believes in the longevity tenets of both Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil, although at this point, he minimizes this. His problem is he's 25 years older and not a day closer to immortality. I won't even bother to touch on his libertarianism. I'm not sure how he differs in principle from Jason Arday; he holds an endowed chair at a major university, but he shows no sign of every having had an education himself.

Politically Incorrect AI

At The Nerve News: Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.

Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist.

Having made a career in tech, I can vouch for this insight:

One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business/AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from Hermit Tech, a consulting firm of "radically ethical data wizards" (that is, tech consultants). For a year and a half he has been talking to hundreds of executives — and, more importantly, their subordinates — about what, if anything, AI is doing for their businesses.

. . . Suresh says he's never seen a successful enterprise AI project: "Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half." Not one of their clients would face a business challenge if OpenAI went out of business tomorrow. The problem most companies struggle with is that they're "terminally bad at running software projects effectively". Adding AI to the mix doesn't solve this problem – it just adds a whole new range of ways that software deployment can fail.

Chatbots don't help. The internally facing chatbot that's supposed to help employees figure out how to navigate the business sucks because it is only as good as its training data – the business's documentation of its own processes. Businesses suck at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots also suck. They either can't solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the "solution" goes nowhere.

Suresh recounts his sole positive customer-service chatbot experience: a Mitsubishi chatbot with a natural-sounding, responsive voice politely took all the details of an automotive failure and promised him a callback. That callback never came, but Suresh is certain that Mitsubishi has logged this as a chatbot success story, even though the experience convinced him not to buy a Mitsubishi car.

One thing I'm noticing is that the unquestioning corporate adoption of AI is generating a peculiar inverse reaction in academic and literary environments, for instance at The Yale Review:

At The Yale Review, we are committed to publishing work shaped by human judgment, care, and responsibility. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies—including large language models (LLMs)—are increasingly part of the cultural landscape, both as a subject of inquiry and as a tool in creative and critical work.

As an institution, we may occasionally use AI technologies to support internal tasks such as calendaring, research collation, and editorial planning in ways that we deem in keeping with our overall mission. However, all published writing is selected, edited, and fact-checked by human editors.

We welcome submissions that engage thoughtfully or critically with AI—especially when AI is central to the inquiry or deployed self-reflexively as part of a writer’s process. All work we publish must reflect the discernment and intent of a human author. Where AI-generated material appears prominently in a submission, we expect writers to note this in brief and explain how it was used.

More frequently, the policy is just plain No AI, as at the equally prestigious Baltimore Review:

About AI: Do we really have to say it? OK. No. We want to read work created entirely by humans.

What's puzzling here is that, as we see just above, AI is struggling to prove itself in business environments, but results from the real world indicate that the one field where it's been a roaring success has been academics, where it's turned out to be a whole new way to beat the system. It'll knock essay questions and comp assignments out of the park, and I strongly suspect that even the most respected journals are reluctant to feed recent years' issues through an AI detector. In fact, I'll bet they're terrified of what would happen if they announced a policy of henceforth doing this with all new submissions.

I've been chuckling for two days over the result AI gave me in yesterday's post, when I asked it simply to generate a story that looked like Lydia Davis, one of the most respected current authors, had written it. It was a perect example of what an AI large language model can do. There was plenty of training data -- Davis's stories are all over the web. The large language model was capable of breaking out the highly visible elements of her narratives and style. The result was unintentional, but hilariously accurate, satire.

What do you think The Yale Review would do if I submitted an essay outlining the insights to be gained from yesterday's post? After all, they "welcome submissions that engage thoughtfully or critically with AI—especially when AI is central to the inquiry or deployed self-reflexively as part of a writer’s process." That might be a bridge too far, but I'm not going to rule this out, at least for now.