“I won”

This is a poem I wrote after being inspired by the intelligence, kindness, sportsmanship, and overall moral virtue of perhaps the greatest human being ever to walk the earth. I’m talking of course, about the one and only Donald J. Trump.

“I won”

They say that I lost, but I know that I won.
I’m a great leader! And so is Kim Jong!
Lost by six million? It must be fake news.
Propagate all of my dangerous views.

Pollution is fake! Corona is fake!
There’s millions of dollars that I gotta make!
My fans will adore me, who care’s what I do?
I could shoot someone on fifth avenue.

Thirty-four comrades indicted, oh my!
Fraudulent cronies, they better comply.
Perhaps I can pardon a few, set ’em free.
American heroes, the way it should be.

It’s not about truth, and it’s not about facts.
I’ll monger with fear, cuz I know it attracts.
Pandering voters with outrageous claims.
Desperately trying to bolster my fame.

Conspiracy theories. Believe ’em, they’re true!
As long as they make me look better, they’ll do.
Pizzagate here! Election fraud there!
Q-Anon something or other I’ll share.

The Dems are the devil! They’re after your kids!
I’m playing along for the highest of bids.
Many a Christian will bow to my name.
As long as I trick them by playing the game.

Controlling their minds is as easy as pie.
Flooding the airspace, with lie after lie.
Herding the sheep and they do what I say.
Chapter 11, I don’t have to pay.

Stop with the fact check! Don’t you have faith?
That’s how I duped ’em on November 8th.
Don’t think, but believe! I’m free to deceive!
How can my voters be so damn naive?

The system is broken? I’ll tell ’em I’ll fix it.
By breaking it further, my MO’s sadistic.
Sowing division, I do what I can.
Making America Greater Again!

Filling the swamp as I fired the experts.
Why do they hate me, despite all my efforts?
Because I’m the best! Unlike suckers and losers.
The captured, the wounded, my ego abusers.

Hey China! Hey Russia! I gotta win!
Investigate Biden! Let hacking begin!
And if I don’t win, then I know what to do.
Faithless electors, I’ll try for a coup!

Silence the people! Just give me the votes!
Blaming Dominion and scaping the goats!
Election is rigged! If ever I lose.
But if I should win then I’ll give up the ruse.

They say that I lost, but I know that I won.
Infected the nation, the damage is done.
I’ll start my own network, there’s more to be spun.
Eroding democracy, fun’s just begun!

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CGI, Movies and Truth…

After watching Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which I liked, though not nearly as much as the original trilogy (Episodes IV, V, and VI), it got me thinking more about something I hadn’t thought about since the most recent presidential election.  As I watched Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia, both characters made possible in large part thanks to CGI (as well as the help of actors Ingvild Deila and Guy Henry), I realized that although this is still a long way away, it is inevitable that (barring a nuclear world war or some other catastrophe that kills us all or sets us back to a pre-industrialized age) the pace of this technology will eventually lead to CGI products that are completely indistinguishable from reality.

This means that eventually, the “fake news” issue that many have been making a lot of noise about as of late, will one day take a new and ugly turn for the worse.  Not only is video and graphic technology accelerating at a fairly rapid pace to exacerbate this problem, but similar concerns are also arising as a result of voice editing software.  By simply gathering several seconds of sample audio from a person of interest, various forms of software are getting better and better at synthesizing their speech in order to mimic them — putting whatever words into “their” mouths that one so desires.

The irony here is that this means that despite the fact that we are going to continue becoming more and more globally interconnected, technologically advanced, and gain more global knowledge, it seems that we will eventually reach a point where each individual becomes less and less able to know what is true and what isn’t in all the places that you are electronically connected to.  One reason for this is that, as per the opening reference to Rogue One, it will become increasingly difficult to judge the veracity of videos that go viral on the internet and/or through news outlets.  We can imagine seeing a video (or many series of videos) released on the news and throughout the internet containing shocking events with real world leaders or other famous people, places, and so forth, events that could possibly start a civil or world war, alter one’s vote, or otherwise — but with the caveat that these events are entirely manufactured by some Machiavellian warmonger or power seeking elite.

Pragmatically speaking, we must still live our lives trusting what we see in proportion to the evidence we have, thus believing ordinary claims with a higher degree of confidence than extraordinary ones.  We will still need to hold to the general rule of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence in order to meet their burden of proof.  But it will become more difficult to trust certain forms of evidence (including in a court of law), so we’ll have to take that into consideration so that actions that result in more catastrophic consequences (if your assumptions/information turn out to be based on false evidence) require a higher burden of proof — once we are able to successfully pass some kind of graphics Touring Test.

This is by no means an endorsement for conspiracy theories generally nor any other anti-intellectual or dogmatic non-sense. We don’t want people to start doubting everything they see nor to start doubting everything they don’t WANT to see (which would be a proverbial buffet for our cognitive biases and the conspiracy theorists that make use of these epistemological flaws regularly), we still need to take this dynamic technological factor into account to maintain a world view based on proper Bayesian reasoning.

On the brighter side of things, we are going to get to enjoy much of what the new CGI capabilities will bring to us, because movies and all visual entertainment are going to be revolutionarily changed forever in many ways that will be worth celebrating, including our use of virtual reality generally (many various forms that we do and will continue to consciously and rationally desire). We just need to pay attention and exercise some careful moral deliberation as we develop these technologies. Our brains simply didn’t evolve to easily avoid being duped by artificial realities like the ones we’re developing (we already get duped far too often within our actual reality), so we need to engineer our path forward in a way that will better safeguard us from our own cognitive biases so we can maximize our well being once this genie is out of the bottle.

The WikiLeaks Conundrum

I’ve been thinking a lot about WikiLeaks over the last year, especially given the relevant consequences that have ensued with respect to the 2016 presidential election.  In particular, I’ve been thinking about the trade-offs that underlie any type of platform that centers around publishing secret or classified information, news leaks, and the like.  I’m torn over the general concept in terms of whether these kinds of platforms provide a net good for society and so I decided to write a blog post about it to outline my concerns through a brief analysis.

Make no mistake that I appreciate the fact that there are people in the world that work hard and are often taking huge risks to their own safety in order to deliver any number of secrets to the general public, whether governmental, political, or corporate.  And this is by no means exclusive to Wikileaks, but also applies to similar organizations and even individual whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden.  In many cases, the information that is leaked to the public is vitally important to inform us about some magnate’s personal corruption, various forms of systemic corruption, or even outright violations of our constitutional rights (such as the NSA violating our right to privacy as outlined in the fourth amendment).

While the public tends to highly value the increased transparency that these kinds of leaks offer, they also open us up to a number of vulnerabilities.  One prominent example that illustrates some of these vulnerabilities is the influence on the 2016 presidential election, resulting from the Clinton email leaks and the leaks pertaining to the DNC.  One might ask how exactly could those leaks have been a bad thing for the public?  After all it just increased transparency and gave the public information that most of us felt we had a right to know.  Unfortunately, it’s much more complicated than that as it can be difficult to know where to draw the line in terms of what should or should not be public knowledge.

To illustrate this point, imagine that you are a foreign or domestic entity that is highly capable of hacking.  Now imagine that you stand to gain an immense amount of land, money, or power if a particular political candidate in a foreign or domestic election is elected, because you know about their current reach of power and their behavioral tendencies, their public or private ties to other magnates, and you know the kinds of policies that they are likely to enact based on their public pronouncements in the media and their advertised campaign platform.  Now if you have the ability to hack into private information from every pertinent candidate and/or political party involved in that election, then you likely have the ability to not only know secrets about the candidate that can benefit you from their winning (including their perspective of you as a foreign or domestic entity, and/or damning things about them that you can use as leverage to bribe them later on after being elected), but you also likely know about damning things that could cripple the opposing candidate’s chances at being elected.

This point illustrates the following conundrum:  while WikiLeaks can deliver important information to the public, it can also be used as a platform for malicious entities to influence our elections, to jeopardize our national or international security, or to cause any number of problems based on “selective” sharing.  That is to say, they may have plenty of information that would be damning to both opposing political parties, but they may only choose to deliver half the story because of an underlying agenda to influence the election outcome.  This creates an obvious problem, not least because the public doesn’t consider the amount of hacked or leaked information that they didn’t get.  Instead they think they’ve just become better informed concerning a political candidate or some policy issue, when in fact their judgment has now been compromised because they’ve just received a hyper-biased leak and one that was given to them intentionally to mislead them, even though the contents of the leak may in fact be true.  But when people aren’t able to put the new information in the proper context or perspective, then new information can actually make them less informed.  That is to say, the new information can become an epistemological liability, because it unknowingly distorts the facts, leading people to behave in ways that they otherwise would not have if they only had a few more pertinent details.

So now we have to ask ourselves, what can we do about this?  Should we just scrap WikiLeaks?  I don’t think that’s necessary, nor do I think it’s feasible to do even if we wanted to since it would likely just be replaced by any number of other entities that would accomplish the same ends (or it would become delocalized and go back to a bunch of disconnected sources).  Should we assume all leaked information has been leaked to serve some malicious agenda?

Well, a good dose of healthy skepticism could be a part of the solution.  We don’t want to be irrationally skeptical of any and all leaks, but it would make sense to have more scrutiny when it’s apparent that the leak could serve a malicious purpose.  This means that we need to be deeply concerned about this unless or until we reach a point in time where hacking is so common that the number of leaks reaches a threshold where it’s no longer pragmatically possible to selectively share them to accomplish these kinds of half-truth driven political agendas.  Until that point is reached, if it’s ever reached, given the arms race between encryption and hacking, we will have to question every seemingly important leak and work hard to make the public at large understand these concerns and to take them seriously.  It’s too easy for the majority to be distracted by the proverbial carrot dangling in front of them, such that they fail to realize that it may be some form of politically motivated bait.  In the mean time, we need to open up the conversation surrounding this issue, and look into possible solutions to help mitigate our concerns.  Perhaps we’ll start seeing organizations that can better vet the sources of these leaks, or that can better analyze their immediate effects on the global economy, elections, etc., before deciding whether or not they should release the information to the public.  This won’t be an easy task.

This brings me to my last point which is to say that I don’t think people have a fundamental right to know every piece of information that’s out there.  If someone found a way to make a nuclear bomb using household ingredients, should that be public information?  Don’t people understand that many pieces of information are kept private or classified because that’s the only way some organizations can function?  Including organizations that strive to maintain or increase national and international security?  Do people want all information to be public even if it comes at the expense of creating humanitarian crises, or the further consolidation of power by select plutocrats?  There’s often debate over the trade-offs between giving up our personal privacy to increase our safety.  Now the time has come to ask whether our giving up some forms of privacy or secrecy on larger scales (whether we like it or not) is actually detracting from our safety or putting our democracy in jeopardy.