Some lucky charm or locket

Posted on August 8, 2026 by hessd

I want to pretend to complain about a paragraph in Amor Towles masterful A Gentleman in Moscow.  There is a tiny bit of truth in my complaint, but it is mostly a vehicle to express my appreciation for one small part of Towles’ attention to the texture of the narrative.

And, as a second introduction, I would like to make this an argument for rereading books that deserve to be read many times.  I have read A Gentleman in Moscow several times now and I have the plot down and the characters down and I am ready to notice other things.  This post is about one other thing I noticed yesterday.

First, here is the paragraph—on p. 41 of my copy.

“By way of response [1] she wiggled back and forth to make herself comfortable, then rested her elbows on the table.  Around her neck hung a small pendant on a golden chain, some lucky charm or locket.  The Count looked toward the young lady’s governess with the hopes of catching her attention, but she had obviously learned from experience to keep her nose in her book.“

Everything in that paragraph leads to the Count and Nina, the “young lady” having the time and the space to begin to know each other.  The response does; the elbows on the table does; the failure to engage the governess does.  Everything does—except the line about the “small pendant on a golden chain,” which has no business being in this paragraph.

When you are reading this to learn how the relationship between Nina and the Count begins, you read right past that.  You do not ask what function all the other sentences play, but which this sentence does not.  The story is just too good for that.  For the first few times.

But I am past the first few times and I can read to see what part each sentence contributes and at that point, I can pretend to be affronted that this sentence—the one about the locket—does not play nicely with others.  It is, however, the most important sentence in the paragraph.

It is not “some lucky charm or locket.”  It is the master key to the Metropol Hotel.  This is clearly established on p. 58, when Nina:

“…raised her hands under her hair and unhooked the delicate chain she wore around her neck.  Dangling at the bottom of the golden parabola was the pendant that the Count at the Piazza (p. 41), but it was neither a lucky charm nor a locket.  It was a passkey for the hotel!“

It is the key that—at their parting—Nina gives the Count as a goodbye present on p. 104.  It is the key with which the Count opens the office of the Bishop, the name the Count has given to Leplevsky the manager of the hotel, and which allows the Count to break into the Bishop’s office (p. 431) and hold him at gunpoint while he goes through all the personnel files.  It is also the key that opens the storeroom in the basement, ( p. 456) where the Count imprisons the Bishop for several days while he, himself, makes his escape from the hotel.

Obviously, none of that could have happened had the chain with “some lucky charm or locket” not been introduced early in the book.  And there is no good reason why it ought to have a paragraph to itself.  It needs to be tucked into a paragraph which is about something else so that people like me will read over it time after time and discover it only when it is joined to all those other paragraphs and becomes a crucial part of the narrative.

So, as I say, I celebrate this lovely figure in the narrative in the only way that occurs to me, which is by pretending to complain about the damage it does to the paragraph about Nina’s first meeting with the Count

[1] to Count Rostov’s invitation to join him at lunch.

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On Not Living in a Biscuit Tin

Posted on July 31, 2026 by hessd

“For several days, in fact, [the Count] had been fending off a state of restlessness. On his regular descent to the lobby, he found himself counting steps….He found that he was walking through the doors of the Piazza at 12:01 for lunch. At 1:35, when he climbed the 110 steps to his room, he was already calculating the minutes until he could come back downstairs for a drink. If he continued along this course, it would not take long for the ceiling to edge downward, the walls to edge inward, and the floor to edge upward, until the entire hotel had been collapsed into the size of a biscuit tin.”

Fans of Amor Towles’ marvelous A Gentleman in Moscow will recognize “the hotel” as the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. It is stately and beautiful, but it is a prison for Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov and the new Soviet government has assured him that if the tries to leave it, he will be shot. The Count has always seen himself as a “Man of Intent,” but at this stage of the story, he has not found one. The result is that he feels the hotel shrinking around him until it will be smaller than a prison cell.

I was impressed that Towles describes the behaviors the Count is relying on as if they were the dimensions of the space he lives in. There is a good deal more that could be said about that, but I picked this passage because I live in a Senior Center and I see a lot of people living in shrinking space. It is a very nice senior center. As senior centers go, it is like the Metropol Hotel, but nothing will keep you from counting the steps and counting the minutes if you do not have intentions that move you and that give you a reason to invest yourself.

The Count is courageous, but he is also lucky. He befriends a very young child, Nina, who is there in the hotel with her nanny, and together they devise adventures. When Nina grows up and leaves, he manages to become the Head Waiter in the Boyarski, the hotel’s prestigious restaurant. All the skills he developed as a noble, being served in such restaurants, he puts to work as a waiter in that restaurant.

As the story develops, Nina’s daughter Sophie, is left with the Count for what is supposed to be “a month or two,” but which becomes permanent. Sophie is about the age that her mother was when each met the Count, and the Count and Sophie devise adventures.

The two little girls are a great help to Alexander Ilyich, but they are not what keeps the hotel from shrinking around him. He takes pleasure in doing thing right and he was raised to know what “right” was in many areas. The area that matters the most to him in this setting is his knowledge of food and drink, but he is also a good friend and a thoughtful mentor. Doing those things and doing them well matter to the Count and they provide the structure of intentions that keep the ceiling, the walls, and the floor where they ought to be.

Here where I live, I see people who are courageous and lucky. And also some who are not. The great advantage of Towles’ description–that it is the hotel that is changing–is that it makes the pressures visible in the way the residents react to them. It is a good way to see these pressures the way they see them or the way they feel them. It keeps others–myself, for instance–away from speculations about motives available and opportunities squandered.

The Count, from the time of this passage onward, has things to do that matter to him. (Readers who are familiar with the story will want to remind me that he was one step away from suicide at one point, but if they were to remind me of that, I would reply that it took only the taste of honey made by bees from his faraway childhood home to bring him back.)

I am a fan, as you might have guessed, of having things to do that matter. They don’t have to matter to anyone else, but they need to provide me with a reason for being bold at one time and patient at another. I don’t want to live in a life-space the size of a biscuit tin and I don’t have to.

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I remember it all…like it was yesterday

Posted on July 16, 2026 by hessd

I don’t, actually.  That title is bait for my children.  It is the first part of a two-line joke that they will all remember and that is why it is the title.

I have reached the time in my life when I reach back for a “recent memory” and discover that it was actually a long time ago.  This past July 2, I celebrated a running project that I began in 1976 and completed (two days early) in 1977.  Those don’t sound so long ago.  I celebrated our nation’s bicentennial by running 1776 miles between 4th of the first year and the 4th of the next year.  But when I say that it was 50 years ago, I am shocked.

That is what was in the back of my mind when I remembered a series of essays I wrote to my kids.  On the title page of the collection of essays it says: “Essays to my Children” June 15, 2001—July 5 2002.”  The dates themselves don’t have any particular significance—they are not built around the magic year of 1776, for instance—but now that I have gotten into the habit of looking back, it is hard not to notice that it was 25 years ago that I started.

I began with the idea that at a certain point, it would be worthwhile for a Christian father to say to his kids just what he believed.  The idea was not so much that they ought to believe what I do; rather that it was they ought to know just where I was for whatever help if might provide them in working out where they were.  They were 42, 40, and 38 years old, when I finished and I did not think of the essays so much as a gift to them as the payment of a debt.  I eventually called the series, “The Debt I Owed.” [1]

The actual experience of writing and sending out the essays was not at all what I expected.  What I asked them to agree to do for me was to send me an email confirming that they had received that week’s essay.  And that was every week for a year. I thought that was far enough away from asking whether they agreed or not and close enough to meet my need to know that the essay had reached them.  Before they agreed, they very wisely asked for some definition of the length of the essay.  I don’t remember how the negotiations went, but we finally agreed on two pages (12 point font).

That turned out to be very good for me, by the way.  Especially in the chapter on doctrines, there are some topics that really can’t be articulated in two pages.  For those, I nearly always wrote a longer one first and worked for the clarity that would allow me to cut it down to a short two pager.

It was also not what I expected in that the regular confirmation they they had received “Dad’s essay” came to mean a great deal to me.  It meant, for one thing, that they took me at my word that I was not trying to bend their ideas closer to mine.  But principally, it required them to see to it every week that they sent an email that they cared nothing at all about for the transparent reason that they cared about me.  I had asked it of them and they had agreed and all three of them responded to the essay every week.  And there were fifty-two essays.

I knew from the beginning that I would get more out of the exercise than they would.   It required me to think through—while thinking of myself as their father—just what was important about the way I grew up.  And how I had come to some conclusions about knowledge—what we could know and what we could not.  And what the major doctrines of the Christian faith were, as I understood them.  And what the implications of those doctrines meant for a life of discipleship.

You would expect that kind of radical reaching back to contain some surprises and, of course, it did.  But I think the biggest surprise was that the doctrinal section had almost nothing to say to the discipleship section.  When I started, I thought the doctrines would unfold themselves into patterns of behavior.  They did not.  I was dumbfounded.

Still, it was an exercise that turned out to matter to me.  Whatever belief system there is in your background, you can live a lot of years with it humming away back there and causing you no trouble at all.  But when you try to say precisely what beliefs are contained in this peaceful and shady area, you find yourself stumbling time after time.  And if, in addition, you take on the task of describing how you came to those beliefs, things get more complicated quickly.

I picked up the rudiments of my Christian faith at home, mostly with my father.  They went through some changes through my years of teaching, but the outlines would have been familiar.  I picked up my understanding of how we know things—how we know anything—in grad school.  What are the chances, I ask, looking back, that the beliefs would play nicely with the theories of knowledge?

Not much, of course.  And the set of essays I took on 25 years ago, required that the early self and the later self learn to listen to each other and then to put that newfound dialogue into words intended for kids who had known me all their lives although they were now in their 30s and 40s and had made their own lives for themselves.

How could I have taken that for granted?  I am glad it was so long ago.  I can look back with puzzlement on the doctrinal side and with appreciation on the family side.  That is what the title of this essay is all about.

[1]  Playing off of the idea that the four major sections were Doctrine, Epistemology, Biography, and Theology (DEBT)

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Autocorrect Tyranny: The Usage Overlord

Posted on July 13, 2026 by hessd

My brother John brightens the Mondays of a lot of people with his Pixlist, a nature photograph and some snappy commentary which he makes available on Monday mornings.  This morning, besides telling me a good bit about how tendrils of the Bur Cucumber grow, he offered this little comment.  I think of it as a sua culpa.  I’ll come back to sua culpa. Here is what he said.

Everything starts out tiny.  This is an apical meristem, the growing point of one of those 20 foot stems of Bur Cucumber climbing over the Bitternut Hickory (not the Butternut Hickory as I said last posting—twice.)  The “i” and “u” keys are right next to each other but I claim to have been victimized by the autocorrect function). 

As intrigued as I was by the gyrations of the Bur Cucumber, I was really taken over by “victimized by the autocorrect function.”  As you see by the title, I am moving in the direction of “autocorrect tyranny,” even though I know that is a bridge too far. 

What I’d like from an autocorrect function is a polite question.  I hear it the way I would hear it from one of my more polite friends.  “Pardon me, Dale, did you mean “Bitternut?’  This calls my attention to what I have actually written and ask if that is what I intended to write.  That’s a nice touch.

But if I am not notified, then someone else’s sense of what I meant to write is being substituted for mine.  Imagine a very quick consultation among the subsystems that constitute the autocorrect function.

He just typed Butternut.  

Do you think he meant Bitternut.

Very likely.  Of the last 100,000 uses of the two words, Butternut was almost always the intended word.

Do you think we should put a wavy red line under the word so he has a chance to decide?

We can’t do that.  A wavy red line means the spelling is incorrect and he has correctly spelled another word.

Well then, maybe a wavy green line?

But that doesn’t mean anything.  Even if he saw it, he wouldn’t know what it meant. Just leave Butternut in.  It’s probably what he meant.

Don’t you think we ought to ask him?

You know there is not efficient way to do that and we are—please remember—all about efficiency.  That is what he bought and that is what we are providing.

So long as I don’t get to make the choice, the “judgment” of the autocorrect function—maybe autocorrect dysfunction—is going to prevail.  And I don’t get to say what I mean.

And by the way, when I said, in Latin, that it was the fault of the autocorrect function, I wrote sua culpa—your fault—instead of mea culpa, “my fault.” I said I was going to come back to that. The Usage Overlord changed it to “sea,” because that is a more common use of those letters.  I had to go back and put it into italics before it would allow the usage at all.  It had no trouble at all with the “mea” in mea culpa.  I guess more people claim it is their fault than say “it is your fault.”

And probably it is more often my fault. But not this morning.

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Exclusivity

Posted on July 8, 2026 by hessd

I would like to think about words today.  I want to specify that because the words I want to think about point clearly to arenas of social conflict and I do not want to be in an arena.  Just the words, ma’am

Inclusion and exclusion are fundamental human acts.  They are reciprocal and they are both necessary.  Being in favor of inclusion but not of exclusion is like being in favor in inhaling and against exhaling.

Exclusion makes “us” and “them” possible.  It is necessary to human society.

All of the questions of how we want “them” to treat “us” and how “we” are going to treat “them” are relevant to the functioning of a society, of course, but they are not relevant to the words we choose to point to those issues.

So how did “exclusivity”  become a volatile and dangerous word?  I think carelessness, mostly.  When you exclude me from something—an event, a group—to which I have a right of access, you have committed an act of unfairness.  It might be immoral; it might be illegal.  The standard I want to use is fairness.

That being the case, it seems odd that the social weight has come to fall on the act of exclusion, rather than the basis of the exclusion.  In other words, exclusivity is not the problem here and that matters.

Why does it matter?  Because our reflexive and unconsidered use of “exclusivity” points to the act of exclusion rather than the basis for exclusion.  We badly need some such expression as “inappropriate exclusivity.”  I know it is long and hard to say, but think of it as being a draftee into the army when a national conflict is looming.  Sometimes there are just things you need to do even when you don’t want to.  Saying “inappropriate exclusivity” is one of those.

And what do you get for all that work?  First, you make “exclusion” and “exclusivity” into neutral words.  If they are neutral—neither good nor bad—they direct attention away from the fact of exclusion and to the basis for exclusion and that is where the attention ought to be.  That adjective—inappropriate— requires that we imagine that there are appropriate exclusions and inappropriate exclusions.  We are against the latter type.  Only.

Without that, “exclusivity” becomes a hungry carnivore, roaming the neighborhoods and gobbling up acts of appropriate exclusion.  Even acts that allocate this to you and that to me by some method everyone has accepted, is just food for the “exclusivity monster.” When you have taken control of your portion and begin to help yourself to my portion, I object.  But “exclusivity” sticks his head in the window and points to the contested part and says that in refusing to share my portion, I am engaging in an act of exclusivity.

Now I expect that you were puzzled by the introduction of the hungry carnivore.  Why all that violence?  This is why. The idea that you, having taken control of your portion, should think that you have rightful access to my portion needs to be resisted.  Everyone agrees to that.  But the charge of exclusivity messes up that agreement.  The carnivore points a finger at my unwillingness to share my portion and say, “Ha!  Exclusivity!” and he is correct.

Ownership or exclusive access was established when the oatmeal was served, some in my bowl and some in yours.  Only exclusion will ensure that my breakfast goes into me and yours into you.  You will say, surely, that it is only common sense that the oatmeal in my bowl is mine and the oatmeal in your bowl is yours, but remember that we are not talking about common sense; nor are we talking about oatmeal.  We are talking about words.

Does “exclusivity” solve the oatmeal problem.  Of course not.  It is the clearest possible instance of it.  Does “inappropriate exclusivity” solve the oatmeal problem?  Probably.  It certainly and reliably changes the focus to whether exclusion is appropriate in this situation.

The snarling beast who points the finger and says, “Ha! Exclusion” now has nothing to say.  There is not, in our current circumstances, an “appropriateness beast.”  Appropriateness requires a committee, not a predator.

“Appropriate on what basis?” is the approach of the appropriate criterion.  And we all know that there are good bases for exclusion and bad bases.  Let’s have a discussion about what is good and bad about this reason for excluding anyone or any claim.  

To shift the metaphor just one more time, the “exclusivity” claim is surgery done with a screwdriver and a wrench.  “Appropriateness” is a scalpel.

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Celebrating Just a Little

Posted on July 3, 2026 by hessd

50 Years ago, I got a pamphlet from the National Joggers Association.  Their idea was that a really good way to celebrate our nation’s birthday, if you are a runner, would be to run 1776 miles between the 4th of July in 1976 and the4th of July in 1977.  I calculated that that would require less than 5 miles a day and my regular runs were longer than that.

No problem.

Well, it was a problem.  I signed up and among the things they sent me was a card to record my miles.  It had a lot of boxes like the ones you see here.  And not to spoil the ending or anything, this picture shows that on July 2, I ran a regular run of 6.2 miles.  That brought me to 1775 miles for the year.  Then I ran another mile in the afternoon, about which I will say more later.

I put “no problem” in a paragraph by itself because the five mile calculation required that you did not get sick during the year and that you stayed injury-free during the year.  I missed both of those.

I gave it a good run during most of the year and that included both summer—hot and humid—in western Pennsylvania and winter—cold and humid.  Also icy.  And with all that, I would up in March of 1977 283 miles behind the pace.  So that means the regular five miles a day, plus enough to begin to eat into that deficit.

There were very few days that spring when I did not get two runs in; one to keep my pace and one to begin paying off the debt.

The last mile was share with Ron Galbraith, the basketball coach at Westminster College.  Ron was one of the most competitive people I ever knew and it was only friendship that made him willing to ease back a little and let me break the tape.

New Wilmington being a little town, the local newspaper sent someone down to cover the “event.”  The picture is from their story.  Some friends came down to see the last mile.  I remember confetti and a lovely bouquet of daffodils from a friend’s front lawn.

There is nothing particularly meritorious about running a lot of miles in one particular year, but I remember when I looked at the deficit and decided to do it anyway.  And that decision really has stood me in good stead since then.

I remember too, the little games I added.  I would run three miles before my shower in the morning.  It wasn’t the best time to run,  especially if I had been out after dark the previous evening, but I needed the extra miles.  I was living on “new faculty circle” at the time and that circle was half a mile long.  I got into the habit of adding that half mile to whatever the distance it was that I had just run.

I counted on those half miles adding up on the chart.  But what I didn’t count on was that once I started calling that last half mile a “victory lap,” I noticed that my body began to treat that last half mile as “not really running.”  I may have had a stitch in my side or a blister on my foot or a muscle that wanted to keep cramping, but that was “during the run.”  And the victory lap was not a “run;” not really.  So those conditions went away or nearly so.  That taught me a lot.

And once I adopted the “victory lap” metaphor, I began to think of the years of my life as if they represented the four laps of a mile race—twenty years to the lap.  And my years since then, every one of them, is just a victory lap.

It was a really great experience and…you know…only 50 years ago today.

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Being Old: Part IV

Posted on May 30, 2026 by hessd

I see it as a time of triumphs, and so could you.  In this post, I will explain how it can be done and leave you time to reject it entirely.  I will caution you, however that as you begin to reject it, you stop and think whether what you have that is better.

I’ll begin with some examples that will give you all the reason you need to stop reading.  I am writing this at a Starbucks in Denver.  This Starbucks is about half a mile from our hotel.  So I put my computer into my backpack and got ready to head out the door.  I had forgotten, however, to zip one of the pockets in the backpack and a piece of crumpled foil fell out.  I reached down and picked it up and threw it away.  Triumph!

Big deal?  Certainly not.  Triumph?  Absolutely.  Reaching down all the way to the floor is very far from automatic anymore.  It is closer to a routine problem.  What it is NOT is automatic and unnoticed.

Second example.  Yesterday I sat through a graduation ceremony at which two of my step-granddaughters (my step-daughter’s children) graduated from high school.  Word had it that there were 600+ graduates and I was in the middle of a very long row.  I began to get the early symptoms that either are vertigo or that signal an episode of vasovagal syncope. [1]  This is a disaster for newbies, but I am not a newbie.  I crossed my legs and squeezed them together, I rubbed some cold water on my face and neck, and I focused my vision on one of the flags set up on the floor.  And when it was ready, it left me to enjoy the rest of the ceremony.  Triumph!

Third and final example.  Last year, when we attended this graduation (for a step-grandson) we parked in a nearby parking garage, where we were stuck afterwards for over an hour.  This year, we located a neighborhood that was a good distance from the arena where the graduation was held.  Can I walk the distance to the arena?  Yes, despite the fact that if I stride out at my normal pace, the muscles along both shinbones will cramp painfully.  So I dealt with this situation in two ways: social and physical.  The social solution is to tell the other members of my group that I am going to have to slow down periodically and they need to keep track of where I am.  I don’t require any help; just understanding.  The physical solution is to alternate normal walking pace with much slower walking (creeping) pace and cover the distance with scarcely any pain at all.  Triumph!

Why, exactly, do those illustrate triumphs?

It is that question that impeded my progress for so long.  I think I understand it now.  When I was, say, half my current age, I did not experience any of those obstacles.  No obstacles, no overcoming of obstacles.  That is so obviously true that some of you might be tempted to accuse me of praising the obstacles just so that I could overcome them.  Not so.  In a heartbeat, I would choose not to experience those obstacles last all.  But back when I was 44, I had other obstacles to deal with.

Furthermore, there is an intermediate stage between the easy and natural performance of tasks and the labored triumph I currently experience.  It is stage of ignorance, frustration, and resentment.  IFR.  [2] The fundamental question—so silly that you never actually asked it out loud—is: “Why is this happening to me?  It never happened to me before!”

“Ignorance” because you don’t know what it is, much less why.  In the foil example, my lower back has stiffened up and I have to deal with it diplomatically, as if it were a foreign government.  I know that now. [3]  “Frustration” because I keep trying to do what I have always done—and sometimes it works—and mostly failing.  My efforts are frustrated and I am taking the frustration personally.  Hence the “resentment.”  Something I have a right to has been taken away from me and I am angry about it.  Since my rights (never considered before they were abrogated) have been taken away, I have every right to my resentment.

And I do.

But, of course, it doesn’t help.  And given what I know, I cannot have my ignorance back.  And given that I still have to do the things I was doing, frustration only makes it more difficult to acquire the new skills I need.  So of the three, the only one that needs to be resolved is Ignorance.  The other two I just need to get over.

So here is the hard part of the essay.  I have laid out the three eras.  The interposition of the second era is the basis for my experience in the third era.  In the third era, I no longer suffer from the ignorance I had and, with a little practice, I also no longer have to fail at the task.  There is, in fact, a way of bending over to pick up the foil if I do it thoughtfully, i.e., in the way I have learned to do it and have practiced doing it.  There is, usually, a way to head off the lightheadedness and blurred vision that might be simple vertigo but that also might be a looming social disaster. [4] There is a way to walk “with the group” if they know how I will have to vary my pace to walk the distance.

The first era is nice, but it is not about triumphing over obstacles.  The second era is awful, but it forms the basis for the third era, which I am busy celebrating and suggesting in this post.

These may seem to you to be “cheap triumphs.”  They are not.  In the first place, they eventuate in actions that are worth taking.  In the second place, I had to learn a lot that was hard to learn—even after I got rid of the resentment—and I did and I learned how and when to use it.  Those are achievements—you cannot say they are not.  But they do not need to be celebrated as triumphs.  It was my own decision to do that and the basis for the decision was that celebrating triumphs does a lot of good things for me.

And why would I not choose that?  I can think of only three reasons: ignorance, frustration, and resentment.  I am tired now and I rest my case.

[1]  For people who don’t have this particular inconvenience, it means that heart’s vagus nerve acts up, my blood pressure falls rapidly, and someone calls 911.  These are all consequences that do not belong in the graduation scenario.

[2]  IFR for those who would be disappointed in me if I did not include at least one TLA (Three Letter Acronym)]

[3]  Please do not go off along the lines of what I might be able to do to reconcile myself with my lower back.  This essay is complicated enough without that and you are only doing it so you will not have to think about what I am asking you to think about.

[4]  It is a social disaster only. I am awake and fully competent by the time the ambulance arrives, but I now know that there will be eight hours of pointless testing before they will let me go home.

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The Work of Humans

Posted on May 26, 2026 by hessd

I’m going to skip over all the practical impediments to this.  If it has to get done, it will get done.  We turned the entire economy over the the war effort in the early 40s and did things no one had even imagined could be done.  Why?  Because we felt we had no choice.

So I am thinking AI thoughts on one side of my mind and on the other, I am thinking carboni thoughts from The Ministry for the Future. [1] The carboni is a currency that was awarded to people who reclaimed carbon dioxide  from the atmosphere or who prevented it from escaping into the atmosphere.  There is no natural economic system that would reward that job, so they invented a currency that would and changed a lot of economic behavior that would otherwise not have occurred.

In the meantime, the AI side of my brain is trying to grapple with the fact that we keep defining jobs so that they can be done better by AI.  There is no reason we could not define some jobs that can only be done by humans (and leaving others to whichever life form does it best) so that there is a balance between economic efficiency and human flourishing.

The way I have heard the problem posed took for granted that the most efficient (productive) way to provide various good and services is the best way.  When that argument fails on the merits, the argument is that firms that refuse to work that way will be put out of business by firms that excel in it.

You could even define “human support jobs” in a way that would allow AI machines to outperform humans.  What you cannot do is to say that jobs that are defined by human to human contact can be better done by AI.  Some jobs could be made to come under the productivity metric; other jobs come under the human support of humans metric.

If that sounds like Affirmative Action to you, I am willing to let you be reminded.  If the alternative were to turn out to be Affirmative Inaction or Affirmation Rather than Action, it wouldn’t sound as bad.

I, myself, think that we can be more discerning about what only another human can do for a person.  I think we have not paid much attention to that form of the problem yet.  But I also have a nightmare scenario that pushes me in the direction of the human care of human beings.  It is that if we settle for the simulated care of human beings of which AI is already quite competent, we will begin to define what we value and what we need in terms of what it can produce for us.

Perhaps a silly example would help.  Imagine that the speech programs with which they fit up AI systems are unable to pronounce the Sh- as in shibboleth.  Like the Ephraimites, they could not pronounce the Sh-.  Fine; use it as a test.  But this was a battlefield situation.  They can either pronounce it or they can’t.  But if you were living with them, as many people so far have lived with robots, you would have the chance to decide that your really preferred a word that sounded like “Sibboleth” rather than the old way.

Some years ago, Sherry Turkle wrote a book with the title, Alone Together.  It is a spectacularly good book, but along the lines of this essay, it is good to remember that the subtitle is: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.  The short answer is that we develop emotional attachments to these AI devices and want to prefer what they offer us to what could be available from any other source: human or machine, natural or artificial.

The reason the system I am trying to imagine would require humans providing services to other humans is that if we do not, humans will be vulnerable to choosing the AI performance over the human one.  And that is only the provision of services.  There are also special skills required to receive those services in an affirming way. [2]

It seems sensible, I am sure, to lob the ball up as if it were a jump ball and allow the better performer to control the play thereafter.  You could even say that we will simply let people choose which source of their “personal services” to use, the natural ones or the artificial ones.

But it is not sensible.  AI systems can be tweaked to provide better service in the same way that viruses tweak their performance to stay ahead of anti-viral  treatments.  AI systems can perform in the way that is coolest or hottest, depending on the era; squarest or weirdest depending on the culture.  The authentic response of one human being to another is not going to meet the preferences of people who allow their preferences to be messed with like that.

As nearly as I can see it, nothing short of defining personal services as services provided by one human and received by another human.  That should take care of the competition between the two.  It may very well, as in the carboni example, require a lot of rules and a new currency, but it seems to me that it is a step in the direction of thinking it through together.

[1]  Kim Stanley Robinson’s wonderful sci-fi novel about the rescue of the planet.

[2]  Giving and receiving are discrete sets of skills, neither of which can substitute for the other.

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Being Old: Part III

Posted on May 24, 2026 by hessd

One event after another has chased me back into my extensive electronic library.  Let me illustrate.  Where I live, there is a debate being formulated based on the Tragedy of the Commons.  In fact, there is a much more relevant literature based on Elinor Ostrom’s study of Common Pool Resources, which I have in my “library.”  The prospect of the debate reminded me that I have it.  It shouldn’t have taken that much.

In one of the Bible courses I teach, a theologian is criticized for being too general in his prescriptions, but I have a much earlier book that he wrote which is aimed precisely at the individual application of the same teaching and I have that, too, in my electronic library.

You get the idea. 

But I go to that vast and curated collection only to look something I have forgotten.  I do not treat it as the very individually chosen treasure that it is.  What I do instead is scout out new books, many of them on those same themes.  Mostly, I do that because someone has just discovered the issue and has found a book and wants to talk about it.  But I am old now (see title) and it has come to seem to me scandalous that I leave my library alone or check on it only episodically.

What I should be doing in my old age is lovingly reviewing them; reminding myself why I scanned

them and saved them.  They are my “old books” and I should be luxuriating in them.  I am looking forward.  I think that is mostly a good thing.  But I am looking forward instead of looking backward and I think that is a shame.

All the materials that formed my Political Psychology course are there.  All the materials I wrote for my Political Psychology course are there including some very pertinent examples.  I have there the best study of the framing of issues I have ever read and I have not read it in maybe twenty years.  If it is as good as I remember, I should read it again very soon.

I have three sets of such libraries.  The first is largely academic and it is material I collected for three reasons.  The first is that I really needed a PhD and to do that I had to persuade a committee that I had done some original work.  The second is that I taught courses in Public Policy over the next forty years and I added to my electronic library every time I taught the course.  Some of it I wrote myself.  Most of it, I found in journals and textbooks.  The third is that I spent that same forty years also teaching courses in Political Psychology, and I kept reading the founders of the subdiscipline and their modern critics.

The second set has more to do with theology and biblical exegesis.  I have studied those topics since the 1960s and began adding them to my electronic library as soon as I had a computer and a scanner.  I have some tomes and I have articles that tickled my funny bone.  I found them to be humerus.

The third set more or less defies classification so I just built a library under my own name.  All kinds of stuff is there, but if it intrigued me and if it is not political science or biblical studies, that is probably where it is.

I have built the case for not reading new books on my old topics.  As usual, I have overbuilt.  What I would really like to do is to allow the new issues to chase me back to the old materials.  The illustration of the Tragedy of the Commons and the institutional contours of Common Pool Resources is a good example of that.  The issue came up here where I live.  That discussion would be much enriched if it were broadened to studies that are contemporary and empirical.  I actually have some of that material in my library that will show me how to get more if I need more.

I really need to spend more time there.  It could very well be that is one of the great compensations of being old.

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The Days of our Life

Posted on May 8, 2026 by hessd

Donald Trump is a disaster as President, but he is probably the best pitch man we have ever seen in the Oval Office.  He has found a way to attract and hold the attention of an electoral majority.  He has made American government the favorite soap opera of many voters, who turn on their TVs to find out “what he has done next.”  The quality of attention that is paid to the DT Show is like the quality earlier generations paid to a soap opera, hoping to find out of Dustin will FINALLY pop the question to Jennifer.

The Framers were not, as everyone surely knows, fans of “democracy.”  In fact the principal connotation of that word in their time was “mob rule.” They dealt with that worry by restricting who could vote (white male property owners) and who they could vote for.  The people elected one part of one branch of the legislature.  Period.  And even so, the argument had to be made in the Federalist Papers that if trouble arose, regional dissatisfactions would not flourish (the country is too big) and that, in any case wiser heads would prevail (the Senate).  They also made no place for political parties, which were not invented until some time later (1800).

It is easy, from our present standpoint, to look back and call the Framers’ presuppositions naive, but our own ideas are beginning to look naive as well.  We have thought, until recently, that voters will vote for and sustain in office, parties that solve their problems and meet their needs.  Until recently, nearly all of that took place “off camera.”  Heads of departments and bureaus were budgeted for projects and given authority to complete them and then left alone. [1]

The clear demonstration of the Trump administration is that “off camera” is no longer adequate.  It does not sustain the attention of voters for whom “what is he going to do next” is the question of the day—day after day after day.  Among some segments of the electorate, there is the sense the “he is doing all this for us” but even for people who have not been carrying that grievance, the “on camera” form of government has attracted their attention.

It would be easy go slide off into a rant at this point.  I say that to help me control the tendency.  What I want to say, really, is that DT has changed the form of government by changing the appearance of government.  He has successfully “personalized” government.  When he says of an action by some foreign power “They have disrespected us,” millions of people see themselves as part of the “us.”

I felt sly when I titled this post, “the Days of our Life,” using the collective singular instead of the plural.  It is in fact, “our life.”  Citizens who are appalled at what the President is doing are saying in vain, “He does not represent me.”  Yes, in fact, he does.  However much liberal Democrats may hate the actions and the posturing, this President does, in fact, represent “us” and will until he is replaced.

This is “our life” and these drama-ridden days are the days that define that life.

I tried to include here a picture from Trump’s early acting career  [2] in order to make the point that it was so successful that he is still using it.  What “the U. S.” used to do, he does now, and he casts it in language everyone will understand and some will cherish.

[1]  Not quite “alone.”  They always had the rapt attention of representatives from important interests watching them, but those representatives often came in pairs, one pro and one anti, depending on the proposed legislation.

[2]  He is playing his final role at the moment and we are all paying for it.

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