July 19, 2023 - Where Banning Books Can Lead, Artificial Intelligence & Algorithms, Advice for those on Medicare, Voting by Mail, and the Nostalgia Quiz

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First Ban Books, Then Burn Books, Then Burn their Readers

Heine

German poet Heinrich Heine wrote a play, Almansor, in 1821.  One of its most famous lines, ‘Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschenm’ rings true today.  It was forgotten in Germany in the 1930s and has been ignored in other parts of the world as well throughout history. 

Today, some Americans, including Florida’s shameless governor and groups like ‘Moms for Liberty,’ should be made aware that these words, when translated into English are, ‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn humans too.’  

Are periodic repetitions of the lessons of the Inquisition and the Holocaust necessary to remind us of this?

Banning books is apparently a more acceptable tactic than burning them, at least in the United States, avoiding the acrid smell of smoke that might bother some people.

In Heine’s 1821 play, Almansor, the book burning was set in 1492, probably not accidentally because that was the year that Jews were being expelled from Spain, but the book being burned was the Koran.  Although this is still an open question among academics, Heine, in 1821, by making the victims Muslim may have been cautiously trying to avoid the play being taken as a comment on the antisemitism of his day directed at Jews, which might have been dangerous for him.  

To better put Heine’s words into their proper context, here is a short article about a lecture given by an Israeli professor and former diplomat in March of 2014 at the Central European University, a small private institution with campuses in Vienna and Budapest. 

"The Tale of Two Book Burnings: Heine’s Warning in Context"

"Heinrich Heine’s ominous sentence, "those who burn books will in the end burn people," is one of the most overquoted phrases in modern history. In his lecture on March 11, CEU Recurring Visiting Professor Sholomo Avineri helped put the sentence into context while outlining the 19th century history of German Jewry.

Avineri

However shocking the Nazi book burning in Berlin in 1933 was, it wasn’t the first time that German students and scholars initiated such acts. Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels led students and scholars to burn books by authors deemed enemies of the German spirit, Avineri warned.

In the late 18th century Heine’s birthplace, Dusseldorf in particular and the Rhineland in general, was occupied by France. The Jews of the Rhineland were emancipated, with Karl Marx’s father and Heine among them, and were free to attend university and even to practice law or medicine. When the area was annexed to Prussia in 1815, thus far emancipated Jews were given the choice to convert to Christianity and hold on to their profession, or to keep their faith and lose their position. The backlash of this “choice” was that it radicalized the intellectuals, sowing the seeds of future revolutionaries and communists.

With German nationalism, anti-Semitism grew in the early 19th century. Mostly forgotten Kantian philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries even called for legislation against Jews. He said their influence on Germany was overwhelming, and he even suggested that “they should wear a sign in public places.” However, “Jews were so marginalized at the time, they were basically invisible,” Avineri pointed out. The sentiment of physical exclusion of Jews had been present before the German unification of 1870, although it was the most "Jewish-friendly" country for a short while.

In 1817, two years after the German nationalists' victory over Napoleonic France and on the 300th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses, the student fraternities (Burschenschaften) organized a pilgrimage to Wartburg, a center of German nationalism where Luther found sanctuary after his excommunication. At the Wartburg Festival, students declared their universities wouldn’t accept any foreign students - foreign meaning French or Jewish. The only exception was the University of Heidelberg, whose fraternity was labeled the “Juden” fraternity from then on. Nationalistic, pro-unity speeches were given by students and academics, and books whose authors antagonized German unification were burned. The first book to be thrown onto the bonfire was written by a Frenchman and carried the title “Civil.”

Was it this instance of book burning that prompted Heinrich Heine’s prophecy "those who burn books will in the end burn people?” Heine’s first ever play "Almansor" is a tragic love story between an Arab man and Donna Clara, a Moroccan woman who’s forced to convert from Islam to Christianity. Taking place in Granada in 1492, the tragedy depicts the burning of the Qua’ran, the act that prompts the sentence now engraved in the ground of Berlin's Opernplatz commemorating the horrifying book burning of 1933. Why Heine depicted Muslims as the victims of book burning and not the Jews is still an open question.

Heine’s lyrical poetry was well-loved in Germany, his most famous poem "Lorelei" even appeared in a collection of German folk songs, although the poet’s name was given as Anonymous. His books, together with the works of Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kastner, Karl Marx, Heinrich Mann and many other "un-German" authors, were also burned on May 10, 1933.

Avineri is professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He served as Director-General of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the first government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He received the Israel Prize, the country's highest civilian decoration in 1996.

The lecture was sponsored by CEU's Nationalism Studies Program and Jewish Studies Program."

JL

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Artificial Intelligence, Social Media, and Algorithms

A recent article in the New York Times By Kevin Roose pointed up the ‘doomsday’ dangers of Artificial Intelligence, and described ‘Anthropic,’ a new A.I. platform which some hope might avoid the frightening aspects of earlier competing A.I. programs such as Chatbot.  Check out the article at  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/technology/anthropic-ai-claude-chatbot.html or by CLICKING HERE.

Right now, I am plowing through a 2022 book (‘The Chaos Machine’ by Max Fisher) that claims to be the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world.  It is a disorganized and poorly edited book, but it makes the point that companies such as Facebook and Twitter, in business to make a profit for their shareholders, were ruthless in adopting techniques to capture as much of the public’s ‘online’ time as they could, taking advantage of unethical algorithms (which Fisher seems to interchangeably equate with A.I. and which the companies' executives may not have fully understood) to do this. 

 

Some algorithms define their targets based on readily available data concerning age, gender, income, online shopping and spending information, etc.   That's why if you purchase something online, you will soon start getting emails advertising similar products. Such algorithms are useful for marketing purposes. Other algorithms, however, may cause certain postings to ‘go viral,’ and have less legitimate aims.

 

From Fisher's book, I’ve learned that these questionable and dangerous algorithms might operate in this manner:  

 

1.   Many, perhaps thousands, who are intrigued by what might be an emotionally charged, vitriolic, posting somewhere in social media, such as on Facebook, access it, and read it.  It might not have any basis in fact whatsoever. 

2.   Fascinated by it, some of them might even pass it on to others, and perhaps add their own comment. The algorithm, designed to recognize this, even if they did not pass it on to others, but knowing they at least clicked on it, sends them further postings sharing the original posting’s positions, usually more vehemently, but particularly so if they had passed it on or made a comment.  Algorithms do things like tally up the number of emotionally charged words in a posting to classify how 'strong' it might be. YouTube may even show links to related videos on a clickable sidebar, the strongest ones on top.

3.   As a result, curious individuals may then be offered increasingly more opinionated emails about the subject from often unfamiliar social media sites, pass some on, and even if they do not, their inboxes become overwhelmed by the stream of social media offerings their original actions initiated, especially if the false subject matter appears in millions of postings already circulating on social media. This is what the algorithm is designed to do.  Increase a site’s traffic.

4.   Soon, opportunities for contrary views to appear on social media are lessened, leaving them to show up only after thousands of other questionable postings pop up, or disappear entirely. Search engines similarly steer them in that same direction.  And in this manner, minds are gradually changed, and fraudulent beliefs are spread and reinforced.  Social media is believed by more than those who pay attention to contrary information in newspapers, from government officials, or even from belated semi-apologetic statements by the top executives of the companies providing the highways social media travel.

5.   No human individual can be identified as being specifically responsible for doing this.  It’s done by the algorithms that had been created by coders to increase traffic on the platforms, as they had been assigned to do by their employers, without any concern for the algorithms’ ethics. 

6.   Fisher offers the ‘Pizzagate’ episode (a totally false story of pedophilia led by Hillary Clinton centered in a D.C. pizzeria, resulting in someone shooting up the place) as an example of the conspiracy-targeting effect of social media’s algorithms.  Tens of millions believed the story.  And the same kind of falsehoods on social media, growing exponentially, caused the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, as well as disturbances in Sri Lanka, France, Germany, Brazil, and in the United States where it was part of the organizing of the Charlotteville right-wing demonstration, support for the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and even the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States in 2016. The anti-vaccination movement is an example today.

 

Roose’s article seems to look at information like this as what amounts to ‘last year’s news.’ Most people professionally involved in ‘IT’ (Information Technology) have long recognized it as the way things 'go viral' on the internet.  Roose includes this quote, which well describes the points Fisher tries to make:

‘How many of the problems of the last decade — election interference, destructive algorithms, extremism run amok — could have been avoided if the last generation of start-up founders had been this obsessed with safety, or spent so much time worrying about how their tools might become dangerous weapons in the wrong hands?’

Clearly, both Fisher and Roose place the blame on the major companies that provide platforms for social media.  Their concentration had been on expansion and profitability. 

But Artificial Intelligence actually travels a somewhat different route than merely using algorithms in the legitimate, not the poisonous, manner described above, which it does.  It also provides creative skills to relieve the programmer of the task of fully researching the material they post on social media and use in developing systems for other roles that information technology plays in our economy and society.  

Initially, that would seem to be a good thing.  It augments human creativity in all areas with all that is out there in cyberspace!    But in doing so, it depends upon algorithms, including those which might be questionable.  And it may not test the validity of what it accesses from a myriad of sources.  When asked to write an article on a historic event, for example, A.I.'s sources might include viewpoints that have been totally discredited, but which still are out there, and that a 'human creator' would not think of expressing.

I am still trying to get a handle on A.I., but I can see that it can end up controlling those who use it, those who initially start off using it merely as a creative tool.  

Some feel it can be as great a hazard to mankind as climate change or a global nuclear war.  Why?  Remember that A.I. includes in the sources of its ‘creativity’ faulty, opinionated, if not dangerous, information as a result of the kind of questionable algorithms discussed above.  Such ‘contamination’ of these sources is the heart of the problem.

Yet, some think it might be the opposite, a great work-saving boon to mankind, but there’s a shadow behind that as well, the unemployment it might cause.  The current strike by screenwriters and actors begins to recognize this.

Finally, in the old days (less than a decade ago), it was very expensive to establish an internet presence, requiring large investments.  This was because the required ‘servers’ and hardware needed were very costly.  The advent of ‘the cloud’ solved this problem by making the servers of companies like Microsoft and Google available inexpensively on what amounted to a rental basis. Hence, numerous questionable start-ups were able to appear, with but two prime objectives, quick profitability and being bought by firms like Google for a gigantic price, ethics taking a back seat if being a concern at all.

As I’ve said, I’m still trying to get a handle on Artificial Intelligence and those algorithms that exponentially expand the number of views of a posting.  Any assistance in this area would be appreciated.

JL

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 Nostalgia Quiz #1  (answer will appear on next posting of Jackspotpourri.)   

Sweeny Todd is the name of :

a.   A variety of apple grown in upstate New York, noted for its crispness and sweetness.

b.   SEC quarterback whose records at the University of Alabama were broken by Joe Namath.

c.   A fictitious London barber who murdered his customers to become ingredients in meat pies.

JL

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Voting By Mail in Florida Requires Signing Up Again!

Even if you voted by mail in 2020 and 2022, it is still necessary for you to again sign up to again vote my mail.  If you live in Palm Beach County, you can take care of this and find more information on voting and elections at www.votepalmbeach.gov  including if perhaps you’ve already requested a vote-by-mail ballot, and when that choice expires for you.  Don't assume that though.  Check it out on the site!  Elsewhere in Florida, contact your local Supervisor of Elections.

JL

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Managing Your Medicare Representative

Senior citizens should be aware that even after they set up a power of attorney or a health care proxy, Medicare will not discuss benefits, or anything for that matter, with a senior’s relatives or lawyers, without specific authorization to do so.  The senior may not be available to join in a telephone conversation to orally give such authorization which might suffice. This can cause delays and inconvenience for seniors who might depend on others to help with medical decisions.

This hurdle can be easily overcome according to an article in the AARP Bulletin.  If the senior has an online Medicare account, all that need be done after logging in is to go to ‘Edit My Account Settings,’ and then click on to ‘Manage My Representatives.’ If the senior doesn’t have an online account, going to Medicare.com will make establishing one very simple.  Because none of us know what the future might bring, this should be done in advance.  Like now.

JL

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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri

Email Alerts:  If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do.  And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.  

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If you want to send someone the blog, exactly as you are now seeing it, with all of its bells and whistles, you can just tell folks to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or by providing a link to that address in your email to them.   I think this is the best method of forwarding Jackspotpourri.

There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though!   Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible.  If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which the blog will be forwarded, along with a comment from you.  Each will receive a link to the text portion only of the blog that you now are reading, but without the illustrations, colors, variations in typography, or the 'sidebar' features such as access to the blog's archives.

Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting, but I recommend sending them the link. 

Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.

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