Oh, Dear: AI Now Defies EN I.3

A new update to LLMs gives them a symbolic logic model to test their decisions against before they explain them to you in natural language. 

Every AI you use right now has a massive blind spot. At its core, it is just a giant autocomplete engine.

It is brilliant at language, but fundamentally terrible at rigorous logic.

When you ask an AI to solve a complex math problem, execute a multi-step coding workflow, or map out a business strategy, it doesn't actually "think."

It guesses what the next word should be based on probability.

That is why your AI hallucinates. It uses vibes to do math.

Now, a new paper called "Hybrid Reasoning Agents" just completely changed the paradigm.

Researchers realized you can't fix this by just making the model bigger. You have to change how it processes reality.

They took the creative, language-generating power of a standard LLM (System 1) and wired it directly into a deterministic, symbolic logic engine (System 2).

Instead of predicting the next word and hoping it's right, the AI drafts a solution and instantly runs it through a strict logical solver to prove it works.

If the logic fails, the AI catches it, rewrites it, and tests it again. All in the background. All before you ever see the output.

It perfectly bridges the gap between neural networks (which guess) and symbolic logic (which proves).

And the results are staggering.

Complex reasoning and planning tasks that completely break traditional models are now being solved with near-perfect accuracy.

Because the AI is no longer relying on probability to verify its own logic.

This is NOT the great idea that they think it is. All of you who followed the Nicomachean Ethics discussion last year know why: this is precisely the error that Aristotle warns against in EN I.3. 

Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

By treating analogical reasoning that can apply to people or physical objects as if it should be strict logic with proofs, you open the door to a host of errors. 

Bird Reich

The Atlanta Falcons should probably have run this new logo by a few more people. The comments are pretty wild. 

The Epstein Conspiracy

I know David Reaboi, who authored this book. He's an intense thinker, and I imagine he's come up with something interesting here. I ordered a copy, which I'll review once it arrives, but if any of you are interested in it I can recommend his work in general. 

He takes the interesting tack that the Epstein conspiracy was not an Israeli operation. I think this is at least potentially true; I track it to British intelligence at least initially, and also take Ms. Maxwell rather than Mr. Epstein to have been the actual central figure in it. However, I'll wait to see what David has to say before saying anything more. 

They Left Out the Best Part

Hot Air linked this post about the battle of Neville's Cross, which they claim no one has heard of. I've heard of it, and they left out the best part of the story.

That noble gentleman Sidney Lanier redacted Froissart's chronicles of the Hundred Years War for young men to read -- sort of a 'good parts version,' a la The Princess Bride -- and he didn't leave it out. 

The King of Scotland was taken prisoner, fighting most gallantly, and badly wounded before he was captured by a squire of Northumberland named John Copeland; who, as soon as he got him, pushed through the crowd, and with eight other companions rode off, and never stopped until he was distant from the field of battle about fifteen miles.... 

WHEN the Queen of England, who had remained in Newcastle, heard that her army had gained the day, she mounted her palfrey, and went to the field of battle. She was informed that the King of Scotland had been made prisoner by a squire of the name of John Copeland, but who had ridden off with him, they could not tell whither. The queen ordered that a letter should be written, commanding him to bring the King of Scots to her, and telling him that he had not done what was agreeable to her in carrying off his prisoner without leave. All that day the queen and army remained on the field of battle which they had won, and on the morrow returned to Newcastle. 

When the letter from the queen was presented by a knight to John Copeland, he answered that he would not give up his prisoner, the King of Scots, to man or woman, except to his own lord the King of England; that they might depend on his taking proper care of him, and he would be answerable for guarding him well. The queen upon this wrote letters to the king, which she sent off to Calais. She therein informed him of the state of his kingdom. The king then ordered John Copeland to come to him at Calais; who, having placed his prisoner under good guards, in a strong castle on the borders of Northumberland, set out, and, passing through England, came to Dover, where he embarked, and landed near Calais. When the King of England saw the squire, he took him by the hand, and said, “Ha! welcome, my squire, who by his valor has captured my adversary the King of Scotland.” John Copeland, falling on one knee, replied, “If God, out of his great kindness, has given me the King of Scotland, and permitted me to conquer him in arms, no one ought to be jealous of it; for God can, when he pleases, send his grace to a poor squire, as well as to a great lord. Sir, do not take it amiss if I did not surrender him to the orders of my lady the queen; for I hold my lands of you, and my oath is to you, not to her, except it be through choice.” The king answered, “John, the loyal service you have done us, and our esteem for your valor, is so great, that it may well serve you as an excuse; and shame fall upon all those that bear you any ill-will. You will now return home, and take your prisoner the King of Scotland, and convey him to my wife; and by way of remuneration I assign lands, as near your house as you can choose them, to the amount of five hundred pounds sterling a year, for you and your heirs; and I retain you as a squire of my body and of my household.” John Copeland left Calais the third day after his arrival, and returned to England. When he was come home he assembled his friends and neighbors, and, in company with them, took the King of Scots, and conveyed him to York, where he presented him, in the name of the king, to the queen, and made such handsome excuses that she was satisfied.

When the queen had sufficiently provided for the defence of the city of York, the castle of Roxburgh, the city of Durham, and the town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as well as for all the borders, and had appointed the Lords Percy and Neville governors of Northumberland to take proper care of it, she set out from York, and returned to London. She ordered the King of Scots, the Earl of Murray, and the other prisoners, to be confined in the Tower of London; and, having placed a sufficient guard over them, set out for Dover, where she embarked, and with a favorable wind arrived before Calais three days preceding the feast of All Saints. The king, upon her arrival, held a grand court, and ordered magnificent entertainments for all the lords who were there, but more especially for the ladies; as the queen had brought a great many with her, who were glad to accompany her, in order to see fathers, brothers, and friends, that were engaged at this siege of Calais.

If you follow the link, in the chapter just above the battle is recounted including some poetry of the era that Froissart was drawing from in shaping his own account. 

Warning Shots Confirmed

Since we're in the firing squad business again, here are a few additional candidates for consideration by the lawful authorities. 

[A] group of retired admirals, ex-USAID bureaucrats and professional protest organizers got caught on their own recordings working out the conditions under which they get to declare the government of the United States illegitimate, and somehow we are supposed to believe they are the ones protecting democracy.

Here is what @DataRepublican put out in Part 2 of the Democracy Files. The videos come from a group called Renew to Thrive, with Danielle Reiff and Paul Zeitz in key roles, and it sits inside a much bigger umbrella called the United Democracy Alliance, which she describes as the hush-hush control room for groups like 50501 and Indivisible, deciding when protests get deployed, the timelines and how to respond. National Security Leaders for America, 1,600 former military, intelligence and diplomatic officials led by retired Rear Admiral Michael E. Smith, is credited with operationalizing the whole thing. 

If you want to keep the republic, you have to shoot people like this. Following the lawful process, assuring their rights to a fair trial, etc., but all the same you have to do it or the country isn't serious enough to be taken seriously. Either it's a real nation with the right of pit and gallows, or it isn't. If it isn't, then of course it will be swept away by those who are willing to make use of such things.  

UPDATE: An essay on Color Revolutions as they may affect this situation. These were especially common during the Obama era; it was noted that a flag of a single color was easily replicated across a given community, and itself has no ideology. You can project your hopes on the Green Flag or the Orange Flag or whatever, just as Obama explained that people projected their hopes onto him as if he were such a thing. 

The essay credits the CIA and USAID, but I think Soros' network is more important than the sideline mention it receives. That network has been attempting one in Serbia for several years, though it has apparently failed. 

The Smell of Gasoline

I don't think this is the song I was thinking of yesterday, but it's a good pairing. I remember liking the smell of gasoline around my grandfather's service station. I pumped gas for him when I was a child, in deep defiance of Federal standards. The gasoline was leaded sometimes in those days. I'm fairly intelligent; who knows what I might have been without the lead in the gas I pumped, in which we washed our hands at end of day.

I guess it doesn't matter. I was wedded from birth to the hardware. V-type engines, motorcycles and chrome. Whatever I gave to it, it's given a lot to me in return.

Venison and Gasoline

So after this weekend's successful ride to and from the Stone Mountain Games, into Atlanta traffic down superhighways, my son came home and wrecked his bike on a road he rides every single day and knows perfectly well. The cause was a deer, as it often is, and he had reason to suspect it was there. A mother deer and a fawn crossed in front of him, so (as I have taught him) he began to slow down and look for others. The second fawn bolted from cover at the last second, fouling his front tire and causing the wreck. The bike went down, twisting his ankle underneath it, slid across the road, and then flipped into the air and crashed onto its side once it hit the dirt. North Carolina highways have no shoulders to speak of, in the mountains especially. 

When I heard the sirens going down the valley, somehow I knew it was him. I started down the road after them and came across them tending to him shortly thereafter. Of course all the firefighters were friends of ours, except one fellow from Cullowhee who happened by. 

As motorcycle wrecks go, it was everything you could want. I doubt the bike will be repairable. This is a bike I put sixty thousand miles on myself, and that he grew up on the back of as a child before I gave it to him for Christmas one year. I put two brand new tires on it for him just last week before the Stone Mountain run. 

Nevertheless, it was all you could want because he seems to have escaped any serious injury. We do need to follow-up with the orthopedist for an MRI to check the soft tissues in the ankle, but the X-rays showed no broken bones at least according to the reading of the emergency medicine physician. Some minor abrasions. The bike didn't drag him even as it twisted his ankle because the highway crash bars I put on it kept it from pinning his foot or leg. When the 800-pound bike flipped and crashed to earth, he wasn't on it: all that kinetic energy went away from him when he sensibly let it go.  

As far as I can tell he did everything exactly as I taught him, and on his own account always wears complete safety gear -- leathers, helmet, gloves, strong leather boots. That worked to his advantage today. 

So many of my friends are bikers. Every one of them, including myself, has been in at least one motorcycle wreck. None of them have died thereby. All of my biker friends who have died have done so from heart attacks or the like. It's an inherently risky activity, but skill and preparation can help you.

All the same, today I got lucky. So did my son. If the bike didn't make it, she died with honor after a long and glorious career. 

One of the firefighters got the deer.

Memento Mori

The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.

The Catholic priest who was killed by a falling crucifix over the weekend in Ecuador had been giving a sermon about the fleeting nature of life just before the freak accident was caught live on camera.

Father Patricio Sánchez Molinari, of the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in southern Guayaquil, was reflecting on the words of Jesus when he told his congregation they should not waste their lives scrolling on their phones and instead dedicate them to God and their loved ones.

“One day, all of us here will also die, and sometimes the time we’ve spent on things doesn’t have as much meaning as the time we spend with God,” he said....

The priest went on to ask God to bless his congregation as he began another prayer — when the giant crucifix behind him suddenly fell off the wall and landed on him.

So it is written. We cannot be surprised when it continues to happen.

Category Errors

A "category error" is a serious philosophical error in which, because something is assigned to the wrong category, a whole set of mistakes is sure to follow. A fairly common one among conservatives is Ross Perot's dictum that 'government should be run like a business.' No, it shouldn't; those aren't the same kind of things at all. This is also an example of the fallacy of composition, in which it is assumed that something which holds at one level of organization holds at all levels of organization: this is not true either. Oxygen and hydrogen at room temperature are gasses that lack the property of 'wetness,' but combined into a new form of organization -- water -- they are liquid and wet. 

I was thinking about this while reading of a classroom experiment this morning.

One lecture in Industrial Psychology, in particular, I will never forget. 

The professor spoke about how an effective job description focused on concretely measurable tasks, not vague instructions, or characteristics. 

For example, "maintain an 85% or greater average on customer feedback surveys", instead of "be cheerful and upbeat", or even "interact positively with customers".

This means that goals are clear, and performance is measurable.... 

Once some of the students had wrapped their minds around this concept, the professor decided to do a class exercise. 

He asked the female students to come up with a job description for "husband".  At first, this went fine. The girls noodled around a bit with things they wanted their husbands to be (tall, etc), but he was able to gradually steer them towards describing what they wanted in terms of actions. 

But then he asked the male students to define a wife in the same way. 

And all the girls became upset. Some of them had full-on meltdowns. 

Every single thing that a male student wanted, or expected, from his hypothetical future wife was sexist, oppressive, old-fashioned, misogynistic, patriarchal, etc. 

They were literally screaming. Some of them in tears. 

And I realized something pretty quickly. It wasn't the actual, concrete responsibilities of the female role that they objected to. 

It was the idea of there being a female role at all, with any attached responsibilities. 

The obvious category error here is assigning an industrial concept to the family. Just as government is not and should not be run as if it were a business, the family is not a business and definitely should not be run as if it were. The point of a business is to generate profits. The point of a family is to provide an intimate space for humanity to achieve its natural ends. These can include happiness, children and their successful rearing, delight, meaning, and a whole host of other things that are important though they may not be profitable.  

As a result, it is probably important that we don't assign concrete, measurable standards of performance to each other inside of our families even if we it is important that we do when running a business. In the family there needs to be room for growth, for comfort in bad times, for expansion and change as interests or capacities develop, and so on and so forth. It's not the point of the thing that we hit targets, but that we experience love and support and give others the same things in return. 

To take an example from the field, cooking. Traditionally women cook meals while men work outside the home, but that's not very important. Even in the old days, some men decided to become cooks as a profession. 

Apple pie.

It happens that I like to cook, and my wife doesn't like to cook, and as a consequence I'm better at it than she is -- no offense to the lady -- because you practice doing what you enjoy doing and it is practice that makes perfect. We're Gen X, not the younger people being complained about, but it works for us and it's nobody else's business. It's our marriage. We don't report to anyone else about how we run the thing. 

The problem the young ladies in the original long quote have is thus not that they object to being tied down to an industrial performance standard in their prospective roles as wives; it's that they assume it is reasonable to tie the prospective husbands down to such standards as husbands. Each couple has to figure this out for themselves, and like us, they don't report to anybody about how they do it. The only thing that really matters is that they are loyal to each other while doing whatever it is they work out to do. The only thing you can't break is the bond of honor. What that bond entails is up to the two of them.

Mothers More Deadly than School Shootings

We've visited this occasionally with regard to abortion, which is the leading cause of death of Americans if unborn Americans count as Americans. This is for children already afoot.

Warning Shots

DataRepublican has made a tremendously serious allegation that we should probably take seriously. 

Here is the allegation:

What you not have heard is - there is an operational plan to put [Democratic Socialists of America plans] all into action. If the Democratic Party sweeps 2026, then DSA will become "foot soldiers" in constant clashes with the administration to cross a "red line" or invoke a "doomsday scenario" - meaning, President Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, probably sometime in 2027. 

Then, a lot of coordinated responses kick off, including delegitimizing the federal government itself and handing that legitimacy to Democratic governors. 2028 then becomes a vote on whether to keep America governance as-is or to burn it all down to appease a "young and brown" demographic.   

This is followed-up by a real-life example of this plan possibly being actioned in Virginia: 

@DataRepublican

 laid it out: coordinated clashes with the federal government to delegitimize it and hand legitimacy to Democratic state officials -- specifically governors & AGs

‼️Virginia’s AG just ordered election officials to:

• Deny ordinary DOJ monitors access to polls

• Tell federal agents to leave and call local police

• Document badges, weapons, vehicles & movements

• Challenge federal subpoenas

• While eliminating Election Day voter eligibility challenges

❌No specific unlawful federal operation identified—just preemptive resistance that sets up the “red line” showdown and shifts authority to the state and transfers legitimacy and control to Democratic state officials -- in Virginia's case, leftwing extremists Governor Abigail Spanberger and Attorney General Jay Jones -- 

❌This is an operational plan, not theory. 

What I would add to this discussion is this: the governor of Virginia mentioned in the real-life example is a former case officer at CIA. A case officer, at times "operations officer," is the sort of real spy that is fictionalized in the James Bond novels. For those of you following a similar debate in which a sitting Congresswoman is speaking to the possibility of using lawfare to discourage anyone in college today from applying to the administration for fear of "problems" that might occur from working with the government, that woman is also former CIA, although an analyst rather than a case officer.

I am not suggesting that they represent a CIA plot to plant leaders within the government for the purpose of overthrowing it via this DSA action plan. However, the CIA is not that big compared to the US military; the odds of there being an informal alumni association who know each other and are prepared to work together at the high levels of government that they plainly occupy in a common interest are high enough to be a reasonable bet. 

Provoking an insurgency as part of an attempt to delegitimize the Federal Government in favor of state governments they control is a high-risk plan with obvious downsides. Even the larger states do not have adequate coercive power to actually dominate their internal populations, for example; legitimacy is the only way governance works here. At the height of the insurgency in Iraq, we needed two divisions to keep anything like a lid on Baghdad (population 8MM); North Carolina's National Guard is not quite a whole brigade, which might be enough to control Charlotte (population 3MM) if they bring in the rest of the brigade from West Virginia and South Carolina, but not the rest of the state. 

That 'rest of the state' includes Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne and many Special Forces; so if there's a split between the Federal government and the Democratic state governors, North Carolina doesn't look like a happy example for the insurgents. For that matter, the 30th ABCT that the North Carolina National Guard makes up the heart of can be Federalized especially in cases of insurgency; in order to draw out the NC or VA national guards the insurgents would have to ask for mutiny, which means that any loyalist elements would have the law on their side in replacing their chain of command. The rest of the state also includes lots of Appalachia, as does West Virginia: in denuding WV of its National Guard in order to try to control Charlotte, they would free up a lot of literally unconquerable backcountry for counterrevolutionary guerrillas. Virginia itself has similar problems, and shares borders with both NC and WV. 

The DSA is itself a kind of insurgent movement within the Democratic Party, in direct competition with the remnants of the Clinton faction and dodgy cooperation with the Obama faction for control of the party. I can see them causing serious problems in certain cities; the idea of delegitimizing and replacing the Federal government seems unlikely to succeed. 

That doesn't mean that it wouldn't be attempted. However, there is no guarantee that a broken legitimacy will be replaced. The most dangerous elements of this alleged movement are the Party of Government, and in breaking the legitimacy of government they would in essence be destroying their own One Ring. They lack the force entirely to make good a conquest; if they convince the People to reject the Federal government, like Humpty Dumpty they will find that 'all the king's horses and all the king's men' may not be able to put the thing back together again. 

Still, such madness has been attempted before, and wisdom is plainly no prerequisite for obtaining power. It's worth thinking about, and maybe talking about with people you trust. Islands of resistance broadly distributed are the one thing they cannot possibly overcome: just as the US military could never quite defeat a broadly-distributed resistance of ordinary men with rifles in Afghanistan, nor could the Soviet Union before them. 

Home from Stone

We must have made quite a sight coming home, with the sword strapped to my motorcycle and that Lochaber Axe strapped to my son's. It was a gift to him from our chief, having belonged to a friend and longstanding member who had passed on. I don't know that such weapons are normally transported by motorcycle, but with a little thought the bike was perfectly serviceable as a mode of transportation. The axe will now reside in honor until it is needed again.  

UPDATE: 

I wanted to black out the parts of this photo with people in them, and also to blur out the license plates, both in the interests of the privacy of the people involved (some of whom were strangers whose privacy I wanted to protect for golden rule reasons). However, I do want Hall readers to enjoy how the bikes looked when rigged up with a sword and 'a battle axe in the Lochaber style.' 

Stone Mountain

Good Highland athletics today. 

UPDATE: 

A well-respected Clan. 

Stone Mountain Run

Headed south this weekend for the Scottish Highland Games. 

Yes, that is a sword strapped to the bike. It’s important.

Encamped lakeside below the mountain.