AI rules

I continue to be amazed at what Grok can do. I think I posted some months back about the neighbor's child custody case that I've been drawn into. I'm trying to keep costs down by helping the family lawyer with whatever parts I'm competent to do, not knowing any family law to speak of and having no experience at all in state court.

To my amazement, you can ask Grok what to do when the opposing party fails to respond timely to a motion to transfer the San Antonion case to the my county, where the child lives, then belatedly asks the San Antonion court to reconsider the uncontested order transferring the case after the transfer is complete, even if there really was something wrong with the original motion (filed after a statutory deadline by now-former counsel; I hired my neighbor a new one). That's not a easy issue to research from scratch on-line without any experience in family court, but it didn't bother Grok at all. It spit out a very serviceable motion to dismiss and brief after only a bit of back and forth. When the family court in San Antonio granted the motion to reconsider despite its clear loss of jurisdiction even to hear it, Grok can convert the brief to a petition for a writ of mandamus in a heartbeat. Now, I read all the statutes and cases and ran the whole thing by the family lawyer to be sure Grok wasn't taking me for a ride, but honestly, it was good work. I'd have been happy to get it from a talented young associate after a week of work.

Last night I asked what to do when I needed a business-record affidavit from a doctor, but his office didn't want to bother with notarizing the affidavit. Grok instantly laid out 3-4 things that get past the obstacle, including using an affidavit signed under penalty of perjury instead of one signed on oath and witnessed by a notary. (I'm terrible with business records, since in my practice we stipulated admissibility of documents 100% of the time, or the bankruptcy courts would have had our heads on spikes for wasting time and money.) Alternatively, there are subpoenas duces tecum or depositions on written questions that get around the roadblock and yield admissible documentary evidence without the need to bring a custodian of records into the courthouse for live testimony, but also without thoroughly irritating potentially helpful medical staff by making them show up for a deposition.

Then I asked, OK, how about the body-cam video that the county doesn't want to produce under the Public Information Act (a/k/a state version of FOIA), citing a privilege because the video relates to an ongoing criminal DUI case, and another privilege because the video might affect the privacy of a minor? Instantly Grok said, skip arguing with the county and the state AG's office, just go to the family judge and ask him to compel production, because he can override a privilege in the best interests of the child, and he's used to it as a routine matter.

It's like having a mentor who can set you off the right direction, and he doesn't even make you go look up the statutes, he has the citations right there, and will draft cover letters and motions to compel and whatever you need. Could I ever have made good use of this tool way back when! It beats Westlaw research by a mile. And it's scot-free. I'm probably helping bring the grid down, but hey. I just want this 13-year-old to live with her sane grandma.

Nicomachean Ethics IX.3

When should you end a friendship?

Another question that arises is whether friendships should or should not be broken off when the other party does not remain the same. Perhaps we may say that there is nothing strange in breaking off a friendship based on utility or pleasure, when our friends no longer have these attributes. For it was of these attributes that we were the friends; and when these have failed it is reasonable to love no longer. But one might complain of another if, when he loved us for our usefulness or pleasantness, he pretended to love us for our character. For, as we said at the outset, most differences arise between friends when they are not friends in the spirit in which they think they are.

Fair enough, is it not? If you chose a friend because he amused you, you'd quit spending time with him if he didn't keep doing that; if you chose a friend because he was rich and bought you nice dinners, his poverty might end your friendship. Yet if you had convinced him that you really admired and respected him, and that's why you came to his dinners, he might reasonably be annoyed.

So when a man has deceived himself and has thought he was being loved for his character, when the other person was doing nothing of the kind, he must blame himself; when he has been deceived by the pretenses of the other person, it is just that he should complain against his deceiver; he will complain with more justice than one does against people who counterfeit the currency, inasmuch as the wrongdoing is concerned with something more valuable.

But if one accepts another man as good, and he turns out badly and is seen to do so, must one still love him? Surely it is impossible, since not everything can be loved, but only what is good. What is evil neither can nor should be loved; for it is not one's duty to be a lover of evil, nor to become like what is bad; and we have said that like is dear like. Must the friendship, then, be forthwith broken off? Or is this not so in all cases, but only when one's friends are incurable in their wickedness?

This advice is a problem for Christians, who are advised to forgive everything and love their enemies. I don't have an answer to that problem. I'm just acknowledging it.

If they are capable of being reformed one should rather come to the assistance of their character or their property, inasmuch as this is better and more characteristic of friendship. But a man who breaks off such a friendship would seem to be doing nothing strange; for it was not to a man of this sort that he was a friend; when his friend has changed, therefore, and he is unable to save him, he gives him up.

In a way I find that comment to be a strange thing for Aristotle to say, even though it's a perfectly ordinary sentiment that I don't think is controversial. The point of the Ethics is that virtue is a habitual character that is formed by repetition of good habits into firm characters. Here we see an acknowledgement that characters can deform, too, presumably in the same way: by bad habits that are allowed to continue unchallenged for a long time.

But if one friend remained the same while the other became better and far outstripped him in virtue, should the latter treat the former as a friend? Surely he cannot. When the interval is great this becomes most plain, e.g. in the case of childish friendships; if one friend remained a child in intellect while the other became a fully developed man, how could they be friends when they neither approved of the same things nor delighted in and were pained by the same things? For not even with regard to each other will their tastes agree, and without this (as we saw) they cannot be friends; for they cannot live together. But we have discussed these matters.

Also a little surprising, this time because the emphasis is not on helping your friend -- here the friend doesn't even need to be 'saved,' as just a moment ago was the case in the paragraph before. It's about abandoning him for not becoming as virtuous as you did. And how virtuous is that, if you abandon your old friends because they stayed the same as they were when you were coming up together?

Also, how can you not be friends because they have childish intellects compared with your own? Children are often the most sincere of friends; except for their grandparents, perhaps, who befriend the children with a deep love and intensity. Aristotle has treated the family relationship as different from friendship, but in my experience it is of great value to pursue friendships with those much older, or much younger, than you are. Our habit of tending to keep to our own cohort is greatly limiting in terms of the experience we are exposed to (when younger) or that we convey (when older); and it is limiting in our perspectives as well. I already know what the world looked like to someone who grew up in the American South of the 1970s and early 80s; I can still learn what it looks like to someone who is coming up today.

I do get the point, of course. The young sometimes seem to not know anything at all, and teaching them the context they need to understand the problems can be tiresome. Yet it is worthy to do so, and far less laborious than trying to 'save' a fallen friend. As for the ones who never changed, well, managing consistency in an ever-changing world is not always to be despised.

Should he, then, behave no otherwise towards [the unchanged friend] than he would if he had never been his friend? Surely he should keep a remembrance of their former intimacy, and as we think we ought to oblige friends rather than strangers, so to those who have been our friends we ought to make some allowance for our former friendship, when the breach has not been due to excess of wickedness.

I met an old friend the other day that I hadn't seen in more than twenty years. It turned out we had nothing to say to each other. She seemed to be doing well, and to have a perfectly satisfactory life without me imposing upon it; and while I remember her very gladly, I didn't feel that it was necessary or appropriate to press a renewal of our friendship. Probably something like that is what he means here; we remain friendly, but allow each other to pass by. If she had needed something of me, it would have been different; but she clearly didn't, and had learned to make her way without me. It's ok that we change, and move on, and lose touch even with treasured companions; that's the way the world works. We were together for a time, and mattered to each other once; once, but long ago. 

Counting Costs

"What Happened in Gaza Might Even Be Worse than We Think," says the NY Times, perhaps not understanding how I would ordinarily use the word "worse." Whatever happened, I would regard it as a sad end to a lingering problem that was definitely going to end one way or the other. Hamas asked God to bring them into a reckoning with Israel through a titanic act of blood magic via human sacrifice; whatever happened to them was devoutly prayed for by them. I trust God's justice and mercy in such matters.

Indeed, even death in such circumstances can be a release from worse situations; if you do trust in divine mercy, as one might given that our entire heritage points at it as a thing we should believe in, thousands of years of men and women living and dying believing in it, you might hope for that.

But anyway, this piece is nonsense.

For many Americans, there might be a temptation to disbelieve the enormity of what has happened in Gaza. After all, it is a catastrophe funded by our money, made possible by our weapons, condoned by our government and carried out by one of our closest allies. It’s little wonder that some want to downplay the damage.

Their defense is to cast doubt on the numbers. It goes something like this: The death toll, counted by the Hamas-run health ministry, must be an exaggeration to court international outrage. If it isn’t, then most of those killed were Hamas fighters, surely, not civilians. Either way, it can’t be worse than other horrors elsewhere, in South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which we Americans are blameless. Taken together, it’s a potent repertoire of deflation and denial.

That's definitely not what I said; what I said was that Israel wasn't being any worse than we usually are at conducting intense urban warfare in the Middle East. And definitely not, indeed, than other Muslims do in wars that don't get called "genocide."

I don't think the current war in Israel is an example of genocide because the Israelis don't really seem to be trying to exterminate Palestinians as such, nor so far even to expel them from Gaza (as I frankly expected they would) in order to create a larger buffer zone given the October 7th demonstration that they were currently very vulnerable. The 50,000 figure killed is a tiny percentage of the total population of Palestinians, and 2.5% even of the population within Gaza -- a pretty restrained bit of killing given the intensity of the fighting and Israel's clear superiority in weapons.

Likewise, it doesn't extend to conflicts within a group: in the Syrian civil war, for example, fourteen million people were forced out of their homes and many killed or harmed, but nobody thought it was a genocide. There was even a religious difference here and there, Alawites and Muslims, Shi'ites and Sunnis, and even ethnic differences between Arabs and Kurds (who sometimes appeal to ancestral faiths as well). It wasn't thought a genocide all the same.

That was in May. So her account of the "unusually rigorous" count by the Hamas-run health ministry and her proposed supplements to it amounts to this: "If de Waal is anywhere close to right, this conflict will have killed 7.5 percent of the prewar population of Gaza in just two years."

So that's three times the estimate from May, which I agree was shockingly low. As someone who has participated at length in wars in the Middle East involving large urban populations in tight spaces, though, that 7.5% guess remains remarkable for its discriminate limits. I don't know how you'd fight for two years in such a densely populated urban area without depopulation of half the population. Assad definitely didn't do that. The current population of Syria is ~25 million; 14 million people were displaced in the war. 

Seven and a half percent, at the top of the estimate, giving them every inch of the wiggle room they're asking? 

If the Jews had done no better than us fighting in Mosul or than Assad did in and around Damascus, we'd still have nothing to say. But in fact the Israelis did better, and fought cleaner, even with people who hated them more than Iraqis ever hated us. I had lovely chicken dinners with Iraqis who'd been trying to kill us not that long before, including officers of the Special Republican Guard. We got along great; I really liked that one former general I met while doing that. (We called him a Sheikh, but he wasn't really; he was urban, not tribal. He had been really a general.) It was nothing like the hatred that the Israelis and the Palestinians have going on. Yet the Israelis took much better care of their enemies than we ever did.

Nicomachean Ethics IX.2

Today we turn to the problem of experts. It's a real problem: if you aren't an expert in a given field, you can't identify those who are. How would you? But we need experts.

Mostly Aristotle lays out the problem today, so I will just let him do that without comment.

A further problem is set by such questions as, whether one should in all things give the preference to one's father and obey him, or whether when one is ill one should trust a doctor, and when one has to elect a general should elect a man of military skill; and similarly whether one should render a service by preference to a friend or to a good man, and should show gratitude to a benefactor or oblige a friend, if one cannot do both.

All such questions are hard, are they not, to decide with precision? For they admit of many variations of all sorts in respect both of the magnitude of the service and of its nobility necessity. But that we should not give the preference in all things to the same person is plain enough; and we must for the most part return benefits rather than oblige friends, as we must pay back a loan to a creditor rather than make one to a friend. But perhaps even this is not always true; e.g. should a man who has been ransomed out of the hands of brigands ransom his ransomer in return, whoever he may be (or pay him if he has not been captured but demands payment) or should he ransom his father? It would seem that he should ransom his father in preference even to himself. As we have said, then, generally the debt should be paid, but if the gift is exceedingly noble or exceedingly necessary, one should defer to these considerations. For sometimes it is not even fair to return the equivalent of what one has received, when the one man has done a service to one whom he knows to be good, while the other makes a return to one whom he believes to be bad. For that matter, one should sometimes not lend in return to one who has lent to oneself; for the one person lent to a good man, expecting to recover his loan, while the other has no hope of recovering from one who is believed to be bad. Therefore if the facts really are so, the demand is not fair; and if they are not, but people think they are, they would be held to be doing nothing strange in refusing. As we have often pointed out, then, discussions about feelings and actions have just as much definiteness as their subject-matter.

That we should not make the same return to every one, nor give a father the preference in everything, as one does not sacrifice everything to Zeus, is plain enough; but since we ought to render different things to parents, brothers, comrades, and benefactors, we ought to render to each class what is appropriate and becoming. And this is what people seem in fact to do; to marriages they invite their kinsfolk; for these have a part in the family and therefore in the doings that affect the family; and at funerals also they think that kinsfolk, before all others, should meet, for the same reason. And it would be thought that in the matter of food we should help our parents before all others, since we owe our own nourishment to them, and it is more honourable to help in this respect the authors of our being even before ourselves; and honour too one should give to one's parents as one does to the gods, but not any and every honour; for that matter one should not give the same honour to one's father and one's mother, nor again should one give them the honour due to a philosopher or to a general, but the honour due to a father, or again to a mother. To all older persons, too, one should give honour appropriate to their age, by rising to receive them and finding seats for them and so on; while to comrades and brothers one should allow freedom of speech and common use of all things. To kinsmen, too, and fellow-tribesmen and fellow-citizens and to every other class one should always try to assign what is appropriate, and to compare the claims of each class with respect to nearness of relation and to virtue or usefulness. The comparison is easier when the persons belong to the same class, and more laborious when they are different. Yet we must not on that account shrink from the task, but decide the question as best we can.

Nicomachean Ethics IX.1

Aristotle begins the ninth book with a curious decision: he compares friendship to contractual relations in business. 

In all friendships between dissimilars it is, as we have said, proportion that equalizes the parties and preserves the friendship; e.g. in the political form of friendship the shoemaker gets a return for his shoes in proportion to his worth, and the weaver and all other craftsmen do the same. Now here a common measure has been provided in the form of money, and therefore everything is referred to this and measured by this...

Yes, that's what makes it a curious decision: we normally consider friendship to be entirely unlike the relationships we pay for, or take pay to have. 

...but in the friendship of lovers sometimes the lover complains that his excess of love is not met by love in return though perhaps there is nothing lovable about him), while often the beloved complains that the lover who formerly promised everything now performs nothing. Such incidents happen when the lover loves the beloved for the sake of pleasure while the beloved loves the lover for the sake of utility, and they do not both possess the qualities expected of them. If these be the objects of the friendship it is dissolved when they do not get the things that formed the motives of their love; for each did not love the other person himself but the qualities he had, and these were not enduring; that is why the friendships also are transient.

That paragraph again refers to the Greek homoerotic structures, which don't exist in our culture. There might be some general lessons for those who use love relationships as a way of getting practical goods ('utility,' Aristotle is calling that). 

But the love of characters, as has been said, endures because it is self-dependent. Differences arise when what they get is something different and not what they desire; for it is like getting nothing at all when we do not get what we aim at; compare the story of the person who made promises to a lyre-player, promising him the more, the better he sang, but in the morning, when the other demanded the fulfilment of his promises, said that he had given pleasure for pleasure. Now if this had been what each wanted, all would have been well; but if the one wanted enjoyment but the other gain, and the one has what he wants while the other has not, the terms of the association will not have been properly fulfilled; for what each in fact wants is what he attends to, and it is for the sake of that that that he will give what he has.

I'm guessing 'lyre players' were the guitar players of his day. But now we reach an important question:

But who is to fix the worth of the service; he who makes the sacrifice or he who has got the advantage? At any rate the other seems to leave it to him. This is what they say Protagoras used to do; whenever he taught anything whatsoever, he bade the learner assess the value of the knowledge, and accepted the amount so fixed. But in such matters some men approve of the saying 'let a man have his fixed reward'. Those who get the money first and then do none of the things they said they would, owing to the extravagance of their promises, naturally find themselves the objects of complaint; for they do not fulfil what they agreed to. The sophists are perhaps compelled to do this because no one would give money for the things they do know. These people then, if they do not do what they have been paid for, are naturally made the objects of complaint.

Protagoras gave his name to a Platonic dialogue, which turns on the question of whether virtue can be taught (if it is, as Socrates believed, a form of knowledge then it ought to be able to be taught, as Protagoras claimed to do). If you could teach virtue successfully you might well let your students set your rate of pay; after all, being now virtuous men, they would doubtless treat you equitably. 

Unfortunately, perhaps, we already know that Aristotle disproved Socrates' claim that virtue is a sort of knowledge. Can it be taught, then? Yes, because it is a sort of practice. It turns out not to be something that you can understand, but it is something that you can do. You can do it over and over until it becomes habitual for you, until it shapes your character.

But where there is no contract of service, those who give up something for the sake of the other party cannot (as we have said) be complained of (for that is the nature of the friendship of virtue), and the return to them must be made on the basis of their purpose (for it is purpose that is the characteristic thing in a friend and in virtue).

Yes, this is another reason why this is a curious comparison. We write contracts to govern relationships where friendship is absent, because the trust that you will be treated well is also consequently absent. We use the enforceable law as a substitute, as it were, for friendship.  

And so too, it seems, should one make a return to those with whom one has studied philosophy; for their worth cannot be measured against money, and they can get no honour which will balance their services, but still it is perhaps enough, as it is with the gods and with one's parents, to give them what one can.

I trust you will all reflect on the wisdom of that paragraph. 

If the gift was not of this sort, but was made with a view to a return, it is no doubt preferable that the return made should be one that seems fair to both parties, but if this cannot be achieved, it would seem not only necessary that the person who gets the first service should fix the reward, but also just; for if the other gets in return the equivalent of the advantage the beneficiary has received, or the price lie would have paid for the pleasure, he will have got what is fair as from the other.

I'm not sure how well that principle works. It seems to hang on an unstated assumption that the services will be of roughly equal value, which may not be the case. 

We see this happening too with things put up for sale, and in some places there are laws providing that no actions shall arise out of voluntary contracts, on the assumption that one should settle with a person to whom one has given credit, in the spirit in which one bargained with him. The law holds that it is more just that the person to whom credit was given should fix the terms than that the person who gave credit should do so. For most things are not assessed at the same value by those who have them and those who want them; each class values highly what is its own and what it is offering; yet the return is made on the terms fixed by the receiver. But no doubt the receiver should assess a thing not at what it seems worth when he has it, but at what he assessed it at before he had it.

That is definitely not how we operate today; but in spite of the fact that our cultural heritage contains strict limits on usury, in fact usury has become the norm.