ethics – dangermouse.net

Designing a government

Tuesday means working on a new lesson plan for my ethics classes. This week I’m going to be teaching kids how to design a government!

The premise at the start of the class will be: Imagine we’re setting up a new country. We have land and a few million people, but we don’t have a government yet. It’s our job to decide what the government will be like.

We’ll go through various stages of selecting what sort of leader we want, how we’ll decide who the leader is, what powers should they have. And then think about how to make laws. Figure out what jobs the government should or should not do – should it provide health care, for example, or education, or food and water, Internet, should it regulate business, support the arts, etc. And then we’ll think about how we can ensure that the people in the government don’t become corrupt or authoritarian. This should be plenty for kids to chew on and debate about in class!

I took Scully for a walk at lunch, and again with my wife after she got home from work. It was very cold again today.

And I’m starting to plan for Friday night’s upcoming Dungeons & Dragons session. I’m adding a new rule, co-opted from Dungeon Crawl Classics (with some modifications), which is highly regarded by many gaming groups: Mighty Deeds of Arms.

When fighters or dwarves attack, they may declare a Mighty Deed of Arms, an additional effect of their attack. e.g. disarming opponent, pushing opponent back, tripping opponent over, grappling, headbutting, blinding attack (picking up and throwing sand, or aiming weapon at eyes), etc., or whatever cool manoeuvre you can think of, like swinging on a chandelier and kicking opponent in the face. You have a Deed Die (d4 at 1st level, increasing in size with levels). Roll your Deed Die with your attack die. If your attack hits and the Deed Die is 4 or more, your mighty deed succeeds! Score normal damage, plus a bonus effect depending on your declaration and the Deed Die result (better results for scores above 4).

The idea is to give fighter types something cool and interesting to do that scales up with level. (We’re playing 1981 Basic/Expert rules, not 5th edition, so we don’t have all the ridiculous bells and whistles of that edition.) Hopefully it’ll be fun!

Coldest day of the year so far

It was all about the weather today. A cold front with rain came in overnight, blowing cold air from the south. Sydney’s maximum temperature today was 14.5°C at 1:30am, but really that barely counts, as it never rose above 13.4°C during daylight, and for most of the day it was more like 12°C or less. This was accompanied by intermittent cold rain, and steady winds putting the “feels like” temperature more like 7°C. But even the middle of the night 14.5°C made this easily the coldest day of the year, by a good two degrees.

I only went outside very briefly to pick Scully up (in the car) from my wife’s work at lunchtime, and to take her out for a toilet around 5pm. It was freezing and awful outside. Even Scully wanted to get back inside as quickly as possible.

This morning I wrote my critical thinking/ethics class for this week. I normally do it on Tuesday, but I did my university marking yesterday because my Tuesday evening class currently has no kids enrolled, giving me an extra day to write my lesson plan. The topic is “Science Fiction”, and I thought this would be very interesting and have some cool questions. But in my first class tonight I realised that a lot of the questions are very yes/no type, with not much opportunity for interesting reasoning or discussion. So I modified them a bit in the subsequent lessons, which went better.

The apartment next door to ours has been listed for sale since February, and they finally had an auction on Saturday, where it sold. When the real estate agency had moved display furniture into the place for photography and in-person inspections, they ignored the sign in the lift that says “don’t block the doors with furniture”, and broke the lift. After the sale on the weekend, today they moved the furniture back out… and broke the lift again. So I had to go up and down the fire stairs with Scully several times, instead of using the lift.

Final word for today: Brrrr!! 🌬️🌧️🥶

Autumn is here. Finally

Today was the first day that really started feeling like autumn here. And we’re most of the way through it already, with winter just two weeks away. There are fallen leaves on the roads and footpaths. Glimpses of autumn colour with the liquidambars, camphor laurels, and ginkgo trees turning. (Although these are the minority – most of the trees around here are evergreens.)

And it’s turned chilly. Today only reached 16.2°C in Sydney, which is about average for a winter’s day, and it was windy which made it feel even colder. We had heavy rain in the morning, but the middle of the day was dry, though overcast. The heavy rain is back in the evening, and is expected to get heavier overnight and we will get some very heavy falls over the next two days.

We took advantage of the break in the rain to go for a drive at lunch. I suggested we go to Allambie Pies to get some pies. Unfortunately the traffic was bad. The few blocks near our place in that direction seem to always be choked on weekends nowadays, and it took us about 20 minutes to drive as far as we could have waked in the same amount of time.

It eased up and I thought we were okay, but we hit a big traffic snarl further on. This one turned out to be caused by a serious car accident ahead. By the time we crawled past, two cars were being towed and police were directing traffic around the obstruction. It looked pretty bad. But I just saw on reddit’s Sydney sub that the driver of one of the cars had posted to thank a good samaritan who stopped to check everyone was okay, and directed traffic around the obstruction until the police arrived. One driver was taken to hospital with minor injuries, but nobody was killed or badly hurt, thankfully.

This evening I had three more ethics classes on the “Socialising” topic. An interesting observation I’ve made: One of the question I ask if it’s okay that some people might treat an AI chatbot like a friend, conversing in a natural way, telling it secrets and emotions, looking for advice, etc.

Almost everyone in the 10-12 year old classes answered very much: No, that’s bad, an AI isn’t a real person, it doesn’t understand like a human, it could be harmful, etc.
But several kids in the 13-15 year old classes gave more nuanced responses. Some saying it could help shy people or people without friends to express their emotions in a useful way, or to get some advice for things they might not have thought of themselves (although they should filter it for sensibility themselves), and so on.

I’m glad pretty much all the kids have a healthy scepticism about AI tools. I suspect that’s not the case for kids whose parents don’t invest so much in their education, though.

Ethics of automated AI summaries of ethics lessons

The weather here has been showery for the past several days. Intermittent sunshine, with occasional heavy showers passing across and vanishing within half an hour or so. But it looks like the showers will get more frequent and intense as we head into the weekend, with up to 100 mm of rain forecast. So that should be interesting.

It’s another long weekend, with tomorrow (Friday) being Anzac Day, another public holiday where the supermarkets are closed, so I can’t do my regular Friday morning weekly shopping for the second week in a row.

And in other news, I discovered today that Outschool is producing automated AI summaries of each of my lessons and sending them to enrolled parents after each class. I don’t recall being informed of this new feature (but it’s possible I missed it in one of the teacher newsletters that Outschool sends out periodically). Importantly, I can’t find any teacher settings to control this feature—there’s no way to disable it. I was a little puzzled as to how it was generating the summary, because when I clicked out of curiosity on the link that I’d never noticed before that said “View the AI class summary”, it showed me the following:

The teacher led a discussion about Antarctica, exploring reasons why people might want to visit or explore the continent, as well as potential challenges and risks they would face. The class considered the benefits and drawbacks of allowing countries to claim or mine parts of Antarctica, and whether it would be acceptable for people to live there in the future if global warming made the continent more habitable. The teacher provided context about Antarctica’s unique environment, the history of exploration, and the current Antarctic Treaty that regulates activities there. The class also discussed the role of science and research in Antarctica, and the potential impacts of tourism. Overall, the session focused on critical thinking about the complex issues surrounding the use and preservation of this remote and harsh continent.

This is more and more detailed information than I include in the class description text for this week’s topic. So I went back to the class that I taught an hour earlier, and it listed the following summary:

The teacher introduced the topic of Antarctica, discussing its geography, climate, and wildlife. The class explored why people might want to visit or explore Antarctica, considering both the benefits and risks, such as the extreme cold, lack of food and resources, and hazardous terrain. The teacher presented information about the history of Antarctic exploration and the current system of claims and treaties governing the continent. The class also considered the potential environmental impact of activities like mining and tourism in Antarctica. Throughout the discussion, the teacher facilitated dialogue with the students, asking questions to elicit their thoughts and perspectives on the various issues surrounding Antarctica.

Similar in content, but very different in wording. After discussing with some friends in our Discord chat, we’ve concluded it must be an automated transcript of the voice from the Zoom meeting, then fed through an AI summariser. I’m sceptical of the value of AI for many things, but in this specific application I think it’s done a reasonable job of accurately describing the class content. So I don’t actually mind it so much, as it does help to keep the parents informed of what their kids are learning. But I would like the opportunity to configure or disable it in settings if I wanted to.

On the bright side, I suppose if parents are getting these AI summaries for every single class their kids are enrolled in, hopefully they won’t be reading them all super carefully and critically.

I wonder how likely it is that one of these summaries might include some of the small-talk chat that I engage in with the kids while we wait for later arrivals to join the Zoom call. It’d be bad if the summary included something like: “The teacher asked about the pet puppy of one student and how its toilet training was going.” 🤭

Awful Australian politics

Maybe not what you’re thinking from the title. My wife has started watching the Netflix series The Residence. It’s set in the White House and there are various political characters, including one who is repeatedly referred to as the “First Lady of Australia”. It’s clear that the writers have no idea about how Australian politics works, because the spouse of the Prime Minister has no such title and no duties anything like the role of First Lady of the United States. Can’t they do even basic research to get these things right and not annoyingly wrong?

As an aside, our current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, isn’t married, being divorced from his first wife before being elected. He has a partner, and proposed marriage last year (while Prime Minister). Their wedding is expected to follow the imminent election, now just 11 days away. If he’s returned as Prime Minister, it will be the first time an Australian Prime Minister gets married while in office.

I suppose I have another story about politics. With the election very soon, the political ads are ramping up in all media. As has become usual, many of them are scare tactic ads aimed at making voters afraid of the other major party. And one of them which I heard again today is making the point that our Opposition leader wants to make Australia “more like America”. This is enough to scare Australian voters. “That guy wants to make Australia more like America” is an effective scare message to get people not to vote for that guy. And it’s working, because the Opposition is falling behind in the polls. That tells you something about our collective opinions on the US right now.

This morning my wife took Scully to work, so I had a morning free to go for a run, and took the chance to do another 5k. The weather was chilly, with intermittent heavy showers all day, but I managed to avoid them while running.

This afternoon I wrote up my lesson plan for this week’s ethics topic, which is Antarctica. There are plenty of questions about why people are interested in Antarctica, who (if anyone) should be allowed to go there, live there, own it, use mineral resources, etc, etc. I did the first class this evening and it went fairly well. It’s always tricky doing the first class of a new topic, and not knowing which questions the kids will find interesting or have strong opinions on.

Tonight we had one kid who was pretty gung-ho in favour of letting people mine Antarctica, and two who were more concerned with protecting its environment, so that was interesting!

The joy and despair of roast vegetables

I’ve realised that although I love roast vegetables, the reason we seldom have them is because I really hate cooking them. I find it unenjoyable to make roast vegetables, compared to cooking most other things.

My wife and I were talking today about what to make for dinner to go with the last slices of leftover lentil loaf from Easter lunch. She suggested roasted vegetables: potato, pumpkin, onions, the usual sort of thing. My heart sank.

I’m not even sure why I dislike making roast vegetables. It’s not like it’s difficult or time consuming, other than just waiting for the oven to cook them. There’s something about all the oil, and the mess in the roasting pan… I don’t know. I love eating roast vegetables, but I really really dislike making them.

Anyway, my wife decided to take the reins and do the cooking tonight. So I got to eat roast vegetables without having to prepare them! So that was pretty good. She was home today because of the Easter Monday public holiday, and in fact only has three days of work this week due to Anzac Day being on Friday.

This evening I completed the last two ethics classes on the “Memories” topic. I did the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm experiment results with all my classes, and now that the topic is completed I can report the final result: 33/47 kids said they remembered seeing the word “sleep” on a slide that did not include that word. So that’s over 70% success rate in giving them a false memory, compared to a reported rate of about 44% for tests over many subjects. I saw that it’s more likely to work with adults and less likely to work with children, so my result is a little against the trend. But of course the numbers are not really high enough to make any significant conclusion, other than yes, it really is easy to induce false memories in people.

I claim this is ethical because I explain to the kids afterwards what happened, and how it works, and we discuss the consequences of the fact that our memories are unreliable, and how we should take this into account in our lives. It was a really good topic!

OOC stories and unreliable memories

Today I worked more on Darths & Droids story planning, getting feedback from co-writers on some of the out-of-character story arcs I brainstormed yesterday, and modifying some of them in response. I put some of them into a new strip, written and produced.

This evening I’ve run three more classes on the Memories topic. The Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm test has turned out to be pretty successful in getting kids to demonstrate false memories. Out of 9 kids so far, 6 of them said they remembered seeing the word “sleep” in a list of words that didn’t actually include that word.

It’s a little bit risky doing this over a Zoom class, because I can’t be 100% sure that none of the kids are writing down all the words, or even taking a screenshot. But if they’re doing that they’d get the question correct, so the number could potentially be even higher.

Another question I’m using is essentially the set-up for the classic 1990 Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall. I posit a future technology that could be used to create fake memories, and then ask the kids if it would be okay to use this to create pleasant memories, such as a great vacation that they didn’t really go on. Most of the kids so far have said this would be bad and unethical, but a few said it would be good and could help people be happier. So far none of them have recognised the source of the idea. One girl actually said this was an amazing idea and she wrote it down and said she’d write a story about it! I should ask her next week to share her story with me.

Otherwise I had a fairly standard day, walking Scully a couple of times. The weather is finally starting to feel more like autumn with cooler days, but apparently it’s not going to last as the forecast is back up to 30°C on the weekend!

Missed Monday and a special seaplane lunch

Wow, Monday was so busy that I didn’t even realise I forgot to post aa blog entry until my wife asked me a short time ago, “Did you post on your blog yesterday?” It wasn’t exciting-busy, it was just a lot of online ethics classes, and walking Scully, and cooking dinner, so not really much to write about. Which is maybe why I forgot it.

Today, however, we had a special day out. My wife had the day off work and we booked a restaurant for lunch. A nice one, on the harbour shore, with a view. Unfortunately the weather turned overnight and it was chilly and cloudy and windy, but not uncomfortably so from our table on the wharf.

The restaurant is the Empire Lounge, at the Sydney Seaplanes terminal in Rose Bay. This is the only seaplane terminal in Sydney Harbour and they do scenic flights over Sydney, as well as shuttle services to some locations just north of Sydney where there are fancy secluded waterside restaurants that have a seaplane wharf for guests. There are no actual destinations that the seaplanes fly to, as they’re just not practical for any destinations within range. But the site was the old terminal for Sydney’s first international airport, receiving the Empire Flying Boat service from Southport in England, which took ten days to reach Sydney.

For lunch we had some of the hummus with focaccia to start:

Then I had the pan-fried snapper (with a side of green vegetables shared with my wife, no shown):

And for dessert a baked cheesecake:

The meal was pretty good, everything tasty and delicious.

Back at home I did some story planning stuff for Darths & Droids. I tried to write a new strip, but needed to work on background material to get the story arc straight in my head first, and also look up some old strips for continuity.

This evening I had the first class in the new week’s ethics topic: Memory. I have some interesting questions about reliability of memories. I used the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm test, showing a set of words related to sleep, but not including the word “sleep”. And then hid the words after about 15 seconds and asked the kids what words they remembered. The very first word “remembered” was “sleep! I wasn’t sure how well the test would work in getting them to remember something they never even saw, but it was very successful.

On TV, I’ve started watching the new season of Black Mirror. I really like this series, but with the first new episode I got a feeling of dread, like it was giving companies ideas, kind of like the infamous Torment Nexus. … Time to watch another one!

Completely forgot about yesterday’s post

Ooops! I intended to write a blog post yesterday, but I just completely forgot. It was a busy day. I had two ethics classes starting early at 8:00 am – an hour earlier than last week because of the daylight saving change on the weekend. This also meant that my 12:00 class—that I’d temporarily shunted to Tuesdays because it didn’t give me enough time to get into university for the Data Engineering lecture—could now be moved back to 11:00 on Monday. So I had that class too. Then I had one hour to take Scully to my wife’s work and hop on a train into the city and pick up some lunch on the way before the lecture.

This was the last lecture with new material, talking about complex systems and agent-based modelling. We have two weeks off now for the mid-semester vacation and then the Easter Monday public holiday, followed by four weeks of student project work tutorials.

When I got home, I made pizza for dinner and then had two more ethics classes in the evening, which chewed up the rest of the day.

Today we had some rain and cooler weather, which was nice. I wrote my new ethics class topic, on “Brands and Trademarks”. With some interesting questions like:

Should I be able to start a business called McDonald’s:
• that does shoe repair?
• that sells pizza?
• that sells burgers?
• if my surname is McDonald?
If I do start a shoe repair shop called McDonald’s, should I be allowed to advertise it with a red and yellow sign saying “McDonald’s”?

I also made some slides to show the kids with illustrative photos of businesses with modified names, and this took a while. So it took me longer to write this class than usual, and I didn’t get around to doing much else during the day.

Scully is finished her medication for her bloody poops last week, and seems to be fully recovered, so that’s good news. There was some other test the vet did which also came back negative. So we don’t really know what the problem was – probably some sort of gastro-intestinal infection I guess.

In other news, the Australian election campaign is progressing. Prime Minster Albanese is firming up in the opinion polls, while opposition leader Dutton is falling behind. At least part of this is the “Trump factor”, with Australian voters recoiling from conservative politics due to the destructive antics of Donald Trump in the USA. Dutton was initially a few weeks ago expressing a need for some Trump-like policies, such as reducing the size of the federal government, but this has backfired badly and he’s had to backpedal and change his tune. So if anything good can come from Trump, I’m hopeful that it makes Australian voters head for a more progressive choice, n the same way it appears to be doing in Canada.

Board games night and a nice autumn Saturday

Friday was board games night at a friend’s place. I did the usual grocery pickup in the morning, followed by four ethics classes. I’m having fun with the current topic of “An Ethical Society”. One of the interesting questions for the variety of responses is as follows:

Imagine that we could somehow make a society where everyone behaves ethically. Would such a society still need laws?

About half the kids have been saying that yes, you should have laws just in case someone does something wrong, because if you don’t have them, then there’s no way to enforce any way of stopping them. A few said you need them just to remind people, to set the boundaries of what behaviour is okay and what is not—even if nobody is stepping over the line, you still need the line to be drawn there. And a third group said no, you don’t actually need laws, because everyone is (according to the premise) behaving ethically, so nothing can go wrong.

After classes I drove over to the friend’s place for games. We played three different games, all new to me: [one I can’t remember the name of, where everyone drafts 8 cards from a central pool, and they combo in various ways to score points – the description is so generic I can’t search for it successfully, and the theme was so non-evident that I have no idea what it was; but it was actually fun and we played it twice], Forest Shuffle, and Kingdomino Origins (which I’d been wanting to thy for several weeks, always arriving at games night after the others, just when they’re packing it up).

Edit: As identified in the comments, the mystery game was Faraway.

This morning I did my 5k run, and for the first time since January recorded a time below 27:30, which is what I like to aim for as I can manage it about 50% of the time. The past few weeks have been messed up by high temperatures and humidity, travel, and being out of practice due to the time spent travelling. The cooler autumn weather is definitely making things feel nicer at the moment.

Scully is doing a lot better. Her poops are blood-free, but still a little soft, perhaps due to the antibiotics. So presumably it was some sort of gastro infection, which the antibiotics are fixing up.

A big task accomplished today was booking accommodation for our trip to Europe in June/July. We’re moving around and staying in five different cities, so had a lot of options to browse through and choose and then book. But we managed to book them all. The next step will be thinking about the train trips between cities and working out the best ways to get tickets for those. Some will be Deutsche Bahn, which I’ve used before and have an account with, but some will be with other rail companies as they’ll be traversing countries like Austria and Hungary.

For dinner tonight I made vegetable fajitas. And I’m baking more sourdough rye bread.