David McElroy

Our culture is locked in a battle over objective reality.

The ability to observe objective facts and then use reason to interpret them was at the center of human progress for the last few hundred years. Science that came out of this allowed us to improve the world. We made ourselves fabulously wealthy by historical standards. We improved the lives and health of everyone.

Today, we’re slowly throwing all that away.

One group claims that men can become women — and vice versa — just because they feel that way. They claim that subjective feelings — across a wide range of issues — determines what is allowed and what is not.

Another group is perfectly happy to follow politicians who tell lies at an unprecedented scale. These people don’t mind the lies and don’t mind ignoring reality they don’t like — just as long as their side holds power.

In the meantime, a few of us still insist that truth matters. Objective reality matters. Character matters. Honesty matters.

For those of us in that intellectual and moral “no man’s land,” we watch as clowns to the left and jokers to the right insist that seizing power and defeating enemies is all that matters.

And some of us know that nothing can change until our society can once again show a principled commitment to objective reality and truth — as a broad consensus.

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It’s hard for me to love other people. It’s even harder for me to love myself.

I was driving home from work Monday evening and I had just angrily hung up the phone. A woman had called me from a company that did some work at my house a few years ago. I didn’t like the way the company was handling its business with me, but it was nothing personal with the woman.

The thing that annoyed me wasn’t her fault. She was just reading a script. She was doing her job. But I was in a bad mood — and I took out my frustrations on her.

I wasn’t nasty or rude, but I certainly wasn’t kind or loving.

As I drove the rest of the way down I-459 toward home, I stewed in my irritation, but my annoyance quickly turned toward myself. I wasn’t upset with that woman or her company.

I lectured myself about being a hypocrite. I berated myself about my unwillingness to live up to my values when it wasn’t convenient — when I wasn’t in the right mood.

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Here’s some weekend fun — if you don’t take it too seriously.

What’s your “personality mascot”? If you’ve been on any form of social media lately, you might have run across this latest fad.

I noticed a number of people who’ve posted cute little animal characters — squirrels, raccoons, owls, otters and more — who were customized by AI software to represent something about them.

I decided to give it a shot, but I had very low expectations.

What I had forgotten was that I happened to have AI software that knew quite a bit about me. I’ve had ChatGPT read hundreds of my articles from the last few years. I’ve also used the software for research and analysis, which had led to long and involved “conversations” about philosophy, science, culture, ethics and other important subjects.

So I asked ChatGPT to give me a well-crafted prompt that anyone could use to get a “personality mascot” and a complete description — along with an image — based on everything the software knew about the person.

It sounded fun, but I didn’t expect it to be much more entertaining than a Magic 8 Ball. I was wrong. The software took the task far more seriously than I had expected — and it had a lot more insight into me than I expected.

I’m going to give you the prompt you can use with any AI chatbot if you want to, but the trick is that this prompt requires the software to already know a lot about you (or to then “interview” you to learn enough to answer the question).

But before I give you the prompt to try for yourself, here’s what the software said for me. As I read this, I found myself thinking that this shows genuine insight about my own thoughts and feelings, which surprised me.

According to ChatGPT, I’m not an Otter or an Owl or any such thing. I am “the Lantern Keeper.” If you know me, you might think that much of this was written by someone else who knows me. Or maybe it’s just what I want to think about myself. How would I really know?

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