I agree that one could approach the issue that way. I don't believe anyone is. One big reason not to do that, and not to support the ERA at this point in general, is that it is not at all obvious what "not abiding by the ERA" would even look like. The legal landscape has changed so much since it was initially proposed. Most importantly, since the ERA was proposed, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to prohibit most discrimination based on sex. I'm not sure what work the ERA is supposed to do that the 14th Amendment isn't already doing. And since no court has ever recognized the ERA as part of the constitution, there is no case law to guide us in figuring out what it might mean. 

So lets imagine that you are a lawyer, and a client comes to you and asks you to sue the government because, say, the government awarded a contract to her male competitor despite her obviously superior bid, and she thinks it was because of her sex. So you verify the facts as best you can and draft up a complaint (the legal document that initiates a lawsuit). After describing the facts and the basis of the court's jurisdiction, you then have to tell the court which legal provisions you think the government violated. You could write "Count I - 28th Amendment". But if that's all you write, you will almost certainly have committed malpractice. There are much better things you can write, and it is your job as a competent lawyer to know about them and write them. You're going to have to also write "Count II - Equal Protection Clause", and maybe some more counts after that. And now you've given the judge an opportunity, which they will almost certainly take, to avoid deciding the validity of the ERA. Maybe the judge decides that you win on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause, in which case it is unnecessary for the judge to address the ERA at all. Or maybe the judge decides that you loose your Equal Protection Clause claim, and then they can write something like this: "the court assumes without deciding that the ERA is part of the constitution. In the absence of any authority to the contrary, the court chooses to apply the same standard, intermediate scrutiny, under the ERA as under the Equal Protection Clause. Plaintiff's claims under the ERA therefor fail for the reasons already discussed." And now you've spent years of your life, and your client has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, litigating a case to get the ERA recognized as part of the constitution, and you have not gotten a ruling on whether the ERA is part of the constitution. Whereas if you sue the Archivist of the United States for not publishing the ERA as the 28th Amendment, then there really is no way for a judge to rule on the case without deciding whether the ERA is in fact the 28th Amendment. It's the difference between giving a judge an opportunity to decide the issue, and putting them in a position where they must decide the issue.

As I'm imagining this, it would not constitute accepting a tip unless the server or the restaurant keeps it. Ideally the server would notice before the customer was out the door and return the money to the customer. But surely that won't always happen, especially in the transition. In that case, let the restaurant donate the money to a nonprofit.

With regard to fixing tip culture, I think the solution is obvious. Make it illegal for a server to accept a tip. It probably looks bad to enforce this against individual servers, so enforce it at the restaurant level. Any restaurant where a server accepts a tip can get sued or fined or shut down by regulators or something. Frame it, accurately I think, as cracking down on fraudulent pricing practices.

With regard to the ERA, on a strict textualist reading of Article V (the one that talks about amendments), it is not crazy to think the ERA is valid. The constitution says that an amendment becomes part of the constitution when it is proposed by 2/3 of each house of congress, and ratified by ¾ of state legislatures. Those things happened. Nowhere in the constitution does it say that congress gets to add extra conditions like time limits. That said, the Supreme Court has long held that such time limits are valid and I see no reason that would or should change now.

As to why the archivist matters here, it’s a litigation thing. You need to name a defendant if you want to bring a case. You can’t sue the Supreme Court to ask them to declare the ERA part of the constitution. You can sue the Archivist of the United States for not listing it as part of the constitution. And several states did. That’s how the Archivist became a focus of this issue.

Honestly, the thing that bothered me most about Biden’s comment was the hypocricy of it. He’s been the president for four years. He could have directed his DOJ to litigate in favor of recognizing the ERA as the 28^th amendment at any time during his presidency. Not only did he not do that, his DOJ defended the Archivist’s decision not to include the ERA in the constitution when several states sued over the issue. State of Illinois v. David Ferriero (D.C. Cir. 2023). Changing your position just as you are leaving office is cheap.

I am quite glad to see that Lighthaven is on a path to financial sustainability, as I sometimes attend events there, and I am very much not looking to be subsidized by anyone's charity. One clarifying question. The rough Lighthaven budget above has a line for "interest". Am I correct in assume that that is the entire mortgage payment, both interest and principal, not just the interest? In other words, by successfully making the $1M payment each year, the amount you owe the bank is going down each year and will eventually hit zero?

"Agnostic" doesn't necessarily mean "unknowable and not subject to testing". Much more often it has the weaker meaning "not currently known". There is a house being built across the street. Is there a work van parked in front of it right now? I don't know. This is certainly knowable and subject to testing - I could get up, walk over to a window in the front of the house, and look. But I don't care enough to do that, so I continue to now know if there is a work van parked in front of the house across the street. I am agnostic about the existence of such a work van.

For people who do test prep seriously (I used to be a full time tutor), this has been known for decades. One of the standard things I used to tell every student was if you have no idea what the answer is, guess B, because B is statistically most likely to be the correct answer. When I was in 10th grade (this was 2002), I didn't have anything to gain by doing well on the math state standardized test, so I tested the theory that B is most likely to be correct. 38% of the answers on that test were in fact B.

> This is pretty weird. As far as we know, humans don’t tend to prefer choices labeled B, so we’re not sure where this could have come from in the training data. As humans, it initially didn’t even occur to us to look for it!

Remember, LLMs aren't modeling how a human reading text would process the text. LLMs are trying to model the patterns in the texts that are in the training data itself. In this case, that means they are doing something closer to imitating test writers than test takers. And it is well known that humans, including those who write tests, are bad at being random. 

Great post! 

> a client can show me where they buried their dozen murder victims and I wouldn’t be allowed to tell a soul, even if an innocent person is sitting in prison for their crimes.

For any Alaskan serial murderers reading this, do note that this does not apply to you. Your Alaskan attorney can breach attorney-client privilege to prevent an innocent person from going to jail. See Rule 1.6(b)(1)(C).