Passing the Word: Courage, Judgment, and What We Choose to Notice

In Emma, by Jane Austin, the quietness of a game makes it eligible to Mr. Woodhouse. The letters of a word are used as a vehicle for gallantry and trickery. Frank Churchill proposes, with a glance to Jane, to pass a word to Emma.

Mrs. Weston is convinced that it must be a relief to Miss Fairfax to be able to speak of Miss Fairfax’s engagement. Miss Fairfax admits that since her engagement she has not experienced a single tranquil hour. Emma questions if Miss Fairfax considers herself in the wrong in making a secret engagement.

Mr Knightly has no fear of Emma seeing what his brother writes. Emma agrees with his brother that the good fortune of the engagement is entirely on her side.

In Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, Anil Ananthaswamy tells how Geoffrey Hinton got interested in neural networks in the mid-1960s. He was motivated by the Minsky and Papert proof about neural networks not working for the XOR problem. He proceeded to then complain about it.

Seymour Papert, in an October 1975 interview between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, observed that if the only learning processes that existed were the ones that Chomsky recognized, then the “unlearnable” syntactic structures would have to be innate. The machine in question was the perceptron. Papert then went on to decribe Rosenblatt’s perception. We don’t know whether LLMs are nothing more than sophisticated pattern matchers or if they possess glimmers of the ability to reason and model the outside world. Gains in productivity for programmers cannot be denied. It is still worth noting the issues that were known before LLMs came of age. In Lovely One: A Memoir, Ketanji Jackson Brown shares how her heart was hammering when she stepped up to Associate Justice Stephen Breyer’s place on the United States Supreme Court. Her hearbeats then slowed when Patrick gave her a rallying smile. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked her if she was prepared to take the oath.

Ketanji had been an inquisitive child. She can still see Mama Queenie’s ample shoulders hunched over a small center island in the kitchen as she chatted with Ketanji and her mother’s family. When Mama Queenie attended Ketanji’s wedding many years later, Ketanji was shocked to realize it was the first time she remembered seeing outside her house in Liberty City. Ketanji’s primary event was Original Oratory, in which orators were judged on the persuasiveness of the content and the aspects of their delivery. She also participated in Dramatic Interpretation and Humorous Interpretation in the sort of one-woman show popularized by Anna Deavere Smith’s award-winning plays like 1992’s Fires in the Mirror Crown Heights, in which Anna presented the perspectives of different characters who had experienced New York’s Crown Height riots in the previous year. Ketanji’s friend Craig Tinsky, a fellow Lincoln-Douglas debater who was a year ahead of her, reminded her of the ten-minute extract she had performed from Neil Simon’s play Fools, in which the protagonist is initially unaware that the villagers have been cursed with chronic stupidity for two centuries.

Many mornings, Fran Berger, after being on a specially installed landline to bicker with a vendor to eventually obtain what she was after, would hang up the phone with a flourish, announce that she needed a laugh, and ask who was ready. If no one would volunteer, Mrs. Berger would often pick Ketanji. Whenever she commanded Ketanji to “do Fools!” Ketanji would head to the front of the classroom and begin without protesting. After being elected Political Drama chair her junior year at Harvard, Kenanji sought to highlight aging as a social policy issue. After producing and directing the 1984 Herb Gardner play I’m not Rappaport, which ran for five performances, the campus newspaper reported, “Ketanji Brown demostrates directorial stamina by keeping the two-man scenes lively and engaging.” Her involvement in theater opened a door that put her in the mix with students from many different backgrounds. Despite being predominantly White, Harvard University offered a sizable community of Black students, which would provide such a profound cultural comfort that she could release the breath that she hadn’t known she was holding. As Ketanji’s study group interrogated the worlds within the books they were studying, they also shared their lives. Lisa White confided that in her early days at Harvard, she felt as if she were operating without a scaffold. Kentanji literally took her by the arm and led her to the Black women writers study group. Patrick insisted to Kentanji that he would always choose her. Kentanji wanted to take his words at face value. F. Scott Fizgerald’s depiction of high society stature depicted in The Great Gatsby was more extravagant that anything she had ever encountered. Brené Brown writes, in Dare to Lead, that you are not paying attention if you are not left with a lump in your throat or butterflies in your stomach after receiving time from people. She is always nervous when she speaks in public. She gets the side tilt and less laughter when people aren’t listening.

Joseph Campbell’s lesson is that when you find the courage to enter the cave, you face your fears in order to gain the power and wisdom to serve others. Brené Brown often thinks about DeDe Halfhill’s story when she needs inspiration to choose courage over comfort in order to be of service to others. DeDe writes that “It doesn’t really work to say, ‘I’m going to be vulnerable with you right now.’”

The collateral damage of not being able to plan for painful moments causes us to instinctually squander the joy we need in order to build up an emotional reserve. Too often we tell ourselves things like “We can’t celebrate right now because we don’t know if it’s going to be perfect.” Not celebrating achievements is how the costly mistake of foreboding joy shows up at the office.

The Utah Legislative session kicked off with a storm. In the first week, I found myself scrambling to send out alerts the night before two bills impacting access to gender affirming care were to be heard the following day. I let my company know that I had to step away to go testify at the Utah legislature. I began by greeting Chair Hall and the members of the committee, and thanked them for the opportunity to speak.

I told them my name is Sophia Hawes-Tingey. I’m a former U.S. Navy sailor, a software engineer by profession, and that I currently serve as President of the ACLU of Utah — though I wanted to be clear that I was speaking in my personal capacity, based on my own experience.

I was there to oppose HB174 and HB193. Across my career — in military service, engineering, and civil liberties work — I’ve learned that complex systems fail when decision-makers ignore expertise and evidence. That is what concerns me most about these bills. The Utah Legislature commissioned extensive medical and scientific analysis on these issues —a thousand pages intended to inform careful, responsible policymaking. Yet these bills move in the opposite direction, disregarding that work and substituting rigid political mandates for individualized medical judgment. When lawmakers ignore their own evidence and override medical expertise, people get hurt. These bills undermine the doctor-patient relationship and interfere with health care decisions that should be guided by patients, families, and qualified professionals. From a civil rights perspective, laws that restrict access to care for specific communities — even when framed as neutral — often function in practice as discriminatory barriers. As an engineer, I know systems designed without expert input fail.

As a veteran, I know the cost when leadership substitutes ideology for judgment.

And as someone who has worked on civil liberties issues for years, I know public trust erodes when evidence is ignored.

Even with my encouragement, and the many people in the room who spoke up about the harm these bills would cause, the committee ultimately voted 10 to 3 in favor of the bills, split along partisan lines. One legislator spoke up and said that she didn’t want taxpayer money being used to support elective procedures. For a tiny portion of the community, these are not elective procedures—they are life sustaining and recognized as medically necessary when standards of care are followed. The actual regret rate of people that transition is less than 3%. That means that 97% of people who follow the protocol are ultimately satisfied with the result. About 1% of the population is transgender and will benefit from pharmaceutical treatment, which is incredibly cost efficient. One quarter of those, or 0.25% of the overall population will seek surgery. When the math is done, the cost to the average taxpayer is less than $3 per month. That’s about the price of a half a cup of coffee. Good Samaritans these legislators are not, that vote to take away support for a minority of suffering people. Instead, the good legislator wanted to require insurance companies to pay for people that detransition. That equates to 0.075% of the population. Sure they should be covered; but instead of trying to prevent people from transitioning, we should be making sure that standards of care are followed. The stories of regretful detransitioners are turning up as people or providers who did not follow the standards of care. The legislature needs to address the harms without taking away vital services. My oldest daughter gave me the fantastic news that she and her husband are buying their first house, knowing that he is going to be assigned to the area for another three years. When you buy a home, it’s a huge step, and you need to remember to stick with it if you can. The first few years are the hardest, but it gets easier. Having bought my home four and a half years ago, I am sitting on about $60,000 in equity in my home and working on paying down my debts. I also just bought my first robo vacuum yesterday, and I have already gotten it halfway out of the box. I am so looking forward to setting it up.

Across novels, laboratories, courtrooms, classrooms, and committee rooms, the same quiet tension repeats: what we do with knowledge once it is in our hands. Austen’s characters pass words as a game, Papert and Hinton wrestle with what machines can and cannot learn, Ketanji Brown Jackson learns to hold many voices at once, Brené Brown reminds us that courage is felt in the body, and a legislature chooses whether to heed or ignore its own evidence. Progress is rarely loud at first; it often looks like showing up anyway, telling the truth, and refusing to let fear masquerade as prudence. Just as importantly, it looks like pausing to celebrate the small, hard-earned joys — a home purchased, a voice heard, a step taken forward — because those moments are not distractions from the work, but the very reserves that make endurance possible. The word is always being passed. The question is whether we are brave enough, and resourced enough, to carry it forward.