The Society of Honor by Joe America

Comments

1. CV says:

   March 21, 2026 at 11:45 am

   **Among Filipinos, few questions ignite more debate than: “Bakit tayo ganito?”**

   Thanks, Karl. Your opening sentence reminded me of me! I did ask that question about 25 years ago while having lived here in the US about 10 years. There was already internet, but no AI…. In my research, I found Rizal to be my best resource to answer the question.

   Your essay gives an excellent road map. Unfortunately, it requires a people that is ready to “pick itself up by the bootstraps” to use that Western expression. Rizal had that assumption too.

   Filipinos do not seem to believe in that approach. We seem to think that we are entitled. I think you folk have referred to it as a “señorito” complex.

   Reply
   • Karl Garcia says:

     March 21, 2026 at 12:19 pm

     Remember when you told Joey thar we are theorizing and suggesting, that is very correct. If we can not drive change now, hope eventually we will. I know some one will think of ways to make things happen whether it is a charismatic leader or an action leader.

     Reply
     • kasambahay says:

       March 25, 2026 at 11:53 am

       the only change I can see from higher up is that president bong marcos has lost weight! his trousers hang off him now, they used to be snug and fit him well. strange too that his sister imee is quite these days like she is suffering from a bad case of laryngitis.

       anyhow, president marcos has declared state of emergency, so now, our govt can go in and put cap on fuel prices, maybe even ration fuel too, and may even consider putting cap on prices of commodities as well. my friends in australia told me that 500 gasoline stations in australia run out of gasoline and had closed up shop. kasi raw, the countries that promised to send oil or contracted to send oil to australia changed their minds and decided to keep the oil for their own use.

       Reply
       • Karl Garcia says:

         March 25, 2026 at 1:59 pm

         The fare hike might be too heavy for studdnts if ever

         Reply
       • Karl Garcia says:

         March 25, 2026 at 2:00 pm

         Drivers have chidren too who are students

         Reply
2. Karl Garcia says:

   March 21, 2026 at 12:25 pm

   https://www.philstar.com/lifestyle/2026/03/19/2515414/many-find-philippines-polite-filipinos-think-otherwise-study

   Reply
   • kasambahay says:

     March 25, 2026 at 12:09 pm

     dalawa ang mukha, the face we show to strangers, and those people who are high ranking by the look of their clothes and the way they carry themselves; them we give respect. but the filipinos like the consular official in the middle east who belittled ofws and bad mouthed them for apparently always asking for consular help, ay hindi polite and was given the marching order.

     sometimes, we filipinos dont have the patience and have short fuses to our fellow filipinos na ka-level natin, and snapping at them too. but maybe, if our fellow filipinos approach nicely and with a smile instead of looking sourly and petulantly at us, we may show them politeness at hindi iinsultohin.

     Reply
3. Joey Nguyen says:

   March 22, 2026 at 10:22 pm

   I input a bunch of academic papers and literature that I’ve read before into Claude to see what would happen and it came up with pretty much the same conclusions I’ve been writing about since I arrived here. Am I actually an AI? lol!

   Topic:
   Economic development strategy

   Actor:
   • Historian ->Sociologist -> Policy Advisor -> Senate staffer -> Presidential advisor

   Focus:
   • Diagnostic framing — mapping the structural and cultural constraints specific to your country’s situation
   • Sequencing strategy — which interventions to prioritize given binding constraints (infrastructure, energy, human capital, institutional trust)
   • The Middle Income Trap — how countries like South Korea, Botswana, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Mauritius navigated it, and what was culturally transferable versus idiosyncratic
   • Social cohesion as economic infrastructure — how relational and communal trust networks can be leveraged rather than bypassed in early-stage development
   • Energy and connectivity as preconditions — the sequencing logic behind infrastructure-first versus institution-first versus export-led approaches

   Comparative analysis across 9 countries:
   • Japan
   • Taiwan
   • South Korea
   • Thailand
   • Indonesia
   • Malaysia
   • Singapore
   • Philippines
   • Vietnam

   I came up with the following results and artifacts (generated reports):
   https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/ljtvfzre5nw9f60euviqb/AFZz4BuyWwTH-iuIwzlNv7I?rlkey=tknk7ck26h96zlyl8j0qp95gs&st=9yx61og1&dl=0

   Highlights I found most interesting:

   Cross-cultural analysis of relational debt and how it affects successful development:
   The Philippine case is the most instructive failure. Utang na loob is structurally no different from Japanese on or Thai bunkhun. What made it developmentally destructive was the absence of the performance conditionality that Japan and Korea imposed on their equivalent obligation systems. The lesson is not that relational debt culture is incompatible with development — Japan and Korea definitively disprove this — but that relational debt culture without institutional discipline mechanisms converts development resources into patronage rent.

   On the indifference of the Philippine diaspora compared to the other 9 countries:
   [The Philippines] diaspora is the largest underdeveloped development asset in Asia. Ten million people, $36 billion annually, proven global competence, and a cultural obligation system that keeps them emotionally bonded to home. Taiwan converted a far smaller diaspora into a semiconductor industry. The Philippines is converting its diaspora into consumption. The institutional gap between those two outcomes is not cultural — it is the presence or absence of a trustworthy domestic investment environment and a deliberate government strategy to activate diaspora Vietnamese ơn nghĩa-equivalent obligation.

   Development success or failure across the 9 countries can be distilled to four interacting variables:
   The central analytical argument running through all nine cases is that developmental success is explained by four interacting variables, not any one alone: structural transformation sequencing, institutional architecture, disciplined industrial policy, and cultural-social capital. Countries that successfully escaped the Middle Income Trap (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) consistently combined all four. Those that stagnated (Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines) failed on at least two.

   The 3 most important development policy-relevant findings for the Philippines when successes among the 9 countries are put into a Philippine context:
   First, land reform as a foundational precondition appears in virtually every successful case — Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam. It simultaneously raises agricultural productivity, equalizes income distribution, seeds a domestic consumer market, and converts rural elite capital into industrial capital. No other single policy intervention has comparable developmental leverage at the starting-conditions stage.

   Second, performance-conditioned industrial policy — Alice Amsden’s concept of “disciplined support” — is what distinguishes Korea’s chaebol from the Philippines’ cronies. The organizational vehicle matters less than the discipline mechanism. Subsidies without export or productivity conditionality produce rent-seeking; subsidies conditional on measurable performance produce genuine learning.

   Third, political stability is development infrastructure. Thailand’s coups, the Philippines’ dynastic capture, Indonesia’s post-decentralization fragmentation all demonstrate that policy continuity is not a luxury — it is the precondition within which every other investment compounds. Vietnam’s Communist Party single-party model provides this stability at a governance cost; the question for any developing country is what legitimate institution can provide equivalent continuity.

   Reply
   • Joey Nguyen says:

     March 24, 2026 at 11:30 am

     I guess my years in machine learning (which is basically what AI depends on) came in handy. Crafting prompts correctly with logic chains is incredibly important in getting a good result. Basically one needs to feed correct known information (from my observations in the Philippines), describe regions of the Philippines identify observed government services failures, and so on, then tell Claude how to sequence its thinking. It got some things wrong, mostly regarding unconstitutional stuff, but I told Claude to revise the proposed bill informed by the text of the Constitution as well as constitutional case law.

     Added analysis document and draft of a Senate bill:
     https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/ljtvfzre5nw9f60euviqb/AFZz4BuyWwTH-iuIwzlNv7I?rlkey=tknk7ck26h96zlyl8j0qp95gs&st=9yx61og1&dl=0

     “Philippine Development Agency:” Identify 10 industries, prioritization, sequencing, and linkage matrix on enabling infrastructure:

     On the Three-Phase Sequencing Logic

     The document’s most important structural argument is that the ten industries are not independent parallel bets — they are a dependency graph. Industry 4 (Renewable Energy) is the only industry that appears as an enabler in the linkage matrix for every other industry on the list. This is the analytical basis for treating energy not as one priority among ten but as the foundational investment that determines whether the others are viable. The Leyte-Mindanao submarine interconnection is the single highest-leverage infrastructure investment in the entire document — it connects the world’s largest single geothermal complex to Mindanao’s resource-processing industries at a cost that would be transformational for Industries 3, 5, and 8 simultaneously.

     On the three selections that may surprise

     Coconut Agro-Industrial Complex (Industry 2) is placed in Phase 1 — alongside energy and IT-BPM — because it addresses rural poverty at a scale and speed that no other industry can match, and because its enabling infrastructure (RORO, cold chain, rural roads) overlaps almost entirely with the Rural Services Package that the Bayanihan Compact already mandates. It is the industry with the highest ratio of poverty-reduction impact to institutional complexity.

     IT-BPM 2.0 (Industry 7) is Phase 1 because it is existentially urgent, not because it is easy. The AI automation threat to 600,000–900,000 existing jobs is the most acute near-term economic disruption risk the Philippines faces. Treating it as Phase 3 — something to worry about after the hard infrastructure is built — is the analytical equivalent of rearranging deck chairs. The document frames the AI disruption threat as the forcing function for the KPO upgrade that the sector has been insufficiently motivated to pursue while voice BPO revenues were comfortable.

     Sustainable Tourism (Industry 10) is placed last in Phase 3 not because it is unimportant but because its full value — high-spending, geographically dispersed, culturally rooted — is only accessible after the provincial infrastructure investments of Phases 1 and 2 have made those destinations accessible and after governance credibility makes Philippines competitive with Thailand and Vietnam for premium tourism positioning.

     On the archipelago infrastructure analysis

     The Cluster 4 (Zamboanga-Tawi-Tawi-Sulu) analysis is the most politically sensitive entry in the document. The seaweed resource there is world-class and the poverty is extreme. The document is honest about the security normalization precondition — BARMM governance development is named explicitly — rather than presenting an infrastructure investment plan that implies the political conditions for its execution already exist. That honesty is the PDA’s institutional obligation, even when the conclusion is uncomfortable.

     “Bayanihan Development Compact Act” aka Philippines New Deal:

     The Bayanihan Development Compact Act is best understood not as a collection of programs but as a single integrated argument: that the Philippines’ developmental failure is institutional rather than cultural, and that the same relational solidarity Filipino culture has always possessed can become an engine of national economic transformation if the institutions channeling it are redesigned around performance accountability rather than patronage capture.

     The Central Diagnosis

     The Act’s preamble makes an argument that no previous Philippine legislation has stated this directly: the problem is not the Filipino people but the colonial conversion of the performance-conditioned pre-colonial barangay economy — in which datu authority was earned through demonstrated generosity and redistributive capacity — into an accountability-free patronage system. Spanish colonialism preserved the obligation structure of utang na loob while surgically removing the performance conditionality that had originally bounded elite extraction. American colonialism gave that system democratic machinery without the land reform that would have made democracy genuine rather than performative. The Act is the legislative response to that specific historical diagnosis.

     The Philippine Development Authority

     The PDA is the structural heart of the legislation. It is modeled on the synthesis of Korea’s Economic Planning Board, Taiwan’s Council for Economic Planning and Development, and Singapore’s Economic Development Board. Its defining feature — the provision that distinguishes it from every previous Philippine development agency — is the performance conditionality mandate: all state support, whether tax incentives, development bank credit, technology grants, or export promotion, must be conditioned on measurable, publicly disclosed productivity benchmarks enforced by an independent evaluation panel. Support is withdrawn from enterprises that fail to meet agreed benchmarks regardless of political affiliation. This is Alice Amsden’s “disciplined subsidy” principle — the mechanism that made Korean chaebol genuinely productive rather than merely well-connected — translated into Philippine legislative form.

     The constitutional revision strengthened the PDA’s design by grounding its insulation in administrative law doctrine rather than unconstitutional independence claims: the PDA’s quasi-judicial decisions on specific applications are protected from executive reversal not by claiming presidential immunity but by the well-established principle that quasi-judicial determinations must be reviewed exclusively through the courts. The Director-General’s fixed six-year non-renewable term provides practical independence without unconstitutionally limiting the presidential removal power.

     Anti-Corruption as Economic Infrastructure

     The Act treats anti-corruption enforcement not as a peripheral governance concern but as the foundational precondition for every other provision. Without institutional trust, performance-conditioned industrial policy becomes patronage with paperwork. The Sandiganbayan Anti-Corruption Divisions — the constitutionally compliant replacement for the original Anti-Corruption Courts — achieve the same capacity expansion by working through the constitutionally mandated anti-graft court rather than creating a parallel system vulnerable to jurisdictional challenge. The 24-month case resolution target, the Asset Recovery Unit, the enhanced Ombudsman budget floor, and the Civic Trust Reframing Initiative that frames public service integrity as utang na loob to the citizens whose taxes fund government — all operate together as an anti-corruption ecosystem rather than an isolated enforcement provision.

     The deletion of the Presidential Clemency Prohibition — which was unconstitutional under Article VII, Section 19 — was replaced with the more durable deterrent of perpetual disqualification from public office, which survives any pardon, combined with mandatory restitution enforceable as a civil judgment independent of any commutation of imprisonment.

     Agricultural Land Rights and the Rural Services Package

     The Act’s agrarian reform provisions are its most structurally consequential for poverty reduction. The land use rights completion approach — modeled on Vietnam’s Resolution 10 household responsibility system rather than the full ownership transfer that CARP’s legal attrition failures made politically difficult — provides farm households with 30-year renewable, heritable, transferable, and mortgageable cultivation rights sufficient to generate the investment incentives that transform agricultural productivity. The critical innovation is the Rural Services Package mandate: no land use rights certificate may be issued without simultaneous delivery of farm-to-market road access, LandBank credit, crop insurance, agricultural extension, TESDA training, and cooperative development support. Land reform without services produced CARP’s failure; land rights with services produced Vietnam’s transformation. The Act makes the services legally mandatory rather than optional accompaniment.

     The PTIRI and Diaspora Mobilization

     The Philippine Technology and Innovation Research Institute is the Act’s answer to Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute — the institution that eventually produced TSMC. Its mandate is to license technology from international sources, adapt it to Philippine industrial requirements, and spin off commercial enterprises that build genuine domestic technological capability rather than simply assembling foreign-designed products. The Balik-Siyentipiko at Inhinyero Program offers returning diaspora scientists and engineers competitive international-level compensation, research grants, and equity participation in spin-off enterprises. The Filipino Diaspora Investment Platform converts the world’s most extensively deployed OFW community from a remittance source into a venture capital and technology transfer mechanism. Together these provisions represent the recognition that the Philippines’ largest underdeveloped development asset is not its mineral resources or its agricultural land but its ten million diaspora citizens whose relational obligations to homeland — their ơn nghĩa equivalent — the institutional environment has never given them safe and productive channels to fulfill.

     The Kapwa Governance Program

     This is the Act’s most culturally innovative provision and the one most directly grounded in Sikolohiyang Pilipino scholarship. The organizational communication suppression produced by utang na loob and hiya — the “ningas cogon” agreement without conviction, the tampo withdrawal, the salvage workaround — has direct and measurable costs in organizational effectiveness from hospital wards to government agencies to corporate boardrooms. The Kapwa Leadership Program reframes upward feedback not as a violation of hierarchical authority but as an expression of kapwa — shared humanity, collective commitment to mission. The mandatory Operational Feedback Sessions, anonymous channels, CES integration, and biennial measurement surveys create the institutional infrastructure for organizational cultures where information actually reaches decision-makers. The Korea Air CRM analogy from the thesis is the proof of concept: communication norms can be changed through deliberate organizational design without requiring cultural transformation as a prerequisite.

     The Ten Priority Industries and Sequencing Logic

     The PDA Industrial Strategy identifies ten priority sectors in a three-phase sequencing architecture. Phase One industries — renewable energy, coconut agro-industrial processing, and IT-BPM 2.0 — address binding constraints and protect existing employment while building foundations. Phase Two industries — semiconductors, nickel/critical minerals, maritime services, and aquaculture — exploit those foundations to generate export complexity and domestic value chain depth. Phase Three industries — health and life sciences, aerospace MRO, and sustainable tourism — represent the frontier knowledge economy a more institutionally mature Philippines can sustain. Renewable energy (geothermal, solar, wind) sits at the center of the entire architecture because energy cost and reliability is the single binding constraint that prevents manufacturing competitiveness regardless of improvements in any other variable.

     The Fiscal Architecture and Its Constitutional Grounding

     The Trust Fund mechanism, the appropriations integrity declaration, the COA pre-audit requirements, and the Public Dashboard transparency system together constitute the constitutionally sound replacement for the original Act’s unconstitutional supermajority budget floor and absolute diversion prohibition. The replacement is actually more durable: it operates through political accountability and constitutional institutions rather than through procedural barriers that any subsequent Congress could repeal by implication. The annual appropriation floors expressed as percentages of the GAA, the 60-day advance notice requirement for proposed reductions, and the mandatory public justification create the political cost for defunding that the supermajority requirement attempted to create through legal compulsion.

     Reply
     • Karl Garcia says:

       March 24, 2026 at 12:00 pm

       Many thanks for this. My wrong impression of you being AI averse is being recalibrated.

       Reply
       • Joey Nguyen says:

         March 24, 2026 at 12:30 pm

         I’m adverse using AI as a mental crutch because I dislike lazy thinking. I do a lot of machine learning especially as it relates to cybersecurity though. That’s the basis of my consulting practice. I’ve got a machine learning setup right next to me right now with multiple nvidia cards and tons of memory. “AI” in its current marketed commercial form is just a type of chatbot that uses machine learning. Anthropic’s neural network architecture is actually quite sound compared to others like OpenAI. Claude is a more conservative model btw, which is better for analysis compared to ChatGPT which can be quite loose. Grok is the worst. Deepseek is good with small data sets but it’s a bit weird when the new Deepseek models use bigger language models.

         I also have a custom “connector” that I built that enhances Claude’s abilities. My connector is sort of an academic library of research material.

         If you want I can add in and analyze the industries in your current article, if they fit into the framework I built, and which linkages reinforce and enable different sectors.

         Reply
         • Karl Garcia says:

           March 24, 2026 at 1:16 pm

           Understood thanks.

           Reply
       • Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

         March 24, 2026 at 12:37 pm

         from what I understood so far, Joey has his own server with an LLM on it which he gives very controlled inputs / source and training data.

         And yes, my (own) experiments with prompts on Gemini and Claude in recent weeks have shown me how important they are.

         My experiments have also shown me how AI can lead itself astray to the point na parang usapang lasing na ang chat mo with it.

         Iyong tipong nagbobolahan na lang kayo and the AI sounds like an incredibly intelligent person not rooted in any reality.

         Guess my experience in OCR (not the garden variety but the kind used to automate incoming document entry) of 25+ years also helped.

         I believe that Joey’s critique of AI is that most people use it like people who don’t know how to use a chainsaw properly.

         Most public AI has a lot of garbage in and certainly garbage out – Joey’s best AI ranking (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and forget the rest) I noted.

         A lot of support platforms nowadays already autosuggest solutions using LLMs but they feed from their own, usually quite clean knowledge bases and FAQs.

         Reply
         • Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

           March 24, 2026 at 12:50 pm

           https://www.manilatimes.net/2026/03/24/opinion/columns/will-ai-replace-historians-and-cultural-workers/2305592/ by Xiao:

           IN the Philippines, many teachers, academics and cultural workers are wary of artificial intelligence (AI), and perhaps they should be. It is so powerful it can distort records of the past and present especially with the advent of deepfakes. Also, some even fear that it encourages intellectual dishonesty among students that may be harder to detect in the long run. And what if cultural workers can now be replaced by bots in doing their job? That is why many are afraid to talk about this, but AI seems inevitable.

           It was a privilege to be invited by FamilySearch Philippines to be one of the VIP delegates consisting of government officials and personalities who can influence policymaking and public opinion on records management to attend “RootsTech 2026,” the international conference on genealogy and technology from March 5 to 7 at the Salt Palace at Salt Lake City, Utah, and a special event a day before that called the “Archivist and Record Custodians (ARC) Symposium.” FamilySearch is an international genealogy organization and website sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).

           The theme of RootsTech this year was “Together,” which emphasizes linking generations, collaborating on family history and fostering inclusion among participants worldwide using the latest technology. It is wonderful how the LDS belief in “proxy baptism,” or “baptism for the dead,” which was heavily criticized by some as fringe Christian doctrine, resulted in collaboration to save historical and genealogical records, not just from among LDS members, but from across religions and nationalities. Throughout the event, a video message of Father Gaspar Segaya, OP, the archivist of the University of Santo Tomas, the oldest archive in the country, was shown repeatedly, saying he now teaches “The Gospel of the Archives.” That in saving records that tell the story of the Filipino people, their faith and identity, we “bring the wisdom of the past in the heart of today’s world.” Despite the difficulty of finding records, FamilySearch had digitized most of the existing parish records around the country and makes them available when they are destroyed by calamities. They would have been lost if not for their efforts.

           One of the talks in the ARC symposium pertain to saving records in situations like wars and oppressions as demonstrated by Lars Fivalstad Smaaberg in “Archivists without Borders/Arxivers sense Fronteres: Engaging when documentary heritage and archives are at risk” on the work they have done in the preservation of the archives of the Sahrawi people, the processing of international adoption files in Côte d’Ivoire and support for associations of families of victims of enforced disappearances in Mexico. And there was also a talk by James Cannon and Michael Gray on “Saving Your Tribal and Village Heritage: FamilySearch Oral Genealogy Initiative,” where they talked about how a FamilySearch initiative was able to document 2.7 million oral genealogy interviews from Indigenous peoples of 24 countries that might have been lost, doing 15,000 interviews every week! Again, these oral genealogies may have been lost to us, too.

           The whole conference talked about technological advancements in DNA research and other innovative tools for discovering and preserving family stories. But the subtheme of the conference, the buzzword really, was artificial intelligence.

           Dr. Jonathan Claymore McCollum, in a presentation, “Giving Voice to Silent Scripts: Indexing Records in Dead Languages,” demonstrated how preserving and indexing Ladino, Ottoman and Aramaic records yielded priceless historical, cultural and genealogical data through the help of indexing for searchability and HTR (handwritten text recognition). He then led a panel of experts in Ottoman-Turkish history — Dr. Kent Schull, Dr. Sibel Karakoc, Ahlem Ellafi (project manager for Tunisia of Infoscribe AI), Dr. Stephen Randall Filios and Dr. Richard Wittmann — on how technology, especially HTR, is helping historians do their work. Dr. Wittman talked about his experience penetrating the famous monastery at Mt. Athos and digitizing their records, which for me was thrilling to hear. Dr. Filios gave us some tips on how to use AI effectively: Give them boundaries and remove irrelevant information. Dr. McCollum also reminded us that these AI technologies are really artforms because the word technology itself came from the Greek “technē,” meaning art.

           Despite being a special event for archivists and records custodians, the ARC symposium can be experienced by those who were not with us in Utah, because the RootsTech yearly conference can be accessed online, on demand. Aside from the presentations, there are panel discussions which one can watch on “Digital Transformation Opportunities and Challenges,” and “Preserving the Past with Emerging Tech: AI’s Role in Archival Stewardship.”

           In the ARC symposium, I am realizing the Earth-shattering implications of AI in the preservation of historical records, the very backbone of the historical discipline. AI can never replace historians and cultural workers, but if we learn it, it might make us stronger. More on this and RootsTech next week.

           the part I put in bold is what Joey has been telling us for quite a while (basically garbage in, garbage out) and the prompts I guess are the “boundaries” as the AI has no human context to give itself sensible boundaries. Interesting to see how it is already being used on digitized archives, which makes sense.

           Reply
           • Joey Nguyen says:

             March 24, 2026 at 1:17 pm

             Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT all support adding constraints (what information to discard) to the “thinking” process. In Claude this is done by telling the bot to do so with natural language (“don’t include xyz”) but it is more effectively done with XML tags (“”).

             What annoys me the most about common AI usage is people seem to want to use AI chatbot outputs to win arguments despite putting little effort to actually learn the thing they are arguing about. Or they use AI chatbots as a substitute for actual thinking and didn’t even realize they are dumbing themselves down, like the following from a few days ago on X/Twitter:

             https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:n27pw7bbyk2lcapdazimiypf/bafkreieshzjwoehdhrmtfj6szt433dhoope5bocwjfuspqvzzd2vozjdfa

             Reply
             • Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

               March 24, 2026 at 2:23 pm

               haha, that person might be used by some of your French relatives as confirmation bias if they already have the typical French cliche of “dumb Americans”..

               ..that reminds me of cashiers in grocery stores who no longer know how compute the right change if they made a mistake typing in the cash given. Getting dumbed down and getting too comfortable is something not just the cliche MAGAs are about we in Europe have our own version, just snootier.

               Of course every tool has the potential to dumb us down. I grew up in a time when one often knew the most important phone numbers by heart as one had them written down and typed them in when needed, often at a phone booth, so one remembered.

               We also had pretty old-fashioned teachers when it came to arithmetic, who told us “what will you do if you are in the jungle or there is a brownout”? Pretty realistic in the 1970s Philippines, where you always had candles and flashlights ready for brownouts, and water in pails in case the flowing water was interrupted, which was most of the time in UP then.

               Stuff which I can tell as it is about process not about work content: I have developed some sense of how to work with inputs from different people (which helps in utilizing AI) because first of all I led a team of offshore people in my Cognizant days, of course you delegate because you don’t have the time to do it all, but if one is not to be a senyorito manager (yes I had a senior manager title then so I was a senyor, but that is because of the status-consciousness of the culture of the majority of those working at the company) one has to at least try to get the gist of the solutions they are proposing and understand them too to be able to test them properly. Second I have been utilizing consultants ever since I got into my present job, as even a specialist has stuff where it is economically more efficient to hire those even more specialized, hmm am I making sense yes I guess I am. Same banana, one has to delegate but has to engage to understand. Third I have had projects that were totally outside my special area, happens when you are internal IT and for instance software is passed due to people retiring or leaving so I have had to talk to software vendors or consultants who are from totally different areas. Asking questions to fully understand foreign domains becomes essential, not just taking stuff verbatim like many people do with AI nowadays.

               In fact excellent AI output can be enough to blow one’s mind – I am thinking of the stuff you have uploaded now. Of course one can treat it like some Filipino politicians treat expert studies, not read them at all or skim them. Well the coming Easter weekend over here in Europe is long for that stuff.

               Reply
               • Joey Nguyen says:

                 March 25, 2026 at 12:49 pm

                 The crazy thing is I *have* read through plenty of Philippines Congressional and Senate bills and the “bill” Claude created was much more of a matter-to-fact and ready-for-action plan than any Philippine bill that I ever read. Philippines bills tend to be too aspirational, filled with flowery language, probably much too head in the clouds, and chasing what elites envy about other countries but not spending much time on specifying what *effort* is needed to get there. The 10 industries Claude helped with connecting into industrial clusters are real industries that the Philippines can get going with *right now* that don’t explicitly require FDI (but with FDI would enable supercharged timelines). I identified the 10 industries specifically as areas that could lift up out of poverty large segments of the urban and rural poor that exist as an available workforce. One of my biggest worries for the Philippines is the large working age population will soon age out and the Philippines would become a country with shrinking population that cannot be replaced by massive immigration while at the same time not having built up prior infrastructure that can allow a smaller population to do well globally.

                 Reply
                 • Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

                   March 25, 2026 at 2:26 pm

                   I just skimmed through the ten industries and they are indeed doable. Two (ship repair and aquaculture) were part of the Blue Industries aspect of VP Leni’s 2022 industrial program as the President she did not become. I will have a look at the stuff again in deeper detail during the Easter weekend.

                   Going for a “digital fast” now though, lot of stuff to do at work before Easter. And the usual “spring cleaning” stuff at home as well.

                   Reply
                   • Joey Nguyen says:

                     March 25, 2026 at 3:13 pm

                     Btw I consider Prof. Virgilio Enriquez’s “Sikolohiyang Pilipino” to be nationalistic in nature. Prof. Enriquez’s study of Filipino relational dynamics can be understood from the viewpoint of someone (like me) with a more broad understanding of regional cultures as it relates to the Philippines to be “innovative” — framing Filipino cultural truths a bit differently as a means to serve more nationalistic ends as so many elite-driven discourse is in the Philippines. I still included that academic work though since it does inform the current cultural zeitgeist of how Filipinos (or at least the elites) view themselves and for the fact the work is loosely taught in Philippines schools. In that way Prof. Enriquez’s work as relates to “utang na loob” is not that much different from Meiji Japan’s transformation of “gimu” (a profound moral debt, e.g. from subject to emperor) from interpersonal and local into national service and sacrifice to the nation.

                 • giancarloangulo says:

                   March 29, 2026 at 8:17 pm

                   Most bills leave everything to the IRR or are declarations / pronouncements

                   Reply
                   • Irineo B. R. Salazar says:

                     March 30, 2026 at 12:30 am

                     I guess Bato would say “plans-plans lang iyan” and Ben&Ben would sing “trip-trip lang” to them.

                   • Joey Nguyen says:

                     March 30, 2026 at 2:31 pm

                     Yes, this is how “major legislation” in the US works too. The US Congress, informed by the President, creates a legislative enabling framework. Then agency experts craft regulations to be able to execute on what Congress directed.

                     I guess a problem in the Philippines is that the laws (and indeed even the Constitution) is much too aspirational without sufficient institution building in order to unlock the aspirations. James Madison in Federalist No. 48 wrote of “parchment barriers” (in modern usage “parchment guarantees”) that are barely worth the paper it is written on. In other words, without actual guarantees enforced within strong institutions, a constitution (or law) is not self-executing.

                     For example if one were to look at the EVIDA law (RA 11697), HEVs, PHEVs, and BEVs are all granted a number of relief on taxation and registration, which is great for Filipino consumers. What is not great is in effect EVIDA allows zero-tariff imports on the aforementioned vehicle classes, which is why BYD and VinFast were able to enter the Philippines market. Due to AFTA’s (ASEAN FTA) zero-tariff provision which went into effect in 2015 the Philippines would only be able to impose tariffs on Chinese vehicles. No effort at all in EVIDA to create a domestic auto industry aside from passive provisions. CARS is an EO with annual budget provision so Congress can choose not to provide funds, which happened recently in the 2026 budget, causing existing relationships with Toyota (through TMP) to have less investment confidence. And so on. Even when laws are written, the laws are so nebulous that IRR crafters don’t even know where to start.

         • Joey Nguyen says:

           March 24, 2026 at 1:09 pm

           If you have time Irineo give the artifacts I created a read. Although most of it is what I’ve written about in comments since my time here (with some other stuff Claude suggested), the innovation Claude allowed is to be able to tie my line of reasoning together into a cohesive policy plan and accompanying Congressional bill.

           Probably the most important part is the cross-analysis of cultural practices that contributed to success and failures in the 9 countries I analyzed. Like I’ve shared before Filipino elites act as if Philippine culture is static and in the past, but culture and society evolves. Relational dynamics are very important in driving organizational success. Specific to Asian cultures there’s also various ideas of relational debt (e.g. “utang na loob”). I cross-analyzed how other cultures in the analysis matrix were able to overcome the negative aspects of their own relational dynamics and translate that into success, and how those lessons might inform the Philippines.

           On more effective prompting, Claude supports XML structured prompts. Yes, prompts in the natural language work most of the time, but just like Google-fu which requires knowing how to construct a search query that might not sound at all natural but is more effective XML structured prompts is a huge level up. With XML structured prompts you can also tell Claude to use whatever custom connectors and supported third party datasets.

           Anthropic's Official Take on XML-Structured Prompting as the Core Strategy
           byu/Riggz23 inClaudeAI

           https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/claude-prompting-best-practices

           For example my prompt in natural language:

           Explain in detail the concept of incompletely repayable relational debt in the context of each culture for the following countries:

           Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam

           In order to accomplish this task we will focus on the following broad outline but feel free to add in relevant connections and nuances:

           1. What are the indigenous concepts of incompletely repayable relational debt?
           2. How did contact with outside cultures including colonial experiences, influence the evolution of the concepts of incompletely repayable relational debt?
           3. How do the concepts of incompletely repayable relational debt presently influence social and business interactions?
           4. Are there any cross-cultural intersections or similarities between the countries in question?
           5. What are positive and negative results of incompletely repayable relational debt as pertains to broader culture of those countries as relates to economic development, and more specifically as relates to business culture in those countries?
           6. What are the cultural nuances in those countries that affect how subordinates effectively convey feedback to their superiors?

           Can be re-written in XML Markdown as:

           <topic>Incompletely Repayable Relational Debt Across East and Southeast Asian Cultures</topic>

           <tone>You are an expert cross-cultural sociologist, anthropologist, and a specialist in East and Southeast Asian social dynamics and business culture.<tone>

           <context>Your task is to provide a comprehensive, detailed, and nuanced analysis of “incompletely repayable relational debt” for nine specific countries: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and Vietnam. The analysis must cover both historical indigenous concepts and their contemporary manifestations, including influences from outside cultures.

           Your analysis should be academically rigorous, avoiding oversimplification, and drawing on established sociological and anthropological frameworks. For each country, provide a distinct section. After analyzing all countries individually, include a concluding comparative analysis section.</context>

           <task>For each of the following countries (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam), provide a detailed analysis using the following subheadings:</task>

           <output_format>Country Name: Indigenous Concepts of Incompletely Repayable Relational Debt: Detail the historical, traditional, and indigenous understandings of incompletely repayable relational debt. Explain what this concept entails in its purest form within that culture, including any specific cultural terms (e.g., giri, utang na loob, baksil) and their nuanced meanings. Describe how these concepts traditionally manifested in social structures and personal relationships. Influence of Outside Cultures and Colonial Experiences: Analyze how contact with outside cultures, including colonial experiences (where applicable), influenced the evolution, adaptation, reinforcement, or even erosion of these indigenous concepts. Provide specific examples of how foreign interactions shaped the understanding and practice of relational debt. Present Influence on Social and Business Interactions: Explain how the concepts of incompletely repayable relational debt presently influence social interactions (family, community, personal life) and, more specifically, business interactions (negotiations, partnerships, employee relations, customer loyalty) within the country. Provide contemporary examples. Positive and Negative Results: Discuss the broader cultural implications, both positive and negative, of incompletely repayable relational debt as it pertains to the country’s economic development and, more specifically, its business culture. Consider aspects like trust-building, innovation, corruption, social cohesion, and economic efficiency. Cultural Nuances for Subordinate Feedback to Superiors: Detail the specific cultural nuances and strategies subordinates employ to effectively and respectfully convey feedback or even dissent to their superiors, taking into account the context of relational debt, hierarchy, and face-saving within that culture. Provide actionable insights into effective communication practices.<output_format>

           <thinking>Cross-Cultural Intersections and Similarities (Concluding Comparative Analysis): After analyzing all nine countries individually, provide a dedicated comparative section. Identify significant cross-cultural intersections, commonalities, and shared characteristics or patterns regarding the concept of incompletely repayable relational debt across Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and Vietnam. Highlight both the regional commonalities (e.g., East Asian vs. Southeast Asian) and unique divergences. Discuss how these similarities and differences might inform broader understanding of relational dynamics in the region.</thinking>

           <style>The output must be highly academic, analytical, detailed, and nuanced. Use clear, concise language. Avoid generalizations where specific cultural contexts demand distinction. Ensure a respectful and culturally sensitive approach. Do not use markdown formatting, present as plain text.</style>

           Reply
           • JoeAm says:

             March 25, 2026 at 7:55 am

             I can see the machine saluting and jumping off the cliff into the rod section of a nuclear reactor. This is very very helpful, Joey. It provides boundaries while letting the machine loose. Thanks!

             Reply
             • Joey Nguyen says:

               March 25, 2026 at 12:42 pm

               The focus of my analysis were policies that were able to complement or enable higher value policies. Even though a lot of the stuff Claude did was tying together my separate ramblings, it is useful to see it all sequenced and organized into a framework of a plan. If you have time to go through all the generated analysis, I certainly found it to be eye opening how many solutions are “within reach” for the Philippines, and only require political capital spent in order to get things moving.

               Reply
4. Karl Garcia says:

   March 25, 2026 at 9:35 am

   Guys, I thank you for your ideas I am belately asking permission of using your brsin power hoping to have done you justice.

   Reply