Why Can't a Model Be More Like a Man? - by Hollis Robbins
Anecdotal Value
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Why Can't a Model Be More Like a Man?<br>Everybody's Alfred P. Doolittle now
Hollis Robbins<br>Jul 15, 2026
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The most prophetic figure in George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion (or the 1964 film My Fair Lady, if that’s the version you know) is not Eliza (after whom Joseph Weizenbaum named his proto-LLM) but Eliza’s dustman-turned-philosopher father, Alfred P. Doolittle.<br>Every day it seems another philosopher snaps up a well-paying gig to make the world a more moral place. “One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other,” gushed Benjamin Wallace in last week’s New York Times piece, “The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors.” The 114-year-old Alfred P. Doolittle goes unmentioned, though he was the first of his profession to land a cushy job on the basis of impressing a couple of language researchers.<br>Alfred P. Doolittle (Lerner’s musical gives him the middle initial) is usually read as comic relief, a Fabian lecture on the undeserving poor, a Nietzschean life force who steals every scene. But he’s also the exemplar of the undeserving rich: a harmless blowhard in the right place at the right time with a gift for steering clear of hard questions. He is an effective altruist avant la lettre, turning down 10 pounds offered to him because 5 would be more effective.<br>My prediction: philosophers will keep getting paid but neither the world nor the AIs will become more moral. The LLM is a language machine made of language, trained on the accumulated work of writers, poets, everyone transcribed into the corpus. The newest models are very powerful machines indeed. But they are machines. If anyone is owed a windfall and could make the world more moral it would be language people, poets and writers, who know how to make fictional people.<br>But like arsonists who moonlight as firefighters, the philosophers have found a way to make AI pay for lowering the temperature. According to the Times, philosophy majors had a better chance of getting a job than computer science majors. All the big AI companies each have a half dozen on hand. Anthropic’s most visible philosopher, Amanda Askell, is in charge of the firm’s 23,000-word constitution governing Claude’s moral formation.<br>These philosophers get paid well, with advertised research positions upwards of $429,000. What they do is unclear. Askell is dry about the terms: “no start-up hires a philosopher to do philosophy.” And as with Alfred P, nobody is going to be able to check or measure whether the world is improved.<br>To reprise the Pygmalion plot briefly: Henry Higgins, a phonetician, and his friend Colonel Pickering, author of Spoken Sanscrit, bet that Higgins can pass a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, off as a duchess within six months, by teaching her how to speak and behave like a lady. Eliza’s father shows up to see if there’s an angle for him, as the father. He has raised her up to this point, so why not get some reimbursement for his pains. It’s a kind of dowry request, though he doesn’t use the term. He is open to an “arrangement:” “All I ask is my rights as a father; and you’re the last man alive to expect me to let her go for nothing; for I can see you’re one of the straight sort, Governor. Well, what’s a five pound note to you? And what’s Eliza to me?”<br>Higgins is amused. He’s not a man of morals. He likes talking and hearing others talk. It’s a funny play and the audience is made to laugh at a scene of a wheedling father bursting into the home of two middle aged men who have taken his daughter in because Shaw makes it clear that they are interested in language, not sex.<br>Shaw very much wants the audience to think about sex if only to put it out of their heads, however. Eliza is offered chocolates and replies “How do I know what might be in them? I’ve heard of girls being drugged by the like of you.” Pickering asks: “Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?” Mrs. Pearce, the housekeeper, wonders “what’s to become of her?” By the time Pickering assures Eliza’s father “Mr. Higgins’s intentions are entirely honorable,” the audience is ready to believe it and Eliza’s father is free to joke: “Course they are, Governor. If I thought they wasn’t, I’d ask fifty.”<br>My point here is that Alfred P. Doolittle’s questionable ethics regarding his daughter are not unrelated to getting paid large sums of money for moral philosophy at the end of the play.<br>That is, the basis for Alfred P’s windfall is his “undeserving poor” speech. “What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything... I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth.”<br>Now you could say he’s simply embodying the old image of a “basement-dwelling” philosopher, as the NYTimes puts it. Diogenes lived in a clay jar, Spinoza had a lens-grinding job,...