…some things are
…well
…straightforwardly complicated…or complexly straightforward…or something
They’re lobbying for Ukraine pro bono – and making millions from arms firms [Guardian]
…let’s go with…hard to reconcile?
Gen Z workers tend to be well equipped to edit photos and videos all from their phones, or use website builders like Squarespace and Wix. They grew up using apps to get work done and are used to the ease that comes with Apple operating systems. Their formative tech years were spent using software that exists to be user-friendly.
But desktop computing is decidedly less intuitive. Things like files, folders, scanning, printing, and using external hardware are hallmarks of office life. Do they know what button to press to turn on a bulky computer monitor, when many simply close their personal laptops when they’re done with them? (No, says one Reddit user who works in IT and has resorted to putting a sign over the power button on work computers.)
Steve Bench runs workshops on generational differences in the corporate world. “I joke in my sessions that my Gen Z intern didn’t know how to mail a letter,” he said. “They asked me where the sticker went. I said, ‘Do you mean the stamp?’”
…the power button thing might be a trifle harsh…it’s not like those are in a standard spot…but…they do tend to have a standard symbol or otherwise tend to be pretty easy to identify if you…you know…look…so…maybe it’s a fair shot to take…either way, I guess it’s true that if you weren’t around before a bunch of online stuff was so easy to do you never really had much reason to try to understand how the things you did it with worked…maybe you’d think you had better things to do with your time than learn that sort of thing…so…I guess I’d wonder if it was a complaint akin to the one I remember when my…I think they call them cohorts in academia…hit the employment arena with a lot of them lacking the ability/knowledge of how to compose a formal business letter…from basic grammar & paragraph construction to formatting on the page…which I recall being grist for many column inches…almost none of which mentioned grammar/spell-check, word templates, or…& this probably dates me…fucking clippy…which at the time I confess I did not connect with the paperclip-armageddon thing…anyway…if you want these people to know this stuff…putting them off would seem a poor way to go about it
The tech company HP coined the phrase “tech shame”, to define how overwhelmed young people felt using basic office tools. According to the study, one in five young office workers reported “feeling judged for having tech issues”, which made them less likely to ask for help. And in another survey, the employment firm LaSalle Agency found that almost half of the class of 2022 felt “underprepared” when it came to the technical skills relevant for entering the workforce.
Dell used its own survey of respondents between the ages of 18 and 26 to find that 56% of respondents said “they had very basic to no digital skills education.” A third of them said their education had not provided them “with the digital skill they need to propel their career”.[…]
“I’ll invite them to a Google Meet, and they’ll say, ‘How do we get a link to that?’ But the link is already in the calendar invite,” Simon [“something of a shepherd for Gen Z staff who feel lost navigating Google Suite and other quotidian software”] said. “Like, it’s 2023, this is the world that we live in. Things that seem pretty straightforward often catch Gen Z off-guard.”
For Simon, it’s another problem to blame on the brain-melting power of social media. His hunch: apps like Instagram and TikTok are so easy to use that younger people expect everything else to be a breeze, too. When it’s not, they’re more likely to give up. “It takes five seconds to learn how to use TikTok,” he said. “You don’t need an instruction book, like you would with a printer. Content is so easy to access now that when you throw someone a simple curveball, they’ll swing and they miss, and that’s why Gen Z can’t schedule a meeting.”
When it comes to accomplishing simple tasks, sometimes Gen Z has to get a bit creative – or downright evasive. Elizabeth, a 23-year-old engineer who lives in Los Angeles, avoids the office printer at all costs. “I feel like I just haven’t been taught things that some people consider basic knowledge, and I’m too shy to ask,” she said.
…could be I just need more coffee…but…seems like there might be something to that worth thinking about
Bemiller, the publicist, accidentally killed one work laptop because he didn’t know how to ask for help. Every morning when he turned it on, he would be greeted by a pop-up from the storage service Dropbox, which he always accepted without reading. After a few months, the computer began to run painfully slowly. It often died without warning. Bemiller could not get any work done, and his manager ordered him a new laptop.
By the time the replacement came in the mail, IT had figured out the issue – and it was completely avoidable. As it turned out, every time Bemiller accepted the pop-up, it gave Dropbox permission to back up everything on to the computer’s disk. At the same time, it gave the computer permission to backup to Dropbox.
“It was constantly backing up everything on to itself,” he said. “Murdering that poor laptop is still so funny to me.”
…doom loops come in all shapes & sizes, after all…& in some of them…murder is funny…understanding is cumulative, though…& some things you can pick up on the fly
“Gen Z is very comfortable navigating software they’ve never used before, because they’ve been doing it their whole lives,” Bench said. “They are used to trial and error. They may not be this godsend to the workforce who come in automatically knowing how to do Excel, but they’re fast learners.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/27/gen-z-tech-shame-office-technology-printers
…on the other hand
At the start of this year, Trump announced his education agenda, declaring that he would issue mandates to “keep men out of women’s sports,” end teacher tenure and cut federal aid to any school system that teaches “critical race theory, gender ideology or other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto our children.”
“As the saying goes,” Trump declared, “personnel is policy and at the end of the day if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids we have a major problem.”
[…]
Trump’s claim that he won in 2020 and his mobilization of an angry, resentful center-right electorate trap him in an approach to elections that has simultaneously ensnared the Republican majority in the House, where the speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has diluted his own authority in order to empower the party’s reactionary fringe — including such volatile figures as Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert.These same forces pushing McCarthy into a corner have prompted Fox News to air conspiracy theories network officials knew were untrue for fear of losing market share to conservative media further to the right, disclosures in the Dominion Voting System’s defamation lawsuit against the network revealed.
[…]
“The inclination to conspiracy and paranoia is the bond that links Trump to the far right,” Jeffrey C. Herf, a historian at the University of Maryland, wrote in an emailed response to my inquiry. “Trump without conspiracy theorizing is a nonentity,” he added, in a comment with wider applicability to the contemporary conservative movement.
[…]
In the case of the Senate vote on Trump’s fate after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, “Mitch McConnell flinched,” Herf wrote, because he “understood that he and the G.O.P. establishment had made a Faustian bargain with the far right, with Trump’s base, and that without that base the G.O.P. would probably be consigned to becoming a permanent minority party at the national level.” McCarthy, in turn, understands “exactly the same dynamic, that is, without Paul Gosar, Scott Perry, Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert — and Marjorie Taylor Greene — the G.O.P.’s electoral prospects look dim.”
[…]
Adam Enders, a political scientist at the University of Louisville who has often written with Uscinski about conspiracy thinking, argued in an email:Trump identified a fairly large segment of the American population that is not particularly ideological nor particularly attached to the two major parties. Moreover, these individuals are distrusting of the government, animated by an anti-establishment political worldview that holds that politicians are unresponsive to their constituents, corrupt and all too eager to conspire against “the people.”
Enders said he doubts that Trump
sees himself as “trapped” in this strategy — rather, this coalitional expansion represents his primary value to the Republican Party. This is his magic trick. And I suspect Trump’s Republican electoral competitors recognize this to be the case. For example, it is precisely these anti-establishment voters that DeSantis is vying for when he engages in conspiracy-related culture war posturing on issues such as Disney “grooming” children, C.R.T. and the like.
[…]
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/opinion/trump-desantis-2024-campaign.html
The larger question, however, is whether Trump and other Republican leaders will not only continue to go deeper into the rabbit hole — a redoubt of victimhood, resentment and conspiracy — which at the moment appears probable, but whether they will drag the rest of the nation down with them.
…it sort of begs a question or two about what sort of studying looks rewarding
The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent. “It’s hard for students like me, who are pursuing an English major, to find joy in what they’re doing,” Meg Macias, a junior, said one afternoon as the edges of the sky over the campus went soft. It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to dusk. “They always know there’s someone who wishes that they were doing something else.”
[…] Luiza Monti, a senior, had come to college as a well-rounded graduate of a charter school in Phoenix. She had fallen in love with Italy during a summer exchange and fantasized about Italian language and literature, but was studying business—specifically, an interdisciplinary major called Business (Language and Culture), which incorporated Italian coursework. “It’s a safeguard thing,” Monti, who wore earrings from a jewelry business founded by her mother, a Brazilian immigrant, told me. “There’s an emphasis on who is going to hire you.”
Justin Kovach, another senior, loved to write and always had. He’d blown through the thousand-odd pages of “Don Quixote” on his own (“I thought, This is a really funny story”) and looked for more big books to keep the feeling going. “I like the long, hard classics with the fancy language,” he said. Still, he wasn’t majoring in English, or any kind of literature. In college—he had started at the University of Pittsburgh—he’d moved among computer science, mathematics, and astrophysics, none of which brought him any sense of fulfillment. “Most of the time I would spend avoiding doing work,” he confessed. But he never doubted that a field in STEM—a common acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—was the best path for him. He settled on a degree in data science.
…which…honestly…sounds like it might pass for a smart idea
Kovach will graduate with some thirty thousand dollars in debt, a burden that influenced his choice of a degree. For decades now, the cost of education has increased over all ahead of inflation. One theory has been that this pressure, plus the growing precariousness of the middle class, has played a role in driving students like him toward hard-skill majors. (English majors, on average, carry less debt than students in other fields, but they take longer to pay it down.)
…weird how starting your post-academic career with a mortgage that doesn’t come with a roof over your head seems like it might put its own curve on the trajectory of kids through higher education
…but
…that’s a whole other thing
Who has student loan debt in America? [WaPo]
40 years of debt: Student loan borrowers’ struggles expose flaws in system [WaPo]
…this one’s busy being concerned about the choice of subjects pursued
For the decline at A.S.U. is not anomalous. According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.
During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.
…what’s the big deal? …that part kinda depends
If you take a moment to conjure the university in your mind, you will probably arrive at one of two visions. Perhaps you see the liberal-arts idyll, removed from the pressures of the broader world and filled with tweedy creatures reading on quadrangle lawns. This is the redoubt of the idealized figure of the English major, sensitive and sweatered, moving from “Pale Fire” to “The Fire Next Time” and scaling the heights of “Ulysses” for the view. The goal of such an education isn’t direct career training but cultivation of the mind—the belief that Lionel Trilling caricatured as “certain good things happen if we read literature.” This model describes one of those pursuits, like acupuncture or psychoanalysis, which seem to produce salutary effects through mechanisms that we have tried but basically failed to explain.
Or perhaps you think of the university as the research colony, filled with laboratories and conferences and peer-reviewed papers written for audiences of specialists. This is a place that thumps with the energy of a thousand gophers turning over knowledge. It’s the small-bore university of campus comedy—of “Lucky Jim” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—but also the quarry of deconstruction, quantum electrodynamics, and value theory. It produces new knowledge and ways of understanding that wouldn’t have an opportunity to emerge anywhere else.
…or…just throwing it out there…for some people at least…you maybe think of the one(s) you attended
In 1963, Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California system, gave a series of lectures subsequently collected in a famous book, “The Uses of the University.” He argued that both of these paradigms—the former largely inspired by British schools like Oxford and Cambridge, the latter largely inspired by the great German universities of the nineteenth century—had no actual equivalent in the U.S. Instead, he said, the Americans created the “multiversity”: a kind of hodgepodge of both types and more. The multiversity incorporates the tradition of land-grant universities, established with an eye to industrial-age skill sets. And it provides something for everyone. There is pre-professional training of all sorts—law schools, business schools, medical schools, agricultural schools—but also the old liberal-arts quadrangle. “The university is so many things to so many different people that it must, of necessity, be partially at war with itself,” Kerr wrote.
The multiversity does have a long project, though, and that is the project of opening itself to the world. In the nineteen-thirties, Harvard began making motions in the direction of socioeconomic meritocracy, significantly increasing scholarships for bright students. In 1944, the G.I. Bill was signed, bearing more than two million veterans into colleges and universities, the quickest jump in enrollment (male enrollment, anyway) on record. Between 1940 and 1970, the percentage of the American public that received at least four years of university education nearly tripled, sharpening the university’s democratic imperative. The student ferment of these years pressed for curricular reform, with the goal of bringing the university into greater alignment with undergraduates’ interests. Higher education was ever less a world apart and more a world in which many people spent some time.
…old-fashioned people…& other anachronistic devices…might file that sort of thing under the heading of “a public good”
We’ve Been Talking About the Lab-Leak Hypothesis All Wrong [NYT]
…but
This Revolutionary Stroke Treatment Will Save Millions of Lives. Eventually. [NYT]
…again
A California tunnel could save stormwater for millions. Why is it so divisive? [WaPo]
…we’re still on “whither humanit[ies]?”
For decades, the average proportion of humanities students in every class hovered around fifteen per cent nationally, following the American economy up in boom times and down in bearish periods. (If you major in a field like business for the purpose of getting rich, it doesn’t follow—but can be mistaken to—that majoring in English will make you poor.) Enrollment numbers of the past decade defy these trends, however. When the economy has looked up, humanities enrollments have continued falling. When the markets have wobbled, enrollments have tumbled even more. Today, the roller coaster is in free fall. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the percentage of college degrees awarded in health sciences, medical sciences, natural sciences, and engineering has shot up. At Columbia University—one of a diminishing number of schools with a humanities-heavy core requirement—English majors fell from ten per cent to five per cent of graduates between 2002 and 2020, while the ranks of computer-science majors strengthened.
“Until about four years ago, I thought it was a reversible situation—that those who profess the humanities hadn’t been good enough at selling them to students,” James Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, told me […] “I no longer believe that, for two reasons.”
…no prizes for guessing the first one
One reason was the way of the world. Shapiro picked up an abused-looking iPhone from his desk. “You’re talking to someone who has only owned a smartphone for a year—I resisted,” he said. Then he saw that it was futile. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” He waggled the iPhone disdainfully. “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” Assigning “Middlemarch” in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.
…but…the second route to that conclusion would be the path less traveled, you might say
As I watched, he labelled the start of the graph “1958”—the year after the Soviets launched Sputnik, when the National Defense Education Act appropriated more than a billion dollars for education.
“We’re not talking about élite universities—we’re talking about money flowing into fifty states, all the way down. That was the beginning of the glory days of the humanities,” he continued. Near the plummeting end of the parabola, he scribbled “2007,” the beginning of the economic crisis. “That funding goes down,” he explained. “The financial support for the humanities is gone on a national level, on a state level, at the university level.”
[…]
“This is also the decline-of-democracy chart,” he said. He looked up and met my gaze. “You can overlay it on the money chart like a kind of palimpsest—it’s the same.”
…some universities, of course, are…exceptional
Last year, [Harvard] reportedly had a 3.19-per-cent admission rate. Those who make it through the needle’s eye are able to evade a lot of the forces thought to drag humanities enrollments down. Harvard’s financial-aid packages are ostensibly doled out to the full extent needed, and built without loans, giving students who receive aid the chance to graduate debt-free. Basic employability is assured by the diploma: even a Harvard graduate who majors in somersaults will be able to find some kind of job to pay the bills. In theory, this should be a school where the range of possibilities for college remains intact.
In 2022, though, a survey found that only seven per cent of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from twenty per cent in 2012, and nearly thirty per cent during the nineteen-seventies. From fifteen years ago to the start of the pandemic, the number of Harvard English majors reportedly declined by about three-quarters—in 2020, there were fewer than sixty at a college of more than seven thousand—and philosophy and foreign literatures also sustained losses. (For bureaucratic reasons, Harvard doesn’t count history as a humanity, but the trend holds.) “We feel we’re on the Titanic,” a senior professor in the English department told me.
Students lacked a strong sense of the department’s vaunted standing. “I would never say this to any of my English- or my film-major friends, but I kind of thought that those majors were a joke,” Isabel Mehta, a junior, told me. “I thought, I’m a writer, but I’ll never be an English major.” Instead, she’d pursued social studies—a philosophy, politics, and economics track whose popularity has exploded in recent years. (Policy, students explained, was thought to effect urgent change.) But the conversations bored her (students said “the same three things,” she reported, “and I didn’t want to be around all these classmates railing on capitalism all day”), so she landed uneasily in English after all. “I have a warped sense of identity, where I’m studying something really far removed from what a lot of people here view as central, but I’m not removed from these cultural forces,” she told me.
…yet another aside…apparently I can’t help myself…but…in the UK system…PPE is an actual degree…notably at places including oxford & cambridge…& last I heard one that’s over-represented in the pool of people who are currently trying to make a living out of politics
English professors find the turn particularly baffling now: a moment when, by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the seminar table is at a peak.
…&…I don’t want to sound overly cynical…I know a bunch of bright kids who show every indication of possessing sustained appetites for learning & a willingness to work at it…but…it’s hard to deny that…as the chatbot stuff has but lately demonstrated in spades…adopting the appearance of a thing is a lot less difficult than achieving the thing
Florida Republican pitches bill to eliminate the Florida Democratic Party [NBC]
Elon Musk sets out vision to eliminate fossil fuels from world economy [Guardian]
…if appearances are what we’re counting
“Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”
…the past is a foreign country…yadda yadda…is tourism a good thing…or…if that’s not the right question
…when it comes to virtues…what’s the signal:noise ratio look like?
Tara K. Menon, a junior professor who joined the English faculty in 2021, linked the shift to students arriving at college with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach. At Harvard, as elsewhere, courses that can be seen to approach an idea of canon, such as Humanities 10, an intensive, application-only survey, have been the focus of student concerns about too few Black artists in syllabi, or Eurocentric biases.
“There’s a real misunderstanding that you can come in and say, ‘I want to read post-colonial texts—that’s the thing I want to study—and I have no interest in studying the work of dead white men,’ ” Menon said. “My answer, in the big first lecture that I give, is, If you want to understand Arundhati Roy, or Salman Rushdie, or Zadie Smith, you have to read Dickens. Because one of the tragedies of the British Empire”—she smiled—“is that all those writers read all those books.”
…meanwhile
One misty afternoon, a Harvard junior named Henry Haimo took me for a walk down Dunster Street, and on past Harvard’s red-brick upperclass dorms. Haimo had assumed the style of an ageless Ivy Leaguer: glasses, a button-down, and an annihilated pair of chinos. He decided to major in history after flirting with philosophy. “There’s an incredible emphasis on ‘ethics’ in every field of study now,” he explained: A.I. plus ethics, biology plus ethics. “And effective altruism”—a practice that calls for acquiring wealth and disseminating it according to principles of optimization and efficiency—“is a huge trend on campus, seeping into everything. It has probably contributed to a good number of concentrators and secondaries in the philosophy department.”
I asked Haimo whether there seemed to be a dominant vernacular at Harvard. (When I was a student there, people talked a lot about things being “reified.”) Haimo told me that there was: the language of statistics. One of the leading courses at Harvard now is introductory statistics, enrolling some seven hundred students a semester, up from ninety in 2005. “Even if I’m in the humanities, and giving my impression of something, somebody might point out to me, ‘Well, who was your sample? How are you gathering your data?’ ” he said. “I mean, statistics is everywhere. It’s part of any good critical analysis of things.”
It struck me that I knew at once what Haimo meant: on social media, and in the press that sends data visualizations skittering across it, statistics is now everywhere, our language for exchanging knowledge. Today, a quantitative idea of rigor underlies even a lot of arguments about the humanities’ special value. Last school year, Spencer Glassman, a history major, argued in a column for the student paper that Harvard’s humanities “need to be more rigorous,” because they set no standards comparable to the “tangible things that any student who completes Stat 110 or Physics 16 must know.” He told me, “One could easily walk away with an A or A-minus and not have learned anything. All the STEM concentrators have this attitude that humanities are a joke.”
…maybe they are…but if so it wouldn’t be a very funny one…& it’s definitely on us
Haimo and I turned back toward Harvard Square. “I think the problem for the humanities is you can feel like you’re not really going anywhere, and that’s very scary,” he said. “You write one essay better than the other from one semester to the next. That’s not the same as, you know, being able to solve this economics problem, or code this thing, or do policy analysis.” This has always been true, but students now recognized less of the long-term value of writing better or thinking more deeply than they previously had. Last summer, Haimo worked at the HistoryMakers, an organization building an archive of African American oral history. He said, “When I was applying, I kept thinking, What qualifies me for this job? Sure, I can research, I can write things.” He leaned forward to check for passing traffic. “But those skills are very difficult to demonstrate, and it’s frankly not what the world at large seems in demand of.”
[…]
In a quantitative society for which optimization—getting the most output from your input—has become a self-evident good, universities prize actions that shift numbers, and pre-professionalism lends itself to traceable change. In 2019, two deans at Emory, Michael A. Elliott and Douglas A. Hicks, received a $1.25-million grant from the Mellon Foundation to create what they called the Humanities Pathways program, focussed on career preparedness. (“Faculty learn to integrate into their syllabi elements to make students conscious that what they’re learning will help them with what potential employers are looking for,” Peter Höyng, a German-studies professor who co-directs the program, told me.) It arranges Zoom seminars with alumni to help show the way. Almost immediately, the program’s co-creators were plucked up into bigger roles: last year, Elliott became the president of Amherst College, and Hicks is now the president of Davidson.“When I was a graduate student, in the nineties, the New York Times ran a series of magazine stories about major literary theorists, because they were seen as being central,” Elliott told me from his new office. “Now they would be about people working in artificial intelligence or natural-language processing.” Students have noticed the change of focus. “They like being part of vibrant debate and discussion—it’s one reason we continue to see strong enrollments around Black studies,” Elliott said.
[…]
It is hard to separate the effects of support for cultural endeavors from the effects of increasingly widespread college education. But, for years, there was little reason to. Through the second half of the twentieth century, the opening up of the university to the outside world and the work valued in that world aligned. Being able to appreciate a Thelonious Monk record or a Miller play or the wild sprawl of a Pynchon novel was a widely held objective. The concept of “the canon” is a mirage—there’s no single list handed down from the mountain—but the idea of shared knowledge of challenging art is powerful, and by mid-century it had been framed as a route to upward mobility. The French sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron coined the term “cultural capital” to define the inherited or acquired cultural knowledge that makes movement and advancement easier in a field of society, and by the sixties, in America, that kind of wealth was newly open for the claiming. In 1962, Nichols and May, the aspirational university-humor act, performed for President Kennedy alongside Marilyn Monroe. In 1964, “My Fair Lady”—a verbally dense musical of transformation through upward acculturation—grossed several times as much in cinemas as “A Hard Day’s Night.”In other contexts, though, the government’s investments could be seen as having backfired. Most institutional-opposition movements of the past sixty years, from Vietnam protest to today’s defund-the-police efforts, have been amplified on campuses. That’s partly because fields like literature and history teach close, fact-based study and critical analysis with the goal of pulling up the rug to understand what’s going on beneath. When students graduate and seek changes in broader society, they carry those practices with them. If they’re young, their language is still the current language of the university, so the causes bounce back to professors and students at a convivial angle. That feedback loop is partly how youth movements grow.
Some scholars observe that, in classrooms today, the initial gesture of criticism can seem to carry more prestige than the long pursuit of understanding. One literature professor and critic at Harvard—not old or white or male—noticed that it had become more publicly rewarding for students to critique something as “problematic” than to grapple with what the problems might be; they seemed to have found that merely naming concerns had more value, in today’s cultural marketplace, than curiosity about what underlay them. This clay-pigeon approach to inquiry struck her as a devaluation of all that criticism—and art—can do.
[…]
Students pick up on the emphasis. At the point when, in 1996, the university opened a refurbished humanities building, humanities enrollment was rising; now a new mandate is clear. “Harvard is spending a huge amount of money on the engineering school,” a sophomore mechanical-engineering major said at dinner in the dorms one evening. It was curry night in Pforzheimer House, and a dozen students were chatting at a long table, finishing their meals. “Mark Zuckerberg just gave another half billion dollars for an A.I. and natural-intelligence research institute, and they added new professorships. The money at Harvard—and a lot of other universities, too—is disproportionately going into STEM.” According to the Harvard Crimson, which conducts an annual survey, more than sixty per cent of the members of the class of 2020 planning to enter the workforce were going into tech, finance, or consulting.“I think that the presence of big tech and consulting firms on campus is a big part of people’s perception that you can’t get a job in the humanities,” Hana, a senior in integrative biology, chimed in at the table. “Google, Facebook, Deloitte, B.C.G. . . .” She shrugged in exasperation. “They just have access to our campus in a really pervasive way!” The first time she was buttonholed by a consulting firm was freshman year.
…so…well…back to that in a minute…but…that might be another little trove of potential ledes not so much buried as brushed past…despite the part where arguably each has some gravity of its own to contribute to the trajectory being examined
The chatbot battle is heating up, and Mark Zuckerberg is making it clear that Meta Platforms is focusing on artificial intelligence-powered tools, too.
“We’re creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area,” Meta Chief Executive Officer Zuckerberg said Monday in a post on Instagram. “We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I’m excited about all the new things we’ll build along the way.”
For now, he said, the company is trying to use the technology with text-like chats in Meta’s messaging apps WhatsApp and Messenger, and on visual filters for photos and videos on platforms like Instagram. “We’ll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways,” he added.
Earlier Monday, social-networking rival Snap Inc. said it’s releasing an AI-enabled chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology for its subscription members on the Snapchat app. Snap’s news was the latest entry in the race to offer digital tools that can answer users’ questions in natural language format, following similar test releases from internet heavyweights like Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
https://fortune.com/2023/02/27/mark-zuckerberg-chatgpt-chatbot-ai-team-meta-facebook/
[…]
Zuckerberg’s latest post echoes comments he made on Meta’s earnings call earlier this month — that the company is focused on infusing AI in messaging, the advertising business and its algorithm that decides what content people see on Facebook and Instagram. “We are focused on efficiency and continuing to streamline the company as we can execute these priorities,” he said at the time, just months after firing 13% of Meta’s workforce.
“We’re creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post on Monday. “Over the longer term, we’ll focus on developing A.I. personas that can help people in a variety of ways.”
https://fortune.com/2023/02/28/mark-zuckerberg-wants-a-i-personas-for-facebook-and-instagram-accounts/
ChatGPT and other new chatbots are so good at mimicking human interaction that they’ve prompted a question among some: Is there any chance they’re conscious?
The answer, at least for now, is no. Just about everyone who works in the field of artificial technology is sure that ChatGPT is not alive in the way that’s generally understood by the average person.
But that’s not where the question ends. Just what it means to have consciousness in the age of artificial intelligence is up for debate.
The creation of artificial life has been the subject of science fiction for decades, while philosophers have spent decades considering the nature of consciousness. A few people have even argued that some AI programs as they exist now should be considered sentient (one Google engineer was fired for making such a claim).
Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has speculated that the algorithms behind his company’s creations might be “slightly conscious.”
…which might be described as a “slightly pregnant” kind of a statement
NBC News spoke with five people who study the concept of consciousness about whether an advanced chatbot could possess some degree of awareness. And if so, what moral obligations does humanity have toward such a creature?
[…]
Spokespeople for ChatGPT and Microsoft both told NBC News that they follow strict ethical guidelines, but didn’t provide specifics about concerns their products could develop consciousness. A Microsoft spokesperson stressed that the Bing chatbot “cannot think or learn on its own.”
…& of course there’s that pesky “unreliable narrator” part…but…you never know
“Maybe you won’t be intending to do it, but out of your effort to build more complex machines, you might get some sort of convergence on the kind of mind that has conscious experiences,”
The idea that humans might create another kind of conscious being prompts the question of whether they have some moral obligation toward it. […]
…we hold these truths to be self-evident & all that sort of thing…I guess
If humanity does eventually end up sharing the earth with a synthetic consciousness, that could force societies to drastically re-evaluate some things.
Most free societies agree that people should have the freedom to reproduce if they choose, and also that one person should be able to have one vote for representative political leadership. But that becomes thorny with computerized intelligence, Bostrom said.
“If you’re an AI that could make a million copies of itself in the course of 20 minutes, and then each one of those has one vote, then something has to yield,” he said.
What is consciousness? ChatGPT and advanced AI might redefine our answer
…yield as in bear fruit? …or yield as in make way?
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch posited at the session that the legal protections that shield social networks from lawsuits over user content — which the court is directly taking up for the first time — might not apply to work that’s generated by AI, like the popular ChatGPT bot.
“Artificial intelligence generates poetry,” he said. “It generates polemics today that would be content that goes beyond picking, choosing, analyzing or digesting content. And that is not protected. Let’s assume that’s right.”
[…]
Entire business models, and perhaps the future of AI, could hinge on the answer.
[…]
But there’s a case to be made that the output of a chatbot would be considered content developed, at least in part, by the search engine itself — rendering Google or Microsoft the “publisher or speaker” of the AI’s responses.
[…]
In a post on the legal site Lawfare titled, “Section 230 won’t protect ChatGPT,” Matt Perault of the University of North Carolina argued just that. And he thinks it’s going to be a big problem, unless Congress or the courts step in.
[…]
He suggested that a better approach might be for Congress to grant AI tools temporary immunity, allowing the booming sector to grow unfettered, while studying a longer-term solution that provides partial but not blanket immunity.
…that…might be debatable…depending on your perspective
If the court heartily affirms that Section 230 protects YouTube’s recommendation software, that could clear a path for an expansive interpretation of the law that covers tools like Bing, Bard and ChatGPT, too. If the court looks to draw limits on Section 230 here, that could be a sign that Gorsuch got it right — and AI makers should start bracing for legal head winds.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/01/ai-chatbots-may-have-liability-problem/
…but then
Biden Is Betting on Government Aid to Change Corporate Behavior [NYT]
How Environmentally Conscious Investing Became a Target of Conservatives NYT]
…so are a lot of things
The conservative battle against ‘woke’ banks is backfiring [WaPo]
…& the sunk costs fallacy is some real shit
‘Sometimes Things Break’: Twitter Outages Are on the Rise [NYT]
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/01/twitter-down-for-more-than-an-hour-around-world
…but then
One idea about the national enrollment problem is that it’s actually a counting problem: students haven’t so much left the building as come in through another door. Adjacent fields aren’t included in humanities tallies, and some of them are booming. Harvard’s history-of-science department has seen a fifty-per-cent increase in its majors in the past five years. The humanities creature who recites Cavafy at parties might fade away, but students are still getting their vitamins. There’s a lot of ethics in bioethics, after all.
[…]
In 1980, on average, state funding accounted for seventy-nine per cent of public universities’ revenue. By 2019, that figure was fifty-five per cent, and governors such as Ron DeSantis, in Florida, are applying new pressure for funding cuts. Confronted with those shortfalls, public universities have two options. They can strip down academics, and face what that diminishment leads to. Or they can run to the market and surf its waves.
[…]
Because the state of Arizona cut higher-education funding by more than half between 2008 and 2019, A.S.U. has gone the market route. It invested in its online education, which gained prestige when the school figured out how to give remote students credited laboratory time. (The solution was a system of intensive camps designed by Ara Austin, an assistant professor who took college courses online after a traffic accident and later chafed at such programs’ second-tier, cash-cow status.) Diplomas are the same whether earned online or on site, and the extra tuition, plus donor funds, fills A.S.U.’s sails. In 2007, the university received twenty-eight per cent of its operating budget from the state; last year, it was only nine per cent, for a budget of $4.6 billion. “We are operating in full enterprise modality,” the president, Michael Crow, announced. To put it differently: many of the greatest American public universities increasingly run as private businesses.
[…]
Surprisingly, many in the future biz concur. A funny thing about the market mentality, they note, is that it knows only what’s judged to have future value right now. Career studies have shown that humanities majors, with their communication and analytical skills, often end up in leadership jobs. To that extent, the value of the educated human touch is likely to hold in a storm of technological and cultural change.“Imagine if you had a voice assistant that could write code for you, and you said, ‘Hey, Alexa, build me a Web site to sell shoes,’ ” Sanjay Sarma, a professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T., told me on the phone. (Immediately, he pulled the receiver away to rebuff a device in the room: “Shut up, Alexa! No! No!”) “That’s already happening. It’s called ‘low-code.’ ” There has been much hand-wringing about ChatGPT and its ability to replicate some composition tasks. But ChatGPT can no more conceive “Mrs. Dalloway” than it can guide and people-manage an organization. Instead, A.I. can gather and order information, design experiments and processes, produce descriptive writing and mediocre craftwork, and compose basic code, and those are the careers likeliest to go into slow eclipse.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major
[…]
Hearing students and teachers discuss their accommodations to the new order of things reminded me of the gag in which Charlie Chaplin and a bellhop chase each other endlessly through a revolving door. Everyone agrees that the long arc of higher education must bend toward openness and democratization. And universities, in an imperfect but forward-inching way, are achieving the dream. In 1985, twenty per cent of Harvard students identified as members of a minority ethnicity (a record then); now it’s more than fifty per cent. The number of entering students who are in the first generation in their families to attend college has risen to nearly twenty per cent. International enrollment has climbed. At A.S.U., you can be a barista in rural Alabama and get part-time access to a first-rate education for cheap. The way in which diversity of experience is understood to enrich study, and in which diverse study is understood to enrich society, is a product of work done in the humanities. Harvard and A.S.U. professors to whom I spoke took pride in their institutions’ democratizing feats.
[…]
During the postwar swell of public funding for education, conveyances picked up humanities students right where their B.A. diplomas left them: they could go to graduate school, and on to a stable, rewarding career in teaching and writing; or they could leave the academy for arts-and-letters careers plainly valued by society and at least remunerative enough to sustain a modest middle-class life. Today, the academic profession of the humanities is a notoriously haywire career track, with Ph.D. programs enrolling more students than there are jobs, using them for teaching, and then, years later, sending them off with doctoral gowns and no future in the discipline. (In 2020, the Survey of Earned Doctorates found that less than half of new arts and humanities Ph.D.s graduated with a job—any job—and the odds are vanishing even with élite credentials: of fifteen people who began Princeton’s English Ph.D. program in 2012, only two have landed on a tenure track.) Although the public-funding arc and the university-opening arc once grew in happy parallel, intensifying the value of humanistic cultural capital while expanding access to it, those curves have now crossed.
…who’s counting?
The federal agency which is perhaps best known for its work in tracking down and capturing fugitives wanted by law enforcement notified the US government of the breach, and agents there began a forensic investigation, the chief of the Marshals’ public affairs office, Drew Wade, told Reuters in a statement.
“The affected system contains law enforcement sensitive information, including returns from legal process, administrative information and personally identifiable information pertaining to subjects of USMS investigations, third parties and certain USMS employees,” Wade said to Reuters.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/28/us-marshals-ransomware-attack-compromises-sensitive-information
CrowdStrike says in its annual global threat report that it observed China-linked cyberespionage groups targeting 39 industries on nearly every continent. About a quarter of the hacking was aimed at North America, while most of it targeted China’s Asian neighbors, the report found. The techniques China used have become increasingly sophisticated as cybersecurity has improved, the report found.
“They’re endemic at this point — they’re everywhere,” said Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s head of intelligence.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/forget-chinese-spy-balloon-china-linked-hackers-collect-far-more-information
…sure would be neat if we had a way to help inoculate enough folks to seed a sort of herd immunity to this confection of bread & circuses…but…pursuing humanities is for the birds…the newyorker says so…so it must be true…right?
I think there’s a question buried in this encyclopedic survey of academia: Why is a Harvard dean teaching “Scarlet Letter” at the university level? Didn’t we all read this in 9th grade, concurrent with our colonial history (we Americans anyway)? Did my town have an especially advanced public school system? I have come to learn that I did get an excellent high school education. One example of this is it offered five different foreign languages, and I hear that now some high schools don’t offer any. Wouldn’t it be handy for all of us to know some Spanish, at least, if education is turning to the merely practical, with the rise of STEM education and the phasing out of fiction and its replacement by learning how to read news reports and instruction manuals?
Also, I have a hunch (through close observation) that the reason why many English majors graduate with less student debt than others is that it’s a very upper-middle-class academic vocation to pursue. Do you have any idea how little a low-level publishing or advertising or web writer or adjunct professor makes? And yet they all seem to be able to afford New York and San Francisco rents. It’s people like them who populate the “Times”‘s “On The Hunt” column and episodes of Househunters and Househunters International. “Jen is a part-time writer for an online newsletter for people who breed ferrets. With a budget of only $950,000 it’s going to be tough to find her a place that ticks off all her boxes in the red-hot Austin real estate market, so she might have to make some painful tradeoffs.”
…I don’t know how it works in, say, florida…though I’d hazard a guess that something like the scarlet letter with its overlapping opportunities for introspection about shame, who bears it & who might be deserving to…probably one of the empty spots on the classroom bookshelves these days?
…not that that’s the point…& if I follow you I think I’m mostly inclined to agree with that…maybe with a minor caveat…minor since “in my day” is many moons ago…& the figures involved when I accrued my academic debt in the UK were minor league in a US context, major headaches though they may have caused me
…either way…not forming part of the science faculty’s revenue stream trimmed that figure down more than any other consideration I can think of…lab fees alone would have either taken at least an actual-mortgage-payment-&-something-towards-a-deposit out of my paycheck for well over a decade…or if the paychecks were too meagre to bear that burden…quietly ballooned into an unpayable debt that would hang over me unless/until it was forgiven…which lo, those many moons ago, was actually stipulated as a thing that would happen somewhere around a quarter-century of payments later…iirc
…don’t know what the over/under is on arts vs. sciences when it comes to repayment in full…doctoring pays well but something keeps those junior doctors working back-breaking hours to prop up the NHS despite the sort of work/life balance they’d probably diagnose as requiring clinical intervention…so I don’t know if getting mine all paid off eventually would be statistically more or less of a comparative outlier…I’m fairly confident that most loan recipients pay back considerably more than they were loaned, though…even allowing for inflation & such…& the institutions that pocket the margin aren’t the academic ones apparently struggling with marginal costs?
Re: Florida. I read The Scarlet Letter in junior high (middle school to you youngsters) but I was always in “advanced” classes. Those are now called AP and are under attack by DeSantis, as is the public school system. I went to a rural school system but back then education was considered important there, and the quality was generally pretty high. My wife, in a neighboring county, got a dismal public education and was astonished at all the things I’d learned in junior high and high school. Many of the subjects weren’t even available to her. I studied Latin, for example, at my mother’s insistence (I desperately wish I’d been allowed to study any modern language — the one time she took an interest in my education she screwed up).
There’s a constant theme among establishment journalists that they are really salt of the earth up by their bootstraps types, surrounded by elitist liberals.
When in reality they’re like Pamela Paul, former editor of the NY Times Book Review and now anti-trans columnist for the Times. She wrote an entire book claiming she had humble beginnings, yet she graduated from Brown debt free thanks to wealthy parents, and when she couldn’t find a job she liked, spent a year after college travelling around the world.
And then she settled down by getting her start in the media biz with the parent-subsidized apartment in NYC. But sure, she was marginally lower in the pecking order growing up than her ex, Bret Stephens, so she basically had life 100 times harder than AOC.
For the “Puritans were fucked up” part of my junior year American Lit class, we read The Crucible by Arthur Miller as well as The Scarlett Letter.
That being said, it was also an advanced college credit course. So I can totally see this being collegiate level material.
As disappointing as it is to read about the decline of humanities, the problem is that many STEM grads are pretty fucking ignorant outside of STEM. It gives you perspective on things that STEM does not.
I speak this as a STEM grad who fucked up the critical course of his first year bad enough that he had to take a stop gap year of non STEM courses while taking that course over. I also almost went into history, but there isn’t a lot of demand for history teachers (which ties in with the decline of humanities…the irony not lost on me.)
I took two languages, a full year credit in history and a couple of offbeat Computer Science courses (which I didn’t like.)
See Elmo… on where the lack of perspective and focusing on STEM entirely leads one (rich as fuck financially and completely emotionally crippled.)
They also lack basic communication skills. I get paid fairly well to write for accountants now, and worked for STEM companies in the past. They can’t/won’t do it themselves. It’s mostly “can’t” — some of the dreck I’ve been handed by them is pretty pitiful. But communication skills are always going to be third-rate career options. I was never going to rise to CEO. And while the accountants pay me well by my standards, I’m getting a fraction of what even a junior CPA makes at my firm.
Yeah.
Communications is either feast or famine never in moderation.
I hate presentations by many engineers because they don’t know when to shut off the details or grasp the concept of keeping things at a high level.
I’ve been accused of talking/communicating too much by my bosses (most who did were engineers.) On the other hand, I’ve always been highly rated in 360 reviews for keeping people up to date on the important dates/things and keeping track of info.
Engineers (my people!) don’t grasp that very well.
More than once I have told tech degree seeking students to take as many English literature and composition classes as they can fit into their schedules. When I invariably get the confused puppy look, I have to remind them: “if you talk like an idiot, and you write like an idiot, they’re going to assume you are an idiot, and you won’t get the job.”
To be fair, I do sound like an idiot except when I use my “professional” voice/language.
As for writing skills, you’re not kidding. I had English composition beaten into my head by old grouchy English teachers and some of the lessons stuck. When I read emails written by engineers I find it hard not to Grammar Nazi them (and keep my eyes from rolling into the back of my head.)
…make of that what you will…you might as well…everyone & their dog is bound to, I’m guessing?
If given the choice, I will always prefer news stories about people being stupid to news stories about people being evil.
True, but with Pootin and Elmo you have both.
…it’s an understandable line to take…& I’d be delighted to be able to follow it better in these…but when it comes to deciding which might be the operative term I think I struggle a little with…I guess you might call it perspective…it can start out like two very separate tracks…in parallel, you might say…but if I try to look at where they seem to be headed…somewhere between where I’m standing & my available horizon they do seem to converge?
…it might be like one of those things that actually obeys zeno’s paradox about approaching ever closer but never reaching its theoretical limit…but I think it gets over the tipping point for the identity of indiscernibles…like…that guardian piece about musk being not only misguided but dangerous makes a pretty solid case that certain sorts of applied stupidity in particular contexts is pretty indistinguishable from volitional evil?
…& there he was in the tweet linked to in its second paragraph pontificating about how, along with the prerequisite mention of the media, “elite colleges & high schools” had shifted from being “racist against non-white people” to “racist against whites & Asians”…&…leaving aside the question of why “Asians” & “America” qualify for upper-case standing while “whites” do not per his declamatory typography…concludes that
…which…my inner pedant insists I mention…begins with “maybe” but ends…with something popularly supposed by many to indicate that it is not intended as a question?
…I guess the point I seem to be endlessly circling…in a manner often connected with stuff draining away…is that maybe evil can seem stupid & stupid can seem evil because if you take either one far enough they both end up in the same place…& while I’m on the fence about whether crossing the event horizon of the sci fi singularity is something to celebrate or a-fate-worse-than-death…something called “the vanishing point” seems like it might qualify as a-fate-worse-than-a-fate-worse-than-death
…any which way those dice may fall…I do of course apologize for my part in any & all things that might make the day less palatable…sadly FYCE is a little out of my wheelhouse
…maybe we’d all be better off if I’d taken home ec?
This story is not new but was new to me. I am a little surprised that DeSatan is not bragging about it, seems like something the MAGAts might eat up.
https://tripod.domains.trincoll.edu/opinion/inside-ron-desantis-hidden-past-at-guantanamo-bay/
What does the Seditionist caucus want?
https://hartmannreport.com/p/what-do-the-gop-seditionists-offer
I am so sick of the “woke” bullshit!
DeSantis is a sociopath, so Guantanamo tracks. He’s incapable of interacting with other people in any kind of recognizably human manner. That’s why he deploys his wife to run interference and project an image of basic humanity. There are lots of stories about him and his behavior when he’s not in “public” (he literally doesn’t acknowledge the existence of other people) and quite a few about things he’s done in public. I suspect he’s got a variety of mental issues.
He’s just like Ted Cruz. The only advantage RDS has over Cruz is he hasn’t been in the face of the DC press for years, so they can pretend the exact same repellent deadness isn’t there.
…so…when they did that “don’t look up” movie it was said that the analogy…or titular principle…or whatever we call it…was heavy-handed & somewhat patronising…along with a long & boring list of criticisms that had a similar propensity to balance themselves on the thinnest of fences between make their own point or making the movie’s for it
…& “going woke” is preferred nomenclature to ring the pavlovian bell for “thing you should be frothing mad about to the point of distraction”…but subjectively speaking many of us are used to thinking of that as “waking up”
…so…now I’m wondering what the focus group numbers would have had to say about going with a rallying cry of “don’t wake up”?
…doesn’t immediately seem to be the sort of thing friends say to friends…but maybe that’s just me & my lousy perspective at work again?
So the reason the “woke” thing came up is yesterday a friend posted a quote from George Carlin that he thought was anti-woke. It was actually pretty much the true definition of woke so I had to try to educate him. He is not a Trumper so I thought it would be easy to explain how the Faux not really News has made “woke” the boogieman. He still didn’t get it but said we would have a longer conversation about it soon. I told him I look forward to that. I had sent him these…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/20/anti-woke-race-america-history
…think I mentioned this the other day but if they like to listen more than read or watch you could try this?
Woke: The Journey of a Word [BBC radio]
Thanks for the tip, I will give it a try and hope he listens. Sorry if I missed your link in a previous DOT, I honestly try to get to all the stories & links that are not pay walled.
…never my intention to imply there are obligations implied by the laundry list of links I seem to deposit about the place…& it only goes back as far as leadbelly…so there’s threads of michael harriot’s that take a longer view…but it’s not bad & it’s not too hard to listen to…which seemed like it might be about the right speed for what you were describing?
I just saw this piece written last year which gives a nice writeup of “three” laws in the vein of Godwin’s Law (the third isn’t a law, which is a self-referential joke).
https://karizander.medium.com/3-laws-of-the-internet-politics-edition-767b66a0124b
The first is Cleek’s Law, which states “today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.”
The second is Murc’s Law, which is “the widespread assumption that only Democrats have agency or causal impact on American politics.”
In effect, Republicans are never behind anything evil they do — it’s always something the Democrat forced them to do.
Combined, you get the main thrust of much if political coverage today. Florida Republicans contradict yesterday’s position claiming they stand for free speech to pass laws to crush free speech? Oh dear, so sad, but it’s because of some 1994 protest by Columbia undergrads….
Republicans attack Covid vaccines? Well actually, it’s because Democrats were too insistent that we roll them out quickly…. Republicans flipflop on government health rules and ban miscarriage prevention treatments? Well, you see, Democrats forced them to go nuclear because….
Which brings up a couple of other unnamed basic laws. One is that GOP motives must always be explained by their claimed beliefs and principles, no matter how impossible the connection. Another is that the more extreme a Republican position, the greater the lengths reporters must go to make the GOP seem rational and the Democrats irrational.
…maybe throw a gish gallop in the mix, too?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/donald-trump-debate-strategy-gish-gallop/673061/
…we certainly all seem to be being taken for some sort of a ride…& saddle sores would be compatible with the part where I’d admit to it chapping my ass?
I think if you want you can also split between the High Gish Gallop and the Low Gish Gallop.
The High Gish Gallop attempts to sound reasonable and follow the forms of normal discourse, to hide the rottenness of the source information being used to flood the zone.
It’s designed to “win” debates by superficially following rules.
The Low Gish Gallop, as practiced by Trump, is deliberately and openly unreasonable. The absurdity of everything flooding the zone is a bullying method.
It’s designed to “win” debates by trying to establish that Trump types are immune to rules.
The good thing about Hassan’s article is how he shows that Gish Gallops have been beaten in the past, but only when people stop letting bad faith actors set the terms for debate.
…I’m set in my ways…so the former is always going to be “sophistry” to me…& the latter “cheap sophistry”…with the difference being how empty the rhetoric is
…one way or another they’re all strategies that focus on the speaker getting their way in the full knowledge that an informed audience would know them to be full of shit…so it stands to reason that anything involving them not getting to have their way is going to line up looking like success
…bad faith arguments are like any other kind of faith, in that respect…if your congregation won’t both keep & affirm it…the whole thing tends to fall apart under its own weight?
@bluedogcollar @splinterrip I rarely want to interject in actual discussions as I simply try to toss in a link people might be interested in BTL on the DOTs when I have time…
or even when I have the time to catch up and read the front end as I’ve done now…
but I find myself a bit lost regarding the difference alluded to between high and low gish galloping.
Specifically, this bit:
Is that not either an insinuation that there is an adequate source of information behind the gish galloping or an admission that the gish galloper has an actual source of information from which they can gish gallop?
…and, tbh, even if I were able to make that distinction, it doesn’t really add up for me?
Tomorrow’s headline: “Publicist murdered by IT department”
unrelated to everything…but i survived my HR fuckery
i think HR got a little too clever for themselves…as my mandatory head doctor visit was in fact not mandatory… but voluntary coz HR did not declare me sick…and as such…anything discussed is strictly confidential as HR has no need to know what i was there for if i am not trying to claim sick benefits
sooo.. had a chat with the doc…and HR got a short email from the doc saying i visited today as per their insistence and he sees no reason why i shouldnt be fit to work
not what i expected….but works for me
…so…a taste of their own medicine?
[…sorry…couldn’t resist…but huzzah for catching a break, either way]
seems like…guess i can sleep easy tonight
tho…i obviously still need to watch my step at work as some people clearly dont like me very much
still…not telling anyone what was discussed when asked tomorow other than it was a good chat will be entertaining
sometimes not talking is almost as fun as speaking your mind
I have found this strategy invaluable throughout my career. If you don’t speak your mind, they can’t actually determine what you’re thinking.
The comment period to comment on Medicare Advantage & try to stop the private takeover is now until March 6th. You can find out more about it here:
https://www.endthebribesystem.com/
and comment here:
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/CMS-2023-0010-0001
well…this is a little unexpected
rest in peace mr Mackey
Who the fuck are the “pink-haired communists”? Is that a dog whistle for something or just covfefe?
i dunno…. pink haired communists sound fun to me
can i join the gang?
sounds better than having geriatric old farts running the show anyways…..its a solid argument for having a pension age of like 65 after wich..no more politics for you! or work for that matter…just go…pension..you earned it…possibly
there was a poll here not long ago..i cant be arsed to look up…that stated about 70% of pensioners were in favour of re instating mandatory military service
see… this is why you shouldnt get to do politics….let the people it will affect decide k? thx bai!
(edit) uhh to clarify..i dont mean you cant vote after pension age..thats a right till the day you die…just that you cant take the job
…well…commies are pinkos, right?
…& there was that one lady on the soccer team who wasn’t a fan of his…& I think some of her hair was maybe pink at one point
…so…still makes no real sense but I’m guessing that’s part of what went into the word-salad-spinner on that one?
I’m also irrationally annoyed by “pink-haired” because pink is one of the few non-natural colors that’s pretty reasonable to do at home with a box kit. Pink also fades a lot easier than more difficult colors like purple or teal, so it’s less work to maintain.
Like douchebags are implying we can’t even afford salon rates!