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    I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…

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  3. Jonathan Turner's avatar

    I agree with all of this. The threat is really that stark. The only solution is indeed in-class essay exams,…

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    My big problem with LLMs at the present time, apart from being potentially the epitome of Foucault’s panopticon & Big…

  6. A in the UK's avatar

    I’m also at a British university (in a law school) and my sentiments largely align with the author’s. I see…

  7. André Hampshire's avatar

    If one is genuinely uninterested in engaging with non-human interlocutors, it is unclear why one continues to do so—especially while…

“Mr. Danger”

Interesting:

In references to the head of state, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez sometimes speaks of "Mr. Danger" instead of George W. Bush. New York Times South American correspondent Juan Forero in an October story from Caracas mentioned that Chávez has bestowed that nickname-which makes sense on its face–but he didn’t explain what it means to people in the Spanish-speaking world….

Mr. Danger is a long-standing figure in Venezuelan life, a character in a 1929 work, many times republished, by the novelist Rómulo Gallegos, who was also Venezuela’s first freely-elected president, brought down in a U.S.-backed 1948 military coup, ten months after he took office.

Gallegos introduced Mr. Danger in Doña Bárbara, a work that has been required reading in Venezuela’s secondary schools for forty years, ever since the return of electoral rule. In Gallegos’ novel, Danger is the exemplar of a type of American once common in rural Venezuela. A man of reddish complexion and deep blue eyes, he shows up in the ranch country of Venezuela’s tropical plains, where he kills alligators and tigers for their skins. Before long, he carries out a series of schemes to "conquer badly defended lands," Gallegos wrote. In furtherance of his aims, Danger takes part in the murder and burial of an aged cattleman and his mount, but "for him, the scornful foreigner," Gallegos noted, "there wasn’t much difference between Apolinar and the horse who accompanied him in his grave." Mr. Danger afterwards usurps the property of a declassed landowner and claims custody of the man’s pubescent daughter, until a neighboring rancher-whom Danger had also defrauded–rescues both, Gallegos writes, "to liberate them from the humiliating tutelage of the foreigner."

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