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I teach both large courses, like Jurisprudence and Critical Legal Thinking (a.k.a Legal Argumentation), and small seminar-based courses at Edinburgh…
Surely there is an answer to the problem of AI cheating which averts the existential threat. . It’s not great,…
I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…
Hear hear
I agree with all of this. The threat is really that stark. The only solution is indeed in-class essay exams,…
I’m not sure I’d yet go so far as to call LLMs an existential threat to universities. But I do…
My big problem with LLMs at the present time, apart from being potentially the epitome of Foucault’s panopticon & Big…
Is there any point to running these open threads? Last week was an all-time low, only 9 comments, earlier on, 90 comments or so were common, the last several weeks, more like two dozen. Perhaps I should just open comments on more threads with particular topics?
Could the low response be due to the crunch of the end of the semester? I'd say that's an issue in the profession this week.
I'd like to respond to the Jacobin "privilege" article, assuming it's permitted in these open threads to discuss issues unrelated to the profession.
This article seems to assume that when people say, "Check your privilege," they're saying, "Remember, you eat kale and shop at Whole Foods!" That is, it seems the operative definition of "privilege" here is "anything that belongs to the stereotype of a suburban white person." I don't how Giridharadas intends to use the term–the quoted passage isn't very promising (though I suspect it's being interpreted too literally or uncharitably)–but that's certainly not what I nor what(I suspect) most people mean when they use the term in this way. "Check your privilege" means something more like, "Take into account the byproducts of generations of discrimination that have been to your general advantage and that may make you blind to certain issues or experiences." Though some may use it to shame others and/or glorify themselves, it remains a very beneficial device for getting certain person to put themselves in something akin to a Rawlsian original position.
In any case, Mr. Kilpatrick may need to check his privilege himself if he thinks discrimination issues need to take a backseat to economic issues, or, worse, if he thinks that all injustices are reducible to economic justices. I hope I don't need to argue these points.
A bit of a tangent, but I found the following passage ridiculous:
"By substituting class relations for an arbitrary list of “privileges,” Vox is attempting to paint a picture of an immiserated America with no villain. It’s an America without a ruling class that directly and materially benefits from everyone else’s hard times. And this omission isn’t just incorrect — it robs us of any meaningful oppositional politics that could change it all."
Even ignoring how strained a conclusion this is–why does this child need villains? "We need an object of resentment! How else could we possibly move ourselves to action?"
I do not believe the Jacobin article is assuming that. I believe the main point is that talk about privilege ultimately gets in the way of the discussion around economic inequality. Yes, the author does not appear to be the biggest fan of 'privilege talk', but the ultimate point is that utilizing such talk when discussing economic inequality distracts from the real problem: a one percent with the majority of the wealth and (nearly) all the power. There is nothing in the article, at least on my reading, that leads me to believe that he thinks discrimination issues need to take a backseat to economic, or that all injustices are reducible to economic ones.
If Mr. Kilpatrick's exposition of Vox et al. is accurate then I, as a first generation college student from a working class family, am a one percenter, which is ludicrous. I believe that is the issue he is trying to point out.
I think you should open comments on all threads, like Daily Nous. Never know when people might have something interesting to say about a topic. e.g. the Internet shaming article, Why Be Good?, Project Vox.
BL COMMENT: On the evidence of blogs that always invite comments, it's not clear that cyberspace is full of people with interesting things to say. More importantly, I don't always have time to moderate.
National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track
'The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. Comparing different lifestyles revealed that women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers and that men preferred mothers who took parental leaves to mothers who did not. Our findings, supported by real-world academic hiring data, suggest advantages for women launching academic science careers.'
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/08/1418878112.abstract
"Someone Calculated How Many Adjunct Professors Are on Public Assistance, and the Number Is Startling"
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/04/13/adjunct_pay_a_quarter_of_part_time_college_faculty_receive_public_assistance.html
An op-ed by the authors of the piece mentioned in Anonymous #5:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/13/opinions/williams-ceci-women-in-science/index.html
Our results, coupled with actuarial data on real-world academic hiring showing a female advantage, suggest this is a propitious time for women beginning careers in academic science. The low numbers of women in math-based fields of science do not result from sexist hiring, but rather from women's lower rates of choosing to enter math-based fields in the first place, due to sex differences in preferred careers and perhaps to lack of female role models and mentors.
While women may encounter sexism before and during graduate training and after becoming professors, the only sexism they face in the hiring process is bias in their favor.
Re: the trader, Matt Wage, in the story above — Brian, I assume that the real reason you object is not that Wage is following "bourgeois morality", ('cause honestly, who cares if it's "bourgeois"?), but that he's not really making the world a better place, and perhaps also that the consequences of publicly lauding his behavior are bad. But it's clear that the kid is willing to sacrifice a lot of money (and maybe other things, for all we know) to bring about an improvement in others' lot. What would you have him do instead? Sow the seeds of revolution? Where and how, exactly? If not that, then what? These questions are neither rhetorical nor posed in a wholly skeptical spirit.
The 2:1 gender preference for women over men in STEM fields cited above mirros the ratio of mean publication counts in top 15 journals for junior philosophy hires: http://genderandprestige.blogspot.com/
Does this remind anyone of the blogosophere? http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/in-public-the-shifting-consequences-of-twitter-scholarship/
I found the video of Williams and Ceci explaining the point of their experiment and the results of that experiment engaging and helpful:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-21-over-men-stem-faculty-positions
This is a belated reply to Andrew at #8 (sorry, busy day):
I meant "bourgeois morality" in its descriptive sense, that is, a morality that addresses questions of correct action in terms of what individuals should do in isolation, taking the systemic features of capitalism as fixed.
Bourgeois morality has pernicious features too, as you are aware. It could be that when harm to well-being is primarily a product of systemic problems that focus on individual decision against a fixed systemic background has pernicious consequences in both the long-term and even the medium short-term. Those pernicious consequences may be enhanced when the capitalist media, like the NY Times, seize on instances of bourgeois morality as ideals to which others should aspire.
As to what Mr. Wage might do that would be more salutary for human well-being, I suppose there are many possibilities: he might not work in the "finance industry" at all, which is largely socially useless (even by capitalist standards); he might commit all his resources to supporting social democratic reforms in powerful capitalist democracies like the US; he might commit all his time and effort to helping other well-intentioned individuals with resources organize themselves collectively to do the same.
What I think is fairly clear is that his giving 100K per year to various charities will not eliminate poverty, human misery, or suffering–in either the third world or in the first world–very much. As you know, public relations notwithstanding, the actual effects on well-being of charitable giving are hotly contested by development economists; in particular, even when they make small contributions to alleviating particular diseases or disabilities, we have little or no evidence (please correct me) that they actually contribute to flourishing human lives–primarily because those to whom aid is so often directed for discrete problems live under systemic conditions that thwart human flourishing along many other dimensions, to which charity is rarely responsive.
Here is an hypothesis: if everyone in the thrall of Peter Singer gave all their money, and time, and effort, to challenging, through political activism, the idea that human well-being should be hostage to acts of charity, then the well-being of human beings would be more likely to be maximized. Perhaps that's wrong. But I haven't seen any evidence to suggest it is.
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