Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

20 years ago, the U.S. launched the criminal war of aggression against Iraq...

...and its perpetrators are still free, having never been punished.   Here's what I wrote about the whole insanity back in 2004:

Less than nine months after fundamentalist religious zealots inflicted mass casualties on the civilian population of the United States, and only about six months after the U.S. toppled the regime that harbored them, a country of no consequence or relevance to the safety of the United States--a country hated by the fundamentalist religious zealots for its secular ideology and its Western treatment of women, a country with a devastated economy and crippled military, a country that the U.S. and Britain regularly bombed (since it didn't even have sovereign control over all its own terriroty), a nation half of whose population were children, a country which the US outspent on military might 400 to 1--this country was suddenly declared the most pressing threat to the U.S. and world peace.

Less than nine months after fundamentalist religious zealots inflicted mass casualties on the civilian population of the United States, and only about six months after the U.S. toppled the regime that harbored them, a country of no consequence or relevance to the safety of the United States--a country hated by the fundamentalist religious zealots for its secular ideology and its Western treatment of women, a country with a devastated economy and crippled military, a country that the U.S. and Britain regularly bombed (since it didn't even have sovereign control over all its own terriroty), a nation half of whose population were children, a country which the US outspent on military might 400 to 1--this country was suddenly declared the most pressing threat to the U.S. and world peace.

"Woke" explained

A very perceptive essay by Freddie deBoer, a man of the actual left:

“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.

Israel's "constitutional crisis": the "Alon solution"

Alon Harel (Hebrew U) and Alon Klement (Tel-Aviv U) propose a solution:  Download Separating substance from procedure (1) (003)

Reader comments on their proposal are welcome from interested readers.  Signed comments (full name, valid e-mail address) will be strongly preferred.

Noam Chomsky (and colleagues) express skepticism about ChatGPT

Here; an excerpt:

The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.

The proposed "constitutional putsch" in Israel

Philosopher and legal scholar Alon Harel (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) comments:  Download Harel 2023 Proposed Constitutional Revolution12. 

On the use of "fascism" in America

The historian Bruce Kuklick doesn't have very good intellectual judgment (as those who've read his work on the history of philosophy in America will know), but he has compiled some interesting stuff in his latest book on "fascism" in American political discourse; an excerpt:

[E]ven at this early stage in its history, fascism functioned as more than a neutral descriptor; it instead acted as a “foul noun of preference” that Americans “deployed … against anyone with whom they disagreed politically.” The most popular targets of opprobrium were President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal. At various points in the 1930s, a number of notable figures derided FDR or the New Deal as “fascist,” including liberal philosopher John Dewey (who worried FDR was creating a “police state”), socialist politician Norman Thomas (who worried FDR was beginning to resemble Mussolini), former Republican President Herbert Hoover (who likewise worried FDR was too similar to European dictators), and populist Senator Huey Long (who worried FDR was too close to the business class). But the president was hardly the only one ridiculed in this fashion. As Kuklick highlights, until the U.S. entry into World War II, “everyone called anyone a fascist.”

A computational linguist on "large language models" as "bullshitters"

Here; an excerpt:

How should we interpret the natural-sounding (i.e., humanlike) words that come out of LLMs? The models are built on statistics. They work by looking for patterns in huge troves of text and then using those patterns to guess what the next word in a string of words should be. They’re great at mimicry and bad at facts. Why? LLMs...have no access to real-world, embodied referents. This makes LLMs beguiling, amoral, and the Platonic ideal of the bullshitter, as philosopher Harry Frankfurt, author of On Bullshit, defined the term. Bullshitters, Frankfurt argued, are worse than liars. They don’t care whether something is true or false....

Triumphs of psychological science

"Small Penises and Fast Cars:  Evidence for a Psychological Link."

Israel, judicial independence and democracy

In light of recent attacks on judicial independence in Israel, philosophers Cora Diamond and Harold Langsam both called my attention to this hard-hitting opinion piece in the NYT, whose key argument is that:

On the surface, the battle between Mr. Netanyahu and his critics does indeed look familiar. In recent years, from Brazil to Hungary to India to the United States, anti-government protesters have accused authoritarian-minded populists of threatening liberal democracy. But look closer at Israel’s political drama and you notice something striking: The people most threatened by Mr. Netanyahu’s authoritarianism aren’t part of the movement against it.

The demonstrations include very few Palestinians. In fact, Palestinian politicians have criticized them for having, in the words of former Knesset member Sami Abu Shehadeh, “nothing to do with the main problem in the region — justice and equality for all the people living here.”

The reason is that the movement against Mr. Netanyahu is not like the pro-democracy opposition movements in Turkey, India or Brazil — or the movement against Trumpism in the United States. It’s not a movement for equal rights. It’s a movement to preserve the political system that existed before Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition took power, which was not, for Palestinians, a genuine liberal democracy in the first place. It’s a movement to save liberal democracy for Jews.

This is mostly true, but also a non-sequitur:  even in an apartheid state, the loss of judicial independence can make the place worse, and especially when the courts are the only branch of government which sometimes defend the rights of the victims of apartheid-like policies.  All Israeli Jews and Arabs will be worse off if judicial independence is destroyed; the situation of the Palestinians in the occupied territories will be mostly unchanged (although I can't see how they would not eventually be worse off if the judiciary is fully subordinated to the right-wing coalition).

The political economy of the academy and the decline of the humanities

This New Yorker essay on the decline of the humanities is getting lots of comment on social media; an excerpt:

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....

Katha Pollitt on the "kinder, gentler" Roald Dahl fiasco (with a guest appearance by the Orwellian "Inclusivity Ambassadors"!)

Apt and cutting, as usual; an excerpt:

You may have read that Roald Dahl’s classic tales have been altered to be, well, nicer. Because as we all know, niceness is what Roald Dahl is all about. Forget the misanthropy, physical disgust, and delight in transgression and violence and extravagance that give his stories bite and edge. Forget, too, the dependence of wit and vividness on specific, concrete words, on their sounds and evocative associations. What matters is that no one in the whole world be offended and that no opportunity be missed for moral improvement.

The sociology of police violence, continued: the killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis

Illuminating, as usual, from sociologist Randall Collins.

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

The evolution of the CV

This is interesting.

Jewish philosophers in the UK issue statement about the attack on judicial independence in Israel

Thanks to David Ruben for sharing this:

We are philosophers in the United Kingdom who are also Jewish. We all support the right of Israel to exist; most of us have visited Israel on many occasions, for professional or other purposes. None of us has a history of criticising Israel in public.

However, the Israeli government’s current plan to undermine the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches of government poses a threat to the State of Israel that we cannot ignore. Those like us who care passionately about the health of Israel as a democratic Jewish state cannot remain silent.

The tragic story of Ian Fishback, soldier, whistelblower, and philosophy PhD

MOVING TO FRONT--LINK FIXED

We noted briefly Dr. Fischback's death in 2021; now reader Shawn Loht calls my attention to an in depth portrait of Dr. Fishback, and the tragic toll of mental illness.

The problem with Heterodox Academy is that it is "woke"

That's what philosopher Nathan Cofnas argues in this, shall we say, "provocative" essay.  I have never had anything to do with Heterodox Academy, not for lack of sympathy with their "principled" message about freedom of inquiry and speech in the academy, but rather because of their oft-expressed view that what the academy needs is more Republicans (which is rather different than saying the academy needs robust academic freedom norms and diversity of disciplinary methods and paradigms).  The Republican Party in the U.S. was once upon a time the place where pro-business apologists for capitalism went (pro-labor apologists for capitalism went to the Democratic Party). That is now ancient history:  Reagan sent the Repugs off the rails, and it got worse in the 1990s, and veered into fascist territory with Dopey Donald Chump.  (The remaining nominal Republicans in the academy are overwhelmingly libertarians and free-market utopians, who haven't much to do with the actual Republican Party.  My friend and colleague Richard Posner gave up on the Republican Party more than a decade ago!). The Democrats--which of course still represent the interests of the ruling class, albeit the prudent wing--are the only viable party in the United States, despite (or rather because) its center has been captured by "wokeness," that is, by the idea that all social injustices derive from "race" (and racial prejudice or "systemic racism") rather than class.  Adolph Reed, whom I've often linked to, is a good source for an "unwoke" perspective from the left.

"Transformer models"

ChatGPT is a "transformer" model, and philosopher Ben Levinstein explains what transformer models are!

More explanations of ChatGPT

Philosopher David Lobina writes:

I saw you posted a video on what large language models like ChatGPT actually do, and I thought that readers might enjoy this piece, which is a much more detailed explanation, and a very good one too (except, of course, the stuff about the "laws" of language and thought being much simpler than anyone had thought). 

Pressing questions of the moment: why are the airlines in Asia so much better, on average, than airlines in North America and Europe?

Even SkyTrax confirms it (and that's just their "overall" best):  put aside the fake oil fiefdoms in the Middle East, what one sees, across the board, is that Japanese, Singaporean, Korean, Australian, and Hong Kong airlines are at the very top.  What explains it?  Higher expectations of their clientele?  Less carrying costs in terms of pensions and medical care? Something else.  I once flew ANA (Japan) and it was exceptionally good, heads and shoulders above any American airline.  (The only American airline that is not a consistent embarrassment is Delta.  Why?)

Does anyone in the vast and highly informed readership know why the East Asian (plus Australiasian) airlines are so much better?

"Chat GPT is a blurry JPEG of the web"

This is amusing and probably apt:

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.

(Thanks to Blake Myers for the pointer.)

 

A Black professor "trapped in anti-racist hell"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FRIDAY, FOR THOSE WHO MAY HAVE MISSED IT

This is a pretty wild story:  it's like Lord of the Flies meets Ibram Kendi.

An interview with the intellectual historian Quentin Skinner

Here; an excerpt:

So, first of all, my approach is very obviously indebted to Collingwood, and what he called the logic of question and answer. He and his numerous followers always insisted that the history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral and political philosophy, should be written as an account, not of how different answers were produced for a set of canonical questions, but rather as a subject in which the questions as well as the answers are always changing, and in which the questions are set by the specific moral and political issues that seem most salient, most troubling, at different times — and they will continually change and people will continually find that the pressures of their societies are operating in such a way as to raise new questions. So, there’s one source that really mattered to me very much: Collingwood’s wonderful discussion in his autobiography of the logic of question and answer.

The strongest argument for "free speech absolutism"....

...from the longtime former head of the ACLU, Ira Glasser (the ACLU has abandoned its core mission more recently); an excerpt:

So why did I do it? Why defend the right of people to express views when such people, if they gained the power to do so, would eliminate my views, and maybe eliminate me?

For me, the answer is strategic. I can never be certain who will have political power. I can never be certain that the only people who get elected will agree with me. I know – because it has happened many times – that people will gain political power who will, if they can, act to punish me or people I agree with, because of our views. So what I need is an insurance policy. I want insurance against the probability that people in power will suppress or punish me for my views.

This is a version of what I think is the most plausible defense of free speech, namely, distrust of government to figure out which speech actually lacks value.  Of course, it depends on an empirical premise:  namely, that a blanket rule prohibiting suppressing speech based on its content will, in fact be observed by fascists--or, more precisely, that when a judiciary is acclimated to such a rule, they will stick to it were a fascist in power.  I wish I could be confident that is true, but I'm hopeful that in a large country, with a fairly independent judiciary, it will be.

How does ChatGPT work?

A computer science professor at the U.S. Naval Academy explains.  (The core explanation starts around 7:30, although there is interesting stuff before that, including that ChatGBT can write simple computer programs!)

(Thanks to Joe Hatfield for the pointer.)

"Endings," professional and personal

Philosopher Daniel Kaufman comments, and it's a very interesting read.

The NYT tunnel vision about race comes up against reality

Perhaps someone there should look at the evidence:  "The fact that the five officers charged with Mr. Nichols’s murder are Black complicates the anguish."  That's because in police killings, race is the not the primary variable, but rather class (as with Mr. Nichols:  a high school graduate and unskilled laborer with very little money)--class, plus the pathologies of police culture.

ADDENDUM:  As one reader points out, blacks are three times as likely as whites to be killed in police encoutners.  That is, alas, not surprising given the economic disparities between blacks and whites in America, with its history of apartheid:  "In 2014, about a quarter (26%) of blacks were poor, compared with 10% of whites. The black-white poverty gap has narrowed somewhat since the mid-1970s, when 30% of blacks were living below the poverty line – a proportion nearly four times the share of whites living in poverty (8%)."   The hard empirical question is disentangling the effects of race and class in police violence, a point the murder of Mr. Nichols by black officers drives home.

 

Class, not diversity

Kenan Malik comments at The Observer:

If debates about poverty have become warped by a longstanding view that attributes blame to the individual, debates about inequality have become distorted by a more contemporary trend: the increasing tendency to look at equality in terms of “diversity”. “When you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity,” observes the American academic Walter Benn Michaels. “But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity.”

On the neoliberal identity politics of the fake "left" in America

This essay makes a number of good points (although readers will notice echoes of Adolph Reed, the essay overall lacks his more sophisticated theoretical framework); an excerpt:

[Ne]oliberal identity is u]sing one’s identity or personal experience as a justification for a political position. You may hear someone argue, “As a working-class, first-generation American, Southern woman…I say we have to vote no.” What’s implied is that one’s identity is a comprehensive validator of one’s political strategy—that identity is evidence of some intrinsic ideological or strategic legitimacy. Marginalized identity is deployed as a conveyor of a strategic truth that must simply be accepted. Likewise, historically privileged identities are essentialized, flattened, and frequently—for better or worse— dismissed....

The most checked-out books from the New York City public library system

I confess I've heard of none of these books and almost none of these authors  Apart from old rock 'n' roll, I'm a poor consumer of popular culture.  What do readers make of this list?  Are some of these books worth reading?

Why did Bostrom's "apology" for the racist email mention eugenics?

This author offers an hypothesis. (Earlier coverage, including a link to the strange apology.)  I don't agree with all of this analysis, but it's worth a look.

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

Mandatory "diversity" training doesn't seem to work

We've touched on this before, here's the latest debunking of the DEI industrial-complex:

“We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade,” wrote the sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in 2018, “with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around.” (To be fair, not all of these critiques apply as sharply to voluntary diversity trainings....

Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them....

In the case of D.E.I., Dr. Dobbin and Dr. Kalev warn that diversity trainings that are mandatADory or that threaten dominant groups’ sense of belonging or make them feel blamed may elicit negative backlash or exacerbate biases.

Many popular contemporary D.E.I. approaches meet these criteria. They often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary reunderstanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems. And they often blame white people — or their culture — for harming people of color. For example, the activist Tema Okun’s work cites concepts like objectivity and worship of the written word as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” trainings are designed to make white participants uncomfortable. And microaggression trainings are based on an area of academic literature that claims, without quality evidence, that common utterances like “America is a melting pot” harm the mental health of people of color. Many of these trainings run counter to the views of most Americans — of any color — on race and equality. And they’re generating exactly the sort of backlash that research predicts.

ADDENDUM:   Professors Dobbin and Kalev discuss their diversity research here.   Amusingly, they note that most management practices are not evidence-based.

(Thanks to Roger Albin for the pointer.)

"Artificial Intelligence [sic] forever inanimate and dumb"

This is funny and probably right (and timely, given yesterday's thread):

The cognitive scientist Gary Marcus has been the most active when it comes to showing that, contrary to some of the claims referenced above, LLMs [Large Language Models] are inherently unreliable and don’t actually exhibit many of the most common features of language and thought, such as systematicity and compositionality, let alone common sense, the understanding of context in conversation, or any of the many other unremarkable “cognitive things” we do on a daily basis. In a recent post with Ernest Davis, Marcus includes an LLM Errors Tracker and outlines some of the more egregious mistakes, including the manifestation of sexist and racist biases, simple errors when carrying out basic logical reasoning or indeed basic maths, in counting up to 4 (good luck claiming that LLMs pass the Turing Test; see here), and of course the fact that LLMs constantly make things up.

"Intelligent design" creationism basically finished

Biologist Jerry Coyne reviews the state of affairs.   My "Texas Taliban" alerts category was created some two decades ago precisely because of the efforts by those folks to wreck biology education in Texas!  (Years ago, a member in good standing even came to visit me in my office!  And see also.)

MLK speech in 1962 on the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation

I'd never heard this one before:

 

Philosopher Nick Bostrom (Oxford) is a creepy person (UPDATED)

That's the only conclusion to be drawn about the racist views he expressed in his mid-20s.   People who aren't creepy racists (or mentally ill) don't express such views in their 20s.  Maybe some folks who aren't really creepy racists say stuff like this in their early teens.   A few observations:

1.  He should not be fired or sanctioned for this speech.

2.  The views he defends, like longtermism, are not false because he is a creepy person.

3.  The creepiness is yet a further reason to be suspicious of longtermism and the arguments for it, since they reveal a severe poverty of empathy and human emotions on the part of one its main proponents--attributes which would seem likely to spill over into "philosophical" reflections about what human beings matter and what has value.  There are plenty of objections to longtermism (see for example), but it is perfectly reasonable for someone who does not have the time to work through all the arguments to view the creepiness of one of longtermism's leading proponents as grounds for serious skepticism.  (Vide.)

 

Plato, Mill and inequality

Political theorist David Lay Williams comments.

"Passed away" vs. "died"

A longtime reader, noting my not infrequent use of "passed away" to note the death of some philosopher, writes:

“Passed away” is a religious euphemism, mostly used by sanctimonious and smarmy people who are trying to say that someone's immortal soul has passed away from our contemptible fallen realm and into the bright realm of harp-strumming above. 

It’s sort of Expiration Lite, or exiting from life without actually going through the messy process of death. It’s a way of denying reality. And that’s why it surprised me so much to see it on your blog, where reality-deniers usually get no mercy.

This was honestly a surprise to me (those who pass away, pass away into oblivion and nothingness!), but it would not be the first time I was tuned out of connotations of ordinary usage.  What do readers think?

Former director of Human Rights Watch denied Fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School for having "incorrect" views about Israel

The Nation reports.  If there is one arena in which attacks occur systematically on academic freedom and free speech in the U.S., it is for those--from Finkelstein to Salaita--who do not tow the party line on Israel.  What a disgrace.

"Diversity" and "tolerance" turned on their head

Apt remarks by The Guardian's Kenan Malik regarding the academic freedom fiasco at Hamline University:

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of Hamline’s action is the use of the language of diversity to eviscerate the very meaning of diversity. This is an issue not confined to Hamline. Too many people today demand that we respect the diversity of society, but fail to see the diversity of minority communities in those societies. As a result, progressive voices often get dismissed as not being authentic, while the most conservative figures become celebrated as the true embodiment of their communities.

Here, liberal “anti-racism” meets rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry. For bigots, all Muslims are reactionary and their values incompatible with those of liberal societies. For too many liberals, opposing bigotry means accepting reactionary ideas as authentically Muslim; that to be Muslim is to find the Danish cartoons offensive and the depiction of Muhammed “harmful”. Both bigots and liberals erase the richness and variety of Muslim communities.

The Hamline controversy shows how the concepts of diversity and tolerance have become turned on their head. Diversity used to mean the creation of a space for dissent and disagreement and tolerance the willingness to live with things that one might find offensive or distasteful. Now, diversity too often describes a space in which dissent and disagreement have to be expunged in the name of “respect” and tolerance requires one to refrain from saying or doing things that might be deemed offensive. It is time we re-grasped both diversity and tolerance in their original sense.

Yet more triumphs of AI!

Philosopher Ned Hall (Harvard) writes:  "I just thought you’d get a kick out of the attached transcription of a 'chat' I had with GPT3 (a propos of this). I’d say it’s pretty far from passing the Turing test…."  See for yourself:  Download Ned Hall ChatGPT attempting to solve a logic puzzle

Carl Schurz against American imperialism, 1899...

...in a convocation address at the University of Chicago (which John Finnis could benefit from reading); an excerpt:

If we [adopt a colonial system], we shall transform the government of the people, for the people, and by the people, for which Abraham Lincoln lived, into a government of one part of the people, the strong, over another part, the weak. Such an abandonment of a fundamental principle as a permanent policy may at first seem to bear only upon more or less distant dependencies, but it can hardly fail in its ultimate effects to disturb the rule of the same principle in the conduct of democratic government at home. And I warn the American people that a democracy cannot so deny its faith as to the vital conditions of its being--it cannot long play the king over subject populations without creating within itself ways of thinking and habits of action most dangerous to its own vitality. . . .

[W]e are told that our industries are gasping for breath; that we are suffering from over production; that our products must have new outlets, and that we need colonies and dependencies the world over to give us more markets. More markets? Certainly. But do we, civilized beings, indulge in the absurd and barbarous notion that we must own the countries with which we wish to trade? . . .

"But we must civilize those poor people!" Are we not ingenious and charitable enough to do much for their civilization without subjugating and ruling them by criminal aggression?

(For more on Schurz's remarkable life and career, the Wikipedia entry is not bad.)

(Thanks to Sameer Khan for the pointer.)

Fantasies about AI

This seems a good antidote to the silly fantasies (or nightmares) about AI that animate some benighted folks in Oxford--and it comes from a leading AI researcher (who is, alas, a bit of a philosophical muddle on other topics).  An excerpt:

When you work so close to A.I., you see a lot of limitations. That’s the problem. From a distance, it looks like, oh, my God! Up close, I see all the flaws. Whenever there’s a lot of patterns, a lot of data, A.I. is very good at processing that — certain things like the game of Go or chess. But humans have this tendency to believe that if A.I. can do something smart like translation or chess, then it must be really good at all the easy stuff too. The truth is, what’s easy for machines can be hard for humans and vice versa. You’d be surprised how A.I. struggles with basic common sense. It’s crazy....

I’m a big fan of GPT-3, but at the same time I feel that some people make it bigger than it is. Some people say that maybe the Turing test² has already been passed. I disagree because, yeah, maybe it looks as though it may have been passed based on one best performance of GPT-3. But if you look at the average performance, it’s so far from robust human intelligence. We should look at the average case. Because when you pick one best performance, that’s actually human intelligence doing the hard work of selection. The other thing is, although the advancements are exciting in many ways, there are so many things it cannot do well. But people do make that hasty generalization: Because it can do something sometimes really well, then maybe A.G.I.³  is around the corner. There’s no reason to believe so.

3 Artificial general intelligence, which is like the kind of flexible intelligence we humans have, and which a machine would need to be able to learn intellectual tasks at the level of human beings.

"Wilderness therapy"?

A dear and old friend of my wife's is seeking information about this kind of "therapy" (for teens), about which I know nothing (indeed, I'd never heard of it), but I imagine the varied and intelligent readers of this blog may know something.  Any insights welcome.   You can post comments here anonymously or also email me at bleiter-at-uchicago-dot-edu, and I can forward your comments, anonymized or not as you prefer.  All confidential.  (Here's an example of one well-known program, but I gather there are many others out there!)  Thanks for any insight readers can share!

The University of California strike ended just before Xmas

Here's a recap of what transpired.

Republicans and Covid deaths

This is really stark evidence of the pathological dysfunction of this benighted country, in which one of the two major political parties is openly hostile to de minimis public health measures (recall that Americans died of Covid at a rate two to three times that [or more] of other normal countries):

[B]y far the single group of adults most likely to be unvaccinated is Republicans: 37 percent of Republicans are still unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated, compared with 9 percent of Democrats. Fourteen of the 15 states with the lowest vaccination rates voted for Donald Trump in 2020. (The other is Georgia.)

We know that unvaccinated Americans are more likely to be Republican, that Republicans in positions of power led the movement against COVID vaccination, and that hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated Americans have died preventable deaths from the disease. The Republican Party is unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of many of its own supporters, a phenomenon that may be without precedent in the history of both American democracy and virology....

We know that as of April 2022, about 318,000 people had died from COVID because they were unvaccinated, according to research from Brown University. And the close association between Republican vaccine hesitancy and higher death rates has been documented. One study estimated that by the fall of 2021, vaccine uptake accounted for 10 percent of the total difference between Republican and Democratic deaths. But that estimate has changed—and even likely grown—over time....

The UK is falling apart, an ongoing saga

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 20--AS THE COMMENTS SADLY CONFIRM, THE SITUATION IS INDEED GRIM

I guess this is the legacy of Tory rule:

Countless harrowing incidents have called attention to the ambulance problem in Britain, including that of an elderly man whose family covered him with a tarp as he waited seven hours after falling outdoors, and a 17-year-old soccer player who waited for four hours lying on a rainy field after suffering a neck injury....

Ambulance services across the country, almost all of which are part of the National Health Service and managed by an area’s local health trust, have described a rising number of deaths linked to long waits. One English ambulance service noted that the number for its crews had risen from just one in 2020 to at least 37 in 2022.

Curious to hear from UK readers whether this grim picture is accurate.  Waiting hours for emergency help is pretty horrifying.

A. Philip Randolph, a documentary

A propos last week's post:  I happened upon this very good documentary about Randolph, which taught me several things I did not know (including that Randolph, unlike Du Bois, opposed WWI--pretty embarrassing for Du Bois!):

 

The point of education according to Democrats in America

On Twitter, the Secretary of Education in the Biden Administration wrote this:

Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.

Remember that this is a Democrat speaking, thus confirming, once again, that the Democrats are simply the party of the prudent (rather than insane) wing of the ruling class in America.   Humboldt where are you when we need you?  Not in the Biden Administration obviously!

A. Philip Randolph's speech at the March on Washington for "Jobs and Freedom" in 1963

MLK's speech is better-known, but I happened upon this recording (below) of the march's organizer, the great labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph.  He really had a majestic speaking voice.   And while de jure racism has been defeated by his efforts, and King's, and many others, the economic issues remain little changed:

 

Harvard's new President

"Diversity" is the theme of most of the coverage, since President Gay is black.  She is also a child of immigrants from Haiti (recall); her father was an engineer; she graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, the elite prep school, and Stanford University, earning her Ph.D. at Harvard.  What really struck me, and would concern me were I a faculty member at Harvard, was this:

“The idea of the ivory tower, that is the past, not the future, of academia,” she said. “We don’t exist outside of society, but as part of it, and that means that Harvard has a duty to lean in and engage and be in service to the world.”

Harvard certainly has played a major role in sustaining class hierarchy in America, although that is perhaps not what she means.  But universities have no "dut[ies] to lean in and engage and be in service to the world":  they have duties to produce knowledge and share it with students.  That is their only service, their raison d'etre.   I conclude with an anecdote I've shared before: