Academia

Together with many other academics in the Netherlands, I have been very busy in organizing a nation-wide demonstration next Thursday against the 1 billion budget cuts to higher education that our very-right-wing government has announced. (For background explanation, see this earlier post).

Today, I have a long opinion piece in the daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad analyzing the crisis in higher eduction. For our non-dutch speaking colleagues, and anyone with an interest in this matter, my colleague from the law department Bald de Vries edited an AI-based translation (to which I made a few further tweaks) – you can find it below the fold. [click to continue…]

One of my favorite metasciences lines is: “Does anyone look around and say…things are going great, I just think we need MORE PAPERS?”

Obviously, we all want more scientific progress, better evidence, broader scope — but I don’t think that this is best accomplished by churning out more of these fancy peer-reviewed pdfs. Indeed, our systems of peer review and knowledge evaluation are breaking down under the strain. Everyone is under pressure to produce more and more papers earlier and earlier in their careers.

The situation is accelerating with LLMs. The cost of producing these pdfs continues to decline, and as long as the demand for the pdfs stays strong, we should expect the supply to increase. Everyone agrees that this is a problem.

Well, almost everyone.

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Obviously people are shocked, and particularly shocked at the rejection of normal sensible politics by the rubes who have elected an oaf, a criminal and a rapist to the White House, again. But the trouble is that this kind of thing keeps happening, or nearly happening, and not just in the United States. And it turns out that the policies pursued by the MAGA extremists, by Le Pen, Meloni or Farage, aren’t really all that different from the ones followed by the normal sensible people, albeit that the rhetoric from the sensibles is less crude and laced with sweeteners about “compassion”.

The underlying problem is nationalism and the organization of the world into nation states, a form of organization that fosters and promotes nationalist sentiment and attachment and downplays transnational concern and solidarity, which is “all very well” but shouldn’t come “at our expense”. This has been the problem since well before 1914, but was particularly in evidence then as the greatest movement of international solidarity that had ever been built largely collapsed in favour of supporting “our boys” against theirs. It was there in the 1930s, not only in the rise of particularly agressive nationalisms but in the failure of normal sensible states to come to the assistance of those threatened by it, such as Jews fleeing across borders. All very well, but not at our expense. And it is, rather obviously, in evidence now as countries struggle with people moving and with climate change. All very well, but not at our expense.
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In the spring, I’ll be teaching the second semester of our philosophy grad program’s first-year seminar. This is the seminar all PhD students in the philosophy department take together as a cohort during their first year in the program. The fall semester of the seminar typically leans towards the metaphysics and epistemology side of philosophy, while the spring semester leans toward the ethics and political side. (We recognize that this isn’t really a defensible way to think about joints within the discipline, but the content delivery aspect of the seminar isn’t a priority, and we think of the categories as flexible depending on who’s teaching it. So, it’s a serviceable organizing principle for our purposes.) There’s a separate year-long workshop on pedagogy, so the first-year seminar doesn’t need to include that content, though of course it can.

I took a class like this as a PhD student, and I know that many other philosophy grad programs have them. This must be true outside of philosophy, too. I’m interested in hearing from people about how they’ve experienced courses like this, whether from the student side or from the teacher side or both. It seems to me that there are so many valuable things that a class like this might aim to accomplish, and a wide range of ways it might be put together to realize combinations of aims.

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“We live in an age which silence is not only criminal but suicidal”, wrote James Baldwin in his “Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis”. The year was 1970. I wonder if there has ever been a time when silence was neither criminal nor suicidal. I would like to live there and then, for sure.

In his poem “A leaf, treeless, for Bertolt Brecht” [“Ein Blatt, baumlos, für Berlolt Brecht”] (published posthumously en 1971 in the book Schneepart [Snowpart]), Paul Celan contended that crime lay in any conversation, not only in conversations about trees, as Brecht suggested in his famous “An die Nachgeborenen“. Without trees, every conversation merely repeats what has already been said. (I have a verse from this poem and the tittle of Celan’s answer to it tattooed in my left forearm). [click to continue…]

Until last Friday, I subscribed to two newspapers: the Washington Post and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. As of Friday, I only subscribe to NZZ. I shared my cancellation on Facebook and was surprised by how many people in my network commented that they had done the same. This included people who almost never comment or even react to any of my posts. Clearly I was not the only one who needed to act on the Post’s eleventh hour decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in the US elections.

But I wondered: is this just my bubble? I was super curious to know how widespread this action had been. It turns out, quite widespread. Of WaPo’s approximately 2.5 million paying subscribers, over 200,000 cancelled their subscriptions by today, Monday.

As of an hour ago, Jeff Bezos posted an editorial on WaPo talking about how Americans don’t trust the media. Okay, but the 200,000+ people who cancelled their subscription on Friday presumably trusted WaPo enough to pay for it until last Friday. As noted by David Folkenflik at NPR, if a paper wants to stop endorsing political candidates, fine, but making that announcement less than two weeks before a presidential election is not a convincingly neutral stance. Do it a year or two out and few will raise major concerns. Do it at this point in time and lose a big chunk of your subscriber base, not because we didn’t trust you to provide good news coverage, but because what you did here was spineless.

Do head over to WaPo to read Alexandra Petri’s editorial on the matter. I’m sorry that by unsubscribing from the Post, I have cut my support of her work as well. If there is another way to support here, I’m happy to do it.

Oh, and please minimize or abandon altogether your use of Amazon. Let’s not feed this beast.

The idea of the gold rush is deeply rooted in the American psyche. “There’s gold in them thar hills.” Anyone can abandon his family and community to gamble big on themselves. Thanks to this rugged individualism and the natural bounty of our territory, there’s a chance that you can strike it rich.

More than American, perhaps, the gold rush is specifically Californian. The Californian Dream in fact came to dominate the older American dream, according to historian HW Brands (quoted in Wikipedia):

The old American Dream … was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard”… of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year. The new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck. [This] golden dream … became a prominent part of the American psyche only after Sutter’s Mill.

Maybe this is why I hate California.

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There’s not much I can do about it, but I still spend a lot of time thinking about what I, and others outside the US, should do if that country ceases to be a democracy. But, it doesn’t seem as if lots of other people are thinking this way. One possibility is that people just don’t want to think about it. Another, though, is that I’ve overestimated the probability of this outcome.

To check on this, I set up a flowchart using a free online program called drawio. Here;s what I came up with

I hope it’s self-explanatory. The bold numbers next to the boxes are the probability of reaching that box. The numbers next to arrows coming out of decision nodes (diamonds) are the probability of that decision.

I also apologize in advance if there are any arithmetic errors – my degree in pure mathematics doesn’t insulate me against them.

If the US were remotely normal, every entry on the left-hand edge ought to be equal to 1. Harris should be a sure winner, Trump shouldn’t find any supporters for a coup, the MAGA Republicans in Congress should be unelectable and the moderate program proposed by Harris should be successful enough that Trumpism would be defeated forever.

But that’s not the case. There are two end points in which US democracy survives, with a total probability (excessively precise) of 0.46, and one where it ends, with a probability of 0.54. By replacing my probabilities at the decision nodes with your own, you can come up with your own numbers. Or you may feel that I’ve missed crucial pathways. I’d be interested in comments on either line.

Note: Any Thälmann-style comments (such as “After Trump, us” or “Dems are social fascists anyway”) will be blocked and deleted.

Before Rawls’ shadow in left-liberal political philosophy there was Arnold S. Kaufman (1927-1971), who died when his airplane collided with a military jet while traveling (recall this post). While there is no Wikipedia page devoted to him, Kaufman was rather famous during the 1960s because of his involvement with the student movement at the University of Michigan and especially by promoting ‘participatory democracy’ in the context of the Port Huron Statement (as the New York Times noted fifty years later, and The Nation a decade earlier). In fact, he had been regular contributor to Dissent during the last decade of his life. So, for example, an early version of his book (1968), The Radical Liberal: New Man in American Politics, appeared as a long essay (1966) “A call to Radicalism: Where Shall Liberals Go?” in Dissent. [HT Kevin Mattson.]

Despite his fame in his own era, Kaufman has left almost no trace in the Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy, except that once he was a participant in the debate over Black Reparations. His actual views — in favor of what he calls ‘compensatory justice’’ — are not mentioned. (One can find the argument in the July – August 1969 issue of Dissent.)

Then after he moved to UCLA, he became a key defender of his then junior colleague, Angela Davis, against, inter alia, Ronald Reagan’s (gubernatorial) administration’s repeated attempts to get her fired because of her membership in the Communist Party.* The shape and rhetoric of today’s culture wars are already visible in the debates over her appointment. The essay in her defense that Kaufman published on January 3, 1970 in The New Republic is rather significant to understand his thinking about academic freedom, especially in light of his polemic with Sydney Hook’s more restrictive understanding of it. (Some other time more on that.)

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There are many processes now subsumed under the term “Artificial Intelligence.” The reason we’re talking about it now, though, is that the websites are doing things we never thought websites could do. The pixels of our devices light up like never before. Techno-optimists believe that we’re nowhere close to the limit, that websites will continue to dazzle us — and I hope that this reframing helps put AI in perspective.

Because the first step in the “Artificial Intelligence” process is most important: the creation of an artificial world in which this non-human intelligence can operate.

Artificial Intelligence is intelligence within an artificial space. When humans act within an artificial space, their intelligence is artificial—their operations are indistinguishable from the actions of other actors within the artificial space.

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At the Château of Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire.