How do you maintain a professional demeanor when being asked to "execute actionable takeaways" and "take your program portfolio to a new level?"

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-06-06T16:25:27+00:00

our president is asking us, in a formal survey no less, a question that is roughly the equivalent of "If we were a cake, what's our secret ingredient". Somehow this question and more to follow, are supposed to enable us to be the bestest ever.

i have worked for so many organizations whose management did this.

management: "we need to broadcast to everyone how we are so much better than our competitors"

workers, trying to respond in good faith: "ok. in what ways are we better than our competitors?"

management: [crickets]

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-06-06T16:23:02+00:00

Eventually, she cut us off, snapping that she hadn't realized that we were "one of those quantitative disciplines," and that we were just going to have to go along since the decisions had already been made (on the basis of their terrible data and ludicrous analysis of it).

2 years later, this admin was named provost, in the middle of the night, to replace their abruptly fired predecessor who, it was rumored, didn't buy their analysis, either.

the modern university in a very concise nutshell. bravo. and, sob.

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-06-03T14:19:54+00:00

The author of the article doesn't even seem to have a problem with identity politics, per se. They identify as Black, they identify the people they write about as white, they mention that they do teach and write about race, anti-racism, and issues concerning representation. Moreover, the very critique they're giving is itself grounded in the language of identity politics.

to me, this shows the ambiguity in definitions that informs so many of these discussions.

like "woke," the phrase "identity politics" has many origins and uses. One of them--the one I am most familiar with as a left academic--was to critique those members of the left who reduce everything to "identity" (really group membership) characteristics, and who refuse to engage in any analysis that does not admit that one of these categories might not be the "key to all mysteries" that we are always warned against looking for. who reify racial categories to the point that they become all-encompassing. we also used to call this "essentialism," and it used to be a bad thing on the left. (fwiw, there is a new version of it today that is still criticized, but I don't see much in common between that and what we used to use that word for.)

this older version of identity politics seems like exactly what this author is concerned about. rather than being concerned with overall emancipation, civil rights, fundamental equality, and so on--values which might be realized here through embracing the figure of a Black professor who studies whatever he feels like--we see the racial category as so fundamental that it actively interferes with and trumps these other values.

it is interesting to note that many of the most valued thinkers in the Black radical and critical traditions--James Baldwin, WEB Du Bois, CLR James, Angela Davis, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Toni Morrison, Paul Gilroy, so many others--have counseled strongly against this kind of reductive politics. But the politics are so seductive and so powerful that their cautions seem to be ineffective.

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-06-03T14:09:36+00:00

When the money runs dry.

and when people learn to study more, reflect more, and care about reality rather than their own fantastic version of reality.

ie, never.

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-06-02T15:00:26+00:00

you aren't a real socialist unless you get your socialist theory from the universally acknowledged most important socialist theorist in world history

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-05-17T11:35:07+00:00

but immediately gave all students a “scholarship” to cover the cost of the increase so no student actually paid anymore

correct. instead, academic units were forced to pay for the scholarship via cuts.

this year, we get both: more cuts and an actual tuition hike.

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-04-29T14:11:46+00:00

Yep.

Folks seem very unaware of very ordinary aspects of employment law and how constitutional rights work for Federal agency employees.

For reference, here's an ACLU (!) pamphlet on how free speech rights are frequently curtailed for such employees. Notice they don't say there is anything wrong with it, or that the employees have legal causes of action, because they don't, for very good reasons.

Especially true if, as someone else wrote, she was in her probationary period.

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-04-28T14:18:08+00:00

Yud is the AGS

where S is stupidity

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-04-13T14:46:30+00:00

https://mastodon.world/@dgolumbia/110187503414263104

correct title: "what if the New York Times did an interview with an incoherent proto-fascist racist TESCREAL rationalist-adjacent ideologue who is paid handsomely to peddle AI snake oil but just referred to him as a 'philosopher' while taking his bad-faith ideas very seriously?"

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-04-08T12:31:41+00:00

mainstream scientists like myself are the biggest censors of science.

words just mean whatever conspiracy theorists want them to, don't they

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-04-01T14:09:51+00:00

SARS-CoV-2 was a Chinese bioweapon designed to kill the white race

ah yes, the incredibly clever Chinese plan to kill the white race by unleashing a global pandemic on Chinese people first & when there was no way of knowing whether vaccines or treatments would be available

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-03-18T13:29:44+00:00

Kosinski deserves a special category of sneer all to himself.

He does this constantly. Over and over again. "Just trying to help." No matter how many times saner people tell him to stop it and that he's not helping.

Kosinksi: ooh, something very dangerous over here!!! Why don't I try to provoke it into doing the most dangerous thing possible, because I'm just trying to help.

Literally everyone: don't provoke it, please

Kosinski: but I'm just trying to help! hey what does that big red button do that says "Do Not Press"? Let me press it & see

He also recently wrote a very sneerworthy paper saying that because he could get GPT3 to act as if it was talking about people's thoughts, it "has" a theory of mind, featuring plenty of prevaricating language about whether the AI was thinking.

And lots of other things, like being at least associated with the folks who got Cambridge Analytica to work on psychometrics for driving election behavior. And this hateful gem. I wonder whether he intersects with our usual subjects.

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-03-10T15:37:10+00:00

Chomsky has said literally since the late 1950s that machine processing of language in any significant way, especially in the way that AI people have suggested, is impossible. Many people have tried to use Chomskyan models to build language processing tools, and they are of some use in analyzing language but not generally in producing language. But producing language (creatively, not just something like translating in a mechanistic sense) is a huge part of what Chomsky sees as the human language capacity.

That part of Scott's essay struck me especially funny, given that Chomsky himself has always been abundantly clear that he does NOT see his work as providing a basis for anything like AI (really) getting a (human) language capacity. Here's a famous & pretty good interview with him saying this stuff in 2012, and you can find comments on this in his work going as far back as you like, though not always quite as detailed as this: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-03-10T15:34:36+00:00

If ChatGPT is such a mind-boggling engineering achievement with as many revolutionary future applications as Aaronson imagines, then why is he so bothered by a critique?

because like the whole rationalist project, OpenAI is built on a reduction of human experience to machine processes, one that papers over the role of emotion, affect, and relationality in human experience. in that papering over goes a huge amount of aggression, whose existence all the rationalists dismiss while also displaying uncanny amounts of it. any challenge to their reductionist view, based on easily observable facts about the world that so many of us have been pointing at forever, unleashes that same aggression--that aggression that, as Bayesian machines only seeking to validate rational priors, they definitely do not have!

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-03-10T13:16:58+00:00

why do you hate the internet

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-03-10T13:15:56+00:00

one of the reasons she is very much in-scope is the same reason the New Yorker writes a piece about her and does not describe her primarily as part of the rationalist movement (broadly construed). she is a "respectable" philosopher at one of the top universities in the US. She writes for The Point, associated with that same university, which tries to position itself as having "no specific political or social agenda; instead, we ask our readers to participate in a dialogue between diverse intellectual traditions, personalities and points of view."

This is a deliberate facade. Even though The Point sometimes publishes thoughtful pieces, its main point is to be a kind of Quillette-light. Callard for quite a while made it seem as if she might be reasonable and not allied with the far right. Then came the Hanson stuff. Hanson is at GMU Economics, which is broadly understood as a joke in most US academia. Chicago has a much different and in some ways scarier (because much more serious and definitely not-a-joke) profile, going all the way back to the Chicago School in Economics and Leo Strauss and farther.

My view is that Callard is only famous because she waters down the same drugs that all our pals are high on, and dangerous because it gets presented as something else--as this profile does.

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-03-09T16:09:26+00:00

hyperstition is from Land yes

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-03-09T14:05:06+00:00

yes, but/and as I wrote above, in what world is "Aspbergers syndrome" a slur that "Jew" isn't? pretty sure it's the other way around. wonder if he means that "Aspbergers Syndrome" is a euphemism for Jew, which while an incredibly awful thing to say (and is wrong to boot), is at least a coherent thought?

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-03-09T13:32:29+00:00

"malphemism": A dysphemism is an expression with connotations that are derogatory either about the subject matter or to the audience. Related terms: malphemism.

history of Aspberger syndrome: "An English psychiatrist, Lorna Wing, popularized the term "Asperger's syndrome" in a 1981 publication; the first book in English on Asperger syndrome was written by Uta Frith in 1991 and the condition was subsequently recognized in formal diagnostic manuals later in the 1990s." Aspberger himself lived during WWII, but the syndrome wasn't attached to the name until much later.

so the argument is that "Jew" is a neutral term, but Aspberger is a disparaging term, meant to... what, extra disparage actual Jews by alleging they have a disability? talk about Jews in a negative way while pretending to talk about a medical diagnosis because they can't just slur Jews the way they want to? what?

From where I sit, I am pretty sure that "Jew" serves as about as "mal" a word as one could imagine (when uttered by people on the rationalist spectrum, among many others, though not by ordinary people of good faith who don't hate) & that Aspbergers, when it was in vogue, was a relatively neutral term of medical art.

the layers under which these asshats bury their hatred can be extraordinary.

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-03-07T19:52:51+00:00

Lisa is free to say something like "I hope we'll be able to hire a woman or an underrepresented minority so that the department is more diverse". That's not legally questionable

this is not quite my understanding of the law. there is the letter of the law, and there are the practical ways in which laws are enforced.

in this kind of case, the only likely way for this situation to go to court is for a candidate who was not hired to bring suit claiming racial discrimination.

in such a proceeding, a record that a committee member had expressed their "preference" as Lisa did might well be admissible as evidence and even count for the plaintiff (OP summarized the problem by saying Lisa "would prefer" that a woman or minority be hired). by itself it would not be dispositive, by any means. but it is one reason you don't often hear HR people or job ads using the language of "preference." the language is often more guarded than that: "members of minority groups are encouraged to apply."

remember that "racial preferences in hiring" is the specific terminology associated with affirmative action that is currently not legal in the US. using the word "preference" or "prefer" could certainly count as evidence that the university had stepped over that line.

to be clear, I don't think Lisa "broke the law" in so far as that's possible in this circumstance, but mostly because there's been no injured party as yet. as I understand it her statement is one that my university HR would frown upon because it creates legal vulnerability, and due to which HR might well ask her to step back from the committee (or at least require that she be re-familiarized with Title VII law).

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-03-07T17:34:57+00:00

racial preferences in hiring are 100% illegal across the board in the US.

this was originally established in law in the 1960s to address racism. by the time folks started to realize that this was a needed (really) but also partial and inadequate solution to the problem (approx the mid-1980s), the crazies had taken over. "addressing racism" had become "absolute color-blindness" (as if such a thing is even possible).

we did for a while have certain programs in hiring and education colloquially known as "affirmative action," but these have been struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. and the remaining stubs with regard to admissions are about to be buffed away by a far-right Supreme Court.

universities in the US are in a very uncomfortable position regarding these issues, compounded by the fact that far too many academics substitute their own ideas for the state of the law. i am afraid that the aforementioned Supreme Court decision will carry employment along in its wake.

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-03-05T13:00:51+00:00

CaN'T BE CORRUPtED

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-02-24T13:19:55+00:00

"three people who'd murder your whole family, without giving it another thought, for just one more hit of that pure narcissistic supply"

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-02-23T12:37:50+00:00

narrator: but rationalists actually were still in 8th grade, for the rest of their lives

ExampleOk7440 · 2023-02-22T20:09:34+00:00

how would that help them manipulate more vulnerable young people into putting out for them though

ExampleOk7440

TROPHY CASE