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Javier E

The Constitution at War With Itself - The Bulwark - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/onstitution-at-war-with-itself

constitution lincoln freedom Founding US civil war

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • the original Constitution had elements that were clearly moral—the rule of law, liberty, and self-government all implied understandings of equality that were in tension with slavery.
  • To play on an analogy Feldman powerfully invokes, if we think of the compromise Constitution and the amended Constitution that came out of the Civil War as akin to the Old and New Testaments, with the first being rooted in a rigid adherence to law and the second being rooted in moral understandings, there is more to the Old Testament than its insistence on law; there is an insistence, in the Prophets in particular, on the spirit and morality the law is meant to serve. To push Feldman’s analogy, the Old Testament had shoots that would grow in the New Testament: the moral and philosophical commitments of the new had roots in the old.
  • The highlight of Feldman’s narrative is an exchange between Hezekiah Ford Douglas, “who had escaped enslavement at fifteen,” and William Howard Day, a free-born black man and graduate of Oberlin College. While Douglas insisted that blacks should not, in Feldman’s words, “acknowledge the legitimacy of a constitutional order based on slavery,” Day insisted that while the government was proslavery we should not confuse this “construction of the Constitution” with “the Constitution itself.” And the Constitution itself, framed to “establish justice” and to protect “liberty,” was best understood as antislavery
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  • Fredrick Douglass drew on both strands of this debate, arguing in 1850 that “Liberty and Slavery” were both in the Constitution, giving us a constitution fundamentally “at war with itself.”
  • the First Inaugural where Lincoln argued that the states did not have a constitutional right to secede, particularly on the grounds that they did not like the results of the election of 1860. The states might have a revolutionary right to dissolve the constitutional order and create a new one, but to secede because Lincoln was elected president when he had in no way altered the terms of the social contract was to evade the rules and break the constitutional order he was obligated to defend.
  • I think Lincoln’s First Inaugural is a powerful and compelling work of constitutional analysis. Lincoln’s message in the First Inaugural was twofold. First, he reiterated the compromise. Each state had a right to “control its own domestic institutions” (meaning, of course, slavery). All representatives had sworn an oath to support “the whole Constitution,” which obligated them to adhere to the fugitive slave clause as part of the compromise and not try to evade its terms by “hypercritical rules” of interpretation
  • But Lincoln went on to insist that no part of the Constitution had been violated. Given this, he argued that secession against a constitutional majority would be “the essence of anarchy.” If states could secede after an election rather than “acquiesce” to a free and fair election, then democratic government by a constitutional majority was no longer possible.
  • Once ballots had settled the issue, states were constitutionally bound to oblige. Appealing to bullets was, as Lincoln put it, a “revolutionary” act that broke the constitutional order he had sworn an oath to uphold.
  • Feldman points out that Lincoln’s insistence on a majority as the sovereign was quite different from the Framers’ understanding of the sovereign, which they tended to treat as the whole people.
  • We might best understand this as a question of who is sovereign within the constitutional order, which is separate from who can act to dissolve the constitutional order itself
  • The most visible element of this debate was whether individual states were sovereign in the latter capacity: Could they exit the constitutional order? And if they could not constitutionally leave, did the national government have power to keep them in?
  • Whether America was a union founded by We the People or was a union founded by sovereign states was the subject of fraught debate in the antebellum period.
  • the prolonged struggle forced Lincoln to confront the fact that the Union could not be brought back together on the terms of the old compromise.
  • Feldman also highlights Lincoln as a theorist of constitutional necessity, as he is forced to confront thorny constitutional issues with no easy answer, which includes a detailed examination of Lincoln’s occasional overreach. Not only was his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus wider than necessary, but it included, Feldman writes, suspending “the basic constitutional right to free speech” and locking up critics of the war far more extensively than is usually acknowledged
  • Emancipation would be made permanent with the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery and destroying the compromise at the heart of the original Constitution: “The greater drama of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment was its transformation of the prewar, compromise Constitution into a new Constitution that repudiated the very core of that compromise as it had existed from 1787 to 1861.” This second founding culminated in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, inscribing the principles articulated in the Declaration and reaffirmed by the Gettysburg Address into constitutional text.
  • Americans—particularly those Americans who think patriotism depends on a belief in an infallible founding and a perfect Constitution—too easily gloss over how “complicated, contradictory, and fraught it was for Lincoln and the nation to overcome [the old] Constitution and remake it.”
Javier E

Why the West Misunderstood Putin - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...622956

putin history politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 01 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Anagnorisis is that moment of recognition when a character in a play finally understands their predicament and who they really are.
  • It is Shakespeare’s Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII realizing that he has “ventured … this many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth,” or Richard II saying, “I have wasted time and now doth time waste me.”
  • Three explanations loom. One has to do with personalities and characters.
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  • Putin’s behavior shocked many people because they bought into his image as a grand master of intricate policy maneuvers, which assumes intentionality, adroitness, and cunning. A more accurate judgment followed from saying to oneself: This is an aging dictator, who after 20 years of absolute power gets no pushback; who is paranoid, dismissive, and brutal
  • , he is someone who has deteriorated both physically and—as seen in his delivery of rambling, querulous speeches—mentally.
  • The personality of the Ukrainian president has made all the difference. Volodymyr Zelensky is an Everyman hero: reluctant, initially unsure, but patriotic and courageous.
  • A second explanation is narrower. It has to do with military analysts’ focus on technology at the expense of the human element in war.
  • War is a contest of wills; it is unpredictable; it is the domain of accident and contingency; nothing goes as planned; and events are smothered in a fog created by misinformation and fear.
  • less international-relations theory and more Carl von Clausewitz would have helped
  • Finally, the democratic pessimism of the past two decades has obscured from many the extraordinary power of freedom, and the innate resilience of liberal-democratic countries and institutions.
  • A culture of lies is corrosive, breeding cynicism and eventually self-doubt. Truth is not only more powerful but open to all of us, hence Václav Havel’s dictum that the way to resist tyranny is to live in truth.
Javier E

A Revolution Is Coming for China's Families - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...lopment-welfare-state-3c1e0091

china revolution demographics aging implications economic cultural political

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • In January Beijing announced that the country’s total population shrank in 2022—a decade earlier than Western demographers had been forecasting as recently as 2019.
  • one rapidly approaching demographic problem has flown under Beijing’s radar: the crisis of the Chinese family, the foundation of Chinese society and civilization.
  • The Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically unprecedented transition. Extended kinship networks will atrophy nationwide, and the widespread experience of close blood relatives will disappear altogether for many
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  • This is a delayed but inescapable consequence of China’s birth trends from the era of the notorious one-child policy (1980-2015)
  • Beijing thus far has ignored this looming crisis because planners don’t prepare for things they don’t track. Officials don’t regard data on the family as relevant to statecraft or security. So statistics tally males and females—not uncles, sisters, cousins, widows.
  • We estimate past patterns and project trends through demographic modeling—simulations replicating China’s available population numbers—while “building” family trees consistent with those figures. We can approximate nationwide changes in China’s extended family networks in the past with reasonable validity and describe what lies ahead with fair confidence.
  • we are only now living through the era of “peak kin” in China. In terms of sheer numbers, Chinese networks of blood relatives were never nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century.
  • Because of dramatic postwar improvements in health and mortality, men and women in their 40s today have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960.
  • China’s “kin explosion” may be an important, heretofore unobserved factor in China’s remarkable economic performance since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.
  • China’s withering of the family is set to collide with a tsunami of new social need from the country’s huge elderly population, whose ranks will more than double between 2020 and 2050
  • China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese history.
  • A “kin famine” will thus unfold unforgivingly over the next 30 years—starting now. As it intensifies, the Chinese family—the most important institution protecting Chinese people against adversity in bad times and helping them seize opportunity in good times—will increasingly falter in both these crucial functions.
  • China is now on the cusp of a severe and unavoidable “kin crash,” driven by prolonged subreplacement fertility
  • by 2050 at least half of China’s overall pool of male military-age manpower will be made up of only children. Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will presage lineage extinction for many Chinese families.
  • The reliability and durability of familial bonds of duty will be an increasingly critical question—perhaps even a matter of life and death for many, including frail and impecunious elders in the Chinese hinterlands
  • growing numbers of men in decades ahead will enter old age without spouses or children—the traditional sources of support for the elderly.
  • by 2050, 18% of China’s men in their 60s will have no living descendants, twice the fraction today.
  • who will look after these unfortunates?
  • Still worse than the macroeconomic implications of old-age dependency may be the effect of China’s family crisis on the so-called micro-foundations of the national economy—the little things that make markets work.
  • Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi networks, a distinctive form of special relationships and professional connections, have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. The proliferation of blood relatives was likely a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s phenomenal upswing.
  • the kin dearth may prove an economic depressant well beyond what current “head count” projections suggest.
  • China’s coming family revolution could easily conduce to a rise in personal risk aversion. Risk aversion may in turn dampen mobility, including migration.
  • Less migration means less urbanization, which means less growth—and possibly still more pessimism and risk aversion.
  • If the waning of the family requires China to build a huge social welfare state over the coming generation, as we surmise it will, Beijing would have that much less wherewithal for influencing events abroad through economic diplomacy and defense policy.
  • By 2050 living parents and in-laws will outnumber children for middle-aged Chinese men and women. Thus exigency may overturn basic familial arrangements that have long been taken for granted. The focus of the family in China will necessarily turn from the rearing of the young to the care of the old.
  • Autocracies are typically tolerant of casualties—but maybe not in the only-child China of today and the decades ahead.
  • Failure to contemplate the implications of the coming changes in Chinese family structure could prove a costly blind spot for the Communist Party. Blind spots expose governments to the risk of strategic surprise. The consequences of social, economic and political risks tend to be greatest when states aren’t prepared for them.
Javier E

At the China-Russia Border, the Xi-Putin Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-russia-china-ukraine-5c588831

china russia relationship partnership tension

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • The meeting in Moscow this week between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to showcase what they have declared a partnership with “no limits” between their countries. Beneath the surface are economic, political, cultural and historical divisions that undercut the relationship.
  • Russia seeks to disrupt the international order, including through military action. The International Criminal Court last week issued an arrest warrant against Mr. Putin for war crimes. China, which reached its economic stature through the status quo, seeks changes that further its interests, complicating the binational collaboration,
  • In many ways, the Chinese and Russian economies are highly complementary. Russia exports natural resources China needs to power its industrial economy. China sells goods that Russian consumers want. On the energy front in particular, Chinese purchases of oil and gas since the invasion of Ukraine have helped Russia weather Western sanctions.
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  • China-Russia relations are far from a “monolithic bloc,” Zhao Long, a scholar at China’s Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, wrote in a recent paper. “In Beijing’s vision, it never should become one.”
  • One exhibit depicts the killing of thousands of Chinese in the region by Russians in 1900. Over a loudspeaker, a narrator concludes that Russia-China relations were today peaceful, but that China must remain vigilant. “We can never forget this history,” the narrator said. “If you lag behind, you will get beaten.”  
  • A long and sometimes violent history between Russia and China has left a legacy of distrust. A museum in Heihe is dedicated to what it depicts as centuries of aggressions by Russian soldiers against the Chinese
  • Mr. Xi’s language during his Moscow visit will be closely parsed by Western officials and security analysts seeking to understand China’s intentions for Russia. The frayed ends of China-Russia economic ties are, by contrast, out in the open.
  • Another newly opened bridge, in Heihe, had been highly touted in Chinese state media. It didn’t appear last week to be an economic boon. On the China side of the bridge, two Russian truck drivers, hauling what appeared to be metal shelving, idled near a customs checkpoint. Trucks traveling from China to Russia crossed the bridge at a rate of roughly one every five minutes and even less frequently in the other direction.
  • Before the invasion of Ukraine, most China-Russia trade was settled in U.S. dollars or Euros, an arrangement upended by Western sanctions. Chinese companies now struggle to get paid. One survey by local central-bank officials of Chinese companies that trade with Russia found that after the invasion of Ukraine, 60% of them had suspended operations or were barely scraping by because of logistical and financial hurdles from the sanctions.
  • Russia’s growing dependency on the yuan makes Russia more vulnerable to Chinese actions should relations between the two countries falter
  • “Russian leaders like to emphasize the unprecedented strategic cooperation between the two countries,” Ms. Prokopenko wrote in February for the website of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Yet in reality, this cooperation makes Moscow increasingly dependent on Beijing.” 
Javier E

Before Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the Fed Spotted Big Problems - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...fed-silicon-valley-bank.html

bank supervision fed collapse silicon valley

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • In 2021, a Fed review of the growing bank found serious weaknesses in how it was handling key risks. Supervisors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which oversaw Silicon Valley Bank, issued six citations. Those warnings, known as “matters requiring attention” and “matters requiring immediate attention,” flagged that the firm was doing a bad job of ensuring that it would have enough easy-to-tap cash on hand in the event of trouble.
  • But the bank did not fix its vulnerabilities. By July 2022, Silicon Valley Bank was in a full supervisory review — getting a more careful look — and was ultimately rated deficient for governance and controls. It was placed under a set of restrictions that prevented it from growing through acquisitions
  • It became clear to the Fed that the firm was using bad models to determine how its business would fare as the central bank raised rates: Its leaders were assuming that higher interest revenue would substantially help their financial situation as rates went up, but that was out of step with reality.
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  • By early 2023, Silicon Valley Bank was in what the Fed calls a “horizontal review,” an assessment meant to gauge the strength of risk management. That checkup identified additional deficiencies — but at that point, the bank’s days were numbered
  • The picture that is emerging is one of a bank whose leaders failed to plan for a realistic future and neglected looming financial and operational problems, even as they were raised by Fed supervisors. For instance, according to a person familiar with the matter, executives at the firm were told of cybersecurity problems both by internal employees and by the Fed — but ignored the concerns.
  • Still, the extent of known issues at the bank raises questions about whether Fed bank examiners or the Fed’s Board of Governors in Washington could have done more to force the institution to address weaknesses
  • Other worries center on whether Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, allowed too much deregulation during the Trump administration. Randal K. Quarles, who was the Fed’s vice chair for supervision from 2017 to 2021, carried out a 2018 regulatory rollback law in an expansive way that some onlookers at the time warned would weaken the banking system.
  • Typically, banks with fewer than $250 billion in assets are excluded from the most onerous parts of bank oversight — and that has been even more true since a “tailoring” law that passed in 2018 during the Trump administration and was put in place by the Fed in 2019. Those changes left smaller banks with less stringent rules.
  • Silicon Valley Bank was still below that threshold, and its collapse underlined that even banks that are not large enough to be deemed globally systemic can cause sweeping problems in the American banking system.
  • Some of the concerns center on the fact that the bank’s chief executive, Greg Becker, sat on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s board of directors until March 10. While board members do not play a role in bank supervision, the optics of the situation are bad.
  • “One of the most absurd aspects of the Silicon Valley bank failure is that its CEO was a director of the same body in charge of regulating it,” Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, wrote on Twitter on Saturday, announcing that he would be “introducing a bill to end this conflict of interest by banning big bank CEOs from serving on Fed boards.
  • “It’s a failure of supervision,” said Peter Conti-Brown, an expert in financial regulation and a Fed historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “The thing we don’t know is if it was a failure of supervisors.”
  • Mr. Powell typically defers to the Fed’s supervisory vice chair on regulatory matters, and he did not vote against those changes. Lael Brainard, then a Fed governor and now a top White House economic adviser, did vote against some of the tweaks — and flagged them as potentially dangerous in dissenting statements.
Javier E

All the Trump Indictments Everywhere All at Once - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...ump-indictments-everywhere-all

corruption gop maga electorate trump culture politics

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Here’s Furman:There’s what economists think people should think about inflation—and what people actually think about inflation are different. . . .Inflation has big winners and losers. So surprise inflation helps debtors and hurts creditors. And there are probably tens of millions of people in our economy who have benefited from inflation. Maybe it’s a business that was able to raise prices more. Maybe a worker who was able to get a bigger raise. Maybe it’s someone whose mortgage is now worth 10 percent less.But there are not tens of millions of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation. In fact, I’m not sure there are tens of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation.And so it has these winners and losers. The losers are very aware of their losses. The winners are completely oblivious to their gains.So then as a policymaker, do you want to sort of make people happy? Or do you want to sort of do what you think is in their economic and financial interests? And that to me is not obvious.
  • Oh it’s obvious to me. The People are the problem.But they’re a persistent problem and until the AIs replace us, The People aren’t going away. So given this constraint, I’m not sure that an optimal solution is ever going to be politically possible in American democracy. The country is too fractured. Our political institutions too compromised.
  • so if you work from the assumption that we’re going to shoot wide of the mark in one direction or the other, I’d still rather be on the Trump-Biden side of having done too much, and dealing with our attendant problems than the Bush-Obama side of having done too little.
Javier E

How Sunak may succeed in stopping the boats - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...n-stopping-the-boats-d9hwpzll9

immigration control policy history uk

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • After all, much as its backbenchers huff and puff, even Labour has admitted an important principle: there is a limit to the number of refugees this country can accept.
  • In parliament on Monday, the shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock, said explicitly that “safe and legal routes” for immigration must be “capped” and “based on prioritisation”
  • With an estimated 32.5 million refugees in the world, this ought to be a statement of the obvious
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  • yet it is one the government’s opponents are always reluctant to admit because its logical corollary is that there will always be an incentive for those not included under the cap to try their luck in the Channel — unless they perceive a high risk of deportation. You cannot stop the boats while taking in the passengers.
  • Sunak’s policy, despite its logic, faces a tortuous road ahead. To ministers’ surprise, they won their case on the Rwanda scheme in British courts last year, only to have the first flight blocked in the middle of the night by an ECHR judge.
  • Yet as the home secretary recently suggested, the government still believes it can get its way. The ECHR, despite its reputation for inflexible and expansionist application of human rights law, can be expedient when its institutional reach is under threat
  • In 2012, for example, after an unmanageable surge of cases that provoked European governments’ wrath, the ECHR agreed to limit itself to intervening only where it believed national courts had not done their jobs properly. Its caseload quickly shrank.
  • With the UK outside the EU and therefore able to leave the ECHR with relative ease, the court’s survival instinct has kicked in. Its officials are said to have been taken aback by the hostility to its Rwanda injunction last June and are in a mood to compromise to avoid the risk of losing the UK altogether
  • Even assuming the legislation takes full effect, it may not work. Migrant arrivals are expected to reach 65,000 this year. The asylum backlog stands at 166,000 and counting, hotels are full to bursting and the government hasn’t yet sent a single person to Rwanda, which in turn hasn’t built the capacity to house more than 200. No wonder most think the policy is doomed.
  • Between the prospect of being deported, housed in unappealing lodgings such as barges and RAF bases rather than hotels, and caught by the French, who are being given large sums of money to step up their coastal policing, the government is hoping it can make trying to cross the Channel sufficiently unattractive
  • There has been a sharp drop in the number of Albanians arriving on our beaches since the government signed a co-operation agreement with Tirana, stepped up deportations and publicised both.
  • evidence from Canada in 2016, where a publicity campaign highlighting the deportation of failed asylum seekers from Hungary led to a dramatic drop in arrivals.
  • It all depends on what’s required to deter people from crossing. The aim, after all, isn’t to run a constant, high-volume travel service to Kigali, but to stop people from getting on boats in the first place. This may already be working
  • This leaves the final piece, which is the expansion of “safe and legal routes” to the UK. It has taken months of awkward media interviews, select committee hearings and the threat of a backbench rebellion, but the government has finally accepted it needs a better system for taking in legitimate refugees.
  • One way is a broader, Ukraine-style scheme, so households can bring in refugees if they agree to take them in
  • Another is to allow for more extended family reunifications for refugees who have relatives here
  • And another would be to expand the practice of assessing and accepting people at UN camps, like the Syrian resettlement scheme
  • After years of ineffectual government under Theresa May and Boris Johnson, we have become used to the idea that ministers never have any ability or intention of keeping their promises
Javier E

Can the U.S. See the Truth About China? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...keyu-jin-interview.html

china policy history us rivalry

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • “We’re in an incredibly dangerous world right now,” says Jin, who was born in Beijing and earned her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and whose father, Jin Liqun, served as a vice minister of finance for China. “Without more effort made to understand each other’s perspectives, peaceful coexistence may not be possible.”
  • China’s current economic challenge is to overcome its middle-income trap,11 The term for when wages rise in a country but then stall as a result of higher costs and declining competitiveness. something that the United States might not relate to. It’s not all about displacing the United States as global hegemon, which would come with a huge amount of burdens and responsibilities. And I don’t think China is ready or willing to do that. To see China solely as trying to displace the United States is only going to stoke more fears
  • That’s not to say that the economic means justify the unfortunate circumstances. But China is a country that has done the most economically for the most number of people in the shortest amount of time. If you look at the new generation, they are open-minded on a whole range of issues, so much more than their parents. They care about animal rights, worker rights, social inequity. That shift gives us hope that China will progress.
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  • What specific things, besides stopping industrial espionage, could China do to increase trust? Giving American companies, financial institutions, more opportunities to make money, opening up its various sectors more aggressively — that will allow more dialogue, more cooperation
  • That’s one thing. Second, it’s understandable for the United States to push back on some of the industrial espionage.
  • What are the biggest blind spots the Chinese leadership has when it comes to understanding American policies toward the country? I think the Chinese leaders have this notion that the United States is doing everything it can to try to stop China from growing. Or they believe that whatever China does is not going to elicit more trust.
  • the leadership is convinced that there’s no way out of this. I’m not sure that is the case. And then also, the United States thinks that China wants to displace it.
  • That “despite” is doing a lot of work. It reminds me of that line, “Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” I was trying to say that those are all things that we believe to be essential for sustained economic growth. I was saying that despite all that, China still performed well.
  • you also write about in the book: “Despite the limits China imposes on free-market forces, the absence of a free press, independent judicial system and the individual right to vote, we see there are other mechanisms in place to respond to the needs of its citizens and to address the threats posed by inequality.”
Javier E

Elon Musk, Other AI Experts Call for Pause in Technology's Development - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...technologys-development-56327f

ai control competition competitiveness

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Calls for a pause clash with a broad desire among tech companies and startups to double down on so-called generative AI, a technology capable of generating original content to human prompts. Buzz around generative AI exploded last fall after OpenAI unveiled a chatbot with its ability to perform functions like providing lengthy answers and producing computer code with humanlike sophistication. 
  • Microsoft has embraced the technology for its Bing search engine and other tools. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has deployed a rival system, and companies such as Adobe Inc., Zoom Video Communications Inc. and Salesforce Inc. have also introduced advanced AI tools.
  • “A race starts today,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last month. “We’re going to move, and move fast.”
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  • “It is unfortunate to frame this as an arms race,” Mr. Tegmark said. “It is more of a suicide race. It doesn’t matter who is going to get there first. It just means that humanity as a whole could lose control of its own destiny.” 
  • Messrs. Musk and Wozniak have both voiced concerns about AI technology. Mr. Musk on Wednesday tweeted that developers of the advanced AI technology “will not heed this warning, but at least it was said.”
  • Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta Platforms Inc., on Tuesday tweeted that he didn’t sign the letter because he disagreed with its premise. 
  • Mr. Mostaque, Stability AI’s CEO, said in a tweet Wednesday that although he signed the letter, he didn’t agree with a six-month pause. “It has no force but will kick off an important discussion that will hopefully bring more transparency & governance to an opaque area.”
  • Mr. Tegmark said many companies feel “crazy commercial pressures” to add advanced AI technology into their products. A six-month pause would allow the industry “breathing room,” without disadvantaging ones that opt to move carefully
  • The letter said a pause should be declared publicly and be verifiable and all key actors in the space should participate. “If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium,” it said
  • AI labs and experts can use this time to develop a set of shared safety rules for advanced AI design that should be audited and overseen by outside experts, the authors wrote.
  • “I don’t think we can afford to just go forward and break things,” said Mr. Bengio, who shared a 2018 Turing award for inventing the systems that modern AI is built on. “We do need to take time to think through this collectively.”
Javier E

Opinion | Colleges Should Be More Than Just Vocational Schools - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-policy-higher-education.html

liberal arts humanities college universities citizenship vocation technical

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Between 2013 and 2016, across the United States, 651 foreign language programs were closed, while majors in classics, the arts and religion have frequently been eliminated or, at larger schools, shrunk. The trend extends from small private schools like Marymount to the Ivy League and major public universities, and shows no sign of stopping.
  • The steady disinvestment in the liberal arts risks turning America’s universities into vocational schools narrowly focused on professional training. Increasingly, they have robust programs in subjects like business, nursing and computer science but less and less funding for and focus on departments of history, literature, philosophy, mathematics and theology.
  • America’s higher education system was founded on the liberal arts and the widespread understanding that mass access to art, culture, language and science were essential if America was to thrive. But a bipartisan coalition of politicians and university administrators is now hard at work attacking it — and its essential role in public life — by slashing funding, cutting back on tenure protections, ending faculty governance and imposing narrow ideological limits on what can and can’t be taught.
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  • For decades — and particularly since the 2008 recession — politicians in both parties have mounted a strident campaign against government funding for the liberal arts. They express a growing disdain for any courses not explicitly tailored to the job market and outright contempt for the role the liberal arts-focused university has played in American society.
  • Former Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on higher education in Wisconsin formed the bedrock of many later conservative attacks. His work severely undermined a state university system that was once globally admired. Mr. Walker reportedly attempted to cut phrases like “the search for truth” and “public service” — as well as a call to improve “the human condition” — from the University of Wisconsin’s official mission statement
  • But blue states also regularly cut higher education funding, sometimes with similar rationales. In 2016, Matt Bevin, the Republican governor of Kentucky at the time, suggested that students majoring in the humanities shouldn’t receive state funding. The current secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, a Democrat, seems to barely disagree. “Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global work force,” he wrote in December.
  • Federal funding reflects those priorities. The National Endowment for the Humanities’ budget in 2022 was just $180 million. The National Science Foundation’s budget was about 50 times greater, having nearly doubled within two decades.
  • What were students meant to think? As the cost of higher education rose, substantially outpacing inflation since 1990, students followed funding — and what politicians repeatedly said about employability — into fields like business and computer science. Even majors in mathematics were hit by the focus on employability.
  • Universities took note and began culling. One recent study showed that history faculty across 28 Midwestern universities had dropped by almost 30 percent in roughly the past decade. Classics programs, including the only one at a historically Black college, were often simply eliminated.
  • Higher education, with broad study in the liberal arts, is meant to create not merely good workers but good citizens
  • this is a grim and narrow view of the purpose of higher education, merely as a tool to train workers as replaceable cogs in America’s economic machine, to generate raw material for its largest companies.
  • Citizens with knowledge of their history and culture are better equipped to lead and participate in a democratic society; learning in many different forms of knowledge teaches the humility necessary to accept other points of view in a pluralistic and increasingly globalized society.
  • In 1947, a presidential commission bemoaned an education system where a student “may have gained technical or professional training” while being “only incidentally, if at all, made ready for performing his duties as a man, a parent and a citizen.” The report recommended funding to give as many Americans as possible the sort of education that would “give to the student the values, attitudes, knowledge and skills that will equip him to live rightly and well in a free society,” which is to say the liberal arts as traditionally understood. The funding followed.
  • The report is true today, too
  • the American higher education system is returning to what it once was: liberal arts finishing schools for the wealthy and privileged, and vocational training for the rest.
  • Reversing this decline requires a concerted effort by both government and educational actors
  • renewed funding for the liberal arts — and especially the humanities — would support beleaguered departments and show students that this study is valuable and valued.
  • At the university level, instituting general education requirements would guarantee that even students whose majors have nothing to do with the humanities emerged from college equipped to think deeply and critically across disciplines.
  • Liberal arts professors must also be willing to leave their crumbling ivory towers and the parochial debates about their own career path, in order to engage directly in public life
Javier E

Is Humanism a Real Philosophy? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673631

humanism philosophy AI optimism secularism

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • What her book set out to defend is an intellectual tradition, admittedly ill-choate, that stands for reason, the ennobling potential of education, and the centrality of the “human dimension of life,” as opposed to systems and abstract theories.
  • ut in the intervening months, advanced chatbots descended; so did the possibility that they might soon imperil the whole of that enterprise. Automation stands poised to displace the production of essays and scholarly inquiry. It’s suddenly plausible to imagine that freethinking, that tradition of poking and prodding at all fixed ideas and institutions, will drift into obsolescence, because an oracular machine will instantly spit back answers to life’s questions with an aura of scientific authority.
  • Progressives in the academy have bludgeoned humanism’s fundamental precepts. Gone is the old motto “I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me,” replaced by the fetishization of “lived experience.
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  • Meanwhile, STEM’s conquest of the university has wrecked old humanistic homes. As Nathan Heller’s recent article in The New Yorker documented, the English department is now an unpopulated, undesired version of its former self.
  • That her book doesn’t feel terribly urgent perhaps speaks to a fundamental weakness within humanism.
  • Bakewell self-identifies as a stalwart of humanism, but even she concedes that this is an elusive label. “Humanism is personal, and it is a semantic cloud of meanings and implications, none attachable to any particular theorist or practitioner.” Without a pithy definition or clear doctrine, she can manage only to narrow humanism down to three characteristics: freethinking, hope, and inquiry
  • By setting aside all thoughts of the afterlife, the humanist can focus on making the most of earthly existence, pursuing happiness and mitigating suffering.
  • the belief that people can feel genuine solidarity for one another, despite their differences—but this is a paper-thin morality that hardly survives the skepticism that Bakewell celebrates.
  • she would clearly like humanism to be more substantial than it actually is. The ism suffix in Bakewell’s subject is, in fact, a bit of misdirection, because it implies a political idea or perhaps a coherent worldview
  • Humanism is not a synonym for liberalism or philosophical pragmatism. It more accurately describes a temperament
  • he humanistic canon she constructs sprawls to include the likes of David Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, John Stuart Mill, Zora Neale Hurston, and Thomas Mann.
  • It can sometimes be a struggle to see the commonalities, other than some degree of skepticism about religion, an underlying decency, and a general cheeriness in the midst of dreary struggles against the prevailing politics of their times.
  • While it’s true that freethinking is the enemy of authoritarianism, humanism suffers from a tendency to oversell itself. It doesn’t have a good track record of effectively standing up to facism,
  • in the current American context, right-wing ethno-nationalists have cynically draped themselves in the trappings of humanism. The likes of Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson present themselves as the true defenders of freethinking and open inquiry.
  • Self-doubt, a cheerful disposition, and a joyous pursuit of knowledge are qualities that might make for wise leaders, but can also produce hapless political combatants. Or, as Mann once declared: “In all humanism there is an element of weakness, which … may be its ruin.”
  • humanism is more like religion than Bakewell is prepared to admit. At its best, it is a secular faith. Its universalist spirit and open-mindedness are ethical stances. Its wishful optimism about human possibility can provide spiritual nourishment in a fallen world.
  • This makes it a style of dissidence well suited for the age of AI. The humanist becomes the contrarian who insists on maintaining that which automation seeks to render obsolete: the faculties of the independent mind, the very core of intellectual personhood.
Javier E

ChatGPT AI Emits Metric Tons of Carbon, Stanford Report Says - 0 views

gizmodo.com/ons-stanford-report-1850288635

carbon ai training report emissions

shared by Javier E on 08 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • A new report released today by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence estimates the amount of energy needed to train AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-3, which powers the world-famous ChatGPT, could power an average American’s home for hundreds of years. Of the three AI models reviewed in the research, OpenAI’s system was by far the most energy-hungry.
  • “If we’re just scaling without any regard to the environmental impacts, we can get ourselves into a situation where we are doing more harm than good with machine learning models,” Stanford researcher ​​Peter Henderson said last year. “We really want to mitigate that as much as possible and bring net social good.”
  • OpenAI’s model reportedly released 502 metric tons of carbon during its training. To put that in perspective, that’s 1.4 times more carbon than Gopher and a whopping 20.1 times more than BLOOM. GPT-3 also required the most power consumption of the lot at 1,287 MWh.
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  • If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because we basically saw this same environmental dynamic play out several years ago with tech’s last big obsession: Crypto and web3. In that case, Bitcoin emerged as the industry’s obvious environmental sore spot due to the vast amounts of energy needed to mine coins in its proof of work model. Some estimates suggest Bitocin alone requires more energy every year than Norway’s annual electricity consumption.
  • rs of criticism from environmental activists however led the crypto industry to make some changes. Ethereum, the second largest currency on the blockchain, officially switched last year to a proof of stake model which supporters claim could reduce its power usage by over 99%. Other smaller coins similarly were designed with energy efficiency in mind. In the grand scheme of things, large language models are still in their infancy and it’s far from certain how its environmental report card will play out.
Javier E

We've Lost the True Meaning of Cynicism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...621314

life lessons cynicism history culture ethic satisfaction discipline self-sufficiency cosmopolitan

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morally bankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates American culture.
  • Since 1964, the percentage of Americans who say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” has fallen 53 points, from 77 to 24 percent. Sentiments about other institutions in society follow similar patterns.
  • the modern cynical outlook on life is terrible for your well-being. It makes you less healthy, less happy, less successful, and less respected by others.
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  • Instead of assuming that everyone and everything sucks, we should all live like the ancient Greek cynics, who rebelled against convention in a search for truth and enlightenment.
  • original cynicism was a philosophical movement likely founded by Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, and popularized by Diogenes of Sinope around the fifth century B.C. It was based on a refusal to accept the assumptions and habits that discourage people from questioning conventional dogmas, and thus hold us back from the search for deep wisdom and happiness.
  • Modern cynics also suffer poorer health than others. In 1991, researchers studying middle-aged men found that a cynical outlook significantly increased the odds of death from both cancer and heart disease—possibly because the cynics consumed more alcohol and tobacco than the non-cynics
  • The modern cynic rejects things out of hand (“This is stupid”), while the ancient cynic simply withholds judgment (“This may be right or wrong”)
  • “Modern cynicism [has] come to describe something antithetical to its previous meanings, a psychological state hardened against both moral reflection and intellectual persuasion,”
  • We can most definitely conclude, however, that modern cynicism is detrimental. In one 2009 study, researchers examining negative cynical attitudes found that people who scored high in this characteristic on a personality test were roughly five times more likely to suffer from depression later in life. In other words, that smirking 25-year-old is at elevated risk of turning into a depressed 44-year-old.
  • Whereas a modern cynic might say, for instance, that the president is an idiot and thus his policies aren’t worth considering, the ancient cynic would examine each policy impartially.
  • cynical attitudes lead to being treated disrespectfully—possibly because cynics tend to show disrespect to others, leading to a vicious cycle
  • Scholars writing in 2015 found that, even after correcting for gender, education, and age, the least cynical people saw an average monthly increase in income of about $300 over nine years
  • The most cynical saw no significant income increase at all. The authors explain this pattern by noting that cynics “are more likely to forgo valuable opportunities for cooperation and consequently less likely to reap the benefits of joint efforts and mutual help.” In other words, being a misanthrope is costly.
  • you shouldn’t merely try to avoid cynicism in all its forms. Instead, work to become a true cynic, in its original sense.
  • The ancient cynics strove to live by a set of principles characterized by mindfulness, detachment from worldly cravings, the radical equality of all people, and healthy living
  • If this sounds like Christianity or even Buddhism, it should:
  • in the following centuries, the ideas of cynicism and its offshoot stoicism heavily influenced early Christian thought.
  • To pivot from the modern to the ancient, I recommend focusing each day on several original cynical concepts, none of which condemns the world but all of which lead us to question, and in many cases reject, worldly conventions and practices.
  • 1. Eudaimonia (“satisfaction”)
  • The ancient cynics knew that lasting satisfaction cannot be derived from a constant struggle for possessions, pleasures, power, or prestige.
  • Happiness can come only from detaching ourselves from the world’s false promises.
  • Make a list of worldly rewards that are pulling at you—such as a luxury item or the admiration of others—and say out loud, “I will not be subjugated by this desire.”
  • 2. Askesis (“discipline”)
  • We cannot clear our mind of confusion and obfuscation until we stop anesthetizing ourselves, whether it be with drugs and alcohol or idle distractions from real life
  • Each day, forgo a detrimental substance or habit. Instead of watching television after dinner, go for a walk. Instead of a cocktail, have a glass of water
  • This discipline promises to strengthen your will and help you adopt routines that improve your happiness.
  • 3. Autarkeia (“self-sufficiency”)
  • Relying on the world—especially on getting approval from the world—makes equanimity and true freedom impossible.
  • Refuse to accept your craving for the high opinions of others. Think of a way that you habitually seek validation, be it for your looks, your cleverness in school, or your material prosperity. Make a plan to ignore this need completely
  • Note that this is not a modern-cynical practice of rejecting everything about the world; rather, you will simply be refusing to accept its conventional standards.
  • 4. Kosmopolites (“cosmopolitanism”)
  • Seeing ourselves as better or worse than others sets us against one another and makes love and friendship difficult, which is self-destructive.
  • Start each day by reminding yourself that the world belongs equally to everyone, and resolve not to treat anyone differently because of her status
  • he modern cynic is miserable because he is enchained to the outside world, which oppresses him because it is corrupt
  • The ancient cynic, by contrast, is happy—not because she thinks the outside world is perfect (it obviously is not) but because she chooses to focus on the integrity of her interior world, over which she has control.
Javier E

Opinion | The Left's Fever Is Breaking - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...left-activism.html

progressive woke excess backlash culture history crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • In June the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: “It’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.”
  • That’s why the decision by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party, to speak out about the left’s self-sabotaging impulse is so significant. Mitchell, who has roots in the Black Lives Matter movement, has a great deal of credibility; he can’t be dismissed as a dinosaur threatened by identity politics
  • But as the head of an organization with a very practical devotion to building electoral power, he has a sharp critique of the way some on the left deploy identity as a trump card. “Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces,
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  • Among many progressive leaders, though, it’s been received eagerly and gratefully. It “helped to put language to tensions and trends facing our movement organizations,” Christopher Torres, an executive director of the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice institute, said at a Tuesday webinar devoted to the article.
  • Mitchell’s piece systematically lays out some of the assertions and assumptions that have paralyzed progressive outfits.
  • Among them are maximalism, or “considering anything less than the most idealistic position” a betrayal; a refusal to distinguish between discomfort and oppression; and reflexive hostility to hierarchy.
  • He criticizes the insistence “that change on an interpersonal or organizational level must occur before it is sought or practiced on a larger scale,” an approach that keeps activists turned inward, along with the idea that progressive organizations should be places of therapeutic healing.
  • All the problems Mitchell elucidates have been endemic to the left for a long time. Destructive left-wing purity spirals are at least as old as the French Revolution.
  • It’s not surprising that such counterproductive tendencies became particularly acute during the pandemic, when people were terrified, isolated and, crucially, very online
  • “On balance, I think social media has been bad for democracy,” Mitchell told me.
  • as Mitchell wrote in his essay, social media platforms reward shallow polemics, “self-aggrandizement, competition and conflict.” These platforms can give power to the powerless, but they also bestow it on the most disruptive and self-interested people in any group, those likely to take their complaints to Twitter rather than to their supervisors or colleagues.
  • The gamification of discourse through likes and retweets, he said, “flies in the face of building solidarity, of being serious about difference, of engaging in meaningful debate and struggle around complex ideas.”
  • The publication of “Building Resilient Organizations” and the conversation around it are signs that the fever Mitchell describes is beginning to break.
  • that doesn’t mean the dysfunctions Mitchell identified will go away on their own once people start spending more time together. He puts much of the onus on leaders to be clear with employees about the missions of their organizations and their decision-making processes and to take emotional maturity into account in hiring decisions.
  • the ultimate aim of social justice work should not be the refinement of one’s own environment. “Building resilient and strong organizations is not the end goal,” said Mitchell. “It’s a means to building power so we can defeat an authoritarian movement that wants to take away democracy.” Here’s to remembering that in 2023.
Javier E

A Lesson in Intellectual Humility - 0 views

newsletters.theatlantic.com/...esson-in-intellectual-humility

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Burnham demonstrates that legal institutions were central to sustaining, extending, and legitimizing the violence, at both the local and national levels.
Javier E

Elon. Trump. Resentment. - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672030

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, nationalism had its turn at spurring us to destroy ourselves; in later years, the struggle with monstrous ideologies killed tens of millions and brought us repeatedly to the brink of nuclear war.
  • Today, however, social and cultural resentment is driving millions of people into a kind of mass psychosis.
  • Prominent and wealthy Americans such as Trump and Musk, along with the former White House guru Steve Bannon and the investor Peter Thiel, are at war not so much with the American political system, whose institutions they are trying to capture, but with a dominant culture that they seem to believe is withholding its respect from them. Politics is merely the instrument of revenge.
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  • As one Twitter wag noted, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is like Elmer Fudd buying a platform full of Bugs Bunnies.)
  • There is one more example of such resentment, and it’s a lot less funny. Russia is an entire nation seized with a massive inferiority complex, and the Russian regime is giving vent to that resentment in the continual murder of Ukrainians
  • As the British journalist Simon Kuper noted a few years ago, anti-system parties in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States are powered not by struggling workers, but by the “comfortably off populist voter” who has “never been invited into the fast lane of life: the top universities, the biggest firms, the major corporations.”
  • These citizens think that the disconnect between material success and their perceived lack of status must be punished, and if that means voting for election deniers and conspiracy theorists, so be it.
  • Trump and those like him managed to get a ticket in the swankiest carriage on the train, only to find themselves sitting alone. And if that’s how it’s going to be … well, the only answer is to derail the entire thing, from locomotive to caboose, and make everyone suffer.
  • the brutality of the Russians on the battlefield against their Slavic kin is very much rooted in resentment: Why do you live in freedom? Why are you living better than us?
Javier E

The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...2022-the-crypto-story

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • the technological accomplishment of Bitcoin is that it invented a decentralized way to create scarcity on computers. Bitcoin demonstrated a way for me to send you a computer message so that you’d have it and I wouldn’t, to move items of computer information between us in a way that limited their supply and transferred possession.
  • The wild thing about Bitcoin is not that Satoshi invented a particular way for people to send numbers to one another and call them payments. It’s that people accepted the numbers as payments.
  • That social fact, that Bitcoin was accepted by many millions of people as having a lot of value, might be the most impressive thing about Bitcoin, much more than the stuff about hashing.
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  • Socially, cryptocurrency is a coordination game; people want to have the coin that other people want to have, and some sort of abstract technical equivalence doesn’t make one cryptocurrency a good substitute for another. Social acceptance—legitimacy—is what makes a cryptocurrency valuable, and you can’t just copy the code for that.
  • A thing that worked exactly like Bitcoin but didn’t have Bitcoin’s lineage—didn’t descend from Satoshi’s genesis block and was just made up by some copycat—would have the same technology but none of the value.
  • Here’s another generalization of Bitcoin: Satoshi made up an arbitrary token that trades electronically for some price. The price turns out to be high and volatile. The price of an arbitrary token is … arbitrary?
  • it’s very interesting as a matter of finance theory. Modern portfolio theory demonstrates that adding an uncorrelated asset to a portfolio can improve returns and reduce risk.
  • To the extent that the price of Bitcoin 1) mostly goes up, though with lots of ups and downs along the way, and 2) goes up and down for reasons that are arbitrary and mysterious and not tied to, like, corporate earnings or the global economy, then Bitcoin is interesting to institutional investors.
  • In practice, it turns out that the price of Bitcoin is pretty correlated with the stock market, especially tech stocks
  • Bitcoin hasn’t been a particularly effective inflation hedge: Its price rose during years when US inflation was low, and it’s fallen this year as inflation has increased.
  • The right model of crypto prices might be that they go up during broad speculative bubbles when stock prices go up, and then they go down when those bubbles pop. That’s not a particularly appealing story for investors looking to diversify.
  • one important possibility is that the first generalization of Bitcoin, that an arbitrary tradeable electronic token can become valuable just because people want it to, permanently broke everyone’s brains about all of finance.
  • Before the rise of Bitcoin, the conventional thing to say about a share of stock was that its price represented the market’s expectation of the present value of the future cash flows of the business.
  • But Bitcoin has no cash flows; its price represents what people are willing to pay for it. Still, it has a high and fluctuating market price; people have gotten rich buying Bitcoin. So people copied that model, and the creation of and speculation on pure, abstract, scarce electronic tokens became a big business.
Javier E

The new tech worldview | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...the-new-tech-worldview

tech guru theories pundit culture innovation western civilization ai

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Sam Altman is almost supine
  • the 37-year-old entrepreneur looks about as laid-back as someone with a galloping mind ever could. Yet the ceo of OpenAi, a startup reportedly valued at nearly $20bn whose mission is to make artificial intelligence a force for good, is not one for light conversation
  • Joe Lonsdale, 40, is nothing like Mr Altman. He’s sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley, dressed in linen with his hair slicked back. The tech investor and entrepreneur, who has helped create four unicorns plus Palantir, a data-analytics firm worth around $15bn that works with soldiers and spooks
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  • a “builder class”—a brains trust of youngish idealists, which includes Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, a payments firm valued at $74bn, and other (mostly white and male) techies, who are posing questions that go far beyond the usual interests of Silicon Valley’s titans. They include the future of man and machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of government.
  • They share other similarities. Business provided them with their clout, but doesn’t seem to satisfy their ambition
  • The number of techno-billionaires in America (Mr Collison included) has more than doubled in a decade.
  • ome of them, like the Medicis in medieval Florence, are keen to use their money to bankroll the intellectual ferment
  • The other is Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, whose essays on everything from cities to politics are considered required reading on tech campuses.
  • Mr Altman puts it more optimistically: “The iPhone and cloud computing enabled a Cambrian explosion of new technology. Some things went right and some went wrong. But one thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said ‘OK, now what?’”
  • A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset, making it resolutely upbeat
  • The question is: are the rest of them further evidence of the tech industry’s hubristic decadence? Or do they reflect the start of a welcome capacity for renewal?
  • Two well-known entrepreneurs from that era provided the intellectual seed capital for some of today’s techno nerds.
  • Mr Thiel, a would-be libertarian philosopher and investor
  • This cohort of eggheads starts from common ground: frustration with what they see as sluggish progress in the world around them.
  • In the 2000s Mr Thiel supported the emergence of a small community of online bloggers, self-named the “rationalists”, who were focused on removing cognitive biases from thinking (Mr Thiel has since distanced himself). That intellectual heritage dates even further back, to “cypherpunks”, who noodled about cryptography, as well as “extropians”, who believed in improving the human condition through life extensions
  • the rationalist movement has hit the mainstream. The result is a fascination with big ideas that its advocates believe goes beyond simply rose-tinted tech utopianism
  • A burgeoning example of this is “progress studies”, a movement that Mr Collison and Tyler Cowen, an economist and seer of the tech set, advocated for in an article in the Atlantic in 2019
  • Progress, they think, is a combination of economic, technological and cultural advancement—and deserves its own field of study
  • There are other examples of this expansive worldview. In an essay in 2021 Mr Altman set out a vision that he called “Moore’s Law for Everything”, based on similar logic to the semiconductor revolution. In it, he predicted that smart machines, building ever smarter replacements, would in the coming decades outcompete humans for work. This would create phenomenal wealth for some, obliterate wages for others, and require a vast overhaul of taxation and redistribution
  • His two bets, on OpenAI and nuclear fusion, have become fashionable of late—the former’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is all the rage. He has invested $375m in Helion, a company that aims to build a fusion reactor.
  • Mr Lonsdale, who shares a libertarian streak with Mr Thiel, has focused attention on trying to fix the shortcomings of society and government. In an essay this year called “In Defence of Us”, he argues against “historical nihilism”, or an excessive focus on the failures of the West.
  • With a soft spot for Roman philosophy, he has created the Cicero Institute in Austin that aims to inject free-market principles such as competition and transparency into public policy.
  • He is also bringing the startup culture to academia, backing a new place of learning called the University of Austin, which emphasises free speech.
  • All three have business ties to their mentors. As a teen, Mr Altman was part of the first cohort of founders in Mr Graham’s Y Combinator, which went on to back successes such as Airbnb and Dropbox. In 2014 he replaced him as its president, and for a while counted Mr Thiel as a partner (Mr Altman keeps an original manuscript of Mr Thiel’s book “Zero to One” in his library). Mr Thiel was also an early backer of Stripe, founded by Mr Collison and his brother, John. Mr Graham saw promise in Patrick Collison while the latter was still at school. He was soon invited to join Y Combinator. Mr Graham remains a fan: “If you dropped Patrick on a desert island, he would figure out how to reproduce the Industrial Revolution,”
  • While at university, Mr Lonsdale edited the Stanford Review, a contrarian publication co-founded by Mr Thiel. He went on to work for his mentor and the two men eventually helped found Palantir. He still calls Mr Thiel “a genius”—though he claims these days to be less “cynical” than his guru.
  • “The tech industry has always told these grand stories about itself,” says Adrian Daub of Stanford University and author of the book, “What Tech Calls Thinking”. Mr Daub sees it as a way of convincing recruits and investors to bet on their risky projects. “It’s incredibly convenient for their business models.”
  • Yet the impact could ultimately be positive. Frustrations with a sluggish society have encouraged them to put their money and brains to work on problems from science funding and the redistribution of wealth to entirely new universities. Their exaltation of science may encourage a greater focus on hard tech
  • Silicon Valley has shown an uncanny ability to reinvent itself in the past.
Javier E

A Hamline Adjunct Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job. - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ty-islam-prophet-muhammad.html

politics history culture policy muslim Mohammed image campus free speech education

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • University officials and administrators all declined interviews. But Dr. Miller, the school’s president, defended the decision in a statement.“To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith,” Dr. Miller’s statement said, adding, “It was important that our Muslim students, as well as all other students, feel safe, supported and respected both in and out of our classrooms.”
  • In a December interview with the school newspaper, the student who complained to the administration, Aram Wedatalla, described being blindsided by the image.
  • There are, however, a range of beliefs. Some Muslims distinguish between respectful depictions and mocking caricatures, while others do not subscribe to the restriction at all.
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  • The painting shown in Dr. López Prater’s class is in one of the earliest Islamic illustrated histories of the world, “A Compendium of Chronicles,” written during the 14th century by Rashid-al-Din (1247-1318).Shown regularly in art history classes, the painting shows a winged and crowned Angel Gabriel pointing at the Prophet Muhammad and delivering to him the first Quranic revelation. Muslims believe that the Quran comprises the words of Allah dictated to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel.
  • The image is “a masterpiece of Persian manuscript painting,” said Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan. It is housed at the University of Edinburgh; similar paintings have been on display at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And a sculpture of the prophet is at the Supreme Court.Dr. Gruber said that showing Islamic art and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad have become more common in academia, because of a push to “decolonize the canon” — that is, expand curriculum beyond a Western model.
  • Dr. Gruber, who wrote the essay in New Lines Magazine defending Dr. López Prater, said that studying Islamic art without the Compendium of Chronicles image “would be like not teaching Michaelangelo’s David.”
  • Yet, most Muslims believe that visual representations of Muhammad should not be viewed, even if the Quran does not explicitly prohibit them. The prohibition stems from the belief that an image of Muhammad could lead to worshiping the prophet rather than the god he served.
  • The administration, he said, “closed down conversation when they should have opened it up.”
  • Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, said he regularly shows images of the Prophet Muhammad in class and without Dr. López Prater’s opt-out mechanisms. He explains to his students that these images were works of devotion created by pious artists at the behest of devout rulers.“That’s the part I want my students to grapple with,” Dr. Safi said. “How does something that comes from the very middle of the tradition end up being received later on as something marginal or forbidden?”
  • Dr. López Prater, a self-described art nerd, said she knew about the potential for conflict on Oct. 6, when she began her online lecture with 30 or so students.She said she spent a few minutes explaining why she was showing the image, how different religions have depicted the divine and how standards change over time.“I do not want to present the art of Islam as something that is monolithic,” she said in an interview, adding that she had been shown the image as a graduate student. She also showed a second image, from the 16th century, which depicted Muhammad wearing a veil.
  • Four days after the class, Dr. López Prater was summoned to a video meeting with the dean of the college of liberal arts, Marcela Kostihova.
  • After the class ended, Ms. Wedatalla, a business major and president of the university’s Muslim Student Association, stuck around to voice her discomfort.Immediately afterward, Dr. López Prater sent an email to her department head, Allison Baker, about the encounter; she thought that Ms. Wedatalla might complain.Ms. Baker, the chair of the digital and studio art department, responded to the email four minutes later.“It sounded like you did everything right,” Ms. Baker said. “I believe in academic freedom so you have my support.”
  • As Dr. López Prater predicted, Ms. Wedatalla reached out to administrators. Dr. López Prater, with Ms. Baker’s help, wrote an apology, explaining that sometimes “diversity involves bringing contradicting, uncomfortable and coexisting truths into conversation with each other.”
  • Ms. Wedatalla declined an interview request, and did not explain why she had not raised concerns before the image was shown. But in an email statement, she said images of Prophet Muhammad should never be displayed, and that Dr. López Prater gave a trigger warning precisely because she knew such images were offensive to many Muslims. The lecture was so disturbing, she said, that she could no longer see herself in that course.
  • Dr. López Prater said that no one in class raised concerns, and there was no disrespectful commentary.
  • Dr. Kostihova compared showing the image to using a racial epithet for Black people, according to Dr. López Prater.“It was very clear to me that she had not talked to any art historians,” Dr. López Prater said.
  • A couple of weeks later, the university rescinded its offer to teach next semester.
  • Dr. López Prater said she was ready to move on. She had teaching jobs at other schools. But on Nov. 7, David Everett, the vice president for inclusive excellence, sent an email to all university employees, saying that certain actions taken in an online class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”
  • Dr. López Prater, who had only begun teaching at Hamline in the fall, said she felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over her head, but the shock soon gave way to “blistering anger at being characterized in those terms by somebody who I have never even met or spoken with.” She reached out to Dr. Gruber, who ended up writing the essay and starting the petition.
  • At the Dec. 8 forum, which was attended by several dozen students, faculty and administrators, Ms. Wedatalla described, often through tears, how she felt seeing the image.“Who do I call at 8 a.m.,” she asked, when “you see someone disrespecting and offending your religion?”Other Muslim students on the panel, all Black women, also spoke tearfully about struggling to fit in at Hamline. Students of color in recent years had protested what they called racist incidents; the university, they said, paid lip service to diversity and did not support students with institutional resources.
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