Links to Consider, 10/14
Heather Heying departs UATX; Sam Hammond on AI vs. legacy institutions; Matthew Archer and N.S. Lyons; Martin Gurri on the fate of cable TV
Take the students elsewhere, outside of the classroom, as much as possible. Do this early in knowing them. Go on a field trip somewhere without internet or cell service (it is still possible), and pose questions there, where nobody can google the answer. It is much more difficult to deny reality—to be in the throes of the woke—when in the Columbia River Gorge, than in a comfortable classroom. It is even more difficult to deny reality in the Amazon.
She has resigned from the board of the new University of Austin. She was hoping that it would be a bolder experiment, and that it would recognize the importance of helping students to understand science as a thought process.
Indeed, within a decade, ordinary people will have more capabilities than a CIA agent does today. You’ll be able to listen in on a conversation in an apartment across the street using the sound vibrations off a chip bag. You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of someone else in real time, allowing anyone to socially engineer their way into anything. Bots will slide into your DMs and have long, engaging conversations with you until it senses the best moment to send its phishing link.
As I have said before, I foresee an arms race between AI’s that can serve as impostors and AI’s that can detect impostors. Humans evolved skills at deception and at detecting deception. AI’s will develop those skills more quickly and, within a few years, beyond human capability.
interviews , who says that breaking the institutional grip of wokenesswould essentially require two things to happen at once, one bottom up and the other top down. From the bottom there would need to arise a distinct counter-culture that is explicitly anti-woke, and which – just as importantly – offers an alternative, manifestly superior, happier, and more meaningful way of life to that of the woke cult. This counter-culture would have to succeed in becoming the cool and attractive new “transgressive” mode of rebellion among younger generations. And, critically, this counter-culture would have to strongly appeal to the educated elite, not just function as an outgrowth of populism. Because what this counter-culture would have the greatest potential to accomplish is to essentially foster the growth of a new counter-elite within the woke’s own class base. I actually think this is already happening, which I consider rare cause for a little hope.
This would have to be combined, however, with exceptionally smart, focused, and determined political action from the top down aimed at fundamentally breaking the structural, legal, and institutional incentives that are primarily driving the wokeification of everything in American society (which America then exports around the world as a cultural product). That would necessarily have to begin with uprooting the explosive growth of the civil rights bureaucracy, including by repealing or amending the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988 and the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which together functionally made surrender to wokeness a legal requirement for any organization of even moderate size.
Pointer from Rob Henderson.
Audiences are surprisingly small. Fox, the 800-pound gorilla of cable news, constantly attacked by the left for its pernicious influence over the public, drew an “average total audience” of 2.3 million in August 2022. …
Fox and MSNBC have largely completed the transition to reality TV. All the top programs highlight talking heads, not news reports, thus reducing overhead to a minimum. The tone is apocalyptic and post-journalistic: it’s endlessly us, the freedom-loving masses, against them, our demonic oppressors, and snippets are shown to illustrate the malice and idiocy of the enemy. The audience is expected to hoot and cheer. In this way, political fanaticism is transmuted into entertainment fandom.
The key line of NS Lyons on Woke:
"it is material incentives, not true belief, that lead most people to convert to wokeism."
Those incentives include, so far, lots of status, which is not quite material yet is a direct incentive other than true belief. But then he speculates
"the chances of the political opposition in the United States having the competence, focus, discipline, and fortitude to actually accomplish this are currently close to zero."
As long as Trump is on the scene, I sadly agree.
Lyons is also astute in noting that institutions have no defense against female oriented claims for more empathy and compassion, and the need for emotional protection. Which is both a female strategy, but also goes back to Christian support for the weak and poor, deep & twisted root sof woke.
In thinking about those roots, related also to Christian communalism (almost communism), there is a huge element of prayer and stoic suffering, while helping each other as much as possible without violence. The twisting happens when they want the gov't or some authority to do the helping, and is willing to use violence - to stop the suffering.
This ties in with the discussed "technology-as-magic" fantasy, and " the dream of perfect individual autonomy, free of any and all constraints, that is the gospel of liberal modernity".
This is a false gospel, but very very attractive, especially to an elite class that is too numerous for true elite positions.
If you are correct about AI, it will be a technology shock greater than the internal combustion engine, nuclear energy, container ships, and the internet!