There are still some details to be worked out, but it looks as though I may be able to record my lectures on the use and abuse of formal methods in political philosophy and post them on YouTube. I will be starting probably in the second week of February so stay tuned.
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23 comments:
Wunderbar!
This morning on CBS Good Morning America they had a segment about the AI technology discussed in a prior thread which enables students to write computer generated essays about any topic and the concerns that it is raising in the academic community. Some school systems are banning its use. The professor who is in charge of the creative writing program at Harvard expressed the view that there is not sense fighting the technology, that the academic world is going to have to figure out a way to adapt to it and use it to advance education, e.g., teaching students how to use the technology as an editing tool. The developer of the technology stated that they are working on a way to imbed in a computer generated essay a code which will disclose that the essay was computer generated.
The program also had a tribute to President Johnson, who passed away 50 years ago today, at the age of 64. It reviewed his amazing accomplishments as a legislator, passing the most progressive statutes in our country since the New Deal, only to lose his popularity due to his escalation of the Vietnam War, culminating in his announcement that he would not seek the 1968 nomination of the Democratic Party. The commentator remarked that young people today know little about his legislative achievements, and know him only as a war monger. The segment brought back poignant memories of my college youth, and the traumatic events of the 19660s. 64 sounds pretty young to me now, though I thought of him as an old man at the time.
I would think that where the chatbot technology poses a threat/challenge is not so much in creative writing courses -- where presumably most students are motivated to write their own fiction and/or poetry unaided by technology -- but rather in courses that involve expository (not 'creative') writing, as so many college courses do (btw all Harvard first-year students have to take an expository writing course, a requirement that a good many other schools probably have too, though I don't know that for certain).
LFC,
I believe I may have miswritten when I referred to the Harvard professor as the head of the creative writing program at Harvard. She may well be the head of the expository writing program, since she did indeed state that firs-year students are require to take the class.
Ok, that wd make more sense.
LFC,
You underestimate above how competitive and cut throat the atmosphere among "creative writers" is and how willing many of them would be to take "short-cuts" to fame, fortune and status.
I could tell you a story or two about poets I've known, but I'll spare you them for now.
This is the old story of how to make art "pay" in a market-oriented, winner-take-all society, I guess. Still, I don't know how much help a chatbot will be...
The use and abuse of what, now? Formal methods? Thus, the ecological cris is beyond the grasp of Marx's class analysis? Oops, so is 'class'. The term 'formal methods', this ain't very formal. What methods? I know the term from computer science. My bad?
LFC,
Right, the winner-take-all-society mentality is everywhere, not just on Wall St. No one escapes it, not even those groups, who maybe in the 19th century were a refuge from it, for example, poets or musicians.
Before I began to hang out with philosophers under the illusion that they were "different", I mostly hung out with poets and musicians. So I know them fairly well.
By the way, it may be that today in 2023 there is no software capable of writing an acceptable short story or novel, but in 10 more years there will be.
Most of us here probably recall talking to computer-people in the 1970's, who would tell us that computer translation was just not feasible and probably never would be, etc.
What was it SDS said in 1964? Half the way with LBJ? In other words, “landslide” Johnson was viewed with caution and misgivings quite some time before Vietnam caused his popularity to diminish even more.
And then there’s this (another contribution to a free-ranging, rather chaotic set of comments):
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/20/academics-work-detect-chatgpt-and-other-ai-writing
(1) Can you tell the difference between AI and human composers?
(2) "From Darkness, Light - 2. Fugue" by Emily Howell (David H. Cope)
"David Cope: [S]omehow using HAL, or some version of HAL, is the ultimate insult [to human composers]. There is nothing intelligent about my program in the slightest, nothing intelligent about it.* I could do everything it did if you gave me 10 years. I just don't have that amount of time. I'd rather spend five minutes, thank you very much."
"David Cope: We did a concert here of Bach, of Emi Bach. The middle movement is just adorable ... just lovely. And a friend of mine was sitting in the back of the hall next to an ancient lady. She must have been in her eighties, late eighties, and she couldn't read very well, so she hadn't read the program notes. And she really just was at this concert because friends told her. She didn't know what it was all about or anything like that, but she knew all about music and she loved Bach and she listened to that.
And she turned to my friend and said, 'That was just beautiful.' And my friend started to say, 'But do you know that it was—' And then he said, 'Well, the hell with that!' It was the reaction that I hope people will have a hundred years from now, if by some weird fluke, this stuff hangs around long enough to still be around then. But I hope we can put aside all this machine trapping and stuff and really just deal with the music itself."
Radiolab: Musical DNA
* this is from an interview done more than 10 years ago
If someone is just taking a creative writing course because they need a few humanities credits and think it will be easier than a chemistry or economics course required for their major, of course they might cheat.
"Roughly 23 percent of survey respondents [matriculating Harvard freshmen, class of 2019] admitted to cheating in an academic context [prior to arriving at Harvard]. Of those, 84 percent said they had cheated on a problem set or regular homework assignment, 40 percent said they had cheated on an essay or take-home assignment, and 46 percent said they had cheated on an exam."
https://features.thecrimson.com/2015/freshman-survey/academics-narrative/
I don't know how the thread got onto this, but I can report that the AI chat stuff is now up to a totally catastrophic level -- writing better than most of the people that I know, writing *well*, answering any random questions that you ask. Honestly I think this changes liberal arts, you can't assign homework.
On what basis can you "report"? Do you work in the computer and/or AI field (that is, when you're not making your typically somewhat olympian comments on this blog)?
More on cheating, phonies, & lying about achievements
"Atlanta Cheating: 178 Teachers and Administrators Changed Answers to Increase Test Scores
82 teachers confessed they'd been cheating for nearly a decade"
[35 defendants were indicted; the schools superintendent, alleged to be at the center of the cheating scandal, died of cancer before trial]
https://abcnews.go.com/US/atlanta-cheating-178-teachers-administrators-changed-answers-increase/story?id=14013113
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"Cheating remains ‘huge issue’ at elite Stuyvesant High School"
['remains' in a 2019 article is a reference to the widely-reported scandal of 2012]
"'Some parents at Stuyvesant also play hardball,' the [English teacher speaking on condition of anonymity] said. 'The school will kowtow to parents.... If you have a really pushy parent who will lie and is prepared to stand up to the principal, the student might be given a second chance.'"
https://nypost.com/2019/04/06/cheating-remains-huge-issue-at-elite-stuyvesant-high-school/
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"NYU Professor Catches 20% Of His Students Cheating, And He's The One Who Pays For It"
https://www.businessinsider.com/nyu-professor-class-cheating-2011-7
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"Eighty-one students in anthropology class referred to Executive Committee for academic dishonesty" - Yale Daily News
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/04/05/eighty-one-students-in-anthropology-class-referred-to-executive-committee-for-academic-dishonesty%EF%BF%BC/
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"Doctors Urge Elite Academy to Expel a Member Over Charges of Plagiarism" - The New York Times
"Election to the elite National Academy of Medicine is one of the highest honors a doctor can achieve.... Dr. Noji also, until recently, listed [on one of his LinkeIn pages] impressive honors: the Ordre des Palmes Academiques, presented by President Hollande of France; nomination to the Royal College of Physicians of London; the Antarctica Medal of Honor for Scientific Exploration; and an M.B.A. from Stanford. But the French never bestowed that award on Dr. Noji. The Royal College didn’t nominate him. There is no such prize as the Antarctica Medal of Honor for Scientific Exploration. Stanford Business School says it has no record of his existence. And some of his papers plus a book chapter were copied from former colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for International Development...."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/health/academy-medicine-plagiarism.html
"[T]he future Senator [Edward M. 'Ted'] Kennedy was asked to leave [Harvard College] campus for cheating on a Spanish exam. Kennedy had paid the roommate of a fellow football player to take a Spanish exam under his name. Minutes after the exam ended, Kennedy received a call from the College informing him he would be suspended immediately. After spending two years in the military, Ted returned to the school and graduated in 1956—six years after he took up residence in Wigglesworth in the fall of 1950.
When he launched his senate campaign in early 1962, Kennedy sought to keep the cheating issue under wraps.
...
But the cheating incident was not the only factor behind the budding senator’s negative reception at Harvard.
'I remember hearing about it, but I can’t fairly say how prevalent that was,' said Todd A. Gitlin ’63, former president of Tocsin, a campus group seeking to promote a more liberal foreign policy and to ban the atomic weapon.
Instead, Gitlin said, rejection of Kennedy grew along with discontent with his brother’s actions as president, particularly his aggressive diplomacy."
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/5/27/teddy_boy_senate_1962/
JFK lied to the public about his medical condition.
This single man had the ultimate authority to unleash—or avert—nuclear Armageddon.
You don't think that his lying about his background was evidence of utter contempt for the concept of democracy?
"During the 1960 campaign for the presidency, Kennedy’s political enemies charged that the senator had Addison disease, and the coverup of this diagnosis, orchestrated by Dr. Janet Travell, has been well documented. The crux of the coverup rested on the cleverly worded statement claiming that Kennedy 'does not now nor has he ever had an ailment described classically as Addison’s disease, which is a tuberculose [sic] destruction of the adrenal gland'. In fact, Addison disease has an autoimmune cause in nearly 80% of cases and tuberculosis accounts for only 10%. This narrow definition of Addison disease was successful in deflecting further probes."
Mandel. Endocrine and autoimmune aspects of the health history of John F. Kennedy. Annals of Internal Medicine (2009) 151:350.
___
"[T]he 1960 campaign took its toll, prompting Kennedy to seek the services of Dr. Max Jacobson, a German immigrant practicing in New York. Jacobson, whose patients nicknamed him 'Dr. Feelgood,' injected then-Senator Kennedy for the first time in the summer of 1960 with his 'vitamin cocktail' that included amphetamine derivatives. Kennedy, who received an injection from Jacobson shortly before the first and pivotal famous televised debate with Richard Nixon....
The poor state of his back and its effect on JFK’s overall well-being may have had a considerable and negative impact on the President’s performance at the crucial Vienna summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961. In fact, on the 1st day of the tense summit the president received at least 3 of the methamphetamine-containing shots. Reeling from the nerve-wracking summit, his aching back, and the likely side effects of Jacobson’s methamphetamine shots, ... Kennedy admitted immediately after it ended that the summit did not go well...."
Pait, Dowdy. John F. Kennedy' back: chronic pain, failed surgeries, and the story of its effects on his life and death. J Neurosurg-Spine (2017). doi:10.3171/2017.2.SPINE151524
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"In December 1962, after Jacqueline Kennedy complained that he seemed 'depressed' from taking antihistamines for food allergies, he took a prescribed antianxiety drug, Stelazine, for two days. [Stelazine is an antipsychotic, also used for anxiety]. At other times he took similar medications regularly.
The records show that Kennedy variously took codeine, Demerol and methadone for pain; Ritalin, a stimulant; meprobamate and librium for anxiety; barbiturates for sleep...."
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/us/in-jfk-file-hidden-illness-pain-and-pills.html
[my emphasis in bold]
I.F. Stone, whom no one can accuse of being a tool of the capitalist system:
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for those countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."
Was JFK any more of a liar than any other chief executive of any powerful country you can name?
Maybe the chief executive of Luxemburg doesn't lie.
There are lies, and there are lies.
Reagan lying about whether he dyed his hair black is on a different level than lying about whether you have Addison's disease and need to chronically be on narcotics, amphetamines, and barbiturates to be able to function.
Ted Kennedy might have lied in college, but he was the author of the so-called Kennedy Amendment in 1976 which prohibited the U.S. to sell arms to the Pinochet dictatorship.
Here's a short video of Kennedy's trip to Chile in 1986 during the Pinochet dictatorship. It's in Spanish, but you can see how rightwing thugs stoned his car on his way to meet with opposition figures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0XyCbQomXc
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