why is it news that a guy quits when his boss changes, and a company doesn't do enough to criticize itself? the internet is flooded with information about the risk that AI poses to jobs. cunningham now works at one of the places that likes to write stuff like that. arguably a much better fit!
The political changes that lead to the talent exodus from Goettingen are not, in fact, so different from the ideological oaths required by much of US academia now, and seem to me to be a great way to eliminate our centers of intellectual brilliance.
It's just pure sexism, an exercise in performative feminism. More absurdly, these people appear to have no idea how the dead researchers they feature actually thought. No archival references or citations to work in the original language. It's really just a marketing funnel that ends with a CTA to join their community. You too can pay for further brainwashing.
> Who cares if they’re all women? What difference does it make?
One of my main beefs is the mismatch between the headline "Brilliant Thinkers ..." and the contents of the page. If they had labeled their page accurately "Brilliant Female Thinkers..." I would be less annoyed, but they sneaking their biased filter in under a headline likely to attract more readers than the page's content would if accurately described.
> All that matters is whether the content is useful to the reader.
I find it remarkably useless, especially considering the shallow exploration of the scientists' processes.
> Reducing this website to “performative sexism” feels reductive and pointless.
I was talking about the web page, not the site. And if a page is biased, or employs false advertising to attract clicks, it is right to call that out.
The funniest part of the OpenAI post is where someone comes in breathlessly and says "hey have you read this ACX post on why we shouldn't open source AGI" to the guy who's literally been warning everybody about AGI for decades and Elon is like: "Yup." Someone was murdered that day. There is nothing for dismissive than a yup.
> We create small, smart cadres of people who watch power and wealth pass them by, and they advocate to overturn the system driving their envy.
"They're just jealous" forms of arguments are an ad-hominem fallacy, where characteristics of the opponent (here their supposed intent) are used to discredit their argument [0]. Not only is there no evidence that these activists aren't sincere (which doesn't mean that they are right) but even if they were driven by envy, that doesn't invalidate their criticism of those in power...
Good point, motive and intent do have value in assessing the likelihood that someone committed an crime (or any action). It's not quite the same as using motive to claim that someone is wrong though.
However, I agree that ad hominem is not always fallacious. If I claim that tobacco is not bad for health and it turns out that I have no medical background and that I was paid by the tobacco industry, arguably an ad hominem argument can be used to cast some doubts on my credibility on this particular issue. Probably enough doubts that one doesn't need to pay further attention to what I said.
However it's an approach that should be used with caution. It is much too easy to misuse it to lazily explain away someone's inconvenient argument. It is particularly pernicious when it is using a supposed feeling like jealousy, that are hard to disprove.
I might make an argument that we decided to sidestep fights over class equity for things like sexual and racial equity. That suits the powers that be better. Because now the lower classes are arguing about status instead of their share of the pie.
> University faculty-activists are a perfect example of elite overproduction a la Turchin.
The faculty pushing back against "administrative encroachment" and seeking "the primacy of teaching, learning and research" are your perfect example of an over produced elite?
Mentioned in the article, maybe. But it’s common knowledge that most faculty today are de facto activists, they just done self identify as such usually.
Listen to the recent pinker mearsheimer debate. Pinker would be a good person to advocate for the triumph of enlightenment values and where else would those values be most evident than the academy, and yet Jewish students are made to cower in fear at the student mobs tolerated, if not in effect manufactured by the educators at the nations’ highest institutions, Harvard, Penn, MIT… I know people who were in forced out of grad school for not engaging in activism, let alone committing the ultimate sin, having heterodox views. Perhaps that’s less common in STEM, where politics are non-essential, but it’s de rigeur in social sciences and I’d imagine much of the humanities. It’s common knowledge in many circles that you’ll get different education at Claremont vs berkeley.
Berkeley has had the left leaning historical reputation from the days of the free speech movement and Vietnam protests. But these days (it-least from an outsiders view) it actually seems more grounded since it's a public school & doesn't do race based admissions (Berkeley is 35% asian & 20% white vs CMC is 16% asian and 35% white)[1][2]
> Berkeley is 35% asian & 20% white vs CMC is 16% asian and 35% white
My guess is that this is at least in part due to the different racial makeup of their respective applicant pools. Going to Cal is a dream of many Asian high schoolers; CMC is not revered in the same way.
Also... CMC's free speech is only rated average and sits at 73/248 schools [1] and is the same free speech score as Oberlin which has had some infamous recent incidents[2].
I think their arguments are pretty weak justifying why it fell off. It ignores the obvious change since 2020/2021. Covid was the primary issue (and classes may have been remote) and now issues around race/sex are more prominent.
> a negative reaction to white professors employing the n-word hardly persuades me that CMC has a free-speech problem.
"negative reaction" is a framing... Another would be that there were multiple incidents of students reporting professors to the administration for the content of their lectures (And they don't see how that would effect free expression on campus!)
> This is a very strange criterion for evaluating free speech on campus. Some degree of self-censorship is natural, healthy, and wise. What socially aware person expresses every thought that crosses their mind
If this really is a "bad criterion" (I don't think it is), then it'd be a systemic bias effecting every school & not uniquely CMC.
It could be worse, looks like Emory dropped from #4 to #202
CMC is a private liberal arts school that costs 60k in tuition/yr and only has only 13 hundred students... But I guess in some circles it's well known that it's not as left leaning as it's peers like Amherst or Oberlin.
Berkeley vs U Chicago or Berkeley vs U Virginia would have clicked.
“I know people who were in forced out of grad school for not engaging in activism”
Really?
I also don’t think the school needs to manufacture student mobs. People get these opinions from the internet far more than school imo. Furthermore, if Jewish students were cowering, which I doubt, it wouldn’t invalidate the mob’s reason for forming, which is in response to an ongoing genocide. I’m glad the school doesn’t crack down on opposition to such.
Is it common knowledge? My understanding is that it's generally the administrators and students who are the main forces of activism on campus, not the faculty (outside of some departments).
Both this article and the article on Turchin himself don't pass the smell test. They both read more like opinion pieces than informative articles. Like they were written by either Turchin himself or people who know him.
I didn't get that same feeling from reading the two articles, but Turchin's article on Elite Overproduction is relatively new and the idea is only as old as 10 years. It's a theory that's very convenient for explaining the present but seems to be grounded in past political instability, so who knows... maybe it'll stand the test of time. It is interesting though.
This is a jaded and uncharitable take. I'm faculty and not an activist, but I know quite a few faculty activists, and they do what they do out of a sincere desire to help others. It's not about resentment at all.
As an example, I'm on the neurology faculty. One colleague is an academic activist in the sense that she educates, develops programming, and sits on several committees dedicated to ensuring that historically marginalized groups realize that neurology is a career possibility for them. It gets results, and it's not just self-validating. The claim that belief you can help someone assumes your own superiority is unfortunate.
Some form of at least partial superiority is inherent in the notion of "helping", as is a power dynamic.
You say that your colleague's diversity-focused activity gets results, and my question is: what results? A more diverse body of students studying neurology? And if that is the answer, then who cares? What is your argument that increased diversity makes neurology or science better?
If diversity is your objective function, fine. But there are other goals to pursue, and which should be pursued in academia by faculty. I think diversity is very far from what should be the top priority.
The advantage of diversity is that it is an easy metric to understand, pursue and make gains in.
If you insist about the inherent superiority, you should define superiority. Obviously in the case of my colleague, she has achieved success in that career already. Surely that is the only "superiority" in the example, and that's benign.
The results are two-fold: most directly, more members of marginalized communities pursue and are successful in the field. More distally, clinical outcomes (patient return, treatment plan adherence, and medical outcomes) are higher when patients see doctors with a shared historically marginalized status, particularly race/ethnicity. That's borne out by the research. So increasing the diversity of the workforce enhances outcomes in diverse patient populations.
Your view is just overly jaded. There are data backing all of this up. It's not just done out of a feeling or a PR move or meaningless corporate metric (though those things indeed contribute to the motivation in a lot of cases).
A "sincere desire to help" is a form of self-validation, a move to serve the socially ambitious, and a show of power, in that "helping" implies superiority.
It would be great if educators they could separate the search for truth from the search for "justice". Many can't. Fields in which facts only exist to support justice narratives probably don't belong in university at all.
Do you really think people go into academia as faculty expecting to become rich, only to end up disillusioned? They can't be that smart then, lol. I don't think I've ever met a single faculty member who was there out of good business sense.
Does the college remain a pipeline to good schools? In the past, a very significant portion of the student body, some years the majority, transferred to tier-one, four-year universities (Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, Cal, Chicago, Stanford). This ensured that it attracted smart and ambitious applicants who knew they were not giving up the chance to attend those schools. What is the current rate of admission to tier-one schools, year by year, and how does it contrast with historical rates? If it is lower, does the college view that as a problem? If the college does not view that as a problem, then what is the vision? Deep Springs' reputation was built on being excellent and anomalous in highly legible ways. It can coast for a while as a two-year associates degree on a farm, but not forever.
The college does remain a pipeline, though the landscape of junior + senior transfers has changed.
Once US News started more heavily weighting 4-year completion rates, schools responded by attempting to select for folks who would complete in 4 years and providing more support for first and second year students. That left fewer spots for transfer into upper-level classes because of fewer dropouts / transfers-out.
Like I commented elsewhere, most students until the 60s went to Cornell to the Telluride house. That relationship was very helpful for generations of students. Deep springers still do follow this path, but much more rarely, i.e. every few years someone will go.
The stories from the modern era about a quarter or more of the class going to Harvard of UChicago are mostly gone now, although every so often an admissions director starts trying to get as many dsers as they can -- looking at you Columbia ;) But basically, top schools seem to accept about one deep springs student a year as part of their upper-level transfer class. For example, this year, harvard accepted just 14 students for upper-level transfer, including one deep springer.
So things seem to be getting harder, but the student experience here is so unique and the student quality so excellent, that they're still able gain admission to top schools despite the changing landscape (most of them get into one or more of these schools before they attend deep springs).
There has been some conversation as this has been taking place about new arrangements or additional support (e.g. 4 year scholarships, a formal relationship with another school, etc.), but at the moment, the need isn't acute enough, though vision for this aspect of the experience will be included in the next strategic plan.
Generally, the quality and curiosity of life on the ground here is what attracts great and weird students to enroll rather than a pipeline effect; applicants attached to that don't tend to make it into final class.
The brothel (The Cotton Tail Ranch) closed many years ago.
Another neat thing about the "bus stop" was that the phone booth gave you no way to dial. There was no number pad. You'd pick it up, and the call would go straight to the operator, because neither she nor you actually knew what was going on. That is, the phone was a very old one, built for a system that relied on operators to "put you through". I remember calling the school to tell them I had arrived, and having to wait for the operator to find the right instructions in the manual to do that. Even then, there were only a few of those phones left in the US.
TASP was renamed TASS a couple years ago, and it now offers only two seminars: Critical Black Studies and Anti-Oppressive Studies. The program has been taken over by woke radicals both on its board and in the administration, which is led by Amina Omari, someone with near-zero experience in education prior to her appointment. I receive desperate emails from them asking for volunteers and financial support, which suggest that they have lost some of their base due to their political choices.
Deep Springs is on a different track, but not a totally dissimilar one. That is, the school has been attempting to feminize for decades, a process that culminated in its conversion to co-education in 2018 after a long legal battle. I get the school's newsletters and see occasional land acknowledgements penned by privileged people of color, which tracks with a known trend in US liberal arts colleges.
But the real shift at DS, triggered by co-education, seems to be that it's less hard-core. One person called it "Benningtonization". The boys and girls all hive off into pairs, and the communal life of mind and labor and governance shrinks as it cedes ground to America's default version of life together, the romantic couple.
But the school has gone through many phases. This is no doubt a temporary one.
It's almost as though your physical surroundings are your true phenotype, creating a whole-brain activation with memory cues that disappear when you leave the room. The edges of the self are blurred.
> China has yet to build successful software ecosystems on top of its hardware innovations.
I'm not sure your belief is grounded in reality. I'd go as far as to assert that if China was able to research and develop these chips, both their design and production processes, they certainly are not leaving software as an afterthought.
Nevertheless, even entertaining your fantasy, once these chips are out and people like you and me are able to take these toys out to play with them, you'll soon get software that does something interesting and useful. Software is hardly the hard part, or even costlier.
Nvidia is an excellent example. Without the hardware part, they would simply not have a product line. As they developed expertise in hardware design and production, they are now one of the most valuable companies in existence.
Some market segments even spend thousands of dollars in Nvidia's hardware without having any expectation or plan to use any of NVidia's drivers.
I'm surprised by the cluelessness of most replies here, given that this is HN.
Hardware is only as useful as the software that can run on it. Radically new hardware requires rewrites of certain layers of that software. Ain't nobody got time for that, unless they can be assured that there will be a large number of companies and customers who need software to run on the new hardware.
