This Day In Dissent History: Ants!

On this day in 2006 Rebel Girl writes an administrator about the conditions in Room C2 in the CEC building. (See below).  Earlier during her class session, the rain outside made its way inside, filtering down through the roof and dripping from the edges of the foam-like ceiling panels. Class ended early. Later she returned to evalaute the conditions described in the email below. Roy made a poster.  (See above.) Fun was had. Things are better now!

"These are not hysterical questions."

Rebel Girl found this insightful Maybe you will too. Sigh.

from Al-Jazeera

My undergrads struggle to read – I think I know why

Thanks to the likes of TikTok and Instagram, young people are experiencing a devastating crisis of attention.

• 
  Greg Wrenn

  Associate professor of English, James Madison University

Recently a student, a future teacher, told me she spends over six hours a day on TikTok. In my experience with my undergrads, that’s not untypical. Her addiction isn’t her fault, but it’s now her responsibility, and, more controversially, ours. I don’t want to imagine what her students will be like by the time she’s a mid-career educator like I am.

“I just can’t look away,” she told me, embarrassed.

Having taught for 25 years and attended many 12-step meetings for my own internet addiction, I’m an English professor who doesn’t buy TikTok’s latest efforts – namely limiting daily screen time to one hour by default for users under 18 – to protect our young people’s brains. It’s way too little too late.

In my environmental literature classes, I’ve seen firsthand the long-term effects of digital cocaine like TikTok on my undergrads. I’m on a mission, probably doomed, to get them to be more present – to appreciate the written word and the natural world, sometimes wearing my wetsuit and dive mask to get their attention when we’re discussing coral reefs and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This is not woke indoctrination. My colleagues and I are scrambling to teach on the front lines of a student mental health crisis.

Too many of the undergrads taking the course I currently teach, Environmental Literature of Wonder and Crisis, cannot read. They’re literate, of course, but unable to sit long enough to read a chapter from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden or an essay about an Australian ecofeminist nearly mauled to death by a crocodile. A few have confided they’ve never read a book cover to cover in their lives. Few would freely choose to take this class, but to graduate they need three English credits.

At its heart, this is a crisis of attention. Distractedness and overwhelm are its symptoms. In an informal, anonymous class poll, just 13 percent of my nearly 300 students this semester said they did not suffer from intense anxiety on a regular basis – that shocked me. A third reported that their anxiety keeps them from reading the assigned texts. Half said they have trouble paying attention when reading, even when their phones are off. Reading and reflective time in nature – powerful anti-anxiety meds in themselves – simply can’t compete with TikTok. And neither can easy-going, in-person conversation with sustained eye contact, or a 75-minute college lecture.

My students are overstimulated – and depressed and exhausted – from mainlining TikTok and Instagram. Though further study is needed, research has shown a strong correlation between social media use and mental health challenges. So I shouldn’t really be offended when they ask me to create exam study guides for them.

Their brains, rewired by the likes of TikTok, can’t keep up with all the material. Since high school, TikTok’s hyper-personalised algorithms have been barraging them with 10-second videos, individually tailored to maximise the dopamine hit and the company’s profits. They’re hooked, as recent neuroscience research suggests, the parts of the brain involved in addiction lighting up as they watch an eight-foot-tall giraffe being made from chocolate or a chipmunk stuffing its cheeks with nuts. Like many of us, they deal with their anxiety in ways that end up amplifying it.

Every semester I find myself lowering class expectations, in fear of too many Fs as final grades. I also fear that literature – a repository of our dearest values, a way to grow empathy and imagination, and slow down – is going the way of the cassette tape and dodo bird. With environmental literature, I invite my students to be more present, appreciative of natural beauty and the beauty of stories and words. As catastrophic climate change looms, there’s no time to waste – we have to appreciate the beauty of nature now. Yet so few of my students take the time to truly appreciate the national forest and the national park that our campus is sandwiched between.

Unlike me, my students are digital natives born in the years after 9/11. As children, many of them have never been allowed to roam freely outside and play. When they were in kindergarten, the Oxford Junior Dictionary replaced words like acorn, moss, and fern with database, MP3 player, and broadband. So of course they’re anxious. They’re still young on a planet whose long-term habitability is uncertain. Way too often stuck indoors alone, pecking at their screens and not sleeping. Craving views of their Instagram stories as if their survival depended on it. If they haven’t attempted suicide, they know friends who have...

Have they ever sat under a tree and stuck with a challenging book with paper pages? Have they gazed up at the clouds without their phones for a while and in all the puffiness seen acorns and moss and ferns? Or is nature too boring, best appreciated as a backdrop for selfies?

Do they feel wonder?

These are not hysterical questions.

I want them to feel the wonder I felt at summer camp when 14 of us held hands around a giant oak. I felt instantly calmer in its shade. I also want them to love poetry, to gaze at William Wordsworth’s daffodils and sit in Walt Whitman’s grass.

I too have felt my attention and imagination – my very humanity – dying back. In this numb blur of a cyborg life on an overheating world, what would it take to be happier? It might take slowing down and looking at something real. It might mean going outside and cultivating gratitude and grit, even when we don’t feel like it. Finding supportive, in-person community, wherever the heck that is.

I still find some hope for the future when I teach English majors and creative writing minors, who seem to use social media less often than their non-major peers.

A couple of semesters back, early on in my eco-writing workshop, The Environmental Imagination, my 15 students and I were discussing a chapter in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, “Learning to See,” a title that could be our three-word syllabus. Nature itself, not my words so much, did a lot of the teaching in this class. I asked them to look up at the maple next to us and tell us what they saw.

“Pointy leaves,” said one, still shy.

“Rough, whitish bark,” said another softly.

I asked them to look again, as if this maple were the last tree on earth. “What do you see,” I asked, “that no one else does?”

“That one leaf at the edge of that branch,” Jacob* said, pointing and squinting, “is lighter than the others and has a torn edge”. Next thing I knew he was standing under the maple and feeling the bark slowly with his hands, as if it were ancient pottery, and then Pierre took his place. It doesn’t smell like much, they said. After some laughter and some awkward silences, Bonnie was up and sticking out her tongue to taste the bark.

In a lull in our discussion, I looked out at my students. Most of them had done the reading, with varying levels of comprehension; they didn’t vape in class – they wanted to be here. I saw talented, humane Chloe, who would go on to write about body dysmorphia and a slug. Soulful, concerned Dan, who in his first essay will, in the roiling of the stream, see cultural chaos writ wet. Quiet, fierce Carmen, who, after looking at a hen-of-the-woods mushroom on a trail, will write an elegy for her Bolivian abuelita who fed her chicken salteñas with raisins and olives.

Students like them give me hope. I also ache for them.

That semester, we didn’t create a left-wing re-education camp. Instead, we created in miniature the kind of respectful, just, evidence-based, ecologically attuned society many of us want to live in. As I taught this exceptional class, I was reminded that not all young people need to be taught to care about books or the earth. Neither did I have to make the case to them that this life of fireflies and gnarled cedars is worth staying alive for. “It’s not enough to name the problem,” I told them as they worked on their eco-manifestos towards the end of the semester. “What are we going to do about it?” This applies to both the ecological crisis and our crisis of attention.

What’s at stake here is our collective brain. The basic sanity that allows society to go on. If we’re going to deal with the climate crisis, we must be fundamentally undistracted and creative, full of resolve and courage and cooperation. The calamities of this century will require thoughtfulness, social cohesion, and focus, even if we don’t have it to give. If we do nothing about this attention crisis in our young people – and in almost all of us – the climate crisis isn’t going to get bad enough to matter.

The Biden cover-up

Seymour Hersh: The Cover-Up 

SCHEERPOST 

The Biden Administration continues to conceal its responsibility for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines 

It’s been six weeks since I published a report, based on anonymous sourcing, naming President Joe Biden as the official who ordered the mysterious destruction last September of Nord Stream 2, a new $11-billion pipeline that was scheduled to double the volume of natural gas delivered from Russia to Germany. The story gained traction in Germany and Western Europe, but was subject to a near media blackout in the US. Two weeks ago, after a visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Washington, US and German intelligence agencies attempted to add to the blackout by feeding the New York Times and the German weekly Die Zeit false cover stories to counter the report that Biden and US operatives were responsible for the pipelines’ destruction. 

Press aides for the White House and Central Intelligence Agency have consistently denied that America was responsible for exploding the pipelines, and those pro forma denials were more than enough for the White House press corps. There is no evidence that any reporter assigned there has yet to ask the White House press secretary whether Biden had done what any serious leader would do: formally “task” the American intelligence community to conduct a deep investigation, with all of its assets, and find out just who had done the deed in the Baltic Sea. According to a source within the intelligence community, the president has not done so, nor will he. Why not? Because he knows the answer. . . . .

In early March, President Biden hosted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Washington. The trip included only two public events—a brief pro forma exchange of compliments between Biden and Scholz before the White House press corps, with no questions allowed; and a CNN interview with Scholz by Fareed Zakaria, who did not touch on the pipeline allegations. The chancellor had flown to Washington with no members of the German press on board, no formal dinner scheduled, and the two world leaders were not slated to conduct a press conference, as routinely happens at such high-profile meetings. Instead, it was later reported that Biden and Scholz had an 80-minute meeting, with no aides present for much of the time. There have been no statements or written understandings made public since then by either government, but I was told by someone with access to diplomatic intelligence that there was a discussion of the pipeline exposé and, as a result, certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the American and German press with an alternative version for the destruction of Nord Stream 2. In the words of the intelligence community, the agency was “to pulse the system” in an effort to discount the claim that Biden had ordered the pipelines’ destruction…. 

. . . .

The agency did its job and, with the help of German intelligence, concocted and planted stories about an ad hoc “off the books” operation that had led to the destruction of the pipelines. The scam had two elements: a March 7 report in the New York Times citing an anonymous American official claiming that “[n]ew intelligence…suggests” that “a pro-Ukrainian group” may have been involved in the pipeline’s destruction; and a report the same day in Der Zeit, Germany’s most widely read weekly newspaper, stating that German investigative officials had tracked down a chartered luxury sailing yacht that was known to have set off on September 6 from the German port at Rostock past Bornholm island off the coast of Denmark. The island is a few miles from the area where the pipelines were destroyed on September 26. The yacht had been rented from Ukrainian owners and manned by a party of six: a captain, two divers, two divers’ assistants, and a doctor. Five were men, and one a woman. False passports were involved. 

 . . . .

“It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story,” I was told by a source within the American intelligence community. The disinformation professionals inside the CIA understand that a propaganda gambit can only work if those on receiving are desperate for a story that can diminish or displace an unwanted truth. And the truth in question is that President Joe Biden authorized the destruction of the pipelines and will have a difficult time explaining away his action as Germany and its Western European neighbors suffer as businesses are shuttered amid high day-to-day energy costs….

SEE ALSO:

• How the US Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline (Dissent the Blog, Feb 10)  
• The US blew up Nord Stream Pipeline? Hersh answers questions (Dissent the Blog, Feb 16) 

Excellent journalists "ad hominem'd" by Democrats

 

[Taibbi testifying at the “Hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on the Twitter Files” for the House Judiciary Committee:]

Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the Select Committee, 

My name is Matt Taibbi. I’ve been a reporter for over 30 years, and an advocate for the First Amendment…. 

I’m here today because of a series of events that began late last year, when I received a note from a source online. 

It read: “Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation… was going on at Twitter?” 

A week later, the first of what became known as the “Twitter Files” reports came out. To say these attracted intense public interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage of the Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million impressions and 30 million engagements. 

But it wasn’t until a week after the first report, after Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other researchers joined the search of the “Files,” that we started to grasp the significance of this story. 

The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere. 

What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role. 

...

Following the trail of communications between Twitter and the federal government across tens of thousands of emails led to a series of revelations. Mr. Chairman, we’ve summarized these and submitted them to the committee in the form of a new Twitter Files thread, which is also being released to the public now, on Twitter at @ShellenbergerMD, and @mtaibbi. 

We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded. 

A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.” 

Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism. 

Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge. 

As someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this mechanism for punishment without due process is horrifying. 

Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people’s last line of defense. 

But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken. 

Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system….

* * *

"I hate him passionately."

See Twitter Files

Chat GPT: "I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do."

Outsourcing empathy? What does it it mean to have a machine craft or draft messages of sympathy, solidarity, equity and justice?

Vanderbilt U uses ChatGPT to craft condolences

The apology email also acknowledged that despite adding messages of inclusivity, using an AI program to write a condolences note was inappropriate. “While we believe in the message of inclusivity expressed in the email, using ChatGPT to generate communications on behalf of our community in a time of sorrow and in response to a tragedy contradicts the values that characterize Peabody College,” the email read.

https://www.outkick.com/vanderbilt-university-apologizes-for-using-chat-gpt-to-send-email-on-michigan-state-shooting/

Fake News? ChatGPT Has a Knack for Making Up Phony Anonymous Sources

The first text output from ChatGPT reads like a convincing summary of Bloomberg’s post-electoral philanthropic activities – complete with a quote from Bloomberg, himself. But the I-Team could find no record of the former mayor ever uttering those words.  When the chatbot was reminded to include commentary from Bloomberg’s critics, ChatGPT seemed to make up entirely fabricated quotes from phony anonymous sources. And those fake sources appear to skewer the former mayor for using his wealth to influence public policy. 

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/fake-news-chatgpt-has-a-knack-for-making-up-phony-anonymous-sources/4120307/

Chat GPT and the Sciences 

What are the expectations for scholarship in the sciences and why?

from Science magazine:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg7879

For years, authors at the Science family of journals have signed a license certifying that “the Work is an original” (italics added). For the Science journals, the word “original” is enough to signal that text written by ChatGPT is not acceptable: It is, after all, plagiarized from ChatGPT. Further, our authors certify that they themselves are accountable for the research in the paper. Still, to make matters explicit, we are now updating our license and Editorial Policies to specify that text generated by ChatGPT (or any other AI tools) cannot be used in the work, nor can figures, images, or graphics be the products of such tools. And an AI program cannot be an author. A violation of these policies will constitute scientific misconduct no different from altered images or plagiarism of existing works. Of course, there are many legitimate data sets (not the text of a paper) that are intentionally generated by AI in research papers, and these are not covered by this change.

Most instances of scientific misconduct that the Science journals deal with occur because of an inadequate amount of human attention. Shortcuts are taken by using image manipulation programs such as Photoshop or by copying text from other sources. Altered images and copied text may go unnoticed because they receive too little scrutiny from each of the authors. On our end, errors happen when editors and reviewers don’t listen to their inner skeptic or when we fail to focus sharply on the details. At a time when trust in science is eroding, it’s important for scientists to recommit to careful and meticulous attention to details.

The scientific record is ultimately one of the human endeavor of struggling with important questions. [Emphasis all mine] Machines play an important role, but as tools for the people posing the hypotheses, designing the experiments, and making sense of the results. Ultimately the product must come from—and be expressed by—the wonderful computer in our heads.

College cheating: “Professors just don’t care”

Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm? 

Students say they are getting ‘screwed over’ for sticking to the rules. Professors say students are acting like ‘tyrants.’ Then came ChatGPT...

 By Suzy Weiss; The Free Press; February 28, 2023 

     When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes. 

     But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in. “Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me. 

     Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam questions; and used calculators, which were technically verboten. 

     He finished the exam in under an hour, he said. Other students spent two or three hours on it. Some classmates paid older students who had already taken the course to do it for them. 

     “Professors just don’t care,” he told me. 

     For decades, campus standards have been plummeting. The hallowed, ivy-draped buildings, the stately quads, the timeless Latin mottos—all that tradition and honor have been slipping away. That’s an old story. Then Covid struck and all bets were off. With college kids doing college from their bedrooms and smartphones, and with the explosion of new technology, cheating became not just easy but practically unavoidable. “Cheating is rampant,” a Princeton senior told me. “Since Covid there’s been an increasing trend toward grade inflation, cheating, and ultimately, academic mediocrity.”   

     Now that students are back on campus, colleges are having a hard time putting the genie back in the bottle. Remote testing combined with an array of tech tools—exam helpers like Chegg, Course Hero, Quizlet, and Coursera; messaging apps like GroupMe and WhatsApp; Dropbox folders containing course material from years past; and most recently, ChatGPT, the AI that can write essays—have permanently transformed the student experience. 

     “It’s the Wild West when it comes to using emerging technologies and new forms of access to knowledge,” Gregory Keating, who has a joint appointment at USC’s Department of Philosophy and Gould School of Law, told me. “Faculties and administrations are scrambling to keep up.” …. (continue reading )

Pop!

 

From Scheerpost 

✅ German Lawmaker Calls for Nord Stream Probe 

Sevim Dagdelen takes the Scholz government to task for its lack of “strength and will” in responding to Seymour Hersh’s reporting on the U.S. sabotage of the Russian pipeline. Video and text of her Feb. 10 speech to the Bundestag.

From Scheerpost

✅ [Bernie] Sanders Proposes ‘New Deal for Journalism’ To Ensure Media Serves Public Interest 

Nonpartisan, publicly funded media is "an idea that we should explore," said the senator.

...“[N]obody has ever come up to me, not one reporter—not you, not anybody else—and said, ‘Bernie, why are we spending twice as much on healthcare as any other country and yet we have 85 million uninsured or underinsured?’ How many programs at CBS, NBC, ABC had on why we have a dysfunctional healthcare system? Does that have anything to do with who owns the major networks? ‘Bernie, what are you going to do about income and wealth inequality?’ … ‘Why are billionaires paying an effective tax rate lower than working class people?’ No one asked me those questions.”....