brindlejim

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No kidding. As they say on Twitter: "What did you think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?" Racialism is the stovepipe for the revolution.

Great answer. Thank you.

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 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.