doh, didn’t see link

You’re doing Lenin’s work comrade

5-4 was talking about this

Just gonna say that Said is a very enjoyable read. I’ve read some of his other works (never cracked Orientalism proper, I’m bad), and he is a very good thinker.

Here he is from “Secular Criticism” pgs 2-3. It gets a bit dense in the back half and he’s still an academic, but there’s always moments of lucidity like this in the Said I’ve read (again, can’t speak to Orientalism sadly).

The degree to which the cultural realm and its expertise are institutionally divorced from their real connections with power was wonderfully interested for me by an exchange with an old college friend who worked in the Department of Defense for a period during the Vietnam war. The bombings were in full course then, and I was naively trying to understand the kind of person who could order daily B-52 strikes over a distant Asian country in the name of the American interest in defending freedom and stopping communism. “You know,” my friend said, “the Secretary is a complex human being: he doesn’t fit the picture you may have formed of the cold-blooded imperialist murderer. The last time I was in his office I noticed Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet on his desk.” He paused meaningfully, as if to let Durrell’s presence on that desk work its awful power alone. The further implication of my friend’s story was that no one who read and presumably appreciated a novel could be the cold-blooded butcher one might suppose him to have been. Many years later this whole implausable anecdote (I do not remember my response to the complex conjunction of Durrell with the ordering of bombing in the sixties) strikes me as typical of what actually obtains: humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that you can read classy fiction as well as kill and maim because the cultural world is available for that particular sort of camouflaging, and because cultural types are not supposed to interfere in matters for which the social system has not specified them. What the anecdote illustrates is the approved separation of high-level bureaucrat from the reader of novels of questionable worth and definite status.

Yeah I mean, the Soviets have their flaws, but a commitment to international socialism was not one of them.

Yes but Deng did allow for the further support of the Khemer Rouge in their guerilla phase after Vietnam rolled in and kicked them out.

The unequivocal Deng “L” was allying with the US to support the rebels against the Vietnamese supported government. I can understand the choice as brutal Realpolitik but that doesn’t make it right. The fact that China basically took an aggressive posture versus Vietnam in this era was unfortunately the big L

I think they also mention this in season 1. Blowback is a mindset, a vibe. It’s when the state takes the consequences of its actions to further it’s goals (so Iraq 1 allowing for Iraq 2 is fine actually!).

MASSIVE MASSIVE QUANTITIES OF PIE

Yeah. Years of being policed means they have every motivation to deny (and indeed, they tell each other this too).

It’s just an intractable problem.

deny deny deny and then only when they’re clearly caught in it say “but the policy”

My goal (and I don’t know how exactly to achieve it) is to reverse this so that by copping to it quickly we can move to “do you understand why what you produced is shit and how the LLM did that” without them worried I’m going to drag them to academic integrity.

I don’t know how to get them to do it though. It’s like, I don’t want to spend an hour in my office pulling teeth about “ok, this source isn’t real, but did you document badly or did you use AI”

Primarily because I don’t want to police AI as source discovery stuff. Too much policing means students doing googles and using the AI summary would be afoul of my policy and I don’t want to deal with that. So the illicit use to write your paper is banned but I’m not really checking that and basically am upfront that their work is their own and they’re responsible for checking shit like this (also why this bungle is so infuriating). The whole “generate a wikipedia on a topic” trick it does can be a good starting point for key names, sources, etc and I don’t want to say all of that is banned.

And while I think since students pay for the writing center that’s a better use of time and resources (or hell meeting with me), if a student wanted to chat about their essay with the bot instead, I could see this as potentially useful for those with really bad social anxiety. Balancing what the bot says with what I say isn’t the WORST outcome (indeed as long as there’s multiple vectors of critique/possibility the student has to weigh and choose between my pedagogy is basically working). I don’t like it, but I don’t like a lot of stuff.

But fundamentally it’s because policing this kind of stuff is a time sink and a strict anti AI policy is just a ton of work. Instead, I try to assume student work is student work until presented with something otherwise. Which is also why this student is in danger not because of gen AI use but instead fabricated materials.

I try to be a generous and kind reader. I don’t want to be a cop. But shit like this forces my hand (I can’t pretend otherwise!) and it really bugs me. I want to help the students with THEIR work and writing and I try not to jeopardize that by constantly assuming it’s not theirs. Leaving the door open helps avoid starting with that attitude too early.

Yeah that’s what I’m doing. Ironic how I now get really suspicious when an essay is sub 20%

No that shit is vaporware (the AI detection).

I use TII to verify quotes are real now (I turn off the quotation parsing thing so everyone’s paper should be between 20-35 percent “plagiarized”). AI detection is vaporware tho, may as well flip a coin.

Yeah there’s other stuff for that, but it doesn’t help that they’re not persuaded showing their work is valuable (despite my insistence at the beginning of the quarter all the stuff is there to help them).

Can’t get too into deets because I could potentially doxx myself (don’t expect me to share prompts, etc). Needless to say, I feel like my annotated bibliography has a fairly strong standard for proving material is extant. It’s the students that neglect to do so that end up getting got…

It’s been ages since I saw this, but I love Ken Watanabe so I can’t hate it too much. The politics and Tom Cruise character (because dumb Amerikkkans won’t watch movie about Japan without whitey) is obviously cringe.

The Bibliography is worth points. It’s actually designed specifically to encourage research – it’s graded based on # of sources with a specific goal (that I explain) that it should document their reading and include everything they use to find sources as well (the idea pedagogically is that it’s actually giving them credit when they read something they decide not to use).

I wish they understood this. I tried to explain to them that I want them to learn how to write so that when they use AI they’ll see what’s useful or not from it… it’s heartbreaking.

I have an annotated bibliography assignment that has the purpose of doing just this – and I actually pitch Zotero to them. The issue is they decide not to. Which makes it all the more tragic – I’m transparent about WHY i’m having them do this stuff (i.e. the annotated bib requires them to document their engagement with sources, why they’re using it, what they found useful, etc).

Yeah that’s definitely not an excuse for this paper. Also, my move in that position was always to just find a source broader than my topic and apply it like a lens. Works pretty well.

Oh I get that – the financial reality is there for sure, and I recognize they have other classes, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I know who the “true” villain is.

Doesn’t mean I can’t be mad at these AI companies for unleashing this on us. It actively makes teaching the skills to understand writing harder since students can get close to “good” writing with these machines, but the writing it produces crumbles under the slightest scrutiny. We’re actively harming thought and understanding with them.