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by Akranazon 346 days ago
Thank you. This author's writing is a careful exemplar of everything rotten about higher ed. The article is a great compilation of features, stylistic and material, that need to be crushed and discarded from the university.
1 comments

I'm not in Academia myself. But why do some people (you) get white hot with rage about the people that are in it?
American universities are important institutions and do a lot of good work. However, look no further than this article for the source of the "white hot rage". It's bloviating, vacuous, empty fluff, no meaningful point or persuasive argument, and the statements which come the closest to resembling coherent points are wrong and bad (see https://www.danmcquillan.org/questions_for_anthropic.html). The author feels threatened, because he realizes that an AI could do his writing style much better than he does, given the absence of original thought.

The author is a kind of free-rider: he persists in his position having read just-enough continental philosophy, and memorized the right incantations (buzzwords) to communicate the "aligned" political subtext. Academic left-wing jargon; you have to be against neoliberalism, "tech broligarchy", Palantir (the military industrial complex), technogenesis... Oh, and you have to shoehorn as many race politics subjects into your article on AI, even if they have virtually nothing to do with the topic (KKK, White Genocide, racial superiority, supremacy, eugenics). Points for creativity, I guess.

I thought his reference to the AI being neutral on the KKK was relevant as it demonstrated the AI just doesn't really understand what it talks about.
Each of the terms used by the author, which I listed above, are fine and meaningful on their own. The problem is, it's jarring when academics try to shoehorn their pet issues into as many topics as possible, and combined with the raw density of academic verbiage, it gets quite grating. It tells you a lot about the sensibilities/priorities of the academic.
You've never read any engineering blog rants, then.