Obsidian Wings

self care and communal care

by liberal japonicus

Started out as a comment, but thought I might spin it out to a post. Russell, building on nous, suggested that communal care is self-care and I want to unpack a bit. Nous mentioned in an earlier thread about the difficulties he is having (difficulties that I share) of students who have been told about the importance of self-care and are carrying it out, often to the detriment of the class (my restatement, I'm sure nous put it much more elegantly than I am) which is a difficulty I'm finding as well. Students, when faced with the smallest of speed bumps, throw up their hands and give up. My colleagues here have shared similar stories.

While the situation in a school is different from life after graduation, I was listening to a New Statesman podcast (here) and Andrew Marr brings up the point that a growing number of young people in the UK are going on unemployment with disability benefits and staying on them, which is one of the main drivers of Get Britain Working Again initiative. Marr points out that if the trend continues, the portion of the budget required is going to be unsustainable, if it isn't already. Rachel Cunliffe pointed out that this issue is, in large part, due to pandemic disruption. Marr takes that point, but notes that we don't see the same situation in France and Germany. He doesn't mention the US, probably because the benefits here are so miserly, everyone is basically on their own. They do mention in passing that people with disability benefits were supposed to be re-examined at set intervals, but the Tory government scrapped that requirement to save money.

Some idle speculation by me, while Russell's observation is probably true in a culture like the US, I'm wondering if it applies to the same degree here in Japan, at least in terms of education. As students drop out to self care, the network of inter-personal relationships frays and weakens because there is little to no understanding that they are pulling away for self-care. A large part of Japanese education is socialization, and when a larger and larger minority pull back, that socialization, which was supported by group trips and common expectations, disappears, or is at least greatly reduced. Furthermore, behavior of Japanese colleagues seem to mirror Terry Prachett's observation, which is this

Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave,” said Vorbis. “So I understand,” said the Tyrant. “I imagine that fish have no word for water.

Never existing in a context where socialization was not immediately and automatically created, the idea that they have to set up alternate systems to make up the gap is inconceivable. Nous mentioned 'circles of care', but setting those up requires initiative and a willingness to try new things, all of which are in short supply here.

I'm returning to this post after a bit, but thought that I would put it up in case people want to talk. Have at it.

Restatement of a theme

by liberal japonicus

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr72n1yyj30o

Federal workers received an email on Saturday afternoon asking them to list their accomplishments from the past week or resign - the latest development in the Trump administration's efforts targeting the federal workforce.

The emails came after billionaire and Trump confidante Elon Musk tweeted that workers would "shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week".

"Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation," he wrote.

[...]The email arrived in inboxes shortly after Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac). The messages came with the subject line "What did you do last week?" from a sender listed as HR.

In a copy of the email obtained by the BBC, employees were asked to explain their accomplishments from the past week in five bullet points - without disclosing classified information - before Monday at midnight.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/dec/30/margaret-thatcher-cuts-national-archive

One of Margaret Thatcher's first acts after taking office was to ask her cabinet ministers to send her a brief note on what skeletons they had found in their departmental cupboards, and when these "inheritance" notes came back she was distinctly unimpressed.

The 1979 state papers released at the National Archives today show that she told her cabinet meeting on 14 May that "it wasn't clear why the work currently being done by 566,000 non-industrial civil servants could not be done equally well by 500,000. She did not accept the premise that virtually no cuts could be made unless services are to be reduced," minuted the cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt. He had advised her to begin a "searching examination" of public spending to identify the waste that could be eliminated and priorities established "so that functions could be jettisoned to lighten the ship".

But the defence secretary, Francis Pym, used his inheritance note to point out that his budget was at its lowest in real terms since the Korean war and promptly outlined three demands for extra spending. From the Home Office, Willie Whitelaw pointed out that the prison system had been underfunded for years, and the social services secretary, Patrick Jenkin, complained that Labour had made no provision for its election promise to uprate child benefit.

It was a dismaying response for a prime minister who had imposed a freeze on civil service recruitment at her first cabinet meeting only to be told it would trigger severe shortages in London and other big cities.

The conservative project. It's what's for dinner...

Would you rather own the US and pay $70 or have the rest for $30?

by liberal japonicus

Been watching Kara Swisher, who has spent time with Elon Musk and has a number of insights. So I caught this episode of her podcast with Scott Galloway (here, teed up to the quote) Don't I agree with every point they make, but this point by Galloway made me sit up. 

I said that the US Equity market now was 50% of the total value of all equities globally and he said now it's actually if you [include] corporate debt America represents 70% of of all value globally so if you think about it ... would you rather own America for $70 or if you could own everything but America for 30 which would you pick [and] what that says to me is that America is overvalued and not only is America overvalued it's really the whole world is vulnerable..

A thread to discuss what you would pay for the US. For me, probably not a plug nickle. Have at it.

 

Just another open thread

by liberal japonicus

The other one has moved over to dot-matrix printing, so I thought I'd open up another one. Have at it.

Making the weekend into a year

by liberal japonicus

With apologies to Katy Perry and Zedd, it's been 3 days and it seems like a year. Maybe the superpower is to make things so bad that time slows down. It's like hitting the event horizon of a black hole. And, just like the event horzon, I'll put the rest of this after the break

What their superpower is...

by liberal japonicus

I'm sure everyone is following the various clown cars the Orange the 1st is setting/has set in motion, and you are welcome to talk about them here. But, a bit of meta  (surprise, surprise), I think it is illuminating to identify what is the 'superpower' that underlies all these things. While I'm tempted to suggest the pathological lack of a sense of shame, I've come to the conclusion that it is the ability to rationalize and to do so concerning any outcome. Some examples

• birthright citizenship- well, these migrants hadn't invaded the US, this wouldn't be an issue
• the likelihood of failure after rewriting code in various government software- well, if they had written it better, it wouldn't crash
• The coming Gaza Riviera - well, if they had the wisdom to develop it themselves, we wouldn't have to come in and do it
• sending US citizens to prisons in El Salvador - Well, if you do bad things, you don't deserve citizenship, amirite?

Of course, there was a build up to all this. Phillip Morris arguing that smoking was a net benefit because it reduced health care costs, the idea the climate change will benefit humanity by increasing areas where crops can be grown and increase crop yields, I'm sure you all can add to the list. But the feeling of dread I have is that it has reached a point where no outcome is bad enough to resist this superpower.

Anyway, a thread to refresh the page a bit and give y'all a place to put your thoughts. Have at it.

ObWi and AI

by liberal japonicus

It seems like it's time to take a step back and see if we can come to some agreement about the use of AI here. This is primarily directed at Charles, which is highly unfortunate, because I don't want to make him an object lesson, but it seems unavoidable.

A while back, Charles fed a comment thread into ChatGPT and then linked to the summary. I was really taken aback by that, the idea of having a conversation and the person says well, I just fed everything we said into this machine, and here's what it said you said (oh, and it will continue to use your words and ideas in the future) was rather off-putting. Not that what I write here would not have gotten into chatGPT, the whole model is built on scraping the net in its entirety and I don't have the time or patience to do what is necessary to chatgpt-proof ObWi. But it seems to be an escalation to actually feed stuff from here intentioanlly and with purpose. So I definitely think that is a step too far and would ask that Charles (and anyone else) not do that.

I didn't write this immediately when that happened, but it has been on my mind. But just now, Tony P. asked Charles:

Do you (or Reason, or Chat-GPT) accept that John D. Rockefeller amassed a huge personal fortune from his businesses? I have to assume you do, because you're not ignorant.

Charles took Tony's request as 'please use a prompt to feed this question into ChatGPT'. I don't think that was what Tony intended (Tony is welcome to clarify this) I think the point was that Rockefeller's wealth was a fact regardless of independent of Charles, Reason, or ChatGPT 'opinions', not a request to have ChatGPT explain how Rockefeller's wealth should be considered different in light of different contexts.

Which has me wonder what precise line to suggest here at ObWi, bearing in mind that I can't force anyone to behave in a particular way, especially in regard to chatGPT, except to ban them, which would be overkill. So it seems important to discuss parameters.

If I had my druthers, I'd prefer that when people tackle a question, you don't simply link to or reprint chatgpt output. The link is particularly insidious, because it pulls anyone who wants to engage with you into the ChatGPT ecosystem. If someone abstains from clicking, you can believe that they won't engage with your arguments, where they are simply wanting to avoid giving Sam Altman anything. However, I think it is important to acknowledge using ChatGPT, which sounds like a bit of a catch-22.

I should also add that I use ChatGPT quite a bit, for things like 'please give me 10 examples of this grammatical pattern', 'please outline this student's paper', 'please make grammatical corrections to this essay without changing the content or the style'. I understand that this opens me up to the charge of hypocrisy. Here I am, feeding student work into ChatGPT and getting in high dudgeon when it's my stuff. Folks are welcome to discuss that, I am a bit uneasy with drawing lines here for other people and not doing it for myself. But there seems to be a difference when I am exchanging and offering my own opinions about something as we do here versus when I am in a situation where I am teaching writing to second language learners and trying to get more examples or show them how to use it

Trying to boil this down, I make the following suggestions

-don't simply post chatgpt (or any other AI) output verbatim with no comment
-if you do feel that the output is better than what you could have written, at least add your own points to it
-if you are going to use LLM, acknowledge any points that you get from them
-realize that in doing so, you are making those points yours, so saying 'well, that's chatgpt, not me' is essentially an abdication of responsibility and makes the process of exchanging opinions much more difficult

This is all unfocussed, so I'm hoping that others might be able to weigh in so we can have an understanding of what the boundaries are. I have to wonder that, if there were some variant Charles from another reality who was as committed to syndicalism as this reality's Charles is to libertarianism who employed ChatGPT in the same way, would I come down as hard? On the other hand, it seems that using ChatGPT in this way is a perfect example of why libertarianism is such a mess: A huge amount of sub-rosa assumptions are fed into it and it miraculously comes up with justifications that seem robust until you start examining those assumptions. When used this way, ChatGPT is just another tool to obscure those assumptions so they are never questioned. Discuss.