bsky.app/profile/hill... 100%. Part of why these scripts are really hard to name and openly discuss

…existing narratives about “democracy”, “reason,“ and social relations that are extremely powerful in mainstream American life. /6

The smear works precisely because this deep cultural script (“different kinship systems = mark of civilizational progress = ability to be governing individual”) is so so deeply baked into American folk theories of progress and political activity. It’s not ignorance. It’s weaponization of…5/

So this manufactured controversy paints ZM as fundamentally unable to appropriately govern (“dishonest”) etc because not yet fully civilized, as marked by a supposedly non-modern kinship system 4/

(Including those internal and external others still stuck in “kinship” like women and the not yet civilized) 3/

to mobilize a deep cultural script that political life in the “civilized world” supplants “traditional” kinship systems, replacing unthinking traditional norms with rational individuals who can contest in the public sphere and legitimately govern 2/

Oh and: in spite of paying for course packets w my own research funds, pretty sure a number of students are still outsourcing reading and thinking to LLMs—they just are doing other stuff too that minimally involves relations w others and their own brains.

It feels like I have to either abandon the research part of my job (with serious impacts) to teach well or accept that teaching is going to be kind of a sad grind where we all LARP college poorly.

Thank you for sharing, this really hits a lot of nails on the head. I implemented a bunch of these changes this semester (possible due to fancy uni/low teaching load) and it’s been really working for students and also is completely unsustainable for me in terms of time.

Mostly I feel like I need training in pedagogy of advanced literacy to help students develop the critical reading skills they now rarely get in HS but desperately need to navigate AI slop-verse. Alas our CTL is full AI booster and such training is unavailable. /end

And we move really slowly—one article per week (accommodates in class writing time plus robust discussion of connections to other readings). It’s different; it’s a lot of work but feels like worthy work (vs playing AI cop, which felt awful) /3

…of where students (mostly sophomores) are at. Had to explain the table of contents of the course packets for my; regular in class writing reveals big vocabulary gaps and issues with reading for voice /2

Accepting this as an argument means accepting that, as an educator, your primary commitment is not to educating your students, or to propagating knowledge of your subject, but to finding and securing new markets for products in whose success your employers (or their bosses) have some kind of stake.

Generative AI, in both form and content, and whether looked on favourably or critically, seems to embody a collective hopelessness about the prospect of human learning and creativity, if not human knowledge altogether. It’s as if climate change had fans.

I also think the basic claim "humans are adaptive weirdos and liberal technocracy isn't necessarily the end stage of history" is increasingly counter-cultural, worth bearing in mind when parsing debates about the text.

In class we just read sections of the introduction because it does a good job explaining how most efforts to grasp something deep about "human nature" are products of historically contingent contemporary concerns and offers a crash course in Hobbes v Rousseau.

Oh man, I really don't know. My sense is that a lot of the debate came from folks not knowing what genre of text the book was supposed to be (which, fair enough). I read it as political theory, which shifts how I think about the role of evidence, if that makes sense.