Welcome to the start of another “work” week: M0nday, November 17, 2025, and National Baklava Day, celebrating what is hands-down the world’s finest pastry. Here’s a plate (one serving) of baklava and related Turkish pastries that I ingested in Instanbul in 2008. Sometimes they put cream on top, too. Pistachio baklava is the most prized form.
It’s also Homemade Bread Day, National Butter Day, International Students’ Day, and World Peace Day. Here are John and Yoko in 1969 touting World Peace in a “bed-in” in an Amsterdam hotel
From “The Ballad of John and Yoko”
… Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam HiltonTalking in our beds for a weekThe news people said, “Say what you doing in bed”I said, “We’re only trying to get us some peace”
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 17 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*British journalist Merissa Marr takes the BBC apart for not trying to solve its multifarious problems, which began two weeks ago when the Beeb was shown to have edited one of Trump’s speeches pertaining to the January 6 insurrection. That led to the resignation of the station’s Director General and news head. But the trouble isn’t over yet:
it’s not over yet. This latest ruckus arrived just as a debate is about to start on the BBC’s future role and funding, with its Royal Charter up for renewal in 2027. In an increasingly polarized political and media landscape, the broadcaster has struggled to navigate its public interest remit and has proved inept at learning the lessons when it fails. If the BBC, one of the icons of Britain, can’t prove it can change, it could find its very future imperiled.
Informally referred to as “Auntie Beeb” (others have used more choice language, such as Paul Marshall, a media baron who is an investor in GB News, a hard-right cable channel, who once branded it a “giant toad”), the BBC, like the National Health Service, has occupied a central role in Britain since the first half of the 20th century. To get a picture of British life in that century you could do worse than to scroll through the BBC’s vast archives of footage: It broadcast Churchill’s speeches during World War II (even if he privately griped about its lefty bias), Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 and King Charles III’s 70 years later. David Attenborough made his career in its Natural History Unit, and it has brought the world exceptional comfort viewing like “The Great British Bake Off,” “Gardeners’ World” and, perhaps more questionably, “Strictly Come Dancing.”
. . . . in our more fragmented age, where the very question of what it means to be British has become more complicated to answer, the place of a broadcaster that prides itself on its universality and impartiality has become more precarious.
The BBC has made some unforced errors. The crises of the past few years have been legion. In his five-year tenure, Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, had to apologize for an infamous interview with Princess Diana conducted by Martin Bashir 25 years earlier, when it came to light that the correspondent had deceived her brother to get the interview. In 2023 a BBC News anchor, Huw Edwards, was suspended and later pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children. This year, Mr. Davie faced uproar over the BBC’s coverage of the Glastonbury music festival when it failed to cut away from a band chanting “Death, death to the I.D.F.!” and pulled a documentary on Gaza from its streaming service when it emerged that the father of its teen narrator was a Hamas official.
The Panorama documentary that included the misleadingly edited clip of Mr. Trump’s speech aired more than a year ago, but it wasn’t until last week’s leak that it came more publicly to light. At issue: The show spliced together sections of Mr. Trump’s speech more than 50 minutes apart, which gave the impression that he had explicitly encouraged the U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6. The leak sparked a political firestorm with the right resurfacing its outrage at the BBC’s perceived bias and demanding it be defunded, and Mr. Trump threatening a $1 billion lawsuit.
. . . The nature of the BBC’s business model sits at the center of the debate about its place in modern Britain. The broadcaster gets most of its funding from a license fee, about $230 annually that all households that watch live TV must pay, regardless of whether they watch the BBC (odds are they do — it remains the most-watched broadcaster in Britain) or use its streaming service. For fans, the license fee is precisely why the BBC is a national treasure — it allows the corporation to be a quality broadcaster for all corners of society and a gold standard in news. For its political enemies and media rivals, that guaranteed funding distorts the media landscape, and allows the BBC to march cheerfully from scandal to scandal without learning the lessons other media companies would be forced to confront.
Sounds like NPR and PBS, save that for two years no federal money is going to these “public” stations. And they’ve both become woke. So has the Beeb, but that seems to be only a small part of its problems. The title of the article notes that the Beeb is making things worse, but it’s doing so simply by not proposing a better business model:
It’s essential to at least try to maintain an independent broadcaster with universal ambitions, especially as people retreat further into their own bubbles. The challenge is that competence and quality are expensive, and all signs suggest the BBC will have to do more with less. Inflation and the cost of living remain high in Britain, and the right-wing Reform U.K. party, led by Nigel Farage, continues to gain popularity. The license fee is going to keep coming under attack.
The BBC may need to accept that its future lies in a mixed funding model: a combination of a means-tested license fee, subscriptions for top-notch programming and a further push into the commercial space. The latter is somewhat familiar territory, since it already licenses shows and sells advertising overseas to make up for a shortfall in its accounts after years of financial and political pressure.
As for me, the station lost its attraction when it took “One Man and His Dog” off the air. That show mesmerized me; I could watch the sheep round-up for hours. No more dogs, though.
*The WaPo mourns the death of the penny; the production of one-cent coins stopped for good last week. The news showed the last two pennies being stamped out, which will be preserved by the Smithsonian. Read this take: “The penny is dead. Long live inflation.” Although the elimination of the penny was probably a wise thing to do (they cost more to make than they’re worth, and who uses them any more?), the Post is beefing because the penny was deep-sixed by Trump, not by Congress.
President Donald Trump did not have the legal authority to cancel penny production unilaterally, as he has done. The task should have begun with Congress, not only for constitutional reasons but also for practical ones.
Congressional deliberation would have facilitated solutions for the problems inherent in eliminating a coin that has existed since 1793. Retailers want a new law that would allow them to round prices to the nearest nickel for cash transactions, which probably would have been included in penny legislation. Also helpful would have been an incentive from the government to get the 114 billion pennies in circulation out of cupholders and into banks.
Congressional action has stalled in the past over opposition from metal lobbyists since companies with federal minting contracts are key employers in certain House districts. But Trump has shown a remarkable ability to bend the will of Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Mild effort would have produced a better result and a better process.
Sentimental attachment to the penny is silly nostalgia for a coin people no longer have use for. The penny today is used more in idioms than in payments. Luckily, you can still get a penny for your thoughts, and our two cents, without shiny new pennies being in production.
Yet there is one bitter aspect of this long-overdue decision. It is a partial surrender to inflation. Nothing will ever again cost a penny.
Nothing has cost a penny for a long time. Penny-candy stores, a staple of my youth, have long since vanished. (I used to work in my grandfather’s auto-parts store in Pennsylvania, and I’d be paid a quarter in pennies. For only 10¢ I could get a huge bag of sweets.) What we have to worry about now is that the nickel seems doomed, too, and that I won’t be able to take. The article also fails to note that penny loafers will become obsolete. (Yes, I wore them, and you always had to have a shiny penny in each one.)
*From the Heterodox Academy’s “Free the Inquiry” site we learn about the misuse of the “Institutional Neutrality” principle at the University of North Carolina. As you know, institutional neutrality for colleges, pioneered by the University of Chicago, requires us to refrain from making University and departmental statements about politics, morality, or ideology except when the issues impinge directly on the working of the university. (Individual or group statements are fine so long as they’re not represented as University or departmental statements. Now several dozen universities have also adopted that policy, and it would be good if other organizations would, too. Look what happened to the Sierra Club when it abandoned institutional neutrality! But UNC is misconstruing what institutional neutrality means. The article gives two examples:
The University of North Carolina System’s commitment to institutional neutrality has been invoked by university officials at least twice in recent months, in very curious circumstances that suggest institutional neutrality is being used to avoid any engagement whatsoever with potential political controversy— even controversies that universities are well-positioned to engage in.
In October, Palestinian-American author Hannah Moushabeck was scheduled to read her children’s book, Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine at North Carolina State University (NC State) at an event organized by the campus libraries. Set in Palestine, Homeland centers on Moushabeck’s father and his recollections of his childhood home and community.
However, Moushabeck’s reading was cancelled just a few days before it was set to occur. According to the NC State Technician, Moushabeck was told by event organizers that “university administration prohibited her from reading the book, citing the UNC System’s Equality Policy that requires university departments to remain neutral on political and social issues when representing the university.”
. . . Later, in correspondence with the Technician, the Director of Communications at NC State Libraries confirmed that the decision to cancel Moushabeck’s reading was related to the UNC System policy on institutional neutrality. But based on the available information from Moushabeck and from reporting in the Technician, it’s unclear why Moushabeck’s reading would have violated NC State’s institutional neutrality policy.
Simply hosting a speaker is not tantamount to an endorsement of any particular view. Institutional neutrality invites universities to embrace their role as “the home and sponsor of the critics” rather than engage as the critic itself, but it does not prohibit the exploration of controversial ideas.
There seems to be a double standard about it, though:
No reasonable person would suggest that by hosting the recent talk on “The Horn of Africa and Somaliland” that NC State used their institutional voice to proffer a particular stance on East African affairs. Similarly, the event on “Becoming History: Species Extinction and Capitalism” was not NC State’s official airing of grievances against capitalism. Likewise, Moushabeck’s reading of Homeland would not represent NC State’s library’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But it seems that Moushabeck’s event was held to a different standard than other recent university events, almost certainly because of the book’s focus on Palestine. Such immediate proximity to a hotly contested issue — even via a children’s book — seems to have given university officials pause. The cancellation of Moushabeck’s reading in the name of institutional neutrality was a transparent attempt to avoid even the slightest hint of controversy.
Indeed. UNC screwed up by thinking that a University’s not taking official positions also means that it can’t sponsor speakers who take positions that the university can’t. That is, after all, one of the benefits of college: exposing you to a variety of viewpoints, some of them conflicting.
And then UNC did it again:
Another UNC System institution recently invoked a very different, but equally peculiar, use of institutional neutrality. In April of this year, UNC Pembroke (which lies about two hours south of Raleigh and enrolls over 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students) found itself named as the potential host to a new presidential library in honor of President Trump. North Carolina House Bill 812 was proposed by several Republican lawmakers and allocates $10 million dollars for the construction of a new library dedicated to housing archives from Trump’s time in office.
What did UNC Pembroke officials think about a proposed presidential library on their own campus? Well, it’s hard to say, because they invoked institutional neutrality. According to the Chancellor’s office, “In accordance with UNC System policy, on institutional neutrality and out of respect for the legislative process, [UNC Pembroke] is not allowed to nor will it take a position on this or any bill currently under consideration.”
A presidential library on their own grounds is not an example of the “political controversies of the day,” but directly involves the campus community. Invoking institutional neutrality may have been a way to sidestep conflict with a largely Republican state legislature.
Indeed, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library is at the University of Texas at Austin. Housing it—it’s where Robert Caro researched much of his fantastic biography of LBJ—makes it an academic resource but does not imply that UT Austin endorses all of LBJ’s views. It baffles me why the principle of institutional neutrality is not only resisted by most universities, which insist on the right to issue Diktats, but also misunderstood by them. It is not rocket science.
*A writer named Simas with a Substack called Inexact Science contemplates the effect of AI on education and concludes, “University education as we know it is over.” (Subtitle: “Take-home assignments are dead, ‘one prompt away’ is one prompt too far, and what we should do next.” Luana and I have long argued about this issue, with her agreeing with the article (and adding that lax admissions standards and grade inflation are contributing to the death of universities), while I, remembering my wonderful undergraduate education, desperately want traditional liberal-arts universities to persist. She’s probably right, but I don’t tell her so. Colleges may persist, but not like we knew them; they will become job-training institutes in which technical ability is prized above thinking. Excerpts from the article:
Take-home assignments are dead
AI is now so good that take-home assignments are obsolete.
Last year (2024), I assigned a data project worth 30% of the final grade. My tactic was to make the assignment hard enough that AI couldn’t solve it but a smart undergraduate could. I spent many hours designing the data project; it’s here, if you’re interested.
. . . .This approach kind of worked last year. AI models couldn’t yet solve the problem in one go. Some students produced hilarious Frankenstein solutions—prompting AI for part 1(a), then separately for 1(b), then once more for 1(c), etc., because LLMs [“large language models”: AIs trained on a ton of material] couldn’t handle the full assignment at once. The code was a mess with replicated steps everywhere.
That’s no longer true. I gave the data project PDF to two models (Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5). Both solved it more or less perfectly in minutes.1 Claude was particularly excellent, providing both the code and a lovely report.
. . . . With a heavy heart, I dropped take-home assignments entirely this year.
LLMs are great learning partners, but they’re mostly used as crutches
In theory, LLMs could be infinitely patient, infinitely knowledgeable tutors. You could talk to them about material you’re struggling with, request custom-generated quizzes, or turn boring course notes into exciting podcasts. Most leading LLMs, in fact, provide learning modes designed specifically for this.
Maybe that’s true for 5% of students. The rest just want to get stuff done as quickly as possible.
I saw clear examples of this in my classroom. I assigned two problem sets and asked students to solve them at home, then present solutions at the whiteboard. Students provided perfect solutions but often couldn’t explain why they did what they did. One student openly said “ChatGPT gave this answer, but I don’t know why.”
A single prompt would have resolved that! But many students don’t bother. “One prompt away” is often one prompt too far.
How should universities respond? Simas says this:
If you buy the view that “university education is mostly signaling,” you don’t need to worry much. Make courses tough enough to filter students. AI doesn’t change that.
That’s not my view. University education serves multiple goals, including:
- Provide practical skills for professional life;
- Train critical thinking;
- Build an informed citizenry;
- Expose people to humanity’s greatest achievements.
Advanced AI does reduce the value of teaching practical skills (goal 1). However, that was never the main reason universities exist. For example, I teach asymptotic theory of least-squares estimators. Maybe 1–2 students will do a PhD where this matters. A few more will do data analysis professionally and might appreciate where t-statistics come from. But for most students, this stuff just isn’t that practically useful.
Goals 2–4, though, remain valid even in a world with extremely advanced AI (say, artificial general intelligence, or AGI). Even if humans no longer push the knowledge frontier forward, you can still appreciate the beauty of the Central Limit Theorem. You want people who understand causality, even if AI runs all the analyses. You need citizens who can think critically about how we should live in an AGI world.
Yes, but think about how to teach “critical thinking” in a world without AI. AI can give you all sides of an issue, and you can parrot them back without thinking yourself. Simas underscores the problem of how to think critically in an AI-dominated world:
A common response I get when I complain about AI is this: “Don’t work against AI; show students how to use it.”
This argument is appealing. People have worried that new tech will rot human brains since time immemorial. Socrates argued that books would make us forgetful. Socrates was wrong, and so are the AI naysayers.
I disagree. AI isn’t eliminating some boring, mechanical part of learning. It’s replacing the very core.
Consider coding. Pre-ChatGPT, you had to understand the problem, break it into steps, write code, debug, etc. Now you just ask Claude. Maybe you read the output. Maybe you don’t. The entire learning process—the entire difficult part—gets bypassed.
That’s why AI isn’t like books. Books require you to do the cognitive work. You have to read, understand, synthesize. Books are tools for thinking. AI makes thinking optional.
Simas proposes a “barbell model” with one set of weights being the use of AI and the other being learning fundamentals of a field and using critical skills. This involves avoiding the “mushy middle” where you use AI in a sort of hybrid learning. But seriously, in a class of 200 people, with the students allowed to use computers (most classes do), how can you teach critical skills without having the experiences polluted or ruined by AI? If you give take-home exams, term papers, or essays, well, AI sneaks in there neatly. It is this, I think, that will most change the character of a university. Even lab classes in science can be diluted by AI.
*Andrzej has a public announcement on Facebook:
Step by step emerging from the chaos. It’s going to take a long time. Until the New Year, the old “Leaves from our Garden” [JAC: the Listy site] will work normally. Then they will only serve as an archive. “Leaves from our Orchard” has launched on Substack. For the moment it is a parallel activity, the same texts here and there, but to the Substack website I will slowly add some more important texts from “Letters”, which we created together with Małgorzata. This move is necessary for technical reasons. Here’s the correct link to “Letters” on Substack: https://andrzejkoraszewski.substack.com. There’s a lot of work ahead of me, but I’m slowly (with human help) getting it together.
He adds this photo, which I took on January 4, 2014:
Malgorzata is gone, but Andrzej isn’t giving up, though I wondered how he’d keep the website going. He’s simply downsizing it to a Substack. Life and work go on.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pursued by the paparazzi:
Hili: You show up in the basement with a camera?
Andrzej: Yes. I knew you’d be here.
In Polish:
Hili: Przychodzisz do piwnicy z aparatem?
Ja: Tak, wiedziałem, że tu jesteś.
*******************
From TherionArms:
From Things With Faces: “hubby’s leg”:
From Silly Signs Funny Signs Dumb Signs Stupid Signs:
Masih takes a shot at atheists, and I’m not sure her assertion is correct:
New York vibe: you miss five or six shots on the court, someone helps you score.
My friend @EnesFreedom takes every shot, at China, the Islamic Republic, Turkey, every dictator, while so many atheists stay silent.
✌️🌻 pic.twitter.com/zzhEExHT00— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) November 16, 2025
From JKR. You can find the Torygraph article archived here.
Every single word, by @suzanne_moore https://t.co/Jhij5nt5LQ
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 15, 2025
From Luana; Berkson’s Paradox, which I’d never heard of:
Contrary to popular belief, higher intelligence is positively correlated with most other good traits – social skills, life satisfaction, mental health, etc. On average, smart people are more sociable and less mentally ill. Why do people feel like the opposite is true? Probably… pic.twitter.com/pHVVlQwiuf
— Keeper (@KeeperMatch) November 13, 2025
From Jay. I’d like to be that guy!
A lioness’s reaction upon seeing her rescuer, who raised her as a cub. pic.twitter.com/4fnsdCUIAu
— The Figen (@TheFigen_) November 15, 2025
One from my feed. Look at that bird!
Stellar’s sea eagle is one of the world’s heaviest and one of the largest eagles, weighing between 11 to 20 lbs pic.twitter.com/mXJP9PY1es
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) November 15, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
A Norwegian Jew arrived at Auschwitz in mid-November, and was dead by January. https://t.co/JlH4y9CdWb
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 17, 2025
Two from Dr. Cobb: First, a great video on reddit. The result is amazing,
The Fall of Icarus, fabulous photo by Andrew James McCarthy.
byu/Rredite innextfuckinglevel
True!
Ancient mosaic of a reclining skeleton, holding a drinking cup, with a jug of wine and bread rolls. The caption is generally translated as “Enjoy Your Life” ~ life is fleeting, so enjoy it while you can (Antioch, est 3rd century BC)mymodernmet.com/skeleton-mos…
— Journal of Art in Society (@artinsociety.bsky.social) 2025-11-14T07:05:40.346Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
If you hire only those people you understand, the company will never get people better than you are. Always remember that you often find outstanding people among those you don’t particularly like. -Soichiro Honda, industrialist (17 Nov 1906-1991)
The lovely 2014 photo of Malgorzata and Andrzej brings me close to tears. I am so happy for Andrzej that “I am slowly (with human help) getting it together” and that as Jerry reminds us “life and work will go on”. Because there is still much work to be done.
That’s a heartbreaking picture isn’t it? Every marriage is, ultimately, a tragedy.
I’m happy I got to interact online with Malgorzata just a bit a few years ago.
D.A.
NYC
Yes. Me, too. I haven’t been around much lately, but glad I popped in today to see that photo. It’s sad, but it’s a charming shot. Today’s photo of Hili is nice, too.
I wish you the best over at Substack, Andrzej. Keep on keeping on and thanks for keeping the Hili dialogue going. You’re loved!
What must sting a lot is the fact that Brits have to pay a TV license fee. Are there other fees over there for appliances? Say.. a microwave fee? An air frier toll? hehe
In Japan, where they have NHK (state broadcaster) there’s a similar citizen fee owed by individual families. It is widely hated – even though NHK is pretty good, unlike the troony Palestinian loving BBC.
So hated, in fact that a “I hate NHK” party won a seat in national parliament a few years ago!
D.A.
NYC
I think it’s important to remember that the BBC is a huge organisation. Their prime activity is making TV and radio programmes, and I think in general people are pretty happy with that aspect. Their extraordinary output, and their encouragement and employment of young writers, actors, musicians, producers, and technicians over the years, has been, and still is, incredibly important for the arts in the UK. For example, I think the BBC runs five orchestras and one choir. And almost every successful figure in the UK arts probably owes at least some of their success to the BBC. And of course there’s Jerry’s favourite “one man and his dog”. Who else would fund that?
All this seems a good use of the TV licence fee to me, and I think is the main reason why people still view “auntie beeb” with some affection and pride. The licence fee is a slightly weird (and very British) way to fund an arts organisation, but it seems to have worked reasonably well. And it keeps the BBC independent from the government and from commercial pressures.
It is in the BBC news department where the problems lie, due to poor standards of journalism and bias. Unfortunately, the news department is bringing the whole BBC into disrepute, which seems rather unfair to the majority of BBC employees and output to me.
There are also big problems elsewhere in the BBC. For example the long-running kids show Doctor Who has been turned into little more than woke preaching. Then there is trying to re-write history to falsely make it multi-ethnic, so in Wolf Hall (1500s) a sister to the queen and a privy councillor are portrayed as black, a dramatisation of the 1066 Norman conquest includes black actors, a portrayal of ice-age Britons makes them black, et cetera. These are just a few examples, but most other areas of the BBC are also suffused with wokeness.
Those sorts of things startled and bothered me for a time, but I’ve come around to accepting them. From the perspective of people who are not white but who are living in a largely white country, it is a good thing to see people on the tele who look like you.
Television commercials already depict our society as two-thirds black and half of them homosexual. (I know…Actors’ Equity…) If non-white residents of England in addition want to see people who look like them playing historical figures on television, they can always go back to where they came from and watch television there. What’s next? King Harold’s forced march to Hastings being interrupted five times a day to spread prayer mats on the roadway, and fasting during Ramadan? Moors would be needed for the Battle of Tours, but they got slaughtered. Politically incorrect.
Ok, but there are plenty of dramas set in the present that can sensibly have black actors and plenty of non-drama programming also. I really think that the BBC’s deliberately a-historical casting is deliberately trying to re-write British history and that is partially about (to quote Tony Blair’s speech writer) “rubbing the right’s nose in diversity”, and partly to give people the impression that that’s how Britain always was.
It’s worth pointing out that Britain is very different from America in such regards. In 1960, Britain was 99% white British, where that means all 4 grandparents born in the UK, with that same population having been very settled for a thousand years since about AD 1100.
Mark, It is an intentional falsification of the past—in some ways more pernicious than the denial of scientific fact.
I think drama productions have always done this sort of thing. Black Hamlets, female Hamlets, white Othellos, Bottoms on roller skates, singing Macbeths, Scots Merchants of Venice, Richard III as a Nazi, and so on. It’s not necessarily woke, just a director trying to breathe new meaning into a work.
Respectfully I dissent, Mark, especially with the way it seems to be done at the BBC (black Shakespeare, the Dr. Who — which I grew up with – fiasco, as examples).
As I’ve mentioned I lived in Japan once – the lack of gaijin like me on TV had zero impact on me. I didn’t feel “marginalized” at all.
I think “representation” particularly forced and in ads, mathematically strange, is patronizing and overly obsessed with race.
all the best as always,
D.A.
NYC
BBC gets my approval for Attenborough and I Claudius. But those days are gone.
Nevertheless I’d love to see them do a docudrama where Nelson Mandela is played by a trans Chinese actor.
I disagree with Mark’s point of view on this as well (and I agree with Leslie): Historical programming should not dish out obvious falsehoods. If you renounce this principle (that you have to strive for accuracy), how can you object to those who say nonsensical things like that the real villain of World War II was Churchill (not Hitler)? Giving up on truth can only help those people whose agenda needs lies for its acceptance.
David Anderson (the WEIT reader, commentator, and self-described New York City loudmouth) asked a while ago why so many public broadcaster are so hard left in their outlook?
This is my answer:
1. self-selection into public broadcasting jobs
2. discrimination in hiring and promotion against people who are not on the left
3. insufficient ideological diversity among the staff: when like-minded people gather in groups, they tend to become more extreme in their views than they were before
see:
4.social conformism: fear of going against the perceived group consensus within the organization (you want to keep your job and stay on the good side of your colleagues)
My favourite in the genre, right up there with “The Producers.”
https://www.slamfrankmusical.com
Re the North Carolina “ACT TO APPROPRIATE FUNDS FOR A PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY IN HONOR OF PRESIDENT DONALD JOHN TRUMP AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA”
This is controversial as hell in my mind, precisely because the purpose is not to create a historical record about DJT – which would be a legitimate scholarly endeavor – but to “honor” him.
How can you ‘honor’ a dishonorable president? Will they censor or exclude any documents that show DJT in a dishonorable light? The library will be the size of the postage stamp if they do.
But, of course, it is precisely because it appears that the legislators envision a sort of hagiographic shrine to the prez, rather than a neutral and inclusive repository of information, that the precise parameters of this project should be debated.
I can usually spot an ai-generated paragraph or story simply because it sounds so damn cocksure of itself…no subjunctive or critical questioning sense about it. I guess that as long as it is identified as ai so as to be properly evaluated by the reader, I do not mind so much (even though as anyone who regularly reads my comments on this site knows: “I Hate ai” – hey D.A. Maybe a new political party in the U.S.). As for example in the 50’s I never mistook a Reader’s Digest Condensed book for the real thing or a Wikipedia article as original source material (though Wikipedia was pretty good when it first came out and several years thereafter before trolling became an Olympic sport). As a child I always trusted the World Book and Britannica encyclopedias, though just a few years ago I read a history of enclyclopedias which informed me that, indeed, these books were subject to error also…I guess they were only human.
As far as use in uni, much like when our host and I were undergrads in the 60’s, I think a student gets what he wants out of it. The curriculum requirements in our catalog made sure I got my nose rubbed in what was known as liberal arts, but had I had a better attitude and world-view, I would have gotten much more out of it. My children got a bit narrower education when they went off to school, and my grandchildren can treat college almost as vocational school, picking a narrow major to train in with only a few arts and sciences catalog requirements to round them out. They can still choose an academic major like “neuroscience”, but also “sports training”. So long trivium and quadrivium.
I too am very much not a fan of current LLM AI™ (and am expecting the LLM bubble to burst soonish). But, temporarily removing my curmudgeon hat, lots of formerly essential skills have been obsoleted by advancing technology. The one I find particularly evocative is that today few John or Jane Doe-s can tell the time (within an hour or two) by sighting the sun. Maybe much of what we today consider essential thinking will go the same way.
Institutional neutrality. If one thinks like this, one will get it wrong:
Invitation to speak or host = platforming = endorsement = honoring
Many, many partisans get it wrong. As an aside, never underestimate the ability of partisans to act in ways that place their political opponents (and policies) in the worst possible light. The neutrality policy is clear enough; sorting out the honest-but-ignorant missteps from the willful misapplication or subversion will require attention.
That sign is unnecessary. Everyone knows that strip clubs never have any windows in them.
Sometimes they have windows, but they are painted black. 🙂
Except that GB News is not “hard right”. It is perhaps “centre right”, and on issues of woke salience it is perhaps nearer the centre-ground of the British people than the BBC is.
Such labeling is just one small example of how the mainstream media try to discredit anyone who is out of line with them.
I always wonder how much of the “hard right” characterization is bad faith versus plain ignorance. It’s like university professors who declare themselves moderate. Surely, some are, but most are just moderate compared to their farther-to-the-left colleagues and neighbors, but not to the broader public.
I noticed the “hard right” slight there also. I started watching GB News for Andrew Doyle. It is a bit conservative sometimes, but “hard right” it is not. If it is, we can charitably call the BBC (and its Pal stuff particularly) Khmer Rouge, North Korean, or Full Ayatollah! 🙂
It is quite possible many academics and journalists DON’T actually know what “hard right” is – which itself is a problem.
D.A.
NYC
Islam is Ultra Hard Right by definition but is almost never called that, certainly not by the BBC.
Actual “hard right” (e.g. Hitler) and “hard left” (e.g. Stalin) seem to me indistinguishable authoritarianisms except for their choice of word-salad dressing.
Known as the horseshoe theory of politics.
I like the BBC. I listened to Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America in the early 2000s.
According to The Guardian, Nataliia Khodemchuk, the widow of the first person to die in the 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion, was killed in a drone attack on last Friday (14th November). Her husband Valerii Khodemchuk was the senior coolant pump operator, and is very likely to have died right away. His body was never recovered.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/16/nataliia-khodemchuk-widow-of-chornobyl-engineer-killed-russian-drone-strike-kyiv
I just watched a great drama the BBC created called “The Gold”. It was on PBS. I’m looking forward to whenever PBS decides to dribble out season 2.
I am pretty much up to here with pep talks about how great AI is in education, and that I should embrace and not fight AI in the classroom. Those admonitions meanwhile sidestep specific details that I need to do so. I only get vague hyperbole with a dash of pitying eye-roll that I don’t get it.
I’ve had to cancel my online quizzes. Students could take them open notes (I’d have no way to stop it), but the quiz questions included high order Blooms questions that are not from their notes. But now ChatGTP solves that since they don’t even need to sit in lecture and take notes or even think or read to get 100% on every quiz — but they will bomb the in-person exam! There is that revenge that I get, but I have now failed to teach them.
I’ve had to re-write my excellent online forum questions, since again an AI could answer those in a jiffy without a student even reading the question or answer. Now I am using questions that no AI can answer. “Go to pg. 218 in your textbook, and look at Fig. 12.8 and the nearby text. Answer the following questions about the experiment described in that figure…” See, I cannot provide even a hint about what the question is about, or an AI could pull it out of thing air. But fortunately an AI can’t understand pictures. At least not yet!
Sigh. This is not what I signed up for, but it will have to do.
This bothers me more than I care to admit. LLM AI produces texts that look similar to other presumably right texts existing in its training. It literally can’t tell right answers from wrong. Unless right answers predominate in its training data, it will spill out random nonsense. This training data is human-generated or -gathered knowledge. AI cannot produce any new knowledge at all. I hate to put it this way but human civilization depends critically on producing right answers to whatever reality throws at us. The more AI contaminates the knowledge space, the more it will look like noise. People most in demand will be those who CAN produce right answers DESPITE being inundated with ever-deteriorating AI-generated drivel. I hope your students are at least open to try to understand this.
I was told way back in the 1980s that a future engineer must learn first of all to THINK and RESEARCH. That is the basis of all problem solving. AI won’t help if both knowledge and ability to acquire it are missing.
Do the administrators of the University of North Carolina system really not understand how institutional neutrality is supposed to work? The principle is for the institution not to take official positions on the controversies of the day. It is not to prevent those controversies from being discussed—in effect, to censor controversy. Craziness.
The results returned by AI bots can be spotty. In my hobby of 50 years—electronics—the AI sometimes gives excellent results, even amazing results. Ask it to design a single-ended triode power amplifier using the 300B vacuum tube and it does a shockingly stupendous job. But ask it if a vacuum tube tester tests for cathode emissions—a much simpler question—and it get things mixed up, with the AI confusing heater-to-cathode leakage for cathode emissions.
So in a subject I know well I can catch mistakes that a student would probably miss. A professor who is expert in the field under consideration will often be able to distinguish an AI answer from an answer that emerges from a student’s brain. Over time, however, the AI is self correcting and will get better and better. We’re just going to have to learn to live with it.
As for the BBC, I’m glad that someone is paying attention. Just about every day during the war against Hamas, the BBC web site had a headline that implied something bad, even evil, about Israel. The text of the article itself was often less bad than the headline, but the editorial goal of demonizing Israel came through loud and clear.
You won’t miss pennies. Canada got rid of them in 2013 and no one cares.
Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a Canadian penny in years! Now I miss that little coin with the maple leaf.
I think you are right. I stopped using pennies 40 + years ago.
Exactly. And who is going to protest this…the average age of die-hard penny pinchers must be 83. Other than that octogenarian who has to use exact change at the checkout counter, no one gives a sh$t about pennies!
“In theory, LLMs could be infinitely patient, infinitely knowledgeable tutors. You could talk to them about material you’re struggling with, request custom-generated quizzes, or turn boring course notes into exciting podcasts.”
Yes—in theory! LLMs could be infinitely patient, infinitely knowledgeable tutors if they didn’t frequently “hallucinate” (i.e. make up bullshit). The tech companies have still not solved this problem, and many experts think that the problem is fundamentally unsolvable because of the nature of the technology (Yann LeCunn, a pioneer of early neural networks, is one such expert). A lot of the think pieces about the future of A.I. don’t acknowledge that basic fact. They seem to take the claims of OpenAI et al. at face value.
“Consider coding. Pre-ChatGPT, you had to understand the problem, break it into steps, write code, debug, etc. Now you just ask Claude.”
LLMs can write code, but there’s no guarantee that the code will work properly. A human being with programming expertise still has to vet the code, and any business that relies solely on LLM-generated code is asking for trouble. (See https://www.techradar.com/pro/nearly-half-of-all-code-generated-by-ai-found-to-contain-security-flaws-even-big-llms-affected)
Thank you for that. LLM skepticism often seems like a lonely road.
Thank you to Peter, above, for his answer to my exasperation about seemingly all state broadcasters being so hard left. I agree with your answers. Big Cas Sunstein fan also.
Loudmouthy yours,
🙂
D.A.
NYC
Loudmouthedly? 🙂
David, consider this:
Eric P. Kaufmann: The Third Awokening: A 12-point plan for rolling back progressive extremism. New York, Bombardier Books, 2024
Eric P. Kaufmann (born in 1970) is a Canadian professor of politics at the University of Buckingham (England) since 2023. Before he was a professor at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a specialist on Orangeism in Northern Ireland, nationalism, and political and religious demography. He received his PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics and Government in 1998.
In 2024, researchers from the Technical University Dortmund (Germany) asked German journalists which German party they were closest to: 23% said they had no party preference, 41% named the Green Party, 16% the Social Democratic Party (SPD), 8% the Christian Democratic Party (CDU/CSU) and 6% the Left Party (Die Linke), 1% the BSW, a leftist party that recently broke away from the Left Party.
To give a sense of how this compares to the distribution of party preferences in the electorate: The combined vote share of the four mentioned leftist parties in the 2025 German federal election was 41.8%. The share of German journalists who named one of those 4 leftist parties as their preferred party was 63%.
So leftists are strongly overrepresented among German journalists. If one were to look at German journalists below 40 the overrepresentation would presumably be even larger, to a significant extent.
41% of the German journalists surveyed in 2024 named the Green Party as their preferred party. In the federal election of 2025, the vote share of the Green Party was 11.6% (In the 2021, the vote share of the Green Party was 14.7%.) And the Green Party is the wokest of the left parties in Germany.
Labeling the entire left of center portion of the German political landscape “leftist” shows a lack of nuance and understanding. The leftist label can apply to Die Linke and the greens. BSW is economically hard left and culturally conservative. The SPD certainly is not leftist – woke-ish, yes. Hard left, no.
Exactly. I’ve lived in Germany for more than 42 years and am very familiar with the political landscape, but also in the USA, where I am originally from. Kober’s description is absolutely correct. An additional comment: BSW is economically hard left and culturally conservative, that is true, but not in the sense of xenophobia (Sahra Wagenknecht herself is half Persian). It is also anti-woke. However, it is pro-Putin.
Note also that the entire spectrum is shifted to the left. The most conservative mainstream party in Germany is the CSU in Bavaria. However, even there there is no talk of introducing university fees, doing away with single-payer healthcare, etc., so in that sense they’re on par with Bernie Sanders on those issues.
In addition, there is the Christian Democratic Employees’ Association (CDA) within the CDU, which can be broadly defined as the left wing of the a conservative party. They represent principles (labor, social, pension, health and family policies) that would be labeled as socialist in the USA. But wokism plays absolutely no role there.
What do those numbers mean? It’s like “four out of five dentists surveyed” in the old TV commercials. But who decided whom should be surveyed? So how were those journalists chosen? Is it representative? Weighted with the reach of their publications?
I doubt that ANY profession would have party preferences which reflect those in the general population. Is that a problem? Should there be party-preference quotas for all professions?
That a penny costs more to produce than it is worth is not, in itself, an indication that it is somehow not a good idea to mint them. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/making-cents/
That doesn‘t mean that there is no reason to get rid of them. One might be that they are WORTH more than their face value, so there is motiviation to melt them down and sell the metal (which is illegal). The other is that nothing can be bought for a penny. They will still be needed for those stupid 9.99 prices, though, unless such prices are done away with or prices are rounded (not necessarily up), as is the case in many countries and has been the case in the U.S. for decades at gas stations.
That a penny costs more to produce than it is worth is not, in itself, an indication that it is somehow not a good idea to mint them. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/making-cents/
That doesn‘t mean that there is no reason to get rid of them. One might be that they are WORTH more than their face value, so there is motiviation to melt them down and sell the metal (which is illegal). The other is that nothing can be bought for a penny. They will still be needed for those stupid 9.99 prices, though, unless such prices are done away with or prices are rounded (not necessarily up), as is the case in many countries and has been the case in the U.S. for decades at gas stations.