ChatBots, Homelessness, Dairy Farmers, and Churches - Dinner Table Digest № 31
I’m sharing four pieces this time, with one highlighting the chilling effects of ChatBot programs on the university student experience, along with another calling out a disappointing response from government with respect to homelessness in the Waterloo Region. Then, after a short digression into my experience milking cattle and my relationship with my Dutch in-laws, we look at how dairy farmers from the Netherlands are fueling conspiracy theories worldwide, before finishing with a short piece on the role of religion in the War in Ukraine.
Sections: The College Essay is Dead / Waterloo Region Officials Out of Their Depth / Dutch Farmers and the Global, Right Wing Culture War / Ukraine’s Orthodox Churches
The College Essay Is Dead - Stephen Marche - The Atlantic
As I sit and work on a writing sample for a future Ph.D. application, does the work I am putting in even matter, now that we have ChatBot programs that can write competent, graduate level essays?
In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: “I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program. …
Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems. Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated? Going by my experience as a former Shakespeare professor, I figure it will take 10 years for academia to face this new reality: two years for the students to figure out the tech, three more years for the professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five years for university administrators to decide what, if anything, to do about it. Teachers are already some of the most overworked, underpaid people in the world. They are already dealing with a humanities in crisis. And now this. I feel for them.
And yet, despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.
Region of Waterloo officials out of their depth dealing with the homeless - Leslie Morgenson - Waterloo Region Record
Far from doing a good job, this writer lists several ways in which officials from the government of the Region of Waterloo have made a further mess of the unhoused situation in Kitchener and Waterloo.
In being out of its depth on this issue, one would think that at the very least the region would lean toward compassion, putting the most vulnerable first. At the very least they could comprehend that there is a segment of our community that has very few public places where they can enter. But, absurdly, it seems as if the regional councillors believe they themselves are the vulnerable party in the encampment situation. So, ethics don’t even enter the conversation. And there are no ancient Roman statesmen and philosophers here to remind us that the health and welfare of the people is the highest law.
With a show of no compassion, one can only conclude the region’s behaviour was all about appearance of abiding the law; or that an encampment might be seen as a blemish on the landscape of the region.
The region clearly lacks any grasp of the roots of addiction as a societal issue and the complex connection between addiction and mental health.
The encampments have raised strong and varied emotions this year from all across this region. But the unsheltered don’t have the luxury of time, energy, or a voice at the table to enter this dispute. They are elsewhere … trying to stay alive, moment by moment.
The encampment was the strongest statement the unsheltered in our community have yet made. On their part, it wasn’t a political move. It wasn’t their intention to start a battle. They just wanted a place to lay their heads at night and the options were becoming fewer. Instead of setting up on the private property of a homeowner, they set up on regional land, close to the few amenities offered them. Sounds like a thoughtful decision on the part of the tent dwellers.
How Dutch farmers became the center of a global right-wing culture war - Patrick Smith - NBC News
I have some experience with Dutch dairy farmers, a very peculiar lot. While doing my M.A. I worked, briefly, milking cows for a Dutch dairy farmer, who had immigrated to Ontario from the Netherlands some 15 years earlier. My girlfriend at the time, now wife, grew up the granddaughter of a salt-of-the-earth, hardworking, balls-to-the-wall, Dutch Reformed dairy farmer, for whom the values of God, Family, and Hard, Honest, Heavy Work were paramount. Having visited extended family in the Netherlands, I can say for certain though, that, despite the Dutch reputation of driving a hard-nosed bargain and their propensity to view hard physical labour with divine reverence, they are the kindest people with the biggest hearts. In my case, while my in-laws and I go together like oil and water, I am grateful that I was able to develop a great relationship with the family patriarch and OG Dairy Farmer before he passed away. So, it is with some knowledge of the deep values of the Dutch dairy farmer that I find myself frustrated that some are being asked to eliminate their herds altogether in the name of climate change mitigation. That said, the conspiracy theory elements of the farmer's protest draw definite worries.
Dutch Facebook and Telegram groups, often with “Freedom” in their names, post memes and videos almost daily arguing that the farmers movement is opposing the “great reset” — a supposed attempt to remake the world into a single economic-political bloc to the detriment of national identities.
Klokkenluiders voor Vrijheid (meaning whistleblowers for freedom, which has 87,000 subscribers) shared a video in November featuring David Icke, a British conspiracy theorist, arguing that Dutch farms are being shut down so the government can restrict food supply and more easily coerce and control the population. …
The theory has definite international resonance. It has featured on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and was given oxygen by the actor Russell Brand on his YouTube channel, which has 6 million subscribers. The theory has echoes of the racist great replacement theory, which has been cited by right-wing mass shooters in their manifestos from New Zealand to El Paso, Texas.
Conspiracy theories tend to begin reacting to a specific, complex problem, but then begin to encompass all of society’s problems, especially if there is no other explanation being offered.
“Political scientists call it issue expansion. It’s a small issue, but it expands because of vicious circles and before you know it, it’s all about the great reset,” Arjen Boin, an expert in social movements from Leiden University in the Netherlands, said by phone.
At one protest in Amsterdam in July, an upside down Dutch national flag, the symbol of the farmers’ struggle but also of a wider anti-government “freedom” movement, was emblazoned with the slogan: “Dutch evicted for Ukrainians? Government? Guilty.”
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Ukraine’s Orthodox churches and the fight for the country’s soul - The Economist
When nations are at war, religion often becomes a central battleground. Ukraine is no exception.
Ukraine’s government sees the UOC’s links to Russia as a security risk. The Russian Orthodox Church is led by Patriarch Kirill, an ally of Vladimir Putin. But the UOC says it is firmly behind Ukraine’s fight to defend itself. In May it scrubbed all mention of Moscow from its statute. “There has been profound change in the church,” says Geraldine Fagan, editor of East-West Church Report, which covers Christianity in the former Soviet Union and central Europe. “I see deep anger [at Russia] and unequivocal support for Ukraine.” She believes most of its clergy are Ukrainian nationalists.
But many Ukrainians still view the UOC with suspicion. Cyril Hovorun of University College Stockholm says the break with the Russian church was a “big step… but at the same time a way to camouflage” the church’s links to the regime in Moscow. Since 2014 UOC priests in eastern Ukraine have helped pro-Russian separatist forces. In May, at the same meeting at which it broke with the Russian church, the UOC authorised its clergy in Russian-occupied areas to make decisions independently of the church’s leadership. Critics say this has legitimised the help that some clergy have given to the invaders. On December 7th a priest from Luhansk was sentenced to 12 years in prison for telling Russian soldiers the movements of Ukrainian troops. Another priest is on trial for allegedly blessing Russian weapons.
Ukraine’s government also fears that parts of the UOC could act as a fifth column inside unoccupied Ukraine. In recent days the security services have raided more than 350 UOC buildings, including some at Pechersk Lavra, a monastery in Kyiv, the capital, which is listed by UNESCO as a world-heritage site. The force says it has found Nazi symbols, stacks of cash and literature denying Ukraine’s legitimacy as a sovereign state. At the Lavra there were reports that congregants sang pro-Russian songs. Priests there were forced to take lie-detector tests.
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