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One of the reasons why many historical cycles seem to recur every hundred years, more or less, is that the people who learned the lessons of this mostly forgotten past are dead and gone. We can’t hear their warnings, or benefit from their experience. So we are doomed to repeat their mistakes.
That’s why I’m always fascinated by things that happened almost exactly a century ago. They typically represent a comparable point in the cycle as the one we are currently living through. Yet those earlier events exist just beyond the horizon of our living memory — and thus tell us painful truths that we can only learn from history books.
How will encouraging students to use AI when writing papers in political theory, philosophy, literature, or history deepen learning? I have taught in UChicago’s social sciences core sequence, I have studied the linguistic and analytic capacities of LLMs, and I can say with confidence that there is no use of AI that can “deepen” students’ learning of Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Marx, and Du Bois over and above an unmediated engagement with the original works. If one wants to deepen students’ understanding of human beings’ most difficult, elevated and important intellectual and artistic achievements, one needs to give instructors the means of demanding that students spend time with the works, alone. Allow professors to require students to spend the time they are nominally already required to dedicate to the course outside the classroom in tech-free reading rooms; shut down the WiFi; scramble the cell signal; send them to weeklong retreats in the deep, dark woods. Whatever.
Failure to do so will mean giving up on mastery in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, and with it, the liberal-arts model of college education itself.
It really is that straightforward. And almost everyone in the American academy has already waved the white flag.
As Horbatsch notes in the catalogue, only a small fraction of 15th-century drawings, the earliest works in the show, survive and all extant examples were made as functional objects in the studio. Drawings were valuable workshop material, handed down from master to disciple. The sole surviving drawing by van der Weyden’s own hand, a silverpoint portrait of a young woman (c.1440), is thought to be a free copy after a lost portrait by Jan van Eyck, and it reveals not only van der Weyden’s practice of copying works by his most famous predecessor but also his subtle use of line and keen observation of texture and facial expression.
Saying goodbye to WordPress. I won’t stop writing longer posts, I’ll just be writing them here and at Cosmos Malick and at a new blog that I am calling, unimaginatively I suppose, Personal History. I’ve begun it by re-posting a few autobiographical pieces from the old WordPress blog, and I will be adding to those over time — largely for my own sake, as I’m trying to make sense of some of the odder things about my life. But since most of my readers are unlikely to be interested in all that, I’ll keep it siloed in its own blog.
It’s all part of the Ayjay Empire, though. As far as I can tell, most of my readers find out what I’m writing through the weekly newsletter/digest and don’t really care to what URL the links go. Nothing will change for you, if you’re one of those people, and little will change for anyone else.
The famous East Cloister of Gloucester Cathedral, with the earliest known example of fan vaulting. Much larger version of the photo here.
In God’s mercy, this design for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral was not chosen.
The weirdest thing about the current AI-may-kill-us-all stories is the tone of the people who work for the big AI companies. They’re all like, “Hey, our products may well destroy humanity 😂🤪🤷 okay gonna try this new coffee shop, ciao for now” — Still, just as I’ve been asking how AI is going to “cure cancer,” I’d also like to know how it will kill everybody. The promises and the threats are equally abstract.
UPDATE: I see that the WSJ is asking my question.
If I don't post much in the coming days and weeks this is why.
Mark Humphries: “To my mind, the traditional research paper as a tool of differential assessment is now dead. And I think it should be left to rest in peace.” I believe this judgment is correct.
Morning on campus.
