Weekly Grounding #64
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
“Can Globalisation Survive the US-China Rift?”
At The Financial Times, Alan Beattie asks whether globalization can survive increasing economic “decoupling” between the United States and China. He notes that it has been “largely non-aligned” and “often middle-income economies,” like Brazil, Vietnam, Mexico, India, Turkey, and Malaysia that have shored up global supply chains under threat from the US-China rift. As a result, distinct Cold War-style trading blocs have not yet solidified:
At the same time, global infrastructure—like the massive network of fiber optic internet cables that integrates the internet on the ocean floor—is “bifurcating into American and Chinese spheres of influence”:
Beattie concludes: “The medium-term future for globalisation seems set: a struggle between Washington and Beijing for pre-eminence, or at least resilience, which continually threatens to override economic efficiency with national security. The counterweight will come from geopolitical agnosticism among other governments and the endlessly inventive supply-chain managers of multinationals. Those countervailing liberalising pressures have won in the past. But the centrifugal forces pulling the trading system apart are by far their fiercest opponent yet.”
“The Third Framing”
On the same topic,
asks whether “an international economic system [can] exist in the world of nationalisms” at : “With the current geopolitical tensions, international economic policies of the West are in the process of dramatic change. Instead of an open worldwide trading system, the current approach calls for the creation of trade blocs among the political allies. This is in contravention both of the first and the second framing of the international economic system that sought to differentiate trade from political relations, having learned from the disastrous creation of politically-segregated trade blocs between the two World Wars.”Milanovic continues: “The point is that in practice the neoliberal international regime that debuted in the 1980s is dead. The major countries that defined its rules have ceased to abide by them. We are thus facing a strange situation where the main architects and the founders of the neoliberal international order no longer believe in it and do not apply it, but somehow the system should be still apparently adhered to by the rest of the world. This is an untenable situation. There is no way in which a World Bank mission to an African, Latin American or Asian country can seriously complain about government subsidies, trade discrimination, seizure of assets of political opponents, trade bloc trading, or industrial policy while the very same policies are prosecuted by the framers of the international economic system. The contradiction can be papered over for a while, but cannot be ignored forever. If the international neoliberal rules are no longer considered the appropriate rules for the United States and Europe, should they be considered as the right rules for the rest of the world? There is simply no current answer to this question. The new rules have to be invented and introduced or the entire system will become incoherent and internally contradictory so much that eventually no ‘system’ at all will exist. The world will be back to individual country optimization under the rules of the jungle.”
He concludes: “If the world is now moving towards policies of national self-sufficiency and national interest above everything else, then an international system of rules not only does not make sense, but cannot exist. Or it may end up in total irrelevance the way the League of Nations did.”
“High Schoolers Need to Do Less So That They Can Do Better”
In a New York Times letter to the editor, Tim Donahue observes that “We have pushed high school students into maximizing every part of their days and nights. Those who take the bait are remarkably compliant, diluting themselves between their internships and Canva presentations. We condition students to do a so-so job and then move on to the next thing. We need to let them slow down. Critical cognition, by definition, takes time.”
Donahue argues that “Without a collective pushback, the general squeezing of things will continue apace. And that squeezing is now happening in classrooms. Reading full-length books can feel like a transgressive act when the National Council of Teachers of English in 2022 announced its support for the idea to ‘decenter book reading’ in English language arts education. Instead, they suggest ‘critically examining digital media and popular culture’ as more worthwhile.”
For more on how schools “dumb us down” (to use John Taylor Gatto’s pithy phrase), see my 2019 article for Truthout, “John Taylor Gatto Challenged the Ideas Inherent in US Mass Schooling.”
“Abolish Grades”
In his letter, Donahue mentions how grade inflation has contributed to the increased overscheduling of high school students. This is because extracurricular activities have become even more important in the college admissions process when so many students get straight As. In this article by
at his eponymous Substack, he addresses the issue of grade inflation head on, arguing that it has gotten so bad that grades should be abolished altogether: “Now that the most common grade at most four-year colleges is an A, the stakes for each individual course are much higher. Since there is no way for students to distinguish themselves by doing exceptional work, a single negative outlier takes on outsized weight. To get a stellar GPA, a student doesn’t have to be exceptionally good at any one thing; they have to manage risk in every single course they take over the course of four years. As a result, today’s grading system has come to express a perverse set of institutional values: ‘We care much more about your ability to jump through any hoop we put in your path than about your ability to excel in your strongest subject or about your intellectual curiosity for challenging fields outside your main focus.’”Monk insightfully observes that “grade inflation also punishes students for uneven performance over time. If you are a middling student with few major life challenges and strong mental health, you will wind up with a high GPA. If you are a brilliant student who really struggles during one term because of a family crisis or some mental health problem, your GPA will tank, never to recover. This is deeply ironic. Much of the explicit or implicit justification for grade inflation is a concern about social justice. And yet the current grading system favors mediocre kids from stable homes over talented ones from less stable backgrounds.”
He argues that “a system becomes so irredeemably broken that the least bad option is to give up on it, at least for the time being. The grading system at American universities has now reached that stage. Imperfect though that solution may be, it’s time to bin the whole damn thing. And perhaps, in ten or thirty or fifty years, that will allow us to start from scratch.” I believe that there are compelling philosophical and pedagogical reasons to abolish grades altogether for good (entirely independent of the very real grade inflation problem), but pieces like Mounk’s are a step in the right direction. For more on grade abolition, see David F. Noble’s excellent 2007 piece, “Giving Up the Grade.”
“Neuralink's Grand Vision Isn't Scientifically Supported”
At
, argues that “the ultimate goal of Neuralink to augment normal baseline humans seems not just premature, but right now lacking scientific support at all. It would be based entirely on aesthetics and preference and maybe minor speed-ups in a few edge cases.”Hoel elaborates: “When I first heard [Elon] Musk talking about this [merging humans with machines], I realized that he was imagining that humans are capable of outputting information at rates that go far beyond their current abilities…However, while neurons themselves are very fast, our consciousness and our intentional outputs are much, much slower. Even Musk’s example of speaking like an auctioneer requires a lot of practice. Some people do speak and think faster than others, but at its fastest it’s only a bit behind typing speed. I think I could get used to just thinking and watching words appear, but it would be a convenience for me personally only because I do this for a living (and it would be minimally different than voice dictation). Even if speed-ups could be practiced to eke out an advantage, you will notice that most thinkers and intellectuals already find no need to train themselves to think or talk at the speed of an auctioneer. In other words, even if you could output text as fast as thought, thought itself is not particularly fast.”
These objections only address the technical problems with Musk’s Neuralink project. For more on the ethical dimensions of his transhumanist worldview, see my essay, “Telos or Transhumanism?”
“Consciousness Came Before Life”
A group of scientists theorize the relationship between life and consciousness for The Institute of Arts and Ideas: “Most scientists and philosophers believe that life came before consciousness. Life appeared on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago; consciousness and feelings, it’s said, evolved later due to complex biological information processing, perhaps only recently in brains with language and tool-making abilities. In fact, though, there’s good reason to think that consciousness preceded life, and was central to making life and evolution possible.”
They draw on mathematician Roger Penrose’s reading of fellow mathematician Kurt Gödel: “Penrose supports his claim that consciousness is caused by or made up of waveform collapses by appealing to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. This states that within a sufficiently complex formal system, there are always true statements that cannot be proven within that system – they are ‘non-computable.’ We call these statements the Gödel sentences of the system; an ‘external determinant,’ or a more powerful system, is required to prove a system’s Gödel sentences.
“Penrose argues that conscious minds are not like these complex formal systems, since they don’t have any Gödel sentences. Put differently, consciousness involves a non-computable process – a process which cannot be classically computed. In contrast, familiar, classical reality is algorithmic and ‘computable.’ Penrose therefore concludes that the non-computable process and its attendant conscious ‘feelings’ or ‘qualia’ must come from outside classical physics, namely from quantum physics with its own set of laws.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.
"He concludes: “If the world is now moving towards policies of national self-sufficiency and national interest above everything else, then an international system of rules not only does not make sense, but cannot exist. Or it may end up in total irrelevance the way the League of Nations did.”"
National self-sufficiency in an era of increasingly scarce sources of energy and of critical raw materials? Good luck! :-) National interest? Well, yeah, if one accepts defining the interest of a group of global elites with a certain national home base as the interest of that "nation." What we see, again, is globalization but with separate camps of alliances pursuing their own interests, damn the rest. A growing struggle for survival.