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.
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“Hear No Evil”
At
, addresses the silence surrounding the Trump administration’s crackdowns on speech: “It is amazing how few of the people who [did the reporting behind the Twitter Files] have had anything to say about the attacks on free speech coming from the current administration. Some, I think it’s safe to say from what they’ve written and tweeted in the recent past, outright applaud it. I’ve felt like this needs to be said for a long time, but it’s reached a level of absurdity that I feel weirder not pointing it out than I feel anxious about potentially antagonizing a few friends and allies.”He highlights Trump’s “Truth” on the administration’s attempt to deport anti-war activist Mahmoud Khalil for his political speech:
Woodhouse writes: “You may not feel the same way I do about the war in Gaza. You may personally despise the protesters at Columbia and other universities. You may feel that some of their tactics have fallen outside of the bounds of protected speech. But read Trump’s statement and ask yourself honestly if anyone who claims to be a free speech warrior should not be alarmed by this rhetoric and the action that preceded it. Ask yourself if those who, like me, regarded Biden’s attacks on Covid dissent as an ominous instance of creeping authoritarianism can seriously claim that Trump has not met and exceeded that standard?”
He concludes: “I’d like to believe that the principles espoused by the movement against the online censorship of the Biden administration were more than partisan grandstanding and ‘owning the libs.’ The persistent silence from that crowd, however, makes it nearly impossible to come to that conclusion.”
“Science, Politics and Anxiety Mix at Rally Under Lincoln Memorial”
Meanwhile, the tepid resistance to Trump appears to be doubling down on some of the very things that have contributed to the anti-Trump movement’s broad unpopularity. The New York Times reports on the recent “Stand Up for Science” rally in Washington and similar satellite protests around the country. Participants sought to defend “science” yet did not reckon with their own role in radically undermining trust in the scientific establishment during covid. The article reports: “Friday’s protesters made their feelings known with a diversity of placards, some pointed (‘Fund Science, Defund DOGE’); some catchy (‘Make America Think Again,’ ‘No Brains, No Gains’); some clever (‘In Evidence We Trust’); some resigned (‘I Can’t Believe I’m Marching for Facts’), some too explicit to repeat here. Several read, ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun-ding for Science.’”
These signs were paired with equally tone-deaf statements by rally participants: “Elsewhere, three young women, all students, stood together with a sign that read ‘Science is Apolitical.’ One said, ‘I didn’t tell my parents I’m here,’ and they all laughed. She added, ‘I should be at home doing my research. But I can’t, because we might get defunded. It shouldn’t be political, but because they’re making it that way, we don’t have a choice.’”
“Chinese Investors Privately Take Stakes in Elon Musk’s Companies”
The Financial Times reports that “Wealthy Chinese investors are quietly funnelling tens of millions of dollars into private companies controlled by Elon Musk using an arrangement that shields their identities from public view, according to asset managers and investors involved in the transactions. Since Musk was named a key figure in US President Donald Trump’s drive to remake the US government, China-based asset managers have been promoting the pair’s relationship as an enticement to raise capital from rich Chinese. The money is flowing into Musk’s non-public ventures including xAI, Neuralink and SpaceX, the world’s most valuable private company.”
The report notes that these “investments are being placed through opaque structures known as special-purpose vehicles, which have the benefit of concealing the investors’ identities, to avoid the ire of US authorities and companies wary of Chinese capital during a nadir in relations between the two countries. Asset managers behind the deals have told investors that the entities are specifically designed to avoid disclosure. The use of special-purpose vehicles in financing is commonplace and there is nothing illegal about the arrangements. Still, it raises concerns about the potential for undue influence and conflicts of interest at a time when Musk has unprecedented involvement in US policy, politics and business.”
“I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats”
laments the havoc wreaked on higher education by generative AI for The Walrus: “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It’s not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by AI—papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading, or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course…To judge by the number of papers I read last semester that were clearly AI generated, a lot of students are enthusiastic about this latest innovation. It turns out, too, this enthusiasm is hardly dampened by, say, a clear statement in one’s syllabus prohibiting the use of AI. Or by frequent reminders of this policy, accompanied by heartfelt pleas that students author the work they submit.”Jollimore continues: “My students have been shaped by a culture that has long doubted the value of being able to think and write for oneself—and that is increasingly convinced of the power of a machine to do both for us. As a result, when it comes to writing their own papers, they simply disregard it. They look at instructors who levy such prohibitions as irritating anachronisms, relics of a bygone, pre-ChatGPT age…As I go on, I find that more of the time, energy, and resources I have for teaching are dedicated to dealing with this issue. I am doing less and less actual teaching, more and more policing. Sometimes I try to remember the last time I actually looked forward to walking into a classroom. It’s been a while.”
“It Mostly Works”
analyzes the rise of “vibe coding” at : “In this 404Media article about a vibe-coded game, Emanuel Maiberg defines vibe coding as ‘being less methodical and detail oriented, telling the AI tool what you want, and getting it to work without worrying about the code base being messy.’ We are supposed to be excited that AI will liberate the world from the tyranny of expertise, and we can all be equal in our ignorance. But why is ‘vibe’ part of this term?”He continues: “‘Vibe coding’ retains the implication that you can’t explain or even understand how something works. But under the pressure of AI hype and its championing of incomprehension, there seems to be not a ‘vibe shift’ but a ‘vibe’ shift occurring, as the term drifts toward a different connotation. Where vibe once conveyed something that can’t be analyzed, now it conveys a purposeful indifference to analysis or explanation, as well as to the components that make up something. It is as though the preponderance of vibe talk made explanations irrelevant in all cases, and now we speak of vibes to forbid comprehension, which would be unfun.
“‘Giving in to the vibe,’ then, means deliberately refusing to understand, as though that would be to defy AI’s supremacy. One should let AI handle the data and the details so that you can just have gratified impulses, which are ultimately just a matter of data being manipulated to your liking—prompting, waiting, tweaking, and trying again until you are satisfied or bored with what you’re doing. Being involved with the thinking process, the details, would be to go against the vibe. It’s a superfluous burden that sets you against the spirit of the times.”
“Without Regard For Persons”
discusses resistance to AI in the workplace for and : “If AI promises to advance the prime directive of all publicly-traded businesses—namely, to increase productivity by means of greater efficiency and to maximize the value of corporate assets—then workers’ resistance may be seen as little more than an obstacle to be overcome by whatever tactics are deemed necessary. Indeed, to the extent that people are cynical about AI and how they imagine it will affect their future, it seems that there is at least an equal measure of cynicism within the upper echelons of corporate hierarchies towards workers’ intransigence when they are asked to welcome it into their work lives.”Anderson continues: “Confrontations like the present standoff between management and their AI-skeptical employees disclose a reality which has long characterized modern industrial and post-industrial labor: while modern economies seek methods by which to efficiently produce and distribute goods and services for human consumption, they aren’t, at least not primarily, systems designed for human beings to work inside; the need of modern corporations and bureaucracies to employ human beings was always, in an important sense, an accidental feature, a byproduct of the simple fact that we alone possess the competencies required to keep the system running—and perhaps we couldn’t ask for better evidence of this than the fact that employees who do this kind of work are being so aggressively pushed out of the office at the first sign of technological feasibility.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.