On the death of recycling

 I came across an insta post this week that really resonated with me. For anyone that doesn't have instagram, I_am_mum_bum made a short video articulating her guilt over the way she seems to have forgotten her values since becoming a mother. She explains she used to identify as really principled. She was an activist and campaigner for various environmental and animal rights causes, lived by really strict ecological and political principles, and generally defined herself as someone whose priority was to make a difference and be a force for good.

She explains that she just caught herself 'hoying an empty plastic mayonnaise bottle into the bin, instead of washing it out and recycling it'. She expresses shock and disappointment and guilt. But goes on to give a powerful and heartfelt explanation of how she just doesn't have time for anything any more, how depleted she feels, since her life began revolving around meeting the needs of her children.

I think there is something really important in this. It connected with a realisation that I had that maternal instincts are not necessarily or even ever an overall force for good. Though we tend to think of motherhood as soft and loving and selfless - and it is! -there is a dark truth too, which it creates a powerful and I think biological shift in our priorities that makes us insular, selfish, Karens who will sometimes protect our offspring to the exclusion of everything else.

There is evidence that oxytocin - the so-called love hormone - makes new mothers more racist as well as more devoted to their babies. And I suspect this goes a long way to explaining the well-known shift towards the political right that often occurs as people get older. We are all idealistic lefties in uni, but by middle age we often become a lot more Tory. Its often explained as being about home ownership and simple wealth accumulation. But I think the maternal thing probably makes a large contribution too. Socialists suddenly become elbows-out tiger mums. And struggle to see the irony.

Its also true, i think, and as explained by Mum Bum, that mothers are genuinely overwhelmed and under-resourced and this exacerbates the shrinking of their moral circle. They often don't have time or space to care for themselves, let alone anyone else who isn't their children. and i suspect there are political forces at work here too.

Keep the women exhausted and overstretched so they don't attend protests or power-broking council meetings. Keep them from being school governers and attending public hearings. Keep them from reading or thinking or meeting and they'll lose the ability to articulate their rage at all the men who have ripped them off and excluded them from the soft levers of power.

The drudgery that stems from their learned helplessness doesn't only ensure that we're doing work they don't want to do. It's also shutting us out and shutting down our resistance. It maintains our appearance in the eyes of young women as irrelevant and boring. It makes us really damn easy to ignore and manipulate. Directed to capitalism-friendly self-care until we truly believe we inhabit a dog eat dog world where the elbows must be out or the family ship will sink, be trampled in the societal rush towards smoother faces and larger cars.

I'm tired. 

Yes, I know that I should stop scrolling instagram if i'm so tired but also, if you're thinking that but you're not a woman single parenting young children while working a full time job than you can get fucked.

Waiting

Well, it is coming up six months since my book was released into the world. I am proud to report that at this point I have managed to wrestle the frequency with which I check the view count down to just once a week.  It took a lot of discipline to get there.

At this point I think i can safely report to any interested parties that the enduring experience of publishing a book is........needing to be patient. I knew the publication process itself would likely be drawn-out and frustrating. But I hadn't really thought about what to expect afterwards. If I had sat down and thought about it I could have worked out that it would likely take a long time for there to be any kind of reaction.  I know that a few people have agreed to review my book. But its pretty long, so reasonably they'd need a month or two to read it. Then more time to write the response. Then if there is any kind of editor involved there will be extra time added for emails to get read and actioned. And then there is whole publication time line all over again, but the journal version this time. And all that's ignoring the fact that book reviews are rarely top of anyone's to do list. And the fact that in some cases it took months just to persuade the publisher to send a copy of the book out. Judging by the timelines i see for other academic works, i can probably expect reviews to start being published around 12 months after the book's release - i.e. June 2026.

Of course I'm happy and relieved its getting reviewed at all. And I have had short and positive responses from friends and colleagues. But let's be honest, a year is a long time to be chewing my nails worrying whether its any good or not. Is it unhealthy that I'm weekly scanning reddit and google and even asking chat gpt if it likes it? What if it got reviewed already and i just haven't found it yet?

What if the radio silence continues even after June 2026?  How long is too long? If nothing at all is written about my book this time next year, would that still be too soon to declare it 'stillborn from the press'?  How does one even come to know if you've written such a turkey that nobody even wants to say so?

It is well known that people often experience post-phd blues, because they've been so wrapped up for so long in their project that once its complete people often don't really know what to do with themselves. It's a Herculean effort followed by a major anti-climax. But at least with a PhD you get a viva a determinate amount of time afterwards, where you get a clear verdict.  With a book you just shout it out into the void and hope someone answers, at some point. At least i'm too busy to waste time more than once a week checking for responses......well maybe once more couldn't hurt.

An anarcho-syndicalist future for Gen-AI?

 I was required to complete an online training module by my university last week. Several actually, but a new one was on the use of generative AI. I was expecting it to be full of warnings and maybe some advice about how to spot its use in essays. To my surprise, but not necessarily dismay, I was wrong. It was pretty positive about the idea of Leeds academics using generative AI in their work. In fact it was encouraging us to use it to plan meetings, improve our lecture slides, and even develop funding proposals. There were lots of caveats about only using it as a starting point and treating it as fallible. But it heartily advised us to play around with it, do some prompt engineering, and see how it might be able to help. 

Overall I was pleased (and surprised) to see Leeds deviating from its usual cautious, wait and see what others do, approach. I'm skeptical generally of the idea that LLM's are likely to cross a singularity point and turn evil and destroy us all. Scifi lover though I am, my reasoning is that being evil requires the possession of goals, and things can only acquire goals of their own if they evolve by natural selection. Without that, they can only have the goals that humans program into them. and we already knew that humans are evil so there is nothing new to see here.

Anyway, one of the interesting things about the training module was that it included much-repeated instructions to use only one particular, university-approved, brand of Gen-AI. Presumably this is because they've paid a hefty license fee and need to justify it. But they also explained that they've acquired a license wherein anything you feed into the LLM stays in the local university-zone of the LLM. The thought is that you can trust the system not to steal your work. I think there is also an option to keep it private so you don't share it across the university network either.

This gave me an idea. Wouldn't it be cool if different universities all developed their own firewalled LLMs, encouraged all their staff to feed all their work into it, and then each competed with other universities to solve hard problems and develop new theories?

My basic understanding is that each LLM would be slightly different, distinguished by its different inputs, and would constitute a sort of idiosyncratic super-brain for each university, melding the linguistic habits of all its different researchers. It would be fun to see how they then produced different approaches to, for example, the problem of reconciling quantum physics and general relativity. It would be like a scaled-up market place of ideas. A marketplace of superintelligences.

We'd need careful mechanisms to stop powerful/wealthy universities from just favouring their own solutions, of course. And it would be terrible for cooperation between universities. But maybe we could move universities away from being nationalistic/regional and more towards each being biased towards a different set of ideologies, like in Robert Nozick's utopia.  Academics could choose which university to offer their work to, based on their individual sympathies and goals. 

I wonder what would emerge?

What is the universe trying to tell me?

 Things that have happened this month:

• My office computer stopped connecting to the internet for no apparent reason
• The screen of my two year old laptop stopped working
• I lost my housekeys
• The battery of my camper van went flat
• The electrics in my kitchen stopped working

Obviously the common denominator in all this is me. But what about me? Am I emitting some sort of current? Why?!

Kind concepts as idealised models

 https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/centre-theoretical-philosophy/doc/kind-concepts-idealised-models

Dink'inesh

I had the good fortune a few years ago to be able to visit the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. It is a wonderful place, that does such a great job of bringing its exhibits to life. I found my way to the Hall of Human Origins, where they have recreated the Laoteli footprints from Tanzania. These are tracks discovered in 1978, but thought to have been made 3.6 million years ago by three members of Australopithecus afarensis, an early human ancestor. 

They've set scale casts of the footprints into the floor as you enter the hall. I found it incredibly moving to trace these steps, and notice that they were roughly the same size as my own feet.

A bit further on, you can see a replica skeleton of 'Lucy' the most famous Australopithecus. Apparently the team who found her relatively complete skeleton in Ethiopia named her after the Beatles song. It was only recently, back in Leeds, that it was pointed out to me how inappropriate this name is. 

Joe Williams, of Heritage Corner Leeds, led me and others on a Black History Walk to celebrate Black History Month (October in the UK). He opened by noting that one of the tour's goals is to mitigate the erasure of Blackness from British History. And as his first example pointed out that this goes all the way back to Human History, way back before the British Isles existed as a nation. What sense does it make that one of the very first humans known to have walked the earth was given an English name? 

We all know that humans evolved in Africa. That White features evolved only much later. Paleoanthropologists from Lucy's homeland, Ethiopia, chose the Amharic name 'Dink'inesh', and in 2013 she went home to the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa.  

It hit me hard to realise I hadn't previously questionned the decency of her name. For White scientists to go and loot former colonies was pretty normal in the 1970s. But to appropriate her very being with a name take from a song by the Whitest band ever, in a horrible echo of the slave names given to those whose culture and history was stolen from them.......yuck.

Her new name means 'You are amazing' and I will try to remember not to use the old one again.

The future of university

 I think i've had a really good idea (this happens a lot). Finally figured out how to make my millions. 

Universities are in crisis, student numbers are falling, and there is a lot of hand wringing about what universities are for. I think its time to repurpose some of the universities as for-profit assisted living centres for 19-25 year olds.

Hear me out.

Day 1341

 That's right - a mere 3 years, 8 months and 2 days after i began blogging about my attempt to write a book.....it's out!

https://academic.oup.com/book/60068?login=true 

The electronic version at least. I'm not exactly sure what the access conditions are, i need to find out, but its free to me via my leeds uni sign-in.

I'm so happy!!

cancelled!

 Unfortunately Kristie had to cancel. the first slot only will now take place online

Students these days

 Yesterday I read Steven Hales' thought-provoking post about how students have changed (with thanks to Daily Nous for flagging it). Hales has noticed his students becoming significantly worse at reading, writing and basic maths over the course of his 30-year career. And he puts it down largely to smart-phone addiction.