Polytropy

Sources for this post include the following.

• On recent events in the US:

  1. Seth Masket, “Friday Night Musk-acre” (February 1, 2025).
  2. Olga Lautman: “Why has Musk gained access to our data?” (February 2, 2025).
  3. Timothy Snyder, “The Logic of Destruction: And how to resist it” (February 2, 2025).
  4. Heather Cox Richardson, “February 2, 2025.”
  5. Malcolm Nance, “In The Trump ‘White’ House: No Spies Matter” (February 7, 2025).
  6. “An Uproar as Trump and Musk Wreak Havoc” (New York Times, letters, February 7, 2025).
  7. Elad Nehorai, “Elon Musk Isn’t a White Nationalist. He’s a White Globalist” (February 7, 2025).

• On technological fantasies and what they may do to students:

  8. Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries, and Joe Slater, “ChatGPT is bullshit” (2024).
  9. John Warner, “AI Boosters Think You’re Dumb” (February 2, 2025).
  10. Seth Bruggeman, “A Crisis of Trust in the Classroom” (January 14, 2025) – students either cheat with technology, or do little of anything.
  11. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) – perhaps students motivated only by grades should drop out.
  12. Steve Rose (interviewer), “Five ways AI could improve the world: ‘We can cure all diseases, stabilise our climate, halt poverty’” (Thu 6 Jul 2023) – Ray Kurzweil thinks “Our mobile phone … makes us more intelligent,” and since we already have nukes, AI is “not really making life more dangerous”; anyway, “More intelligence will lead to better everything.”
  13. Rachel Uda, “In Such a Connected World, Why Are We Lonelier Than Ever?” (February 6, 2023).
  14. Hanna Rosin interviewing Jonathan Haidt, “The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right” (March 21, 2024).

• On a particular fantasy of effortless learning:

  15. Wikipedia, “Decoded neurofeedback.”
  16. Adam Hadhazy, “Science Fiction or Fact: Instant, ‘Matrix’-like Learning” (June 21, 2012).
  17. Takeo Watanabe and others, “Perceptual Learning Incepted by Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback Without Stimulus Presentation” (9 December 2011).
  18. Kevin Le Gendre, “Steel pan virtuoso Leon Foster Thomas: ‘Some people don’t think it’s a serious instrument’ ” (February 24, 2023).

• Works leading me, somehow, to all of that:

  19. Northrop Frye, The Double Vision (1991).
  20. Peter Jukes, “In a rare interview, Philip Pullman tells us his own origin story, and why the great questions are still religious ones” (13 January 2014).

At Persepolis, outside Shiraz, Iran, Tuesday, September 4, 2012, this is the Gate of Xerxes – the Xerxes whose failed invasion of Greece is recounted by Herodotus