Jonathan Stray

Some months ago, I began typing an email to my friend historian Richard John and quickly realized I was writing an essay I had wanted to do for years. I published it this morning and call it, "Two Forms of 'Technology' Criticism: Cultural Pessimism Versus Materialism." In it, I make a distinction between materialist critique and a different tradition rooted in cultures of despair and condescension that frets about "instrumental reason" and something it calls "technology." Materialism is right and good. Cultural pessimism sucks. Link below.

All can be true: 1. Universities have been targeted by a decades-long bad faith campaign 2. Status quo is vastly more normal than craziest stuff on Fox/social media, esp. outside elite schools 3. Parts of academia are in rough shape Despite 1 & 2, we can and should address 3.

There's a longer answer to this question, of course. Every field has some mix of normative and descriptive work. This can get unbalanced. I've been arguing for computer scientists to take clearer normative stances, for example. From the outside, what I would say is in the last few decades the humanities seem to me to have become dominated by, let's call it the critical turn. The emphasis on race/class/gender oppression, and more generally critique instead of description, is diagnostic. These fields also give off a more insular vibe, at least to me; for example I don't see a lot of work seriously grappling with how economics actually works (IMO Graber's "Debt" was unenlightening), and some major developments in psychology seem ignored too. Certainly the politics of humanities scholars have collapsed; there are many ways to see this, but there's lots and lots of data and it all says the same thing: there's some sort of leftist uniformity dominating all of these fields. Leftist politics are not intrinsically bad of course, but it does have its dysfunctions, and these are amplified by uniformity of thought. At the same time, there are definitely right-wing activists attacking the humanities. Yet many external criticisms cannot simply be rejected as insincere or uninformed. So this is the current situation as I see it: multiple related humanistic fields have become overbalanced with a fairly narrow kind of prescriptivist approach. In that context, more descriptive work can be neglected, the field starts to feel insular, and people are going to be more suspicious of political claims coming from affiliated scholars. And unfortunately, I think at least some of that suspicion is justified. If nothing else, this is a parsimonious explanation for the collapse of trust in humanities scholarship. You may not agree with me, of course. This debate has been endlessly rehashed, and there is a very active Discourse around all of this, as I am sure you know. But hopefully this at least gives you a sense of how I, personally, interpret the state of affairs as suggesting that normative restraint would be corrective.

What could it mean for an AI to be "politically neutral”? And can we measure it? New paper + dataset. We propose a defn that applies to any type of conflict: a neutral response should maximize approval on both sides of an issue, while keeping that approval balanced. 1/🧵

To follow up on this — feel free to totally ignore the results for ChatGPT and Anthropic and dismiss them as biased. Grok which is explicitly designed to not have left-wing bias still leans left! Is that because most writers are on the left? Maybe but doesn’t Grok know that?