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Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences:
Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.
I don't trust big tech to honestly evaluate the impacts and effects of their own products. We need a neutral, or even outright adversarial, independent body to investigate issues like say, the effects of social media on teenage mental health, and the university seems as good a place to do it as any (it might be objected that such research falls under the heading of "psychology" or maybe even "economics" rather than "social sciences" - but I doubt that the people in favor of these cuts would be particularly friendly to psychology or economics departments).
There are certain legitimate and even pressing research topics (e.g. psychological differences between racial groups, impact of racial diversity on workplaces, etc) that fall under the heading of "social sciences", but which are unfortunately impossible to investigate honestly in today's climate of ideological capture. The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.
The Science post screwed up the link to the announcement, here's one that works. Despite Science's spin, the overall reporting is accurate. Let me de-spin it a bit, with quotes from the original announcement:
An elected government chooses a popular priority--economic growth--and a ministry aligns with that priority.
So the applications to this fund should either make a reasonable case that they will benefit NZ economically, or that they have some potential to lead to that. That's in line with the priority the elected government has established for itself (economic growth).
I can see why humanities and social scientists would be upset: nobody likes to have their source of funding taken away. I have but two questions: (1) do they disagree with the current elected government prioritizing economic growth, or (2) do they argue that the humanities and social science projects funded by this fund lead to economic growth as well as the core science projects?
If the disagreement is with the first question, then the response is: elections have consequences. New Zealand economy is doing poorly, people are worried, they elect a government with a mandate to grow the economy. While other goals have value, they have lost priority.
Is there any argument on the second front? The Science article hints at the possibility:
... but there is absolutely no follow-up or development of this argument. In fact, it's clear that "fundamental science" of the kind that an Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology is likely to do indeed will continue to be funded, and likely at a higher rate than before now that the funds are not going towards social science / humanities. Unless, despite the name, that institute is pursuing non-core, non-fundamental-science projects (e..g, "How would an advance in nanotech affect [$historically-disadvantaged-minority]?" or "Indigenous knowledge of microchips").
That brief hint of a beginning of an argument is followed by a conflation of economics and social cohesion, and then by how this will impact Maori-led research. So bupkis.
Your argument is at least more developed: you think that growing the economy through pursuing advances in science and tech leads to decrease in well-being of the population. I wonder, though: New Zealanders adopt science and tech products made elsewhere, and (let's take your claim at face value for the moment) suffer the social consequences anyway. Isn't that strictly worse than having NZ companies develop the product domestically, and at least capturing the economic benefits of the product?
My more direct fear is that critical reflection on questions such as: what is "well-being"? to what extent is "well-being" worth pursuing? does it make sense to have a single unified metric of "well-being"? - will cease. Such reflection is naturally at home in humanities departments.
You can argue that we don't need state funding to think about such questions. But a culture that sees no value in the humanities in general is unlikely to find value in these questions in particular.
What was the last big win for this state-sponsored critical reflection?
There's been a lot of interesting work on illusionism about consciousness in recent years. I don't agree with illusionism, but defenders of the position have made strides in showing how such a seemingly implausible position can actually be coherent, and they've helped clarify exactly what's at stake in debates over materialism.
Definitely not the one idea I'd expect to see grow in strength from my admittedly cursory undergrad study, and definitely much later than any example I could think of.
Thanks!
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I was gonna read the philosophical paper and scoff at its navel-grazing, but turns out it's quite interesting and got me thinking about applications of its ideas to AI.
To argue his thesis (that just cause you "obviously" feel stuff (generalized Moore argument) doesn't necessarily mean that you actually subjectively experience it in the moment), he distinguishes between the subjective experience (phenomenal), the behavioral aspects associated with the experience (functional), and the value we assign to the experience (normative).
I don't know what it's like to be you (or anybody other than myself). So even if the generalized Moore argument feels compelling to me when applied to myself (I feel stuff, so obviously I have phenomenal experiences), it takes a generalizational leap for me to also apply it to you (I am human, and others are human, so their experiences are probably like mine). That's even though I have lots of evidence that other people don't feel like me, and don't experience the world like I do. Still, it's safer to err on treating everyone like Player Characters in their own right and assume that they also feel stuff (phenomenal), because otherwise they'll think badly of me (normative) and gang up against me (functional).
But what about AI? It's not going to think badly of me and gang up on me if I treat it like it doesn't have feelings. I can adjust levels of politeness in my prompts if I think it will make a difference in the output (functional), and disregard the normative notions of proper communication.
(Of course, the same idea applied to animals. Well, I wasn't going to donate to PETA anyway.)
Come to think of it, I have heard versions of these ideas before... in Theravada Buddhism. Does it count as being "state-sponsored" if the founder was a prince?
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