A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Author: Anca Gheaus

Academia / Education / Pedagogy / Teaching

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What we train need not be the same as what we assess: AI damage limitation in higher education

It has always been clear that ChatGPT’s general availability means trouble for higher education. We knew that letting students use it for writing essays would make it difficult if not impossible to assess their effort and progress, and invite cheating. Worse, that it was going to deprive them of learning the laborious art and skill of writing, which is good in itself as well as a necessary instruments to thinking clearly. University years (and perhaps the last few years of high school, although, I worry, only for very few) is the chance to learn one’s writing and thinking. When there is quick costless access to the final product, there is little incentive for students to engage in the process of creating that product themselves; and going through that process is, generally, a lot more valuable than the product itself. Last March, philosopher Troy Jollimore published a lovely essay on this theme. So, we knew that non-regulated developments in artificial intelligence are inimical to this main aim of higher education.

Even more concerning news are now starting to find us: Not only is the use of ChatGPT bad for students because the temptation to rely on it is too hard to withstand, but respectable studies such as a recent one authored by scholars at MIT show that AI has significant negative effects on users’ cognitive abilities. The study indicates that the vast majority of people using Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, in order to write, forget the AI-generated content within minutes. Neural connections for the group relying on natural intelligence-only were almost twice as strong as those in the group using LLMs. And regular users who were asked to write without the help of LLMs did worse than those who never used ChatGPT at all. The authors of the study are talking about a “cognitive debt”: the more one relies on AI, the more they lose thinking abilities. All these findings are true of most users; a silver line, perhaps, is that users with very strong cognitive capacities displayed higher neural connection when using LLMs.

In short, LLMs are here to stay, at least until proper regulation – which is not yet on the horizon – kicks in; if this study is right, they can give valuable support to the more accomplished scholars (perhaps at various stages of their career) while harming everybody else. Part of the university’s job is to develop the latter group’s cognitive abilities; encouraging students to use LLMs appears, in light of these considerations, a kind of malpractice. And assigning at home essays is, in practice, encouragement.

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Gender

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Feminism without “woman”?

Anyone who is at all online these days – as you are if you’re reading this – will know that one of the most fierce culture wars revolve around the meaning of “woman”. They’re fought in courts, in universities, on other blogs and of course on social media and even on streets.

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Children / Duties / Education / General / Rights

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A puzzle of liberal childrearing: may neutral states allow parents to dominate children’s value-formation?

This is another post about childrearing and, like my previous ones, it is complaining about the status quo. This time I’m thinking about what we actively do to expose children to various ways of living and views about what makes for a good life (too little) and about how much we let parents screen such sources of influence out of children’s lives (too much.)

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Children / General / Liberty / Rights

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Having slaves and raising children

When I said yes to co-writing a book on surrogacy, I thought it would be just a straightforward application of my general view that moral rights over children, including the right to custody, are grounded in children’s own interests rather than in any interest of the right holder. And in a way it is: in a nutshell, I argue that custody is a prerogative, and hence cannot be sold or gifted. A practice that permits people to transfer it at will is illegitimate. But, along the way, I’m making interesting discoveries; one of them is just how far one may push the analogy between holding slaves and raising children in a world like ours, which has not yet fully outgrown the long tradition of denying rights to children. Many contemporary philosophers of childrearing should find the analogy plausible, even if they don’t share my view about the justification of the right to custody. Let me explain. (more…)

Academia / Distribution / Economics / Gender / General / Rights

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“Level playing fields”: a misguided complaint about discrimination against well-off women

This is the third, and last, of a series of three posts about gender justice and conflicts of interest between women who belong to different classes. In the first post I argued that priority should be given to the worse off women: When a particular policy (which is otherwise justified) would benefit poor, or working class, women, there is a strong presumption in favour of that policy even if it would, at the same time, set back the interests of better off women. Many care-supporting policies are like this: The very mechanism that makes them work in favour of those women from low socio-economicbackgrounds who are saddled with care duties leads to the reinforcement of statistical discrimination and other biases against professional women. (more…)

Distribution / Economics / Gender / General / Rights

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Feminism and the top end of the payscale

Class is a deep dividing line in feminism for two, mutually compatible, reasons: One is about the strategic use of limited time and energy in the feminist movement. The interests of poor and working-class women often diverge from the interests of the more privileged, hence the need to set priorities. This is what my previous post was about.

But the more important reason – captured these days by the agenda of the Feminism for the 99% movement – is that the problems of women who make it to the top are parasitic on a structure of the labour market and schedule of rewards that should not exist in the first place. This second complaint against lean-in feminism (sometimes and, I think, mistakenly, identified as “liberal feminism”) is not merely about misplaced priorities, but about identifying feminism with the gender cosmetisation of deeply unjust existing arrangements. The worry with the upper class feminism is, as Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser put it, that “[i]ts real aim is not equality, but meritocracy. Rather than seeking to abolish social hierarchy, it aims to “diversify” it, “empowering” “talented” women to rise to the top.”
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Distribution / Economics / Gender / Public Philosophy / Work

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Feminism for Working-Class Women Is the Best Feminism

This extended post is a response to a recent Boston Review article by Gina Schouten, called “‘Flexible’ Family Leave is Lousy Feminism”.

This must be one of the most animated debates amongst feminists: how to find the best remedial policies for women who are disadvantaged because they serve as main care-givers for their children, elderly parents, sick relatives or friends. They are disadvantaged in many ways. Some are economic: lower lifetime earnings and fewer work-related benefits compared to people without care commitments – hence more dependency on spouses. Others are social: part-time workers take a hit in status, stay-at-home mums even more so. Finally, there are the relational and psychological disadvantages: women who are economically dependent on their partners have less negotiating power than their partners, and many face tremendous difficulties when they want to leave abusive relationships.

The gendered division of labour – women’s assignment to the hands-on care that we all need at different periods of our lives – explains, to a large extent, not only the gender pay gap but also the feminisation of poverty and the private domination to which many women are subjected. No surprise, then, that feminists have two distinct aims: to protect women from the risks of being a care-giver, and also to do away with the gendered division of labour, which is a main source of the problem. I am one of these feminists; I would like to see women and men equally engaged in the labour market, and looking after anybody who needs care.

But I’m also adamant that we should pursue these two aims in the right order: we should give priority to protecting women from the worst consequences of the gendered division of labour over the abolition of the gendered division of labour itself. Moreover, we should be aware of the unavoidable tension between the two aims, and keep this in mind when advocating for particular gender policies. (more…)

Children / Climate / Economics / Moral values

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Multi-parenting: what would it take for it to work?

Earlier this year I published a short article arguing that multi-parenting can provide a solution to a contemporary conundrum: on the one hand, many people are increasingly worried about climate change and environmental destruction. They know that having fewer children is, for a majority of people, the most effective individual action they can take to reduce their carbon footprint. Some women go on “birth strikes” – they decide not to bring children into the world. On the other hand, life without children can be terribly impoverished. Parenting may be the most important – and creative! – act one can engage in, a non-substitutable occasion for personal growth and, for many, the central source of meaning in life. (Which is not to deny that, for many other people, a childless life is perfectly fine.) (more…)

Democracy / Distribution / Economics

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There is too much division of labour: Against all-or-nothing social roles

Marx might have been right, too strict a division of labour is making us worse off in an important respect: we cannot but fail to develop core human abilities, and this failure cannot but affect our sense of wellbeing, of being at home in the world. Not that we should, or could, fully undo the division of labour such that you and I can “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” But is it really unavoidable, or good for us, to have to live by a radical division of labour where the main social roles are an all-or-nothing business?

Consider: you either enter politics, dedicating it a large amount of time, or you have virtually no say in any public affairs. You’re either a parent or someone who can have children in their lives only very sporadically and precariously. You typically either have a full-time job (for many over-engulfing) or an unsatisfying one, which you can all too easily lose, and which probably doesn’t pay enough to live. You’re either in a monogamous relationship, or else your relationship(s) are not socially sanctioned as serious, meaningful, worthy of protection – as marriage and civil partnerships are.

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