Neville Morley's Blog, page 15

Deeper Understanding

I’ve been continuing to think about ‘AI’ and LLMs and the like; partly through sheer annoyance at some very silly ‘This Is How AI Will Build Utopia’ and ‘This Is How AI Will Destroy Us All’ articles (it’s a two-man con, isn’t it? They set this up as THE debate we should be having, with both sides calling for more funding for research in this area, drawing attention away from the systems and structures shaping these developments), partly because I was putting together a funding application for a small project on how to respond to Chat-GPT and its ilk within the assessment of historical skills, and partly because the philosopher John Holbo has been posting some very interesting, thought-provoking pieces on Crooked Timber, prompting some high-quality discussion.

One of the significant themes emphasised in the latter is the role of the human response; we are the ones ascribing intentionality, consciousness, intelligence and emotions to the unknown thing that is generating stuff that reminds us of our own outputs – even when disparaging them, by talking about ‘mimicry’ or ‘hallucinations’. There must be a shedload of relevant research in the anthropological study of ‘animism’ – a human propensity to identify patterns of regularity, predictability and even consciousness within the mass of data we receive about the world around us, and for the most part to anthropomorphise it all. If horses could draw their gods, they would look like horses, as Xenophanes remarked; humans conceive of the inscrutable processes of generative AI either as quasi-human or as a very human, crude science fiction image of what aliens or supercomputers would be like, i.e. part-exaggerated and part-deficient humans (intelligence without emotion, aggression without pity etc.). We all need to (re-)read Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris…

This also brought to mind a post I wrote about six years ago, that I think has aged pretty well (without having had the slightest impact): we need some serious study of Greco-Roman cultures of enslavement to broaden our sense of how societies respond to such a situation. Extensive debate and confusion – philosophical, legal, cultural – about whether our ‘thinking tools’ are human, or semi- or deficient humans, or merely ‘two-footed things’ analogous to ‘four-footed things’ like cattle and dogs. Widespread fear of revolt or violence – combined with a willingness to hand over sensitive tasks, personal information and financial responsibility, upbringing of children etc. to these alien, hostile, resentful subjects.

The insistence that even when one of them has attained full legal status as human, and amassed wealth and social standing, there is always something that marks them out as inferior (masking the anxiety that perhaps there isn’t); this might be more of a problem for the future, but is it stretching the analogy too far to see something of this mindset in reactions to Chat-GPT outputs, the idea that there are easy ways of telling them apart from ‘real’ writing (even if, as has been noted in discussions of using ‘gAI’ to detect the products of other LLMs, the principles also serve to exclude non-native speakers, the less well-educated etc.)?

Obviously Greco-Roman societies were actually founded on the enslavement of full human beings, whereas we are not (and ‘enslavement’ is clearly not the right term). But for the purposes of understanding the reactions and thinking of the established elite (today: western humans generally), this doesn’t matter; the presence of ‘things’ that appear to possess some human-ish qualities and that are capable of taking on many complex tasks makes this a decent enough analogy, not least because neither we nor the ancients are sure what we’re dealing with, what we’re living alongside, what we’re ceding power and responsibility to, and that’s precisely the issue.

So, if I wasn’t trying to write a book about something completely different, I would be looking for some suitable funding calls for projects on the social and cultural dimensions of ‘AI’, because I’m pretty sure they don’t yet realise how much they need input from Greco-Roman history. If anyone wants to run with this idea, be my guest – I might have the capacity to be a CI, but I’d rather see this happen without me than not happen at all.

Incidentally, since I drew the title of this piece from it, the 2011 original of Kate Bush’s song is SO much better than the 2018 remake, perhaps just because voice software has got a lot better in the last five years so the 2011 version seems more prescient… https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JVU6eFBvQ0g

Connection

No, I don’t have anything terribly profound to say about the current smorgasbord of social media platforms, but it’s an excuse to post this bit of ineffable cool…

As someone with multiple accounts on the Twitter, it’s probably inevitable that I have different, not necessary coherent criteria for evaluating new systems (and deciding whether to put any effort into existing ones).

To start with the specific expectations of @Thucydiocy: I dream of a platform without misattributed Thucydides quotations – and one of the consequences of Twitter’s steady descent into chaotic decadence has been a marked decline in those, even in the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ category, to the point where I might almost dream of retirement (yes, I’ve seen enough odd-couple buddy cop movies to know that this is a fatal statement). But there is always the suspicion that it’s simply moved elsewhere, and that does mean that, as an absolutely bare minimum, I need to be able to check. No hashtags? No ability to search for key terms? Threads, you’re already useless. (Mastodon seems misattribution-free, but I’m not sure how far I trust its search function. Post? Does anyone actually post anything there amidst the tumbleweed?).

CthulhuUK and the Thucydides Cats have had their moments in the last few years, but not enough to persuade me to invest any time in establishing their presence elsewhere; so, it’s a question of what happens to me as me. There was an interesting post earlier in the week from an Australia academic who goes by The Thesis Whisperer on Academic Enshittification, drawing on Cory Doctorow’s persuasive theory about how online platforms begin by offering their users a great service to draw them in, then screw them over for the benefit of business owners, and then screw over the business owners in order to grab all the value for themselves. And then die.

Academics are both users and business owners when it comes to social media. Basically, it’s no longer true that you build can a substantial audience by doing Good Work and telling people about it. Today you can talk about your research on social media platforms all you want, but hardly anyone will hear you unless you pay cash money because Algorithms.

Personally speaking: well, kinda. Self-advertisement has never been a particularly big motive for my engagement with social media, or I might have cultivated a more serious and respectable online persona. I do advertise my blog posts, for the endorphin rush of seeing that a whole twenty people have visited it, however briefly, this week – but that’s become an end in itself, rather than imagining that somehow my blog or Twitter presence can be leveraged into anything other than occasional confusion that somehow I can feel I know someone pretty well and yet we’ve never met. I mean, I pay to keep adverts off the blog, rather than making any money from it.

So, no, primarily I remain a user rather than a business. What Twitter offers is, still, however imperfectly compared with a few years ago, an almost immediate sense of what’s going on in the world, and in different academic disciplines, and from many different perspectives; I’ve spent years building up different lists and identifying the people I can trust on different topics, and working out how to manage it effectively; and, while some of those people are no longer there, it still works pretty well. Or at any rate much better than the alternatives.

It’s certainly true that I have a privileged experience; not being a woman, or gay, or non-white, or a celebrity, I basically get ignored and can follow crazy far-right loons (predominantly, those who adopt ‘Thucydides’ as an alias so pop up in my regular searches) as a homeopathic insight into crazy far-right conspiracy land rather than a constant threat or harangue. And I’m insignificant enough that I can be myself – or maybe not exactly myself, but a more rounded version, including the aspects that many years ago used to write satirical newsletters and be unbearably pretentious about music and would have loved memes – without any fear of consequences.

Dance like nobody’s watching; tweet like everybody’s reading. Yes, if you wanted a case study in ‘staid middle-aged academic attempts to get down with the young people’ it could be me on social media, and very probably I would have written more and wasted less time without it. But I would also genuinely know less and have a narrower view on the world, and it is entirely infuriating that Space Karen threatens to take all this away and leave me just with a choice of places that are more or less nice, sensible, dull and limited. Yes, a load of people have left – but too many are still there, and not easily found in the other places, for me to jump ship, even if the bastard destroys Tweetdeck. To be honest I wasn’t there for civility in the first place…

Political World

Whenever I teach Greek Political Thought – which has now been for the last three years running – the opening discussion has always been on the meaning of ‘political’, and the emotions and values bound up with it. The aim, of course, is to highlight both the connection to antiquity and the significant differences in attitudes; could we imagine classical Greek politai objecting to the idea of making an issue political, or complaining that someone has politicised a debate? The modern drive is to push the political into a small, closely-defined box, limited to the formal mechanisms of voting and the activities of a small number of professionals, to insulate multiple areas of life from its influence and then to lament general disengagement.

Politicians – especially those in power – are perhaps those most ready to complain about making something political, so that they don’t have to take any responsibility for it. You would think, however, that it would be quite difficult to try to depoliticise an action election; nevertheless, that’s what seems to be happening in my own constituency of Somerton & Frome, where we have a by-election coming up in just under a fortnight. Perhaps it’s the only sensible course when your predecessor resigned in disgrace due to an exciting combination of alleged sexual harassment, drug use and dodgy financial arrangements with Russian businessmen, but the current Tory candidate appears to be running on a platform opposed to politics, or at any rate opposed to ‘political games’, which is apparently what the other candidates are doing by trying to win votes, criticising the government etc. People have lost faith in politics, so the answer is a candidate who doesn’t like them either.

But then this is a campaign which responds to widespread disenchantment with the Conservative Party by downplaying any association with it. The latest leaflet doesn’t just masquerade as a local newsletter, it limits any mention at all of the word ‘Conservative’ to quotes from ‘ordinary local folk’ – let’s assume they are real – who express a wish to vote for a good local Conservative candidate. The candidate herself is described solely in terms of her localness, and activities in local government. No mention of the great things achieved by thirteen years of Tory rule; no mention of Brexit, interestingly enough, given that this was a pretty Brexity area; no mention of Sunak’s five pledges. Just lots of localness, and some pictures of farm machinery.

Given that the Lib Dem candidate is equally local, and equally involved in farming, and also has a track record in local government, there are times when the choice the week after next appears to revolve around which one has the nicest-looking dog, and whether being able to trace one’s family’s presence in the area back 250 years is an asset (in both cases, this suggests a Liberal victory).

This harks back not just to an idea of the ‘good constituency MP’, dedicated to his/her locality more than to a national party, but even to a more ancient conception, in which what matters is a track record of public service, cultural values and slaughtering thousands of enemy combatants without any notion of ‘party’ allegiance. It’s interesting that there is – or, at least, that there can be thought to be – a wish for such a style of unpolitical politics to return. But it is surely consciously nostalgic, knowing that this is not how things actually work. Politics that is unpolitical at local level simply hands greater power to those at national level who actually pull the levers, even as they themselves decry making anything ‘political’ – and this is less a matter of elected ministers than of those who pull their strings.

A candidate who decries politics is either lying – all those other guys are political, I’m not so you can trust me, just as they all use rhetoric but I talk plainly – or is utterly naive and so will be useless as a representative. Or, they have entirely given up hope of holding onto power, and are trying to construct a grassroots base in the West Country from which they can return in future…

Twelve Days in the Year: 27 June 2023

Current sleeping pattern: wake around 4, brief panic about work and everything else, try to lie still so as not to indicate to Hans (eldest cat) that I’m awake as he’s want food, fuss or both, try to drop off again; this time managed to doze for an hour and a half without starting to think too much, so could be worse. Up at quarter to six feeling hung over, to do dishes and make tea. Weather very grey, and starting to feel stuffy. News full of vague speculation about events in Russia – BBC has now shifted to calling it a mutiny rather than an attempted coup. Awkward format; two people speculating, whereas Twitter creates better impression of multiple opinions gradually moving towards some preliminary conclusions; typical that the BBC interviews its own reporter for commentary rather than an academic expert on Russian politics. Tory candidate accused of groping; English cricket ‘racist, sexist and elitist’. Colour us all surprised – apart from the timing, which is actually unexpected, the day before a test match.

Carried out the usual morning Twitter routine, searching for ‘Thucydides’ to get a sense of the current state of discussion and to pick up any fake quotes – always hoping for sonething new or interesting. There are a lot fewer than there used to be, perhaps a sign of the expulsion of bots (though even after muting several hundred of them, I still daily encounter one or two accounts tweeting out fragments from the early P.G. Wodehouse story, now tending to make some reference to ChatGPT, but whose purpose continues to be opaque). Not a lot this morning, just a ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote in response to the idea of political power being determined by ability to lift weights (or maybe past ability – to be fair, this doesn’t appear to be a fully developed theory) and the Vegetius “if you want peace, prepare for war” line, which has only recently started to be misattributed to Thuc.

Some continuing fallout from some US pundit arguing for ‘proper’history (Thucydides appears to endorse everyone’s priors, oddly enough), and random bits of Thucydides Trap, but really not a lot – has my Thucydides book missed its moment? Search results are dominated instead by a couple of relentless conspiracy theorists and shitposters who’ve chosen Thucydides as part of their user handles; I’ve previously blocked a couple of these because they’re utterly tedious, but one offers genuine insight into the crazy world of QAnon. It’s a shame the research ethics committee took so long to review my proposal for a project on ‘Who wants to be Thucydides?’ that I ran out of time and energy to do proper research, but I expect the responses to any questionnaire would be fictional too.

Shower, breakfast, saw A. out to the car and brought in the empty recycling boxes; washed the maggots out of the food waste bin, cleaned the cats’ litter trays. Checked greenhouse and watered the plants- only half an hour’s worth of work today, as the vegetable beds were watered yesterday, but the aubergines continue to be very thirsty. Checked the vegetable beds – and clearly the universe has decided that, regardless of the idea that this should be a completely ordinary day, Things Should Happen To Be Written About. Back story: our garden has suffered for years from badgers, which destroy potatoes, sweet corn, gooseberries (yup, they roll on the bushes to knock the fruit to the ground) and especially parsnips. We therefore have an electric fence round the whole veg patch, and grow potatoes and parsnips with wire protection – and still they manage to wreck most of the parsnips every year. This was of course once my claim to Internet fame, in the relatively early years of the Twitter – “The bloody badgers have now started on the celeriac!” proclaimed as one of the most middle-class tweets ever.

This year, the mighty Newt – ultra-posh hotel complex cum rural experience enterprise up the road, that’s bought up most of the land in the area to plant cider orchards and raise exotic cattle – put up heavy-duty stock fencing around the field at the bottom of the garden, and since then there have been no signs of badger incursion at all, to the point where we started to wonder if in future we could reduce the protective measures. This morning, however, the parsnip bed has been wrecked, and the gooseberry bushes have broken branches – I’m very glad I picked the main crop yesterday. Bloody stripy bastards. It’s got to the point where I am mostly stoical, as there’s nothing one can do other than wonder if it’s worth even trying any more – what hurts is the fact we’d had months of hope that the problem might have gone away. At least they haven’t started using the flower garden as a latrine again, as they did a few years ago.

Had another cup of tea to calm down – and instead came across yesterday’s news about the planned closure of most railway ticket offices. Honestly, why is this country so useless and cheaoskste? There are tickets that the machines refuse to accept exist, such as my regular day return to Exeter – if you can’t use the app (or it’s not working, as regularly happens) the only option is a ticket office if you don’t want to pay nearly double. Plus, management of disabled access, at a station like ours where you can’t get to the other platform except by footbridge unless a station person can escort you across the tracks? After my broken foot earlier this year, I am much more sensitive to issues of mobility and access, and how far the UK seems to regard such people as an annoying inconvenience for the process of extracting corporate profits. Bloody pinstripy bastards.

Two hours then disappeared more or less without trace – I know I’ve sent emails, answered emails and written a couple of student references, but it doesn’t feel as if I’ve achieved anything – and since several of the emails involved negotiations about dates for postgraduate vivas and upgrades later in the summer, the feeling of time running away was even more accentuated. Then a drive down to Yeovil, where I had an appointment to scan my bone density, presumably prompted by the aforementioned broken foot. The most awkward aspect – besides having to be in Yeovil at all – is the requirement to avoid jeans, belts and buckles; I have for many years hovered on the boundary between two trouser sizes, so tend to buy the larger one to accommodate the occasional periods when the cake craving gets the better of me – so currently everything is a bit loose without a belt.

Having parked the car and negotiated assorted roadworks to get to the hospital, the usual lots of waiting around, listening to elderly ladies discussing the medical problems of friends and acquaintances – and other family members, as it gradually became apparent that Alzheimer’s-afflicted Bill, who tends to walk along and than suddenly stop, not responding to anything, and then start walking again, is a labrador. The conversation then segued into the case of a friend getting tired of clearing up puddles of piss and ripping up all the carpets before storming off to visit the grandchildren – and this time it’s a husband. “Thank goodness we don’t have husbands we have to live with, eh?” The same woman was starting to explain why she won’t have anything to do with that sort of thing with her ‘gentleman’ – “I’m not going to go into the toilet with him!” – when I was called away to be put into different poses for the scanner, thankfully not involving any claustrophobic tunnels, which remains one of my great fears. Trouser preparations a waste of time; the guidance hadn’t mentioned zips, but apparently they’re just as fatal to scanners as buckles and belts, so had to change into scrubs for the purpose. A laconic “we’ll be in touch”; at least there was no attempt at showing of knowledge of Roman History, as I’ve had with some consultants there.

Home, via a couple of unsuccessful attempts at finding some plant saucers for the aubergines in the greenhouse that are drying out much too quickly. Had planned to have yesterday evening’s leftovers for lunch, but A. took most of the cooked rice for hers, so hasty stir fry with some slightly bedraggled cabbage and extra chilli sauce instead. Equally hasty walk into town to get a Castle Cary Big Bat Count event poster put up in the bookshop and to buy compost, plant saucers and compostsblr bin bags, then stagger back up the hill in time for online editorial board meeting for Classical Receptions Journal, which took up the bulk of the afternoon – as ever, a bit difficult to concentrate, especially with rather erratic broadband connection, but better than some. Familiar issues – problems in getting people to review submissions (I had to approach ten people to get two reviewers for one recent piece), vague questions around open access.

Now a switch to energetic action, to get supper ready in time; grated courgettes and mixed with salt to extract moisture, walked up road to get eggs from the usual supplier, squeezed out courgettes and mixed with feta, a bit of grated cheddar and herbs and spring onions (at this point I forgot to add the eggs, thankfully without any adverse effects), and packaged the whole lot in filo pastry; while it cooked, dug the first new potatoes of the year, just in case the badgers return in force tonight. Ten minutes calling the two younger cats, Hector and Olga, who spend most time outside at the moment; I’m happy to let them wander, but A. likes them to check in, or be checked in, at least once an hour.

After supper, further endless tinkering with my jazz composition homework – a blues inspired loosely by Charles Mingus’ Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, in which currently the harmonic structure keeps wandering off in a completely different direction from the melody as I try to avoid too-obvious chord sequences. Yes, they may be obvious for a good reason… The problem is that I don’t have enough harmonic knowledge to know in advance how something is likely to sound, so just have to keep trying different things, saving multiple copes in case (as regularly happens) I realise an earlier version was less rubbish. Starting to suspect that I will once again be trying to avoid the tutor’s eye rather than having my homework dissected in class.

Taggeschau at seven, partly to keep up with my German (I was relieved to cope with three days of pretty well solid German at last week’s conference in Bochum, albeit with a lot of vague gesticulating to compensate for gaps in vocabulary, so want to maintain this) and partly because it’s generally much more international than the BBC – a good place for European and world news, not just German. Putin, sex scandal in Catholic Church, ongoing rows about new energy regulations. Then flicking through channels: a Trabi-Krimi, various culinary journeys through different regions, and an equestrian competition from Aachen, being introduced by Princess Anne (pretending not to speak German…).

None of these appealed; instead – with express permission from A, who can sometimes get a bit cranky if I disappear off upstairs for hours – I returned to the music, starting on a completely new version of the harmonies (which ended up sounding very similar to the first version, but I think it makes more sense). Back downstairs just after eight to read for a while then check the garden – putting on the electric fence – let Hans out for a final time in the hope that he then behaves himself overnight (the others are always good as gold, but he tends to stomp, yell and occasionally piss), and then bed; did sudoku for a while before lights out just after nine. And yet I still feel tired all the time…

(For an explanation of why I’m writing such a mundane yet lengthy post about my day, see Twelve Days in the Year).

Update: this now has the correct date… I am less surprised that my brain is fried, and clearly suffused with anxiety that the summer has half vanished already and I’ve made no progress on the book, than that it took six hours for anyone else to notice.

Twelve Days in the Year: 27 July 2023

Current sleeping pattern: wake around 4, brief panic about work and everything else, try to lie still so as not to indicate to Hans (eldest cat) that I’m awake as he’s want food, fuss or both, try to drop off again; this time managed to doze for an hour and a half without starting to think too much, so could be worse. Up at quarter to six feeling hung over, to do dishes and make tea. Weather very grey, and starting to feel stuffy. News full of vague speculation about events in Russia – BBC has now shifted to calling it a mutiny rather than an attempted coup. Awkward format; two people speculating, whereas Twitter creates better impression of multiple opinions gradually moving towards some preliminary conclusions; typical that the BBC interviews its own reporter for commentary rather than an academic expert on Russian politics. Tory candidate accused of groping; English cricket ‘racist, sexist and elitist’. Colour us all surprised – apart from the timing, which is actually unexpected, the day before a test match.

Carried out the usual morning Twitter routine, searching for ‘Thucydides’ to get a sense of the current state of discussion and to pick up any fake quotes – always hoping for sonething new or interesting. There are a lot fewer than there used to be, perhaps a sign of the expulsion of bots (though even after muting several hundred of them, I still daily encounter one or two accounts tweeting out fragments from the early P.G. Wodehouse story, now tending to make some reference to ChatGPT, but whose purpose continues to be opaque). Not a lot this morning, just a ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote in response to the idea of political power being determined by ability to lift weights (or maybe past ability – to be fair, this doesn’t appear to be a fully developed theory) and the Vegetius “if you want peace, prepare for war” line, which has only recently started to be misattributed to Thuc.

Some continuing fallout from some US pundit arguing for ‘proper’history (Thucydides appears to endorse everyone’s priors, oddly enough), and random bits of Thucydides Trap, but really not a lot – has my Thucydides book missed its moment? Search results are dominated instead by a couple of relentless conspiracy theorists and shitposters who’ve chosen Thucydides as part of their user handles; I’ve previously blocked a couple of these because they’re utterly tedious, but one offers genuine insight into the crazy world of QAnon. It’s a shame the research ethics committee took so long to review my proposal for a project on ‘Who wants to be Thucydides?’ that I ran out of time and energy to do proper research, but I expect the responses to any questionnaire would be fictional too.

Shower, breakfast, saw A. out to the car and brought in the empty recycling boxes; washed the maggots out of the food waste bin, cleaned the cats’ litter trays. Checked greenhouse and watered the plants- only half an hour’s worth of work today, as the vegetable beds were watered yesterday, but the aubergines continue to be very thirsty. Checked the vegetable beds – and clearly the universe has decided that, regardless of the idea that this should be a completely ordinary day, Things Should Happen To Be Written About. Back story: our garden has suffered for years from badgers, which destroy potatoes, sweet corn, gooseberries (yup, they roll on the bushes to knock the fruit to the ground) and especially parsnips. We therefore have an electric fence round the whole veg patch, and grow potatoes and parsnips with wire protection – and still they manage to wreck most of the parsnips every year. This was of course once my claim to Internet fame, in the relatively early years of the Twitter – “The bloody badgers have now started on the celeriac!” proclaimed as one of the most middle-class tweets ever.

This year, the mighty Newt – ultra-posh hotel complex cum rural experience enterprise up the road, that’s bought up most of the land in the area to plant cider orchards and raise exotic cattle – put up heavy-duty stock fencing around the field at the bottom of the garden, and since then there have been no signs of badger incursion at all, to the point where we started to wonder if in future we could reduce the protective measures. This morning, however, the parsnip bed has been wrecked, and the gooseberry bushes have broken branches – I’m very glad I picked the main crop yesterday. Bloody stripy bastards. It’s got to the point where I am mostly stoical, as there’s nothing one can do other than wonder if it’s worth even trying any more – what hurts is the fact we’d had months of hope that the problem might have gone away. At least they haven’t started using the flower garden as a latrine again, as they did a few years ago.

Had another cup of tea to calm down – and instead came across yesterday’s news about the planned closure of most railway ticket offices. Honestly, why is this country so useless and cheaoskste? There are tickets that the machines refuse to accept exist, such as my regular day return to Exeter – if you can’t use the app (or it’s not working, as regularly happens) the only option is a ticket office if you don’t want to pay nearly double. Plus, management of disabled access, at a station like ours where you can’t get to the other platform except by footbridge unless a station person can escort you across the tracks? After my broken foot earlier this year, I am much more sensitive to issues of mobility and access, and how far the UK seems to regard such people as an annoying inconvenience for the process of extracting corporate profits. Bloody pinstripy bastards.

Two hours then disappeared more or less without trace – I know I’ve sent emails, answered emails and written a couple of student references, but it doesn’t feel as if I’ve achieved anything – and since several of the emails involved negotiations about dates for postgraduate vivas and upgrades later in the summer, the feeling of time running away was even more accentuated. Then a drive down to Yeovil, where I had an appointment to scan my bone density, presumably prompted by the aforementioned broken foot. The most awkward aspect – besides having to be in Yeovil at all – is the requirement to avoid jeans, belts and buckles; I have for many years hovered on the boundary between two trouser sizes, so tend to buy the larger one to accommodate the occasional periods when the cake craving gets the better of me – so currently everything is a bit loose without a belt.

Having parked the car and negotiated assorted roadworks to get to the hospital, the usual lots of waiting around, listening to elderly ladies discussing the medical problems of friends and acquaintances – and other family members, as it gradually became apparent that Alzheimer’s-afflicted Bill, who tends to walk along and than suddenly stop, not responding to anything, and then start walking again, is a labrador. The conversation then segued into the case of a friend getting tired of clearing up puddles of piss and ripping up all the carpets before storming off to visit the grandchildren – and this time it’s a husband. “Thank goodness we don’t have husbands we have to live with, eh?” The same woman was starting to explain why she won’t have anything to do with that sort of thing with her ‘gentleman’ – “I’m not going to go into the toilet with him!” – when I was called away to be put into different poses for the scanner, thankfully not involving any claustrophobic tunnels, which remains one of my great fears. Trouser preparations a waste of time; the guidance hadn’t mentioned zips, but apparently they’re just as fatal to scanners as buckles and belts, so had to change into scrubs for the purpose. A laconic “we’ll be in touch”; at least there was no attempt at showing of knowledge of Roman History, as I’ve had with some consultants there.

Home, via a couple of unsuccessful attempts at finding some plant saucers for the aubergines in the greenhouse that are drying out much too quickly. Had planned to have yesterday evening’s leftovers for lunch, but A. took most of the cooked rice for hers, so hasty stir fry with some slightly bedraggled cabbage and extra chilli sauce instead. Equally hasty walk into town to get a Castle Cary Big Bat Count event poster put up in the bookshop and to buy compost, plant saucers and compostsblr bin bags, then stagger back up the hill in time for online editorial board meeting for Classical Receptions Journal, which took up the bulk of the afternoon – as ever, a bit difficult to concentrate, especially with rather erratic broadband connection, but better than some. Familiar issues – problems in getting people to review submissions (I had to approach ten people to get two reviewers for one recent piece), vague questions around open access.

Now a switch to energetic action, to get supper ready in time; grated courgettes and mixed with salt to extract moisture, walked up road to get eggs from the usual supplier, squeezed out courgettes and mixed with feta, a bit of grated cheddar and herbs and spring onions (at this point I forgot to add the eggs, thankfully without any adverse effects), and packaged the whole lot in filo pastry; while it cooked, dug the first new potatoes of the year, just in case the badgers return in force tonight. Ten minutes calling the two younger cats, Hector and Olga, who spend most time outside at the moment; I’m happy to let them wander, but A. likes them to check in, or be checked in, at least once an hour.

After supper, further endless tinkering with my jazz composition homework – a blues inspired loosely by Charles Mingus’ Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, in which currently the harmonic structure keeps wandering off in a completely different direction from the melody as I try to avoid too-obvious chord sequences. Yes, they may be obvious for a good reason… The problem is that I don’t have enough harmonic knowledge to know in advance how something is likely to sound, so just have to keep trying different things, saving multiple copes in case (as regularly happens) I realise an earlier version was less rubbish. Starting to suspect that I will once again be trying to avoid the tutor’s eye rather than having my homework dissected in class.

Taggeschau at seven, partly to keep up with my German (I was relieved to cope with three days of pretty well solid German at last week’s conference in Bochum, albeit with a lot of vague gesticulating to compensate for gaps in vocabulary, so want to maintain this) and partly because it’s generally much more international than the BBC – a good place for European and world news, not just German. Putin, sex scandal in Catholic Church, ongoing rows about new energy regulations. Then flicking through channels: a Trabi-Krimi, various culinary journeys through different regions, and an equestrian competition from Aachen, being introduced by Princess Anne (pretending not to speak German…).

None of these appealed; instead – with express permission from A, who can sometimes get a bit cranky if I disappear off upstairs for hours – I returned to the music, starting on a completely new version of the harmonies (which ended up sounding very similar to the first version, but I think it makes more sense). Back downstairs just after eight to read for a while then check the garden – putting on the electric fence – let Hans out for a final time in the hope that he then behaves himself overnight (the others are always good as gold, but he tends to stomp, yell and occasionally piss), and then bed; did sudoku for a while before lights out just after nine. And yet I still feel tired all the time…

(For an explanation of why I’m writing such a mundane yet lengthy post about my day, see Twelve Days in the Year).

Twelve Days in the Year

I’m in Bochum, for a conference starting tomorrow on Bier in der Antike; wonderful to be back in Germany rather than just getting fifteen minutes’ sanity from the Taggesschau every evening (time devoted to Johnson shenanigans in the last fortnight? Zero), lovely to be back on Eurostar, at least once you’re past the security and passport queues that make the experience barely distinguishable from an airport whereas once it was completely calm and relaxed. But the reason for writing this is not to make you all jealous about the beer thing, or to grumble about Brexit again, but to announce a new writing project.

My reading for the train – in between the unavoidable emails and a PGR student upgrade work sample – was Christa Wolf’s Ein Tag im Jahr: 2001-2011. In 1960, Wolf responded to a call by a Russian journal for writers across the world to describe in detail the same day, 27th September, following a practice which Maxim Gorki had begin in 1935; she then persisted with this custom for the next half century – the final entry in this volume is a facsimile of the handwritten pages written just over two months before her death, as she had not had energy or time to work them up for publication.

Wolf herself commented that she was not entirely sure why she persisted – that she recognised that not all the motives were conscious. Horror of forgetting, leading to the idea that at least one day every year should be recorded and not vanish into oblivion. An honouring of the mundane, not seeking out anything remarkable or momentous but simply noting what happened (though inevitably world events encroached; this volume begins with her waiting for the USA to launch its war against Afghanistan, with reflections on civilisation and empire that remind me why I really must, some day, write a book on Wolf and antiquity, unless someone else will hurry up and do it for me). What we would now call ‘mindfulness’, an attentiveness to reality and the real (I would speculate that ‘Wirklichkeit’ carries certain overtones of ‘authenticity’ as well as ‘reality’).

I always wanted to be the sort of writer who could devote part of their day to reflection on everyday life and world events, and recollection of and commentary upon literature and history (to be fair, Wolf is quite open about how much of her day is spent answering banal letters and dealing with mundane admin, including saying ‘no’ to a lot of stuff). At the same time, as I continue to drag myself out of the slough of Long COVID and feeling tired all the time, I feel as if a regular writing commitment might help build up my general writing stamina, and make it more of a habit. So, from next Tuesday, I’m going to start doing the same thing once a month, describing the day, for at least a year. Starting on Tuesday – which means, of course, that the actual piece will appear a day or so later – will mean that I take in the key date of September 27th.

Why, you might ask, once a month and not once a year (given that I certainly don’t have the time or energy or motivation for a conventional daily diary)? Well, it feels like the right balance of commitment and investment. An annual entry implies, for someone who isn’t already the sort of established writer who gets to ponder whatever they feel like and still get an appreciative audience, something substantial and indeed meaningful, so quite a commitment and a higher-risk enterprise, and at the same time doesn’t do anything to build up writing muscles. Once a month doesn’t set up the same expectation of length or profundity, while still being a regular enough discipline that I think I can actually manage it.

And at the very least, it will give me a monthly post for the blog, perhaps even more trivial than usual, but at least I can claim that its triviality is simply the reflection of the mundane existence of a middle-aged academic, rather than – as with all my other pointless blog posts – a product of my lack of inspiration…

Passing Strangers

I’m inclined to take it as evidence for the continuing collapse of Twitter as a workable platform for intellectual exchange and communication – yes, I’m still naive enough to try to use it for that purpose – that I’ve only just heard of the death of Dan Tompkins, about four days after everyone else. Well, for specialised values of ‘everyone else’; as these tributes make clear, much of Dan’s career was devoted to teaching and service at a single university rather than extensive publication or reputation-building. I guess he may have been one of those people whom everyone nevertheless knew from professional conferences in the US [side note; it was very weird to attend the UK Ancient Historians’ annual meeting, aka the Baynes meeting, for the first time in a few years, and not see either Jane Gardner or Peter Rhodes], but I imagine – I do have a fairly terrible sense of these things – that he wasn’t especially well known in the UK.

My relationship with him was almost entirely electronic; we certainly met in person once, when he came to a Reception-of-Thucydides workshop I organised in conjunction with the APSA annual conference in Washington in 2010, and maybe another time I don’t remember, and plans to meet up in the US when I was hoping to organise a mini-lecture tour combined with visiting wife’s family fell apart because of the plague. But we corresponded regularly by email; obviously he was the person to go to for discussions of M.I. Finley, and he would regularly get in touch with comments and questions about Thucydides and his reception, maybe once a year or so, and I ended up on a sort of mailing list for his random thoughts (and now feel sad and ashamed that I didn’t respond more extensively and regularly – life gets in the way, you assume there will always be a next time).

What has really left me in a rather shaken state is that this is my second death of the morning: I heard from a mutual friend of the passing, far far too young (I don’t know if he was yet forty), of Dimitri Almeida, Professor of Inter- and Transcultural Studies at Halle. We never met at all, but I feel genuinely bereft. I first encountered Dimitri’s work on the French far right when researching my piece on the Politics of Decadence for the Oxford Handbook of Decadence; he’d written an article on decadence as a trope of the Front Nationale – which cited an article of mine from a decade or so earlier. It was this that first persuaded me that there was serious potential in expanding the topic into a full-blown research project; we corresponded and chatted, he participated in some online workshops I organised, and we developed a joint funding proposal (unsuccessful, but a really great collaborative experience).

As recently as March we were discussing next steps, when he said that because his prognosis wasn’t looking great, he’d better put things on hold rather than risk dying in the middle of a project and creating great inconvenience. Which just seems to confirm what a great collaborator he could have been, and I can only imagine the conversations that might have taken place. Damn.

Your Own Personal Jesus

I came across a very nice, thought-provoking piece last week by Jim Dickinson of the WonkHE blog – actually written back in November, but reposted because of its relevance to debate about whether universities should have a formal ‘duty of care’ to students – considering higher education, and especially student support, through the prism of ‘nostalgia memes’. You know the sort of thing: ‘Whatever happened to Proper Binmen?’ posts on Facebook, liked by the sorts of people who complain a lot about ‘health and safety gone mad’ and having to sort their recycling. As Dickinson notes, it’s a lament about the present state of things that implies everything would be great if we could just return to the way things were, and even if we don’t buy into that world-view, it still raises the question of what elements of past practice might be worth trying to salvage or protect even as other things inexorably change.

Obviously I am the very last person who should start nit-picking someone else’s whimsical, ephemeral blog idea, but… There’s no doubt at all that academia is suffused with nostalgia for an earlier, less stressful/better resourced/less bureaucratised/more collegial/more elitist/more radical/delete as appropriate time. When it comes to the specific nostalgia meme of Proper Binmen, I think this more or less works for Dickinson’s main focus on students, the degree to which university discourse (especially outside universities) still takes for granted the model of the full-time, not-working, living-away-from-home-with-no-caring-responsibilities 18-to-20-year-old as its default, and at the same time bemoans the fact that today’s students are all whiny snowflakes with seventeen flavours of gender identity. (It’s still more complicated than Proper Binmen – is our nostalgic image of the student drawn from Brideshead Revisited or the ‘68 Événements? I’m reminded of a complaint of a character in A Dance to the Music of Time that “one is never really a student in England”…).

But what do we imagine if we think of ‘Proper Academics’? Lots of tweed, I suppose, and very male; a cross between Giles from BtVS and Professor Branestawm – and I now recall that there is some nonsensical cosplay around ‘Dark Academia’ that probably fits this theme. Okay, so it’s a thing. What isn’t obvious is why this thing is supposed to be obviously better in the way that Proper Binmen were obviously better, except insofar as one might favour a professoriate that is as male, white, elite and small-c conservative as possible. Is there an idea of how academics used to be – or better, perhaps, what they did or didn’t do, rather than just who they were and how they dressed – whose absence explains why things just aren’t working any more?

Obviously academics themselves have an idea of what things were like for their predecessors, which tends to involve more status, more money, bigger offices, less teaching, less bureaucracy and a lot more time for research, under less pressure to produce, probably with a dutiful wife to manage all domestic stuff and type up one’s notes. But the point about Proper Binmen is not that they had a better time of it than today’s refuse collectors, but that they did a filthy job with a whistle and a grin and this was better for everyone else. So, is there an Imagined Academic who did specific things more or better or differently, to others’ benefit – especially, given that this is the theme of the week, in supporting and teaching students?

I guess the analogy may be less Proper Binmen and more The Good Old Neighbourhood Bobby, who knew everyone in the village by name and kept the youngsters in line with a firm clip round the ear and applied the law flexibly for the Greater Good (“the Greater Good”) rather than spending his whole time filling out forms and prosecuting innocent Gollywog lovers while the Real Criminals go scot free. Always available, always at the heart of the community, never too busy; was this ever a real thing with academics?

There is the archetype of the kindly old don who offers afternoon tea to all his students [for elite Oxbridge values of ‘students’, and not too many of them], or of the trendy Bradburyesque radical lecturer who keeps open house for his students [for ideologically sympathetic and/or sexually attractive values of ‘students’] – but, leaving aside the issue of whether either of those is remotely desirable as a model, it can hardly be claimed that once upon a time all academics fitted such a template. Yes, knowing everyone’s name would be a good thing – and the difficulty of getting everyone’s name right when you have thirty or forty personal tutees is an obvious symptom of the expansion of HE without commensurate resourcing – but that seems a bit minimalist.

Hypothesis: what is felt to be missing today is not a specific form of personal tutoring or student support, treating all students in a particular way, but a bespoke, student-specific approach. The default Proper Student just needed someone who knew their name, sorted out any essay extensions that needed to be sorted out, invited them to sherry or a garden party a few times a year, and wrote boilerplate references afterwards – and was there in case of the sort of emergency that required a tutor. But some students need a Yoda, or a Michael Caine, someone who would recognise their potential and put in the effort to draw it out, the catalyst to make university a life-changing experience.

De me fabula narratur… I’m not sure I would have taken the path into research and teaching if Peter Garnsey, whom a small group of us was seeing for the City of Rome course, hadn’t spotted some sort of spark of interest and given me a copy of a piece he’d been writing on urban diet to see what I thought of it. The combination of encouragement and flattery was perfectly timed and tailored to pull me in.

Obviously being this sort of guru – offering what the student needs, rather that dispensing pre-packaged esoteric wisdom on a take-it-or-leave-it basis like the professor in The Secret History – is quite time-consuming. The more students for whom the lecturer has to provide the basic tutorial service, the less capacity for giving extra help to the Special Ones; the less the Proper Students model holds true in reality, the more support more and more students need, the less capacity for giving more time to a few. Whereas once, I guess, it was possible to assume that 95% of students were fine so long as they weren’t sitting in your office in tears, now it’s the non-present ones who cause most anxiety.

So, there simply isn’t the time or the energy to seek to identify students who might most benefit from a bit of personal Kenobiing; further, there’s a sense that probably most of them need it these days, not just a few, and hence a reluctance to give special treatment to just a few if you can’t offer it to all. “Help will always be given to Hogwarts to those who deserve it” and “…to those who ask for it” are equally problematic ideas: who decides who deserves help, on what basis, and how do you stop it becoming a case of more being given to those who are self-confident enough to request it, who may not actually need it the most?

On reflection, the dominant image of the Proper Academic may have little to do with universities at all, but is rather the Professors at Hogwarts; substitute parents, always – except when motivated by evil – trying to protect the teenagers under their care from danger even when those teenagers persist in seeking it out, never too busy with other things, always – except when motivated by evil – recognising the Specialness of the Special One and his friends. The demand for universities to be effectively in loco parentis for a bunch of young adults is close cousin to the unspoken idea that they really should be more like boarding schools than the real world, just with a bit more magic.

Where does this leave us? Personally I think all my students are special, even the toerags who are absolutely fine but ignore the first seven increasingly anxious emails. Yes, I have a particular liking for those willing to argue and explore ideas, but my response is not to make extra time for them but to tailor my teaching to try to get everyone arguing and exploring ideas. I’m not sure if this makes me a Proper Academic or not, but I do wear a tweed jacket occasionally…

Automatic Lover

See me, feel me, hear me, love me, touch me… One of this week’s ‘AI is here to make life wonderful; resistance is useless’ stories – as opposed to the equally pervasive ‘AI is going to destroy us all; resistance is useless’ takes – was that language processing models are being touted as the answer to the problems of shy, inarticulate people on dating apps. Struggling to put yourself across in a way that gets you dates? Here is your electronic Cyrano, able to draw on the whole repertoire of human love language, and to respond almost instantaneously to an interlocutor with quips and chat-up lines! The natural response, that surely this is one of the key points where it’s most important to get a sense of the real human being behind the dating profile, their personality and manner, misses the point from the perspective of the potential user: what if I don’t have any confidence in my personality?

I’m struck by a possible analogy – because of course I am – with the use of ChatGPT in university coursework. This is prompted partly also by a comment on social media from the Exeter historian Richard Toye, who’s been running focus groups with students about their approach to essay-writing: key takeaway, that students are terrified of saying something interesting by mistake and being penalised for it. Okay, that fits with the dominance of A-level marking schemes that basically demand you include the Twenty Key Points for a given question or else – you can have your own ideas, but only as a bonus, not a substitute, and maybe it’s better not to risk it. If nothing else, this means that new undergraduates are not at all practised in developing or supporting their own ideas, or judging whether an idea is any good.

But they are faced with their lecturers claiming that there are no Twenty Key Points, and urging them to read beyond the module bibliography and engage critically with sources and develop their own arguments, and they have no confidence at all in their ability to do this. This, I think, is where ChatGPT appears with a promise to help them out, an academic Cyrano who will facilitate their appearing like confident, articulate scholars, enough (they hope) to fool the marker.

Certainly the cases where I have most strongly suspected the involvement of ‘AI’ assistance over the last few months have involved the use of evidence (alleged quotes from ancient sources that I don’t recognise and cannot find in any translation, and that in some cases clearly contradict the conventional sense of the author’s ideas, without this being remarked upon) and reading widely beyond the module reading list (the familiar problem of citing lots of plausible-looking but non-existent publications). These are precisely the areas where we’re trying to get students to show their individuality, to develop skills that can’t easily be replicated by language processing algorithms – the last place we want to see ChaGPT getting involved. They’re using our own satellites against us!

The three bits of good news are, firstly, that clearly students are aware they ought to be doing this stuff, even if they’re not actually doing it themselves; secondly, that the better an idea we have of why students might turn to such expedients – insecurity about specific skills, rather than ruthless willingness to cheat in pursuit of a qualification – the more we can focus our teaching on those areas. And, thirdly, that ChatGPT really is rubbish at this sort of thing, so we can more easily spot that a student is parroting someone else’s alexandrines, and they don’t get a lot of advantage from it even if we don’t…

Torn

Nothing’s right… Yes, there are times when I spend almost as much time deciding on a suitable music-referencing title for a blog post as I do actually writing the thing. The optimistic version would have been some variant on the famous line from Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: “There is a crack in everything…” But, while it does indeed let some light in, it is potentially the sort of crack that calls for urgent applications of superglue before the whole thing falls apart. Everything’s Ruined? Perhaps a little premature. Changes? Certainly.

Yes, I’m thinking of the plague and its aftermath, prompted partly by an article by John Harris in the Grauniad earlier this week on the tendency to try to pretend that everything is all back to normal. It really isn’t. I am, for a change, not focusing on my own condition, which has settled into a groove of something that feels closer to the way it was before, just less focused and more tired, with a sense that maybe I could push myself a bit more but maybe that would shatter something – and the permanent possibility that maybe this is about being in my mid-50s rather than anything more specifically medical.

Rather, I’ve been reflecting on the year’s teaching, as classes are over. On the one hand, I’ve seen some student work that’s as good as anything I’ve read in thirty years – in my Roman Political Thought Seminar in particular, students coming up with an original idea, developing it, and then responding brilliantly to feedback to produce the final version (a particular shout-out to the one who took my very critical comment and, in a kind of intellectual jujitsu, turned it into a key strand of their introduction). And there have been lively, engaged, well-informed discussions, even in 100+ lectures – and I don’t see the fact that the latter took place on Padlet as a disadvantage, whatever the one student in module feedback thought.

On the other hand, I have never had to cope with so much absence and disengagement, including students who didn’t attend a single final-year seminar in person (the one time the class took place online because of my broken foot, they appeared but didn’t say anything). In the autumn, I’d made available the recordings I’d done in previous years as an additional resource, and then wondered whether this was a terrible error as it allowed students to access content and maybe think this was all they needed while missing out on all the discussion and exploration of ideas; in the spring there were no recordings as it was a new module, and they still didn’t turn up.

I’m doing my best not to speculate about the motives for this behaviour, let alone make any judgements on it; I have to assume that they’re adults and have decided that this is best for them, or the least bad thing in the circumstances, or the only viable approach. I can’t see it as a good thing in terms of intellectual or academic development, but there’s a limit to what I can do about it. As far as the rest of the class is concerned, to be blunt it’s better if those students don’t attend at all, rather than turn up for one class in three or four (as plenty of others did), as then I have to spend a lot of time recapitulating and repeating, and there’s no continuity in either ideas or group dynamics. Compared with a few years ago, it’s been pretty well impossible – or at any rate I have failed – to establish any sort of collective spirit or identity, any sense of us exploring these topics and their wider implications as a group, but only at best a number of ongoing separate conversations with different individuals (that are probably then off-putting for less regular attenders).

I imagine that a lot of this can be attributed to the impact of COVID – the fact that these are students who have had their education hugely disrupted, and have perhaps never properly learned a whole range of habits of studying and engagement. But I also can’t help thinking that we – individual teachers, but still more universities as a whole – keep getting it wrong.

To generalise wildly: in the first full year of pandemic teaching – so, 2020-1; the tail end of the 2019-20 academic year was just sauve qui peut emergency measures – I think we under-estimated conservatism and inertia. Whether we were actually excited by being able to do some things differently (take-home papers instead of traditional exams! asynchronous online discussions! slow teaching!), or just took the pragmatic view that there was no choice but to do things differently however much we hated it, we all put in huge amounts of work to rethink course delivery, record material etc. – and were then confronted by accusations of laziness and dereliction of duty by media and politicians who couldn’t conceive of anything that wasn’t a traditional lecture being any good or remotely worth the money.

This was infuriating; but, much more seriously, whether because they imbibed the same message or were ground down by the rest of their circumstances or were simply instinctively conservative, many (most?) students also failed to respond to these new approaches in the way we (I) had hoped or expected. Well, maybe take-home papers were accepted, but of course they don’t have any choice about those, but the asynchronous discussion boards remained untroubled by discussion, and the online breakout rooms all sat there in silence with their cameras off. The sorts of online communities and solidarity I’d experienced just through the discussion of topics of mutual interest resolutely failed to develop. You can take a horse to water, but if the horse will drink only out of an old-fashioned stone trough…

And so we reverted to traditional in-person teaching methods as quickly as possible (hanging on, in my case, to take-home papers – at least until ChatGPT destroys them as a viable assessment method – and Padlet, regardless of what some students say in module feedback). It was what the students said they wanted, not just a response to press coverage and government ministers, and probably what most of us wanted as well. But the enthusiasm of students for this reversion is, shall we say, less evident on the ground than we might have expected – see above re attendance and engagement. Have we in fact over-corrected – reverted to the old normality too quickly and too far, when this cohort of students (unlike those who had had several years’ experience of traditional university teaching, or at any rate traditional sixth-form teaching) are not wholly suited to it, or at least not fully prepared for it?

If there is any validity to this hypothesis, then either we should have put in a lot more effort to preparing new students for what’s expected them at university, rather than assuming without much thought that they would be more or less as well prepared as previous cohorts, or we should have retained more of the new methods and approaches in the hope that these students might be more open to them. (Maybe not all of them, as it’s a second year who hates Padlet, but a larger proportion?).

Or both, obviously. Illusion never changed into something real…