Grit, presentation 1

update: proposal submitted deadline met 8/15

The final version was more sweeping and more circumspect, both. I do not roast my employer specifically bc they are just like every other health professions university. It's about healthcare students needing (imo) both human attention and reflection-scaffolding, but what they have instead is their hallucinating phones glued to their face - not as a distraction from school (they're not misbehaving they are behaving as expected) - but as a tool that is supposed to be "school enough" for them. It is not, but I was/am willing to test the theory. By Oct, the new assignments (in much tamer/G-rated forms than what I've been posting, but structurally same) will be in classes that ran the same as last semester EXCEPT FOR THESES NEW GRITTY VARIABLES (2x the students + AI "assistance"). And we'll see what happens ....

Then, I sent the proposal to the one other English professor still left on my planet / the associate chair in charge of assessing me - heads up. 

He had just also submitted a proposal to another related professional conference in which he argues that a Marxist critique would strongly suggest WE SHOULD NOT BE DOING THIS (exactly what it is I'm doing lol). In part, his critique is the same takedown of the original Grit concept, which is now being applied in higher education with the assistance of AI.

So independently of each other, we both see the same reality (these days, people agreeing on what reality is 👍), and we reacted exact opposite way(s) to it. AND, I am the most compliant, and he's a compliance officer. I'm all in. Radically compliant. This is NUTS so of course I'm all in. We're not going to be able to "turn around" now, so GO FORWARD. Right into the gaping maw of it all.

He is supportive / understands. In Narrative Medicine class alone, I have 70 students enrolled. It's too popular to kill (yet). And the intellectual property is mine until they figure out how to shoot me.

The laptop is open. No need for the fuckwriting lure. I'm in teacher mode now.

I am compartmentalizing like a motherfucker. There's really no other way of writing this for me other than the odd present 'breaking through' the 'near-future-past' fiction that would capture a moment in which I am sitting in front of HBO watching house of dragons when I decide to work in 'angry dragon' into the novel I'm writing in part to dogfood AI (and cope with all of it), specifically my llm that then there's a commercial on HBO wherein a slightly demented elderly woman uses chatgpt as her "companion" - She's knitting, and they're both laughing over one another because it doesn't matter that they understand one another. I stop what I'm doing, and I look up the ad and I feed it into chatgpt, and I'm like "did you know that this?! you HALLUCINATE, that is ethical af!! This is going into the presentation goddamn it!" but uhmmm none of that can go into the slidedeck sooo. It feels like I'm writing a noose. Not a bunch of standalone but kind of related islands of things - more like concentric circles tightening. In writing, tightening is always good.

I remain unconvinced that there is no way to utilize what they've got - phones on faces and reel length attention in lives that are already high stakes regardless of profession - and at the devils crossroad of Teacher and Provider - oof - I'd take a reel 🤷🏽‍♀️ - I am going to take whatever access I can get to cracking open skulls like walnut shells, or at least drilling holes into which I layer coils, excited but becalming myself so I don't lose count (recall)

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I will figure how to do exactly what they wished "put AI in everything." And why I did it, how I did it, got nothing but tangled smut out if it, and an assistant who hallucinates. 

Persons who suffer hallucinations often get absolute shit care (ex addicts) while we're all carrying around hallucinatory confabulators in our phones. 

I'ma roast everybody. The LLMs and my employer ("as an example"). Then, turn around and fill out the little form of professional productivity, yep did a presentation alright ✅️🖕

Working title: Dogfooding the Companion: Narrative Medicine Meets the Hallucinating LLM

At the moment I'm telling it the abstract isn't good enough isn't good enough, isn't good enough, isn't good enough, isn't good enough, between cups of coffee, until it gets to the point where it's worth my own 👁time to edit. 

I've been to this conference multiple times. Leans heavy towards bioethics. Can't imagine they'll love unexamined high-verisimilitude confabulation.

grrrrrrrrr

VIRGO

 (August 23-September 22)

Virgo biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that evolution isn't a ladder of progress but a branching bush of experimentation. Most species that ever existed are extinct, but they weren't failures. For a very long time, they were successful experiments in being alive, well adapted to their environment. When conditions changed, they ended. That's how evolution works. Let's apply this lesson to your life, Virgo. If a part of your world is concluding, celebrate and thank it, then bid it a fond farewell. Feel grateful that it succeeded completely at what it was meant to do and gave you all it had to give.

Yes, I am aware. Everything in every major life category, every body,  is dead, dying, or over. Farewell, in some cases fondly.

love in letting go - warren zeiders ouch

https://www.pcmag.com/news/ny-school-district-shelves-plan-to-spend-58k-on-robot-teaching-assistant not it