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****** NYTimes: The Laws of Campus Culture War

The Laws of Campus Culture War www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/opinion/columnists/campus-speech-culture-war.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

“I’ve long appreciated the pseudonymous writer Scott Alexander’s description of liberalism: “People talk about ‘liberalism’ as if it’s just another word for capitalism or libertarianism or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism,” he wrote on his Slate Star Codex blog. “Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war.”

He’s exactly correct. And as the Supreme Court has repeatedly observed, our nation’s educational system — and especially its college campuses — is the place where we learn liberalism. It’s the place where we are supposed to practice pluralism. Our system of government was built to accommodate conflict but only as long as that conflict is channeled through a Constitution that protects our liberty from the government and empowers that government to protect its citizens from one another.

Students are entitled to be free. They are entitled to be safe. But enduring hard words and hearing dreadful ideas isn’t just an inescapable element of pluralism; it’s also the price of peace itself. Break that system, and the conflagrations abroad will have violent echoes here at home. Trust that system, and we can manage the conflicts that tear other nations apart.”

Sent from my U.S.Cellular© Smartphone

**** Google’s New Search Tool Could Eat the Internet Alive

If widely implemented, the peril of AI search is that it could eventually shrivel up much of the content that is now reliant on Google traffic for survival. Nothing is going to happen to the internet overnight, but websites hire people like me to notice and solve problems for readers because helpful information gets clicks. If publications aren’t rewarded with traffic, they are going to publish less information. Google claims it understands the stakes, though the company is notoriously secretive about how its algorithms work: The spokesperson told me the company will “continue to prioritize approaches that send valuable traffic to a wide range of creators and support a healthy, open web.” But the basic premise of a searchbot necessarily involves more text in Google, and less traffic to websites. Google’s AI doom loop may lead us into a much smaller version of the internet, with fewer sites, fewer posts—and thus a worse experience for all of us.

Read: AI search is a disaster