Christian Colleges Can't Be Woke

Over 40% of the colleges closed since Covid are Christian. The reason is straightforward.

Most college students are female, most college administrators are female. Women value relationships over truth. That's why most colleges are going woke - women always worry about building family relationships. Colleges aren't designed to be about families, they are designed to seek out the truth.

But, as women dominate the college experience, they have to go woke, because ... female. Inclusion. Equity. That's purely a female perspective on the world. Colleges turn into matriarchal, mother-child relationship models. In the whole history of the world, there has never been a successful matriarchal society.

Woke is not compatible with Christian. The two world-views don't mesh. Ironically, even though Christianity is dominated by women believers, Christianity is male-centered, it is dominated by a search for truth.

Christianity is a Father-Son relationship, not a mother-child relationship. Male-centered Christianity is inimical to woke. A father scourges his child, intentionally exposing children to certain levels of danger to harden them for life and help them gain experience in dealing with life's difficulties, while mothers coddle children. Endlessly coddling a child ultimately destroys the child. Jordan Peterson talks about the devouring mother as a Jungian archetype. There's a reason the Hindu deity of death and destruction is Kali, a goddess, a female.

So, Christian college enrolment is necessarily going to drop because there's no way to square those two competing world-views. You cannot have women run an institution designed to be run by men. It doesn't work.

AI Detectors Don't Work

 Artificial Intelligence essay generators, like ChatGPT, are designed to simulate human essay writing. The better the AI generator, the more difficult it is to distinguish its essays from that of a human author. The whole point of the generator is to be indistinguishable from human authoriship.

AI generators are simply deep statistical analysis engines. Each word in the English language is assigned a numeric value, then  statistical engines use large language data to correlate word frequency and distance from each other in sentences. When a string of words is supplied (a question), the engine turns the words into numbers, use the numbers as input, correlates what a reply sequence should look like, and spits that reply sequence back. The numbers are changed back into words right before the words appear on your screen.

All the AI generator does is mindlessly mirror back to us our own Q-A sequences. Ultimately, everything an AI generates was in some way human-generated, both by programmers and by the vast audience of essays the statistical engine was trained on. 

So, how well do these detectors work?

If a non-native English speaker writes an essay, it will be flagged as AI-generated. Stanford University's study indicates AI-detection tools commonly flagged international students. 

The University of Pittsburgh was one. In a note to faculty at the end of June, the university’s teaching center said it didn’t support the use of any AI detectors, citing the fact that false positives “carry the risk of loss of student trust, confidence and motivation, bad publicity, and potential legal sanctions.” 

Every AI generator has political biases, with ChatGPT being the most far left

AI-generated content probably cannot be copyrighted, according to the US Copyright Office. There have been very few court cases, so no one knows where this will end up. But the first court ruling on the subject agrees with the US Copyright Office. 

On the other hand, AI generators claims the right to use anything you input as its own, in perpetuity:

“perpetual, revocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid, transferable, sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, create derivative works”

Now, is this all that different from Raphael or Michelangelo claiming as their own work created by their assistants? Or Ph.D.s claiming as their own work done by their grad students or postdocs?

Film credits often list the names of dozens of talented people who contributed to the creation of a film, but typically just one copyright owner — namely, the film company that produced it.

AI pattern-matching tools can discriminate against the poor and disabled. 

AI detection tools may be impossible to create:

"Considering those factors, it might well be impossible for humans to create tools to identify AI-generated text with 100 percent accuracy and reliability, something the paper alluded to: "Our findings strongly suggest that the 'easy solution' for detection of AI-generated text does not (and maybe even could not) exist. Therefore, rather than focusing on detection strategies, educators continue to need to focus on preventive measures and continue to rethink academic assessment strategies (see, for example, Bjelobaba 2020). Written assessment should focus on the process of development of student skills rather than the final product."

And AI-generated watermarks can be spoofed: 

"For a sufficiently advanced language model seeking to imitate human text, even the best-possible detector may only perform marginally better than a random classifier. Our result is general enough to capture specific scenarios such as particular writing styles, clever prompt design, or text paraphrasing. We also extend the impossibility result to include the case where pseudorandom number generators are used for AI-text generation instead of true randomness. We show that the same result holds with a negligible correction term for all polynomial-time computable detectors. Finally, we show that even LLMs protected by watermarking schemes can be vulnerable against spoofing attacks where adversarial humans can infer hidden LLM text signatures and add them to human-generated text to be detected as text generated by the LLMs, potentially causing reputational damage to their developers."

You can fool the detectors by running your AI-generated content through a paraphrasing engine like undetectable.ai, Quillbot, or HideMyAI. The detector abilities are so bad, that OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, have shut down their own AI detector. 

Instructors at the high school and college level are deeply concerned. They cannot believe they cannot reliably determine what is AI-generated and what is not. But, the fact is, they cannot determine the differences with any reliability. If a student uses AI text generators from Day One, the instructor will not see a sudden change in writing ability. No tool will reliably allow detection of AI text generation. The business that employs the graduate will undoubtedly use AI to streamline text-writing tasks, so there isn't much point in penalizing a student for using AI, nor is there much of a way to do it even assuming the professor desired it.

Between automated learning platforms, like Khan Academy, streaming video from Youtube, AI text and image generators, and the fact that certifications are replacing college degrees, instructors are losing the thread that explains why they exist.

Addendum (is modern academia just an elaborate form of hazing?):

However, AI models may be able to learn how animals communicate

Vanderbilt has shut down TurnitIn's AI detector for being too unreliable. One test showed only 68% accuracy in AI detection.

The University of Kansas recommends against TurnItIn's tool

July 2023: MIT Tech Review, AI Detection tools are easy to fool

Sept 2023: OpenAI admits AI Detection tool doesn't work.

October 2023: GoldPenguin, AI Detectors don't work

October 2023: ZDNet, AI Detectors, 80% accuracy at best

Report says AI can always beat detectors

HowToGeek: How AI Detection Works (hint: it also uses LLM)

AI is becoming ubiquitous, it is now present in all major mail/search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo)

Students are using AI to create college application essays

Four colleges have turned off AI detection (Vanderbilt, Michigan State, Northwestern and the University of Texas at Austin):

“Turnitin’s technology is not meant to replace educators’ professional discretion. Reports indicating the presence of AI writing, like Turnitin’s AI writing detection feature, simply provide data points and resources to support a conversation with students, not determinations of misconduct.”

One recent study from Stanford found that seven AI detectors incorrectly flagged more than half of essays written by non-native English students as AI-generated, whereas the results were “near-perfect” for English speakers. Turnitin was not one of the services tested in the study.

OpenAI has initiated Copyright Shield to protect its users from copyright claims. 

Applicants use AI essay generation to apply to colleges

Half of all students use ChatGPT to cheat.

Elon Musk's Neural Link has volunteers. Also, the Humane AI pin

Experts cannot reliably distinguish what constitutes "evidence-based" statements.

The Embarrassment of JPII's TOB

JP II's TOB was - according to JP II himself - definitely incomplete. Putatively about sex, it managed to go through ALL of the TOB general audiences without once addressing either the place of children or the place of suffering in the "theology" of the body. Indeed, even when JP II points out the incompleteness in his last audience, he still omits mention of children or family:

These reflections do not envisage a good number of problems which, because of their object, belong to the theology of the body ( as, for example, the problem of suffering and death, so important in the biblical message.

How in the name of Sweet Fanny Adams do you discuss a "theology" of the body, a theology of human sexuality, without addressing the ultimate biological goal of human sexuality (children) or the ultimate biological conformance of the body to Christ (suffering)???

So, in that sense, TOB was not only incomplete, but also repetitive and mostly puerile. As far as the Church is concerned, TOB was deprecated the moment it was launched. It is nearly impossible to find any Church document which references (i.e., footnoted) any of the "TOB" general audiences. Even JP II himself refuses to refer back to them. The entire sequence of audiences just fell off the boards and disappeared right after it was delivered.

As for Church teaching, celibacy continues to hold pride of place.

Sex continues to be primarily a remedy for concupiscence.

Marriage continues to hold a sad and distant second place to the height of human sexual expression, that is, celibacy and religious orders.

Lay people went crazy for it, but the Church, in her official teachings, ignores it. It appears to be an embarrassing interlude in JP II's pontificate.

The Murder Problem

Here's something I didn't know. Jordan Peterson says half of all murderers, and half of all murder victims, were drunk at the time of the murder. Statistics bear this out:

Alcohol

According to the NIAAA, as many as 86% of homicide offenders were drinking at or before the crime time.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported convicted murderers in state prisons stated alcohol was a factor in half the murders they committed. It’s higher in murders of intimates (54%) than of acquaintances (50%) or strangers (47%).

Among all homicide victims, 39.9% had a positive BAC including 13.7% with a BAC between 0.01%–0.79% and 26.2% of victims with a BAC ≥0.08%

Income Disparity

We also know that the more income disparity there is in a community, the more murders take place:

Inequality—the gap between a society's richest and poorest—predicts murder rates better than any other variable, according to Martin Daly, a professor emeritus of psychology at McMaster University in Ontario, who has studied this connection for decades. It is more tightly tied to murder than straightforward poverty, for example, or drug abuse. And research conducted for the World Bank finds that both between and within countries, about half the variance in murder rates can be accounted for by looking at the most common measure of inequality, which is known as the Gini coefficient.

Young Black Men

Finally, murder and other violent crimes tend to take place within, not between, demographic groups. So, white men kill other white men, black men kill other black men, Hispanics kill other Hispanics, and so on. Now, although black males only make up around 6% of the population, we also know that half of all murderers and half of all murder victims are black males between the ages of 15 and 30. 

Why is murder so peculiar to black male culture? Well, we can look back at the culture of dueling to get a hint. The duel of honor is peculiar to agrarian societies, where goods (such as cattle or sheep) are easily taken by others and hard to identify once lost. 

While the northern United States was settled primarily by farmers from more established European countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and especially England (particularly from areas around London), the southern United States was settled primarily by herdsmen from the more rural and undomesticated parts of the British Isles. These two occupations — farming and herding — produced cultures with starkly different notions of honor.

This leads to the need for the virtue of honor, the respect for a man's word/deed being good. Loss of honor meant loss of economic activity. If you had no honor, no one would trust you to keep your end of an economic bargain. For the poor, honor was sometimes the only good they had available to use for barter. 

Remnants of the duel can still be seen in the alleys behind middle schools and high schools, where students who have little or no money of their own fight duels of honor to protect the only thing they do have, their reputations. It is no coincidence that the American duel survived in the antebellum south longer than it did in any other part of the nation. That southern honor-based tradition continues today in much of American black culture.

What this means is that murders in the North are more likely to occur during the course of another crime, like burglary, and involve strangers, whereas murders in the South are more likely to arise from a personal conflict, such as a barfight or love triangle. Other studies have shown that only homicides that involve a victim personally known to the perpetrator are elevated in the South compared to other regions of the country. Most interesting of all is the fact that this effect is correlated to the size of a town or city. In medium-size cities (pop. 50k-200k), Southern white males commit murder at a rate of 2 to 1 when compared to the rest of the country; in small cities (pop. 10k-50k) the ratio is 3 to 1; in rural areas it is 4 to 1

So, if we want to cut the murder rate, the demographic that REALLY needs attention are the young, poor black men who live in an honor-based culture, have alcohol or other substance abuse problems, and who live near ostentatiously rich men.

We know from addiction studies that substance abuse is a problem of social integration - when people feel incapable of integrating socially into some kind of community, they turn to drugs. Now we can narrow down the focus to WHY young black men are not being integrated into their communities.

So the problem of violence is not just a problem of the larger community, but specifically of the black community those young men are most familiar with, the specific honor-based community that is REJECTING these young men.

If we want to solve the problem of violent crime, we need to address honor-based culture, the substance abuse problem and income disparities. 

Women in the University

66.2% of college administrators are women and 33.8% of college administrators are men. Women have dominated college administration for decades. Their administrations are coterminous with the decline of American higher education.

Just 41% of students enrolled in a postsecondary institution in fall 2020 were men. For every man, there are now almost two women attending college:

In 1970, men outnumbered women in college, accounting for 59% of undergraduate enrollment in two-year institutions and 57% in four-year institutions. This was partly due to the high numbers of men enrolling for the purpose of avoiding conscription during the Vietnam War. In fact, the gender enrollment gap closed sharply as soon as the draft ended in 1973. By 1980, gender was perfectly balanced in four-year colleges, and women outnumbered men in two-year schools, accounting for 55% of enrollment in those institutions. Since 1980, the female-to-male ratio in two-year college enrollment continued to increase until it hit about 1.4 in 1995, stabilizing at that point. The relative female-to-male ratio in four-year college enrollment, however, increased steadily throughout this time period, reaching 1.3 in the fall of 2019.

At every level, men are graduating at lower rates than women. Men who enrolled in a four-year college in 2013 were ten percentage points less likely than women to graduate within 4 years.

Over 1.1 million women received a bachelor’s degree in the 2018-19 academic year compared to fewer than 860,000 men; put differently, about 74 men received a bachelor’s degree for every 100 women. Even fewer men graduate with an associate or master’s degree, relative to women. Doctoral degree conferral is the most gender-balanced, though even here 54% of degrees are conferred to women.

The Unnecessary Bomb and Japan's Surrender

The Timeline for the End of WW II

February, 1945 - Stalin used the Yalta conference to obtain territorial concessions from the Allies. In order for Stalin to gain these war trophies, he had to fulfill two important conditions: participation in the war and agreement with the Chinese government on the Yalta terms. Otherwise, the Allies might renege on their promises at the peace conference. Thus, it was imperative for him not only to enter the war, but to prevent the war from ending before the Soviets joined it. 

April 5, 1945 - the Soviet Union gave the required 12 months' notice that it would not renew the five-year Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact

May 1945 - Negotiation for Russia to intercede began the forepart of May 1945 in both Tokyo and Moscow. Konoye, the intended emissary to the Soviets, stated to the Survey that while ostensibly he was to negotiate, he received direct and secret instructions from the Emperor to secure peace at any price, notwithstanding its severity.

June 7, 1945 - As the emperor and the policymakers in Japan became aware of the impending defeat of the Battle of Okinawa, they decided to seek rapprochement with the Soviet Union to exit from the war. To achieve this goal, the Japanese government entrusted former prime minister and foreign minister Hirota Koki to contact Ambassador Malik on June 7 in an unofficial capacity. During a series of meetings with Malik in June Hirota sounded out the possibility of concluding an alliance or a non-aggression pact, or at least the renewal of the Neutrality Pact. Japan’s ill-advised move fell right into the Soviet trap to prolong the war.

June 22, 1945 - The Emperor summoned the Big Six to a meeting. Unusually, he spoke first: "I desire that concrete plans to end the war, unhampered by existing policy, be speedily studied and that efforts made to implement them." The Supreme Council said Soviet entry into the war “would determine the fate of the Empire.” Army Deputy Chief of Staff Kawabe remarked, “The absolute maintenance of peace in our relations with the Soviet Union is imperative for the continuation of the war.”

July 12, 1945 - On July 12, Foreign Minister Togo sent a telegram to Ambassador Sato, instructing the ambassador to see Molotov immediately to present the emperor’s message requesting Moscow’s mediation to terminate the war. Togo stated that it was the emperor’s wish to end the war, but made it clear that so long as the Allies demanded unconditional surrender, Japan had no choice but to fight to the last man.

July 15, 1945 - Just before he left Moscow for the Potsdam Conference (July 17-Aug 2), Stalin had received a personal message from the Japanese Emperor, asking him to act as intermediary between Japan and the United States. During the Potsdam Conference, Stalin's intention to enter the war was clear. Truman wrote about Stalin in his diary: “He’ll be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about.” Truman and Byrnes were working out a “timetable” to force Japan’s surrender. They wished to avoid Soviet entry into the war, and they were determined to use the atomic bomb for that purpose. With Stalin’s reference to the date of Soviet entry into the war either “by the middle of August” or “in the middle of August,” Truman believed that the Soviets would enter the war on August 15. As his diary entry shows, Truman knew full well that the Soviet entry would cause Japan to surrender.

July 18, 1945 - On July 18, when Truman paid a return visit to Stalin’s villa, Stalin revealed the information that the Japanese had asked Moscow to mediate in ending the war. He revealed to Truman Ambassador Sato’s note requesting Soviet mediation to terminate the war. Stalin was eager to prolong the war until all the preparations for his attack were completed, while Truman was also interested in prolonging the war only until the atomic bomb could be dropped, making Truman's leadership and {Truman's} American technology the reason Japan surrendered. Besides, Truman had a long-standing racist hatred for Asians. This gave him a chance to act that out. 

Aug 6, 1945 - Truman drops the bomb on Hiroshima. Essentially all of America's military leaders, including Eisenhower, Halsey, LeMay,  King, Arnold, Chennault, and Spaatz, opposed Truman's decision, saying that the dropping of the atomic bomb was not militarily necessary.

Aug 8, 1945 - Verbal report of Hiroshima damage delivered to the military

Aug 8, 1945 - Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori went to Premier Suzuki Kantaro and asked that the Supreme Council be convened to discuss the bombing of Hiroshima, but its members declined. 

Aug 9, 1945 - two minutes after midnight, Stalin declared war on Japan and opened a northern front in Manchuria. 

   - By 4 AM, Tokyo was aware of the Soviet invasion. Japan's tentative suite for peace, using neutral USSR as an intermediary, was now closed. Worse, Japan now had a two-front war to protect the home islands. Japan estimated the US could be held off for months, but with all elite units stationed in the south to face America, Japan felt it could hold out against the Soviets in the north for only ten days.

   - 10:30 AM - The Supreme Council meets.   

   - 11:00 AM - Tokyo receives news of the Nagasaki bomb. 

    - 2:30 PM - Japanese cabinet meets and is informed a captured American flier had said, under torture, that the US had 100 bombs and would destroy Tokyo and Kyoto next. The meeting adjourned with no consensus about surrender

Aug 10, 1945 - at 2 AM, the Emperor is asked to decide the matter. He chooses surrender.

Aug 12, 1945 - asked if Japan would continue the war if the integrity of the Emperor were not preserved in the peace treaty, the Emperor replied, "Of course."

Aug 13, 1945 - Gen. Anami on Aug. 13 remarked that the atomic bombings were no more menacing than the fire-bombing that Japan had endured for months.

Aug 14, 1945 - an attempted coup against the Emperor is put down

Aug 15, 1945 -  Emperor Hirohito's surrender speech to the public and the army is not consistent. When addressing the public, he said, "the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable ... . Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization." When addressing the military, he did not mention the "new and most cruel bomb" but rather said that "the Soviet Union has entered the war against us, [and] to continue the war ... would [endanger] the very foundation of the Empire's existence."

Sept. 2, 1945 - Japan signs peace treaty on battleship Missouri.