Professors from across the country have long been lured to Florida’s public colleges and universities, with the educators attracted to the research opportunities, student bodies, and the warm weather.
But for a swath of liberal-leaning professors, many of them holding highly coveted tenured positions, they’ve felt increasingly out of place in the Sunshine State. And some of them are pointing to the conservative administration of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis as the reason for their departures, according to The New York Times.
DeSantis, who was elected to the governorship in 2018 and was easily reelected last fall, has over the course of his tenure worked to put a conservative imprint on a state where moderation was once a driving force in state politics. In recent years, DeSantis has railed against the current process by which tenure is awarded, and with a largely compliant GOP-controlled legislature, he’s imposed conservative education reforms across the state.
So any way you slice it, this is not a loss for Republicans, they’re getting precisely what they want here. Unintended consequences? Probably, but they’re too blinded by their belief in their own superiority to be able to imagine any.
It just means that science communicators on the internet are becoming vitally important, so the young can still access quality information.
It might be a double edged sword, but unless Republicans can stem the flow of information on the internet (and they have and are trying different ways to do that), this is a battle that they have no chance of winning.
That’ll only work until the Internet is drowned out by fake AI bot science videos and blogs, stressing certain narratives.
YouTube is already today fighting those videos, AI generated trash science stuff.
It’s happening now, today. That’s why I always rage against shills and bots, because it really will mean the death of communication for Humanity if it goes to its logical conclusion. And when Humanity doesn’t communicate, War is not far behind.
If you pollute the virtual ‘Town Square’ badly enough, those who want communication to not happen will win.
It’s worth mentioning that AI has a self correcting factor. If we can’t tell what’s AI output and what isn’t, AI is going to be trained itself on AI output, which breaks it.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it’s good to remember that the “public square” is vast. Poisoning it isn’t going to be as simple as poisoning 4chan.
Also, on the topic of AI, what if their information-gathering improves over time, too? Sure, there will be bad versions, but there are already bad human actors, and we’ve mostly learned how to identify and fact check them.
I think your scenario is certainly reasonable, but I don’t think it’s the only option, either. Plus, I’ve already seen people saying things like, “That sounds like an AI wrote it.” Current and future generations may simply learn to detect AI and take any claims skeptically.
Either way, hard to say what the future holds with any real accuracy.
Well there’s one Facebook, there’s one Twitter/X, there’s one Reddit (or two if you want to count Lemmy), etc. Not as vast as you might think.
Bots are very fast and inexpensive to use and can be done multiplicatively very easily.
I hope you’re right, but I don’t have your confidence in the future that you seem to do.