Joe Nalven is a former Lecturer of Anthropology and Lawyering Skills at the University of San Diego.
A University Without Walls, A Prison Without Cells, and Extinction Superintelligent Bot by Joe Nalven and DALL●E 2 Science fiction may foreshadow the future of AI. Antony Bryant’s call for papers cites Stanisław Lem’s short story, Golem XIV, written in 1981, which sought to anticipate where humanity and its AI technology were headed. In Lem’s […]
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Chatbots like Google’s Bard, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Baidu’s Wenxin Yiyan (Ernie), and ChatSonic allow humans to communicate with machines using natural human language through text-based or, in the case of Alexa and Siri, voice-based systems. Some see these early versions of an increasingly sophisticated human–machine communication framework as a Pandora’s box that needs to be paused […]
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One of my teaching tricks is to ask my students, “Can we have the word up without the word down?” If we have only one of these words, we find ourselves lost in that memorable koan—the sound of one hand clapping. Some words and ideas require complements. Others, such as hot and cold, also include […]
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If you listened to the first day of oral arguments in the twin racial preference cases before the Supreme Court, you might have wondered whether the participants were AWI—Arguing While Intoxicated. Surely, they must have known that ‘diversity’ is an illusion. Humans have far preferred tribal, sectarian, kin, national, ethnic, linguistic, and racial categories; or, […]
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The Supreme Court and American Values This article is about a Supreme Court decision—actually, a companion set. These decisions haven’t happened yet, but I can fantasize, imagine, wish, desire. In a nutshell, I would like to see these decisions affirm equal protection under the law in much the same way that a similar decision affirmed […]
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In Part One of this essay, I analyzed the ways in which two contrasting lenses—the liberal lens and the critical lens—affect postsecondary administrative practices and curricular development. I also asked whether there is any defense of the critical lens in education. To read my assessment of those two subjects and to get more background on […]
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The Critical Classroom, a book published by the Heritage Foundation, makes cogent arguments against structuring the classroom with the lens of critical theory. Still, I would have liked to read an article in the book defending the critical classroom. Perhaps I could play the role of an imagined interlocutor, but my attempt at exploring the […]
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Race is not a tame problem like those of mathematics or popular games. Tame problems thrive in systems with defined internal logic and operational clarity. Race is a wicked problem. There’s the easy label of the human race; and then, the more difficult divisions into tribe, clan, sect, class, nation, and other forms that can […]
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From a bird’s eye view, most children stories can be understood as a process that guides the child into becoming a member of society──a member of a particular culture, a particular place, and a particular time. We tell them about dangers, morals, customs, and cultural beliefs, and how to perform the rituals of daily life. […]
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This is not an article about censorship. It is an article about critical thinking—framed within legislated guardrails. Boundaries are important in elementary and secondary education, more so than in higher education. We immediately think of age-appropriate materials, but there is also the more difficult issue of how we ought to frame education. At some point, […]
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When I was ready to write up my dissertation fieldwork, I was stymied by conceptual perspectives for organizing my data. What I thought about data collection before entering the field of anthropology had been overwhelmed by the reality of fieldwork. That was in the mid-1970s, when the concept of the ‘web’ of society was giving […]
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The airwaves have combusted. Parents confront school boards. Across the country, state and government agencies are moving in opposite directions: some release the genie of racial equity and Critical Race Theory (CRT) while others try to corral it and squeeze it back into the bottle. In California, CRT, either explicitly or implicitly through its aligned […]
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Richard Feynman remarked “for Nature cannot be fooled,” hearkening back to Isaac Newton—a reminder that Nature’s laws are indifferent to what humans think or wish those laws might be. The same goes for biology, which we ignore at our peril. Sex genes appeared some 180 million years ago in mammals. Not only do they make […]
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