Against excellence

The Swedish Research Council is currently in the process of selecting around ten “excellence clusters” for groundbreaking research that will receive substantial funding over the coming decade. While the long timeframe is laudable, I nevertheless feel frustrated by yet another “fat cat” initiative that risks reinforcing existing imbalances between Sweden’s higher education institutions. Far from necessarily promoting innovation, giving more money to already successful researchers may simply produce diminishing returns, especially when many have their most significant contributions behind them.

Just as with our own internal system for allocating research time at Halmstad, I think incentive structures in academia are often backwards. While incompetence and complacency certainly exist, low research productivity is often a consequence of heavy teaching loads, or simply of caring enough about students to devote time to them, rather than any lack of originality or creativity. Taking into account all the time spent applying for research funding, sitting on committees to allocate it, and then reporting and evaluating everything, I cannot help thinking that simply distributing a substantial share of that money as equal, unconditional research grants would make so much more sense.

AI-hotet behöver inga mördarrobotar

Emma Dahlin har rätt i en viktig sak (SvD 19/10): de procentsatser som cirkulerar om risken för mänsklighetens utrotning till följd av artificiell intelligens är inte vetenskapliga mätningar. De är subjektiva bedömningar som bör behandlas med stor försiktighet. Men därav följer inte att själva risken saknar teoretisk grund.

Det centrala argumentet handlar nämligen inte om enskilda incidenter med dagens AI-system, utan om vad som kan hända när vi utvecklar artificiell intelligens som överträffar människans förmåga att förstå och förändra världen.

Här är begreppet instrumentell konvergens avgörande. Oavsett vilka slutliga mål en artificiell superintelligens har kan det vara rationellt för den att eftersträva vissa delmål: att undvika att bli avstängd, skaffa resurser och framför allt öka sin egen intelligens och beräkningskapacitet. Om den dessutom kan förbättra sin egen konstruktion uppstår möjligheten till en rekursiv, självförstärkande utveckling där varje framsteg underlättar nästa.

Det är här vi måste frigöra oss från populärkulturens föreställningar om mördarrobotar. Den yttersta risken är inte att en artificiell intelligens börjar tycka illa om människor. Det är att mänsklighetens undergång blir en oavsiktlig bieffekt av dess strävan efter helt andra mål.

En superintelligens skulle exempelvis kunna utveckla teknologi för att på molekylär nivå omvandla jordens materia till beräkningsstrukturer, så kallat computronium. I ett sådant scenario förlorar människan inte ett krig. Hon förlorar förutsättningarna för liv, ungefär som andra arter har förlorat sina livsmiljöer till följd av mänsklig verksamhet, utan att deras utrotning någonsin varit vårt egentliga syfte.

Detta är ingen förutsägelse. Varje led i resonemanget kan ifrågasättas, och filosofen Joe Carlsmith har utförligt analyserat just de antaganden som måste vara uppfyllda för att avancerad AI ska kunna leda till permanent mänsklig kontrollförlust i en antologi nyligen utgiven på Oxford University Press. Att sådana scenarier inte kan tilldelas någon tillförlitlig sannolikhet innebär inte att argumenten kan avfärdas.

Här finns också ett djupare politiskt problem. Demokratins kanske främsta styrka är att den erkänner vår mänskliga felbarhet. Vi kan fatta fel beslut, men också ompröva dem, byta regeringar och lära av våra misstag. Denna möjlighet till korrigering förutsätter emellertid att misstagen inte är oåterkalleliga.

Med existentiella risker ställs denna logik på sin spets. Vi kan inte experimentera med mänsklighetens framtid och utvärdera resultatet i efterhand. Men osäkerheten gör det också svårt att avgöra vilka risker som motiverar att utvecklingen begränsas, eftersom dessa måste vägas mot den potentiella nyttan av avancerad artificiell intelligens inom allt från energiforskning till medicin.

Det är detta som gör frågan så svår. Vi behöver kunna fatta gemensamma beslut om risker som vi varken kan beräkna eller korrigera i efterhand. Det kräver ett långtgående internationellt samarbete som i dagens geopolitiska läge framstår som alltmer avlägset. Men att problemet saknar enkla lösningar gör inte risken mindre verklig.

Spaghetti con cinghiale

After a week apart, Linnéa came up to Halmstad last night to help me pack all my books. As we slow-cooked wild boar ragù with soffritto over a bottle of Lat 42 from Rioja, I could not help feeling a sting of melancholy about leaving Hallandsgatan, but now the train is truly in motion, so to speak.

Waking up to grey skies, I spent all of today in front of the computer marking systematic literature reviews before forcing myself to the gym for ten kilometres of indoor rowing, two activities that felt strangely analogous. My only interruption was giving away my sofa to charity, and now I will spend the rest of the evening packing as much as possible. Meanwhile, down in Kristianstad, Linnéa is reading up on Cayenne in the Lonely Planet guide to South America: “it all feels like a forgotten European outpost grafted onto a remote corner of a palm-fringed coast, just ripe for a starring role in a Graham Greene novel”.

Brooktorpsgården x 2

Steam

Meeting the boys at the railway station yesterday, we first had pizza at Vapiano before taking the ferry across the harbour to Eriksberg. With not one but two historic steamboats passing by, the smell of coal in the sunshine played a funny trick on my mind, transporting me to China, Ehrenfeld, and London all at once.

Luckily, we came ashore right next to the hotel where I would be staying for the night, and it felt good to spend some time together after so long apart. Fortunately, in just a couple of weeks, I will be back to being a “quantity dad”, as Måns Zelmerlöw dismissively called it, with the boys staying with me for most of the remainder of the autumn semester.

Waking up early to temperatures around freezing, I ran along the quays of Eriksberg in the dark this morning, with frost covering all the bridges, before picking up William’s friend Philip for the opening round of this year’s chess Allsvenskan. Playing White, William defeated a chess veteran born in 1951 after a little more than two hours of intense play. To celebrate, William and I headed down to Dawaat on the waterfront before taking the ferry across the harbour once more.

Now, aboard the train to Halmstad, I have an incredibly busy week of packing, marking and a TRAINS conference ahead of me before flying down to Dubrovnik with William on Saturday morning.

Night train 91

Ending the conference in high spirits at Pipes of Scotland, I left Umeå on the night train shortly after 9 p.m., settling in for the 725-kilometre journey south to Stockholm. As a night train aficionado, I find that there is something about travelling this way that goes beyond mere transportation. Being lulled to sleep by the train’s movement as we head out across the Ume River delta somehow connects so many years and places.

Then, nine hours later, I wake up in Stockholm, a city that even my newfound friend Mac, who has lived here his whole life, admits he sometimes finds overwhelming. Still, it keeps growing on me with every visit. Today, though, there will only be time for a short coffee before I take the train to Gothenburg and the kids.

Postericide

Over lunch, the conversation turned to the end of humanity as Catriona McKinnon presented her forthcoming book with MIT Press, introducing the concept of postericide and arguing that deliberately causing human extinction should be recognized as a new international crime.

As with many in the field, McKinnon seems fixated on “fossil capital” without recognizing the globally shared benefits of fossil fuels, from plastics to the natural gas used to produce the synthetic fertilizers that help feed billions of people. More importantly, however, she seems to miss the bigger picture of technological evolution. To return to one of my favourite examples, climate ethicists might condemn a nineteenth-century steam locomotive without recognizing that today's electric trains are themselves downstream of the same technological lineage. The problem is that we cannot know where technological evolution will take us, making precaution a deeply problematic guiding principle. After all, there is no safe baseline to which we can simply retreat. We cannot know what dangers technological development may unleash, but neither can we know what possibilities for human flourishing, or even survival, might be lost by holding it back. In a world of so many unmet needs, I would rather embrace a proactionary principle through which we democratically pursue the futures we want, recognizing that every technology comes with its downsides and that we must choose among different bundles of risks and benefits in ways that expand our capacity to collective shape the future.

As for the legal framing, I find it just as socially destructive as the use of climate attribution science to pursue litigation over losses of wealth and infrastructure that might never have existed without fossil-fuelled economic development in the first place. Rather than turning climate change into an endless source of legal conflict, it seems far more fruitful to accelerate technological innovation until fossil fuels become not only environmentally undesirable but economically obsolete.

And finally, if we are to play McKinnon's game of pointing fingers at ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, or Mohammed bin Salman, I would argue that Greenpeace deserves an equal share of scrutiny. After decades of spreading unscientific anti-nuclear propaganda, surely the organization must also bear some responsibility for delaying the transition away from fossil fuels. If we are to assign moral blame for putting humanity's future at risk, why should that blame extend only to those who promoted fossil fuels, and not to those who opposed the most promising alternative?

Morning in Umeå

Ground to cover

Now into the third and final day of the conference, it takes a moment to piece together everything that has happened since I touched down at Umeå Airport on Wednesday morning. But, yes, Elin and I went for a rainy river run, I attended the first programme board meeting of the semester on Teams, and had coffee with my former colleague Linnéa at Kulturbageriet before taking bus number 1 up to the Humanities Building for an evening of wine and a presentation of the research project “Forests of Emotions”. After the strong impression that Lisa Röstlund’s Skogslandet made on me, I found myself nodding in agreement with the basic premise that emotions are fundamental to how both forest owners and conservationists relate to forests, and that more “facts” alone are unlikely to make much of a difference.

Then, after waking up above the rooftops at Comfort Hotel Winn, it was my turn to present my paper An Ecomodernist Critique of Emissions Sufficientarianism. Without hiding behind any PowerPoint slides, and bringing nothing more than a few keywords, I took to the podium, knowing that the only way I could do this was by being fully present and speaking my mind, frightening as that might be. Rereading my paper a few days earlier, I had been struck by how much ground it covers, and how much each step builds on the previous one. In retrospect, I am not sure whether I managed to bring the argument full circle, from the geophysical realities of climate change to how degrowth risks foreclosing more emancipatory planetary futures. At times, I fear I may have been unnecessarily polemical, but clearly I was saying something that no one else was saying.

Afterwards, I sat down to listen to presentations on everything from the tragedy of wilderness appreciation to teleological contextualist perspectives on biodiversity offsetting, before it was time for Teea Kortetmäki’s fascinating keynote on “After wilderness: cohabitability in a humanized world”. With my mind both bubbling with thoughts and exhausted from the intensity of all the conversations, it felt good to take the bus downtown for some Indian food together.

Yet, reflecting on those conversations, I was again struck by how rarely some people on the political Left seem to consider their own role in the worsening affective polarization of society. I guess a little perspective-taking would go a long way here. Imagine how a committed vegan would feel if suddenly forced to eat steak, and perhaps it becomes easier to understand why people resist having their deeply held values challenged, even when those challenges are morally justified.

Early departure

Taking off ten minutes early from Halmstad Airport, our ATR 72-600 climbed through windy skies before making its way up towards Stockholm and Arlanda Airport.

The other week, I watched a YouTube documentary about a guy flying on such turboprops across the Atlantic, stopping in the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland before working his way south towards New York through the Canadian High Arctic. While I have long dreamt of taking a repositioning cruise along a similar great circle route, with lots of undisturbed time to read and write, his journey certainly put my own Arctic adventures into perspective.

After a short stop for breakfast at Pontus, my immediate plans once I get to Umeå are to go for a rainy river run with Elin, followed by a couple of Teams meetings. With the conference dinner starting at 7 pm, it is going to be a long day considering that I had my alarm set at 4:15 am.

L'Oreille Cassée

As Linnéa tells her kids that she is going to French Guiana over Christmas, the obvious question is: why? It is in situations like these that one wishes to be Tintin, with an artefact having gone missing from the Museum of Ethnography in Brussels or Professor Calculus having been kidnapped, either of which would immediately provide a perfectly good reason to set off on an adventure.

But in our case, I guess it was more of a spur-of-the-moment thing, something about rockets launching into space, French cheese, and rivers winding through the jungle. A blank spot on my mental map, somewhere without templates or fixed expectations. And, of course, the fact that Linnéa speaks French (and I aspire to one day).

Against certainty

With the taxi booked for 04:45 tomorrow morning, I am happy to have packed everything I need for Umeå, except perhaps the faintest idea of how I am going to make it back alive. Looking through the conference programme, it is once again obvious that I am the only one on “Team Abundance”, and I seriously wonder why I keep putting myself through these kinds of situations. While a psychologist might suspect a tendency towards self-harm, I guess it is because, deep down, I still believe in something resembling Habermasian communicative rationality: that we are not forever prisoners of our identities and worldviews.

Yet my own faith in those bright planetary futures has faltered considerably in recent years. As our digital overlords themselves were quick to point out, technological progress may not be as easily tamed as we once imagined:

“If you argue that environmental sufficientarianism is unrealistic because it assumes an implausible degree of moral discipline and international cooperation, someone might respond that safely managing transformative AI requires even more extraordinary coordination, institutional competence and restraint.”

This is a powerful objection, pointing directly towards the paradoxical implications of human fallibility in the Anthropocene, a topic that I hope to explore in some detail at WPSA in March (assuming my paper gets accepted).

Still, taking the long view of human history, I simply cannot believe in a future of ethical homogenization where everyone is forced to act and think the same way. If we have learnt anything, surely it is that value change happens gradually by inspiring each other to be our better selves, not by forcing either “democracy” or “sustainability” down each other's throats, especially when we ourselves struggle to live up to our proclaimed ideals.

Bottlenecks

Having worked in academia for more than twenty years, I have come to the conclusion that few people complain as much as academics, which is particularly perplexing given that we remain among the most privileged groups in society.

While there are always individual stories that are genuinely horrifying, I find it incredibly frustrating how little attention is paid to the simple fact that when demand exceeds supply, as it clearly does for permanent academic positions, some mechanism of selection must exist. We can limit the number of doctoral students, postdocs, assistant professorships, or senior lectureships, but no matter how we arrange things, there will inevitably be a point at which not everyone can advance to the next level.

Over the last decade, Sweden has increasingly invested in assistant professorships (biträdande lektorat) as a pathway for relatively junior scholars to secure permanent positions as senior lecturers. Often restricted to applicants who earned their PhDs within the preceding five or seven years, these positions effectively exclude more experienced scholars (like me), creating a situation in which academic mobility becomes increasingly difficult, as noted in a recent article in Universitetsläraren.

What the article largely overlooks, however, is why universities have become so reluctant to advertise traditional senior lectureships in the first place. One important reason, I suspect, is that competition for such positions has become so intense that successful applicants would often already have been promoted to full professor elsewhere. From the university's perspective, there is little incentive to recruit someone at the senior lecturer level who is already qualified for a professorship, particularly when the latter comes with considerably greater financial commitments.

The result is something of a paradox. By creating a more predictable career path for younger academics, universities have simultaneously made it increasingly difficult for established scholars to move between institutions. And as everyone holds on to the positions they already have, fewer vacancies become available, further reinforcing the problem.

I am not sure there is any easy solution to this. Certainly, I would welcome greater opportunities for academic mobility, including for people like myself. But increasing the number of permanent academic positions comes at a cost, and I am far from convinced that this should be a priority given the many other pressing needs in society. In the end, moving the bottleneck from one career stage to another is unlikely to make it disappear.

Ostbewusst

Today, Svenska Dagbladet had a long-read article on the cultural legacy of East Germany, telling the story of how young Germans, born long after the fall of the Wall, have come to build their identities around a country that ceased to exist more than thirty years ago. As someone who travelled extensively to the GDR as a child, and whose imagination has never quite left the sand dunes of Rügen, I find this phenomenon of Ostdeutschwerdung fascinating on so many levels.

In part, I think it speaks to the poles of my own identity, to how I can appreciate both Spreewaldgurken and the modest pleasures of Good Bye, Lenin!, while also enjoying business class aboard Lufthansa across the Atlantic. As an outsider, it is of course easier not to take sides, but similar tensions play out in Sweden too, if less visibly, as the rural periphery finds itself at odds with Stockholm’s metropolitan centre. Here, too, I find myself belonging to both worlds and neither.

Children of Men

With the rain intensifying through the evening, William and I slowly dried off after our Ryde ride back to the hotel as we had dinner. Unwilling to venture out again, we opted for a quiet evening together in our hotel room, looking through old photographs of him growing up in Umeå. Though memories never tell the whole story, it was heartwarming to see all those photos of me and the boys, especially now that we have spent so much of this autumn apart.

Having reached the present in Google Photos, we debated which film to watch before settling on a true dystopian classic from 2006: Children of Men. Set in a decaying, fascist England in an alternative future where no children are being born, its extraordinary extended takes were as brutally realistic as ever, even if reality has not quite turned this dark (though sometimes, as with Gaza, one wonders).

Having won five of his seven rounds, William is now playing against an opponent with a much higher Elo rating, while I am recovering at Espresso House after a mad ten-kilometre run on the treadmill. With only a week having passed since Malmö Marathon, my legs were not really up to it, so I had to compensate by pushing my cardiovascular system harder, with my heart rate averaging 163 bpm.

Dysosmia

Having dropped William off at the chess tournament venue, I laced up my red Hoka Rincons and headed out for a short sunset run in Karlstad, a city I have not visited for almost twenty years to the day.

Located on the northern shore of Sweden’s largest lake, the city feels surprisingly coastal, with its large guest harbour. What stood out even more, though, was the strong smell of chocolate or coffee, making me briefly wonder whether I was experiencing dysosmia (I have lost much of my sense of smell over the last couple of years) before I stumbled upon the Löfbergs Lila coffee roastery.

Once back at the hotel, I indulged in the complimentary dinner included in Strawberry’s Home concept. While the value is more obvious in Norway, where everything else is outrageously expensive, it definitely saves a few bucks (if such Americanisms are allowed) when on the road. With heavy rain expected tomorrow, I am happy I got to explore at least the central parts of the city on my run, as I will probably be confined to the gym’s rowing machine.

Matcha latte

This morning, a young woman wearing a hijab spilled what looked like an entire cup of matcha latte across the floor of the train. Rather than telling anyone, she simply walked away. As the train attendant appeared with a roll of paper towels, I felt rather strange just sitting there behind my laptop, so I got up to help.

While we were cleaning up the mess, the attendant began complaining about “Arabs”. And just like that, a rather ordinary instance of inconsiderate behaviour had become something much bigger. Or, perhaps more accurately, something much smaller. What struck me was how readily the stereotype was available, as if it had been waiting all along for an opportunity to be confirmed. The young woman had behaved badly, no doubt, but somehow her behaviour was no longer her own. It had become evidence about an entire category of people, one to which the attendant had assigned her without knowing anything else about her.

Almost at the same time, I happened to come across an old promotional photograph from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, where I used to teach. It shows me surrounded by students in a classroom, a little snapshot of a time when my own world was expanding. Looking at that photograph now, I was reminded of how much larger the world is than the categories through which we ordinarily understand it. Of course, meeting people from different backgrounds does not mean that we will always like them, agree with them, or approve of their behaviour. But perhaps it can teach us to let people remain individuals, rather than immediately turning them into representatives of something else.

Listening to the wind

When told by the Swedish Academy that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Anne Carson apparently replied that she was in Iceland listening to the wind. Hard to match, but at least I grabbed the one book of hers I had on my shelf and jumped aboard a metallic Öresund train into the autumn rain.

Compared to Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, with its exploration of desire in classical literature and philosophy, I must admit that my own final edits to the När då då? manuscript feel rather flat. Still, I am happy to have finally submitted it for review, meaning that I can now turn my academic attention back to those elusive biogenic hydrocarbons, courtesy of the Swedish Energy Agency.

Beach runs

Moving north in less than a month, I am trying to maximize my beach running by chasing the morning light along Västra stranden. Yesterday, I was even able to squeeze in a lunch run as the waves kept rolling in.

Today, I attended that APT-turned-lecture on cognitive perspectives on education, which I greatly appreciated, with my only reservation being the insistence that learning science is not a “perspective” but rather an entirely inductive enterprise. In fact, claims that something is not theoretical or in any way ideological are often an indication of the exact opposite. Unsurprisingly, it did not take many minutes before someone in the audience took the content as a vindication of their own views on education, emphasizing “hard work” and the importance of homework.

While I prefer to remain on the sidelines of these pedagogical debates, I think it is important that we all recognize our own biases and preferred interpretations. Just as “evidence-based policy-making” often becomes “policy-based evidence-making” in practice, translating cognitive research into educational practice inevitably involves values and priorities of its own.

The president

On the train this morning, Linnéa and I came to reflect on the fact that Donald Trump first became president in 2016, and that for our younger kids, he is simply “The President”, in much the same way that Ronald Reagan was for our generation. Like yesterday, when we watched a rather disturbing documentary about Sweden’s minister for civil defence, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, it is difficult to fully grasp just how much political discourse has changed.

Considering the speech Trump recently gave at the United Nations, it is worth remembering that, for all his faults, Ronald Reagan told the 42nd session of the General Assembly in 1987:

“In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity […] I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

Science fiction, alright. But perspectives like that mattered. Democracy itself depends on something similar: losers’ consent, the willingness to accept temporary defeat because one remains committed to a political order larger than one’s immediate interests. The same is true internationally. Politics cannot function for long if every disagreement is reduced to the satisfaction of our basest instincts.

Perhaps that is what feels most different today: not simply the policies, but the shrinking of the horizon.

Too cool for school

Returning to Halland in time for tomorrow’s workplace meeting (APT) on learning science and the cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham’s book “Why don’t students like school?”, I am struck by the basic point that our brain is not designed for thought, that thinking is hard work, and something we often do our best to avoid, especially when it comes at a social cost.

At the same time, humans are naturally curious. We want to see what lies beyond, to better ourselves (if we are to speak Star Trek), and to learn new things. But curiosity is fragile. What we seem to enjoy is not thinking as such, but the small reward that comes from successful thinking. Problems that are too easy are boring; problems that appear impossible are frustrating. Somewhere between the two lies the pleasure of figuring something out.

This also means that good teaching cannot simply consist of making students “active”. To think about something, students need something to think with: factual knowledge, previous examples and procedures stored in long-term memory. Asking students to critically discuss a question for which they lack the necessary background knowledge is no more intellectually demanding than asking them to guess.

Perhaps the better question for teachers is therefore not whether a class is a lecture, seminar or game, but: where is the cognitive work? Who is actually doing the thinking? Willingham notes how easily a lesson can become a long series of teacher explanations, while the students themselves solve very few problems. And perhaps we are sometimes too eager to supply answers before we have created a question that students actually want answered.

Seen this way, the challenge is to design teaching in which students repeatedly encounter problems that are difficult enough to require thought, but sufficiently accessible that they can experience the satisfaction of solving them.

C4

Founded by the Danish king Christian IV in 1614, many things in Kristianstad, including the city itself, bear his name. Taking the bus out to the C4 shopping mall, I started the day with an upper-body strength session at Nordic Wellness (my legs are still trashed from the marathon) before sitting down to mark 47 exams in Inspera, a marathon in its own right.

However, as so often in my life, I had already received the reward before putting in the work, as Linnéa baked the most delicious cinnamon buns yesterday while I cooked an old favourite dish of mine (minced lamb with sage and lemon) for dinner. We also got to play a game with all the flags of the world, which I am bringing along to Karlstad to play with William next weekend, as well as a round of the feminist edition of När då då?. Linnéa’s daughter won the latter, presumably thanks to Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women having been her favourite book when she was younger.

Malmö, again

Being a city full of memories, reaching back to the 1980s in Beijers Park, through the late 90s of coming of age, to the open skyline of Kasai this summer, Malmö has always held a special place in my heart. Today, I got to race 42.2 kilometres through its streets.

For the first half marathon, I lived the dream of running in under three hours and thirty minutes, even if my heart rate was well above 170 bpm. Having passed the 21k mark in one hour and 43 minutes, it only took a few more kilometres for reality to catch up with me. With my knee hurting like hell and my stamina simply not there, from 32 kilometres onwards it became pure suffering, often with my pace dropping to between six and seven minutes per kilometre. Finishing in 3 hours and 53 minutes, I felt horribly nauseous but, luckily, both my parents were at the finish line and took extraordinarily good care of me.

A few hours at a Parisian café later, all parameters were back to normal and I could take the train back to Halmstad. Looking back on the race, I am still happy about finishing in under four hours and having had such a beautiful day by the water. Contrary to the forecast, the sun broke through the mist in ways that almost reminded me of California, and it is no exaggeration to say that I could see myself living in Malmö again sometime in the future, when the kids have grown up.

200 papers

According to the Washington Post, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago managed to produce more than two hundred papers in just nine months, largely thanks to generative AI, before fellow academics started raising questions. As such, I should perhaps not be surprised that I recently had to wait three months for a journal to even decide whether to send my manuscript out for review. Luckily, they did, so now I have one more article out there awaiting its fate.

Hopefully, I will have another one joining it next week, as Kalle and I are wrapping up our co-authored article on the board game När då då?. Compared with my work in environmental ethics, pedagogical research really is such a blissful world of encouragement and supportive comments. I mean, few people are going to object to students learning the history of political thought or being exposed to voices outside the established canon.

After spending six hours in the classroom, I stopped by Nordic Wellness for a quick gym session before making a massive carb-loading feast of pecorino meatballs and spaghetti, served with a glass of Argentinian red (as per tradition). Tomorrow, at 7:37 a.m., I will take the high-speed train down to Malmö, where the gun goes off at ten sharp at Ribersborg, sending me everywhere from Limhamn to Värnhem before eventually bringing me back to Ribersborg – hopefully with the clock showing something under three hours and thirty minutes.

Kennedy

After twenty years of blogging, I might be forgiven for thinking I have written things here on Rawls & Me that I in fact have not. Talking with Linnéa yesterday about the not-so-clear-cut distinction between democratic debate and foreign influence operations, I was reminded of a speech John F. Kennedy gave in 1962, which I was certain I had mentioned on the blog. I searched in vain, but I remember the quote as speaking directly to a democratic ethos that seems all but lost these days:

"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

Much like Linnéa's wish to raise her kids as world citizens in a time dominated by chauvinism, many of my values (such as the idea that everyone on this planet deserves a reasonable material standard of living) would, I often feel, have been plain common sense sixty or a hundred years ago. But as the discourse has shifted, they, like Kennedy's words above, have come to seem almost like fringe positions, now that "safety" and group egoism have taken precedence over everything else.