[FRIAM] ‘A huge cudgel’: alarm as Trump’s war on universities could target accreditors | US universities | The Guardian

[steve smith]

Thanks for sharing Glen.  Fascinating.

Listening to Cadwalladr was very moving:   A few years (months?) ago I 
might have dismissed (more of) this as alarmist conspiracy theory but 
for complicated reasons feel surprisingly open (vulnerable?) to her 
message.   I was unaware of Carol's background other than tangentially.

If I have any (significant) trepidation it is around my mistrust of 
"populist" messages and both extremes of technophilia/technophobia.

Re: "hard work"...   my recent cogitations on Friston Free Energy, 
Active Inference, and the thermodynamic/informational parallels.    
"Hard" work, just like encryption/decryption is somehow relative to 
one's current knowledge...     Maintaining a "fever pitch" of surprisal 
seems to be the key to thriving... too much and you die, too little and 
you stagnate and become vulnerable to the consequences of deferred 
surprisal.

In this model, all engagement in the world is a mix of "learning" and 
"action"...  tuning "surprisal" requires a combination of understanding 
the self/environment better and in changing what can be changed so that 
the current details of surprisal will be less of a problem in the future.

On 4/14/25 9:52 AM, glen wrote:
> I still feel like 99% of this conversation is about convenience and 
> work. Nothing worth doing is easy, whether university accreditation, 
> sifting good faith from corruption, sifting truth from bullshit, or 
> selecting your content providers. TANSTAAFL
>
> For those of us still using Grok and Twitter (or Amazon Prime, Google, 
> yaddayadda):
>
> This is what a digital coup looks like
> https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_this_is_what_a_digital_coup_looks_like 
>
>
> The Social Security Administration Is Gutting Regional Staff and 
> Shifting All Public Communications to X
> https://werd.io/2025/the-social-security-administration-is-gutting-regional-staff-and-shifting 
>
>
>
> On 4/12/25 10:39 AM, steve smith wrote:
>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> I do not agree with the motives for attacking accreditors, and will 
>>> admit that there might be a tiny baby in an ocean of bathwater, but 
>>> I will not mourn their demise.
>>>
>>> davew
>>
>> I'd like to see a larger discussion here of the abstractions involved 
>> in all forms of "governance" and "regulation".
>>
>> We all have beaucoup personal anecdotal experiences of the myriad 
>> ways those designed-in feedback loops seem to go entirely awry or 
>> seem to work against their own stated purpose. This can exhibit as an 
>> acute (or even mild but chronic) inconvenience any one of us 
>> experiences as we rub up against said "regulations". It can also 
>> exhibit as what feels like a fundamental opposition of values (e.g. 
>> when I feel that it should be my personal choice whether I wear a 
>> seatbelt while driving vs feeling entirely comfortable with deferring 
>> to a rule declaring which side of an undivided highway I should be 
>> driving on).
>>
>> To the extent that the universe is ordered by stacks of 
>> self-organizing systems (quarks, elementary particles, atoms, 
>> molecules, bio-molecules and cellular life, multicellular life, .... 
>> ) it would seem inevitable that there is a liminal range between 
>> these levels of organization where what multicellular creatures 
>> experience as *cancer* cells are to the cells themselves, just 
>> exercising their own (?latent?) sovereignty.
>>
>> It is easy for me to identify with the peasants with their torches 
>> and pitchforks at the castle gates, but with a little self-awareness 
>> of my larger context also recognize that there is a logic to the 
>> higher-level organization of society that I am engaged in which it 
>> behooves me to understand and engage in (even if as a dissident or 
>> freedom-fighting revolutionary).   A hallmark of life, and perhaps 
>> this stacked levels of reality I'm trying to gesture toward, seems to 
>> be to maintain a multi-scale loyalty/identity with upward/downward 
>> coupling...   a cell needs to nurture it's own organelles while 
>> participating in being a good member of a tissue which in turn is 
>> organized into a good organ which collectively comprises an organism 
>> which fits into it's own familial/ecosystem/cultural context.
>>
>> In the spirit of "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say 
>> anything at all", I tend to withdraw my participation from systems 
>> where I feel that my participation is more disruptive than not.   I 
>> (like many) harbor all types of anti-social sentiments which have me 
>> *wanting* to disrupt systems which happen to be inconvenient or 
>> confounding to my sensibilities, but I also recognize that I actually 
>> don't want to participate in a "revolution" which I have no concept 
>> of what I will replace the existing organizational structure with.   
>> My outrage and energy are better directed to systems I *can* 
>> contribute to?
>>
>> I don't mean to dismiss all "creative destruction" just recognize 
>> that perhaps there is always a bias against glancing up and down the 
>> stack of self-organization and noticing one's actual role in that 
>> continuum?   Many little kids (esp. boys?) seem to find it more 
>> interesting  to kick down someone else's sand castle than to build 
>> their own.   Maybe a meta-rule of entropy at work?
>>
>> Maybe this will trigger a return to Glen's rants about the implicit 
>> use of "levels" which is also welcome as I don't think my references 
>> here to "stacks" and "levels" are completely righteous by any 
>> means.   I'd like to find a better language.
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Apr 12, 2025, at 10:44 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
>>>> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/trump-war-on-universities 
>>>>
>>>>
>
>
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