Yeah, it functioned as a kind of propaganda, as they were sure the US would look good in comparison to where the students came from. Apparently this administration thinks that’s no longer the case…
Assuming they don’t actively make them worse:
When I first saw the headlines, I was trying to figure out how much of it was the result of the use of “AI”, how much was their usual total lack of comprehension of what they read, and how much was just simple fraud. But I realized the three go hand in hand with these people and are intertwined.
It’s the usual Trumpian “bullshit,” given a gloss by the technology. Originally I thought Trump and Kennedy were a weird pairing, but now I see how much they fundamentally have in common.
Yeah, exactly. We’re having serious damage done to our infrastructure and institutions, which is fixable with time*, but changing the world’s response to the US isn’t. The world sees that the US is broken, and will move on and cut us out of any sort of important global decision making.
*Except that part of the breakage here involves alienating the global educated population that go to school in the US and do research here, etc. That may not be entirely fixable, and it certainly won’t even start to be until the US has gotten its shit together and stayed that way for some years.
Occasionally I think, “This has got to be a rare example of an accusation that couldn’t possibly be projection.” Then, some months later, “I stand corrected.”
It’s also interesting to look at modern societies that are highly ethnically and culturally homogeneous, and the weird forms of prejudice they start inventing (e.g. horoscope and blood type discrimination). Humans not only naturally diversify, if you see diversity as a weakness or negative, they’ll also come up with new and arbitrary ways to fail purity tests.
