At most, you need to add to it as the field progresses, but I doubt literary analysis ever turns out to have been wrong.

Sometimes. But more importantly a good literature prof will be highly responsive to ongoing changes in the world around them with respect to the selection of texts, texts themselves will develop new resonances as times change (consider how Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded might have changed before and after MeToo), and as critics generate new literature of their own, new perspectives have to be considered. These points, it turns out, all circulate around what you said here:

I don’t think works of literature get a lot of updates as time passes

This isn’t really true. At the most basic level of analysis (which isn’t strictly correct, but will do for now), there are never less than two components, and one of them does change as time passes. (1) The words themselves, usually printed on a page without much variation between copies, and (2) the reader of those words. This “reader” is a hugely complicated object, and the text itself doesn’t really exist in any meaningful sense without one (dried ink letters are not “language” as such, but at most a record of information which generates language upon activation by a mind). It is this “reader” (or the huge variety of “readers” who continue to come in and out of existence as time passes) who generates changes that have to be kept up with in the study of literature, but that reader is a vital object of study in the (very roughly speaking) twofold object of literary studies.

Even the idea of an unchanging but growing corpus disguises, and yet relies on, this twofold division. The maintenance of such a corpus relies on the maintenance of a tradition of readers entrusted with the assumptions and techniques of interpretation pertinent to the ideals of that tradition. What is often foregrounded here is the maintained tradition, external to individual readers, but it is those individual readers who, collectively, actually do the work of keeping it.

The job of an up-to-date literature course is to attempt to account for such changes over the span of a three month term/semester, and it’s the consequent process of selection and refinement that generates the work which is being suspiciously handed off to a scammy robot in the article.

read that sentence back in a mirror to me

This isn’t a joke either. Read it back in the mirror. To ME. What do you think you see when you look in the mirror? WRONG.

I’d advise that the SneerClub is actually a negroni with extra-proof (70-90% alcohol) rum replacing the Campari, which is instead drizzled from the bottom of a nearly empty bottle over the top. And it’s taken like a shot, beginning when you log on and continuing at your own pace until either you pass out or the internet does.

I would guess that their personal reach over the name is pretty limited by a number of factors, including that the town itself has quite a significant similar claim itself. “Oxford Brookes” university, for example, is not a part of Oxford the Ancient University, but it certainly helps their brand to be next door (and as far as I know it’s a perfectly fine institution as far as these things go).

The issue with the Future of Humanity Institute would be almost the other way around: that as long as it’s in-house, the university can hardly dissociate themselves from it.

Never meditate folks, it’s bad for the brain

Speaking as apparently one of the few people online who still has to look it up in order to find out a reference is to Avatar and not some Vietnamese proverb from the ‘60s…but I repeat myself

I want to add William H. Tucker’s posthumous “The Bell Curve in Perspective”, which came out I think right at the end of last year. It’s a short, thorough, assessment both of the history of The Bell Curve book itself and what has happened since.

Even the first chapter is just mindblowingly terse in brutally unpacking how (a) it was written by racists, (b) for racist ends, (c) Murray lied and lied afterwards in pretending that ‘only a tiny part of the book was about race’ or whatever

If you thought English was French it would phonetically read something like “pruhccupied” without it, or even more phonetically “prëccupied” (using, funnily enough, the same dots but as in Albanian orthography, which happen to capture the sound quite well). Does this only raise further questions? Well yes.

Without wishing to be rude, this seems like a comically false equivalence. On an obvious count: farmed animals bring a lot of baggage. Nobody wants to go to a slaughterhouse, which would be the genuine equivalence here between dealing with a real, messy, argumentative human being, versus just eating the beef with the picture of the friendly cow on the packaging, i.e. advocating for a cost-benefit which favours people who don’t exist yet.

While I agree with you about the economics, I’m trying to point out that physical reality also has constraints other than economic, many of them unknown, some of them discovered in the process of development.

Bird’s flight isn’t magic, or unknowable, or non reproduceable.

No. But it is unreproducible if you already have arms with shoulders, elbows, hands, and five stubby fingers. Human and bird bodies are sufficiently different that there are no close approximations for humans which will reproduce flight for humans as it is found in birds.

If it was, we’d have no sense of awe at learning about it, studying it. Imagine if human like behavior of intelligence was completely unknowable. How would we go about teaching things? Communicating at all? Sharing our experiences?

To me, this is a series of non-sequiturs. It’s obvious that you can have awe for something without having a genuine understanding of it, but that’s beside the point. Similarly, the kind of knowledge required for humans to communicate with one another isn’t relevant - what we want to know is the kind of knowledge which goes into the physical task of making artificial humans. And you ride roughshod of one of the most interesting aspects of the human experience: human communication and mutual understanding is possible across vast gulfs of the unknown, which is itself rather beautiful.

But again I can’t work out what makes that particularly relevant. I think there’s a clue here though:

…but I also take care not to put humanity, or intelligence in a broad sense, in some special magical untouchable place, either.

Right, but this would be a common (and mistaken) move some people make which I’m not making, and which I have no desire to make. You’re replying here to people who affirm either an implicit or explicit dualism about human consciousness, and say that the answers to some questions are just out of reach forever. I’m not one of those people, and I’m referring specifically to the words I used to make the point that I made, namely that there exist real physical constraints repeatedly approached and arrived at in the history of technology which demonstrate that not every problem has an ideal solution (and I refer you back to my earlier point about aircraft to show how that cashes out in practice).

I’ve been saying this more often lately, but LessWrong gets its readers in, by and large, at the absolute bottom rung of intellectual thought, they don’t know anything else

You have to interpret somebody getting into LessWrong as just graduating from Cracked or Newgrounds in the mid-2000s

“…trying to head off an argument by bringing their estimates down as low as possible” - you’ve got it. We’re done. You can stop now.