Later this month, I’ll be teaching my dissertation chapter on grief to a grad seminar of young bioethicists as part of a class session on Death and Dying. These students are doctors, social workers, researchers, policy folks, all sorts.
You might ask, how do you teach death to folks who already encounter it in their professional lives?
Well, I’ve been sitting in on a graduate anthropology seminar for an entire week, so on Tuesday I’ll be shadowing a hospice doctor. My plan is to take notes and say nothing.
So how’d I get here?
I’ve been noticing for a while that the version of AI research I get at conference talks and even one-on-one in coffee shops is oddly sanitized. And that’s no real surprise: Folks rehearse scripts and narratives to present their work so it appears ‘logical’ and ‘‘scientific’’.
So, it takes a fair amount of philosophical sophistication to work backwards and ask an unraveling question. I think that’s why it isn’t until a socially direct disciplinary outsider shows up at Q&A or probes over coffee that some of these questions to come up.
But philosophical questioning alone can’t uncover what AI researchers are doing day-to-day and minute-to-minute. How do they decide how to design or tweak or evaluate or implement a model? How did they come to believe that, say, this is how folks in Bioethics reason about principles like justice and autonomy, so their model should mimic that?
It turns out, there really is no substitute for being there and seeing what happens first-hand.
I used to TA for a philosophy teacher who loved to tell undergrads, “There is no shallow end of the pool.” Sometimes I thought this was a flimsy excuse for the syllabus to assign up to a hundred pages a week, plus The Brothers Karamazov on their own time!
But I do get it—in philosophy, even seemingly simple questions pull on other strands. The same issues come up everywhere, so it almost doesn’t matter where we begin. Before we know it, we’re starting to get a better grasp on how everything hangs together. Since there is no shallow end of the pool, we have to jump in.
I have no real idea what a hospice doctor’s day looks like. But I do know they have to balance the patient’s (usually past) wishes against their (usually current) suffering against their loved ones’ (usually acute) distress, and so much more.
So I tried writing down an initial set of questions I had going in:
How do doctors balance these factors against one another?
How do they help patients and their loved ones conceptualize death
How do they provide comfort?
How do they respond to being relied upon as experts in a domain where no one really knows what comes next, and there are no perfect solutions or bright lines between managing grandma’s pain and narrowly overdosing her?
How do they deal with the moral burden of playing God over the power of life and death?
Fortunately, here comes another anthropology slogan: “Who, what, where, when, how, and with what consequences?”
What I find interesting here is the substitution of ‘why’, which might invite prematurely reading intent into folks’ actions, with this much more pragmatic ‘with what consequences’, which is supposed to help reorient us back into detailed observation of what’s actually happening around us.
But each of these questions is helpful. For instance, my initial questions might be overrepresenting the “who” of doctors, and underrepresenting social workers and other folks at hospice. Of course, shadowing a doctor will bring its own biases, but it will also open up opportunities to be surprised.
It at least puts me in the room where I might start glimpsing which of my assumptions are wrong.
I don’t know what to expect, although I suspect I’ll encounter a lot of suffering and moral angst on all sides.
If I can just be present, be observant, and quietly take some of it in, I think I can honor what’s going on and have a much more grounded sense of how death and dying appear to my students. And I’d really appreciate that.
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