The First Circuit's (Mostly) Correct Dismissal of the MIT Antisemitism Suit

Today, the First Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision affirming the dismissal of a Title VI lawsuit brought by Jewish students alleging an antisemitic hostile environment at MIT. The court concluded first that the incidents pleaded by the plaintiffs were by and large not instances of actionable discrimination but rather were protected speech, and that what pleaded incidents were plausibly antisemitic were too isolated to meet the "severe" and "pervasive" threshold necessary to assign legal liability. Second, it concluded that even if the first part of the analysis was untrue, the claim failed for the independent reason that MIT could not be demonstrated to have been deliberately indifferent to the antisemitism.

Overall, I think the opinion is strong and reached the correct result. I was particularly happy to see it acknowledge the extraordinarily difficult position academic administrators are in when trying to mediate between cross-cutting speech/discrimination complaints, as this of course reflects my own position in contrast to the many Monday-morning-quarterbacks who think that these questions are perfectly straightforward and the only reason it looks hard is because of instincts towards censorship and/or bigotry.

I also think this decision illustrates a danger in how many Jewish groups are treating law and litigation as a primary mechanism for policing allegedly antisemitic speech. The litigation approach, to my eyes, is very much tied to a broader misapprehension of the legal landscape regarding discrimination that believes, quite wrongly, that Every Group But the Jews gets immediate and unconditional legal protection the instant they feel a twinge of discomfort on campus or in the workforce. Back in 2020, when Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times while alleging that the conditions she endured at the paper were tantamount to constructive discharge, I made the following observation (after observing that, in fact, the conduct she identified in her letter came nowhere close to that which would support a successful discrimination lawsuit):

Weiss' confusion is in line with something I've noticed from many conservative observers of anti-discrimination law. They wildly underestimate how high the barriers are to winning a discrimination claim -- probably because they're ideologically committed to the notion that minorities get their discrimination claims rubber-stamped (when the reality is such claims are overwhelmingly rejected by the courts, often before reaching a jury). So when they experience something that is in the family of discrimination, they assume that (a) it must be illegal ("if these whiny minorities are winning, surely my very real pain and trauma must present a winning case too!") and (b) if it isn't treated as illegal, that must be because of some latent anti-conservative(/white/male/whatever) bias, rather than the normal functioning of a legal system they generally endorse.

So too here. The misshapen "us too-ism" morphs what is objectively a very precarious strategy (legal discrimination claims are hard to win, especially when the conduct they are challenging is primarily speech!) into something that appears viable. Law very intentionally and in my very appropriately does not purport to capture everything that could be reasonably called antisemitic -- here, the court agrees that there are certain pleaded incidents which were (if the pleaded facts were true) antisemitic (they were just too isolated to support liability), and particularly in the speech domain there may be speech that can be called antisemitic (or at least debated as such) but which cannot have legal liability attached. But the headline that everyone reads when one files a suit and loses is "antisemitism claims found to be meritless," and there is little hope to then reignite the conversation in the more expansive and forgiving domain of discourse and dialogue.

On that note, if there was one area of the opinion where I have a bit of hesitation, it was in how it treats the plaintiffs' arguments for how anti-Zionism is antisemitic (at least in some forms). The opinion somewhat oscillates between two positions here. Sometimes, it suggests that there remains open debate on the contours of when and whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and that our legal system "resolves through discourse, not judicial fiat" (30). "Plaintiffs are entitled to their own interpretive lens equating anti-Zionism (as they define it) and antisemitism. But it is another matter altogether to insist that others must be bound by plaintiffs' view" (28). This I think gets it right. But at other points, the opinion shifts away from the lens of "it is inappropriate for judges to resolve this contested ideological question" and instead delivers a flat judgment that the challenged conduct was simply not antisemitic ("The disruptive political protests sympathetic to Palestinian views of the conflict with Israel were not, by and large, antisemitic." (41)). This I think is unnecessary and flouts the prior, careful choice to abstain from making that judgment one way or another.

One last point: I think the way the First Circuit dispenses with the Jewish plaintiffs' sincere belief that anti-Zionism is antisemitic is at odds with the Second Circuit decision I flagged last month regarding a Christian school's stated belief that forcing its girls' basketball team to play against teams that fielded transgender athletes would violate its religion. In the latter case, the Second Circuit treated disagreement with the Christian school's own articulation of what its religious beliefs required as tantamount to religious animus. In this case, by contrast, the First Circuit had little trouble telling the Jewish plaintiffs that they were (at least as far as the law was concerned) incorrect about what sort of conduct does or doesn't target their religious values. To be clear: I think the First Circuit is closer to the mark here than the Second: disagreement with a religious person's views, so long as that disagreement is not itself motivated by religious hostility, should not suffice to make out a claim of religious discrimination. The Second Circuit's opinion was far too expansive and, if applied consistently, almost certainly unworkable. But it goes to illustrate, once again, that these expansive new religious liberty principles being introduced by the judiciary almost certainly are not going to extend to Jewish litigants -- in part because they have to have limits, and Jews are not part of the in-group meant to be protected but not bound.

If I Am Only For Myself, Who Will Be For Me?

The first two lines of Hillel's famous maxim read as follows:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am only for myself, who am I?

It's obviously famous for a reason. The first line endorses some measure of self-regard or at least self-reliance -- we have to advocate for ourselves. The second cabins the first -- if we only care about our personal self-interest, who are we? As in so many things, the best path lies somewhere in the middle.

Hillel's line came to mind for me when I was reading reports of a prominent New York City Rabbi urging his congregants to oppose Zohran Mamdani for mayor. His call was framed in terms of urging Jews to "prioritize their Jewish selves" -- to self-consciously elevate "ahavat yisrael ... over other loves." They should not vote on "affordability, food instability, education, policing, sanitation, taxes – the everyday issues that shape our great city’s life." They must vote in a way that first and foremost "safeguards the Jewish people." Everything else is secondary.

I don't think Mamdani represents the sort of existential threat to the Jewish people that warrants this sort of reaction. This is not the same thing as saying Jews aren't allowed to have concerns over some part of his record. But sermons like this strike me as more than a little histrionic, except for the fact that to me they read like a desperate attempt to spur on a Jewish community which by and large is not reacting hysterically to Mamdani. Again, it isn't so much that Mamdani is being greeted with gushing support (the most recent polling shows that among Jews Cuomo is ahead of Mamdani, but just barely). They're just not converting their various concerns and misgivings into the all-out existential panic this Rabbi would like to see.

But leave all of that aside. My actual quarrel with the Rabbi's sermon is that, as a prescription for political action, it presents an incredibly short-sighted political vision for Jews. For if Jews can legitimately say to various other groups and communities "we hear your concerns (about affordability or policing or Islamophobia or what have you), but we ultimately have to look out for ourselves first"; well, those other communities are equally entitled to reply "and we hear your concerns (about antisemitism), but we ultimately have to look out for ourselves first." And even in New York City, there are a lot more of them than there are of us. So remind me how exactly this will redound to the benefit of Jews?

I raised this same argument six years ago in the context of British elections, where Jews were pleading with non-Jews to not vote for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party given Corbyn's rank antisemitism (and Corbyn, to be clear, is on his best day far more antisemitic than Mamdani is on his worst). Many of these Jewish figures harbored no illusions about the Tories, including that party's own sordid involvement in racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia (and, for that matter, antisemitism). But, they argued, as terrible as Boris Johnson may be, "stopping Corbyn has to be the number one priority for British Jews. And a vote for anyone but the Tory candidates is, ultimately, a vote for Jeremy Corbyn."

Jewish voters who act under this logic, they would say, are by no means endorsing Brexit, which they detest, or xenophobia, which they abhor. They hate these things, genuinely and sincerely. But their hand has been forced. In this moment, they have to look out for Number One. 

I understand this logic. I understand why some Jews might believe that in this moment, we cannot spare the luxury of thinking of others.

I understand it. But it is, ultimately, spectacularly short-sighted. 

To begin, if we accept that British Jews are justified in voting Tory because we are justified looking out for our own existential self-preservation, then we have to accept that non-Jewish minorities are similarly justified in voting Labour in pursuit of their own communal security and safety. We cannot simultaneously say that our vote for the Tories cannot be construed as an endorsement of Conservative xenophobia but their vote for Labour represents tacit approval of Corbynista antisemitism. Maybe both groups feel their hands are tied; trapped between a bad option and a disastrous one. And so we get one letter from the Chief Rabbi, excoriating Jeremy Corbyn as an “unfit” leader, and another competing letter from the Muslim Council of Britain, bemoaning Conservatives open tolerance of Islamophobia. 

But if the Jews reluctantly vote Conservative “in our self-interest” and BAME citizens reluctantly vote Labour “in their self-interest”—well, there are a lot more BAME voters in Britain than there are Jewish voters. So the result would be a massive net gain for Labour. Some pursuit of self-interest. 

Meanwhile, those Brits who are neither Jewish nor members of any other minority group are given no guidance by this approach. There is no particular reason, after all, for why they should favor ameliorating Jewish fears of antisemitism over BAME fears of xenophobia. From their vantage point, these issues effectively cancel out, and they are freed to vote without regard to caring about either antisemitism or Islamophobia. At the very moment where these issues have been foregrounded in the British public imagination in an unprecedented way, insisting upon the primacy of pure self-interest would ensure that this attention would be squandered and rendered moot. 

Of course, all this does not even contemplate the horrible dilemma imposed upon those persons who are both Jewish and BAME—the Afro-Caribbean Jew, for instance. They are truly being torn asunder, told that no matter how they vote they will be betraying a part of their whole self.

And so too here. The argument from self-interest -- aside from ignoring those whose intersecting identities may make them acutely perceive a threat from both Mamdani and Cuomo -- ultimately licenses every other group to not care about Jewish concerns. After all, they have the same license to prioritize their own communal needs and values as we do.

So much of contemporary Jewish discourse is a plea for solidarity, against the pain of feeling dismissed or viewed as extraneous whenever a peer says something to effect of "I'm not happy with how he's alienating Jews, but X Y Z matters more to me." Yet here we see that exact same argument run, and it is a logic that effectively endorses (for the non-Jewish majority) ignoring Jewish concerns.

Indeed, I might daresay that Hillel was, if not wrong, then at least incomplete: If I am only for myself, who will be for me? Aside from me, nobody. And that is a very lonely place to be.

"Pro-Palestine" is a "They", Not An "It"

There is no doubt that one major development in American politics over Israel/Palestine over the last two years has been a dramatic expansion and mainstreaming of pro-Palestine political advocacy. It's no longer a given that all or nearly all politicians will ritualistically intone "I am pro-Israel." It's no longer the case that self-identified "pro-Palestine" actors are confined to a tiny fringe leafleting outside UC-Berkeley.

One upshot of this growth is pluralism. As a movement gets larger, it encompasses a wider range of perspectives. Social movements, I've long argued, "moderate as they mainstream", and this moderation effect often frustrates the original "hardcore" of the movement, who may view the newcomers as engaging in coopting or even selling out. The moderates, for their part, may well view the old guard as hidebound, extremists, or simply unrealistic. It's a common pattern, and it's pretty clear it's being replicated here as well.

That said, there are a lot of people with strong incentives to downplay this pluralism and instead treat pro-Palestine as a monolithic thing.

Consider the reports that, in the wake of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza, Hamas has launched a bloody crackdown on dissidents and rivals, including public executions of those they are accusing of being "collaborators". Given that this by all appearances is an extra-legal terror campaign against Palestinian civilians, one would expect it to be condemned, and one need not search far to find various pro-Israel voices running lines to the effect of "now that Israel isn't involved, 'pro-Palestine' groups are silent -- or even support it!" On the latter point, they're not making things up: the National Students for Justice in Palestine organization, following these reports of Hamas' killings, called for "death to collaborators" in apparent endorsement. As awful as it is to see, it appears there are prominent, non-fringe elements of the pro-Palestinian movement who more or less support Hamas engaging in violent terror not just against Israel (we knew that) but against Palestinians as well.

Yet, on another level, the pro-Israel voices I mentioned above are making something up, because the NSJP is by no means the only "pro-Palestine" organization out there, and in fact it is not at all difficult to find pro-Palestinian voices who are horrified by Hamas' rampage of terror. The Palestinian Authority lambasted Hamas' killings as "heinous crimes"; a Palestinian human rights NGO similarly accused Hamas of "extrajudicial executions" which "constitute a legal and moral crime that requires immediate condemnation and accountability."

In the abstract, there isn't anything especially odd or complicated here. "Pro-Palestine" is a "they", not an "it"; it contains a wide range of different groups and outlooks. Under that broad umbrella, why would it be hard to grasp that there might be some people who flatly support Hamas and others who find them risible?

But it's also not hard to see why many players in this drama are so enthusiastic on sweeping that pluralism under the rug. The pro-Israel commentators want the NSJP's pro-murder posts to be the paradigm example of what the pro-Palestinian movement stands for. "This is what this movement really is." In doing so, they can discredit all of the other members -- including those who are rightfully horrified by Hamas' brutality -- by association. And on the other side, obviously groups like NSJP have an incentive to present themselves as the sole and authentic representation of what "pro-Palestine" means. They want the broad, inchoate energy behind "pro-Palestine" to be channeled through them. Groups which take a softer or moderate tone are not allies, they are threats. And with strength in numbers and in unity, there is a lot of tacit pressure to defer to the leadership of established organizations and not disturb their decrees regarding what views "count" as pro-Palestine and what do not -- even if those decrees are often based more on internal political considerations than any healthy respect for pluralism and disagreement.

Yet incentives aside, we would all do better not to indulge in this game. One theme I've been returning to over the past several months is that many pro-Palestinian activists are speedrunning a realization many pro-Israel activists have also had to start grappling with: the reality that many -- not all or even potentially most, but many -- of the people who march under your flag really are exactly as extreme and nasty and blood-thirsty as your worst enemies describe them as. We like to think of these attacks as smears, and often they are insofar as they present sweeping and general guilt across the whole movement. But on the pro-Israel side, it actually is the case that there are many non-negligible figures whose outlook towards Palestinians is one of simple, naked racism; who do not remotely "just want peace"; who absolutely openly endorse human rights violations of the most vicious kind in the name of "security" or "greater Israel". And likewise, on the pro-Palestine side, it actually is the case that there are many non-negligible figures whose outlooks towards Israelis and Jews is one of simple, naked antisemitism; who do not remotely "just want peace"; who absolutely endorse human rights violations of the most vicious kind in the name of "decolonization" or "freeing Palestine." I and many other Jews who identified with Israel had to work through that reality, and so too must the pro-Palestine community work through the reality that it is not a slur or a slander or a bad-faith attack: groups like the NSJP really are right now endorsing Hamas' murder spree targeting Palestinian civilians.

However, this realization is not an accuse to swing all the way in the other direction. Those who endorse Hamas' murder spree are not an inauthentic, fringe, or fake part of "pro-Palestine", but neither are they the authentic, true, or sole representative of it either. The notion that every person who sat at a pro-Palestine campus encampment is now elated to see Hamas executing Palestinians in the streets is simply not credible. Pro-Palestine is a they, not an it. It is irresponsible to deny the presence of this particular faction; it is equally irresponsible to cede it the status of being the only relevant faction.

Overcoming Hardship versus Flourishing with Support

One of the interesting things about "equality of opportunity", as a concept, is that while it's often used as a conservative talking point ("equality of opportunity, not equality of result"), if one actually takes it seriously, it would require a pretty radical reordering of our social structures from top to bottom. Do you know how hard it is to actually establish equality of opportunity? For example, one would have to either eliminate economic inequalities altogether or (this is no easier) eliminate their impact in terms of how they affect the starting positions of young people. Whatever world that looks like, it's very distant from our own.

In the meantime, though, those of us who do take "equality of opportunity" with a modicum of seriousness try to accommodate the actually extant inequalities with some imaginative guesswork. We see two candidates, one with perhaps slightly lower test scores but who has overcome significant adversity, the other with higher numbers but no such disadvantages, and try to ask ourselves the counterfactual: "How would the first candidate have performed had they started on equal footing with the second?" It's an imprecise art and that leaves a lot of room for subjectivity (and complaints), but it at least tries to answer the question nominally posed by "equality of opportunity" in a realistic manner.

Yet there's another dimension of equality of opportunity that I think sometimes gets overlooked, which is that even where starting points are equal, results may differ depending on what the starting point is. Let me explain:

Imagine we were trying to rank the "merit" of 100 people, and assume for sake of argument it is possible to do this in an objective way (we can rank everyone from 1 to 100). The equality of opportunity issue noted above concerns how we make "adjustments" to the ranking based on differences in starting points -- some faced significant hardships and adversity, others were provided substantial mentoring and support for them to flourish -- and the problem is that this is all counterfactual. 

But suppose we could do the social scientist's dream and send all 100 people to an alternate reality where they start off in exactly the same position -- they all face (the same) significant hardships and adversity which they need to overcome. If they all faced the same hardships, we might say that that the resulting 1 - 100 ranking was an objective determinant of merit.

However, now suppose we send those same 100 to a different alternate reality. Here, too, they all start off in exactly the same position. But this time, instead of all facing (the same) hardships and adversity, here they all are provided the same support and nurturing (they start of equivalently advantaged, rather than disadvantaged). Once again, at the end of the experiment we rank everyone 1 - 100. But my guess is that the rank order in Alternate Reality #1 would be different from that produced in Alternate Reality #2. The skillset that yields high performance under conditions of adversity is not the same as the skillset that yields high performance under conditions of support and nurturing.

All of this is a long-winded way of asking: which do we care about more? Again, note that this isn't the easy in theory/hard in practice question of comparing one candidate who faced adversity against another who was given support. In our hypothetical, all candidates are both equally supported and equally disadvantaged (in the two realities). So the question here is whether our vision for the "best" candidate -- the ideal we are trying to approximate via our guesswork adjustments -- is the person who thrives under conditions of adversity or the person who outperforms in ideal circumstances.

Of course, the actual answer is "it depends". Some jobs or social roles we know demand significant resilience in the face of hardship, and so we want the person who can perform best in those circumstances. More broadly, I think we find intuitively attractive the idea that this sort of scrapper is particularly praise-worthy compared to those who "had it easy". Yet there is another frame where we would want that everyone would get the support, resources, and nurturing that would best position them to thrive. We don't want to haze people for its own sake; we should hope to construct social roles in such a way that their occupants are not having to scrape and scrap for traction but are put in the best position for success. Yet the fact that different people would be (even under a genuine "equality of opportunity" ideal) the "best" performers under these two frames is interesting to me; it underscores how there is an inescapable element of normative choice even in the best case scenarios of what a meritocracy might be.

There's no big moral here, just another meditation on the complexities of equality.

First They Came For Tylenol, Now Circumcisions

The latest stop in the RFK/Trump team's conspiracy-addled rampage against science was an assertion that "circumcisions" may be a cause of autism. This drew an accusation from Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) that RFK was trafficking in antisemitism (a small but vocal cadre of antisemitic activists have centered their hatred of Jews on circumcision, which they present as tantamount to child abuse).

What I find most interesting about this latest foray in RFK nuttiness, though, is how it in many ways diverges from the more typical linkage antisemites tend to draw when it comes to Jews and public health. In general, the conspiracy claim historically has been that some mainstream medical practice is actually dangerous, but Jews avoid the risks via some secret Jewish handshake. On vaccines, for instance, the antisemite I feature in my "Things People Blame the Jews For" series alleged the following:

Go to Wal-Mart and look at the children in the check out line.... They usually all have blank stares now .... Walk the check outs until you see a kid who is totally engaged with people, smiling, bright and acting intelligently. Ask the mom if she vaccinated her baby, and if hse says yes, ask if she is Jewish.... I never figured out the method, but I can definitely state that somehow, "they" do not get the same shots.

Vaccines are bad, except the Jewish vaccines, which are fine. RFK himself has tapped into similar logic when he contended that the COVID virus was "engineered" to not target Ashkenazi Jews -- again, Jews presented as getting some secret healthcare privilege denied to the victimized masses.

But the circumcision argument cuts in the opposite direction: Jews are far more likely to be circumcised, and so if circumcision causes autism (and again, I cannot stress enough that the medical evidence here is "no, it doesn't, you idiot"), then Jews would be disproportionate victims. How nice of RFK to be looking out for our wellbeing (/sarcasm)!

The Frog Prince

A few days ago, a viral video circulated of a neo-Nazi agitator interrupting a psychology class at the University of Washington ... and then being chased out of the room and across campus by basically all the students in the class (as well as the professor). At the end of the video the guy trips and is held down by some of the students (you can hear him pathetically mewling "I thought you were the party of peace!") until campus security arrived to arrest him; those students also prevented anyone from enacting any violence on the man.

On the reddits, I saw a lot of praise for the students' solidarity and discipline, and in particular their decisive action to assume that the Nazi scumbag they had on the ground was not physically attacked or injured. But I remember reading one commentator who was a bit confused by that angle of praise. Aren't we all fans of punching Nazis? Don't we understand that violence is sometimes necessary to defeat fascism? Why was everyone so insistent that this Nazi, who very clearly brought it upon himself, be left unharmed?

My response to that was simple: if you're not a pacifist, then yes, you accept that sometimes violence is necessary to achieve important political ends. But if you're at all a liberal, then violence should never be your preferred choice. If there is a nonviolent way to accomplish your goals, then that's what one should do -- violence is not a good for its own sake (in fact, it's quite bad "for its own sake"). In this circumstance, the students were able to neutralize the Nazi without resort to meaningful violence. Violence wasn't necessary, so it was good that they didn't resort to unnecessary violence.

I was thinking about this with respect to the anti-ICE protests in Portland, and in particular, the comical site of inflatable frogs, chickens, and other absurd animals that have taken center stage in these protests. This being Portland, the worry when Trump announced his invasion plan for our city was that some group of rabble-rousers or agents provocateurs would take it upon themselves to enact violence, which Trump would then use to bolster his lies about Portland being a wartorn hellscape. But instead, they've been met with these ridiculous animal outfits, which have been incredibly effective at making the fascists look ridiculous. Kristi Noem trying to play tough gal while overwatching an "army of antifa" comprised of about a dozen peaceful protesters, one in a chicken suit? Comedy gold. But also, political gold: it highlighted in brilliant and excruciating detail how profoundly unserious Noem and her gang of fascists are. They are playacting a crisis of their own creation so that they can present themselves as action stars; countering that absurdism with humor and whimsy and comedy does more to resist their agenda than any masked stone thrower could accomplish.

In saying this, I'm in no way downplaying the seriousness of the moment we are in. Nothing could be more serious than the specter of one's own government invading your city in order to enact an explicit agenda of ideological terror and suppression. But it is that very seriousness that compels serious thought about what would constitute the most effective countermeasure to that attempt.

The violent/non-violent protest debate, too often, is presented in ethical and philosophical terms -- (when) is violence justified? But this skips past the more immediately practical question of (when) is violence useful? Often times, one can (or should) leave aside the question of justification because the utility just isn't there. And often times, it seems like those who grimly intone the need for violent action because "power cedes nothing without a demand" or some such cliche are very self-evidently excited at the opportunity for violence. It is something they revel in, and desire for its own sake -- the move of first resort, not the last. As much as that instinct presents itself as rising to the demands of the moment -- "by any means necessary" -- it more often than not represents an abdication of the need to actually respond to the demands of the moment in favor of personal indulgence.

So once again, kudos to Portland for resisting that impulse. The point of activism is not to provide an outlet for one's personal rage (however warranted it may be). The point is to figure out effective strategies for undermining one's opposition, and seize on those weak points. Fascists are weak wherever the people show joy. The Portland protests, which show our city in all of its joyful weirdness, represent the best possible response to Trump's pathetic efforts to slander our city as something it isn't.

AI Über Adderall

Another day, another AI hallucination story -- this time involving mega-consulting firm Deloitte, which just refunded a big chunk of change to the Australian government after a report they did was found to contain inaccurate and likely hallucinated citations.

Every time I see one of these stories, I always am left asking "Why? Why did you do it?" The risks have to be well-known at this point. And getting caught seems like it's close to career suicide. What's happening?

404 Media did an interesting interview with attorneys who had been caught using AI (and who failed to catch AI hallucinations), and the general theme (aside from "a subordinate did it and I didn't check") was some variation on being overworked and under a ton of pressure.

Now, perhaps I'm overthinking this. But I am wondering if there's some interplay between the historic hard-charging atmosphere of the big consulting firms and use of AI. Companies like Deloitte have a bit of a reputation vis-a-vis their work culture, which basically boils down to "if you are willing to be worked to death, we'll make you richer than God." Younger hires, in particular, are hit with truly unfathomable workloads and time pressures (with sometimes predictably tragic consequences). The historic implicit expectation, if one was in such a situation, was basically to wink at "drink your coffee, take an Adderall, stay up all night, bang it out." I have to assume the work product generated in such circumstances was not always outstanding, but it was at least a human employee's substandard, bleary-eyed work product.

But imagine it's 2025 and you're in that impossible Kobayashi Maru situation. Instead of using Adderall as your crutch, doesn't AI feel a lot more attractive? If we throw out any sort of professional concern about putting out good work product -- and in the imagined situation, there's no way not to; actually performing to expectation is functionally impossible -- then why not roll the dice with AI? The work is going to be bad either way, but at least you can (literally) sleep at night. 

I don't know -- it's just a theory, and I have no evidence that this is going on. But it doesn't seem implausible, no? Maybe another sector AI is disrupting is the ability to "rely" on overcaffeinated and drugged up twenty-somethings to kill themselves on consulting assignments to squeeze a few more dollars out of the bottom line.