I knew this was coming; in fact, I was interviewed several times for this article about misconduct by Lawrence Krauss. I had to tell the journalist that at most I’d gotten some second-hand echoes from the whisper network, but that I knew nothing directly about any accusations against him. But then, I’m a guy — I wasn’t at risk for being groped, so no one was going to pull me aside and warn me. Also, as a guy who was hanging out with Krauss now and then, there was no way to trust me not to spread the word to the accused…and whoa, but a lot of women were terrified of being alone with him, and of the effect he could have on their career.
Go read their stories. I believe them.
It’s a shame, too, because in theory, he’s an ally. He just seems to fall short in practice.
But Krauss says his movement is getting more diverse, not less. He is politically liberal, decrying sexism, racism, and “the fear of people who are different,” and is a vocal critic of Donald Trump. And yet, he’s not always politically correct, whether saying that religion drives xenophobia, dismissing burka-clad Muslims as “women in bags,” announcing that a statue looks like “Jesus on the toilet,” or tweeting articles arguing that #MeToo has gone too far.
And in his private life, according to a number of women in his orbit, Krauss exhibits some of the sexist behavior that he denounces in public. Now that these accusations are coming out in the open, some women have doubts that the skeptics will acknowledge the body of evidence about his behavior, and confront their own preconceived beliefs.
Once again, skeptics are afflicted with a curious blindness. There’s a psychology study waiting to happen here.
“Skeptics and atheists like to think they are above human foibles like celebrity worship,” Rebecca Watson, a prominent feminist skeptic, told BuzzFeed News. “In a way, that makes them particularly susceptible to being abused by their heroes. I think we see that over and over again.”
Women at skeptics meetings would often warn each other to avoid Krauss, she added, but conference organizers seemed reluctant to act. “He was a popular speaker,” Watson said. “None of them were interested in doing anything about what was happening.”
Krauss hasn’t done himself any favors, either.
But Krauss’s reputation took a hit in April 2011, after he publicly defended Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier who was convicted of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl and spent 13 months in a Florida jail.
Epstein was one of the Origins Project’s major donors. But Krauss told the Daily Beast his support of the financier was based purely on the facts: “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.”
Oh, well, the cynic in me knows exactly how all this will turn out. Krauss will face no consequences, his popularity in the skeptic/atheist movement will be undimmed, and all the women who spoke out in that article will face an increase in the torrent of abuse they already get. It took a lot of courage for them to go on record, for which I know they will be punished.
If you thought Shermer had a lot of scumbag defenders, get ready for this.
Wow. That almost sounds like an excerpt from The Onion. He’s that bad at thinking?
PZ:
And Rebecca Watson will become the focus of a storm again, for yet another very mild and reasonable statement.
Epstein was in his mid- to late 50s when he was surrounding himself with presumed 19 year olds. I wonder where they kept the IDs Krauss checked when they were all half-naked?
More like, Krauss has not faced consequences. Didn’t we already know about this in 2013? I guess Krauss silenced the allegations with legal threats.
I was wondering when something like this was going to drop. Remember the time he implied he might sue Jen McCreight over multiple sexual assault allegations she’d posted? These rumours have simmered for years, and combined with our society’s improved support for assault/harassment victims it was more a matter of when than if.
Laurence Krauss? I’m shocked, I tell you! Shocked!
Well, not that shocked.
Seriously, hasn’t he been a notorious asshole? He defended fucking Epstein. He went on record to defend a convicted child molester and child-sex-ring runner. He acted as if Epstein was equally a victim. He’s also not the only prominent scientist who did.
I kinda would be surprised if he weren’t a predator.
Gah, beaten to the punch!
If Case Western knew about his behavior and pulled one of those “thank god he’s leaving and will be someone else’s problem” — i.e., they didn’t warn ASU– then it is to their utter shame.
he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him
Hey, as a heterosexual male I don’t see any probl… what the devil do you mean, my niece is there!
“whether saying that religion drives xenophobia, dismissing burka-clad Muslims as “women in bags,” announcing that a statue looks like “Jesus on the toilet,”
I don’t have a problem with this. Religion does drive xenophobia (Christian and Muslim slave traders say Hi!) I had a “Born Again” tell me just last night that Africans never built anything and just sat around in the dirt until the white Christians came along and taught them how to (Egypt and Musa I of Mali say Hi!) and that all muslims want to kill. The Burka does look like a big bin bag with eyes cut out. I have no idea about the pooping jesus but I’m sure that’s a reasonable description too.
“ or tweeting articles arguing that #MeToo has gone too far.”
This I do have a problem with. F-king men gotta stick their dick in everything don’t they?
“But today the movement is fracturing, with some of its most prominent members now attacking identity politics and “social justice warriors” in the name of free speech. Famous freethinkers have been criticized for anti-Muslim sentiment, for cheering the alt-right media personality Milo Yiannopoulos, and for lampooning feminism and gender theory. Several women, after sharing personal accounts of misogyny and harassment by men in the skeptic community, have been subjected to Gamergate-style online attacks, including rape and death threats. As a result, some commentators have accused parts of the movement of sliding into the alt-right.”
Is spot on. But I gotta say, I’m proud of the way things are changing on Reddit’s /r/Atheism 8 months ago, every second post seemed to be from these guys, we’ve been putting up rebuttals and fighting them off, it was a crazy free for all for a while there, daring to say something negative about Sam Harris or Dawkins would get you down voted to reddit hell, but with persistence and a lot of ink spilled, I can honestly say I’ve seen it changed (I also think the global explosion of their poster child, Trump, and his admin has shown them to be what they are, not what they claimed). As a person of colour I’ve never felt more welcomed there, I see a lot people leap to defend, correct or smack down any racist, homophobic, sexist or general bullshit. Which is more than I could say about /r/myowncountryname.
What I’m trying to say, don’t lose hope, I think I’m seeing the tide change. Hell, today I saw a post that Milo is now down to flogging vitamin supplements on Alex Jone’s “show” hahahah! There are douche bags still around, but they seem to be retreating to their own shitty groups and celebs after discovering hate disguised as Atheism has no home in our community – they’re starting to rally around people that spew the same crap as them instead, regardless if their Atheist or not (e.g JBP). Which is fine, I’m happy to see them drift away and stick to their own Alt-Right /r/beholdthemasterrace groups ;-)
Funny how all these people spanning over a decade and two continents have all invented the same totally baseless accusations against poor Mr Kraus. Even the universities are lying. Almost as good a conspiracy as all those fake school shootings.
Must have washed their eyes with aged urine.
Wow…that’s rather, um, non-scientific. Surely he’s heard of this concept of “extrapolation”? You know, where we expect a trend to continue? And the trend would be that men who hang out with young women for no “apparent” reason tend to get fidgety with those women. So he doesn’t need to “see” anything to at least be concerned and, when hearing complaints, shouldn’t be believing this man over other people as proper extrapolation of the data suggests otherwise.
Put a check mark in the “not surprised” column for me, too. So, who’s next?
I’ve already received angry email from people telling me that I rape students, so I guess that would be me.
for those interested, you can examine LK’s own “thinking” RE Epstein back in 2011 here:
http://skepchick.org/2011/04/lawrence-krauss-defends-a-sex-offender-embarrasses-scientists-everywhere/
he posts in the comments as well, and actually complains about skeptics… deconstructing… his comments.
amazing.
makes for an interesting view into the mind of someone suffering from cognitive dissonance.
“As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.”
I guess Krauss thinks we should preferentially believe all serial killers since by and large they are only ever seen not murdering people.
“On her Skepchick blog, Watson slammed Krauss for not acknowledging his obvious bias — and thus violating a core value of skepticism. “Krauss’ statement is extremely disturbing and makes scientists look like ignorant, biased fools who will twist data to suit their own needs,” she wrote.
“I remain skeptical, and I support a man whose character I believe I know,” Krauss responded in the post’s comments.”
I’m not a distinguished cosmologist, but I don’t think that’s how skepticism works.
@18 Literally just saw someone on Twitter using that same defense for Krauss himself.
The company you fucking keep, eh?
Just because someone appears to skeptical and rational 95% of the time, does not mean they don’t have area where their emotions get the better of them. I’m not surprised, as it appears Krauss has shown a history of problems with females, and other males interactions with females, by refusing to believe the females.
Very sad if the allegations are true, and a black eye for science and secularism. I have several of Krauss’ books, and I’ve watched him on many online debates and lectures. He’s a brilliant physicist, but Einstein himself was also a philanderer.
When Kraus made those Epstein comments I wondered how much he was being paid. Turns out I wasn’t cynical enough.
weylguy @21: There’s a huge difference between “bloke who has a lot of consenting sex partners” and “bloke who is an obnoxious predatory creep”.
I’m also not impressed with Krauss as physics explainer.
Well, no skin off my nose. I was a atheist and sceptic long before being exposed to the respective movements. That was about the time of the Rebecca Watson saga and that put me off for life. Also, after giving up on Jesus, I’ve decided I don’t want any more heroes.
As for continuing to read the literature written by these “fallen idols”, I’m in two minds. I was about to purchase LK’s most recent book but it was available on kindle only as an audio book, so I hesitated. Now I don’t know if I want to listen to LK talk to me for 10 hours.
As for whose next? I’m betting it won’t be David Attenborough!
(And Brian Cox is probably pretty safe)
Rob,
Yeah, I saw your response at the time and, looking back, I realised that he did fumble the explanation. I took that to be the result of him simultaneously explaining it while still trying to get it clear in his head how he was going to explain it. If that makes sense. I don’t know if he did any better in the book. On top of that I don’t know if I understand gauge symmetry well enough to know if he does a good job.
billyjoe @25: I haven’t read his book, but my impression from the interview was that he’d given it a lot of thought, and he thought he had the explanation nailed, with the chessboard. It was embarrassingly awful.
In a nutshell:
If you have a theory, you can perform certain transformations on it. For example, what if you change (transform) the Cartesian coordinate x to x+Δx, where Δx is an arbitrary constant? If your theory looks the same (in the jargon, it’s invariant, or has a symmetry) after you do that, Noether’s first theorem shows that the momentum in the x direction is conserved.
A gauge transformation is more abstract. Roughly, if your theory has a field φ(x) representing a particle of charge q, the transformation involves replacing the field with the field times the phase factor exp(-iqθ) (complex number equal to cos(qθ) – isin(qθ)), where θ is just a number between 0 and 2π. If your theory looks the same after this transformation, then charge is conserved. Note that this has nothing to do with redefining the charge q. In particular, nothing to do with changing q to -q.
Krauss’ problem is that he starts talking about gauge symmetry by talking about charge inversion; changing q to -q. Nothing to do with gauge transformations or gauge symmetry.
billyjoe@24
I really hope so. My niece may well be going to Manchester University to study Physics next year, and they said Brian Cox would be teaching one of the first year classes.
“As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence…”
Evidence is gathered by observers. Victims are observers.
Hmmm. Comments on the Buzzfeed Krauss article have the ID “Pz Myers · University of Oregon”, linking to (apparently) our esteemed host’s F’book page.
The wording seems quite in character, but the institutional anachronism and miscapitalization do make me wonder.
Isn’t PZ at the University of Minnesota, Morris?
Oh wow. So Krauss is defending Epstein scientifically? How skeptic of him.
LykeX @ # 30: Isn’t PZ at the University of Minnesota, Morris?
Well, he keeps telling us that, and it even says so at the linked F’book page – but that page also lists U of AZ right below his name, and apparently the B’feed comment system (or, of course, some insidious impersonator) picks that line to identify him.
Correction on my # 32: that should “U of OR” as topping the “Education” section of the page in question.
Sunny AZ, of course, basks in proximity to the name of Krauss on numerous other pages.
““Skeptics and atheists like to think they are above human foibles like celebrity worship,” Rebecca Watson, a prominent feminist skeptic, told BuzzFeed News.”
Wait, what? Is that true? Because that’s probably the most silly and irrational subculture of hero-worshippers I’ve ever come across.
Helen Huntingdon #34
Who and what are you addressing?
“Once again, skeptics are afflicted with a curious blindness. There’s a psychology study waiting to happen here.
“Skeptics and atheists like to think they are above human foibles like celebrity worship,” Rebecca Watson, a prominent feminist skeptic, told BuzzFeed News. ”
Like some above have said or implied, skeptics are not immune hero worship. I keep telling myself and others not to have heroes, only to find myself greatly let down emotionally when a skeptic (or believer) who I admired turns out to have clay feet. I remember the moment I read Dawkins “Muslima” comment. I was stunned and incredulous. For a brief few hours I was convinced it couldn’t have been him, It had to be a spoof. When I found out it really was him, it was crushing.
I don’t want a hero, I just want the world to be populated with people I can admire for their decency and intellect.
I don’t want a hero, but I live in dread that another man who I have admired for his decency and intellect will tomorrow write a “Dear Muslima” post, or turn out to be another Cosby, or Woody, Or worse. Jesus, there always seems to be someone worse.
I don’t want a hero, I just want to believe that most men are not monsters underneath their veneer of civility.
I want a hero.
I don’t know man… isn’t PZ Meyers himself a huuuge creep?
https://youtu.be/5OhbLDFeE4w
teddyruxpin Funny to see those MRA’s and anti-SJW’s being concerned about how not feminist PZ is. Like they fucking care.