The Great Filter of American media

It is the 5th of August, and I have noticed that I’ve already run out of access to ‘free’ articles on various newspapers around the country. I like to check in on the Seattle Times now and then, since that’s my hometown paper, but I’m remote enough that I don’t think it’s worth subscribing…which means that if something happens there at any time in the month other than the first few days of the first week, I’m not getting it from a local source. I think I almost certainly have a few free articles left in the NY Times, but that’s because I despise that paper and only get anything from them when I am surprised by an unlabeled link.

I’m in a privileged position with respect to science articles, since I have access to institutional subscriptions through my university, but even there there are a lot of journals I can’t read. We’ve also got the Elsevier problem, where one greedy publisher buys up rights to a few essential journals and then only lets libraries subscribe if they buy a package that includes a lot of drecky bad journals.

Nathan Robinson has seen the situation clearly: The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free.

But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! You want “Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,” “The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,” or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall. This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.

Then we wonder why the public is so poorly educated on current events and science. I am particularly appalled that we tax everyone twice on science: once to do the state funded research, which we then immediately turn over to for-profit publishers, who then demand that the public pay them, the middlemen, to read the results. They’ve even got scientists hoodwinked into doing all the reviewing of papers for free, and often into paying to have their own work published.

Let’s call a buffoon a buffoon

It must be nice to be filthy rich, so that you can say any idiotic thing and automatically get lots of attention, a good part of it your defenders rushing to make excuses for your idiocy. Witness Elon Musk.

He’s been proving himself a fool over and over again, yet still there are people who still insist that he’s a genius, rather than a walking, talking demonstration that incompetence can easily float to the top in a capitalist society.

I notice that Egyptians have responded to that stupid remark with deference and respectful disagreement. Politeness doesn’t work any more, and maybe it never worked. How about if we start changing that, beginning with a wealthy capitalist exploiter?

Answers in Genesis gets everything wrong

Tonight, at 9pm Central, I’m going to try and wade through the bullshit Ken Ham threw everywhere in a recent video. He’s complaining about atheism, abortion, molecular biology, development, and of course, evolution, all in one crowded half hour, so I’ll start going through it all and see how far I get.

This is also an experiment for me, to see if I can simultaneously put up a YouTube video and make commentary. I don’t know, seems like a tool it would be handy to have in my toolbox.

Quacks are thriving nowadays

The Republicans have a new favorite doctor, Stella Immanuel. She loves hydroxychloroquine and detests face masks, so of course the Trumps love her. She has a few other…interesting…ideas.

Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.

She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by “reptilians” and other aliens.

A couple of Trumps are retweeting her claims, as is Turning Point USA, but Twitter and Facebook are removing the false information she’s spreading.

I think the White House ought to go all in and fire Birx and Fauci and replace them with Immanuel, and also that all of Donald’s medical care henceforth be provided exclusively by Dr Immanuel.

I don’t even know what’s going on in atheism anymore

I feel good about that, too. I still get email from various organizations, though, so I still get sent the Atheist Alliance International newsletter, AAI Insider. The latest issue contains this dodgy gem:

Earlier this year, two AAI staff members made false accusations regarding a Director, then resigned and immediately set up their own organisation with a deliberately similar name, claiming that we are corrupt and that they are white as snow. We have refuted their accusations and they have acknowledged that they were groundless, but they did so on condition that we didn’t tell! We have the evidence. Draw your own conclusions…

Ooookaaaay. I think they’re talking about the International Association of Atheists, which formed a few months ago, but they can’t tell us, and they can’t tell you that they refuted everything that triggered the schism, but they did. Sorta.

I’ve attended a couple of AAI meetings, 8-10 years ago, and they were pretty good. I don’t understand what happened to them since, and I really don’t want to know. Deep rifts, ongoing fragmentation, and crumbling reputations seems to be the order of the day in atheism.

The contradictions of anti-SJW atheists laid bare

The latest atheist scandal: Michael Sherlock, executive director of Atheist Alliance International, was a bit less than professional on Twitter. He called religion “retarded”, and when told that word has a lot of baggage, escalated the argument and ended up calling a woman a “cunt”. This has led to the organization suspending him without pay for one month, which seems like a reasonable rebuke to me, and the process leading to that punishment seems fair, as well. Atheist organizations have had a bit of trouble with poorly behaved leaders lately, so it’s a good idea to set standards and enforce them. If anything, the punishment was too light for an action that led to three board members announcing their resignation, and the Atheist Foundation of Australia severing their ties to AAI. I get the impression that Sherlock has been an antagonizing figure at AAI, especially given that they had recently appointed and then fired David Silverman.

Except…now Sherlock has become the newest cause célèbre for all those anti-SJW folks who are outraged at consequences — you know, what they’re calling “cancel culture”. Any effort to clean their room and tell the paid professionals who are supposed to be running the show to stand up straight is met with petulant whining from the spoiled children who otherwise adore people like Jordan Peterson. How dare you expect them to behave?

The funniest reaction comes from Atheists for Liberty, which claims that social justice is destroying atheist groups. To which I have to say, if they oppose social justice, let them be destroyed, along with the Catholic church and Islamic fundamentalism, two things they typically oppose for their lack of justice. Their rant is written by Justin Vacula, a terrible person with the same sensibilities as Sherlock, apparently, and he is mad about everything.

David Silverman was innocent, he suggests, his accuser was “screaming”, and the #metoo movement opposes due process. He takes a few swipes at me, too, calling me social justice warrior PZ Myers who remains out of favor (wait, what? I was “cancelled”, and he’s fine with that?), citing a pair of wankers, Michael Nugent and Hemant Mehta, to justify that. So apparently women and PZ Myers can be cancelled, but no, not his regressive little buddies.

But here’s the real meat of the complaint:

The intrusion of social justice and woke ideology into atheist circles continues. To name just one example of many, Alex DiBranco spoke at the Secular Student Alliance’s 2020 National Convention, where she argued for “a feminist humanist approach” to “contest white, male, and cisgendered supremacism” saying, “the organized secular/atheist movement has over-emphasized opposition to religion or the belief in a god for its own sake, rather than prioritizing the problem of harm posed to social justice from any direction.”

Atheists for Liberty stands against destructive social justice entryism and the overblown response to an atheist activist calling religion a “retarded relic.” Atheists for Liberty instead prioritizes the free exchange of ideas, individual liberties, religious freedom (including non-belief), Enlightenment values, and secular government.

I think I like this Alex DiBranco. Yes, any atheist movement should fully embrace feminism and humanism, and seek to expand their remit to embrace human social values. Anything less and you collapse into the black hole of conservative insularity and a mob of smug men patting themselves on the back for being enlightened. You get creatures like Trump and Boris Johnson, amoral exploiters and abusers. Any movement that seeks to make fundamental changes in society, like the removal of the influence of religion, is fundamentally not conservative, and to succeed and gather influence must adopt a progressive stance — these libertarian, right-wing atheists are doomed to implode in contradictions. Social justice is the only thing that can save atheism, while it’s people like those at Atheists for Liberty that are destroying it.

To quote Amanda Marcotte:

The moral is there is no leftism that can function coherently without anti-racism and feminism at its center. What is obvious now — anti-government sentiment was just opposition to government showing any interest in equality — was always obvious to “social justice warriors”.

You’re saying now that atheism is not leftism, but I’ll reply that it should be. In this era when western civilization is clearly sick and capitalism has exposed itself as a Ponzi scheme, no viable philosophy can afford to ignore reality and pretend that these right-wing sympathizers are anything but a poison pill for progress.

Astroturfing education

Look at these poseurs.

The one person who looks to be of an age to be a student doesn’t look very happy to be out there. Those are terrible signs, too, wordy and hard to read and attempting to make scattershot points. “Teachers teach me best”, “e-learning is not for me”, “My kids need…in person learning 5 days a week”, yeah, the agenda is clear: get these damn kids out of my house every weekday. The real giveaway is that every sign insists on “masks optional” — why? It’s such a peculiar conservative shibboleth.

But here’s the deal. I agree with a lot of what they want. I’m not a fan of wearing a mask all day, and you probably aren’t, either. I think in-person teaching is best. Some students will thrive with remote teaching, the majority will have a less enlightening experience. I’m at a residential college, and I agree that immersion in the academic experience is valuable. I must also confess that remote teaching, even while I think it is less effective, requires twice as much work out of me. I’ve got 30 years worth of stuff all prepared and ready to go in a classroom and lab, and you’re telling me I have to start over from scratch? Yikes. I was miserable last spring, I expect to suffer some more this fall (but with a little more time to prepare and cushion the blow, I hope).

So here I am, already agreeing with the sentiments on their little, hard-to-read signs, and they’re not at all persuasive. They seem to have forgotten the whole reason we’re doing all this: it’s because we don’t want their kids to die or suffer life-long consequences of infection — the won’t be playing football with scarred lungs! — and we’re trying to find compromises to allow ongoing progress in their education while not increasing their risks of disease. The signs don’t mention any of that. They seem to be thinking that all of these changes in the schools are just to discomfit their conservative values, rather than protecting the kids.

What I also don’t understand is that, if my situation were different and I was the parent of school-aged kids again, I would be welcoming efforts to keep them out of the plague-pit. Just as every winter I’d make sure they had a warm coat and a scarf when they went out, I’d be nagging them to wear a mask. Just this week my wife and I made a trip to St Cloud to deliver a high-quality mask to our oldest boy. He’s a grown-ass man in his 30s, and we worry! On the flip side, my grown-ass daughter stitched up a mask and sent it to me last month. This bizarrely cavalier attitude about masks tells me one thing: they don’t believe in science and medicine. They probably believe in the two sticks lashed together behind them, and the American flag on their hat, but neither of those things will help them if their daughter gets COVID-19, or if she comes home from their “mask-optional” public school or church incubator and pass it on to them.

My sign would be a little pithier. “MY KIDS NEED TO BE HEALTHY.” I’d sacrifice everything to have that be true.

This is a barroom conversation, not a publication

It must be awfully easy to get published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. A couple of beers, some scratches on a cocktail napkin, and you get to call it research.

According to a research paper accepted for publication in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, extraterrestrials are sleeping while they wait. In the paper, authors from Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, and Milan Cirkovic argue that the universe is too hot right now for advanced, digital civilizations to make the most efficient use of their resources. The solution: Sleep and wait for the universe to cool down, a process known as aestivating (like hibernation but sleeping until it’s colder).

Understanding the new hypothesis first requires wrapping your head around the idea that the universe’s most sophisticated life may elect to leave biology behind and live digitally. Having essentially uploaded their minds onto powerful computers, the civilizations choosing to do this could enhance their intellectual capacities or inhabit some of the harshest environments in the universe with ease.

OK, sure, yeah. Maybe. Why not? Evidence would be kind of nice to have, but hey, speculate away. They just guess that extraterrestrial life might be like my laptop, with a “sleep mode” that conserves battery power, just like a 19th century scientist might speculate that alien life is steam-powered and has periods where they cool the boilers and scrape the accumulated scale out of the pipes. Perfectly plausible. Take what you know and extrapolate it far off into the unknown, all while pretending you know exactly what you’re talking about.

The idea that life might transition toward a post-biological form of existence is gaining ground among experts. “It’s not something that is necessarily unavoidable, but it is highly likely,” Cirkovic told me in an interview.

Experts. How do you become an expert in alien species that have progressed so far beyond our known technologies? Especially when you’re willing to recognize that these hypothetical aliens would face challenges on such a cosmic scale that trying to imagine how they would cope with them is like stone age tribesmen trying to come up with an explanation for how to amplify a weak wi-fi signal to reach your deck.

The funny thing is, these guys don’t even believe their own theory.

Interestingly, neither Sandberg nor Cirkovic said they have much faith in finding anything. Sandberg, writing on his blog, states that he does not believe the hypothesis to be a likely one: “I personally think the likeliest reason we are not seeing aliens is not that they are aestivating.” He writes that he feels it’s more likely that “they do not exist or are very far away.”

Cirkovic concurred. “I don’t find it very likely, either,” he said in our interview. “I much prefer hypotheses that do not rely on assuming intentional decisions made by extraterrestrial societies. Any assumption is extremely speculative.” There could be forms of energy that we can’t even conceive of using now, he said—producing antimatter in bulk, tapping evaporating black holes, using dark matter. Any of this could change what we might expect to see from an advanced technical civilization.

Well then, why even propose it?

Yet, he said, the theory has a place. It’s important to cover as much ground as possible. You need to test a wide set of hypotheses one by one—falsifying them, pruning them—to get closer to the truth. “This is how science works. We need to have as many hypotheses and explanations for Fermi’s paradox as possible,” he said.

The important word there is TEST. Very good, smart guys. How do you propose to test it? I don’t mean that silly suggestion they made that we could send a space probe to the alien’s planet and poke the bear, since we won’t have the capability to do that in the foreseeable future, and even if we did, it seems incredibly stupid to propose to annoy some god-like aliens. Inventing empty hypotheses with no means to test them that are so improbable that you think simpler hypotheses are a better explanation is not “how science works”.

My job has always been toppling idols

A curious phenomenon: after my post yesterday about Krauss’s bad op-ed, I got complaints. I always do, but these had this odd tone: ‘I used to like you, but now you’re being critical of my heroes’. It confuses me. Why do you have heroes? Why do you think being critical of people is bad? Wait…why are you being critical of me? It all smacks of unthinking idolatry. We should be critical thinkers, and prominent people who aspire to be leaders and inspiring figures should be criticized most of all.

(Don’t look at me. My aspirations nowadays mainly involve spiders.)

I went easy on Krauss. That op-ed was dishonest right-wing trash that lied about the people who were “cancelled”, and could only have been published on the sleaziest of conservative publications, like the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. For a more thorough dissection, you might want to read John Jackson’s exposure of Krauss’s lies and misrepresentations.

  • Krauss claims one of Hsu’s “crimes included doing research on computational genomics to study how human genetics might be related to cognitive ability—something that to the protesters smacked of eugenics.” Well….yeah, manipulating the genetic material of humans for certain traits for the sake of future generations is kind of the definition of eugenics. Krauss doesn’t explain why it wouldn’t be nor why people should be unconcerned with such a plan. So, this doesn’t really advance any argument he thinks he’s making.
  • “He was also accused of supporting psychology research at MSU on the statistics of police shootings that didn’t clearly support claims of racial bias.” Well, as I explained before, that study was mentioned on Twitter, but nowhere else during the controversy. So, technically true, but largely irrelevant to the controversy.
  • “Within a week, the university president forced Mr. Hsu to resign.” Ten days, actually, Mr. Objective-Intellectual-Standards. And welcome to the land of post hoc ergo propter hoc. The two things Krauss listed preceded Hsu’s resignation in time therefore, Krauss concluded they caused Hsu’s resignation. Here’s few possible causes completely unmentioned by Krauss:

That’s just the stuff Krauss wrote about Stephen Hsu! His whole op-ed is that repulsively dishonest about everything, as one might expect of a disgraced academic who is lashing out at those who uncovered his bad behavior.

The author of this fallaciously argued piece is Lawrence Krauss, a man who was found guilty of sexual misconduct by his own university and has been banned from the campuses of three others. Hsu, who hosted a Holocaust denier on his podcast has now defended himself with a neo-Confederate and a serial sexual harasser. These are people who obviously have problems with presenting the truth. Credibility counts and Hsu’s defenders have none.

If these people are your heroes, and if you’re more annoyed at those who point out their feet of clay than at their bad behavior, you’ve got a problem.