Give it a rest, Boghossian and pals

You’d think they’d learn. When Boghossian and Lindsay published their phony “conceptual penis” paper, they were roundly mocked and ridiculed for concluding that academia was corrupt because they got a badly written paper published in an obscure journal, proving nothing. It’s the skeptical equivalent of p-hacking — yes, if you carry out a badly designed experiment, you will sometimes get a positive hit, but you can’t conclude anything from it. No one is surprised that, in the volume of papers submitted to the peer-reviewed literature, clunkers get through. We know the system is not perfect.

But now we learn that, after their initial ‘success’ with the “conceptual penis” article, they sat down and repeated the same thing, over and over again. They intentionally flooded journals with “fake news”, and when some of it leaked through, cried triumph.

Beginning in August 2017, the trio wrote 20 hoax papers, submitting them to peer-reviewed journals under a variety of pseudonyms, as well as the name of their friend Richard Baldwin, a professor emeritus at Florida’s Gulf Coast State College. Mr. Baldwin confirms he gave them permission use his name. Journals accepted seven hoax papers. Four have been published.

What I have learned from this is that the familiar trio of frauds — Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose — have a real talent for writing garbage papers, which I’d actually kind of already known from their activities on social media. Now they’ve gone beyond their original efforts of making nonsensical interpretations to making up data, as in a paper about observations made at a Portland dog park, which made a number of people suspicious, and which led to an unraveling of their game.

All of this prompted me to ask my own questions. My email to “Helen Wilson” was answered by James Lindsay, a math doctorate and one of the real co-authors of the dog-park study. Gender, Place & Culture had been duped, he admitted. So had half a dozen other prominent journals that accepted fake papers by Mr. Lindsay and his collaborators—Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University, and Helen Pluckrose, a London-based scholar of English literature and history and editor of AreoMagazine.com.

The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences. “I think that certain aspects of knowledge production in the United States have been corrupted,” Mr. Boghossian says. Anyone who questions research on identity, privilege and oppression risks accusations of bigotry.

You know, if you’re a left-leaning liberal, there are plenty of gigantic targets you could be taking aim at: all you need to do is look at all three branches of the federal government, or police activities nation-wide, or the military-industrial complex, or the undermining of regulations by big corporations, or wealth inequality. We have no shortage of big, serious problems. But for some reason, these left-leaning liberals have decided that academia is too left-leaning, and must be exposed. And what have they exposed? A set of problems that Francis Bacon railed against in the 17th century.

Bacon was well aware that science had a weakness, that it was done by flawed humans who had their own biases (he was rather deeply flawed himself), and strove to make people self-aware of their own weaknesses and make efforts to use a rigorous methodology to circumvent those problems. Even the big name journals in technical fields occasionally publish terrible work because it meets pro forma conventions and is backed by lots of money (<cough, cough&> the ENCODE project), but you don’t see PluckBogSay going after those — instead, they have an agenda of conspiring against feminist and social science journals, which says something about their intent.

It might have been interesting if they’d chosen journals in their own fields, and written articles that satirized weaknesses in their own discipline…oh. Hey. I just realized — maybe Boghossian’s entire career has been a performance art piece criticizing how lackluster frauds can get academic jobs in philosophy. He may yet pull a valid criticism out of his hat.

But punching down at marginal journals because they have a soft spot for tendentious prattle ain’t it. It’s also exploiting a feature of academia that I rather like — trust. Even Alan Sokal has problems with what they’re doing.

This isn’t the first time scholars have used a hoax paper to make a point. In 1996 Duke University Press’s journal Social Text published a hoax submission by Alan Sokal, a mathematical physicist at New York University. Mr. Sokal, who faced no punishment for the hoax, told me he was “not oblivious to the ethical issues involved in my rather unorthodox experiment,” adding that “professional communities operate largely on trust; deception undercuts that trust.”

I could agree that many disciplines can be too trusting, and that more self-discipline is warranted. We do, however, have an ethical mechanism for addressing that problem: it’s called writing rebuttals and critical arguments that directly address bad work. It’s what I do with creationism, for instance. I’ll write a confrontational article pointing out why their claims are bogus, using knowledge of my own field to explain why they are wrong. I don’t sit down and write 20 garbage creationist articles (even though that would be trivially easy to do) and contribute to their body of work, which they’ll then use to justify creationism.

If you can find a bad article accepted for publication in a feminist journal, please do jump on it and tear it apart. That contributes to the strength of the discipline. Don’t write a bunch of bad articles of your own, which are clearly intended only to weaken the whole discipline and provide a set of easy, straw-man arguments that you can use to pretend you’re a smart guy.

They seem to know deep down that what they’re doing is wrong and unethical, and they have a rather fatalistic view of their future prospects.

Mr. Boghossian doesn’t have tenure and expects the university will fire or otherwise punish him. Ms. Pluckrose predicts she’ll have a hard time getting accepted to a doctoral program. Mr. Lindsay said he expects to become “an academic pariah,” barred from professorships or publications.

Interesting that they frame the anticipated consequences in terms of being punished or barred. That’s not the case at all. They’re going to have serious problems with a future in academia because they’re writing trashy papers that don’t further the knowledge in their disciplines at all, and seem to be more interested in policing people they don’t like than in advancing philosophy, mathematics, or literature. Maybe if there were a department of anti-feminist studies somewhere, they could fit in. Or maybe their real specialty is “grievance studies,” the very thing they are complaining about.

Otherwise, setting themselves up as martyrs is all the qualification they need to get a position in some right-wing think-tank, which is clearly the appropriate destiny for these “left-leaning liberals.”

Uh-oh. I get the Tim O’Neill treatment

And it’s a long treatment, so brace yourself.

I’m not going to disagree with his major points, but am just going to say that I think our background disciplines also tend to color our interpretation of the data. As a biologist, this summary resonates perfectly with me.

As already noted in relation to Myers’ rather different form of “agnosticism” on the question, historical analysis of pre-modern evidence simply cannot arrive at definitive answers and can only make structured, evidence-based but subjective assessments of what is most likely.

Evolutionary biology does the same thing: we gather all the evidence we can, sieve through it, and try to make a best assessment that accounts for all of the data with as little subjectivity as possible…but since we’re human, we can’t eliminate it all. We also try to conform our explanations to existing models of how the world works, and I think that’s where we often get conflicts. When I say there’s a question of parsimony here, I’m really saying is that I have a model in my head, and what’s the simplest way to fit these data to it? And as a biologist I have one model that involves thinking about populations and downplaying individuals (individuals make a transient contribution that is then broken up and blended with all the other individuals in the population), while a historian might focus more on specific instances and place greater weight on an individual’s role. So that’s where this bit doesn’t fit as well into my head.

The problem is that the whole of Mythicism, in all of its forms, is based on a fundamental supposition – that a non-historical Jesus form of early Christianity existed – which has no sound evidential foundation. And Occam’s Razor makes short work of this kind of idea.

This is how the Principle of Parsimony applies to the question. It is not merely that, as Myers seems to think, the idea of a single person as the point of origin is “simple” therefore it is most likely. It is that the sources all say that there was a historical preacher as the point of origin of the sect and all of the alternative explanations for how this could be is based on a weak foundational supposition which can, in turn, only be sustained by contorted readings of the texts which are also propped up by still more suppositions.

OK, I agree with the point that “the sources all say that there was a historical preacher as the point of origin of the sect”. If you’re just going to accept the sources as your sole objective data (a fair decision!), then sure, an argument between informed historians is going to converge on a single answer, as he does.

Unfortunately, that collides with my biases as a non-historian evolutionary biologist who tries to answer historical questions about organisms. When we try to identify the last common ancestor of all tetrapods, for instance, we don’t have any doubt that such a thing existed, but the “thing” is not a single individual (it ain’t Tiktaalik!), but a population, or a group of populations, or even a few loosely interbreeding species, and we’re averse to holding up a fossil and declaring, “here is the mother of all four-legged vertebrates!”, because we know it’s not true.

So I look at the Middle East of a few thousand years ago (or even today), and I see a fermenting chaos that is throwing up preachers and prophets all over the place, and to point to one guy and say he’s the one seems to avoid the bigger question of what was going on in that particular environment. Wouldn’t it be better to acknowledge the cross-fertilization and interbreeding of ideas that had to have been going on? This Jesus fellow is just one focus, and given how little we know about him, not even a particularly interesting focus.

I also have to question the reliability of the sources that all say there was one man. Writing that Christianity was produced by a committee, or the complicated interplay of a gang of scholars living in one little town, isn’t as compelling a story as saying it was this one enlightened individual. It’s like how in evolution the popular press seems to be locked into the idea of a “missing link”, looking for that one bone that ties a convoluted history into a pretty package, even as all the biologists try to tell them there wasn’t one link, and it’s not all missing, but parts of it will always be lost to us.

But all right, I can accept that historians have reached a practical consensus based on available evidence that there was a guy named Jesus who triggered a major religious movement 2000 years ago, and that denying his existence is a pointless exercise in pedantry that is often misused by lazy denialists. After all, if some revisionist came along and tried to claim that Devonian sarcopterygians were a fantasy and illusion cobbled up by Carboniferous limb apologists to justify the righteousness of tetrapody I’d also find them annoyingly obtuse.

Another thing: if you’re an atheist already, this is an argument that is totally irrelevant. If we had definitive evidence that Jesus existed — a time machine goes back, snaps a photo and takes a DNA sample — it wouldn’t change my mind at all, nor would it persuade Christians to abandon their faith. If the time machine goes back, and the time travelers flounder about, unable to identify which of the multitude of preachers is “the one”, that similarly is not going to change the mind of anyone about the truth of Christianity. It’s a kind of peculiarly bad pattern of argument that doesn’t resolve anything that matters at all.

I guess if you’re the kind of atheist who wants to say, “Hur hur, Christians are wrong about something, therefore there is no god,” maybe it would appeal. But this is like picking the most fuzzy, vaguely definable claim with known deficiencies of data that you can find and then splitting hairs to find a way to say the other guy is wrong, and doing it in the face of a whole mob of scholars who are telling you that your interpretation is non-standard. Tactically, it doesn’t sound smart.

We might as well be arguing that Jesus was an alien. The whole debate just puts us in a looney-tunes cartoon.

In which I disagree with xkcd

This is not a perspective I share.

This has not been my experience at all. I plod forward with reasonable expectations of humanity, and am constantly horrified by the worst opinions that I never imagined anyone would hold, flung at me in surprise.

Seriously, did anyone ever anticipate incels? Did you go looking for them? Did you imagine they could exist?

Bad memories

I had to look high and low to find a copy of that old debate I had with Geoffrey Simmons, because I wanted to reference something he said, so once I found a copy, I put it where I’d more easily find it in the future, on YouTube. Some of you old-timers will remember that debate — I blogged about it at the time, and there was a follow-up, too.

It was disillusioning for me at the time. I knew that creationists misrepresent the facts all the time, but this guy was just right there in my face, pretending he was an authority on the fossil evidence when he wasn’t, and also flat out lying about that evidence. He claimed that the entirety of the whale fossil evidence consisted of five bones — “five or so fossil pieces from dog-size animals”! Debate really doesn’t work as a tool to get at the truth when one side’s sole tactic is to lie brazenly, as we’ve also learned from Republican politics.

It’s also frustrating when the debate format doesn’t allow you to bring out the evidence and rub your opponents face in it, and if you point out that he’s lying he gets all indignant and smarmily whines about tone, and the moderators are both grossly biased and using your appearance as a gimmick to sell tours to the Creation “Museum”.

Ken Ham, innumerate evolutionist

I visited both the Creation “Museum” and the Ark Park, and one thing that leapt off the displays to me, and to other biologists I’ve shown these things to, is that Ken Ham has evolved to become a kind of hyper-evolutionist. Take a look at this illustration from Answers in Genesis, for instance.

Now compare it to this diagram of cat evolution.

Not that different, are they? They’re both tree diagrams, they both show an ancestral form diverging into multiple modern species, they both imply change and evolution. AiG’s is more cartoony and simplified, the real evolutionary diagram has more species, but the differences are more of style than substance, except for one little thing.

The time scale on the evolution image is 20 million years.

The time scale on the AiG image is 4 thousand years.

It’s weird. Answers in Genesis has gradually gone from complete denial of any evolution at all to arguing for so much evolution so fast that it’s enough to make a population geneticist choke. Does his audience care? I guess not. They’re not used to recognizing the implications in a quantitative chart, I guess, and see no conflict at all in ol’ Ken Ham waving his hands at a phylogram on steroids while claiming evolution is false.

Naturalis Historia has a more detailed discussion of this phenomenon, with a very nice wrap-up.

Would you recognize many of the animals that boarded Noah’s Ark? Not according to Ken Ham and his colleagues. The ark contained only the common ancestors to the great diversity of animals you see today. Giraffes on the ark? No. Chimpanzees? No. Lions? No. etc… One cat pair evolved into more than 100 species of cats most of which went extinct just a few hundred years after the Flood. Yes, Ken Ham has fully embraced Post-Flood Rapid Evolution as a mechanism of creating the amazing variation we see today. As he falls further down the slippery slope into the rabbit hole of radical hyper-evolution Ken Ham is, ironically, more accepting of naturalistic speciation (Darwinian evolution) than Old Earth advocates such as Hugh Ross.

Talk me out of this (or into it)

I’m considering dropping in on some creationists speaking at the Twin Cities campus next week.

Dave and Mary Jo Nutting have been to Minnesota before, but I didn’t bother going — but I wasn’t on sabbatical back then. The Alpha Omega Institute is a rather nutty organization, so maybe I should scribble up some notes on them.

What do you think? I’m on the fence, so I’ll let the comments decide. Also, would any of my Twin Cities peeps want to make an evening of it?

It’s a technical term

I was reading outside my discipline, which is always good for a surprise. It was a paper titled “Something’s Going on Here: Psychological Predictors of Belief in Conspiracy Theories“, which isn’t that far outside my interests, and was actually rather interesting. Here’s the abstract:

Research on individual-difference factors predicting belief in conspiracy theories has proceeded along several independent lines that converge on a profile of conspiracy believers as individuals who are relatively untrusting, ideologically eccentric, concerned about personal safety, and prone to perceiving agency in actions and profundity in bullshit. The present research represents the first attempt at an integrative approach to testing the independent contributions of these diverse factors to conspiratorial thinking. Two studies (N=1,253) found that schizotypy, dangerous-world beliefs, and bullshit receptivity independently and additively predict endorsement of generic (i.e., nonpartisan) conspiracy beliefs. Results suggest that “hyperactive” agency detection and political orientation (and related variables) might also play a role. The studies found no effects of situational threats (mortality salience or a sense of powerlessness)—though it remains to be seen whether real-world instantiations of situational threats might move some people to seek refuge in conspiratorial ideation.

One phrase leapt off the page at me: “bullshit receptivity”. This is a thing? They have a way to measure it? They do!

Bullshit receptivity. Participants’ receptivity to superficially profound statements was measured using the Bullshit Receptivity Scale (Pennycook et al., 2015). This measure consists of nine seemingly impressive statements that follow rules of syntax and contain fancy words, but do not have any intentional meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”; “Imagination is inside exponential space time events”). Participants rated each of the items’ profoundness on a scale from 1 (Not at all profound) to 5 (Very profound). They were given the following definition of profound for reference: “of deep meaning; of great and broadly inclusive significance.”

I love the name. I love that they have to define “profound” for their subjects. I also found their result interesting:

Exploratory regression analyses showed that the association between agency detection and conspiracy belief dropped most markedly when controlling for bullshit receptivity (and to some extent dangerous world beliefs). This suggests that a tendency toward agency detection might contribute to bullshit receptivity, or that they share a common psychological substrate in relation to their association with conspiracy belief.

Spurious belief in agency and conspiracies is associated with an acceptance of pseudo-profundities? I am not surprised. That explains a lot.

Now I want to see the Bullshit Receptivity measured in fans of Deepak Chopra and Jordan Peterson. It’s got to be off the scale.

I’m worried about David Silverman

He may have joined a cult.

He’s the new executive director for a shiny new organization, Transformative Humanists of America, which may not be so new: their web pages sometimes refer to themselves as humanist.com, which seems to be some kind of generic humanist forum. But they’ve gotten together and put together a nearly unreadable mass of words. I’m not sure what they’re all about, but what they seem to consider their main selling point is their mediocrity.

Society is fracturing at an alarming rate with the right hemorrhaging integrity while the Left is cannibalizing itself. As a result the majority middle is increasingly apathetic, disillusioned and without a home. Most people are good, which means suffering is increasing at our own hand. Transformative Humanism can and will help reunify society so we can get back to the business of the Greater Good.

They’ve got a whole section on the Extremism Horseshoe. Yup. Horseshoe theory again. The idea that the left is just as evil as the right, but those who straddle the fence are the best people. Politics are just the worst.

Trump took over and he was more polarizing than Obama had been. Now the left is doing anything it can to make Trump fail, even if it is good for the country. Just imagine the dehumanization and echo chambers that are in effect when we cheer for the failure of nuclear arms talks with North Korea! Trump is a pussy-grabber, so he hates women, so all of his supporters hate women to some degree – that is what the left is saying – dehumanizing en masse, shouting in their echo chambers, and indeed posting things like “please unfriend me if you support Trump”.

How dare you dehumanize Donald Trump for dehumanizing women and minorities! Don’t you realize that makes you as bad as he is?

I tried to figure out what “transformative humanism” is, but the section on “About transformative humanism” wasn’t at all helpful.

Humanism is not a religion, and therefore, is secular by default, like golf is secular. You can be a religious or nonreligious golfer, and you can be a religious or nonreligious Humanist. The rules in golf are secular, because they have no religious position, and the secular morality that we champion here at Humanist.com are also devoid of religion. “Secular Humanist” organizations by definition are exclusionary, divisive, and can be pretty hostile to religious people, but we at Humanist.com are doing this right. Everyone who agrees with our secular reasoning and wants to be a good person by the definition we set forth, is invited, whatever your opinion is on God.

Wait a minute…they differentiate themselves from other organizations that are hostile to religion, but they hired David Silverman as their director? The David Silverman I saw at the World Humanist Congress a few years ago, in which he pissed off a fair number of humanists for aggressively telling them they were all actually atheists, and they ought not to be pretending otherwise? Dave Silverman, Firebrand Atheist? I am mystified.

But maybe this explains the association. It has a whole section that emphasizes forgiveness, and condemns that whole social networking thing.

On-line, with echo chambers in full effect, redemption is often hard to come by. The ability for people to just disconnect from others makes redemption easy, because dehumanized ostracized people are easily replaced, so there is very little incentive for anyone to go through the process that goes against their outgrouping brain and take someone back in, even if they deserve it. Additionally, the outward, proud ostracization that accompanies the echo tunnels creates the Culture of Fear, making it incredibly scary for people who disagree with the outgrouping to voice their support for the ostracized person for fear of being outgrouped themselves. So the silent majority sits in fear of the social extremist minority and the latter rules and the former sits in fearful silence.

Then there’s the section on civil discourse that starts with a quote from Steven Pinker.

“Left-wing and right-wing political ideologies have themselves become secular religions, providing people with a community of like-minded brethren, a catechism of sacred beliefs, a well-populated demonology, and a beatific confidence in the righteousness of their cause.”

― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

If there is one place where the need for social improvement is most evident, it is the area of civil discourse. All over the country and all throughout the Internet, the apparent demise of calm civil discussions and their replacement with hate, extreme labeling and dismissal, and intellectual echo chambers dominates those of us who miss such ideals.

Yeah! The left and right are indistinguishable, just look at the hateful extremism that condemns people like Donald Trump. We need calm civil discussions to deal with Nazis…oh, fuck it. This is just another centrist gang of status quo warriors who want to adopt rules that promote stasis and acceptance of whatever the assholes at the top tell us to do. We may be sliding into a pit, but don’t you dare criticize the people who pushed us in, and you will accept your fate graciously. Namaste.

I find it hard to believe that Silverman has joined these do-nothing wankers, but he himself announced it. I guess it’s all about desperately trying to retain relevance, although I don’t think he’ll find it with these do-nothing babblers.

They really do go on and on at painful length without saying anything. For instance, I read their Who and What We Are page to try and find out who was behind it, who the organizers are. They don’t say! It’s just more platitudes, with a little rebuking of the Left, but nothing specific. It’s tediously empty of any specific content.

You know what else it’s missing? Any mention of major social issues, like racism or misogyny. I guess they’re taking the middle ground on that, too. There’s nothing about science, or concern for the environment — I guess they don’t want to risk colliding with the righties they want to woo! Nothing about politics other than “why can’t we all get along”? No concern about church/state separation. Its only message seems to be that they won’t criticize anyone for being far right reactionary assholes, therefore you should join them.

I don’t think the American Humanist Association has to fear any competition here.

Maybe the Intellectual Dark Web isn’t as profitable as they dreamed

Oh, look. “Pangburn Philosophy” the guy who’s been sponsoring these talks by alt-right asshats all over the place, maybe isn’t doing quite so well lately.

Can’t pay his speakers? Sam Harris and Majid Nawaz refusing to go on stage? Wow.

Can this get any more embarrassing for them?

Whoops. There go Jordan Peterson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Whatever will happen to this conference?

They just lost 4 of their 5 headliners. That’s a catastrophic collapse.

Jordan Peterson, fragile little snowflake and misogynist

I remember the old days of the internet, when some dork would throw a hissy fit and demand that we skeptics immediately remove all our mean statements about their devoutly held beliefs, and threaten us with legal action. And we’d all laugh at such absurdity, because once it’s on the internet, it’s being spread widely and isn’t going to go away, no matter how fiercely you stamp your foot or how loudly you scream.

I’ve personally experienced their ire: Pivar, Shermer, Carrier, to name just a few. Their efforts are futile. The facts do not disappear when they make you uncomfortable. Yet they still don’t get it.

The only difference today is that now it’s the so-called rationalists who are making willy-nilly threats of lawsuits to silence their critics, all while simultaneously genuflecting before the altar of free speech. It’s freakin’ weird, man. You’d think their heads would explode, or that at least their followers would notice the hypocrisy and turn their backs on them. But they don’t.

Latest in the litigious free-speechers who want to shut people up: Jordan Peterson. He’s suing someone who criticized his book.

In June, he threatened to sue Down Girl author and Cornell University assistant professor Kate Manne for defamation, after she criticized his book, 12 Rules For Life, and more generally called his work misogynistic in an interview with Vox. (Peterson previously filed a lawsuit against a university whose faculty members, in a closed-door meeting, argued that showing his videos in a classroom created an unsafe environment for students.) In letters to Manne, Cornell, and Vox, Peterson’s lawyer, Howard Levitt, demanded that all three parties “immediately retract all of Professor Manne’s defamatory statements, have them immediately removed from the internet, and issue an apology in the same forum to Mr. Peterson. Otherwise, our client will take all steps necessary to protect his professional reputation, including but not limited to initiating legal proceedings against all of you for damages.” (You can read the full letter below).

Among the statements Levitt objected to: Manne’s contention that Peterson’s book included “some really eyebrow-raising, authoritarian-sounding, and even cruel things,” as well as her observation that “it doesn’t seem accidental that [Peterson’s] skepticism about objective facts arises when it’s conveniently anti-feminist.” The lawyer and his client were equally unhappy with this line: “I also suspect that for many of Peterson’s readers, the sexism on display above is one tool among many to make forceful, domineering moves that are typical of misogyny.”

You don’t do this. You don’t bluster and threaten to sue critics of your book, no matter how savage their reviews. You especially don’t sue them when they can quote you and support all of their contentions, when your whole schtick is making broad-brush characterizations of people as archetypes and stereotypes.

I don’t get it. I get abused far worse, over a longer period of time, by various people who despise me, and they aren’t shy about doing it publicly (although, admittedly, they often do it behind the veil of anonymity), and I’ve never once thought about suing someone far it. These free-speech paladins, on the other hand, do it all the time.

Reminder: we’re still fundraising to defend ourselves from one SLAPP suit by one of these asshats. Not one of the usual freeze-peach suspects has spoken out against that suit — they’re inviting him to speak at their conferences, instead.