The problem with cable news, demonstrated in less than 30 seconds.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The problem with cable news, demonstrated in less than 30 seconds.
I have seen scientism, and it’s usually not us. The most blatant example recently was Pinker’s appalling essay in which he suggested that Hume could have used some instruction in molecular biology; I’ve seen people like Hawking and Krauss claim that philosophy is dead, killed by science. But usually the prominent atheists manage to step back from the brink and acknowledge that there is virtue to the humanities that is not dependent on science (but make no mistake, poetry is not a tool for generating new knowledge, but for communicating insights into human nature, which is fine and valuable — science is the tool we have for testing and verifying, and for acquiring new information about the universe).
Massimo Pigliucci has written a paper chastising the New Atheists for taking a turn towards scientism. But take note of my first paragraph: I’ve already given more specific examples of scientism than Pigliucci does in his entire paper. I’d also consider them illuminating: Krauss has retracted his sentiments, both Krauss and Hawking took a lot of flak for their weird ideas about philosophy (science is a branch of philosophy, so I found both rather discombobulating), and Pinker…well, I’d consider that the most damning evidence for a plague of scientism within atheism, that so many praised that blatant example of ahistorical and aphilosophical BS. Pinker isn’t even mentioned anywhere in the paper.
Pigliucci has picked his scientistic enemies: Dawkins, of course, and Harris and Stenger, adding just for the sake of completeness a couple of other scientists, me and Jerry Coyne, who also strongly criticizes the paper. Hitchens is dismissed as a mere polemicist, while Dennett, as a philosopher, causes some discomfort to his thesis, Pigliucci simply acknowledges that he can’t accuse him of scientism and moves on to his other targets.
But he can’t really defend his accusation against any of the others, either, and he doesn’t seem to care that there is a range of perspectives on philosophy even within his hand-picked sample. I consider myself to have a strong appreciation of philosophy and the humanities, and have even proposed to colleagues that a real liberal arts education ought to require learning some philosophy. Stenger’s work is full of history and philosophy; read God and the Atom
And look who he leaves off: Susan Jacoby, David Silverman, Hemant Mehta, Greta Christina, Ibn Warriq, Ophelia Benson. And worse, he has to explicitly deny that AC Grayling is a New Atheist! The impression I get is that what he has done is not find prominent New Atheists who endorse scientism, but prominent New Atheists who also happen to be trained as scientists, and then clumsily elided “is a scientist” into “is practicing scientism,” while also glossing over the existence of philosophers in our clan. We have a word for this: cherry-picking. It’s not a compliment.
Then he tries to define New Atheism, mentioning that nothing in it is actually “new” (a point that I think all of the New Atheists have made repeatedly! It’s a stupid name we got stuck with by a journalist writing in Wired). Here’s his definition.
Rather, it seems to me that two characteristics stand out as defining New Atheism apart from what I refer to as classical Atheism, one extrinsic, the other intrinsic. The extrinsic character of the New Atheism is to be found in the indisputably popular character of the movement. All books produced by the chief New Atheists mentioned above have been worldwide best sellers, in the case of Dawkins’s God Delusion, for instance, remaining for a whopping 51 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. While previous volumes criticizing religion had received wide popular reception (especially the classic critique of Christianity by Bertrand Russell), nothing like that had happened before in the annals of Western literature. The search for the reasons explaining such an unprecedented level of popularity is best left to sociologists, and at any rate is not really relevant to my aims here. It is likely, though, that the New Atheism qua popular movement is a direct result of the complex effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We have seen that the first book in the series, by Sam Harris, was written explicitly in reaction to those events, and I suspect that careful sociological analysis will reveal that that is also what accounts for Harris et al.’s success.
The second reason is intrinsic, and close to the core of my argument in this paper: the New Atheism approach to criticizing religion relies much more forcefully on science than on philosophy. Indeed, a good number of New Atheists (the notable exception being, of course, Daniel Dennett) is on record explicitly belittling philosophy as a source of knowledge or insight. Dawkins says that the “God hypothesis” should be treated as a falsifiable scientific hypothesis; Stenger explicitly—in the very subtitle of his book—states that “Science shows that God does not exist” (my emphasis); and Harris later on writes a whole book in which he pointedly ignores two and a half millennia of moral philosophy in an attempt to convince his readers that moral questions are best answered by science (more on this below). All of these are, to my way of seeing things, standard examples of scientism. Scientism here is defined as a totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions; or alternatively that seeks to expand the very definition and scope of science to encompass all aspects of human knowledge and understanding.
So he’s got two criteria: 1) We’re popular. That’s an accusation that has me stumped; would we be more respectable if nobody liked us at all? 2) We’re scientists and take a scientific approach. Well, we’re not all scientists, and what’s wrong with looking at an issue using evidence and reason? Why shouldn’t we reject ideas that might be pretty to some people, but contradict reality? It’s not as if we can’t appreciate beauty or justice, entirely non-scientific ideas, unless they’re also counter-factual. Beauty and justice are best when they aren’t wrapped around lies and nonsense!
I’m going to start replying to these broad-brush accusations of scientism with my own accusations of philosophism. It seems to me we’ve got a plague of people who resent the success of atheism and respond by belittling it with trite claims of it being “bad theology” or “naive philosophy”. I’m about to be served with a big plumbing bill for a frozen pipe — I wonder if I can get a discount if I argue that those two guys with the big toolboxes were insufficiently appreciative of the philosophy of flowing water, and are unwarrantedly popular with homeowners this time of year. Damn plumbists.
Nature has posted a rebuke to one of their employees for outing a pseudonymous blogger.
We would not normally comment on a point of view expressed by an employee in a personal capacity and in their personal time. However, as Nature was mentioned in a recent personal Twitter post by a Nature editor, it is necessary for us to clarify our views and policies. Firstly, we are pleased that the editor in this case has apologised to Dr Isis for the language used and for the fact that her identity was revealed. We also wish to make clear that both the language and behaviour are contrary to Nature’s principles and codes of editorial practice, and indeed contrary to the practices of all our editors. We encourage civility and respect on social media by our employees, and hope for similar standards from those we interact with. Blindness to the status of research authors is enshrined in our editorial selection policies and practices, as is the respect for, and protection of, anonymity. We take our responsibilities to our authors and reviewers seriously and we protect the identities of anonymous reviewers, manuscript authors or authors of magazine articles. Our policies on anonymity are detailed on our author and reviewer services pages: http://www.nature.com/authors/index.html. We continue to listen to reactions and are carefully considering the issues. The history and circumstances are complex, so we will not be commenting further on the specifics at this time.
The only comment directed at the offending employee begins with “we are pleased”. Wait, did I say “chastised” and “rebuked”? My error. I meant to say “lovingly stroked.”
This is how Nature‘s reputation gets dethroned, you know.
The only thing keeping me from assuming that Grantland, which published that awful outing of a transgender woman, is a haven of unethical wankerism, is that one of their writers, Christina Kahrl, seems to get it.
It was not Grantland’s job to out Essay Anne Vanderbilt, but it was done, carelessly. Not simply with the story’s posthumous publication; that kind of casual cruelty is weekly fare visited upon transgender murder victims in newspapers across the country. No, what Hannan apparently did was worse: Upon making the unavoidable discovery that Vanderbilt’s background didn’t stand up to scrutiny, he didn’t reassure her that her gender identity wasn’t germane to the broader problems he’d uncovered with her story. Rather, he provided this tidbit to one of the investors in her company in a gratuitous “gotcha” moment that reflects how little thought he’d given the matter. Maybe it was relevant for him to inform the investor that she wasn’t a physicist and probably didn’t work on the stealth bomber and probably also wasn’t a Vanderbilt cut from the same cloth as the original Commodore. But revealing her gender identity was ultimately as dangerous as it was thoughtless.
What should Grantland have done instead? It really should have simply stuck with debunking those claims to education and professional expertise relevant to the putter itself, dropped the element of her gender identity if she didn’t want that to be public information — as she very clearly did not — and left it at that. “That would have been responsible,” transgender activist Antonia Elle d’Orsay suggested when I asked for her thoughts on this road not taken. It’s certainly the path I would have chosen as a writer making this sort of accidental discovery, or would have insisted upon as an editor.
The editor of Grantland, Bill Simmons, on the other hand…ouch. He’s got a long, long mea culpa out that at least clearly admits that they screwed up, but also admits that the problem runs very deep.
Before we officially decided to post Caleb’s piece, we tried to stick as many trained eyeballs on it as possible. Somewhere between 13 and 15 people read the piece in all, including every senior editor but one, our two lead copy desk editors, our publisher and even ESPN.com’s editor-in-chief. All of them were blown away by the piece. Everyone thought we should run it. Ultimately, it was my call. So if you want to rip anyone involved in this process, please, direct your anger and your invective at me. Don’t blame Caleb or anyone that works for me. It’s my site and anything this significant is my call. Blame me. I didn’t ask the biggest and most important question before we ran it — that’s my fault and only my fault.
So it was run past more than a dozen editors at Grantland, and none of them had a problem with the fact that it was all about othering a trans woman, a woman who killed herself over the story? Wow. Grantland really sucks.
He’s also still making excuses for Caleb Hannan.
As for Caleb, I continue to be disappointed that we failed him. It’s our responsibility to motivate our writers, put them in a position to succeed, improve their pieces as much as we possibly can, and most of all protect them from coming off badly. We didn’t do that here. Seeing so many people direct their outrage at one of our writers, and not our website as a whole, was profoundly upsetting for us. Our writers don’t post their stories themselves. It’s a team effort. We all failed. And ultimately, I failed the most because it’s my site and it was my call.
That’s nice. Right. As he explains, Hannan was writing this long independent piece on a putter that didn’t gel for them until he added this twist that the designer was exposed as one of those weird trans people, making it supposedly compelling and interesting…to a large team of editors that didn’t include one member of the trans community. Yeah, Grantland has a big problem, but that doesn’t excuse Hannan at all.
I’ll also point out the assessment of the article by Boing Boing. The story wasn’t that good; it relied on bringing out a string of gotchas culminating in the big weird reveal of a dead trans woman.
Another thing: critics keep saying that Hannan’s article was great storytelling, hiding terrible ethics. No. It’s a lurid mess. It’s written and paced like a 90’s-era daytime TV thriller, copying the structural and sensational qualities of other works without caring for how and why they work.
As for me, I continue to be disappointed that Grantland failed Dr V.
This entirely not-safe-for-work video purports to tell the true, scientifically accurate story of the Teenage Ninja Turtles. I don’t know — it seems to think all turtles are the same.
We just got back home from Twelve Years a Slave. Throughout that movie, all I could think is, “we human beings did that to other human beings? We suck.”
Now how am I supposed to get to sleep with that kind of disgust for humanity on my mind?
(It was still the best movie I’ve seen in at least a year, though.)
Hannan is a sports writer who was writing a story about the design of a golf putter. Not my cup of tea, but OK, there are interesting physics and ergonomic issues there. Unfortunately, his story got side-tracked from the relevant and interesting and into the destructively personal by his bigotry.
The designer of the golf club was a Dr V. It was clear from their communications that Dr V was rather pretentious and committed to maintaining her privacy, insisting that any story be about the product not the developer, but she was also extremely helpful, making a custom club for Hannan and giving him help in using it. The club is apparently very good*, so it’s quality wasn’t misrepresented…but Hannan does some background work and discovers that Dr V had lied about her qualifications.
That’s legitimate for a journalist to do. A story about a mysterious designer who isn’t everything she claims to be, but has designed some great sports equipment? Sure. That’s a reasonable story.
But, sad to say, the story he wrote is centered rather differently, and reveals a great deal about Hannan’s biases and preconceptions. In an interview with another source, he learns something he considers horrible.
He was clearly trying to tell me something, which is why he began emphasizing certain words. Every time he said “she” or “her” I could practically see him making air quotes. Finally it hit me. Cliché or not, a chill actually ran up my spine.
“Are you trying to tell me that Essay Anne Vanderbilt was once a man?”
It took a moment for him to respond.
A couple of guys making air quotes about personal pronouns, and a “chill” running down his spine at the discovery that Dr V was a trans woman? I wonder if Caleb Hannan has figured out yet why Dr V was so insistent on keeping her self out of the story. Could it be because that’s how so many people react to her identity?
But no, Hannan just discovered that he now had a great hook for his story.
What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself.
Hannan told Dr V what he was going to publish. She was rightfully furious. If the science behind this putter was bogus, that would be reason for her to be angry at being exposed, but I’d support Hannan’s decision to publish it — using false credentials is news. But instead what was going to be a key point in this story was the unwilling outing of a trans woman, and especially given Hannan’s attitude that this was something “weird”, that should have been off-limits. Yes, tell me if someone is faking a degree from MIT. But a trans woman is not faking being a woman; she’s also not doing that for personal profit, but is instead entering a life of peril and contempt, as Hannan’s reaction shows.
Before the story was published, Dr V, Essay Anne Vanderbilt, committed suicide.
Caleb Hannan went ahead and published the story, complete with personal information about the woman, using masculine pronouns, referring to her by her previous name, and with the appalling gall of closing the story by calling it a “eulogy”. You would think having your subject kill herself over what you were doing would make you rethink; maybe go back and remove the sensationalism out of respect for the dead, and maybe recognize the magnitude of your bigotry and realize that you were letting that all hang out in the story, too. But no; he just went ahead and outed a dead trans woman against her will, and his editors also didn’t see a problem with printing it.
Oh, I know what’s wrong with Caleb Hannan. He doesn’t have a speck of conscience or empathy.
Melissa McEwan has an excellent summary of the unconscionable Mr Hannan’s actions. It was just a “strange” story to him, but it was Dr V’s life.
Here’s another good piece on this story: Dr. V Is Dead, Caleb Hannan Is Celebrated: Why We Can’t Accept Lazy, Transmisogynistic Journalism. A bit at the beginning really captures the depth of Hannan’s thinking.
A few hours later, when Wire editor Bill Wasik suggested on Twitter that Hannan’s investigation of Dr. V’s work and life contributed to her death, he replied “ouch.”
“Ouch.” A woman driven to suicide by Hannan’s article, and he says, “ouch.”
*The quality of the club is complicated. He raves about it at first, but then later says that maybe it was psychological — he thought it was great when he thought the designer was a physicist, but now it’s just gathering dust in his garage. He doesn’t consider the other side of the psychology: that maybe he’s avoiding using it since discovering that the designer was trans, and he clearly finds that creepy.
Ashley Miller is getting legal threats from a company called Cinematic Appraisals, because she found their claims laughable, and publicly laughed at them. I have to join in the laughing.
They claim to be a scientific script review company — for a fee, they’ll take a look at your movie script proposal, run it through some scientific tests, and tell you whether it will connect with an audience
(I wonder if that’s how movies like Transformers end up getting made?) I wondered how they do scientific script appraisal, so I visited their pseudoscience page. It’s illustrated with this:
They put your script under a microscope, and use molecular models to do something or other? What? If only they’d included some beakers of colored water with some dry ice to make them bubble, then I might believe this is a real photo of science in action!
But no, this is what they say they do:
The Mind Science Method has been lab tested and is proven to correlate with the actual psychophysiological responses of a subject to the screenplay. Testing measured neurobiological activity with a variety of electrodermal equipment including galvanic skin monitor, electromyrograms [sic], a zygomaticaus [sic?], a corrogator [sic?], an EEG and EKG (MP150WSW with Tel100C remote monitoring module data acquisition system).
The galvanic skin monitor is pretty much the same thing as the e-meter Scientology uses — it’s basically measuring how much you’re sweating. Electromyograms are recordings of muscle activity; I presume that’s what they doing with the zygomaticus (a muscle in your face involved in smiling) and the corrugator muscles (which are used to wrinkle up your forehead). Then they’re measuring general brain activity and heart rate.
If you want to get a strong response from a person strapped into such a setup, tell them a detailed story about sexual activity, or about lots of violent action with graphic descriptions. Suddenly, a great deal of the American movie industry is explained!
Otherwise, though, it’s a silly sciencey description of some really basic physiological apparatus, with misspellings and awkward grammar, that isn’t going to be able to do what they claim it will do, even with their pretense of a magic algorithm.
I can understand why they’d rely on lawsuits to protect their reputation. It’s too flimsy and compromised to be able to stand on its own.
Zack Kopplin has a very thorough exposé of the Responsive Ed charter schools in Texas. Charter schools are an alternative to the standard public school system, but they receive public funding, your tax dollars, and are therefore required to follow the same legal strictures as all public schools. And that means no religious indoctrination.
The Responsive Ed schools are simply yet another manifestation of the creationist ideal: they teach creationism flat out, and they also mislead and cast false doubts on evolutionary science. They also use the Christian bible as a source.
Outright creationism appears in Responsive Ed’s section on the origins of life. It’s not subtle. The opening line of the workbook section, just as the opening line of the Bible, declares, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
There’s the usual ignorance of how science works, too.
Another Responsive Ed section claims that evolution cannot be tested, something biologists have been doing for decades. It misinforms students by claiming, “How can scientists do experiments on something that takes millions of years to accomplish? It’s impossible.”
The Texas legislature ought to be sitting up in alarm at these gross illegalities…but as it turns out, state senator Dan Patrick, chair of the Texas Senate Education Committee, is also promoting Responsive Ed. Sorry, Texas, you’re doomed. As long as you keep electing these assnuggets to run your educational system, you’re not going to have competent education.
It’s not just evolution, either. Kopplin lists all the lies that are taught about history, other countries, feminism, stem cells, gay rights, sex ed, you name it.
Texas: screwing over another generation. Thanks, guys.
It’s the most boring game to watch, ever, and it’s also terribly destructive to the saps who play it. Yet Superbowl Sunday comes up in a few weeks, and hordes of people will be watching it. Why? Maybe this chart explains it all:
There’s no game there! It’s mostly commercials. Maybe that’s why it’s a popular party focus: there isn’t actually much going on to distract you from drinking beer and chatting with friends.
