Television “science”

Are you a film crew person looking for work in the UK? Multiple opportunities have opened up for the crew for a documentary!

A new Covent Garden-based film company seeks a producer of marketing and distribution, a researcher/presenter, a camera operator, a sound person, a runner, and an editor, for its first documentary, called Laughing with Women. Why are women, on average, slightly less funny than men? Does gold-digging in particular impair women’s joke-making ability? If women publicly reject gold-digging, do they become as funny, or funnier than men?

If the radical and revealing street-based social experiment at the centre of our documentary proves gold-digging does make women less funny (as pre-production research suggests) then our findings will make headlines around the world, our film’s two minute teaser trailer attached to all those news and blog articles. The full documentary will be shot to a broadcast-quality standard and format, giving mainstream television companies worldwide the opportunity to purchase broadcasting rights (if they’re feeling brave enough) whilst we maintain a virtually guaranteed revenue stream from our already established hardcore of supporters and fans around the world, who, along with everyone else we intrigue, will be able to enjoy Laughing with Women on newly launched pay-per-view channel, Vimeo on Demand (VoD) – where VoD itself takes a very modest 10% cut. The documentary has the potential to be translated into several languages – gold-digging a familiar if hidden story in every country, until now.

Positions available…

Producer of marketing and distribution

Researcher/presenter

Camera person

Sound person

Editor

All positions paid at the minimum national wage or above, to be negotiated.

Shooting dates…

The main shoot, testing the documentary’s key hypothesis, and the kind of fireworks it will generate, will take place from August 1st, for 10 days, in central London. Eight to ten other shooting days will be organized for soon after. If interested in getting involved, please email your show-reel and/or CV, along with a paragraph or two saying hello, explaining in a little detail why you are specifically interested in working on Laughing with Women – and what your individual take on it all might be – also outlining your availability. Interesting respondents will be contacted for a Covent Garden meeting soon, where the whole plan, and a closely linked follow-up project can be discussed.

That isn’t a documentary. They’re not building a story around an established science fact, they’re inventing a premise that they simply assume is true, and are then designing an “experiment” (more likely a contrived set of sight gags) to “prove” their claims on video. I can roughly predict what they’re going to do: they’re going to approach women, insult them by suggesting that they’re venal gold-diggers, and then demonstrate that angry women don’t have much of a sense of humor about sexist assmonkeys harassing them. Hypothesis proven! Of course, if women were actually funnier than the men in their sample, you know that wouldn’t get aired — they have a prejudice, and by god, they’re going to make it appear true.

And then they hope that people will be “brave enough” to make their video go viral when it confirms conventional bigotry. If their little dog-and-pony show doesn’t get picked up any broadcasters, it isn’t because they’re afraid to pander to stereotypes — turn on your TV and look, that’s never a problem — but because this “documentary” will be so patently slanted and dishonest that it is a slap in the face to real documentaries everywhere.

Wait a minute…they’re looking for a people to do camera and sound, a produce, a presenter, and an editor, for a show that is going to be a series of confrontations and requires almost no writing. So there is basically no crew at all right now, just a no-talent hack sitting on his ass in his office dreaming of putting together a show to prove to the world that women lack a sense of humor and are all gold-digging bitches. He sounds like every MRA in the world.

I called it. This is the dream of no-talent hack Tom Martin, who brings nothing to the project other than a resentment of women.

Jonah Lehrer: he’s baaaaack

Lehrer has landed a new book deal. This has sparked justifiable disgust: Maria Konnikova explains why.

Lehrer is not the writer who simply made up a few Bob Dylan quotes and self-plagiarized (the way he’s portrayed in recent accounts of his latest book deal). He is the writer who got the science wrong, repeatedly, who made up facts, misrepresented information, betrayed editors, and lied, over and over and over again, for many years, in multiple venues, not just in a single book. He is, in other words, the writer and journalist who went against the basic tenets of the profession, and did so many times over. He is the surgeon who botched surgery after surgery, the lawyer who screwed up case after case, the engineer whose oh-so-pretty designs toppled after a year or two, not once, but multiple times, and on and on. Why, then, is he not seeing the consequences the way he would have necessarily done in most other professions? Why is he instead getting the equivalent of a fresh docket of cases or a new departmental job: a coveted book deal with a prominent publisher?

He’s slick. He writes with a glib authority, and is a master of superficial plausibility, able to whip out a snappy footnote with a reference just obscure enough to tickle recognition in the brains of knowledgeable readers and to wow the yahoos. He sounds smart. But there’s a real vacancy at the core.

He’s not good at the science. He’s a poor researcher. He’s not a good writer — he churns words around and knows the form, but the content isn’t there.

So now he’s going to paste together another book that will clutter the shelves and deprive better writers of support. Konnikova suggests an action we can take:

And that’s why we, the readers, are the only possible villain—that is, if we choose to be, by continuing to pay attention to Lehrer, by continuing to cover his work, by buying his new book and reviewing it and drawing attention to it. By making it possible for this book of love to be another best-seller.

So let’s make a choice. Let’s not do it. Let’s show Simon & Schuster that they backed a losing horse that has run its last. Let the book flop, not sell. Don’t buy it, resist the urge “just to see” what the fuss is all about. We make Jonah Lehrer. Without an audience, he is nothing, plain and simple.

Won’t work. She’s preaching to the choir — the people who read science blogs already know Lehrer’s reputation, and won’t be tempted in the slightest to buy yet another bit of hackwork from the guy. I have no plans to every pay a penny for that book, that’s for sure.

Lehrer has made a brilliant move, actually. He’s writing a pop psych book about love. He’s going to wave the tattered banner of his past science writing to argue that he has the authority to speak for science on a matter of everyday importance, and his precious scholarly style will add weight to that claim in the minds of his new target audience. And that audience isn’t us. His new audience will be the people who watch Oprah to learn about science.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that Oprah was part of his pitch. This is a book tailor-made for that show: the flawed writer seeking redemption (who also happens to be young and attractive), the pseudo-highbrow style, the subject matter, the “counter-intuitive” pronouncements that will actually line up well with what the audience wants to hear.

I’ll bet you that right now the publicists are thinking up copy to send to the weekday afternoon talk shows, and that by this time next year Lehrer will be working that circuit. And that he’ll make big buckets of money selling off the sad bleeding shreds of his integrity.

No, no, no…not philosophers too!

You’d think if there was any area of human endeavor that was least likely to be full of absurd sexual drama and thoughtless harassment, it would be philosophy. Don’t those people sit around thinking ponderously about ethics and moral behavior and living the life of the mind all the time?* But no, it’s all booze and animal lusts for them, too, just like the rest of us.

The crux of this story is that Colin McGinn, a very well known philosopher, was sliming one of his own graduate students with salacious email (pdf), making remarks about masturbating while thinking about her, etc. McGinn’s own defense does him no favors; and now he’s claiming that women support him in email, because they’re so much more sensitive than men. Advances towards a student are simply unacceptable, no matter how much McGinn wants to pretend it was simply friendly banter. McGinn’s own defenders aren’t helping, either.

Professor Erwin goes on:

“There was some sexual talk, banter, puns, and jokes made between the two,”  Mr. Erwin said. “The written records, I believe, show that this was an entirely consensual relationship.” 

No, no. That is not how it works. It is remarkable how profoundly this misunderstands the student/professor relationship. A professor’s relationships with his or her students are not “entirely consensual” like that. Student/professor relationships inherently have a highly unequal balance of power. That includes students in one’s undergraduate and graduate classes, obviously, but it also includes teaching- and research assistants; academic advisees; people whose thesis or dissertation committees one sits on; exam proctors; everyone. Everyone. Anything a student says or writes to a professor has to be seen in that light. Suppose the professor engages in sexual banter and the student banters back. Maybe that’s because she consented and wanted to banter, but maybe it’s because the power differential inherent in the relationship placed her in a position of duress, in which she felt like she had to banter or face unpleasant consequences. If the return banter was performed unwillingly or under duress, there is no reason to think that the written records will reveal it.

But wait, that isn’t the worst of it. On blogs and on twitter, all over the place, bad philosophy is being done.

I take it as a mark of how deeply messed up the moral compass of professional philosophy is that there are commenters at some of the blogs linked above who seem willing to go to the mat to argue that there may be conditions in which it is acceptable to email your RA you that were thinking about her during your hand-job. Because personal interactions are hard, y’all! And power-gradients in graduate programs that are at once educational environments and workplaces are really very insignificant compared to what the flesh wants! Or something.

Read some of the dumbest things clueless people are uttering in McGinn’s defense.

OK, the communities of atheists, science-fiction writers, gamers, scholars of literature, skepticism, politics, and philosophers are rife with sexist scumbags. Is there any small part of the human community that is untainted? Do I need to start hanging out with polyamorous left-handed fly-tying hobbyists or something?

*The pdf linked above also cites something I did not know.

Complaints of sexist remarks and behavior have long plagued the field of philosophy, which has been dominated by men for years. More than 80 percent of full-time faculty members in philosophy are male, compared with just 60 percent for the professoriate as a whole, according to 2003 data compiled by the U.S. Education Department, the latest available.

Perhaps we should all move to Sweden

It’s always the lies. With the revelation that the US is collaborating with various big name internet companies like Google and Apple to spy on everyone comes round after round of denial, and I don’t know which bugs me more. The latest is the claim that we’re only snooping on foreigners, not US citizens (as if that makes it OK, anyway).

At a hearing of the Senate intelligence committee In March this year, Democratic senator Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

"No sir," replied Clapper.

Oh, yeah? Here’s a screenshot from the NSA datamining tool, called BoundlessInformant (just the name is revealing, isn’t it?). Color is a measure of the degree of surveillance, with red the most and blue the least. What’s that country in the lovely goldenrod somewhere in the middle of the western hemisphere? Oh, that’s us.

boundless heatmap large

Relax, though. All those companies collaborating with the NSA are swearing on a stack of Bibles that they have nothing to do with it.

On the heels of media reports that the NSA has gained access to the servers of nine leading tech companies — enabling the spy agency to examine emails, video, photographs, and other digital communications — Google has issued a strongly worded statement denying that the company granted the government "direct access" to its servers. That statement goes so far as to say that the company hasn’t even heard of "a program called PRISM until yesterday." 

It’s Google. It’s their company policy to not be evil. They wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

According to Chris Soghoian, a tech expert and privacy researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union, the phrase "direct access" connotes a very specific form of access in the IT-world: unrestricted, unfettered access to information stored on Google servers. In order to run a system such as PRISM, Soghoian explains, such access would not be required, and Google’s denial that it provided "direct access" does not necessarily imply that the company is denying having participated in the program. Typically, the only people having "direct access" to the servers of a company like Google would be its engineers. (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has issued a similarly worded denial in which he says his company has not granted the government "direct access" to its servers," but his language mirrors Google’s denial about direct access.)

No, not Facebook, too!

I like the point made by Cenk Uygur in this video: it’s a clear violation of the fourth amendment to the US constitution. Isn’t it cute how people are absolutists about the right to bear arms, but prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures? That we can wobble on.

The freeze-peach brigade gets taught a lesson

Amanda Marcotte explains the obvious.

Free speech entitles you to:

  1. Say what you want to without fear of government censorship or retribution.

Free speech does not entitle you to:

  1. An audience. You can say what you want, but people are not actually required to listen to you spew. So, contrary to many, many claims otherwise, your free speech rights are not trampled if someone ignores you, blocks you on Twitter, or refuses to give you a job as a writer or communicator for their organization. National Review isn’t stepping on my free speech rights because they don’t hire me. If your sexism stops you from getting a prominent job in media, that is also not a violation of your rights.
  2. To have others host your speech. This is a corollary to the first one. Facebook, blog comment sections, online forums, etc. are just like TV shows, radio shows, and magazines: Their house, their rules. They have built up an audience and they are not obligated to turn around and give you that audience to spew your garbage. Start your own damn website/magazine/forum.
  3. To be protected from criticism. I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but free speech protects your right to celebrate rape with your “jokes”, and it also protects my right to call you an asshole for it. Daniel Tosh can think it would be hilarious to watch someone get raped and say so, and I say that makes him a moral monster and a piece of shit. It is not censorship to hurt the tender feelings of people who think rape is hilarious.

Occassionally, you’ll see some people try to sidestep the obvious idiocy of yelling “free speech” to defend someone from, you know, free speech, by instead lodging accusations that feminists are “oversensitive” or some other garbage. But the only people I see being oversensitive in these debates are the sexists who are so torn up over criticism that they melt down, start yelling incoherent and easily disproved claims of censorship, and start issuing rape threats in order to stop the painful, painful criticism. If oversensitivity bothers you so much, physician, heal thyself.

I blame the internet for their ignorance. It’s been infected with this ridiculous libertarian bullshit for so long…

Diversity building at Coyot.es Network

USA HDR 2012-08-10 (12)

I’ve been in work and personal overload lately, and I apologize for not annoying people here nearly as frequently as I’d like. The work overload, at least, will likely lift soon. In the meantime, I wanted to pass something along about an opportunity for biodiversity-oriented bloggers. It’s below the fold. For you non-fold-looking-under Hordelings, here are some cuddly cacti:

[Read more…]

Only rapists are allowed privacy now

The hacker who exposed the rot in the Steubenville rape case has been arrested by the FBI and faces serious jail time.

At first, he thought the FBI agent at the door was with FedEx. "As I open the door to greet the driver, approximately 12 FBI SWAT team agents jumped out of the truck, screaming for me to "Get the fuck down!" with M-16 assault rifles and full riot gear, armed, safety off, pointed directly at my head," http://www.projectknightsec.com/Lostutter wrote today on his blog. "I was handcuffed and detained outside while they cleared my house."

He believes that the FBI investigation was motivated by local officials in Steubenville. "They want to make an example of me, saying, ‘You don’t fucking come after us. Don’t question us."

If convicted of hacking-related crimes, Lostutter could face up to 10 years behind bars—far more than the one- and two-year sentences doled out to the Steubenville rapists. Defending himself could end up costing a fortune—he’s soliciting donations here. Still, he thinks getting involved was worth it. "I’d do it again," he says.

Rape a girl, get a sympathetic press and a light jail sentence in the juvenile system. Expose the rape of a girl, get a decade of prison time. Anyone else find this a little bit out of balance?

To compound the hypocrisy, Lostutter is being criminalized for cracking open supposedly private data. At the same time, it has been announced that the Obama administration has authorized the NSA to snoop on private email, chats, file storage—everything we put on the net. If the data has already been compromised to hell and gone by our own government, how can our government make a case against Lostutter? Can we expect a SWAT team to nab Barack Obama now?

The Church of England just wounded itself

You may think this is good news, but you should be deeply troubled. The Church of England has officially decided that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

The Bishop of Leicester, who leads the bishops in the House of Lords, said they would now concentrate their efforts on “improving” rather than halting an historic redefinition of marriage.

It represents a dramatic change of tack in the year since the Church insisted that gay marriage posed one of the biggest threats of disestablishment of the Church of England since the reign of Henry VIII.

“Troubled?” you ask, “This is exactly what Myers has favored for years!” But, you see, I didn’t factor in the theological implications. When the source of all objective morality (as we’ve been told God and his priesthood are, many times) undergoes a major revision, we ought to think about what it means. Let us consider the possibilities.

  1. There is a god who cares very much what you do with your genitals, and sometimes he changes his mind. You should find this terrifying. Here’s this all-powerful deity who can send you to paradise or to hell, and the rules for admission can change at any time. Your absolute objective morality is suddenly in flux! You could be cruising along, living the rules of your religion meticulously, and there could be a revision at any time — what if god, on a whim, decided that all marriage was an abomination, and you were supposed to practice free love? Are you prepared to obey?

    1. Related concern: is this retroactive? So if a pair of randy, lonely medieval goatherds were getting it on in a beautiful French meadow and were condemned to hell for it, do they get released now? What’s the PTSD like after a thousand years writhing in unthinkably intense agony?

    2. I’d assumed getting into heaven is like getting tenure — you’re set for the afterlife. But apparently it’s more like working for a psychopathic boss and the rules can change on the fly. This doesn’t sound like a particularly pleasant, stress-free existence.

  2. There is a god who cares very much what you do with your genitals, but the priesthood has been consistently misinterpreting him. This should shake your trust in organized religion — they can get God’s will totally wrong. What if God gave you your genitals for a reason, and you’re supposed to be using them joyfully in all sorts of ways, and the communication between heaven and earth is just totally garbled? He’s up there raging at the phone line like Bill O’Reilly muffing his lines, while the priests are straining to understand what he’s saying in all the bellowing and crackling static. “What’s that you say? Something about penises? Cut off what?” We could be committing all kinds of crimes of omission and emission without even knowing about it!

    1. What if god said, “I gave you men a prostate for a reason, you should be using it”, and all those straight males in a committed relationship who haven’t been getting pegged regularly by their wife are damned to hell? That would be a shocker at the pearly gates.

    2. We don’t know that the priests are getting it right even now. Maybe god really is a bronze-age patriarchal chieftain with bizarrely restrictive rules about sexual behavior, and those untrustworthy priests are translating those rules with more and more errors. You really can’t believe anything they say, whether you like their conclusions or not.

  3. There is a god who really doesn’t care much about what you do with your genitals — he has greater concerns that matter more. Maybe he only has two commandments, “Be excellent to one another” and “Party on!” and all this fussing over specific sexual practices is a gigantic distraction — you’re not going to get grilled about where your penis has been or what has gone into your vagina when you get to heaven at all. All this angst about sexual behavior is simply a reflection of the psychological hangups in the heads of the kinds of people who appoint themselves morality monitors.

    1. I have a suspicion that chopping off young women’s heads for losing their virginity won’t be compatible with “Be excellent to one another”. Neither is beating up people you meet at a gay bar.

    2. We really don’t know what the rules are any more. Maybe we should stop trying to imagine what a cosmic overlord in the sky wants us to do, and look to our fellow human beings for guidelines, instead.

  4. There is no god, no afterlife, no eternal punishment or reward. The priests have been making it all up, using this invisible boogeyman as a goad to get you to serve their earthly whims. You’ve been had, people, rise up and throw off your chains, cast down the church!

I kinda like #4 best.

I have to admit, though, that the most conservative religious people actually have one thing right: if you go around changing any of the rules, if you exhibit any flexibility in interpreting the faith, it means you have cause to question the whole elaborate edifice of religion — every wobble has the potential to cause the whole structure to come crashing down. The church is extremely rickety, which is why reason is such a threat to them.

But I also think that demolition would be a good thing.

Harvard’s shame

It seems Tauriq Moosa and I have a similar opinion of Oprah Winfrey — she’s a successful peddler of pseudoscientific nonsense. It’s too bad that Harvard doesn’t have the same ability to recognize a fraud when they see one, since they had Oprah disgrace their commencement ceremonies, and then gave her an honorary degree. In what, I don’t know; can you get a Ph.D. in dangerous foolishness at Harvard?