Oh, no. Not my University of Washington!

The inappropriate pressure to turn universities into vocational colleges is having an unfortunate effect on my alma mater…and colleges everywhere. The humanities are being cannibalized to feed the STEM monster.

You won’t find a single expert on the history of the American Revolution or the Civil War at the University of Washington anymore. Since last year, the state’s oldest and largest university no longer employs a professor who specializes in American history before the year 1900.

Its history department has no scholars on the history of ancient Greece and Rome, and it recently stopped teaching Sanskrit, the ancient language of India and the root of many other languages.

Yikes. I took a look at the faculty roster for the history department, and it still seems huge compared to what we’ve got at my little university, and there’s far more diversity now than what I recall from <gulp> almost 40 years ago, when every course seemed to be taught by a white man. So there are some pluses…but the big gaps are troubling. Also, I don’t recognize anyone there at all — except for one emeritus professor, Arther Ferrill. And I was a guy who spent a lot of time in the history department. I guess that’s to be expected after my long departure.

“What’s sad for the younger generation is that so many students here have been literally pushed away from the social sciences and humanities to STEM, and are not happy,” said UW history professor James Gregory.

“There’s so much messaging in general about STEM, STEM, STEM,” he said.

Gregory remembers a discussion he had with a bright student, a history buff who was majoring in finance, but kept signing up for history classes because, as she described it, “I love to think.”

Why not switch your major, he suggested.

“My parents wouldn’t hear of it,” she said.

It me. Almost.

I took full advantage of any and all electives I could squeeze into my schedule, and sank deeply into the history department offerings — I even considered switching to a history major or at least a minor, early in my undergrad tenure, but decided against it, not because of parental pressure, but because I liked biology way too much. I got my loving to think in bio as well as history.

One thing I’d say to Dr Gregory, though, is that a lot of STEM faculty would agree with him. One problem we have is students who regard our STEM courses as not so much a learning experience in themselves, but an obstacle to getting a degree so they can go on to the job they want or the professional program they want to enter. Every year I get a crop of advisees with well-thought-out plans to get through the degree requirements as fast as they, with electives chosen outside of their major for how well they fit into their schedule, or how easy they are, and that’s a tragedy. I tell them they ought to pick a subject that interests them and think about taking courses to build their breadth of knowledge. Sure, you’re a biology major, but that shouldn’t prevent you from getting some in-depth knowledge about history, or poetry, or philosophy just because you can.

Unfortunately, that attitude doesn’t help if your university kills the program you love most. That’s why we need to support every discipline, not just STEM.

Also, I thought the Quad, where most of the history classes were taught, was the prettiest part of campus back then. That walk from Red Square up through the tree-lined lawns of the Quad was much nicer than the the spooky shortcuts through the basement tunnels of the monolothic bulk of the Health Sciences Center that I learned so well.

The Fyre Festival was a trial run of the ‘B’ Ark

You all know the story of the Douglas Adams’ ‘B’ Ark, I’m sure. It’s about a planet that packed up a bunch of people into a spaceship and sent them off to “colonize” a new planet.

“Yes, so anyway,” he resumed, “the idea was that into the first ship, the ‘A’ ship, would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; and into the third, or ‘C’ ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things, and then into the `B’ ship – that’s us – would go everyone else, the middlemen you see.”

The subset of the population loaded up unto the ship were telephone sanitizers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants. It seemed a bit overzealous — hairdressers and security guards at least are quite useful. Especially since I’ve discovered people who are far more useless than that lot. You see, I watched two documentaries about the Fyre Festival last night. Two of them — one on Netflix, another on Hulu — so you can just grovel in schadenfreude all night long.

You quickly learn that the most useless people on Planet Earth are ‘social media influencers’, people with the job of promoting ‘social media influencers’, and people who pay ‘social media influencers’ for doing nothing but looking pretty and posing. The guy who set up the grift called the Fyre Festival, Billy McFarland, is a compulsive liar who embodied many of the same shallow values as the people he bilked, but the difference was that he avidly ripped into the populace. He was like an animated gummi bear falling upon a bowl of barely set jello and devouring everything in front of him. He’s a terrible, awful, weak person who found his niche and then fouled it so badly that he is currently serving a 6 year sentence in prison.

Of the two, I thought Hulu’s Fyre Fraud was better at exposing the phony promoters, like FuckJerry (how edgy!), a company whose sole business is pumping out sophomoric memes and promoting self-promoters. Fuck FuckJerry. Netflix’s Fyre, though, goes deeper into the harm McFarland caused to good people with real productive jobs, like all the Bahamians who were lied to and tricked into working long hours of manual labor, scrambling to try and get this trash ‘festival’ assembled, and were then never paid.

And then the whole thing collapsed so quickly, as all the trust-fund babies and pretty people spilled onto the sand on the day of and discovered it was all lies.

I now know how easy it would be to fill up the ‘B’ Ark. All we need to do is pay Kendall Jenner $250,000 to tell the kinds of people who think she has anything to say to climb the boarding plank, and they’ll go, guzzling champagne and taking smirking selfies as they scurry aboard. Good riddance.

I wanna go to Mexico now

My wife and I have been watching this show, The Final Plate, on NetFlix. It features these talented chefs competing against each other for something or other — they basically ripped off Iron Chef. It started off interestingly, but is turning into a bit of a slog, and jeez, I’m really disliking the emcee and those obnoxious, pointless pauses (“and now … … … … … begin!”). I’ve developed a few other gripes, as well. But this isn’t about the show!

Fortunately, before I began to sour on it, one of the early episodes featured the cuisine of Mexico, and oh man, I started pining to visit Mexico again. If nothing else, just for the food. I still dream about real Mexican food.

Then I saw this video.

It is silly — I don’t know how you would test for Mexican ancestry, since the people there are such a melange of different origins. Spanish? Native American? Black? All those other Europeans who have migrated there? I don’t think any test is going to find that I have much in the way of Mexican ancestry — I’m a blinding white mixture of Scandinavian and English (although 23andMe does say I’m 0.6% Spanish), so I’m not going to get any discount from AeroMexico. Unless loving the place would give me some honorary, spiritual association. Or the test is only a random number generator, which wouldn’t surprise me.

The video ends with some guy saying, I’d go to Mexico, if they had Taco Bells on the street corners down there. He would be disappointed. Taco Bell is terrible greasy cheesy glop — real Mexican food is diverse and complex and wonderful and the kind of thing I would dream about. Maybe more Americans should visit the country and learn more about it.

How hard is it to get your garbage paper published?

Not very. The problem is that while the majority of science journals are legit and at least try to be honest, there are some that simply rubber-stamp submissions…and then charge a fee, of course.

Experts debate how many journals falsely claim to engage in peer review. Cabells, an analytics firm in Texas, has compiled a blacklist of those which it believes are guilty. According to Kathleen Berryman, who is in charge of this list, the firm employs 65 criteria to determine whether a journal should go on it—though she is reluctant to go into details. Cabells’ list now totals around 8,700 journals, up from a bit over 4,000 a year ago. Another list, which grew to around 12,000 journals, was compiled until recently by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado. Using Mr Beall’s list, Bo-Christer Björk, an information scientist at the Hanken School of Economics, in Helsinki, estimates that the number of articles published in questionable journals has ballooned from about 53,000 a year in 2010 to more than 400,000 today. He estimates that 6% of academic papers by researchers in America appear in such journals.

If 6% of papers in shoddy journals is 400,000 papers, that implies that almost 7 million papers are published each year. No wonder I can’t keep up. But still, 6% is a fairly low percentage, and as the article says, there are tools to evaluate journals. Cabell’s blacklist seems to require payment to access — and a rather hefty payment at that — so it’s only going to be accessible if you have an institutional subscription. Anyone can browse Beall’s list of predatory journals. All of these lists have pitfalls, some of them discussed in this review of Cabell’s.

Both sides profit from these unscrupulous journals — the publishers get money, and the academics get to pad their CVs, and you’re punished if you point that out.

But one academic has been prepared to stick his neck out and investigate his own institution. Last year Derek Pyne, an economist at Thompson Rivers University’s business school, in British Columbia, published a paper in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, itself published by the University of Toronto Press. In it, he reported that many of the business school’s administrators, and most of its economics and business faculty with research responsibilities, had published in journals on Mr Beall’s blacklist. Dr Pyne also claimed that these papers seemed to further their authors’ careers. Of the professors who had published in the blacklisted journals, 56% had subsequently won at least one research award from the school. All ten instructors promoted to full professor during the study period had published in a journal on Mr Beall’s list.

By the way, Beall of Beall’s blacklist faced all kinds of pressure to stop, and the list is now maintained by someone who demands anonymity; Pyne also got in trouble.

Subsequently, Dr Pyne told school officials that an administrator up for promotion had published widely in blacklisted journals. This earned Dr Pyne an e-mail from the university’s human-resources department on June 15th, threatening him with disciplinary action for “defamatory language and accusations”. When asked, the university declined to comment.

So, apparently, if you’ve got a goofy pile of crap you want published as peer-reviewed science, there’s somebody somewhere who will oblige you. That makes an ‘experiment’ in which someone wants to discredit an entire academic field by getting garbage papers published somewhere rather pointless and inconclusive, don’t you think? You have to wonder what kind of twit would consider such an exercise meaningful.

Help Vyckie Garrison

Vyckie Garrison is an awesome person who managed to extract herself from the Quiverfull movement — that ghastly Christian cult that insisted that women must be continuously pregnant in order to spawn hordes of children. She got out of that, remarried, and then discovered that her new husband was an abusive, controlling, and gaslighting slimeball. If you’ve ever wondered why she wasn’t writing for the blog she founded, No Longer Quivering, it’s because her husband made her give it up, and give up her writing career in general, to increase her dependency on him. There are other ugly details that I won’t share here. She has once again fled an untenable situation, hastily packing up a few belongings and her family while he was off at work, and driving off to an undisclosed location. Her family was broken up while she is in hiding, as well.

Now she’s desperate and alone. If you can, make a donation to help her out.

Goofus and Gallant

I remember these little cartoons from when I was a kid, which tells you how old they are, but my kids also read them. They were staples of the magazines in pediatrician’s offices (they might still be, I don’t know). It was a simple concept, a series of panels in which two kids were faced with a situation, and Gallant would respond in a good way, while Goofus would screw it up even worse. It plays out in real life, too!

Earyn McGee is a grad student at the University of Arizona. One of the fun things she does on Twitter is post photos under the hashtag #FindThatLizard, and then post the answer later, under the hashtag #FoundThatLizard. That’s the game. She has some simple rules, like this:

Well, a well-known science blogger found that photo, and appropriated it, and put up a post saying “Spot the Lizards!”. Without linking to the original. Or naming the author. Saying he’d name her later, after everyone had played the game on his blog. But…but…that’s just the game on her twitter feed. No one needed his blog to enjoy the idea, and he added absolutely nothing to the game.

So let’s play Goofus and Gallant.

Gallant:

Here’s McGee’s response. It’s a gracious acknowledgment of appreciation, and a polite request that he not undermine her efforts.

Wow. I’m never that nice. But that’s a classic Gallant reaction.

Now watch how a Goofus can take a bad situation and make it even worse.

Goofus:

This is how a Goofus reacts, by blaming everyone else.

Umm. . . I SAID I’d give the tweet in the reveal post at noon, which I did and which shows who posted the picture. You should know better than to chastise me before you know all the facts. Shame on you. I will accept an apology.

UPDATE: Apparently a Twitter mob was sic’ed on me by people who didn’t even read my post, which said this: “Can you spot both? I’m not giving the original tweet, as it contains the answer, but I will in the reveal at noon Chicago time.”

Credit was of course given; I withheld the source for a few hours so people could guess without looking at the answer in the subsequent tweet.

The Twitter outrage mob didn’t read the original post (this seems to be common), and piled on without doing so. I’d say they all owe me an apology, but of course I expect none. That’s the way outrage culture works. Even if you err, you never apologize.

Wow (that’s a bad wow, if you can’t guess). That he announced that he was subverting McGee’s game ahead of time and would eventually reveal the creator does not change the fact that he was basically stealing attention from a grad student. Then to demand an apology? Hoo boy.

But then he updates to chastise people, calling them a “twitter mob”, for not reading his blog post, as if that were the star around which everyone is supposed to orbit, and demands that everyone apologize to him.

Jebus. That’s too extreme a difference for even a Goofus and Gallant cartoon. No one would believe that Goofus could be that petty in Highlights for Children. But then, the creator apparently didn’t know Jerry Coyne.

By the way, Gallants who use Twitter might do well to follow Earyn McGee.

Jordan Peterson gets email

He gets evidence that those damned Leftists are corrupting the purity of STEM, and shares it with the world. It’s embarrassing. He doesn’t understand anything he’s talking about.

Well, I’m just going to have to spit out what went through my mind as I read it.

I would like to inform you that your assertion about post modernism bastardizing the sciences is an accurate one.

Anyone want to take any bets on whether either of these bozos understand what “post modernism” is?

I am taking a Big Data certificate program at York University. We are, for no apparent reason, being forced to read a book about how data analytics is creating inequality and discrimination in our society.

If you bet that he did, you lose. Post modernism is not the same as recognizing structural inequities in society. Expecting students to understand the consequences of their work is not outside the bounds of a course.

Oh, but he is being FORCED to read a textbook for no apparent reason. I would think that a fellow academic colleague would know about this bad attitude: a student comes into a class, thinking they already know it all, and anything the professor assigns is a priori deemed irrelevant. They why are you taking the class, bucko? Did you forget that you’re here to learn new things?

I think there is an apparent reason the student is assigned that book. It’s because Big Data fucking matters. It has an impact on society. You need to be conscious of that fact, here’s a book that is going to make you think about what you are doing.

Unless, of course, you’re a cocky Peterast who thinks actions don’t have material outcomes.

This seems wholly inappropriate for a course that is fundamentally structured around learning computer programming.

Where you, the student, know better than the instructor what is “appropriate” in a subject you haven’t learned about yet.

The specific author we are being forced to read is Cathy O’Neal

FORCED!!! Wait, wait. Cathy O’Neil? MathBabe? @mathbabedotorg? She’s brilliant. Your course sounds like it must be very good, sharing interesting perspectives.

who is part of occupy wall street, black lives matter, and who is a blue haired third wave feminist who uses her credentials to push her ideology.

Yeah, credentials! Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard, taught at MIT, left academia to make money in the financial industry, left that after discovering how soulless it is, has written several well-received books on data science, you know, that subject you claim to be studying. But she has blue hair.

Here’s a short video in which O’Neil explains how data science algorithms are not intrinsically objective.

That sounds like an important perspective, to me. Maybe you ought to pay attention in class, Big Data Person.

She has written about how all university admissions are biased, not just Harvard’s, and this is primarily because the SATs and other intelligence testing is correlated to income, and without proof, concludes that this necessitates bias towards privileged people.

If you find in your data analysis that rich people are preferentially getting into college, then that is evidence of a bias. If your hypothesis is that rich people are more intelligent, you need to provide independent evidence that that is the case. (I know what to expect: the circular argument that well, rich people are admitted to college, therefore they must be smart. I got into college, therefore I am smart enough to spot a logical fallacy at a thousand paces.)

It is actual insanity that this woman is regarded with high enough esteem to be teaching her perspective to people who are learning data analytics techniques.

Why is it insane? Because she has blue hair and is a woman, therefore everything is ideological? Read her book. Learn to analyze the information she presents, because that’s what she does. It is, supposedly, what you are taking a class to learn more about.

It appears they want to instantiate an ideological motivation into our purpose for analyzing data.

I know this one, too. You want to pretend that your ideology that data is totally objective and unbiased is not an ideology. You cannot simply “analyze data” without awareness of the assumptions and hypotheses that surround that analysis.

I see this sentiment at my job as well where we have employees who are PHD level social psychologists conducting research projects around the concept of implicit bias testing even though they claim a comprehensive understanding of quantitative analytics.

I don’t get it. This clown is writing to Peterson, a PHD [sic] level psychologist, implying that PHD [sic] level psychologists can’t possibly have a comprehensive understanding of quantitative analytics? I know a few psychologists. Many of them have a better understanding of statistics and mathematics in general than I do. Yet Peterson considers this a valid complaint? Much confusion here.

Also, that understanding of implicit bias comes from a quantitative analysis of data. Try reading the literature…which is what your instructor is trying to get you to do, while you run crying and screaming to Jordan Peterson to get the bad blue-haired lady to stop making you think.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to take my place in this realm with confidence when I am being force fed this propaganda on all fronts.

FORCE FED!! How dare teachers make you aware of what you don’t know. It might hurt your self-esteem. Where’s the hug box for aspiring data scientists who don’t want to be FORCED to think about the meaning of their work?

It is hard to move forward with this constant bombardment of counter factual forces that we are being obliged to follow or be termed unqualified for the position.

FORCES! If you refuse to consider the effects of and reasoning behind the algorithms you use, then it’s true: you’re unqualified for the position. You want to be a mindless coder. That is not what a data scientist does.

Man, that was painful. That Jordan Peterson thinks it was persuasive in any way, rather than just the entitled whine of a selfish child who doesn’t want to learn, should tell us that he is just another know-nothing anti-intellectual.