Boghossian in a panic!

He thinks he’s going to be fired from his position at Portland State. That’s not necessarily the case, but Boghossian has been found guilty of ethical misconduct for his “grievance studies” exercise.

Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University and the only one of three researchers on the project to hold a full-time academic position, was found by his institutional review board to have committed research misconduct. Specifically, he failed to secure its approval before proceeding with research on human subjects — in this case, the journal editors and reviewers he was tricking with his absurd but seemingly well-researched papers.

Their defense is peculiar. James Lindsay literally says “It’s not actually scholarship”, Pluckrose says, “They can’t say we needed IRB approval…because there weren’t any real human subjects”, and that they couldn’t ask for IRB approval because that would tip off the (human) reviewers they were trying to trick. But that’s nonsense — of course you can do blind and double-blind studies on humans, IRBs approve those all the time. Here’s what they actually expected:

“An IRB protocol application should have been submitted to the Office of Research Integrity,” reads a determination letter from Portland state’s IRB dated last month. “University policy requires that all research involving human subjects conducted by faculty, other employees and students [on campus] must have prior review and approval by the IRB.”

Exactly. As an extra bonus, having an official declaration of exactly what they were trying to do and how they planned to analyze it ahead of time would have been more persuasive that they were actually doing a real study. But they weren’t, and they’ve even admitted it — if it’s not really scholarship, then what was it? I don’t know. Garbage? A publicity stunt? Propaganda?

It’s also the hypocrisy.

Over all, Christensen said he and Sears believe that Boghossian “wants to have it both ways.” That is, publicly presenting his project as a “rigorous study that exposed flaws in the peer-review system” while also “claiming that the hoax wasn’t a genuine study, and therefore IRB approval doesn’t apply.”

I don’t do research on humans, but even I know this kind of work demands IRB review (spider research doesn’t, at all), and I’m a bit shocked that they didn’t even discuss it with an IRB officer. I don’t even see any reason to expect that the application would be turned down, except possibly over its lack of rigor and poor foundation. By not going through the protocols — which even Boghossian admits are important and necessary — they did a disservice to research.

I agree with this assessment.

“We think that he did commit academic fraud, by design, and that some professional sanctions might be warranted,” Christensen continued. Boghossian and his colleagues “did misrepresent themselves, they did falsify their evidence and they did commit a serious infraction of research misconduct by deceiving these editors, wasting the time of the readers and then publicly slandering the journals and their fields. It is the right of any university to investigate fraud perpetrated by its employees.”

They also wasted the time of reviewers — you know that reviewing papers is unpaid service work for professors, right?

But guess who is defending Boghossian: Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker. Of course.

At least we’ve got the authors on record now admitting that their “study” wasn’t a study, and wasn’t even any kind of scholarship at all.

I’m afraid

My wife is something of a packrat, especially with papers — she has a dread of losing some important documentation, so she keeps it all. All of it. Bank statements from 1995, that sort of thing.

Then last night she started watching this Marie Kondo show. I’m cringing. I want Kondo to stop smiling like a manic mannequin. I’m getting annoyed that she shows up at these people’s houses, does next to nothing other than making a few suggestions, like how to fold clothes, and tells them to get to work and turn their belongings upside down…and then leaves. The family then gets to work and does everything.

She does have some good ideas, but the weird meditation thing at the start, and thanking the clothing you’re throwing out…no thanks. I don’t need the bogosity layered on top of the practical.

But my wife is getting a gleam in her eye, and has suggested that we should watch another episode or two tonight. She also moaned with delight when these couples talk about how cleaning together has brought them closer together. I’m worried that I’m going to get dragged into the KonMarie cult, even if it does mean we’ll finally get rid of all those boxes full of useless, ancient paper. Has anyone else been suffering through this? Does anyone know any good deprogrammers?

Sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their heads, and they still managed to screw it up

Aquaman. My favorite comic book as a kid, about a guy who can breathe underwater and talk to fish. I was looking forward to this movie, and the trailer had some promising hints…like when, as a boy, Aquaboy is being bullied in an aquarium and all the fish come to the glass and intimidate the bad kids by staring at them. That’s the Aquaman I wanted to see, where the power was all about communication and cooperation with marine creatures.

That’s not what we got. It’s another fantasy movie about a muscle-bound lunk getting his way. I had so many problems sitting through this crap.

  1. Jason Momoa can’t act. He’s big and hairy and flippant, but that’s it. There’s zero chemistry with the love interest that’s shoe-horned in — we’re never given any reason why Mera would find him interesting or attractive, other than that maybe she’s shallow and only interested in his hunky body.
  2. What is his superpower?. He seems to be a wet superman. Early on, he’s shot by what looks like a hand-held cannon with exploding shells — they knock him down, but all he says is “ow” as he gets back up. Yet later he’s pierced by a trident through the upper chest and shoulder (it’s only a flesh wound of course, he’s all better a few minutes later). His vulnerability fluctuates as the plot requires.
  3. Everyone is superpowerful. It gets to be a bit much. There’s a scene in the trailer where Mera and Aquaman casually jump out of an airplane flying over the Sahara Desert — they fall thousands of feet, hit the sand with a bit of a whoomf, and then walk on to their destination. Later, there are a couple of literal cliffhangers, with Mera rescued from falling into a chasm by Aquaman, and I’m just thinking — let her fall. She’ll bounce. There are no stakes here.
  4. The plot is a pathetic scavenger hunt. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: there’s a grand macguffin that will allow him to defeat the bad guy, and the hero has to follow a trail of clues around the world to find it. It’s the laziest plot device ever.
  5. The writers are too lazy to maintain even that thin thread of a plot. Step 1: Go to ancient cave in Sahara Desert, use widget to find map to Sicily and another widget. Step 2: Go to Sicily, use Widget #2 to spy two islands in the Mediterranean, then, aww, fuckit, this is boring. Skip islands. Steal fishing boat, putt-putt straight to the end boss to fight over macguffin.
  6. The world is tiny and weightless. How do they get from the middle of the Sahara Desert to Sicily? They just do. Walk, maybe? They take that stolen fishing boat to the Trench Kingdom, which is presumably somewhere deep in the Western Pacific. So…Sicily, through the Straits of Gibraltar, south to the southern hemisphere, round the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, north along the coast of South Asia…takes maybe most of the afternoon, and next thing you know their boat is being overrun by toothy Lovecraftian horrors. There’s no sense of place. It’s just The Ocean, you know, that single address.
  7. The villain is boring. It’s a white man who thinks he deserves to be King of the Ocean, so he can kill all the land-dwellers, for some reason. He has all the super-powers Atlanteans do, but his special talent is being able to open his mouth really wide and yell into the ocean. By the way, everyone is white in this movie, except the black human bad guy pirate, whose superpower is being very angry and wanting to kill Aquaman. OK, diversity is served by the merpeople, and the crab people, and the Lovecraftian horrors. If you identify as a slimy giant-eyed fanged monster, this is the movie that will finally give you some representation.
  8. Once again, medievalism. Atlantis is an advanced, super-technological society, ruled by kings, where only those with royal blood can grasp the macguffin, and kingship is established by trial by combat to the death. Fuck you, Wakanda. Black Panther had some virtues that allowed me to overlook the comically silly political system, but Aquaman doesn’t. Also, in Atlantis, miscegenation carries a death sentence. No wonder it’s so white!
  9. The bad guy is on a pointless quest. He’s trying to unite the multiple undersea kingdoms so he can get the title “Ocean’s Master” and then destroy the puny terrestrial humans. But early on, before he unites them all, he does a magic something that inundates coastlines with a huge tidal wave that throws all military ships up on the beach, and also flings all of the human’s garbage back up onto the land. Besides making Boyan Slat look even more ridiculous than he already is, that demonstrates immense power that we land lubbers can’t match. I surrender already. I, for one, welcome our new aquatic overlords.
  10. There are really only two women in the movie. There’s Aquaman’s mother, who is snatched away early in the story and fed to the Trench Horrors for breeding with a hoo-man. There’s Mera, another super-Atlantean princess, whose main role is to have flaming red hair and be Aquaman’s sidekick. She fights people, provides occasional bits of exposition, and is used by her father as a tool for dynastic marriage, but otherwise makes no contribution to the story at all. Strangely, neither Mera nor Aquaman’s mother have the kind of royal genes that would allow them to grab the magic macguffin — I guess it also senses Y chromosomes, or penises, or something. Maybe if it were an engulfing macguffin rather than a pointy stabby macguffin they could have been more useful.
  11. The physics is unbelievable. Water isn’t treated as a medium that might affect movement in anyway — poorly streamlined things just barrel through it with no effect. Also, they use whales as transport animals in Atlantis, and to fight deep in the ocean. Wouldn’t they be frequently rising to the surface to, you know, breathe?

On the plus side, if there is one, it’s a pretty movie, in a garishly over-cluttered CGI way. And, uh, that’s all I can think of.

No, really, I’m racking my brain, and there’s nothing to commend this incoherent mess with a star whose charisma rests entirely in his pecs.

The kindest critic of them all

My favorite book reviewer, Dana from Glenville, sent me a present. That was very kind of her.

I appreciate that she even included instructions on its use, but, generous as she is, I’m not going to dab mysterious liquids received in the mail on myself. Instead, I’m going to save it close at hand in case there is an outbreak of vampires.

I did consider putting it in an atomizer to see what effect it might have on my spiders, but right now I don’t have any to spare for experimentation.

If they actually were logical, it would be easy to crush them

You know that familiar Star Trekkie trope where a human makes a computer explode by leading it into a logical contradiction? It doesn’t work. It never works. Otherwise the final panel of this comic would be the freezepeacher alien melting down into a puddle of goo.

Any sentient brain will be at least subconsciously aware that it can’t encompass the entire universe of phenomena and so will be accustomed to shunting contradictions to the side. If it doesn’t fit the model of the world in their head, it’s ignored (or, in unfortunately rare cases, is used to modify the model).

That’s not the point of this comic, I know, but it just made me pine for a universe where the people who claim to be masters of objective truth actually would explode or disintegrate or whatever it is beings of pure logic do when logic fails.