Today I learned about Gell-Mann Amnesia

Why didn’t I know this term before? It’s useful.

The phenomenon of people believing newspapers on topics which they are not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing them to be extremely inaccurate on certain topics which they are knowledgeable about.

It’s also amusing, because the term was coined by Michael Crichton, who is a prime example of a beneficiary of the Gell-Mann effect — people think he’s credible on the things he wrote about, which he wasn’t.

This video creator also discusses what she calls Mann-Gell Amnesia, where a genuine expert gets all hung up on an irrelevant error in minor simplifications, not recognizing that science communication often involves making simplifications that need to be later corrected, as people get deeper into a topic.

It’s a long video, but hang in there for her explanation of why Michio Kaku is dead to her.

Happy Father’s Day for those of you who have fathers you respect

I don’t have a father anymore, and I miss him all the time. If you got one, give him a call!

I spent the weekend with my daughter and granddaughter (National Grandparents Day is on Sunday, 10 September, my wife’s birthday, so that’ll be easy to remember), and Skatje fixed a delicious dinner of fish and mushrooms, while Iliana made festive mudcakes. I haven’t heard from my oldest son yet, but that’s better than what my other son did — he called to tell me he’s going camping at the Mora Campground near La Push, and he didn’t invite me! I’m very upset. I love that part of the world.

He also reminded me of one time I was camping out that way with my brother, Jim, and how we got soaked in the constant rain there and drove into Forks to get cheeseburgers. It’s weird how the older you get, the more associations every bit of dirt on the planet acquires, and everything keeps bringing back old memories.

Anyway, Jim’s dead now too, and he left behind 3 kids who I hope are all remembering him today.

Now I need to go recover from hours of driving and an exhausting 4 year old.

A retraction long overdue

RETRACTED. Another article on that bogus Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria nonsense has been pulled from the literature.

The usual suspects are all outraged at this rebuke. The odious Colin Wright wrote an article damning the journal — he claims the retraction was over a minor, inconsistently applied technicality.

The technicality? Informed consent. Very minor. Totally unimportant. I don’t know why we even bother.

For those unfamiliar with this slop, the assessment of the psychological state of young trans people was obtained by soliciting self-reports from their parents, parents recruited from web sites where people obsessed with trans issues gather. All their data was gathered from an anti-trans website! It’s as if someone looked up the parents of scientists by finding their posted comments on Answers in Genesis, and then came to the conclusion that all evilutionists were formed by resentment of their pastors and association with god-hating school clubs, and determined that scientists were all pathological basket-cases.

I don’t know how it got published in the first place. The authors are openly biased, they pulled all their data from an openly biased website, and they even admit in the paper that there is a chance their results were biased, and somehow, it got accepted anyway. Surprise, if you poll posters to a site called “ParentsOfROGDKids,” you’ll get testimonials to the existence of ROGD.

Another surprise: they even say in the paper that The initial purpose of the survey was not for scientific publication, but information gathering for a community of parents with shared concerns. Then, what the hell, they published it anyway.

Oh, and if you want to know where one of the authors, J. Michael Bailey (hey, I also mentioned him yesterday) is coming from, this might help:

🤮

Careers are apparently an outmoded concept

Tenure is under attack in conservative states. Republicans want to take a career that is already difficult to enter, demands extreme flexibility in where you can live, and doesn’t pay particularly well, and they want to make it even more unattractive, and they are finding that increased uncertainty means their university positions are harder to fill.

But I’m not going to try to defend tenure here. Instead, I was floored by this one comment:

Tenured university professors are the only people in our society that have the guarantee of a job, Texas Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate, said upon passage of the bill. These professors claim ‘academic freedom’ and hide behind their tenure to continue blatantly advancing their agenda of societal division.

That’s not their agenda, so that’s a lie. More shocking, though, is the implicit notion that no one should have a guarantee of a job. We live in a society where everyone is totally dependent on a reliable source of income for food, housing, and health care, but you are not promised the means to obtain that income. They want your life to be precarious, because then they can control you. That threat of potentially losing the job you need to live is a powerful tool of manipulation, it’s the knife at your throat they can use to force you to accept lower pay, or terrible working conditions, or long hours.

Why shouldn’t truck drivers and welders and fruit pickers and make-up artists and poets and electricians and house movers be guaranteed a job? These are all positions that are in demand (oh, sorry, except for poets — but that just says there ought to be a way for people to live while doing art), so why can’t we, as a nation, agree that this pool of ability ought to be reasonably maintained by paying the people willing to do it? Let them have the power to demand the right to live because they’re willing to do the work.

I know, this is what unions are for. Republicans hate unions, too. Republicans want your life precarious so they can extract maximal profit from you.

This is a little bit personal. When I was growing up, my father was a mechanic, a skilled job that I couldn’t do, you probably couldn’t do, and that required a lot of hard labor to do. Employers played games with him all of his life, though. Boeing was the dominant employer in the region, and they’d constantly fine-tune their work force, letting people go on short notice, and then later re-hire them, only to fire them a little later. Life under that regimen was like being a yo-yo, and it wasn’t easy having to scramble to find a new job every 6 months to a year, and maybe accepting a lesser job that didn’t suit your abilities because you’ve got kids to feed. It kept the workers hungry and willing to compromise on pay, though!

That’s what Republicans want for everyone. Professors should all be forced into adjunct positions with semester by semester contracts; they should be doing academic piecework, cobbling together a curriculum and doing research in spaces they have to periodically take down and reassemble. That’s what they want for everyone, if we’re all living hand-to-mouth and at the mercy of our employers, that’s great for profit-taking. In the short term, anyway. It might compromise quality in the long run, but by then the managers will have extracted the wealth that pays for their mansions and boats and expensive cars, and that’s what matters.

Guilt by association

Flash this image to see how fast a ‘free speech warrior’ will block you.

One accidental occurrence is meaningless and forgivable, but when you keep hanging out with the same group of racists for over 20 years, and when you are repeatedly informed that these are bad guys, the correlation becomes rather more substantial. All you have to do is look at Steven Pinker’s history of academic friendships to see that maybe there’s a problem here.

  • 1999 — Pinker joins the human biodiversity (h-bd) group begun by Steve Sailer, now the editor of VDARE, along with race science researchers like Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, race science funders like Ron Unz (of the Unz report), J.P. Rushton of the infamous, explicitly eugenic Pioneer Fund, and J. Michael Bailey, who used pseudoscience to stoke transphobia and hate.
  • 2004 — As editor of Best American Science Writing, Pinker publishes Steve Sailer’s essay citing inbreeding in Iraq as a rationale for an inevitable failed state, as well as fellow h-bd members Virginia Postrel and Daniel C. Dennett. Also included is writing by Max Tegmark, the MIT professor who recently attempted to fund a neo-nazi media group as part of the Future of Life institute, and two columns by Nicholas Wade of the New York Times, who later wrote a ‘deeply flawed, deceptive’ book on race science and was condemned by 140 population geneticists for misappropriating their work.
  • 2005 — Pinker writes a letter “to protest the shocking and disgraceful treatment of professor Helmuth Nyborg”, a fellow h-bd member who speaks at the same conferences as David Duke and researches sex and race differences in IQ. In June of 2006 Nyborg was found to be “grossly negligent”, misrepresenting his own scientific efforts and results. Nyborg is subsequently relieved of duty from Aarhus University as part of a 3 year investigation. In 2009, Pinker sends a second letter in defense of Nyborg without changing a word, addressing it this time to the new president of the university. Many fellow h-bd members join him, including Rosalind Arden, Harpending, and Rushton, as does Linda Gottfredson.
  • 2006 — Pinker writes a lengthy article on the the IQ of Ashekenazi Jews by fellow hb-d members Harpending and Cochran (debunked and later proven utterly unfounded by better science and scientists) in which he blithely asserts that “Like intelligence, personality traits are measurable, heritable within a group, and slightly different, on average, between groups.” In 2019, Pinker defends Bret Stephens’ use of the discredited paper, while Stephens goes on say that he regrets not obscuring the source of the data, noting that “I could have cited from any number of other sources not tainted by Harpending’s odious racial views.”
  • 2007 — Pinker provides counsel to Alan Dershowitz, with whom he taught a class on Morality and Taboo as described by the Edge.org (full syllabus here), on the interpretation of the interstate commerce law used to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein. The late Epstein was, of course, a prominent funder of the Edge.org, the elite group of scientists and thinkers which included Wilson, Dawkins, Dennett, Cochran, and Pinker (as well as Gould and many others). Pinker is a bit sensitive about this connection.
  • 2012 — Pinker helps fellow hb-d member and holocaust denier Ron Unz tailor a critique of self-described “scientific racist” Richard Lynn’s work on IQ, emphasizing his openness to it as a legitimate area of inquiry. (arguments about who is the real racist get ever more surreal in these circles).
  • 2013 — Pinker, an advocate for the biological inevitability of war, coordinated with Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett to urge that book reviewer John Horgan either denounce a book critiquing an ethnographer (Chagnon) and his writing on his subject (the Yanomami of the Amazon) or recuse himself entirely, warning that a positive review might ruin his career. Horgan, in conversation with Chagnon for more than a decade at that point, does not cave to the pressure, later saying “I’m only sorry that my review did not point out the irony that Chagnon — unlike some of his hard-core Darwinian champions and like many of his critics — rejects the view of war as an instinct.”
  • 2018 — Pinker shares a Quillette article by fellow hb-d member Rosalind Arden on the disinvitation of fellow Nyborg supporter, Linda Gottfredson, from a conference. In his note, he tuts at the SPLC for labeling her an ‘extremist’ simply because she has spent nearly half a century insisting that racial disparities in IQ are innate, immutable, and ensure unequal outcomes between racial groups. Perhaps he feels this too is a reasonable hypothesis — or perhaps he feels the conference would benefit from the work of Arden and Gottfredson correlating intelligence and semen quality. (Arden discloses their professional relationship if not the subject of their work in her article, saying of intelligence research “How often do we take the time to walk empathetically in the cognitive shoes of others? Millions of people struggle to maintain their health, their jobs, and their finances for the blameless reason that they are a little less adept.”)
  • 2022 — Upon the posthumous discovery of E.O. Wilson’s approving correspondence with eugenicist (and h-bd member) Rushton, Pinker does not reflect or contemplate the implications of this discovery for either his field or his close collaboration with Wilson. Instead, he promotes an article by Michael Shermer (another one of the New Atheists that took a hard right) and remembers the battles Wilson, like Pinker, fought in the NYRB on behalf of biological determinism.

I’m also grateful that the article reminded me of the argument between Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould on evolutionary psychology. Gould was brilliant. Man, I miss that guy.

Bari Weiss is an agglutinizing agent for losers

It does me good to see one of those hateful anti-woke organizations falling apart, but it’s also dismaying to see how easily radical conservative groups can suck money out of the pockets of the obscenely rich. I guess if you’re extremely wealthy you can easily throw a million dollars here, a half million there, as long as the recipient panders to the bigotry that comes naturally to bloated capitalist nepo babies. Here’s a long story about how a few IDW types built a short-lived organization on connections to the rich. It features Bari Weiss, of course.

Weiss had already been talking with a few of her friends about creating a new anti-woke organization. One was Melissa Chen, a writer and the managing director at Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit that takes books about concepts such as liberty and reason and translates them into Arabic, to make them more accessible; she later described herself as a conservative who was forming her trajectory in “the anti-woke space.” Another was Peter Boghossian, a former professor best known for getting absurd papers about subjects such as dogs perpetuating rape culture at dog parks published in feminist and postmodern academic journals to expose what he saw as corruption in scholarship, and who has earned some prominence as a public intellectual defending free speech and opposing illiberalism. Chen and Boghossian had workshopped a pitch to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for a project to create “a modern-day Death Star” to wage “ideological warfare” on the “enemies of modernity”; their plan involved writing coördinated op-eds and promoting anti-woke content, but it was rejected. Weiss and her friends also sought advice from Niall Ferguson, a historian at the Hoover Institution, about the best way forward.

OK. The recipe begins with Weiss, Chen, Boghossian, and Ferguson, creating a rather shitty roux that has no taint of progressive values. Then they invented a label and an ambitious agenda.

Eventually, they settled on a name and a strategy. The organization would be called fair: The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. The name was an initial act of defiance, implicitly painting the group’s opponents, self-described “anti-racists,” as the real racists. The founders’ dream was for the group to replace the A.C.L.U. as America’s new defender of civil liberties—a mission they believed the A.C.L.U. had abandoned. The vision involved a three-pronged approach: legal advocacy, via letters and lawsuits; grassroots advocacy, via a network of volunteers; and education about the issues, spread through projects such as explainer videos and training programs.

Wait, wait, wait — FAIR already exists; it’s a progressive media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. It’s been around since 1986. I have to assume that the confusion was intentional, and that we’re off to a sleazy start.

The American Civil Liberties Union has been around since 1920. It’s a distinguished organization that has fought for our constitutional rights, including free speech, and these bozos want to replace it with an ideologically biased group of bitter reactionaries? I don’t think so. So they added more extremists.

Weiss and the other founders recruited an informal board of advisers—a mix of podcasters, journalists, academics, and lawyers. Among them were the media personality Megyn Kelly, the writer Andrew Sullivan, and the anti-critical-race-theory activist Christopher Rufo.

Kelly, Sullivan, and dear god, Rufo? Can this recipe possibly get any more ugly and unpalatable? Sure can. They needed some rich sugar daddies, and they got ’em.

But it was Weiss, more than anyone else, who was clearly the group’s big draw. She brought in a half-million-dollar donation from Harlan Crow, a Texas real-estate developer who, ProPublica recently reported, paid for years of undisclosed vacations and private-jet travel for the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Suzy Edelman, another donor, who gave fair a million dollars in 2021, wrote in an e-mail to Weiss, “It’s your courage that inspired me to join the movement—not just to reform what’s been captured, but to build new, wonderful things.” I know Weiss a little bit—we’ve hung out in professional settings a few times over the years. When fair was founded, she had just left the New York Times in a very public way, and she was focussed on launching new organizations. “I think we are in a moment of profound change in American life, in which many old institutions are crumbling or have lost trust,” she told me recently.

You should begin to realize that what we’ve got here is a tiny, cozy in-group of destructive, bigoted assholes who have captivated a few bigoted asshole multi-millionaires who were willing to toss them big pots of money. This is the root of our current American problem: we have a surplus of spoiled rich people who know very little but are philosophically committed to the idea that their vast wealth was hard-earned, or they wouldn’t have it. It’s easy to milk them of cash by pointing at some poor people and saying that they’re out to get you.

That’s what this whole story is about, petty bigots with buckets of inherited wealth, and grifters like Weiss who know exactly how to part them from their money. Just repeat “woke, woke, woke” at them and rely on their contempt for others to trigger donations.

Fortunately, the wheels started to come off Weiss’s FAIR gravy train pretty quickly. The thing is, grifters know how to get money, but they aren’t very effective at using it. The organization started to disintegrate in disputes over how nasty and mean they ought to be, and all they would do is talk, talk, talk.

Rob Schläpfer, a volunteer state coördinator in Oregon, told me that he worked on a plan to mobilize parents to attend school-board meetings, but it “didn’t go anywhere. I was just spinning my wheels.” He found it hard to get direction from the national office about what to focus on, or how his chapter’s work should fit into fair’s mission. As time went on, other volunteer chapter leaders around the country started calling and texting Schläpfer to vent their frustrations. “fair was basically virtue-signalling for the anti-woke,” he said. “It was not an organization designed to actually do anything.”

Oh, good. Please continue bleeding money that accomplishes nothing.

Then the initial crop of assholes started to jump ship.

There seemed to be a genuine philosophical conflict within the fair community. In September of 2021, two members of the advisory board, Rufo and the libertarian podcaster Kmele Foster, started squabbling on Twitter about Rufo’s methods for opposing critical race theory in K-12 schools, which Foster described as inviting “all kinds of reactionary hysteria.” Rufo resigned from the advisory board soon afterward. “The question with FAIR that I had was: what are the substantive wins the organization has accomplished? And it was very hard for anyone to explain this,” Rufo wrote to me in an e-mail. fair’s high-profile advisers were “transgressive enough to generate attention, but not transgressive enough to achieve results. It’s almost worse than doing nothing, as it creates the illusion of action and absorbs political energy that would be better spent elsewhere.”

Worst of all, the money was dissatisfied.

Behind the scenes, there was deeper trouble. Suzy Edelman, one of the donors who gave a million dollars in 2021, had started asking questions about whether her gift had been used appropriately, requesting fair’s receipts and copies of the contracts that it used for volunteers and staff. For months, Edelman had also been questioning fair’s approach, particularly on gender issues. “Sex-based rights matter. Single sex spaces for women and girls must be protected. Transgenderism is a fiction designed to destroy,” she had written in an e-mail. She noted that fair had positioned its programs as an “alternative” to mainstream D.E.I., or diversity, equity, and inclusion, training, but, she said, “You can’t ‘DEI-lite’ this issue.” (A spokesperson for Edelman maintained that her concerns about fair were not related to its politics, only its “governance and use of charitable funds.”)

Weiss and Bartning exchanged terse e-mails about Edelman in August. “I am quite nervous that she has gotten to the Crows, which would be really damaging to me personally,” Weiss wrote, referring to Harlan Crow.

Oh, dear. Grifters hate to lose a mark, especially a rich, gullible sucker like Crow. Poor Bari! If she gets a reputation for being an ineffectual, obvious money-waster, the rich people won’t talk to her.

Hmmm. Have any of Bari Weiss’s schemes ever accomplished anything? We should be pleased that she’s at the poisonous core of so many PR campaigns for the Right.

The lesson here is that “anti-woke” is a recipe for incompetence and failure — it’s just that it inspires so much suffering in its inevitable decay.

Mission actually accomplished

We did it! We got our poster done and printed!

We’re flying off to the American Arachnology Society meeting the week of 24 June, so we even finished ahead of time. There have been meetings where I’m still slicing up copy with an X-acto knife and adding Letraset text the night before — but those were the Olden Times. Now that we can just jiggle things on a computer screen and send it to a printer, now we get it done a week and a half ahead of time.

We also got our registration and housing paid for, and booked our flight to Syracuse…and there’s the catch. The meeting is at Cornell, and we don’t quite know how to bridge that last hour of the trip. There’s no public transportation from the airport to the university! (That’s much like UMM, only we’re 3 hours away from the airport.) We’ll figure that out this week, and if nothing else, we’ll throw money at an uber.

As you might expect, the poster is liberally covered with spiders, so I’ll refrain from posting it here — you’ll have to join my Patreon to see it…or come to the meeting! You’ll see even more spiders!

It’s all quantum

Where could these wacky ideas about physics have come from?

That UFO “whistleblower,” David Grusch, who so captivated Tucker Carlson with his credibility, is back and singing like a canary. He’s spilling all the beans about America’s secret UFO program.

Grusch, who received a college scholarship from the Air Force to study physics, did not describe the unusual aircraft as technology from another planet. I don’t want to necessarily denote origin, he said. I don’t think we have all the data to say, Oh, they’re coming from a certain location. Grusch proposed the vehicles the Pentagon is hiding could have come from a different physical dimension as described in quantum mechanics, saying, We know there are extra dimensions due to high-energy particle collisions, etc., and there’s a theoretical framework to explain that.

It could be that this is not necessarily extraterrestrial and actually that it’s coming from a higher-dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here, he said.

In the interview, Grusch reiterated that he has not personally seen the evidence of nonhuman technology but that intelligence officials he spoke with as part of his role on the UFO task force have told him of its existence.

Grusch came so close to the truth. Of these UFOs he has never seen and never witnessed any physical evidence of their existence, he concluded I remember interviewing these personnel and thinking, Either these people are lying to me, having a psychotic break, or this is some crazy but true stuff that’s happening. But somehow he accepted his third option.

Christianity is a death cult

Do I need to explain this? Thulsa Doom was not a role model.

A religious cultist in Kenya did not get the memo, though. Pastor Paul Mackenzie has been telling his parishioners that they can meet Jesus sooner by starving themselves to death. The end result: mass graves.

The number of people who died after a Kenyan pastor ordered his followers to starve to death in order to meet Jesus has surpassed 300, authorities said Tuesday, and the death toll is expected to rise as more exhumations are planned.

The death toll increased to 303 after 19 more bodies were recovered from mass graves in the vast forested land in Kilifi County of coastal Kenya, where pastor Paul Mackenzie and his followers lived.

Coastal regional commissioner Rhoda Onyancha told local journalists that 613 people tied to the area are missing.

There are a couple of pastors in this region who have been misinforming their congregations in ways that lead to mass deaths — it’s like a morbid evangelical revival.