Just yesterday I was savoring the rapid retreat of the piles of snow heaped up by the roadside, enjoying a nice long walk on sidewalks that were not covered with ice, and anticipating the flourishing of spiders everywhere — I even released about a hundred surplus lab spiderlings in my yard and garage. Today…
Cold. Windy. Light snow. Spring!
Here’s a radical idea: social media and capitalism are not a good match. Everyone is trying to force-fit human social interactions into a pay-to-play capitalist box, and it’s just not working.
Parler — remember Parler? One of those Twitter-substitutes fueled by conservative billionaires, promising no content moderation at all, used to plan the January 6 insurrection? That Parler? — just died. It will not be missed.
Parler, the self-described “uncancelable free speech platform,” has been sold and shut down while its new owner conducts a “strategic assessment.” The platform will be back eventually, new owner Starboard says.
The Parler website is now a simple page containing only today’s press release announcing the acquisition, which was completed without financial terms being disclosed. “No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more,” the acquisition announcement said, promising a revamp.
“While the Parler app as it is currently constituted will be pulled down from operation to undergo a strategic assessment, we at Starboard see tremendous opportunities across multiple sectors to continue to serve marginalized or even outright censored communities—even extending beyond domestic politics,” the press release said. No timing for a return was mentioned.
Yeah. The uncancelable has been canceled by market forces, as a luxury that wasn’t a “viable business.” It wasn’t. It takes a real shock to get conservatives to recognize reality.
Then there’s Facebook. Facebook makes money, although the amount is declining, but it relies on selling people’s personal information to marketers — it’s less a social media company than a colossal siphon for collecting data that it can manipulate and sell to those who want to take advantage of users. What it offers as an inducement to draw in those users is the worst of human nature, giving grifters and attention-seeking fools free reign. Facebook is great if you want to sell trash to the gullible and demolish democracy as you go, but Facebook is what you get when you fully meld social media and capitalism. It’s not a good example.
Ah, Twitter. Poor Twitter. It was fun while it lasted, but now it’s been taken over by egomaniac and incompetent businessman, and is being run into the ground by a bad man whose “focus appears to be on cutting costs and making Twitter profitable.” On the one hand, I feel like we should kill it while the Nazis are lying on the ground, helpless and twitching, but on the other…it turns out that Twitter has been integrated into the world-wide disaster response network.
For years, Twitter was at its best when bad things happened. Before Elon Musk bought it last fall, before it was overrun with scammy ads, before it amplified fake personas, and before its engineers were told to get more eyeballs on the owner’s tweets, Twitter was useful in saving lives during natural disasters and man-made crises. Emergency-management officials have used the platform to relate timely information to the public—when to evacuate during Hurricane Ian, in 2022; when to hide from a gunman during the Michigan State University shootings earlier this month—while simultaneously allowing members of the public to transmit real-time data. The platform didn’t just provide a valuable communications service; it changed the way emergency management functions.
We started taking it for granted, that buried in the noise was a genuine public good that could be used to help people. That wasn’t a side of the service that made money, though. At least, not until some soulless clever dicks decided that maybe they could exploit that capability for their profit, unaware that the utility vanishes when you start demanding cash to save people’s lives.
Unfortunately, the platform is becoming less useful as a way of monitoring chatter about developing events. Twitter announced on February 2 that it would end free access for researchers to its application programming interface—a mechanism that allows people outside the company to gather and analyze large quantities of data from the social-media platform. Relief workers have frequently used API access to determine where supplies and other resources are needed most.
Four days after the company’s API announcement, a massive earthquake hit Turkey and Syria, killing at least 46,000 people. In an enormous geographic area, API data can help narrow down who is saying what, who is stuck where, and where limited supplies should be delivered first. Amid complaints about what abandoning free API access would mean in that crisis, Twitter postponed the restriction. Still, its long-term intentions are uncertain, and some public-spirited deployments of the API by outside researchers—such as a ProPublica bot tracking politicians’ deleted tweets—appear to be breaking down.
Social media can be a valuable tool for a society, but not when some capitalist or autocrat somewhere is monitoring it to milk every drop of advantage from it so they can actively harm its users. That’s the fatal flaw: the free flow of information is a strong social good, but when people exploit it for profit it’s no longer free.
This is exciting. I’ve written about my compost bin before, which has been a rich source of spider lore — a partially closed habitat, the domain of some large dark spiders that build their cobwebs in a place rife with buzzing insects.
The bin has been inaccessible for months, buried under snow. Today the snow had retreated enough that we could hobble over slick, crunchy ice to get to it and throw back the lid. What did I see?
First, fresh silk, new cobwebs laid across the corners. Somebody had been working hard. Then, suddenly, at one side, a massive spider loomed out of the darkness — a fully grown, adult male Steatoda borealis. His presence tells me something: he’s much too large to be a recent hatchling, so he must have overwintered down in the dark, sheltered from the storms, huddled in the fermenting warmth of the compost.
We closed the lid and let him be. I’m sure there are more down there who will creep out in the next few weeks to rebuild a thriving colony.
If you want to see this massive unit of a tough Minnesota spider, you can go to Patreon or Instagram. He’s big and dark in shades of red and black with thick strong limbs and glowing eyes.
A borough in the UK posted an innocuous tweet, suggesting that people should go in for cervical screening. They had to take it down because a small minority of haters complained that the words “anyone with a cervix” was offensive to women.
The wording was just fine! It was inclusive and was a message to an appropriate audience. In fact, if you look at the thread, there’s a deluge of support for it, with swarms of people, cis and trans, chiming in to see that the message was good and they appreciated it. There were also, of course, a few indignant assholes whining that only women have cervices, and they were the ones they had to listen to, because Calderdale deleted the tweet.
Those few vicious, mocking tweets are the modern equivalent of this, an ugliness that will stain us all for years to come:
Meanwhile, in the science world, the journal Nature is updating their policies. Language matters.
It is regrettable but true that researchers have used and abused science to justify racist beliefs and practices. As previous editorials have acknowledged, Nature has played its part in perpetuating racism — and has now pledged to play its part in tackling it, together with colleagues in the research community.
As part of this pledge, Nature and the Nature Portfolio journals are updating our advice to authors on reporting research that involves race, ethnicity and other socially constructed characteristics. Specifically, we’re asking that authors exercise care and consideration so that the highest standards of rigour are applied where these attributes are found to be an explanation for an outcome or conclusion. This is part of our ongoing updates to guidance asking authors to describe how demographic characteristics, including sex and gender, are considered in the design of studies — and, more broadly, to consider the research’s potential to cause harm.
They aren’t asking a lot. This is what Nature expects now, and I was a little surprised…shouldn’t this have been standing, routine policy all along?
So, what are we asking authors to do, if their research describes people according to race, ethnicity or other socially constructed categories? Essentially, three things. First, specify the categories used and explain why such classification is needed. Second, explain the methods used to describe people in this way — for example, did study participants self-report, or did the information come from a census, social media or administrative data? Third, we would like authors to describe how they controlled for confounding variables, such as socio-economic status. These requests will be added to a paper’s reporting checklist so it is a part of the usual editorial and publishing workflow.
I’m not going to publish in Nature, and the kind of work I do isn’t going to touch on issues of race and sex (although some will try to force it!), but I would have thought that if you were doing work in those areas of sufficient prestige that it would be published in top-tier journals, those rules would have been already incorporated. You can never underestimate the devious efforts of bigots, though!
It’s all just hanging out there, exposed, flapping rudely in the wind, and we’re supposed to pretend that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t selling out the country. The story is simple and transparent.
Thomas’s mother lived on some property owned by Thomas. Harlan Crow paid Thomas $133,363 for that property, and then allowed his mother to continue to live there rent-free afterwards, and in fact renovated the house, put on a new roof, a nice fence, etc.
Crow was the best landlord of all time!
Of course, what it all was was a pretext to put a whole lot of money in a judge’s pocket and curry favor with him. Thomas knew this; he rather obviously avoided reporting the whole money shuffle to the government, and tried to hide the source of this sudden largesse.
“He needed to report his interest in the sale,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer now at the watchdog group CREW. “Given the role Crow has played in subsidizing the lifestyle of Thomas and his wife, you have to wonder if this was an effort to put cash in their pockets.”
Oh, really? You think? I’m not wondering at all. Hint to ethics lawyers everywhere: the time for understatement is over. This is time to suspend him from the bench while impeachment proceedings are begun. I’d go so far as to suggest it’s time for handcuffs, except we all know that white collar crime by high-ranking federal officials is going to be treated with kid gloves, instead.
See also Robert Reich’s take on this situation.
On Wednesday, I’d had a little private pity party, moaning to myself how I really disliked my teaching schedule and would never do this again. You see, this semester, thanks to a sudden schedule change, I was teaching two very different classes back to back — I’d finish lecturing in genetics, and immediately have to swivel and scuttle off to teach introductory biology. I like to have a little break between my classes, a time to reorient myself, review the material, put my feet up, sip a little wine (OK, I don’t do the last bit, but I can dream.) I have been spoiled.
Thursday I was a guest at the local high school. Yikes. One class after the other, all day long. You get your lesson plan all mapped out well ahead of time, because once that first class launches at 8:25, you are on a fixed trajectory all day long, with only a few minutes between classes. Forget moments of reflection, don’t even think about the imaginary glass of wine, because a succession of students are going to march in and occupy your classroom.
I don’t think I could cope with teaching high school. Much respect to those who do — you are all overworked and underpaid.
On the positive side, though, it was a pleasant experience…for a day. Just a day at a time. The big difference between college and high school is that college students are generally so damned serious. They’re paying out big bucks and accumulating a substantial debt to be here, and classes are their job, while professors are the bosses armed with the scourges of exams. At the 7th and 10th grade classes, I started talking about spiders, hands were raised, students would spontaneously offer wild accounts of their spider experiences, they’d ask question after question, it would sometimes get a bit raucous. Their enthusiasm was wonderful.
Now how to get the college students that fired up…I think I’ll have to kill all the exams. Abolishing tuition would help, too. I’ll get right on that for next year.
By the way, I also got to peruse their textbooks, briefly. There’s been a change there: they weren’t using Miller & Levine anymore! They’d switch to something called Inspire Biology, which looked fine, but different: lots of short, choppy segments with exercises to make the students think, less of a narrative, more for short attention spans. That isn’t bad, I could see how you could use textbooks like that to customize how you teach.
They did still use the familiar Miller & Levine lab manual and praised it highly.
For those who don’t know, Miller & Levine’s Biology was, for many years, the ubiquitous text I’d see in every high school student’s backpack. It was kind of like Campbell Biology at the college level. I’m seeing a lot more textbook diversity in the last decade or two as publishers seem to have realized that owning the rights to a popular textbook is a cash cow. For them, not the authors.
For me, the first sign of spring is when I’m walking around and start seeing thin filaments everywhere — the little threads of silk left behind by traveling spiders. This year the first delicate threads spotted were on campus, draped over the metal signposts around the parking lots. They’re all webbed with criss-crossing strands!
I didn’t see the spiders there, not yet, just these traces. From past experience, those signs are often populated by Theridion, so I’ll keep my open for the first appearance of the little guys.
Today is a busy, frightful day. I volunteered to stop by the Morris Area High School to give away some spiders and talk in general about the importance of spiders, and I don’t exactly know what I’m doing. College students are one thing, but middle school and high school kids are completely different beasts. I’ve done this before, and mainly what I come away with is the feeling that we don’t pay teachers enough.
I’m meeting with 7th and 10th grade biology classes this morning and afternoon. I’m bringing in a lot of baby spiderlings which are tiny and hard to see, not impressive at all, and a couple of larger adults. I’ve also got several egg sacs, one of which is very, very close to eclosion — maybe we’ll get a sudden eruption of spiderlings, which would be exciting. I’m going to propose leaving a half dozen spiderlings in the classrooms, along with a supply of wingless fruit flies, and recommend that they take care of them for a few weeks, and then on some bright spring day, to release them in a grassy area near the school.
I’ve been researching lesson plans lately, and unfortunately, almost all of them have been geared for younger kids — K-6. I’m not going to talk down to this group, so I figure I’ll just explain a few scientific details and open the floor to questions.
They’re going to eat me alive, aren’t they?
Seriously, you had to know it wasn’t going to stop with banning drag shows.
Let’s close the libraries in Missouri. They’re just full of seditious blasphemy.
Republicans in the Missouri House of Representatives have voted to defund their state’s libraries after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the state for banning numerous LGBTQ+ books as “explicit sexual” materials.
The April 4 vote removed $4.5 million of state budget funding for libraries as well as “costs for diversity initiatives, childcare, and pre-kindergarten programs,” WCPT 820 Radio reported. The removal now requires an additional state house vote and state senate approval before heading to the governor’s desk to become law.
In Texas, they’re starting small. Give ’em time.
A small Texas county is weighing whether to shut down its public library system after a federal judge ruled the commissioners violated the constitution by banning a dozen mostly children’s books and ordered that they be put back in circulation.
The Llano County commissioners have scheduled for Thursday a special meeting in which the first item on the agenda is whether to “continue or cease operations” at the library.
You might wonder what horrible books they tried to ban.
The books that Llano County officials removed from the library shelves include Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”; “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti; the graphic novel “Spinning” by Tillie Walden; and three books from Dawn McMillan’s “I Need a New Butt!” series.
Last year, an assistant principal at a Mississippi elementary school was fired after he read “I Need a New Butt!” to a second-grade class. The reason? Because the book used words like “butt” and “fart” and included cartoon images of a child’s butt.
Also removed from the library were Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen”; Robie H. Harris’ “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health”; and four other children’s picture books with “silly themes and rhymes,” like “Larry the Farting Leprechaun,” “Gary the Goose and His Gas on the Loose”; “Freddie the Farting Snowman” and “Harvey the Heart Has Too Many Farts,” according to the complaint.
I guess we’ve moved beyond hiding the books that talk about sex and race to silencing anything that mentions farts. Don’t straight white people do that, too?
In its heyday, Silicon Valley was flush with money (OK, it still is), and was a magnet for tech talent…and also for the con artists who wanted to skim off the surplus. Among the many frauds is Eliezer Yudkowski and his LessWrong community. Here’s a fascinating letter that boldly airs the accusations.
The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley and its sister organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), claim to be organizations dedicated to AGI safety and the art of human rationality. However, these organizations are not what they make themselves out to be, and MIRI is in fact defrauding its donors through misleading promises and an ongoing cover-up of statutory rape, blackmail, and fraud.
MIRI was founded as the Singularity Institute in 2000 by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent thought leader in the Less Wrong “rationalist” community. Less Wrong is a community blog (also founded by Yudkowsky,) that claims to be dedicated to the art of human rationality. Yudkowsky has written over 300 blog posts, several books, and a popular fanfiction that gained him the status of a minor celebrity, especially among fellow “rationalists.” The “rationalist” community in the Bay Area, which is fairly tight-knit, features group housing, where members live together and sometimes work together.
Yudkowsky’s ideas had members of the Less Wrong community convinced that Yudkowsky would bring about singularity and save the world. Yudkowsky has positioned himself as one of a small class of people focusing on global catastrophic risks, while teaching his followers that the ethical thing to do is to either work directly on AGI, or get a high-paying job and donate to MIRI. Many of the people in the Less Wrong community took Yudkowsky and MIRI very seriously. Until recently, most of MIRI’s donations came from within that community, with some members donating tens of thousands of dollars to the cause. The original team at MIRI was composed partially of top contributors to the community’s blogs, like Nate Soares, Luke Meuhlhauser, and Anna Salamon.
While these bloggers weren’t as popular and admired as Yudkowsky, they were widely trusted by the community. And at events like the Workshop on AI Safety Strategy (WAISS) run by CFAR, people would suggest ideas like taking out life insurance that would pay out to MIRI, and then committing suicide to further the cause.
Working at MIRI conferred a kind of special respect as someone who Yudkowsky and other prominent members thought were worthy to save the world. To young teenagers enamored with the Less Wrong community and its stated ideals, it’s easy to see how kids could’ve been coerced into having sex with adults working at MIRI.
Yeah. They actually suggested that members of the community with mental health concerns take out life insurance policies, that it would be a greater benefit to the high ethical causes of the group than their continued existence. They also recruited (dare I say “groomed”?) teenagers to join up and frolic with their middle-aged leaders.
Testimony from community members alleges that several underage young teenagers were having sex with the 30- and 40- year old researchers working at MIRI, especially between 2007 and 2014. The list of people accused includes (but is not limited to) the director and senior research fellow, and a former executive director who is now working at the Open Philanthropy Project, a major donor to MIRI.
Perhaps relatedly, this was going on around the time MIRI was accepting significant financial support to the tune of $50,000 from Jeffrey Epstein, even after his conviction for prostituting children. Yes, that Epstein.
MIRI’s entanglement in statutory rape was one of the worst kept secret in the Bay. Many rationalists are keen to say that the age of consent is an arbitrary number, and favor treating young people as fully-grown adults. So, it wasn’t much of a secret that older individuals in their 30s and 40s were having sex with teenagers. And perhaps that’s why when nearly a hundred people in the Bay Area Rationalist Community Safety Discussion group (BARCSD) saw insiders discussing whether the perpetrators had successfully evaded the statute of limitations for statutory rape in reference to MIRI, the members of BARCSD collectively shrugged. Additionally, one of the former underage teenagers was in the group, and admitted to having sex with much older adults, though this failed to interest the BARCSD.
Multiple comments were edited or deleted once members realized legal consequences were possible.
This is a group that communicated online extensively, and it’s revealing that now it’s sinking in that they’ve left a trail behind them, and are busy deleting old posts that might incriminate them.
Yudkowski always did seem like a pretentious phony to me, and it’s good to see that some people are catching on.
