Aubrey de Grey couldn’t leave well enough alone

So, Aubrey de Grey was accused of sexual harassment, and was under a formal investigation. I guess he wasn’t confident about the outcome, because he tried to apply some pressure to potential witnesses, and got caught.

A “necessary” firing by people who are clearly deep admirers of the guy is an interesting combination. It suggests de Grey has been frantic in his efforts to scuttle the investigation to the point his dismissal was completely unavoidable.

I do wonder where he could go after this. I can’t imagine a university would want to be affiliated with him, but maybe some oddball think-tank somewhere would take him on. Or some quack organization — Mercola has money, he could use a celebrity front to help sell anti-aging snake oil.

Uh-oh. This is just going to get weirder. De Grey just posted his response on Facebook, and it’s wild.

with the investigation. Below is the entire text. Decide for yourself. Remember that my mention of the state of Celine’s career “as things stand” was written in the aftermath of the outpouring of support for me and condemnation of her that followed my first Facebook post 24 hours previously.
Let me close by saying that I am in a perfectly fine position to start a new foundation right now, hiring my loyal staff and proceeding as if nothing had happened, but that that is not my plan. I plan to get the truth known, my foundation back, and the bad actors excised from our community. Meanwhile, let’s just keep going.
Text of the email that precipitated today’s action:
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Rght mate, if you care about your (and my, yes) friend Celine you will listen up. There is a job you need to do that probably only you are in a position to do, largely BECAUSE of your rush to judgement today that will have cemented her trust in you.
The six-week investigation into Celine’s allegations against me has concluded. It was conducted by someone named Sue Ann Van Dermyden – look her up – good luck to anyone who tries to paint her as a whitewasher. It has found not only that those allegations are 100% fictitious, but also that Celine’s account of them in her posts and her testimony to Sue Ann is replete with grave inconsistencies – AND, with features that clearly suggest she was fed false information by a SRF board member (which you will probably also have inferred from my Facebook post last night, but then it was just me saying it).
The consequence (other than my reinstatement, obviously) is that a new investigation is being launched, again by Sue Ann, but this time investigating SRF so as to identify the actual villain. The existence of that new investigation is going to be made public tomorrow afternoon – unless, drum roll, it is obviated/aborted by new information.
I probably don’t need to spell out anything more. Celine’s career is absolutely over as things stand, and the only reason it actually isn’t is because I am a man of honour who refuses to let somebody (especially a meteoric rising star) be burned at the stake while an actual villian gets away scot free and is thereby emboldened. Yes she will have to take some lumps for being so gullible, but that’s not such a big deal. BUT, what will completely torpedo my rescuing of her is if she is seen to be resisting the identification of the actual villain. So now, as in tomorrow (Thurs) morning, is the time when Celine needs to find her mojo and spill the beans. As of now, a few people are in the frame as the culprit. Celine needs to name names, and fast, so that no one gets to know that this new investigation is happening as a direct consequence of her insincerity to Sue Ann and the world.
And you need to tell her so, as probably only you can. Go to it.
Cheers A
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“Celine” is Celine Halioua, one of his accusers who has posted a blistering indictment of the man; SRF is the SENS Research Foundation. His defense is…that someone else harassed her? It wasn’t him? He’s just the gallant knight galloping in to rescue her, and her career is over unless she names a different villain. And then he’ll take the SENS Foundation back and purge it of all the bad people who have been conspiring against him. Or start a new foundation of his own. No matter how it turns out, the woman he harassed needs to take a few lumps.

The guy is delusional. I can see why he was fired.

I guess David Sabatini is a failed scientist now

The fall from grace was precipitous, but it should have happened long ago. The molecular biologist David M. Sabatini has been outright fired from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Whitehead Institute, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he also loses his tenured position at MIT soon enough. Can you guess what prompted his ouster?

An investigation found that he had “violated the Institute’s policies on sexual harassment among other policies unrelated to research misconduct.” No details are available yet, but it’s notable that they were serious enough that he wasn’t merely placed on leave, or slapped on the wrist, or placed under tight restriction on his interactions with student. Nope, just flat out FIRED. Tea will have to be spilled sooner or later, though.

This is not entirely surprising, but I had expected the grounds for his dismissal would be over his frequent cases of forged and falsified data that had already given him a reputation, or perhaps over his amazing arrogance. He’s a guy who, when caught with faked figures in his paper, would turn around and accuse the people who disclosed his errors of being “resentful, anonymous, petty, failed scientists”.

That’s what I thought would bring him down in the end. I hadn’t heard anything about him being a sexual harasser, but we should have figured that that would be a comorbidity associated with terminal cockiness.

Students are smarter than the administrators give them credit for

The FDA is about to approve the Pfizer vaccine, which is good news. The timid beancounters who run this place had announced that they were just waiting for that final bureaucratic hurdle was cleared to declare that vaccination was required to enroll, a silly piece of posing by a bunch of people who have all been vaccinated for weeks to months already. We were supposed to wait for a box to be ticked on a form before making common sense requirements to protect student health? That’s nuts. It’s also been frustrating.

Other universities have already been requiring it, without that legalistic seal of approval, like U-Va. Here’s what I found interesting in that story:

The campus unveiled its vaccine mandate in May and the overwhelming majority of the campus is in compliance, officials said. More than 96 percent of U-Va. students are vaccinated against the coronavirus and 335 students with religious and medical exemptions have been granted permanent waivers, officials said.

An additional 184 temporary waivers were granted to students who have had trouble getting vaccinated but plan to get their shots upon arriving to campus.

Less than 1 percent of students enrolled — or 238 students — are not in compliance, “but only 49 of those students had actually selected courses, meaning that a good number of the remaining 189 may not have been planning to return to the university this fall at all, regardless of our vaccination policy,” said Brian Coy, a school spokesman.

First, a religious exemption? Why? Prayer is not protection. Piety is not an excuse to be a superspreader. I support the medical exemption — some students are immuno-challenged, for instance — but anything else is pandering nonsense.

But secondly, look at those numbers. While the administration has been wringing their hands and moaning about how we shouldn’t impose barriers to students coming to campus, the students have been smart and sensible and getting off their butts and getting vaccinated as soon as they could. I’m confident that UMM students are just as competent as U-Va students, and we’re going to find next week, when classes start, that the overwhelming majority are going to want the precautions, like masking and vaccine requirements, so they can protect their health while getting the education they need. I suspect the hesitation from on high is driven entirely by Republican assholes in the legislature with power over our budgets.

That peculiar plural

There’s a quirk in creationist talk that has long been a tell. The say “evidences” instead of “evidence”, despite the fact that “evidence” is already plural. It’s not a big deal — Doug Theobald documented cases where serious scholars also used “evidences” — it’s just an odd affectation, maybe a holdover from theological writings, but it’s useful when you hear it because it’s a quick clue that you’re dealing with someone with an unusual background. Eugenie Scott even claimed “The only people who use ‘evidences’ (plural) are creationists or people who have spent far too much time reading their literature! ‘Evidences’ is a term from Christian apologetics …”, which isn’t quite true, but it’s a fine approximation.

So I was curious when Michael Harriot brought up another unusual plural used by a specific subset of people: “freedoms“.

Whenever unshowered Americans are confronted with something they don’t want to do, they immediately begin blabbering about their “freedoms.” It’s like the “race card” for white people. While you and I know that the word “freedom” only makes one appearance in the Constitution, apparently there’s a second Caucasian Constitution that I haven’t seen that clarifies this murky terrain.

As you can see, it doesn’t even have to make sense. More importantly, they will never say exactly which specific freedom they are talking about. They won’t cite a specific law or clause in the Constitution that supports their position. That’s because there isn’t one.

Inserting “freedoms” into a random sentence makes one seem more patriotic, like randomly mentioning “the troops.” Basically, “freedoms” is a conservative dog whistle used to justify police brutality, pro-gun legislation and even blackballing Colin Kaepernick.

Weird. Now I’m suddenly seeing it everywhere, used almost exclusively by conservatives to, in some way, amplify the size of the affront to their privilege, and also to put themselves on a safely vague footing. They can’t say their “freedom” is being taken away, since they aren’t going to jail and don’t even seem to suffer any consequences, but putting that “s” on the end somehow implies a numerous and unspecified set of privileges are being taken from them. It’s a useful rhetorical trick, I guess.

And that’s exactly what creationists want to do, too — wave vaguely at some mysterious set of facts that they don’t have to detail.

I guess they possess great wisdoms and cunnings.

Look at Mississippi go!

Impressive statistics.

Remember how that slow rise in frequency back in March 2020 convinced all the universities to shut down and go entirely to online instruction? Good times.

Then how we went through that shocking peak in the summer of 2020, but that it started to show signs of a decline, so the universities all said, “Great! Back to school with masks and social distancing!”, despite the fact that it didn’t drop below the levels that shut everyone down in the spring? There’s something interesting going on in human psychology going on there.

We got an even greater surge in the winter of 2021, but then we got the vaccine, and cases started to plummet, and we all got cocky and figured we got this licked, so the universities start planning to remove all the preventive measures they’d put in place, didn’t even consider requiring vaccination, but a significant proportion of the citizenry have somehow decided vaccines are bad, and then along came Delta.

And that’s how we get Mississippi in August of 2021.

Look at that graph: oscillations, with the peak getting higher each time. Every time numbers start to decline, we slack off so they come roaring back, worse and worse. You’d think someone at some point would realize that this says we’re losing, that the occasional breathers are just setting us up for a rebound. It’s like we have only a three month window of collective memory, only remembering the improvement in spring of 2021, while completely forgetting the peak in January.

Shut down Facebook, please

It’s a nightmare already. Where do the hapless goobers among our citizenry get their bad ideas? Facebook. The whole damn company is an engine of disinformation, and it wants to grow, like some kind of cancerous tumor. The latest great idea to come out of Zuckerberg’s stinking maw is an implementation of the metaverse. Sounds like it could be fun, right? If you grew up on Snow Crash and Jennifer Government and Ready Player One and failed to notice that those are all horrific dystopias. Zuckerberg read them and saw his future dream. He’s been putting together his version of the metaverse, or zuckerverse, or suckerverse, and some have seen it.

First floated in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, the Metaverse is an idealised immersive successor of the internet – a virtual space where billions of users will move, interact, and operate across myriad different but interoperable worlds and situations, always retaining their avatar identities, virtual possessions, and digital currencies. It is hard to pin the Metaverse down (more on this later), but the shape one can make out amid the cyberpunk mist is some version of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One meets Fortnite, meets virtual reality, meets blockchain. A game-y galaxy that seamlessly fuses with the Meatspace. What matters is that Metaverse is now the buzzword du jour, and that Facebook wants a piece of it. The bad news is that Zuckerberg’s Metaverse ambitions sound boring as hell.

Time and again over the interview, Zuckerberg dropped language that seemed to have been cribbed straight out of some stuffy consultancy’s 40-page insights report. He waxed lyrical about the Metaverse’s ability to increase “f​​ocus time and individual productivity”. He coined the dreary formula “infinite office”, a supposedly desirable scenario in which Metaverse-dwellers conjure up multiple virtual screens on their Oculus VR headsets in order to multitask like pros. Zuck was “excit[ed]” (!) about the Metaverse’s potential for organising VR office meetings.

If anyone could make Zoom meetings worse, it’s Zuckerberg, the dead-eyed corporate zombie. It can’t be that bad, you might think, but then you just have recall the wasteland of ads and trolls and endless lies that he turned a social service to connect friends into. Or if you don’t believe that, see for yourself what the metaverse will look like if Facebook has its way.

Oh hell no.

You know, while Facebook is working hard on the VR interface that Satan will love, a right wing terrorist drove up to Washington DC with a truckload of, he claims, potassium nitrate and detonators, and parked by the Library of Congress, demanding to speak to President Biden, or he was going to blow everything up. The Capitol has been evacuated. He has been live-streaming his threats and rants over Facebook.

It has taken Facebook three hours to notice and shut him down.

That’s a rapid response from the company that has allowed fascists, quacks, conspiracy theorists, and anti-vaxxers to thrive for over a decade. They will not get better. This is what they do: provide a profit-making forum for the very worst, most sensationalist ideas, so don’t wait for them to do anything that might harm the bottom line.

We’re going to have to do something. The good news is that the FTC has reopened their antitrust case against Facebook.

“Facebook lacked the business acumen and technical talent to survive the transition to mobile. After failing to compete with new innovators, Facebook illegally bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat,” said Holly Vedova, Acting Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition.

Facebook did not immediately respond to request for comment, but the company said on Twitter that it was reviewing the case.

The filing is also the most high-profile action to date under the agency’s new Democratic majority, helmed by Big Tech critic Lina Khan. Khan inherited the Facebook case from the previous Trump-appointed chair, but her ability to see it to a successful conclusion could define her legacy as an antitrust enforcer.

Burn them down, please. And then nationalize a simple communications service that allows me to chat to family and friends without having to wade through the offensive glop the kooks flood everyone with.

A libertarian perspective on science funding

What a bizarre Twitter conversation. I have stirred up the Aubrey de Grey cultists who have been arguing at me that de Grey and his SENS foundation are doing great work and must be supported. When I ask why, there’s one point they constantly bring up: he recently got $25 million dollars of funding! Therefore, it must be worthy work.

If he’d received funding from NIH, then yeah, I’d be predisposed to suspect that there must be some core ideas that survived peer review by qualified scientists (peer review is not perfect, I hasten to add…it’s just better than no peer review). However, that $25 million came from some cryptocurrency donations called “Pulse Chain Airdrop, whatever that is, not scientific review, and all of the funding is coming from wealthy donors who have no scientific qualifications at all. So they’re trying to tell me that it is an unmitigated good that billionaires are supporting science — my concern is that this is about billionaires dictating what science gets done.

And then, this jaw-dropping statement:

As long as the scientists being paid to do the research are capable and knowledgeable, the scientific literacy of the funders themselves are pretty irrelevant.

Also realistically, the funders likely do understand the research on a basic level, otherwise, why would they find it?

Two points:

Scientists aren’t employees being paid to achieve a specific goal by a wealthy patron. This is a disastrous approach to funding science, especially since they admit that the scientific literacy of the people holding the purse strings is irrelevant. Right now science funding is weakly isolated from the ignorant with power; congress gives a block of money to scientific institutions that then determine by peer review how it is disbursed. Relying on authoritarian rich people to decide what science is worth pursuing is a huge step backwards.

I doubt the funders actually understand the research. Why would they fund it? Because some charismatic gomer promises them that their money will work to help them live forever. They don’t know how, but the con artists are good at babbling sciencey words. It is such a naive assumption that rich people only spend money on things they understand at a “basic level”, especially when you realize that Jeff Bezos is rumored to own a $400 million dollar yacht (at least, someone owns that beast). $25 million is a crumb, and for that, we want to allow billionaires to dictate what science should be done?

I think I spy a libertarian non-scientist who thinks expertise is irrelevant.

It begins

Last night was a bad night — I’m feeling rather battered and my face is sore. Where did they insert that endoscope again? Oh, right, there were some minor problems with anesthesia so I got manhandled a bit while unconscious. I’m feeling it. Bottom half is doing great, but the top half, back and face, were run through a mangler. The aches are already easing up, though, so I’m not worried about it.

I was also advised to go gently on meals, despite being ravenous. I was a good boy yesterday, so it was nothing but soup and toast. There are still strange rumblings and squelchy noises coming out of my guts, so that was a wise decision, but today I surrendered to my hunger and started the day with a mushroom omelette and giant cup of coffee. That should help.

Feeling better already, except…the university has begun its ominous slouch towards opening. Yesterday was the official opening convocation, which I missed for obvious reasons, but today begins with a two hour division meeting (we’re going to talk about budgets and assessment and other such minutiæ ; strangely, there is nothing on the agenda about the pandemic challenges we have to face), followed by a one hour biology discipline meeting, followed by me having to spend some time finishing the genetics lab cleanup so the next lab class can move in for the Fall.

Then I’d better get those class syllabi out to the students. I meet with my new advisees on Monday. They better be wearing masks!

So far, it looks like this school year is starting with an assumption of total normalcy, while ominous horror-movie music has begun rising in my head, and I just know we’re going to reach a crescendo with screeching violins next month. No way am I going to split up and go into the basement in the coming month.