Science Vs limiting their output

I have listened to the Science Vs podcast for a while, but had somehow missed the fact that they had become exclusive to Spotify. This is not a good situation to be in for a podcast promoting the understanding of science, and the host/producer Wendy Zukerman and the editor Blythe Terrell have taken the consequences and are now limiting their output to shows that debunk stuff released on the Spotify platform

Zukerman, the host and executive producer for “Science Vs,” and Terrell, an editor for the science podcast, plan to limit their production on new episodes because they do not believe Spotify’s rules regarding misinformation go far enough.

“Until Spotify implements stronger methods to prevent the spread of misinformation on the platform, we will no longer be making new Science Vs episodes, except those intended to counteract misinformation being spread on Spotify,” they wrote in a letter to Ek, posted on Twitter on Monday.

“Science Vs,” which is exclusive to Spotify, looks at the science behind topics including pandemics.

They have already started doing this, with their latest episode Joe Rogan: The Malone Interview, which you can listen to here.

I applaud the principled stance that they have taken. You can find their twitter feed here.

Engadget have a few more details in Spotify’s ‘Science VS’ podcast will only fact-check misinformation being spread on Spotify

Bette Midler should stay in her lane

I am generally not a great fan of people telling actors that they should stay in their lane, but occasionally they really should stay in their lane. Bette Midler demonstrates a clear example of this.

It all started with a tweet by Dr. Jen Gunter

Which caused Bette Midler to write the following

It is hard to surprise me these days, but I must admit I hadn’t considered Bette Midler attacking Dr. Jen Gunter as being alt-right as one of the missing ingredients of 2020. Bette Midler’s defense was much appreciated by Marianne Williamson

Unsurprisingly, Dr. Jen Gunter actually knew what she was talking about.

Bette Midler is probably not going to admit that she is wrong about Marianne Williamson, but hopefully this will be a lecture in humility, making her actually do a little research before tweeting, and especially before accusing someone like Dr. Jen Gunter as being alt-right.

In things that never happened

After the tragic school shooting in Parkland, there was a lot of tweets on the subject on twitter.  Of the ones I saw, most were either talking about how to stop school shootings, or amplifying the voices of those who were direcetly affected by this school shooting. And then there were the Russian bots, pushing any gun control talking points.

And then there were the rare gems like the following

 

I call this a gem, because it is such a blatant lie, that it is amazing that he thought he could get away with it.

In many European countries, including my native Denmark, there is no such thing as an armed security guard. Either you are police or military, or you are unarmed. In other European countries, there are armed guards in high risk situations, e.g. transporting money, but rarely at any other time. Again, the general rule is, that if you are armed, you are police or military.

In no European country I know off, would anyone think of placing armed guards at a school, except in very extreme situations. For example, police guards Jewish schools when there is a very high Islamic terrorist threat level.

So, the idea that anyone would think it commonplace to place armed guards at a school, regardless of the size, clearly shows that the person has no understanding on the situation in Europe – it is, in other words, a fundamentally US question.

I am not the only who has made fun of this tweet, J.K Rowling has done so as well, and David Burke has taken it down (but not acknowledged that it was a lie).

Skeptics fail at skepticism once again

There is a new article in the Skeptic Magazine going the rounds among prominent white male skeptics.

It is by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, and called The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies, and is an attempt to take down the field of gender studies by getting a “Sokal-style” hoax article published.

Since many prominent white male skeptics hate the field of gender studies, they are filled with glee by this take-down of the field.

There is just one problem – it is nothing of the sort. One hoax article is not enough to take down a field, especially not if it is accepted by a scam journal, which this one was (after being turned down by a real journal in the field).

For a good take-down of the crappy Skeptic Magazine article, see this excellent blogpost by Ketan Joshi: The engine of irrationality inside the rationalists

The Ebla Tablets and proof of the Old Testament – pushing long-debunked ideas

I came across this link on Facebook

Bible Critics Silenced Once Again As Archaeological Discoveries Prove Old Testament To Be Accurate!

For many years, the critics of the Old Testament continued to argue that Moses invented the stories found in Genesis. The critics contended that the ancient people of the Old Testament times were too primitive to record documents with precise details.

In doing so, these critics basically claimed that there was no verification that the people and cities mentioned in the oldest of Biblical accounts ever really existed.

The discovery of the Ebla archive in northern Syria in the 1970′s confirmed that the Biblical records concerning the Patriarchs are spot on. It was during the excavations in northern Syria that the excavating found a large library inside a royal archive room. This library had tablets dating from 2400 -2300 BC.

The “article” at the end of the link is from February this year.

The Ebla Tablets were discovered in 1974-1975, and already from the start, some people tried to use them as evidence for the truth of the Old Testament.

Even back then, it was considered nonsense, and the Washington Post had an article about this back in December, 1979 – Ebla Tablets: No Biblical Claims

When 11,000 clay tablets dating from 23 centuries before Christ were unearthed in northern Syria three years ago, biblical scholars around the world rejoiced that ancient proof had been found for the Old Testament.

“The tablets were being hailed as a find equal in importance to the Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Dr. Robert Biggs, professor of Assyriology at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. “The claims being made for these tablets created a sensation in biblical circles.”

But three years of intense study and debate among scholars changed all that. No longer are biblical claims made for the 11,000 clay tablets of Ebla, the ancient Sumerian city whose palace was destroyed by fire around 2300 B.C.

“In my opinion, parallels with the Bible are quite out of the question at this stage,” Biggs told a recent gathering of science writers sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. “People who are looking to the Ebla tablets for proof of the authenticity of the Bible are going to be sorely disappointed.”

The article goes into more detail about how the tablets are being misread and misrepresented.

It is not often I come across new articles pushing so-called new evidence, that has been debunked for nearly 40 years.

Swiss gun laws

Switzerland meme - 1 in 2 citizens has guns. Lowest crime rate in the world

This meme is currently doing its rounds on facebook.

If you have been following the US gun debate over the years, you’ll know that gun advocates in the US loves to point to Switzerland as an example of why guns are not a problem. Of course, as often is the case with gun advocates in the US, they leave out a lot of facts, and even outright lie.

The meme seems to be fairly new, but the actual message has been pushed for several years, and has frequently been debunked. But since it is going around again, I guess we need to do a new debunking.

 

 
Before we start with anything else, let’s start with a short introduction to Swiss gun law (courtesy of Wikipedia):

Gun politics in Switzerland are unique in Europe. The vast majority of men between the ages of 20 and 34 are conscripted into the militia and undergo military training, including weapons training. The personal weapons of the militia are kept at home as part of the military obligations. However, it is generally not permitted to keep army-issued ammunition, but compatible ammunition purchased for privately owned guns is permitted. At the end of military service period the previously used gun can be converted to a privately owned gun after a weapon acquisition permit has been granted (fully automatic weapons will be rebuilt into semi-automatic ones). Switzerland thus has a relatively high gun ownership rate (31%-61% in 2005, declining).[1] Current research from 2014 estimates gun ownership rate around 25%.[2]

As the Wikipedia article shows, there is a lot of difference between the rate of gun possession and gun ownership, with the later being as low as 25&. The distinction is important, since only gun owners are allowed to have ammunition.  The rest have the gun as part of their militia duty/military training, but don’t have any ammunition.

This is obviously a major difference from the US.

Also, the people who own guns, generally only get them after they have finished their militia duty, essentially ensuring that only people who has trained with the weapon can get it. Again a major difference from the US.

Of course, it is possible to get a permit to buying a gun even before finishing the militia duty, as long as you are over the age of 18, and are not psychiatrically disqualified nor identified as posing security problems, and have a clean criminal record. This is, unless of course, you have one of the following citizenships: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Algeria and Albania. If you hold any of those citizenships, you are out of luck, as you are barred from getting a permit to buy a gun, even if you live in Switzerland.

When buying guns or ammunition, information about the seller, the buyer and the actual purchase is registered at the cantonal weapon registration bureau, which keeps registration details about weapon owners. Again, this is nothing like the US.

There are strict rules about transporting guns and concealed carry permits, about storage of guns etc.

All these facts are left out by the NRA and other gun advocates in the US, who only mentions the prevalence of guns, but not the restrictions and registrations. Many of these restrictions and registrations are quite similar to measures that gun control advocates have tried to introduce in the US, but which the NRA and other gun advocates have fought against tooth-and-nails.

Now let us look at the idea of Switzerland having the lowest crime rate in the world.

Saying “the lowest crime rate in the world” isn’t a very precise statement, and it is hard to be sure what is included in that, so let us try to look at some relevant crime numbers in Switzerland.

When we look at firearms-related deaths, Switzerland is certainly not the one with the lowest rate. Switzerland had 0.23 firearms-related homicides per 100,000 people in 2013, which was more than at least 25 other countries. Switzerland’s number for unintentional killings are also higher than a number of other countries (as is the number for firearm-related deaths whose category is undetermined).

If we look at intentional homicides in general, Switzerland is doing better than when we only looked at firearms-related homicides. Switzerland had 0.6 homicides per 100,000 people in 2011, which put it fairly low on the list, but still with at least 7 countries below it, including Japan.

When looking at incarceration rate, there is also a indication that Switzerland is not the crime-free gun paradise as some people want to make it into. While incarceration rate doesn’t really tell anything about the level of crime, it still seems reasonable to expect that a country with nearly no crime would have a very low incarceration rate. Switzerland has one 0f 84 people per 100,000. This is pretty low, placing Switzerland solidly in the lower half, but there are quite a few countries lower on the list.

No matter at what numbers we look at, does Switzerland come out as the one with the lowest crime rate.

But it is worth noticing that Switzerland certainly comes out ahead of the US on those lists. The numbers in the US are consistently among the worst in the Western World (and frequently the worst).

So given that, I think the meme might actually be on to something. Maybe the US should try to introduce gun laws and militia training similar to Switzerland. This might reduce the firearms-related killings from their current horrifying levels.

For more on Swiss gun laws, see the legal report at the Library of Congress.