In case you were wondering why Quillette is a hacky web site

They ran an article titled Activists Must Stop Harassing Scientists. That made me wonder what they’re complaining about: animal rights activists setting fire to labs? Anti-vaxxers deluging immunologists with abusive emails? Republicans misrepresenting climatology and trying to shut down research?

Nope, none of the above. They are concerned that women complaining about sexual harassment are driving “good” men out of scientific fields. Their evidence: two anecdotal complaints. The first is from an anonymous Australian astrophysicist who left his native country for a position in China, because of the “political climate in Australian universities”.

It’s very hard to find a tenured job in astronomy if you don’t belong to a protected group (alas, I am a white hetero Christian male, bad luck!) and/or you don’t do enough visible activism (or at least enough virtue signaling) for a number of green-left issues. In China, it’s highly likely that Chinese astronomers are subject to the same political interference from the Communist Party, but at least a foreigner like me is left alone, and I can do astronomy in peace, without wasting my time with diversity initiatives. And I see first hand that astronomy jobs are still given to the best candidates regardless of gender, ethnic origin, etc. Unlike my Australian boss, my current Chinese boss has never berated me for not being socialist enough.

Huh. Here’s a chart of the percentage of women in the International Astronomical Union, by country.

I don’t see evidence of discrimination against males, Christian, white, hetero or otherwise in Australia, or in China. Rather, there seems to be a strong bias against women. I wonder why that is?

If you care about the science or your specific field, abandoning diversity initiatives would seem to be likely to drive more good women out of the field than good men. If you actually cared about merit, I would think you’d want to work to make sure the best people had opportunities.

He also complained that he had to write a diversity statement. It is routine that researchers have to justify their contributions to university administrations — you have to write a summary of your research, your teaching, and committee work and outreach. This is utterly normal. As he describes it below, the diversity statement is simply more of the same.

There are many levels of discrimination. At one level, you have an increasing number of jobs, fellowships and grants officially reserved for women and “first nation” people. At another level, for jobs open to white males, there will be special clauses in the application to make sure the candidates are sufficiently woke. For example, you’re required to write a “diversity statement”—which is nothing more than a pledge of allegiance—to illustrate how you have shown “leadership” when it comes to diversity issues in your previous jobs, your teaching and your research (organizing workshops, writing reports, giving talks for women-only audiences, etc.)

It’s not a “pledge of allegiance” to state how you have addressed diversity concerns in your work. It is not oppressive to be asked how you’re trying to correct a bias in your field. But I guess some snowflakes are so outraged at having to write a paragraph about that that they’ll pack up, leave their homes, and move to a country where their native language isn’t routinely spoken, rather than face up to real problems in scientific recruitment.

Their second example of the oppressive nature of Leftist academics is…Alessandro Strumia. Strumia is the guy who gave a talk at CERN in which he invented his own citation metric which conveniently “proved” that women were less productive in physics than men, and also even more conveniently “proved” that a woman who got a job that he applied for was inferior to Alessandro Strumia, as if the job application process could be fairly reduced to performance on a single metric. His arguments were all refuted by the physics community, exposing what a shallow, bigoted thinker he is. All you need to know is that Strumia blamed “cultural marxism” for sexist discrimination, and claimed that differences in physics ability were forged by “human biology practiced as in the plains of Africa thousands of years ago” (his grasp of English grammar is rivaled only by his understanding of biology).

(You can see all of his slides online. They do him no favors.)

Quillette predictably claims that he is the victim of…wait for it…a witch-hunt, a word that automatically throws a red flag on the play. But then, being published in Quillette is itself a big red flag.

The new astrology, accepted by True Skeptics

Skeptics, in my experience, are always strongly anti-astrology. It’s a ridiculous exercise in fortune-telling, based on the idea that distant stars and planets are influencing you at the moment of your birth and shaping your destiny. We laugh.

Then there is Chinese astrology, which we usually only see on paper placemats at Chinese restaurants*, although if you’re part of that cultural tradition, maybe you encounter it more often. It’s also ridiculous. Apparently, everyone born in 1957, like me, are “reliable and independent”.

I think we can all agree that that is absurd.

But there is one kind of astrology that is accepted without question by skeptics, and it annoys me to no end. It is the tedious categorization of “generations”. I recently listened to a podcast that went on and on about characterizing this generation, that generation, asking what we’ll call the next generation, what their attributes will be, and it was infuriating. The borders defined between “generations” are arbitrary, every generation is made up of diverse people, and you can no more define the nature of individuals with this categorization than you can with a paper placemat at a Chinese restaurant.

Look, the baby boom was a real thing: it described a demographic surge after WWII, in which sociologists noticed a rapid rise in the number of children being born. That’s a notable phenomenon. However, whoever first decided to describe the people inside that wave of births as “boomers”, shifting from a description of a population to a generalization of the individuals within that population, deserves to be dragged out and hanged, because it then spawned a whole pointless trend. First we had to name the generation after the boom, Gen X (fuck you very much, Douglas Copeland), and then we had to set up those stupid boundaries which mean nothing, since babies are born continuously, making the discontinuities pure invention. Finally, people made elaborate charts illustrating the long lists of attributes of each generation, an exercise that makes Chinese restaurant placemats look sane and sensible in comparison.

These things are garbage pseudoscience at best, and indulgences in bigoted stereotyping at worst. There are real shifts in the cultural environment over time, and it’s good to recognize those as aspects of our history, but it does a real disservice to the human beings involved to dismiss them as “boomers” or “millennials” or my favorite, “unknown, still being defined”. It’s about time someone stood up and pointed out that these are misleading labels that are about as credible as signs of the zodiac or Myers-Briggs personality tests.


*Chinese-American restaurants, I should say. I never saw them in Beijing, and the food was also completely different.

Why this should be is a total mystery

Jordan B. Peterson has found his people — the evangelical protestant theocrats at that institution of miseducation, Liberty University.

I wonder what he thought of their Creation Studies department or their doctrinal statement?

We affirm that all things were created by God. Angels were created as ministering agents, though some, under the leadership of Satan, fell from their sinless state to become agents of evil. The universe was created in six historical days and is continuously sustained by God; thus it both reflects His glory and reveals His truth. Human beings were directly created, not evolved, in the very image of God. As reasoning moral agents, they are responsible under God for understanding and governing themselves and the world.

A self-proclaimed evolutionary biologist like Dr Peterson ought to find that at least a little troubling.

Discovery Channel is evolving into the Men’s Pulp channel

Several years ago, the Discovery Channel had this successful promotion featuring people singing “boom de yada” while doing awesome sciencey things, mostly. They were also promoting shows about fishing and blowing things up, but OK, it was sweet and memorable. It also featured brief clips of women doing things.

I guess they tried to repeat the success this year, only they forgot someone.

OK, all the stuff about manly men cleaning crab and driving cars and blowing stuff up again is…well, all right, it’s a way to get people interested in science, at least, even if it is only tangentially related to science. I try to be open-minded about approaches to stirring up enthusiasm for science. But it’s all men doing stereotypically masculine activities — there is precisely one woman in the whole thing, she doesn’t speak, she’s wearing skimpy clothing in a long shot as she walks through a forest. That’s it!

Come on, Discovery Channel. I know actual intellectual, thoughtful content isn’t on brand for you, but could you at least have a woman blowing up a truck while swimming with a shark or something?

It reminds me of all those men’s magazines from the 1960s which showed men in dangerous situations (everything in Nature is trying to kill you, you know, even turtles, and your role is to fight them off to rescue Your Woman). Discovery Channel is regressing. Maybe they should rename themselves the Saga or Argosy or True Men channel.

Tucker Carlson is simply a dumb, sexist bully

I got glasses in high school. It was great — I still remember marveling at all the things I could see. Apparently, objects 10 feet away from you aren’t supposed to be blurry. I also remember the school bullies having a blast laughing at ol’ four eyes, who was clearly a nerd now, with the final signifier in place.

Smarmy, sneering Tucker Carlson reminded me so much of those chickenshit bullies. He recently went on air to mock Chris Hayes for wearing glasses, which was a symptom now of being a feminist. Further, he spoke contemptuously of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a woman and “29 year old former bartender” who dared to talk about science. Chris Hayes is what every man would be if feminists had power. I had no idea that forcing men to wear glasses even if they didn’t need them was on the feminist agenda; I guess we’re all going to be forced to get degrees from Brown University and a Harvard fellowship, too.

There was more. He compared Hayes to Ellen Degeneres, as if that was some terrible insult.

“He looks like Ellen, kind of a fusion show,” Carlson said. “But did you hear what he said? Our only hope for survival. Holy smokes. That is terrifying. Help us, Chris Hayes.”

That’s not what Hayes said, of course. He said that some saw the Green New Deal as the only way of protecting our way of life. But Carlson’s frequent shtick isn’t to engage with arguments on the merit, preferring, instead, to levy insults.

As he did when first mentioning Hayes.

“Chris Hayes is what every man would be if feminists ever achieve absolute power in this country,” Carlson said. “Apologetic, bespectacled and deeply, deeply concerned about global warming and the patriarchal systems that cause it.”

Let’s compare Carlson to what science says…or at least, what one correlational study found.

To measure this, the researchers looked at Google searches for terms that associated with that insecurity — erectile dysfunction, hair loss, “how to get girls,” etc. — and cross-referenced the frequency of those searches with voting patterns in 2016 and 2018.

“We found that support for [President] Trump in the 2016 election was higher in areas that had more searches for topics such as ‘erectile dysfunction,’ ” the researchers wrote in an article for The Post. “Moreover, this relationship persisted after accounting for demographic attributes in media markets, such as education levels and racial composition, as well as searches for topics unrelated to fragile masculinity, such as ‘breast augmentation’ and ‘menopause.’ ”

But maybe the fact that Carlson is bleeding advertisers is more relevant to his deep insecurities.

Also, if you’re going to sneer at someone who graduated cum laude from Boston University for not being competent to explain science, you might want to get your facts straight, and not misrepresent what was said. What was that about “3 million years of human history”? Homo sapiens is about 200,000 years old, and for most of that we don’t have a record that would count as ‘history’. Is he counting australopithecines in that history?

Today, my knee is all swole up like a balloon

Except that it’s kind of firm and fluid filled. And it hurts. And it wobbles when I walk on it.

[Doctor shouts from stage left: “Then don’t walk on it!”]

OK, imaginary doctor, if you say so.

[Futurist shouts from stage right: “Would you like robot limbs, and a jetpack?”]

Yes, imaginary futurist, sign me up! Can you get me those before this sloppy aching mess heals up?

[Futurist whispers: “no.“]

Shut the fuck up, stupid futurist.