Bly is the fellow who put Scienceblogs together, and to his credit, one of his responses to the heat generated by the whole PepsiCo debacle is to step forward and be more open. His blog is at Science is Culture — go say hello. Or tell him what to do to fix everything.
I’ve got a little inside information on Premise Media, makers of Expelled — despite all the bragging about what a successful movie they had, they still haven’t fully paid contractors they’d hired, and the company appears to be dead. It was a kind of zombie company anyway, with a fake website filled with fake projects to trick people into taking it seriously, and now it’s simply decaying. All that’s left is a collection of clips.
However, the writer, Kevin Miller, has found employment working on something even schlockier — the poor guy’s career is sinking so fast, he’s going to end up writing for Veggie Tales at some point. He’s working on a new movie with…Kirk Cameron!
The movie is called Monumental, and I dare you to puzzle out what it’s about from the description at that link. It seems to be best described as Kirk Cameron’s Vanity Show, in which a film crew follows him around as he gushes out a right-wing simplistic version of American history that emphasizes how God was on our side every step of the way. It sounds like the sort of thing they’d want to bring in the Texas board of education to consult on.
I remember the classic BBC television series, America, and it has echoes of that…except instead of a guy with class and gravitas like Alistair Cooke, their narrator is going to be a pious pipsqueak creationist with a reputation for inanity and ignorance, and it’s being written by a fellow whose last big screen effort was notorious for its dishonesty and incompetence. The Dunning-Kruger effect strikes again!
My wife is the one hanging out with celebrities this weekend, so no, we have not made the Minchin Accommodation.
Please do continue whatever the heck you were talking about. I just had to make this clear to the spouse hanging out in Vegas.
(Current totals:10,573 entries with 1,048,281 comments.)
I know you all mean well, but 30-40 emails a day just about the German octopus ‘predicting’ World Cup matches is wearing me out. I have to explain a few things.
Cephalopods are not psychic. Nothing is.
If this were real, it would be Paul the Precognitive Octopus. It’s telling the future, not reading minds.
Cephalopods cannot see into the future. Nothing can.
As this game is set up, there’s a simple 50% chance in any trial that the octopus will guess correctly. It has guessed correctly 6 times; there’s a 1 in 64 chance you could get the same result flipping a quarter.
Cephalopods are smart and responsive. This scenario is ripe for the Clever Hans effect, which means the handler’s knowledge about likely winners can greatly improve the odds of the observed result.
I’m sure that the aquarium housing Paul could use a little extra money. If the octopus actually does have paranormal powers, they should apply for Randi’s million dollar challenge. I’m sure they won’t, because they know that in a well-controlled experiment, Paul’s amazing abilities would suddenly disappear.
I really detest this kind of prolonged silly indulgence in a common supernatural belief by a purportedly scientific organization. Once is a lark, a joke, a funny bit of self-mockery — stretching it out turns it into an exercise in misinformation.
Psychics are lying parasites. I hate to see a beautiful cephalopod smeared with that ignoble reputation.
FREE THE OCTOPUS! IMPRISON THE DISHONEST MEDIA!
Oh, dear. Right after posting this, I got email from Brian Souter.
Hi Mr Myers
I just saw your article:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/i_am_really_tired_of_paul_the.phpWith its:
‘Cephalopods cannot see into the future. Nothing can.’
And
‘Psychics are lying parasites. I hate to see a beautiful cephalopod smeared with that ignoble reputation.
Well Paul is proving you wrong!
Can octopi lie?
So far Pauls 100% success at the World Cup proves your scepticism is unjustified, not to mention pettily vindictive, as you see your cafully crafted world being kicked about like a jabulani ball. He does have psychic powers…and so do many if not most people. Its only the opressive rage of witch hunting sceptics, that presents this from flowering. Out in the real world…these things do happen.Paul is luckier than most psychics tho: hes doesnt have to deal with the rage of sceptics influencing his predictions…Hes immune to the rant of the Randis.
Pauls done the world a real service! Showing that such gifts are real…And its being broadcast live… to the world!…randi the bandi can start writing that check!
What a pity to see science smeared by last ditch self-serving lying in the face of real and real world evidence…
Regards and GO PAUL!
Brian
Whoa. I guess I’ve been taught a lesson.
Just listen to Carl.
You know how New Scientist published that horrible magazine cover that said “DARWIN WAS WRONG” in big letters, which we now get to hear about all the time at school board meetings as every authority-happy creationist waves it around and announces that they were right all along? I want a copy of the July issue of the Portuguese edition of Playboy for the same reason.
Jesus is on the cover of the July Playboy, sitting on a bed, holding a scantily clad female. The title of Saramago’s book is engraved into the headboard of the bed.
The other explicit images in the magazine show Jesus watching a lesbian sex scene, standing next to a street prostitute, and looking over the shoulder of a half naked woman reminiscent of a Catholic school girl.
This is purely for pedagogical purposes, of course. For any other purposes I’d want the weird bearded guy airbrushed out of the picture.
We just got this note from Adam Bly:
We have removed Food Frontiers from SB.
We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way.
How do we empower top scientists working in industry to lead science-minded positive change within their organizations? How can a large and diverse online community made up of scientists and the science-minded public help? How do companies who seek genuine dialogue with this community engage? We’ll open this challenge up to everyone on SB and beyond in the coming days so that we can all find the right solution.
That is such a relief.
I agree that scientists in industry must be part of the discussion. However, putting that discussion in the framework of an industry-sponsored infomercial compromises it — there are just too many constraints on what could be said. I also don’t believe that PepsiCo in this case was interested in a genuine dialog — what they wanted was a PR whitewash, and they were willing to pay to get it.
Some people are reasonably asking what next. Notice that Bly is asking questions up there! You can help by making suggestions.
You know that whole “climategate” nonsense was settled, right? It was a ginned-up controversy with no merit, and the evidence still supports the conclusion of anthropogenic global warming.
Unfortunately, that message hasn’t gotten to the public yet. It just goes to show how easy it is to persuade people with fabricated conspiracy theories.
33.6%
Yes, the panel was fair in reproaching their behavior while upholding key data.
66.4%
No, I still believe those scientists fabricated data to support their beliefs on man-made warming.
I did like this one comment:
Typical for scientists to lie… look at evolution and how they try to justify it.
Yeah, that guy is smart and well-informed.
Here we go again, another creationist who doesn’t understand the evolution side of the argument at all. He’s criticizing the argument from bad design in a kind of backwards way.
I’ve never heard a Darwinist complain that the mind they use is the result of lousy design, that their mind is the result of a mindless, purposeless process and thus fundamentally untrustworthy as a reality-processor. (Would you want to buy a “word-processor” made by a random, purposeless process? Would you trust it?)
I’ve never heard a Darwinist complain they’ve been given a crappy brain never designed for abstract thought, or, indeed for thought at all. And yet, according to the self-same Darwinist, the brain is not designed for anything, just like the heart is not designed, the knee is not designed, the eye is not designed, etc. They all just popped out of the ooze, on their own, for no purpose, and if you’ve got problems with that, you’re not very Bright™!
I’ll complain! I have a very bad brain for the purposes I want to use it for. It’s pretty good, but prone to awkward mistakes, for deciphering behavioral cues and inferring intent in my conspecifics, which is still a useful skill, but other functions, like the ability to search out fruit and tubers, or to coordinate a hunting party, or to detect predators lying in wait, I’ve let slide out of a lack of utility. I’d like a brain that could hold more than half a dozen numbers at once in my head, or that wasn’t prone to perceptual errors, or that could process written information a bit more efficiently than this linear, one-word-or-phrase-at-a-time parsing. I wish I had a memory that could accurately record events and scenes, rather than storing a few key hints and reconstructing the rest. I’d like a brain that was actually evolved for doing mathematics naturally, rather than requiring years of discipline and training to acquire the skill artificially.
We really do have very untrustworthy brains. The capacity for abstract, rational thought is a byproduct of general cognitive capacity, and doesn’t come easily to any of us. We have to work at it, and some of us, as is well demonstrated by creationists, never quite get the hang of it.
We even build crutches for brains. Math is a crutch. Science is a crutch. Philosophy is a crutch. Artists, too, use learned heuristics to get their minds to operate reliably in that unnatural mode. We rely utterly on these kinds of intellectual tools to focus our brains efficiently on problem solving, rather than doing what comes naturally, which usually involves snarfing down cheeseburgers and having wild monkey sex with other bipeds.
So yeah, we have crappy brains never designed for abstract thought. What we have are brains shaped by the exigencies of survival — we have big brains simply because of chance and the fact that having a smaller brain, in our peculiar niche, meant you either died or didn’t get laid. We make do. We haven’t been gifted with brains that would be better suited to our current urban/technological lifestyles.
Same with hearts, knees, and eyes. The current forms have been sculpted by time and chance to be good enough to keep us alive. All of them show signs of suboptimality, I can safely say as a fellow who needs glasses, has to watch his blood pressure and cholesterol, and has been plagued with a wobbly knee since he was a teenager. I’ll keep my back, prostate, and teeth in reserve, if we really need more examples of problematic ‘design’.
I’ll leave the strawman claim of derived structures popping whole and complete out of some mysterious ooze out of the argument, too. That’s just stuff you say when you’ve got a particularly stupid, malfunctioning brain. Although, actually, it does make my argument for me…
It’s easy. Bait your hook with stupid.
It’s true, we’re a sucker for that stuff, although it does have a downside. We’ll come up, swallow the bait, follow the line to its source, devour the poor fool holding the pole, and then waddle off, all fat and smug. It’s our nature, we can’t help it.
So, for instance, an Indiana politician who is considered a potential presidential candidate, Mitch Daniels, talks about atheism.
People who reject the idea of a God — who think that we’re just accidental protoplasm — have always been with us. What bothers me is the implications — which not all such folks have thought through — because really, if we are just accidental, if this life is all there is, if there is no eternal standard of right and wrong, then all that matters is power.
And atheism leads to brutality. All the horrific crimes of the last century were committed by atheists — Stalin and Hitler and Mao and so forth — because it flows very naturally from an idea that there is no judgment and there is nothing other than the brief time we spend on this Earth.
You should read the rest of that interview, especially the part where he talks about not being ostentatious with his faith. It’s so precious.
The projection is strong in this one. I don’t know if I’d want a president who thought the world was divided into people who thought the only two possible purposes in life were to glorify God or a brutal drive to power.
Daniels is an example of a Christian considered smart enough to be president. You should see what the brain-damaged masses believe. It’s always fun to be lectured about what I believe by a marginally literate kook. Did you know that atheists believe in these six things?
She even made a video about it!
But wait! You haven’t seen the scariest part! Who is this person?
Jellooo I’m Bev, I’m a health care provider, I work in a hospital and nursing home. I also earn my degree in Bachelor of Science major in Management, I teach academic program to toddlers, children and young adults, I also teach speech to foreign student.
If only she’d move to Indiana, she could run for president someday.
