The MIT Media Lab is going to be getting some intense scrutiny

The Chronicle of Higher Education has now noticed Caleb Harper’s “Food Computer”. It’s a long article, and a good chunk of it focuses on the novel funding setup MIT has for the Media Lab — it’s basically a semi-autonomous unit set loose to harvest money from rich people (that’s the good part) with relatively little oversight on the quality of the work done with that money (the bad part). So while some people are screaming “You accepted money from pedophile!”, others are now yelling “And you spent it on WHAT?!!?“.

If I were employed by the Media Lab, I’d be scrambling to update my CV and apply for jobs that would allow me to run away before someone wrote a revealing article about my project to teach spiders how to solder circuit boards … which hasn’t worked once, but boy howdy did Silicon Valley like my idea of replacing small Asian children with even cheaper spiders.

Hey, isn’t that what science is supposed to be all about, skimming creamy rich money off our excess of gullible, over-hyped tech billionaires? That’s what the MIT Media Lab was all about anyway. It’s Harper’s turn to be exposed and ridiculed, but I’m wondering what other fantasy-land projects were cooking over there.

But let’s give Caleb Harper a chance to defend himself.

Harper’s optimism helps raise money, and without money he won’t be able to see this dream of an international network of food computers come true. His critics, he said, “are basically jealous because I raise a lot of funding while giving away knowledge for free.” Harper also said that he doesn’t mislead the public. He’s explained his progress in great detail in a series of Medium posts, he said. Some may have misinterpreted his vision as current reality, he said, but if they listened closely they would not be mistaken. “Can you email a tomato to someone today? No,” he said. “Did I say that in my TED talk? Yes. Did I say it was today? No. I said, you will be able to email a tomato.”

It’s true that Harper didn’t quite say that food computers can email tomatoes or apples, though you could be forgiven for thinking exactly that. He frequently leaves the impression that the project has achieved, or is on the brink of achieving, an enormous breakthrough. It’s a style that has attracted the sort of high-profile attention, not to mention corporate funding, that fuels projects at the MIT Media Lab, and his willingness to showcase food computers beset with problems feels consistent with Ito’s “deploy or die” philosophy.

So his dream is to be able to email a tomato (or more precisely, a set of instructions to a “food computer” that will allow it to replicate the exact growing conditions for a specific tomato), so he’s doing this fun thing of making an extravagant claim (“email a tomato”) while simultaneously admitting that he can’t, and is building boxes that allow him to fake emailing a tomato. It reminds me of Fritz Leiber’s SF story, “Poor Superman”, about a scientology-like cult that invents wild stories of colonies on Mars and super-technology, knowing they’re false, but justifying them by saying they have to pretend to convince people to implement the reality.

Here’s the final word from a real working crop scientist on this story:

She also labels this approach “Sugar Daddy Science”, in which you just have to court an ignorant patron to siphon off money into your pocket for your bad ideas.

Tsk.

So what is — or rather, who is — the problem with New Atheism?

We should face the facts: New Atheism is dead. Time for a post-mortem.

New Atheism itself was a rather slight intellectual movement and thus fizzled out quickly…

Ow. Ouch. Hey, that stings. Gettin’ personal there. But why was it slight, and why has it fizzled out? I think we can blame that on the refusal of leading figures to get at all deep, on their shallow understanding of philosophy, and how they only used atheism as a tool to promote a regressive and ultimately racist ideology. The representative of that self-defeating side of the New Atheism is…

…but not before Harris had cemented himself as the arch critic of fundamentalist Islam—a figure willing to challenge the progressive shibboleths of tolerance and multiculturalism that are, as Harris has put it, getting us killed by the thousands. This contrarian stance has steadily intensified over the years (it went into overdrive in 2014 after Ben Affleck famously suggested that Harris is an Islamophobe on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher) and today encompasses much more than the simple critique of “Islamism” that made his name.

Harris’ association with the Intellectual Dark Web, his constant focus on “identity politics” and “liberal delusion,” and his obsession with his own “bad-faith” critics, just to name a few examples, have made him the bête noire of the left. And this open break with the liberal class of which he has been a member throughout his career has made him more popular than ever. Well over a million people follow Harris on Twitter and listen to each of his podcasts. But as his platform has grown, he has ventured into areas far outside his core competencies, which are limited to mindfulness/meditation and perhaps (though this is debatable) certain subdisciplines of neuroscience and philosophy of mind. As a result, Harris often finds himself in avoidable confrontations with experts on controversial topics about which he knows very little.

I agree. Harris has been a disaster. Dawkins stuck his foot in his mouth a few too many times, and has kind of receded into the background. Dennett avoided most of the problems his peers dragged in, but he is even more retiring now, and does a good job of avoiding entanglement in conservative culture wars. Harris, on the other hand, is still in there, obstinately slugging away, sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand of the alt right, and representing the failure of his ideology loudly and persistently.

The article tries to explain what’s wrong with the guy. I partly agree.

This means that much of the criticism of Harris currently out there is misplaced. In recent years he’s been repeatedly assailed as a bigot and racist. He is neither. The trouble with Harris is more prosaic: he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The Diamond episode is just one example of how Harris’ issues are mostly the result of his own ignorance. The problem isn’t that he’s not an expert at everything—obviously no one is. The problem is that Harris is deeply assertive, outlandishly so, in precisely the areas that are thorniest for non-experts to meaningfully wade into.

Don’t be so quick to excuse his racism! This is like the argument that you can’t be a racist unless you join the KKK and participate in a lynching — nope, we white people have a lot of easy ways to be racist, and Harris is happy to exercise all of them.

But otherwise, yes, that is correct. Harris is an erudite ignoramus. He’s very good at mouthing the platitudes of scholarship while ignoring the principles. The article goes on to cite his catastrophic encounters with Jared Diamond, Ezra Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Bruce Schneier, all incidents where his shortcomings and his egotistical inability to overcome his own prejudices were brought to light.

It sure would be nice to be able to point to Sam Harris and say that the embarrassment of the New Atheism was all his fault, but he had partners in crime, and worse still, commands an audience of millions of atheists who worship his ‘wisdom’. The real failure was that the New Atheism failed to inspire people to be better, and instead simply reassured them that their biases were “logical” and “rational” and “enlightened”.

Cheese it, they’re on to us!

Uh-oh. Kerry Roberts has noticed.

A Republican Tennessee lawmaker says he supports getting rid of higher education because he argues it would cut off the “liberal breeding ground.”

Sen. Kerry Roberts of Springfield called for eliminating higher education while speaking about attending a recent abortion legislative hearing on his conservative radio talk show on Sept. 2.

Roberts specifically called out one activist who testified in favor of protecting abortion rights. He asserted without evidence that the woman’s beliefs were a “product of higher education” and claimed that getting rid of higher education would “save America.”

Yep, he’s right. The kind of conservativism he thinks would “save America” can only thrive in ignorance, so getting rid of education would lead to fewer liberals and progressives, fewer ideas, less progress, more stupidity. If that’s what you want, his formula would actually work!

Sadly, “apnotheriopia” is a word I might have to use in the future

It comes from Philip Senter, in a book reviewed by Darren Naish.

The early chapters of this book evaluate and discuss the creationist contention in general and the relatively young history of the entire movement. The impact of John Whitcomb and Henry Morris’s 1961 book The Genesis Flood is obvious, as is the fact that their arguments fail evaluation (Senter 2019). Nevertheless, their influence was such that – from the early 1970s onwards – a number of like-minded individuals were promoting Whitcomb and Morris’s vision, and were in particular arguing that ancient and medieval writings and works of art make explicit reference to dinosaurs and other long-extinct animals. Senter (2019) uses the term apnotheriopia (meaning ‘dead beast vision’) to describe the tendency of creationist author to interpret monsters in literature and art as long-extinct reptiles.

If apnotheriopia is one of your guiding principles, it ‘follows’ that the fire-breathing dragons canonical to Eurocentric, Christian mythology should be interpreted as dinosaurs or similar reptiles, and that such creatures were dragonesque fire-breathers. So integral has the whole fire-breathing thing been to these authors that they’ve proposed fire-breathing for dinosaurs of several sorts (most frequently hadrosaurs) as well as for pterosaurs and the giant Cretaceous crocodyliform Sarcosuchus (Senter 2019). You might know of one or two cases in which this idea has been mooted. Senter’s book shows that numerous authors have engaged with this vision and written about it. The sheer quantity of this literature is daunting – I was going to say ‘impressive’ but this absolutely seems like the wrong word – and Senter has clearly gone to some considerable trouble to obtain it. He must own a pretty hefty personal library of creationist volumes, and I’m reminded of a statement he makes in one of his papers, wherein he notes that collecting and reading creationist literature on dinosaurs and other extinct animals is one of his “guilty pleasures”.

It’s as ridiculous as it sounds, and it is promoted by the inexplicably popular version of creationism favored by Ken Ham and Kent Hovind. If it’s written down in an old text, the older the better, it must be true, because no one in the past had imagination or creativity, or was ever mistaken in an observation, and they must have been literally describing something that actually existed. Therefore, there were dragons, and they breathed fire. Now let’s steal some observations from paleontology and crudely reconcile them with dragons, and voila!

I’ve got my own little library of creationist nonsense, and they do this all the time. Answers in Genesis still pushes this ridiculous idea as essential to justify their dogma that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

I wonder about this all the time!

Well, not specifically Buckingham Palace, though…

Original by Hannah Hillam

I go into some ramshackle old garage on some rental property that was probably built in the 1940s, and I wonder when the spiders first colonized it, and how much turnover there is in spider populations, and if there is a pattern of expansion and contraction in some families of spiders in a neighborhood. So yeah, exactly the same.

Spider identification agonies. Species are lies.

Spider taxonomy drives me cross-eyed. Today I was working on sorting egg sacs, tearing them away from their mommies, who don’t like that one bit — they’re very protective. I’m learning to tell the different species apart without a microscope. For instance, Steatoda triangulosa has a distinctive zig-zag of pigment on their abdomen that looks like a row of triangles from above, and they also have nearly spherical egg sacs that are white, have a fluffy surface, and are often semi-transparent. Parasteatoda, on the other hand, has an irregular mottling that sometimes looks roughly stripey, and their egg sacs are football-shaped, beige, and have an opaque leathery/papery surface (there are two species of Parasteatoda around here, P. tepidariorum and P. tabulata, which I haven’t learned to distinguish — it requires careful scrutiny of their genitalia — and my live spiders refuse to sit still long enough to poke around their private parts). Those are my rules, they’re what helps me figure out who is what.

So today I’m parting Lyanna from her egg sac…here’s Lyanna:

[Read more…]

Disgusting

The Mirror has an article on a man who claims to have been so severely bitten by spiders that he can’t work. You probably don’t want to read it: it’s mainly lots of close-up, full-color photos of oozing, infected wounds full of pus, and it’s going to horrify and sicken most people. There is one photo of a large false widow, but there is no connection between it and the person’s injuries, and I have to suspect something else is going on here.

The man and his son have multiple lesions all over their legs…how? These are solitary spiders, mostly, and they have no interest in biting people. One bite, I could believe; if you rolled over in bed on one, crushing it, it might bite in self-defense. But numerous bites? This makes no sense. Ticks, bedbugs, that sort of nasty beastie that actually feeds on humans, I could see, especially since those kinds of bites are recurrent and prone to infection.

This is not the first time I’ve seen the UK tabloids freaking out about spider invasions. What’s going on over there? Is this a symptom of rising xenophobia? Can I expect US tabloids to start inventing lurid stories of evil spiders killing people in their beds?

Gilly’s breakfast

I know what you’re all saying: I haven’t been posting as many spider photos lately. Guilty as charged. In my defense, classes have started up, and I’m busier, and I’ve already got grading to do, and I’ve got all these students, and…

OK, you don’t want to hear about it. So this morning I fed a few of the spiders and tried to get some action shots.

[Read more…]

Everyone must say “Happy Birthday!” to Mary

It’s that day today.

(she’s the one in back)

You may be curious how old she is, but we’re not supposed to talk about that. I can say that our birthdays are just about exactly six months apart, which means that when I was one year old, she was six months old, or half my age. Using my keen scientific mind, I estimate that that mathematical relationship would never change, and that therefore today she is still half my age, or 31.

I know. That makes me a cradle-robber. But she’s worth it!

Ugh, Al Seckel’s name floats to the top again

I’ve mentioned Al Seckel before — he was a self-serving fraud who slithered his way into the skeptic community, taking advantage of their gullibility in the face of of any phony who knew the right sciencey buzzwords.

What I didn’t notice before was how entangled Seckel was in another problem: he was associated with both Jeffrey Epstein and John Brockman. He actually organized a “science” meeting on Epstein’s orgy island! He gave TED talks! He was married to Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister! Viewed with hindsight, knowing how unsavory Epstein was, Seckel’s history looks even more horrible now.

Also of note, one of Seckel’s tools to suppress anyone who might question his credentials (he had none; he failed out of everything, but that didn’t stop him from claiming to be a physicist) was the frequent use of lawsuits and threats of lawsuits. He seems to have been suing someone or multiple someones at all times, and people were afraid to talk about his dubious claims because he’d drop a lawsuit on you if you didn’t reward him with honors for his nonexistent skills. It reminds me of some other people who use the courts as a blunt instrument.