I’m done with seeking out spiders in their natural environment, for a while. I’m keeping an eye on a few outdoors (Jenny By-The-Front-Door still lives, despite the recent snow, and there’s a nearby compost bin I have my eye on), but mainly I’m settling in for a winter of laboratory observations now. So here’s a quick review of how I’m raising my spider family.
You want to see a truly deep delusion? I give you “Elizabeth Holmes Is a Visionary, and We Need More Like Her“. It’s an attempt to salvage the reputation of Elizabeth Holmes, who bilked investors to build a blood-testing machine that didn’t work, by complaining about John Carreyrou’s book, Bad Blood. Along the way, though, you get a look into the brain of an entrepreneur. It’s not pretty.
First thing he has to do is discredit the whole notion of “expertise”.
Phyllis Gardner, a professor at Stanford’s medical school, was one of those skeptical doctors interviewed by Carreyrou. Not only did she view Holmes’s original idea (testing blood via a skin patch) as not “remotely feasible,” she broadly dismissed Holmes since the Stanford dropout “had no medical or scientific training to speak of.”
This is correct. Holmes was trying to build a medical device that she imagined in the absence of actual knowledge about how it would work. I would like to imagine a perpetual motion machine. That does not mean that my enthusiasm makes it a good idea. But now the author is going to argue that experts have been wrong before, so let’s discount the importance of expertise in medical technology.
Age and experience elicited a chuckle from this reader in consideration of how wrong the gray and surely eminent “experts” have been for so long about among other things: nutrition (see decades of worship of the “four food groups,” along with last week’s admission that red meat may not be so bad after all…),
A lot of our nutritional information has been tainted by the intervention of corporate/capitalist meddling for profit. Even if I grant him that experts sometimes screw up, though, it doesn’t mean expertise is useless.
foreign policy (see U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Iraq Afghanistan),
Argument from historical clusterfucks. Is there a latin term for that? Also, does anyone think that war-mongering American presidents are an example of expertise?
not to mention the 364 prominent economists who signed a letter to the Financial Times in 1981 stressing how Margaret Thatcher’s fiscal policies of reduced spending and privatization would be “disastrous.”
But Margaret Thatcher’s (and Ronald Reagan’s) fiscal policies were disastrous! They led to our current mess and only benefited the rich…oh. I guess from the author’s perspective that wasn’t disastrous at all.
However, we can now take it as given that the author acknowledges that Elizabeth Holmes had no scientific or medical qualifications — he just thinks such things are unimportant.
Attempts to discredit Holmes for not being a doctor, and for not having completed her studies at Stanford, are the stuff of very small minds. Few will admit it, but degrees are credentials that confirm someone learned yesterday’s news very well, or passably well in many instances. Crucial here is that yesterday people were still dying of all sorts of diseases for which there aren’t yet cures, and for which there isn’t yet technology that detects those diseases ahead of time so that they can perhaps be addressed in pre-emptive fashion. Precisely because “lives are at stake” we want the most creative minds of all working tirelessly to elongate life, and the creative frequently don’t have time for school.
Translation: an education is “yesterday’s news”. Forget about learning the foundations of science, fuck that “standing on the shoulders of giants” nonsense, all you need is creativity! I am inspired! I’m going to go weld something. I never had any training in it, but I have imagination! Then I’m going to rip out all the plumbing and wiring in my house and redo it better, faster, more efficiently! My wife is going to be so surprised.
This guy is a dangerous idiot. He goes on to argue that real business leaders just need enthusiasm and confidence to persuade investors to pour money into your dream so you can just keep on chasing it. If you’re not confident, the investors will abandon you, and Holmes was great because she was so confident.
“Confidence” is the key word in “con man”, you know.
Seemingly forgotten by the eternally smug is that per serial business founder and investor Carl Schramm, capitalistic progress is “messy,” and it’s the stuff of individuals willing to energetically pursue that which is roundly rejected by the existing order. Crucial is that these people are very necessary. This is particularly true in the healthcare space when it’s remembered just how many diseases continue to end lives way too quickly. In short, the world once again needs many more people like Elizabeth Holmes, not fewer. It’s time to end the witch hunts meant to quiet the minds and actions of those who want to force the change without which there is no progress.
Disease is devastating and cuts life short, therefore it’s more important than ever to empower uninformed, poorly educated, but confident people to get rich on promises. Got it.
Oh, and Holmes is the victim of a “witch hunt”, perhaps the most overused phrase in the lexicon of professional abusers. No, she was just a fraud.
Not getting up from this one.
She wields a Broadsword of Brutal Honesty +5.
The recent decision by Atheist Alliance International (AAI) to hire the former leader of American Atheists, David Silverman, to its executive director position is yet another indication that this business-as-usual rehab strategy also applies to movement atheism, which can be just as corrupt, cronyistic, and swaggeringly hostile to women as corporate America. Last year, Silverman was fired from American Atheists after allegations of sexual misconduct and financial impropriety were made against him. The claims leveled against Silverman by two female accusers were extensively detailed by BuzzFeed‘s Peter Aldhous, whose 2018 article notes that one of the women was reluctant to use her full name “because of concerns about hostility experienced by other women who have made allegations of sexual misconduct against prominent atheists.”
As I wrote in a September 2018 piece for RD, Silverman was one of several male atheist leaders who’d been accused of sexual misconduct. According to The Friendly Atheist blog, AAI reached out to Silverman via a friendship with a board member, then created a paid executive director position expressly for him. Must be nice. While women of color in all sectors are routinely shut out of entry level, middle, and executive management positions, white males get carte blanche, have positions of authority created for and handed to them; then receive multiple breaks and opportunities for redemption when they screw up.
Is AAI paying attention? Their choice of a shiny* new paladin just alienated a leading light of the black atheist community, and got decapitated for his trouble. This is probably the biggest PR screw-up an atheist org has committed in ages.
*It’s only shiny because of the thick layer of slime around his armor.
My wife is away for a few weeks, so she’s sending me photos of things she knows I’ll like…like Texas spiders.
Oh, yeah, and also of #1 Grandson.
Memorial to the stolen families on the UMM campus
White Americans stole Indian children and ripped apart Indian families to kill Indian culture.
OK, memories, I’ve experienced this.
I was probably in second or third grade, somewhere around there. The town library was across the street from the elementary school I attended, and rather than walking straight home, I’d often sidle into the library and devour books for an hour or three. Unfortunately, the library had this policy that weird little kids like me had our own specific section of the library, and we were not allowed in the adult section. But I’d already read all the biology books in the kids’ section, and most of them were descriptive and phenomenological picture books, and I wanted to know why, not more what. So I snuck into the adult section one day.
And a librarian caught me. She said I had to have an adults’ permission to be back there with the real science books.
That made me mad. I think eventually I got Mom or Dad to tell them I was allowed to read anything in the main library, and that allowed me to consume everything.
I’m pretty sure that the Kent Public Library changed their policy a few years later, because in high school I noticed that they allowed all kinds of short riff-raff to run free everywhere. Good for them.
Their little hate signs have gotten attention from Newsweek. That’s all they really wanted, was to be outrageous and stupid enough that they’d get written up and win their 15 seconds of fame.
One catch: the College Republicans are eager to disavow the flyers, while speaking out in favor of what the flyers said. So maybe some aren’t so thrilled at being in the spotlight over their regressive views.
The president of UMM College Republicans, Tayler Lehmann, told the Star-Tribune newspaper that the group was not involved with the recent flyer and did not know who was responsible.
In a statement Friday, Lehmann told the paper the UMM College Republicans would “continue to take a lead role in supporting the freedom of speech on campus and fight against gender hysteria and oversensitive triggers that shut down discussion and critical analysis of opposing viewpoints.”
That’s nice. If they really care about fighting against “gender hysteria”, then they’ll shut down the College Republicans, since they’re the only ones carrying on about this. Also, no one is fooled by their use of buzzwords.
By the way, I could probably identify who is responsible, since I spotted one guy putting them up, and it was the same fellow who was tabling for the North Star in the student union the day before.
Also strange: The state College Republicans claims they are aware that the posters were put up by UMM College Republicans. All right then.
Last Thursday, the Minnesota College Republicans, the broader activist body, attempted to distance itself from the Morris posters, tweeting: “We are aware of the posters put up by UMMCRs. State CRs had no knowledge of or involvement with these posters. Further, we would like to note that this is not the type of discourse the College Republicans seek to promote on campus.”
Our more rational, consistent, tolerant students have noticed a problem.
Truckenmiller accused the faculty of failing to address the problem. “Silence makes you part of the problem,” the student wrote. “It’s an insult to students on campus to have our concerns ignored to protect a small group of harassers.
“These messages posted are meant to directly target students, to coerce them into acting out of impulse by directly targeting core parts of their identities. A student cannot learn if in the halls on the way to class a poster is attacking their gender or religion. Action needs to be taken, you need to protect your students and ensure that UMM is a place where a student can get a high quality education without being harassed in the corridors on the way to class. Silence is not an option.”
I agree. Let’s tear them down.
Spotted on Facebook. Hated it.
I am a very critical thinker, which is why I am an Atheist — I don’t believe in things for the most part, unless there is evidence.
That’ bullshit. I’m an atheist, too, and I’m trained in science, and shocker…most of the things I know I don’t have evidence for. I can’t possibly. There are too many things. I haven’t tested whether brushing my teeth every morning actually prevents tooth decay. I haven’t even read any papers on the subject! It makes sense, and I suspect it’s probably true, and it’s a reasonable practice, so I’ll keep doing it. If I have to, like if there were some surprising statement that countered my subjective belief, I might look it up, and I trust that there have been scientific experiments to verify it, but right now I believe it in the absence of known evidence.
Likewise for every other mundane experience. There is electrical current coming out of my wall sockets when I plug things in, and I accept that as evidence that the wiring in my house is actually functional, and that it’s hooked up somewhere to a power supply, but I haven’t actually traced that wiring back to the (probably) coal plant that is generating electricity for me. The fact that my computer is working right now is evidence for something, sure, but the majority of the “things” that make it work are mostly assumptions on my part.
What I actually have is a consistent worldview built on a model I’ve tested on a few key points, and that seems to hold up well under most circumstances. That’s all any of us have. You can be a devout Catholic who believes in transubstantiation and the trinity and dead saviors rolling back stones, and you can say exactly the same thing — your model of the universe simply includes some fundamental assumptions mine doesn’t, and vice versa. You can even carry out the same logical process that I do with my wiring. You can say you’ve done spot checks of the pieces of your theology that matter to you now, and they hold up, but just as I haven’t visited the coal plant, you haven’t yet visited Heaven. You get satisfaction out of your weekly Mass, just as I’m happy with my house wiring and tooth-brushing, and that’s enough for now.
One difference, though, is that I’m a fan of testing my assumptions, mostly. We have this scientific method we use that allows us — even encourages us! — to examine and verify the stuff we don’t know, even if, to be perfectly honest, we can’t possibly examine everything. A scientist or a philosopher is going to inspect key assumptions now and then, and try to build better models of the world as they go, sometimes throwing out perfectly serviceable models, like religion, for others that get some, but never all, of the details better. Never lose sight of the fact that we’re all dealing in approximations, however, and most of what we think is true is actually simply consonant with our current model.
That’s one of the dangers of the kind of atheism held by the guy I took that quote from. It was taken from a conversation in which he actually refuses to consider evidence against his deeply held belief that women who accuse men of harassment are not trustworthy, and he offered up that statement as a testimony that his beliefs are all true, because as an atheist, he doesn’t believe in false things lacking in evidence. It’s a dangerously cocky dogmatism that far too many naive atheists support, where the fact that he has examined a few key points in his worldview (although, more likely, he’s had them handed to him when he read a book by Dawkins), means he has therefore verified all of his opinions with evidence. If he believes it, it must be a fact, because otherwise he wouldn’t believe it.
You’re supposed to practice this idea called epistemic humility. An awful lot of atheists seem to lack it.
You’re telling me that if I want to get from Beneventum to Norba Caesarina, I have to transfer lines 7 times, and it’s going to take how long?
I don’t get the point of all the colors, since they don’t correspond to much of anything, and the key to the map is totally inadequate.
Also, where’s Mornington Crescent?
