Christianity is a death cult

Do I need to explain this? Thulsa Doom was not a role model.

A religious cultist in Kenya did not get the memo, though. Pastor Paul Mackenzie has been telling his parishioners that they can meet Jesus sooner by starving themselves to death. The end result: mass graves.

The number of people who died after a Kenyan pastor ordered his followers to starve to death in order to meet Jesus has surpassed 300, authorities said Tuesday, and the death toll is expected to rise as more exhumations are planned.

The death toll increased to 303 after 19 more bodies were recovered from mass graves in the vast forested land in Kilifi County of coastal Kenya, where pastor Paul Mackenzie and his followers lived.

Coastal regional commissioner Rhoda Onyancha told local journalists that 613 people tied to the area are missing.

There are a couple of pastors in this region who have been misinforming their congregations in ways that lead to mass deaths — it’s like a morbid evangelical revival.

Children’s events — successfully poisoned by the right wing

Here’s more of what we can expect from the kinds of assholes who listen to the current conservative mania. Heidi Starr’s nine-year-old daughter was participating in a track and field event when…

“As my daughter was preparing to get up and throw, a man came out of the crowd, stepped forward and walked towards a parent volunteer and said, ‘This is a girls’ event — why are boys throwing?'” Starr told CBC News.

Starr said she then intervened and corrected the man, whose granddaughter was also participating in the event.

“Then the gentleman started insisting that I provide documentation in the form of a certificate proving that my daughter was born a girl,” Starr said.

Starr added that the man’s wife was also shouting at Starr and Starr’s ex-wife, saying they were “genital mutilators and groomers.”

The asshole denies shouting, claiming all he did was ask for a gender certificate, like that was totally inoffensive.

You might wonder how the daughter reacted to all this — as you might expect.

“She was physically vibrating. She was sobbing. She was in and out of tears all day till bedtime that day,” Starr said.

Given that, I won’t hesitate to post the assholes’ photo and names.

Josef and Krista Tesar

Sports are supposed to be fun. It’s hard to enjoy anything when jerks like that are prowling about questioning the participants identities and right to be there.

At this rate, the Right will starve themselves to death

Comrades, I am pleased to report another glorious victory over the running dog lackeys of the regressive Right: Cracker Barrel has been conquered. It is now ours.

As people across the country continue to celebrate Pride Month, one restaurant in particular let it be known that they’re in full support of the month-long commemoration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender pride.

Earlier this week, Cracker Barrel took some of its customers by surprise when the restaurant shared a photo on its social media accounts of a rocking chair sporting rainbow colors.

The image included the following caption: “We are excited to celebrate Pride Month with our employees and guests. Everyone is always welcome at our table (and our 🌈 rocker). Happy Pride!”

You will also be relieved to know that this triumph does not mean the socialist vanguard is required to shop at Cracker Barrel, just as you are not required to drink Budweiser. This is a victory for the freedom to choose.

They might turn me into a Luddite at this rate

It’s all good, their lives were worse than average anyway

All these raving mad techbro loonies keep ranting about how AI, unless properly nurtured (and paid for), might lead to extinction, and how AI ought to be a high priority for humanity (meaning “give us money), and it’s confusing, because they use words differently than normal people. In particular, the word “extinction” means something very different from what a biologist might understand it to mean.

When TESCREALists [transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism] talk about the importance of avoiding human extinction, they don’t mean what you might think. The reason is that there are different ways of defining “human extinction.” For most of us, “human extinction” means that our species, Homo sapiens, disappears entirely and forever, which many of us see as a bad outcome we should try to avoid. But within the TESCREAL worldview, it denotes something rather different. Although there are, as I explain in my forthcoming book, at least six distinct types of extinction that humanity could undergo, only three are important for our purposes:

Terminal extinction: this is what I referenced above. It would occur if our species were to die out forever. Homo sapiens is no more; we disappear just like the dinosaurs and dodo before us, and this remains the case forever.

Final extinction: this would occur if terminal extinction were to happen — again, our species stops existing — and we don’t have any successors that take our place. The importance of this extra condition will become apparent shortly.

Normative extinction: this would occur if we were to have successors, but these successors were to lack some attribute or capacity that one considers to be very important — something that our successors ought to have, which is why it’s called “normative.”

The only forms of extinction that the TESCREAL ideologies really care about are the second and third, final and normative extinction. They do not, ultimately, care about terminal extinction — about whether our species itself continues to exist or not. To the contrary, the TESCREAL worldview would see certain scenarios in which Homo sapiens disappears entirely and forever as good, because that would indicate that we have progressed to the next stage in our evolution, which may be necessary to fully realize the techno-utopian paradise they envision.

I think maybe “we” and “our” might mean something different to them, too, because the words don’t include me or my family or my friends or even distant acquaintances. Heck, they probably don’t include most of the life on this planet.

Later in his book, MacAskill suggests that our destruction of the natural world might actually be net positive, which points to a broader question of whether biological life in general — not just Homo sapiens in particular — has any place in the “utopian” future envisioned by TESCREALists. Here’s what MacAskill says:

It’s very natural and intuitive to think of humans’ impact on wild animal life as a great moral loss. But if we assess the lives of wild animals as being worse than nothing on average, which I think is plausible (though uncertain), then we arrive at the dizzying conclusion that from the perspective of the wild animals themselves, the enormous growth and expansion of Homo sapiens has been a good thing.

The lives of wild animals as being worse than nothing on average…who assesses that “worse”? People? TESCREALists? I was just watching an adorable little Theridion constructing a cobweb in a signpost — what was “worse” about that? It’ll probably thrive all summer long and leave behind a family of spiderlings who I’ll see building cobwebs next summer.

I don’t think the monarch butterflies and mayflies consider the expansion of Homo sapiens to be a good thing either — they’re dying and declining in numbers. Were passenger pigeons grateful for what we brought to them? I think MacAskill is playing a weird numbers game here. He thinks he can arbitrarily assign a value to an organisms life, either negative or positive or “average” (relative to what, I have no idea), and if it’s less than zero…pffft, it’s OK to exterminate them.

People who think that way about animals tend to eventually do the same thing to people, you know.

So where does this leave us? The Center for AI Safety released a statement declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.” But this conceals a secret: The primary impetus behind such statements comes from the TESCREAL worldview (even though not all signatories are TESCREALists), and within the TESCREAL worldview, the only thing that matters is avoiding final and normative extinction — not terminal extinction, whereby Homo sapiens itself disappears entirely and forever. Ultimately, TESCREALists aren’t too worried about whether Homo sapiens exists or not. Indeed our disappearance could be a sign that something’s gone very right — so long as we leave behind successors with the right sorts of attributes or capacities.

Again, the extinction they speak of is not the extinction we think of. If their strategies lead to the death of every person (and animal!) on the planet, but we leave behind blinking digital boxes that are running simulations of people and animals, that is a net win.

I’m beginning to worry about these people. If I assign them a value of -1, will they all conveniently disappear in a puff of smoke?

This is why administrators don’t teach

Academics get constant training — it seems like every week or two the university trots out a new “module” and duns our email with notifications that we are REQUIRED to take it, and if we defer the training to a more convenient time the notifications don’t stop. It’s a lousy system, but necessary. It’s just that the methods are so poor. For example, this article on sexual harassment in science offers up a few criticisms.

Sexual harassment includes forcing people into sexual activity, giving unwanted sexual attention to someone and making unwanted comments or threats to someone based on their gender. The negative effects of sexual harassment also apply to the people who witness it and the organizations involved. The first thing that experts say needs to be overhauled is traditional sexual harassment training.

The computer-based format of some training modules is familiar to anyone starting a new job, including us. We remember laughable scenarios that were, at best, out of touch with how real people behave, or showed only the most extreme examples of harassment. The training was unrealistic, unmemorable and something to click through as fast as we could. Such passive, simplistic training typically fails, as sociologists Frank Dobbin of Harvard University and Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University found in a Harvard Business Review analysis in 2020.

Training needs to be more in-person, according to experts. People can interact with a live instructor who has specialized knowledge of awkward topics and how to talk effectively about them. The trainers can take the backgrounds and ages of people in the group into account, answer questions in real time, and tailor their program to the organization; what people at a nonprofit might need could be different from workers at a big-box store or in an academic setting. And even in academia, training for scientists who work in the field could be different than for those who work in a lab.

This past weekend, after a week of emails telling me I am REQUIRED to take training in “Fundamentals of Disability Accommodations and Inclusive Course Design,” I did it. It was fundamentally terrible. I am 100% in agreement with the importance of the topic, and I took it very seriously and cleared my calendar and went through this self-paced online program in about an hour and a half. It consisted of a series of simple web pages emphasizing specific points, interspersed with 2-5 minute videos of faculty and students talking about how they solved certain problems. There were also short quizzes (a question or two) occasionally. It was totally trivial. I quickly realized that all I had to do was respect the students and work with them, the core lesson of the exercise, and I’d get everything right. That’s what I want to do, of course, but even if I were a student-hating psychopath, I could have easily breezed right through it all, and gotten my required email notification that I had taken the training and done well.

I’ve taken all the sexual harassment training the university offers, and many others on racial sensitivity and grant management, etc. They’re all the same, screen pages and short canned videos. Like the article says, the “training was unrealistic, unmemorable and something to click through as fast as we could.” It’s unfortunate — they can do better. The best training I had here was on implicit bias, which was not done on a computer, but in a room with other faculty and a specialist who came in and talked to us and answered questions interactively. It also helped in that faculty who were opposed to the whole idea of the training publicly exposed themselves and made for great counter-examples.

I’m just thinking that this is a university, and we have a lot of people who are very good at teaching, yet somehow we have to take these training courses that are the modern equivalent of those horrible filmstrips we had to watch in the 1960s. Imagine if I were to teach my genetics course in the style of these online training courses — I’d be hauled in front of an academic tribunal and chastised severely for my incompetence at my job. You couldn’t even run an online course in any academic subject with this degree of rote key-clicking and low information density pages.

If universities were serious about rooting out and correcting sexual harassment, they have to do a little more than the equivalent of putting a check box online that says “I am not a sexual harasser.” That would take a little more money and investment of expertise, though.

A lesson for parents of trans kids everywhere

The Washington Post has a nice article about Christine Jorgensen, the woman who became famous in the 1950s for her transgender surgery. There’s the usual, expected tales of bigotry — exclusion from bathrooms (that never changes), discrimination, prurient curiosity about her genitals, the New York Post declared that she wasn’t really a woman, etc. — but one thing stood out for me. When she went off to Denmark for her surgery, she informed her parents, and they replied back:

It was also time to tell her parents the reason for her trip, which she had withheld for fear of causing them hurt and confusion. In the letter that was soon to be shared with the rest of America, she reassured them their daughter was “healthier and happier than ever.”

Though her parents struggled to grasp the full meaning, they cabled back: “We love you more than ever.”

Awww. That’s how it should be for everyone — there are a lot of parents today, 70 years later, who need to learn what loving your children involves.

Ceci n’est pas une définition

I put a fairly substantial effort in critiquing that awful paper by Krylov and Co, and now my efforts are rewarded with a rebuttal by Lee Jussim. Oh no. I tremble in fear. But I will bravely acknowledge that his criticisms.

Ole PZ makes a zillion different points, nearly all wrong regarding our paper, but here I’ll just focus on one as illustration. He claims:

The first big problem, and one that plagues the whole paper, is that merit isn’t actually defined.

Ole PZ is a bit familiar for someone I don’t know, but I’ll overlook it. As he says, I made a zillion different points, so I have to congratulate him on wisely focusing on just one. It must be one that I really got embarrassingly wrong, so no doubt his refutation will be devastating.

He has chosen my claim that there is no definition of merit anywhere in their paper, so I anticipate that he will now quote the section of the paper that clearly defines merit, leaving me crushed and humiliated. I read on, dreading my imminent disgrace, and here it is, the part where he exposes me as someone who wasn’t able to understand their paper. This is where he defines “merit” for us all:

This is Figure 2 from the paper:

Of course, the “importance” of any given discovery, talk or paper may be pretty subjective until the fullness of time has weighed in. As our paper repeatedly acknowledged, scientists’ biases may creep in to influence judgments of merit. Nonetheless, we now know that discoveries that cigarettes cause cancer, that bacteria, not stress, cause ulcers and that genes influence many physical and psychological characteristics are pretty important, each of which was doubted, controversial or even dismissed at the time. It also took some time to discover that certain ideas lack merit (e.g., thalidomide is not safe to administer to women who are or might be pregnant; the implicit association test does not measure “unconscious racism”).

Uh, what?

I was expecting a howitzer shell to land on me and blow all my arguments away…but this is it? A graph with two quantitatively undefined axes, but merit still isn’t defined at all. Instead, we’ve got two additional magic words, importance and strength of evidence, with no explanation of how they’re assessed. How do we determine what is important? That’s the whole question here, and he has just deferred the meaning of merit to a different subjective term, importance, modified by another fuzzy parameter, strength of evidence.

OK, so where’s that definition of merit? This is the best he can do? I guess he instead decided to demonstrate the validity of my point, that merit isn’t actually defined. If it were, he would have trotted it out here.

Instead, we get a paragraph making excuses that merit may be pretty subjective and isn’t always going to be obvious. Great! So my comments must have been pretty accurate.

I’m relieved to have emerged unscathed from that rebuttal, but also disappointed. Why are my opponents always so pathetic? I set myself up with a strong claim, that Jussim noticed, and he wasn’t even able to muster a single logical point against it. Pathetic.

I really didn’t have to type all those words. Apparently I should just reply with a bad graph.