Goofus and Gallant

I remember these little cartoons from when I was a kid, which tells you how old they are, but my kids also read them. They were staples of the magazines in pediatrician’s offices (they might still be, I don’t know). It was a simple concept, a series of panels in which two kids were faced with a situation, and Gallant would respond in a good way, while Goofus would screw it up even worse. It plays out in real life, too!

Earyn McGee is a grad student at the University of Arizona. One of the fun things she does on Twitter is post photos under the hashtag #FindThatLizard, and then post the answer later, under the hashtag #FoundThatLizard. That’s the game. She has some simple rules, like this:

Well, a well-known science blogger found that photo, and appropriated it, and put up a post saying “Spot the Lizards!”. Without linking to the original. Or naming the author. Saying he’d name her later, after everyone had played the game on his blog. But…but…that’s just the game on her twitter feed. No one needed his blog to enjoy the idea, and he added absolutely nothing to the game.

So let’s play Goofus and Gallant.

Gallant:

Here’s McGee’s response. It’s a gracious acknowledgment of appreciation, and a polite request that he not undermine her efforts.

Wow. I’m never that nice. But that’s a classic Gallant reaction.

Now watch how a Goofus can take a bad situation and make it even worse.

Goofus:

This is how a Goofus reacts, by blaming everyone else.

Umm. . . I SAID I’d give the tweet in the reveal post at noon, which I did and which shows who posted the picture. You should know better than to chastise me before you know all the facts. Shame on you. I will accept an apology.

UPDATE: Apparently a Twitter mob was sic’ed on me by people who didn’t even read my post, which said this: “Can you spot both? I’m not giving the original tweet, as it contains the answer, but I will in the reveal at noon Chicago time.”

Credit was of course given; I withheld the source for a few hours so people could guess without looking at the answer in the subsequent tweet.

The Twitter outrage mob didn’t read the original post (this seems to be common), and piled on without doing so. I’d say they all owe me an apology, but of course I expect none. That’s the way outrage culture works. Even if you err, you never apologize.

Wow (that’s a bad wow, if you can’t guess). That he announced that he was subverting McGee’s game ahead of time and would eventually reveal the creator does not change the fact that he was basically stealing attention from a grad student. Then to demand an apology? Hoo boy.

But then he updates to chastise people, calling them a “twitter mob”, for not reading his blog post, as if that were the star around which everyone is supposed to orbit, and demands that everyone apologize to him.

Jebus. That’s too extreme a difference for even a Goofus and Gallant cartoon. No one would believe that Goofus could be that petty in Highlights for Children. But then, the creator apparently didn’t know Jerry Coyne.

By the way, Gallants who use Twitter might do well to follow Earyn McGee.

I know how to fix the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “problem”!

You may have seen the tedious Politico article which fished up criticisms of AOC from her fellow democrats for making waves — most of these democrats haven’t made so much as a ripple, so their envy and resentment were understandable. I think this rebuttal was spot on, though.

But how do we end the whiny nobody problem? The Democratic party is full of status quo whimperers.

There is only one solution: we need to elect a few hundred of the kinds of prospective politicians who are inspired by and model their efforts after Ocasio-Cortez. I don’t necessarily want to elect her to the presidency, but a Democratic party that had discarded its apathetic weasels and was populated by an army of AOC types would finally give us a choice. Make her the rule rather than the exception.

If ever you doubted the existence of media bias…

Say “motherfucker” once, and the media melts down; but when a representative announces his allegiance to racist white supremacy, it’s business as usual.

I tried to rationalize this. Maybe “motherfucker” is more sound-bitey? But it’s also kind of generic, and lots of people have said far worse about various politicians. And you would think that a politician openly embracing a racist ideology would be far more newsworthy and would inspire a lot more discussion than a profanity, about which you really can’t say a whole lot.

I think it means the media, and our country, takes racism for granted. Add to that fact that Rashida Tlaib’s exclamation was an opportunity to exercise that racism by bashing a brown woman, and I think we’ve got the root cause of the discrepancy thoroughly covered.

No. A Portland professor is not being railroaded.

“No” is usually the right answer when an article is headlined with a question. Jesse Singal has authored an article in NY Magazine titled, Is a Portland Professor Being Railroaded by His University for Criticizing Social-Justice Research?, and think we can cut through all the garbage by simply saying “no.” Singal tries to present both sides, but one side is not at all convincing.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a mini forum which showcased a variety of different views on the subject. “The entire force of their stunt lies in the fact that they managed to get several satirical papers published,” wrote the University of Washington biologist Carl T. Bergstrom. “But it makes no sense to judge the health of a field by looking at what an insincere author can get through peer review.” On the other side was Yascha Mounk, a Harvard lecturer in government, who condemned the circling of the academic wagons and what he viewed as unfair attempts to undermine the hoaxsters. “[E]ven if all of the charges laid at the feet of Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian were true, they would have demonstrated a very worrying fact,” he wrote. “Some of the leading journals in areas like gender studies have failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit.”

I think Bergstrom already answered Mounck’s objection. You can find bad papers getting published in every field, even, for instance, molecular biology. That there are swarms of worthless submissions and that a few of them leak through is inevitable and to be expected; we shouldn’t be blithe about it, of course, and we should act to tighten up procedures where ever the problem arises, but there was no serious, responsible call to action by the “grievance studies” experiment, other than to simply abolish all of gender studies.

I would point to one extreme example of bad science in molecular biology: the ENCODE project. Does the existence of that badly executed and interpreted project mean that all of molecular biology has “failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit”? I don’t think so. And before you whine about the inclusion of morality as a criterion, I remind you that ENCODE cost $200 million dollars, and if you don’t think sucking away that much money lacks both scientific and moral consequences, well, I don’t think you’ve got much in the way of an intellectual contribution to make.

Here’s the money shot from Singal’s article, though, and why it’s safe to answer “no” to that question.

For the purposes of Peter Boghossian’s case, three facts about IRBs matter a great deal: “study” is defined rather broadly in the federal guidelines; possible risks to humans — even ones that non-IRB nerds may view as negligible — are taken very seriously; and IRBs tend to look especially closely at studies involving deception. For these and other reasons, each of the four IRB experts I spoke or emailed with agreed that yes, the grievance-studies hoax needed IRB approval; yes, it clearly involved human subjects; and no, PSU’s decision to investigate it on that front cannot be reasonably viewed, on its own, as politically motivated. In other words: This particular aspect of the university’s response smells more like a standard reaction to improperly vetted research than a witch hunt.

All the rest is noise; yes, people complain about the onerous paperwork of IRBs, and sometimes the committees tie up research, but only a fool would suggest that we get rid of them altogether.

One other point is that Boghossian is afraid he might get fired. He should be! Not because this one “study”, but because he’s already on somewhat shaky ground. Boghossian is a non-tenured, non-tenure track assistant professor! He has no path to promotion, and he’s probably on a year-by-year contract. This is not to say that it is a good thing how PSU manages their faculty: they have 9 tenured/tenure track philosophy faculty, an equal number of adjuncts, and 6 full time non-tenured instructors, of which Boghossian is one. He’s employed as long as his department finds him a useful contributor to their teaching needs, but if the negatives start to outweigh his utility, they could easily let him go at their next contract review. And this is academia…it’s not as if there aren’t heaps of philosophy Ph.D.s who’d love to get a full-time appointment in a lovely city like Portland.

I doubt that this fuck-up he’s made will get him fired, but it will put a black mark on his record, and administrators will remember it. I would suspect that he’s already signed a contract for next year — no one likes last minute, rushed job searches to fill an abruptly vacated position — so what will be interesting is what PSU does next year, after all the hubbub about this issue has died down, and it’s decided whether his appointment is renewed.

If I were him, I’d be shopping my CV around right now. Although he might be instead banking on notoriety to help him squeeze donations out of alt-right fanbois, since he’ll have his very own grievance to tout.

A day at the science fair

I’ve been off at the local high school, judging the local science fair. It’s a strange experience. An awful lot of the experiments involved playing with guns, which I guess is to be expected in a rural area.

They were still a bit disturbing.

And then you occasionally run into a peculiar rationale, in this case for an experiment involving weighted Hot Wheels cars.

I also had the student who thanked me afterwards, saying “Thank you for judging me.” I had to tell him I wasn’t judging him, I only judge the project.

Anyway, it didn’t matter if they did odd, off-the-wall experiments on phenomena that I didn’t find at all interesting. What mattered is that they actually tested their hypothesis appropriately, and how well they presented their data. And they were all good kids.

Jordan Peterson gets email

He gets evidence that those damned Leftists are corrupting the purity of STEM, and shares it with the world. It’s embarrassing. He doesn’t understand anything he’s talking about.

Well, I’m just going to have to spit out what went through my mind as I read it.

I would like to inform you that your assertion about post modernism bastardizing the sciences is an accurate one.

Anyone want to take any bets on whether either of these bozos understand what “post modernism” is?

I am taking a Big Data certificate program at York University. We are, for no apparent reason, being forced to read a book about how data analytics is creating inequality and discrimination in our society.

If you bet that he did, you lose. Post modernism is not the same as recognizing structural inequities in society. Expecting students to understand the consequences of their work is not outside the bounds of a course.

Oh, but he is being FORCED to read a textbook for no apparent reason. I would think that a fellow academic colleague would know about this bad attitude: a student comes into a class, thinking they already know it all, and anything the professor assigns is a priori deemed irrelevant. They why are you taking the class, bucko? Did you forget that you’re here to learn new things?

I think there is an apparent reason the student is assigned that book. It’s because Big Data fucking matters. It has an impact on society. You need to be conscious of that fact, here’s a book that is going to make you think about what you are doing.

Unless, of course, you’re a cocky Peterast who thinks actions don’t have material outcomes.

This seems wholly inappropriate for a course that is fundamentally structured around learning computer programming.

Where you, the student, know better than the instructor what is “appropriate” in a subject you haven’t learned about yet.

The specific author we are being forced to read is Cathy O’Neal

FORCED!!! Wait, wait. Cathy O’Neil? MathBabe? @mathbabedotorg? She’s brilliant. Your course sounds like it must be very good, sharing interesting perspectives.

who is part of occupy wall street, black lives matter, and who is a blue haired third wave feminist who uses her credentials to push her ideology.

Yeah, credentials! Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard, taught at MIT, left academia to make money in the financial industry, left that after discovering how soulless it is, has written several well-received books on data science, you know, that subject you claim to be studying. But she has blue hair.

Here’s a short video in which O’Neil explains how data science algorithms are not intrinsically objective.

That sounds like an important perspective, to me. Maybe you ought to pay attention in class, Big Data Person.

She has written about how all university admissions are biased, not just Harvard’s, and this is primarily because the SATs and other intelligence testing is correlated to income, and without proof, concludes that this necessitates bias towards privileged people.

If you find in your data analysis that rich people are preferentially getting into college, then that is evidence of a bias. If your hypothesis is that rich people are more intelligent, you need to provide independent evidence that that is the case. (I know what to expect: the circular argument that well, rich people are admitted to college, therefore they must be smart. I got into college, therefore I am smart enough to spot a logical fallacy at a thousand paces.)

It is actual insanity that this woman is regarded with high enough esteem to be teaching her perspective to people who are learning data analytics techniques.

Why is it insane? Because she has blue hair and is a woman, therefore everything is ideological? Read her book. Learn to analyze the information she presents, because that’s what she does. It is, supposedly, what you are taking a class to learn more about.

It appears they want to instantiate an ideological motivation into our purpose for analyzing data.

I know this one, too. You want to pretend that your ideology that data is totally objective and unbiased is not an ideology. You cannot simply “analyze data” without awareness of the assumptions and hypotheses that surround that analysis.

I see this sentiment at my job as well where we have employees who are PHD level social psychologists conducting research projects around the concept of implicit bias testing even though they claim a comprehensive understanding of quantitative analytics.

I don’t get it. This clown is writing to Peterson, a PHD [sic] level psychologist, implying that PHD [sic] level psychologists can’t possibly have a comprehensive understanding of quantitative analytics? I know a few psychologists. Many of them have a better understanding of statistics and mathematics in general than I do. Yet Peterson considers this a valid complaint? Much confusion here.

Also, that understanding of implicit bias comes from a quantitative analysis of data. Try reading the literature…which is what your instructor is trying to get you to do, while you run crying and screaming to Jordan Peterson to get the bad blue-haired lady to stop making you think.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to take my place in this realm with confidence when I am being force fed this propaganda on all fronts.

FORCE FED!! How dare teachers make you aware of what you don’t know. It might hurt your self-esteem. Where’s the hug box for aspiring data scientists who don’t want to be FORCED to think about the meaning of their work?

It is hard to move forward with this constant bombardment of counter factual forces that we are being obliged to follow or be termed unqualified for the position.

FORCES! If you refuse to consider the effects of and reasoning behind the algorithms you use, then it’s true: you’re unqualified for the position. You want to be a mindless coder. That is not what a data scientist does.

Man, that was painful. That Jordan Peterson thinks it was persuasive in any way, rather than just the entitled whine of a selfish child who doesn’t want to learn, should tell us that he is just another know-nothing anti-intellectual.

Startling prescience

This is from a 1958 TV western. I think it might have been inspired by some kind of magical morphic resonance echoing backwards through time.

It looks real — I recognized some of the actors, who were familiar faces from the olden days of black & white TVs (wow, Robert Culp looks really young), but also Snopes confirms it, and also found a copy of the full episode.

I liked the ending. Maybe that’s a prophecy, too.

How not to clean up the ocean

For those of you who have been follow Boyan Slat’s debacle — you know, the pretentious kid who claims to have figured out how to clean up ocean garbage — you should be reading Deep Sea News for all the Ocean Cleanup Schadenfreude. You might also learn a little physical oceanography, which is cool. I was startled in that article by the discussion of Stokes Drift, which I hadn’t heard of, but I know all about Stokes Shift, which made me wonder if they’d been discovered by the same guy. They were. Now I’m imagining a Victorian gentleman going around discovering scientific principles and giving them rhyming names. Did Stokes Thrift mean he gave cheap Stokes Gifts? Was Stokes Sift used to excavate Stokes Rift?

I’m punchy. I need a nap.

Anyway, I don’t know oceanography. What convinced me that this was a con was how young Mr Slat & Co. treated Dr Miriam Goldstein and Dr Kim Martini. Dismissing relevant expertise is a bad way to build a real initiative.

May their booms keep on breaking.

Call to arms, Minnesota!

I got a letter from the Minnesota Science Teachers Association. It seems there is some skullduggery going on to undermine our state science standards, from the Minnesota Rural Education Association. Well, cool: I’m an educator in rural Minnesota, but I know nothing about the MREA. I’m sympathetic to the idea of an organization that opposes/complements those elitist tyrants of the Twin Cities <shakes fist eastwards>. So what does the MREA want?

Minnesota Science Teachers and Citizens:

Science education in Minnesota is at a crossroads. As the Science Standards Revision Committee works to produce a new set of state science standards, the Minnesota Rural Education Association (MREA) is going to the state legislature this session in an attempt to reword statute 120B.023 thereby diluting the quantity, quality and rigor of the state science graduation requirements. Their proposed wording to the statute would still require biology and either chemistry or physics, but would reduce the current third science credit to a set of electives that does not require that “all academic standards in science” be met. This essentially removes earth and space science standards as part of the graduation requirements already in state statute 120B.024 (4) (ii.) and would allow districts to choose what science standards they will or will not teach.

If we, as science educators and citizens, want our students to receive a balanced, comprehensive background in all science disciplines, i.e., be scientifically literate, it is essential that you act now.

Below are samples of letters/emails that can be reworded or used as is and sent to your state representative and state senator. (These letters are also attached as a Word doc to this message.) Your voice must be heard or our new state science standards will be reduced in rigor and merit. Hand-picking which benchmarks will be taught in our schools harms science education for all students. A strong response from science teachers and citizens will tell the Legislature that our students deserve the best science education possible.

Go to https://www.leg.state.mn.us/ to find the names and e-mail addresses for your state representative and senator.

Please e-mail your state representative and senator as soon as possible. Be sure to include “Don’t Cut Science Education Standards” in the subject line. Thank you for your continuing efforts to provide our students with a quality, comprehensive science education.

Shorter version: they want to change the standards to allow high school students to focus narrowly in meeting their science requirements, and also want to open school districts to allow them to decide what science to teach. The first part I’m already disinclined to support because public school educations are already general enough — I’d rather they get a solid overview of multiple disciplines, because I care more about a broad background than that students get to ignore geology or chemistry if they want. As for the second part…I don’t trust rural school districts that much. State standards are there to make it harder for schools to compromise.

But OK, let’s be fair. What does the MREA say about their own plan?

MREA Executive Director Fred Nolan encouraged the state to amend the benchmarks statute 120B.023 that states, “Schools must offer and students must achieve all benchmarks for an academic standard to satisfactorily complete that state standard” by adding that high school students must meet the benchmarks in biology, physics or chemistry, and one elective set of benchmarks from the following: physical sciences, life sciences, earth and space sciences or engineering, or technology and the applications of science. Schools must offer at least two of these elective sets of benchmarks.

So currently, high school students should take biology, physics, and chemistry, and one of a defined set of electives. The MREA would like to change that to an or, and let the schools decide what the additional science elective ought to be. Why? They don’t do a good job of justifying the change.

Minnesota faces a well-documented skilled-worker shortage and Minnesota Academic Standards currently hold high schools back from providing the education and training needed to effectively prepare students for their future jobs. Today’s system operates on a one-size fits all approach for students no matter their plans after graduation.

Ugh. Education as a purely vocational enterprise. No, thank you. I have a lot of respect for good vocational training, but that’s not what public school should be about — it should be about giving citizens a broad, basic background knowledge so that they’re better informed, and know better what they want to do with their life after schooling. No matter their plans after graduation, students should have at least a rudimentary understanding of science (and art, and history, and language, etc.) Focusing on JOBS is counterproductive.

I also find it weird that they say they’re concerned about a skilled worker shortage, and their solution is … to teach less science? Strange. I think there must be other motives they aren’t talking about.

The MnSTA provides some sample letters for Minnesotans to use if you want to write to your rep. I’ll include them below the fold.

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