Bad people can abuse good ideas

One of the more distressing things about organized skepticism is how they’ve tainted science and reason — too often it seems that opportunists have grabbed the principles as handy talking points that they can babble about while acting in ways that befoul the good ideas. But sometimes they get caught at it.

Jason Kottke wrote a post crediting Michael Shermer with popularizing Carl Sagan’s rules — his baloney detection kit. Then he was informed about Shermer’s reputation, so he rewrote the post and put in this addendum.

Update: After I posted this, a reader let me know that Michael Shermer has been accused by several women of sexually inappropriate & predatory behavior and rape at professional conferences. I personally believe women, and I further believe that if Shermer was actually serious about rationality and his ten rules for critical thinking listed above, he wouldn’t have pulled this shit in the first place (nor tried to hamfistedly explain it away). I’ve rewritten the post to remove the references to Shermer, which actually made it more succinct and put the focus fully on Sagan, which was my intention in the first place (the title remains unchanged). (via @dmetilli)

It’s dismaying that it takes this long to get the word out, but eventually, we can hope the truth will win. It’s just a shame that someone can profit for so long off Carl Sagan’s reputation when their life is a standing repudiation of Sagan’s ideas.

Shermer still gets invited to skeptic events, by the way.

Naughty!

This is a list of banned words from 1995.

Two things:

  • These lists are just sort of hilarious when the words are just dumped on you out of context.

  • Shockingly, there are several words in there I’ve never even heard of before, and that I have no idea what they mean. I feel so naive.

The economy must be about to swirl down the drain if get-rich-quick shows are popular

Hell, yeah! I’ve got no talent, no skills, no significant assets, but I want to become a millionaire, so I guess I need to get myself to one of these Real Estate BitCoin Expos. You’ve seen these sorts of things before — “motivational speakers”, “self-help gurus”, people who are little more than self-aggrandizing salespeople like the contemptible Tony Robbins who rent out convention halls and sell themselves to gullible people. This one combines a couple of buzzwords to peddle…nothing.

Another ingredient: faith.

Let’s toss in a graph to get that pseudo-science vibe going. I do wonder what “moneyness” is, and how a bar chart with no units that compares bitcoin to cowrie shell trading is going to inspire confidence.

Add one more ingredient: celebrity. This “expo” had Sylvester Stallone come out and give a speech that said nothing about bitcoin, but was just Sly…selling himself.

Now we dance.

All the crap above was noted by Kerry Taylor, who attended one of these expos and is a “Money Blogger. Speaker. Author. @OnTheMoneyCBC Contributor. Globe Contributor.” Also, apparently, a skeptic who is going after real problems and real frauds.

I think I’d like to hear her speak about con artistry like the Real Estate Bitcoin Expo. You could probably learn something from her, unlike the slick used car salesmen of the expo.

Also, Sylvester Stallone: you cheap hack.

Framed!

This picture is going around the intertubes with comments about how it’s photographic evidence that Steve Shives and I are conspiring to destroy atheism.

I was there at that get-together, it is true, however, not shown in the picture is the ten or so women who were also there, and who artfully slid away out of frame when it was taken. As usual, it’s the women who are doing the work of building up or tearing down, and a couple of guys loafing on the couch get all the credit.

Busy yesterday, busier today

Yesterday, I spent most of the day giving Petersonian advice to old fossils in the Republican party (“stand up straight, throw your shoulders back”). Oh, wait, no, that’s unkind to old fossils — I got to Washington DC, and somehow made a beeline for the natural history museum and had a fine afternoon looking over the exhibits. That’s better.

Today, very shortly in fact, I’m heading off to #SSJCON, which is going to be streamed live in case you couldn’t make it.

So I guess I’m going to be hanging out all day with SJWS, or, more accurately, Atheists Who Advocate More For Accomplishing Greatness With Reason And Science Than Insisting That Atheism Means Nothing Other Than Feeling Smarter Than Theists AWAMFAGWRASTIAMNOTFSTTs.

OK, I guess SJW is shorter and punchier, but I don’t know how to pronounce either one.

The Titan: Netflix can still make terrible, awful, no-good movies

Last night, while I was scribbling away at grading, I put on a brand new skiffy movie from Netflix as background noise…something that wouldn’t be too distracting, because it didn’t look very good. I was wrong. It was terrible.

The movie was The Titan. Don’t bother watching it, unless you enjoy stupid premises. Below be spoilers.

[Read more…]

Good news, everyone!

Stormfront is struggling! Perhaps they’ll die!

Stormfront founder and former Klansman Don Black announced on Tuesday that the white supremacist movement’s first major hate forum is temporarily restricting access to “sustaining members” — users who donate at least five dollars a month — and will be archiving and shuttering its main server on April 6 due to a “financial crisis.”

Black is well-known among white supremacists for perennially complaining about the costs of maintaining the site, which he has threatened to close before. This time, his threats appear to be real.

“I appreciate everybody’s support. But it’s that time of month again, when the big, scary bills hit,” Black wrote to current sustaining members. “Our contributions have once again totaled less than $2000, which is not enough to cover our basic server and radio bills, and this month we no longer have enough personal money to make up the difference.”

I’ll take every sign that our current hideous condition is transient that I can.

This hasn’t been a problem in Minnesota…

…but you never know. How do you get rid of tons of rotting meat, like a beached whale carcass? The article lists four methods:

  1. Blow it up with dynamite. No, don’t do this one. Florence, Oregon tried it in 1970, and will never, ever live it down.

  2. Compost it. Drag it to some convenient place and let it decay. Yikes, that’s going to wreck the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio in your compost heap, but OK, it’s a natural way.

  3. Drag it back out to sea and let it sink. This seems like the best way to me, since whale falls are great boons to marine invertebrates. The catch is that it might take a while to sink, and could drift back to shore.

  4. Treat it like garbage, hack it to bits, and bury it in a landfill. Seems wasteful.

So what would Minnesotans do? They can’t drag it out to sea. I guess we could haul it to Iowa or Wisconsin or the Dakotas and let them deal with it. Otherwise, chain saws and wood chippers?

So, so tired of Jordan Peterson

My morning is made. I have read a review of Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos in the Johannesburg Review of Booksthat savages it appropriately. I chortled through the whole dang thing. Cheered me right up, it did.

And what sort of intellectual does the Idiocracene usher forth? The kind that writes a self-help book for assholes, basically. 12 Rules for Life is a Gladwellian shotgun blast of childhood anecdotes, Bowdlerized mythology, common sense behavioural techniques, grossly undercooked philosophical concepts (Heidegger’s ideas get a proper reaming here), along with a soupçon of mystical Christianity, a dash of Eastern religious-type stuff—oh, and emoticons. (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) It’s all ready-made for the Trump era, where resentment of ‘postmodern’ campus lefties and their intersectional, Black Lives Matter, materialist tendencies have become fodder for prime-time alt-right outrage.

Every paragraph is a wonderful shellacking.

How did Peterson become such an effective Iron John bromide machine? He is a clinical psychologist, a professor of psychology, and a renaissance-style polymath, which in his case means cinching seven or eight basket-weaving disciplines together into one spectacular black hole of knowledge, a negation of the very principles of rigorous scholarship. Peterson appears to have read widely, which is to say: not deeply. Many academic bullshit merchants have done queasy work jamming thinly understood Big Concepts into stocking-stuffer books, but never have they tried to force Charles Darwin, Carl Jung, Jesus Christ, Goethe, Dante, Erich Neumann, Yeats, and literally hundreds of others into a fucking Huffington Post listicle.

Maybe I ought to just quote the whole thing?

Peterson, it should now be clear, is a crank of drunk uncle proportions. But he is also the ‘the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now’, which should not be mistaken for an exaggeration. It’s all caved in on itself, the Western world and its various satellites, in their various stages of orbit decay or escape velocity—we’re all Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angelus Novelus’, gazing at the detritus of history, blown back to the future by the force of the mess. And there’s Jordan Peterson, waiting for us with his rulebook, reminding us to eat a decent breakfast, to pull our flies up, and to refuse futzing with pronouns to accommodate the transgendered.

Nah, I’ll stop there. Go read the whole thing.

Why, you might be wondering, am I so pleased with such a brutal takedown? I’ll tell you. It’s because I made two YouTube videos, Jordan Peterson and the Lobster and PZ Replies to the Lobsterians, which means I am now inundated with comments and email from Very Serious Fanbois, and also more than a few Very Hateful Fanbois, all trying to set me straight. They sound similar to the Cultural Marxism Haters, who also send me similarly clueless tirades. They like to read my mind and tell me how they understand biology so much better than I do, thanks to Peterson’s instruction. It’s utterly nuts.

Here’s a recent example.

Peterson’s point is that through the process of sexual selection we have evolved to climb social hierarchies. The male that rises to the top has more offspring. But I guess sexual selection isn’t a thing in biology anymore. Females don’t select for the most powerful male they can get, they don’t want guys at the top of the social ladder, they prefer the stressed out poverty stricken guys at the bottom instead. Gender is a social construct now anyway, so I guess that explains why PZ Myers doesn’t “believe” in sexual selection. Maybe old PZ’s can explain why dominance hierarchies exist across species, cultures, and throughout time if they have no basis in biology?

They all have this caricature of how males acquire mates — it’s by dominating them, don’t you know — and they love to cite “sexual selection” as a singular force with a singular direction that every biologist ought to bow down before and acknowledge.

Here’s my reply to that guy.

No. That is Peterson’s CLAIM. It is unsupported by the evidence.

Of course biologists accept sexual selection: females choose mates, & vice versa.But it’s far more complex than you imagine. Define “powerful”: is it the guy who can beat up other guys, or the guy who gathers the most food, or the guy who is most helpful with children, the guy who can help her achieve her professional goals, etc.? There are multiple criteria for mate selection. You and Peterson WANT it to be a certain narrow type of behavior that is often the antithesis of what a woman might desire.

It’s not that they prefer stressed out poverty stricken guys — it’s that most people want a cooperative peer who can respect and understand their situation, the better to assist them in living the life they have. Many of us chose our partners because we like them, because we live and work together well, not because we dominate or are dominated by them.

I am so sorry you have fallen for these Peterson lies. They are a recipe for a miserable life.

So he insists on telling me again what Peterson’s point is, as if it wasn’t all laid out in its simplistic glory, and tells me I shouldn’t be reading 12 Rules for Life, I need to read his other works to savor the full force of his obscurantism.

Peterson’s point is that through the process of sexual selection we have evolved to climb hierarchies and that’s partly why they keep showing up everywhere. He’s saying that the ‘patriarchy’ is not some huge conspiracy, and that hierarchies have been around longer than humans. Males further up the hierarchy are more attractive to females. But I guess in a world where gender is a social construct this is taboo. His 12 rules for life book is an extremely cut-down and simplified version of what he’s saying, it is not intended for an academic level of analysis – his papers are. Attacking him at an academic level based on his ‘childrens’ book is like a creationist attacking biologists based on a grade 1 science book – you of all people can do better than that (and as a skeptic who’s been listening to you for years I really wish you would). If you actually want to make a meaningful contribution to the discussion (and I for one hope you do) you’d have to first dig a little deeper. Maybe you could even have an actual discussion with him, I’m pretty sure millions of people would listen to it.

Again, I replied.

I know what Peterson’s point is. You keep telling me. But it’s obvious. And it’s wrong. The hierarchy is a social construct! Try hard enough, and you can imagine them everywhere, exactly as you’re doing.

And oh, god, don’t tell me to read his academic work. I looked some of it up. I started his Maps of Meaning book. They’re WORSE. They are impenetrable gobbledygook. You think they’re brilliant because they’re so difficult, but the reason they’re so difficult is that they’re garbage.

Now I’m getting these comments outraged that I said “The hierarchy is a social construct!”, because they translate “social construct” into “imaginary, nonexistent” thanks to all the repetition of that theme in their cohort, and are trying to convince that dominance hierarchies really do exist, as if I was saying otherwise.

This is a pseudo-intellectual movement led by an ignorant guru that I would like to see collapse under the weight of its inanity, but I know from experience that that won’t happen. People still think Deepak Chopra has something to say, and they’ll be revering Peterson for decades to come, in exactly the same way.