Don’t need no history, social studies, art, music, foreign languages, and communications!

Unbelievable.

So history, social studies, art, music, foreign languages, and communications are all “fat”, total wastes of time.

If you’re like me, you have no idea who Bryan Caplan is, so you’ll have to look him up on Wikipedia (see? It is useful). There you’ll learn that he is an economist, a field that I notice is not on his list of useless ideas, coincidentally. But you will also discover this revelation.

After having long shed a youthful infatuation with the works of Russian American writer Ayn Rand and her philosophical system of Objectivism, in 2004 Caplan wrote in his essay ‘An Intellectual Biography’, “I rejected Christianity because I determined that it was, to be blunt, idiotic. I rejected Objectivism and Austrianism, in contrast, as mixtures of deep truths and unfortunate mistakes. Let me begin with the deep truths. The Objectivists were right to insist that reality is objective, human reason able to grasp it, and scepticism without merit. They correctly hold that humans have free will, morality is objective, and the pursuit of self-interest typically morally right.”

Oh. A godless Randian. Is anyone surprised?

I guess I can kiss my wikipedia page goodbye

Another of the casualties of the various schisms within skepticism and atheism speaks out. Hayley Stevens has long been exasperated with movement skepticism, and she explains why.

Nothing is ever going to change because Skepticism has several large problems that it will fail to ever address effectively:

  1. the movement often allows irrational people to be elevated to positions of power from which they’re almost untouchable when it comes to criticism
  2. the skeptic movement is full of creepy men who don’t know how to behave appropriately around other people and they won’t go away.
  3. the skeptic movement is full of the kind of people who support these bad people unquestioningly.
  4. the skeptic movement is full of echo-chambers in which specific versions of truth are created and from which any information that counters this is shot down and, sometimes, even censored.

That first problem is a common one in new institutions. The skill set to be a good charismatic public representative rarely involves the skill set that is required to be a good, fair manager. Most college professors, myself included, would be totally incompetent in the role of university chancellor…but academia at least has a career path through administration that leads to better training in administrative roles. If you’re a skeptic/atheist who writes a best-selling book, presto, you’re the head of a foundation. That’s often a recipe for catastrophe.

Her second point is true of everything. I can’t single out skepticism for that at all…although the habit of these movements in promoting people well above their competence means the creepy guys get power and never learn to restrain themselves.

The third point…oh, boy is that true. Take a look at the promotional materials for far too many cons and presentations: all any impresario has to do is make a poster with the name of one of the handful of popular speakers in a gigantic bold font, with the date, time, and place below, and the audience will appear. They don’t even care what he (note: they’re all “he”) will say, what the purpose of the talk is about, what issues will be discussed. It doesn’t even need a title anymore. Lesser beings within the movement still have to announce a subject for their talks, but we’ve built a movement around personalities rather than ideas lately.

As for the fourth point, Stevens expands on it herself.

That final point is why I started this article by mentioning Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia — the self-appointed information masters of Wikipedia who operate from within a private internet forum and seem to focus on two things:

  1. working exhaustively to edit paranormal/supernatural related articles
  2. working exhaustively to edit the Wikipedia profiles of Skeptic celebrities, including people who are terrible people and criminals.

It is my opinion that their brand of skepticism is not the good kind. Recently, the Centre for Inquiry (CFI) appointed the head of the ‘Guerrilla Skepticism’ group, Susan Gerbic, as a Fellow which shocked me for a number of reasons. Firstly, because I don’t think Gerbic and her team of editors are very good champions of the skeptic movement. Secondly, when Dr Karen Stollznow spoke out about her experiences of harassment at the hands of a colleague at CFI, Gerbic’s son wore a t-shirt which stated he was on the “team” of the accused, to a lecture that Stollznow was delivering at an event. Secondly, it was Gerbic who added the photo to Wikipedia of Harriett Hall wearing an anti-skepchick t-shirt at TAM.

It’s a good thing to have motivated people monitoring Wikipedia for supernatural nonsense, demanding some empirical rigor in articles. I approve of that. I’m not at all keen on the idea of a group of people who feel it is their mission in life to scrub all the blemishes off of their favorite skeptic celebrities, or worse, to slant articles to favor their preferred regressive skeptics.

For example, the “team” Gerbic’s son favored was “Team Radford” — there was quite a conflict within the movement over Radford’s contemptible behavior towards Karen Stollznow, and his lawsuit to silence her. He’s also been a denialist of the existence of the influence of stereotyping of the sexes, and a champion of the most trivial claims of evolutionary psychology.

But take a look at Radford’s wikipedia page. It’s huge. Every minor accomplishment is a triumph.

Did you know he “solved the mystery of the ‘Santa Fe Courthouse Ghost'”? He debunked the White Witch of Rose Hall! He’s also the world’s foremost expert on the Chupacabra. Yay. These feats of ‘brilliance’ are described at tedious length.

That he’s a serial harasser, that he once posted photos of himself in bed with a woman so he could leverage a lawsuit, that he pressured that woman to surrender and settle a suit in his favor by threatening to hound her through her pregnancy and labor, that he threatened to sue me unless I released evidence of a conspiracy (I did!), that he threatened to sue Rebecca Watson, that he belittles rape statistics, that thinks girls have a biological preference for pink, that he likes to bully four-year-old girls (and loses) — none of that is anywhere in his Wikipedia page. The guy is a toxic mess, but his wiki entry has been buffed to a high gloss.

That kind of willful blindness is one reason I am so over the skeptic movement.

It’s great that we have a dedicated group of watchmen keeping an eye on wikipedia to prevent supernatural crap from leaking in, but who watches the watchmen? They’ve got some strong biases, but they don’t have the discipline to prevent that from dribbling in.

Waffles with toxic syrup served

In case you’ve been wondering how Sam Harris and Matt Dillahunty dealt with the absence of their compadre, Lawrence Krauss, at their talk last week, we have a partial recording. They spent 15 minutes explaining that they weren’t going to talk about it, and saying how important the #metoo movement is while doing their damnedest to imply that we have to watch out because bitches lie.

I’ve been sitting on it for a while because when Harris babbles out that bullshit about how people are equating Weinstein and Ansari in “literally the same sentence” my brain became congested with boiling blood and rendered me unable to act. Fortunately, Thomas Smith says exactly what I think of the whole shambles. Go listen to that.

Aron Ra vs. Kent Hovind, tonight

Tonight, at 7pm EST, Aron Ra is going to engage Kent Hovind on this YouTube channel.

I’ll probably tune in, but here’s a hint for future debates: tell me what the question is. This is two personalities clashing in public, and that’s all I know. Without a good sharp question, I know exactly what Hovind is going to do — it’s going to be a smarmy Gish Gallop with Hovind skittering all over the place, and Aron marching along behind, stomping out lies as fast as he can, and both will declare victory at the end.

It would also be good to have a forceful moderator who shuts down either side if they start drifting off topic…but if we don’t have a solid topic ahead of time, they won’t be able to do that.

The Ark Park and Creation “Museum” are raising their admission prices

They were overpriced to begin with, but they’re raising adult ticket prices by a few bucks anyway. That’s not what they emphasize, of course. They’ve got two marketing tactics.

One is that they’ve lowered prices a bit for young people…but at the same time, they’ve gotten rid of group discounts. I suspect it looks good on paper, but the busloads of kids from the nearby vacation bible school will probably be paying the same amount or more. Still, Quiverful Families will praise the Lord for this change.

The other tactic is laughable. They compare their prices to Disney World. Oh, sure, they’re comparable — in one, you enter a big wooden box which contains fake animals in more wooden boxes with Sunday School lessons on the walls, and in the other…well, does Disney World have papier mache models of dinosaurs, and do they sell postcards and plaques explaining that incest was OK in the Bible? No? Then no contest. And look, the lines are shorter at Answers in Genesis!

Disney’s parks and AiG’s attractions are, in a sense, competing for a family’s time for vacation, offering the best possible quality in all they and we do. However, you can spend many hours waiting in long lines for short rides at amusement parks. At our Ark and museum, however, you can easily spend a full day or two at each location, experiencing edu-tainment all day and rarely standing in a long line.

Watch this silly video of kids discovering that they get to go to Disneyland, and imagine replacing the words “Disneyland” with “AiG’s edu-tainment attractions”. I don’t think they’d get quite the same reaction.

They’d probably rather go to summer school.

Least surprising discrimination lawsuit ever

You will not be shocked to learn that Alex Jones is an asshole in the workplace, too.

Rob Jacobson, a former video editor who worked for the site for 13 years, alleges his co-workers and managers called him “The Jewish Individual” and “The Resident Jew,” and that Jones regularly humiliated and belittled him. As the Mail reports, “The abuse got so bad that one member of staff photo shopped Jacobson’s face on to the image of an Orthodox Jew under the words ‘THE JEWISH INDIVIDUAL DEMANDS YOUR HOT TOPICS’ and printed it out for all to see.” Jacobson, who was eventually fired, is planning to sue Jones for discrimination, harassment, and unfair dismissal, in addition to his EEOC complaint.

Meanwhile, Ashley Beckford, a former production assistant for InfoWars‘s parent company, Free Speech Systems, alleges Jones “often spent his time shirtless, and endlessly leering…at female employees and guests,” which created a “disgusting, hostile environment” that openly encouraged his staff to make inappropriate comments towards women. According to the EEOC statement from Beckford, who is African American, Jones made unwanted sexual advances and allegedly groped her while commenting, “Who wouldn’t want to have a black wife?”

Now if only we could also sue capitalism for setting up a system where a man needs a job that requires him to be humiliated for 13 years.

A study in hiding truth behind a lie

Steven Pinker’s latest book — which I have no interest in ever reading, despite the fact that it’s getting reviewed all over the place — contains some interesting exercises in glossing over ugly truths.

You know, in everything I’ve ever read on the Tuskegee syphilis study — and there are lots of books and papers on the subject — no one ever suggested that the doctors infected the patients with syphilis. They didn’t need to. The truth was damned horrifying. The doctors in that study intentionally neglected to treat a treatable disease, allowing it to run its terrible course, just to see what would happen. They also failed to give the patients the information that would allow them to elect to go to a different doctor for treatment, because that would have defeated their purpose of watching spirochetes eat the brains of black people.

There is nothing forgivable in the facts of the story. Scientists watched human beings suffer and die to sate their sick curiosity and to get a few publications. It did not generate new knowledge, because we already had lots of information on the course of the disease. The information did not prevent harm to anyone, because we had an effective treatment already.

But hey, let’s put a happy spin on it! At least they didn’t intentionally infect anyone with the disease. There, it doesn’t sound as awful now, does it? It could have been so much worse! We can take this approach to everything. Sure, the US bombed villages in Viet Nam with napalm and Agent Orange and high explosives, but at least we didn’t nuke them. See how good and progressive we are? Oh, yeah, we may have prisoners held without due process in Gitmo, and we may have tortured them a little bit, but at least we didn’t infect them with syphilis or shoot them out of cannons or throw them into vats of acid. We could have, but because we didn’t, you need to respect our restraint and our growing humanity.

I must have cursed National Geographic by accident

Back in the dim and distant past, around 2011, when the dignified and staid National Geographic bought up my former blogging home, ScienceBlogs, there was a certain self-appointed guardian of the Purity of NatGeo who was infuriated that I might exist under the bold banner and yellow border of his beloved company. I was going to taint the brand! I was a horrible person who should be dismissed forthwith! I was a corruption, a depravity, a dissolute poisoner of the sacred spirit of science!

He was a little bit distraught about it all.

I’ve completely forgotten his name, but I’d be curious to know what he thinks now, now that NatGeo has completely shuttered ScienceBlogs after a couple of years of neglect, and now that NatGeo is peddling…magic…rocks…to people. Yep, they’ve really sold out. I guess they were envying Gwyneth Paltrow’s reputation and money.

It’s true. They’re sending out magic healing crystals to journalists.

The huge box Nat Geo sent me contained a book, some press material, and this glass water bottle with their name printed on the side. The >$70 bottle’s package advertises that it contains “carefully selected and ethically sourced gemstones representing the building blocks of earth,” including “wood,” “water,” “earth,” “metal” and “fire.” It came with an instruction and information manual.

Why does my water bottle have an instruction manual? It reads: “For the most precious moments in life! Gems raise the energy level of water. That’s been known for hundreds of years and scientifically proven. VitaJuwel Gemwater Accessories are not only Jewelry for Water, they’re a great tool to prepare heavenly gemwater like fresh from the spring.” The instructions are: screw in the gemstone vial, fill with water, and then wait 7 minutes.

You know how it works? Vibrations. NatGeo is promoting vibrations.

Some of the claims are really wild. At one point, the pamphlet says: “Everything in nature vibrates. Gems naturally act like a source of subtle vibrations. These vibrations inspirit water, making it more lively and enjoyable.” This is nonsense, and any reference to electricity in crystals (like piezoelectricity, when charge accumulates on some structures in response to physical stress) is neither exclusive to crystals nor relevant to healing or enlivening drinking water. (“Ha! Yeah. Nah,” astrophysicist Katie Mack told me in a DM.)

Now I feel really guilty. He was right. It was all my fault. That I was briefly (and under protest) sponsored by National Geographic was the causal agent that sent the whole venerable institution plummeting into a deep chasm of woo.

I’m sorry, everyone. I didn’t do it on purpose, it must have just been my bad vibes.

Botanical Wednesday: Maybe it’s a trojan horse

My wife gave me my birthday present a month ago. “It’s not my birthday,” I said. She told me to be patient.

My present was a bucket of dirt. “Gee, thanks,” I said.

“You have to take care of it,” she said. “Oh, great,” I said, “A bucket of dirt and a new chore.”

I did as I was told. It was supposed to do something on my birthday, but my birthday is still more than a week away. And now the bucket of dirt looks like this already.

Is it going to get bigger and more garish by my birthday? Should I be worried that it’s going to eat me? Because that would be a surprise.