How not to be a panel moderator

I’ve seen this happen so often, and not just to women. You’re on a panel; it’s not a debate, but an opportunity for a group of people who supposedly respect each other to discuss a topic. Then there’s one guy (and in my experience, it’s always a guy) who’s practically vibrating with enthusiasm and is eager to interrupt at any point with his point. He may not even disagree with other panelists — he’s just absolutely certain that he can explain everything better than everyone else. A prime example of this occurred at the World Science Festival. Here’s the perspective of one attendee.

So, after thinking about this over night, I’ve decided to share something that happened at the WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL yesterday afternoon in NYC that changed me. Or rather made me step into who I am in a larger way.
As some on my feed have seen, I was live-feeding the beginning of the panel discussion on FB. That panel was made up of some of the greatest and most famous minds in the world in Inflationary Cosmology, String Theory, Cosmology and Physics based Philosophy. The panel was made up of 5 men and 1 woman. And the moderator was a science writer and journalist for The New Yorker.
In the first hour of the panel discussion you can see clearly, if watching the video, that Veronika Hubeny, the only woman on the panel is barely given any opportunity to speak. And the Moderator, Jim Holt even acknowledges this.
In the last 20-30 minutes of the 90 minute discussion Jim Holt finally pushes the conversation to Hubeny’s field of expertise, string theory, and this is what ensued:
He asked her to describe her two theories of string theory that seem to contradict one another.
And THEN, without letting her answer, proceeded to answer for her and describe HER theories in detail without letting her speak for herself.
We could clearly see that she was trying to speak up. But he continued to talk over her and dominate the space for several minutes.
I should say that this panel was taking place in a large auditorium as it is an extremely high-profile and always sold-out event. And the panel discussion was being live-streamed across the world and they say that millions of people watch these videos after they are made public. (Which they already are).
So at this point, after seeing very clearly that she was not going to be given space to speak and in fact having her own theories described to the audience by the moderator, I am in full outrage. My body is actually beginning to shake. The sexism is beyond blatant. It is happening on stage and NO ONE, not a single other physicist or panelist is stepping in to say anything about it. And I can hear other audience members around me, both men and women becoming more and more agitated with what is happening. Jim Holt, even at one point, asks Veronica a question and she laughs because he has been answering his own questions about her work…and he makes fun of her for ‘giggling’.
So at some point while he is Still talking about Her theories, I just can’t handle it any longer.
With my hands shaking,
I finally say from my seat in the 2nd row of the audience, as clearly, directly and loudly as possible;
“Let. Her. Speak. Please!”
The moderator stops.
They all stop.
The auditorium drops into silence.
You could hear a pin drop.
And then the audience explodes with applause and screams.
Jim Holt eventually sat back, only after saying I was heckling him
And he let her speak.
And of course, she was brilliant.
———————–
So, the panel discussion ends.
My hands are still shaking. I’m still upset by the incredible sexism that has been demonstrated this afternoon. But I also realize that I just spoke up in an auditorium full of people that are listening to people that are considered gods in the international science world. I was just overwhelmed by it all
We get up to leave.
And then it happens.
Person after person come up to me. Both men and women.
The first woman, right behind me, reaches over and embraces me and says, “Oh my god. what you said was the most important thing that was said all day. Thank you. Thank you.”
And then people start filing out of their aisles and wind their way over to me:
“Was that you? Thank you so much for speaking up. Thank you.”
“Was that you? Oh god, what he was doing was horrific. Thank you. I wanted to do something but didn’t know how”
“Was that you? I wish I had the courage to say something, thank you! Thank you so much”
“Was that you? You said what everyone here was thinking. Look I had even been writing in my notebook what you eventually said (shows me his notebook with ‘let her speak’ written over and over.) But you said it. You said it. Thank you.”
“Was that you? Thank you! I felt so powerless to do anything.”
And on.
So we were all thinking this.
—-
So I walked out. And my friend who was sitting about 8 rows behind me, came up to me with a huge grin and said
“That was you, wasn’t it? Of course it was. YES!!!!! I will be telling this story for years.”
And the whole time, my hands are still shaking. And I’m felling light-headed. And I just want to scream out into the lobby “WHY IS THIS SEXISM STILL HAPPENING? WHY, does someone like me, with No status in that room, have to be so extraordinarily bold and speak up? And why was it so frightening to do so?”
And I’m thinking. “God, please god let this be an opening for those that were here today and the tens of thousands that watched the live-streaming of the panel yesterday and the hundreds of thousands that will watch the video this year- to speak up when we see this happening. And please let me not be afraid to do this again
…and again
…and again”
Because it was scary.
Please keep giving me courage.

I’m going to be on a bunch of panels at Convergence next month. I’ve done this many times before. When I’m on these panels, I tend to be very conscious of time and opportunity — I’m mentally measuring everyone’s contribution, to both make sure I get my turn with my very important opinion, and also to make sure I’m not dominating the conversation. It’s OK to say your piece and then sit back and listen.

The problem is particularly severe when you’ve got a chatty moderator who does his job of setting up a question and giving each panelist their moment to shine, but then can’t shut up and insists on explaining his perspective and interpretation of everything. Moderators should be there to smooth the flow of discussion among the panelists; they are not King Hot Stuff of the subject. Learn this: if you’re the designated moderator, it’s because you’ve been asked to serve the panel, not because you are the greatest expert who deserves the most time.

Moderators are not the show. They’re the guy who shines the spotlight on the people who are the show.

What happened to 2029?

Ray Kurzweil has been consistent over the years: he has these contrived graphs full of fudged data that tell him that The Singularity will arrive in 2029. 2029 is the magic date. We all just have to hang in there for 12 more years and then presto, immortality, incomprehensible wisdom, the human race rises to a new plane of existence.

Except…

2029 is getting kind of close. The Fudgening has begun!

The new date is 2045. No Rapture of the Nerds until I’m 88 years old. So disappoint.

Kurzweil continues to share his visions for the future, and his latest prediction was made at the most recent SXSW Conference, where he claimed that the Singularity – the moment when technology becomes smarter than humans – will happen by 2045.

Typical. You’ve got a specific prediction, you can see that it’s not coming true, so you start adjusting the details, maybe you change your mind on a few things (but it’s OK if you do it in advance, that way it doesn’t count against you), and you do everything you can to keep your accuracy score up, to fool the gullible.

Yeah, he’s got a score. 86%.

With a little wiggle room given to the timelines the author, inventor, computer scientist, futurist, and director of engineering at Google provides, a full 86 percent of his predictions – including the fall of the Soviet Union, the growth of the internet, and the ability of computers to beat humans at chess – have come to fruition.

Do any of those things count as surprising predictions in any way? They all sound rather mundane to me. The world is going to get warmer, there will be wars, we’ll have substantial economic ups and downs, some famous people will die, some notorious regimes will collapse, oceans rise, empires fall. Generalities do not impress me as indicative of deep insight.

Furthermore, that number is suspicious: you wouldn’t want to say 100%, because nobody would believe that. And you don’t want to say anything near 50%, because that sounds too close to chance. So you pick a number in between…say, somewhere between 75% and 90%. Wait, where did I get that range? That’s what psychics claim.

So, how accurate are psychics on an average? There are very few psychics who are 99% accurate in their predictions. The range in accuracy for the majority of real psychic readings are between 75% and 90%.

He’s using the standard tricks of the con man, ones that skeptics are supposed to be able to recognize and deal with. So how has Kurzweil managed to bamboozle so many people in the tech community?

I’m going to guess that being predisposed to libertarian fantasies and being blinded by your own privilege tends not to make one very skeptical or self-aware. Either that, or Kurzweil is very, very good at fooling people. I’m going to go with the former.

No! Totally unacceptable!

A performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar featured the titular character in contemporary dress.

In this summer’s rendition in Central Park, Caesar is “dressed in a business suit, with a royal blue tie, hanging a couple inches below the belt line, with reddish-blonde hair,” according to Laura Shaeffer, an audience member who spoke to a local radio station.

Then there was the murder scene, with blood spurting everywhere. People were very upset at the scene with a character looking a heck of a lot like Trump. So am I.

Julius Caesar was brilliant and competent, maybe too competent, as he ruled Rome with the force of his will, his dignitas, his armies, his history of victory. Any comparison with Donald Trump is intolerable and inappropriate. I demand that the company cease besmirching the memory of a truly intelligent and historically important man.

You are not being censored!

Well, probably. Not most of you anyway.

We stealthily migrated to a new host server in the dead of night, and everything went smoothly except for a few minor glitches…one being that our comment whitelists kinda got lost. If you posted something and it did not get automatically approved, give it a little time and we’ll get around to whitelisting you again.

If we like you, that is.

Petty and stupid is no way to go through life, son

I ask your forgiveness in advance: this is a video of two of the most unpleasant, least intelligent people in show business, Donald Trump and Piers Morgan. I’ll understand if you don’t click on play.

He actually challenged London mayor Sadiq Khan to compare IQ scores! I am torn. On one hand, IQ scores are overrated and culturally biased, so I’d rather not grant them an unearned validity; on the other, Trump is a profoundly stupid man, and I’d kind of like to see the result of a fairly given IQ test (that is, not the crap you see in online surveys on Facebook).

I’d also like to see his tax returns.

There are a lot of things Trump likes to brag about but doesn’t want actually scrutinized because he’d be exposed as a lying liar.

Robert Price and the embarrassing wing of atheism

Add this one to your “atheism doesn’t make you rational” file: Robert Price being Robert Price again. A couple of years ago, he sparked controversy at an HP Lovecraft convention (he’s also a well known Lovecraft scholar as well as an atheist philosopher/theologian) by basically endorsing Lovecraft’s racism, and further using Lovecraft’s words to support racist policies in the US. Here are the comments he made at that time.

If we can manage to look past [Lovecraft’s] racism, we will manage to see something deeper and quite valid. Lovecraft envisioned not only the threat that science posed to our anthropomorphic smugness, but also the ineluctable advance of the hordes on non-western anti-rationalism to consume a decadent, euro-centric west.

Superstition, barbarism and fanaticism would sooner or later devour us. It appears now that we’re in the midst of this very assault. The blood lust of jihadists threatens Western Civilization and the effete senescent West seems all too eager to go gently into that endless night. Our centers of learning have converted to power politics and an affirmative action epistemology cynically redefining truth as ideology. Logic is undermined by the new axiom of the ad hominem. If white males formulated logic, then logic must be regarded as an instrument of oppression.

Lovecraft was wrong about many things, but not, I think, this one. It’s the real life horror of Red Hook.

Oy. White males invented logic? That’s mythic bullshit. And then to reference the Lovecraft story, The Horror at Red Hook, possibly his most blatantly racist story…to Lovecraft fans, that’s a real dog whistle.

At the time, Price denied the racism.

Having now read several posts from those who were offended by my remarks Thursday night at 1st Baptist, including several friends, I must say I am astonished and very grieved. I am amazed at how they misunderstood me. How can they think I was replicating HPL’s racism, that I was attacking Affirmative Action (didn’t they hear the word “epistemology”?), etc.?

How dare you think he was racist for reciting racist tropes? And how could you possibly think he was criticizing affirmative action?

Well, now he has removed all ambiguity with another racist essay. I have to comment on this one.

I call it the Trayvon Martyr Syndrome [That’s a rather offensive appropriation of a murdered black man, pretending it was some kind of psychological syndrome]. It is a wider phenomenon, and a particularly nefarious one. There had been substantial progress in putting racism behind us in America [No. There was progress in papering it over. Look up sundown towns, redlining, racial profiling, segregation. This stuff has left a historical legacy of discrimination. It ain’t over yet], thanks to the courage of great reformers and real martyrs like Dr. King [I’ve noticed a fondness for dead civil rights leaders among some racists trying to appear tolerant. King was hated by white folks in his time]. But the Obama administration (advised by Al Charlatan) cynically fomented race hate for cheap political advantage and set us back years in race relations [How? Cite one comment by Obama in which he advocated anything other than tolerance]. Who knows why? Well, the Left has successfully used the “Law of Attraction” [Does Price know that this isn’t a law, and it doesn’t work?] to manifest an ugly race-hate climate that didn’t exist until they conjured it into being by insisting it was real [So racism didn’t exist until Obama, and it’s all black people’s fault for making white people hate them?]. And it became real. Their cop-hatred [Yeah, getting shot by cops does tend to make one hate cops] and obnoxious demonstrations [Demonstrations and protests are supposed to annoy their targets; he’s annoyed that Black Lives Matter didn’t make racists comfortable with their racism], invading restaurants and rebuking diners for imagined racism and “white privilege,” had the predictable result: they had goaded the objects of their wrath into the very antagonism they had accused them of. [It’s all their fault for pointing out my racism!]

Or consider the tendency to defend black hooligans and criminals simply because they are fellow blacks, as if to call one a criminal amounts to indicting all African Americans. [No one is doing that, except the people who equate blackness with criminality.] The most idiotic example of this must surely be a black Leftist official in Baltimore claiming that to call anyone a “thug” is racist. Uh, you mean because there is an inherent link between “black” and “thug”? [Incorrect. Take a look at the news media, this is a shockingly common trope. If a black person is gunned down, there is an immediate attempt to tar their reputation with a search of their arrest record; being a murdered black man means it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’re going to get called a “thug” in the press. Murdered white men, no matter how guilty or heinous their crimes, become “troubled loners”] Who except you is saying that? It is you who are inviting the rest of us to think so!

[Wait for it, wait for it, you knew this was coming…]

The sheer absurdity of all this blather about systemic racism was obvious from the fact that white America had elected the first black President! [That a coalition of progressive white voters and minorities and women got together to elect a black man does not mean that all the other racists in the country were absolved; it also does not mean that the institutions that support racist policies suddenly evaporated]

A man who voted for Reagan and George W. Bush, wants to elect Sarah Palin, who praises Trump and voted for him, does not get to claim that because other people voted for Obama, racism does not exist. He’s walking talking writing raving evidence to the contrary.

Don’t you dare break my heart, Al

It’s hot out there, and today I had to run some errands, only not “run”, more of a sweaty amble, and I ended up over-extending myself a bit. You see, I noticed while my wife was away last week that we had no family memorabilia on display, and as I get older, I’m gradually forgetting what they look like, and what their names are, and all that sort of thing, and as I looked up from my laptop one evening to this wide blank wall on the other side of the room, I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t a normal human being have pictures of their kids right there?” And then I thought, “Am I a normal human being?” and then “Do I want to be a normal human being?” and pretty soon I was having one of those philosophical arguments with myself in an empty house, which was a bit embarrassing.

So I decided I would put up some family photos, just to shut myself up.

I ordered some frames, and went through our digital photo collection, and picked out an assortment, and today I ran (“sweaty ambled”) out to the Thrifty White Pharmacy, where they have one of those fancy Kodak photo machines. Load in your digital images, punch a few buttons, and out pops your enlargements to the size you want. They’re nice. Also popular. It seems their is always a line backed up waiting to print out their photos, and do you know who always has lots of photos they want to print? People with families. And they bring their kids with them, which always seems beside the point — you have your little hellions jumping up and down and crawling all over you all the time, why do you need photos of them? Unlike me, who has been abandoned by his children, and is in peril of forgetting their names (I’m joking. I’d never forget Dweezil, Moon Unit, and Diva Muffin. It was entirely to end that stupid argument with myself.)

Knowing the likelihood of delays, however, I wisely brought a book along with me. That book was Al Franken, Giant of the Senate, by Al Franken, Giant of the Senate.

In case you’re ever traveling through Minnesota (I don’t know if it works elsewhere), I have to tell you that this book is a magnificent ice-breaker. So many women walked up to me and asked, “What do you think of that book?” or declared their love of Al Franken, which meant, of course, that they approved of me and my excellent taste in humor and/or politics. These were all women who had offspring pogoing by their side or dismantling the greeting card rack or just moaning in boredom, but that was fine, since all I was doing was killing time with conversation. Alas, though, I had to lie to them. I told them I was enjoying the book.

Which was only half a lie! Really, I’m thoroughly enjoying the wit and humor, the dedication to progressive politics, the jabs at the many cretinous personalities in the Senate, the decent humanity of the man. It is a delightful read.

As I read it, though, I noticed that I was…admiring Al Franken. There was respect. I had this feeling like finally, someone was saying and doing the right things. Most places in this country, you’re looking at your local politicians and wondering how that thing crawled out of cesspit and got itself elected, but here in Minnesota we at least got ourselves some decent senators to give us a tiny glimpse of hope.

I knew what that means, though.

Al Franken is going to break my heart someday. He’s going to get caught with his hand in the pocket of some slimy corporate assweasel — like Jared Kushner. He’s going to be tempted into a dalliance with some flirty 19 year old Hitler Jugend. He’s going to die in a flaming jet crash. He’ll bury the hatchet and become good buddies with Ted Cruz. It’s inevitable. All of my heroes disappoint me needlessly. It’s one piece of evidence that there is a god, and that god’s primary joy in its immortality is to notice when I’m feeling a faint flicker of hope in someone, so that they can strike them down with a thunderbolt of ignominy.

So I feel like I’m betraying the guy when I say I’m finding his work admirable and his goals laudible. It’s like painting a big bullseye on his back, and then waiting for the ineluctable betrayal.

Don’t you do it, Al. I bought your book. Stick to your principles. Live a long life and do good.

The cynic in me is still bracing himself for doom, though.

The water in Flint, Michigan is still poisonous

I wonder if the problem is the administration of that city is packed with incompetent racists? Nah, that can’t be. Here’s one of those administrators with his own entirely rational explanation for the Flint water crisis.

Flint has the same problems as Detroit—fucking ni**ers don’t pay their bills, believe me, I deal with them, Phil Stair, sales manager for the Genesee County Land Bank said on May 26th during a conversation with environmental activist and independent journalist Chelsea Lyons in Flint.

You may gasp in disbelief, but there is a recording of the conversation. That’s his argument.

Read the whole thing.

Corruption in Flint runs deep; as do the racist undertones of its officials. Government officials, both elected and appointed, have a habit of blaming Flint’s problems on the poorest and most vulnerable. In reality, the families trying to get by in a dilapidated city suffer through rate hikes, water shutoffs and tax liens while the taxpayer-funded employees get raise after raise after raise.