I’ve mentioned Mad Mike Hughes here a few times before. He claims to be using a rocket to research “flat earth” hypotheses; every time I’ve mentioned him, I’ve pointed out that flying a steam-powered rocket to a height of a few thousand feet doesn’t test the hypothesis at all. Basic Research 101: design your experiment to discriminate between your hypothesis and alternatives. People fly as high as that rocket, and higher, all the time in commercial and private planes, and they do so safely with the leisure to look out the window. Professional astronauts go much, much higher (with more risk), and they depend on a theory of gravity that the flat earth loons have to deny. There was no reason to strap yourself into an amateur rocket and launch yourself to amateur altitudes.

Now Mad Mike Hughes is dead.

Mad Mike Hughes just launched himself in a self-made steam-powered rocket and crash landed. Very likely did not survive. #MadMike #MadMikeHughes pic.twitter.com/svtviTEi8f

— Justin Chapman (@justindchapman) February 22, 2020

The death was filmed by a crew of ghouls from the Science Channel for airing on the Discovery Channel, along with their usual professionally filmed trash fires about the Bermuda Triangle, Ancient Aliens, and stories about the “Secret Life of Jesus”. He was encouraged by flocks of idiots who think the shape of the earth is an open question, who gawp and play stupid gotcha games, and who reject well-tested evidence because it doesn’t fit their hollow-brained theories.

They, and his own ego, killed Mad Mike Hughes. What a colossal waste.

The latest burst of inane apologetics to enthrall the poobahs of atheism because it allows them to make excuses for Richard Dawkins and others is this piece from Tom Chivers, “‘Eugenics is possible’ is not the same as ‘eugenics is good’”. In it, he invents a label for people who say thoughtless things about science: they are “high-decouplers”, who are good at isolating ideas from all those troublesome things like implications and consequences and even meaning. They can take a complex sociological phenomenon, for instance, and reduce it to “A → B” without fussing about over the messy antecedents that produce A, or that the relationship also produces C, D, E, F…Z and a few letters beyond that. And this is a good thing?

The analyst John Nerst, who writes a fascinating blog called “Everything Studies”, is very interested in how and why we disagree. And one thing he says is that for a certain kind of nerdy, “rational” thinker, there is a magic ritual you can perform. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y.”
…
So you can say things like “if we accept that IQ is heritable, then”, and so on, following the implications of the hypothetical without endorsing them. Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.

Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them, the ritual lacks magic power. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y,” but when you say X, they will still hear Y. The context in which Nerst was discussing it was a big row that broke out a year or two ago between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris after Harris interviewed Charles Murray about race and IQ.

How useful! Sam Harris wasn’t propping up racist ideas, he’s just a “high-decoupler” capable of postulating a subset of a network of interactions is simple and predictable. Don’t hold him accountable for his supposedly commendable ability to ignore everything except the one tiny relationship he is holding in laser-like focus! It’s those low-decouplers who keep distracting him with messy realities that interfere with his beautiful vision of reducing everything to a series of simple, manageable problems. Eugenics all by itself is simple and doable! If we postulate that racial differences are all due to invisible, untestable genes, all inequities are trivial and explainable!

Back in the day, I would have called such an approach short-sighted, implausible, damaging, and stupid, but now we have this useful term, “high-decoupler”, instead. Instead of saying that Dawkins and Harris are oblivious to reality, narrow-minded, and obtuse, I’ll just say they’re good at decoupling. All the atheist-bros and skeptic-bros will nod along happily, as if I’d just given them high praise.

I think Chivers might have hit on a key trigger for many of the schisms in rationalist organizations, though.

I think a lot of arguments in society come down to this high-decoupler/low-decoupler difference. And while I hope I’ve done a good job of putting the case for low-decoupling, I am very obviously a high-decoupler, so often I find myself thinking “but they performed the magic ritual! They said they didn’t mean Y!” and being really confused that everyone is very angry that they believe Y.

For shameful low-decouplers like myself, though, I am also able to hear the obvious implication that Y is an unimportant complication that they don’t want you to think about, and when Y is something that leads to misery and suffering for large numbers of people, I tend to want to say “But you can’t dream about X while ignoring the inevitable disaster of Y that it will bring about!” It’s like saying that lighting this fuse will lead to some pretty sparks for a few minutes, but I’m not endorsing the horrific explosion when it reaches the dynamite. And this, apparently, is supposed to be a scientific virtue.

Also, falling back on the excuse that there is a magic ritual that can make such context-less, narrow speculation acceptable is not the useful metaphor that Chivers thinks it is. That high-decouplers consider incantations significant kind of undermines the rationality of high-decoupling. I think I’ll stick with the community for whom the ritual lacks magic power.

Unbelievable. Kavin is a super-star skeptic — one of those people who gave me hope that the Center for Inquiry wasn’t totally hopeless. Now, after being dismissed, she tells all.

Last October, however, I received a letter from CFI suggesting that “we part ways” and dismissing me from my role as co-host of Point of Inquiry. I believe the dismissal was a response to my outspoken views on CFI’s negligence toward matters of race and diversity — issues that the organization has often sidestepped in the past. If that is indeed the case, it sends a discouraging message. At a moment when racist pseudoscience is making a disturbing comeback, skeptics shouldn’t shy away from talking about race — and we can’t afford to overlook the white privilege among our own ranks.

That refusal to deal with the biggest social struggles of our time is what has always left me infuriated with the skeptic movement — oh, sure, let’s debunk ghosts and chupacabras and UFOs, but racist and misogynist beliefs are just too hard. They love the magic tricks and tests of dowsing, but eugenics? No one in organized skepticism seems to be smart enough to cope with that.

Merging with the Richard Dawkins Foundation didn’t help, and actually made it worse.

CFI’s 2016 merger with a charitable foundation led by Richard Dawkins, an author and biologist who has repeatedly come under fire for Islamophobic and misogynistic remarks, did little to burnish its reputation. (Recently, Dawkins has been widely criticized for suggesting that eugenics would “work in practice” in humans.) As author Sikivu Hutchinson put it in 2016, “CFI’s all-white board looks right at home with [the Dawkins Foundation’s] lily white board and staff.” (Y. Sherry Sheng, who was born in China, was appointed to CFI’s board later that year.)

Then, there was this embarrassment:

Two years ago, in an inept attempt to address the issue, CFI published a special issue of Skeptical Inquirer: “A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism.” The issue, penned exclusively by white men, demonstrated CFI leadership’s woefully shallow grasp of how racism works. In an article on “critical thinking approaches to confronting racism,” the magazine’s deputy editor, Benjamin Radford, referenced the view of evolutionary psychologist and author Steven Pinker that “the overall historical trends for humanity are encouraging”— a view that has been criticized as glossing over the plights of the most marginalized people. Radford’s contribution to the special issue also seemed to ignore the elephant in CFI’s room: He made not even a passing mention of the staggering racial disparities within his own organization — and within the very pages of the publication he was writing for.

Seriously, fuck Ben Radford. That guy should have been fired years ago, and instead they put him in charge of an issue on racism?

Dawkins’ appointee to run the organization didn’t help, either.

It wasn’t just that CFI’s leadership stumbled on matters of race; it often seemed to discourage any discussion of the topic at all. In an anonymous 2019 letter addressed to CFI’s Board of Directors, nine CFI staff members and associates expressed concerns about the conduct and views of CEO Robyn Blumner, including what they saw as her unwillingness to substantively address race and the lack of diversity within the organization itself. “[Blumner] declares loudly and regularly that issues surrounding harmful inequalities of race, gender, and class in our country’s premier scientific institutions should not be discussed on any platform or in any forum in which CFI is involved,” the letter read, adding that “in the absence of authority to meaningfully contribute to these important conversations … CFI staff are experiencing escalating difficulty in building rapport and trust with potential supporters, which undermines our ability to advance CFI’s mission.” (I provided input into the drafting of the letter, at the authors’ request.)

I see why Kavin was dismissed — she was pushing hard to move CFI to address real issues. Easier to kick her out than actually address the failures of the institution.

Last September, CFI announced that the newest member of its board would be yet another white person, actor and Saturday Night Live alumna Julia Sweeney. Disappointed, I reached out to board member Leonard Tramiel, whom I’d regularly interacted with. “You elected another white person to the board? Really?” I wrote. “Yup,” Tramiel replied. “Finding people that want to serve on the board and have the appropriate qualifications isn’t easy.”

“Easy.” That explains a lot. Bigfoot is easy. Haunted houses are easy. Psychic mediums are easy. Faced with the prospect of addressing a hard problem, CFI collapses with a loud farting noise, like a punctured bladder, and throws away the talent that might have made them relevant.

Jesus. All the old skeptic and atheist organizations I was associated with and supported have just rotted away. I wish I’d gotten out earlier.

Raif Badawi is the Saudi blogger, atheist, and critic of the Saudi theocracy who was jailed and lashed, and who is currently in a horrible Saudi prison. He has been in communication with his family, though, with daily phone calls, until recently — Badawi has suddenly gone silent.

Jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, currently serving a 10 year prison sentence for criticizing the Saudi Arabian regime online, has not been heard from in more than a month, leaving his family fearful for his well-being, and unsure if he is still alive.

The last time Badawi’s family heard from him was on Jan. 14, his family’s spokesperson Elham Manea tells TIME. Since then, his daily phone calls from prison have suddenly and inexplicably stopped. Last week, prison authorities told Badawi’s wife, Ensaf Haidar, that he does not want to speak with her, Manea says.

People are fearing the worst.

This will not change our relationship to an unabashedly evil regime, although it should. The US has too many powerful people who profit off the oil, and no small number of ordinary citizens who are fine with torturing and murdering atheists and people who dare to criticize the government.

I’m pretty sure that’s in the Bible somewhere, but I haven’t cracked one of those open in decades.

Anyway, Jim Bakker, convicted fraud, rapist, and shill for bulk food products, is now capitalizing on fear of the coronavirus to sell a “cure”, bringing on a naturopath to tout the virtues of colloidal silver.

The Jim Bakker Show is suggesting that the silver solution it sells can kill the coronavirus within 12 hours. pic.twitter.com/kbUGnUp69m

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) February 12, 2020

You know it doesn’t work, right? Bakker is selling quantities ranging in price from $40 to $300 to gullible old Christians who tremble in fear at every paranoid theory Fox News trots out.

…similarly marketed products also include colloidal silver which according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) provides no known health benefits. Ingesting it can cause side effects including argyria, or discoloration of the skin or other tissue, and poor absorption of other medications by the body.

Whoa. When the NCCIH, an organization of quacks designed to funnel federal grant money to other quacks, says this snake oil has no health benefits at all, then you know it’s bad. Of course, knowing NCCIH, they’re probably only saying that because colloidal silver isn’t part of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and they’d rather you got acupuncture to cure your viral disease.

Yell louder!