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.

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.

Boghossian in a panic!

He thinks he’s going to be fired from his position at Portland State. That’s not necessarily the case, but Boghossian has been found guilty of ethical misconduct for his “grievance studies” exercise.

Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University and the only one of three researchers on the project to hold a full-time academic position, was found by his institutional review board to have committed research misconduct. Specifically, he failed to secure its approval before proceeding with research on human subjects — in this case, the journal editors and reviewers he was tricking with his absurd but seemingly well-researched papers.

Their defense is peculiar. James Lindsay literally says “It’s not actually scholarship”, Pluckrose says, “They can’t say we needed IRB approval…because there weren’t any real human subjects”, and that they couldn’t ask for IRB approval because that would tip off the (human) reviewers they were trying to trick. But that’s nonsense — of course you can do blind and double-blind studies on humans, IRBs approve those all the time. Here’s what they actually expected:

“An IRB protocol application should have been submitted to the Office of Research Integrity,” reads a determination letter from Portland state’s IRB dated last month. “University policy requires that all research involving human subjects conducted by faculty, other employees and students [on campus] must have prior review and approval by the IRB.”

Exactly. As an extra bonus, having an official declaration of exactly what they were trying to do and how they planned to analyze it ahead of time would have been more persuasive that they were actually doing a real study. But they weren’t, and they’ve even admitted it — if it’s not really scholarship, then what was it? I don’t know. Garbage? A publicity stunt? Propaganda?

It’s also the hypocrisy.

Over all, Christensen said he and Sears believe that Boghossian “wants to have it both ways.” That is, publicly presenting his project as a “rigorous study that exposed flaws in the peer-review system” while also “claiming that the hoax wasn’t a genuine study, and therefore IRB approval doesn’t apply.”

I don’t do research on humans, but even I know this kind of work demands IRB review (spider research doesn’t, at all), and I’m a bit shocked that they didn’t even discuss it with an IRB officer. I don’t even see any reason to expect that the application would be turned down, except possibly over its lack of rigor and poor foundation. By not going through the protocols — which even Boghossian admits are important and necessary — they did a disservice to research.

I agree with this assessment.

“We think that he did commit academic fraud, by design, and that some professional sanctions might be warranted,” Christensen continued. Boghossian and his colleagues “did misrepresent themselves, they did falsify their evidence and they did commit a serious infraction of research misconduct by deceiving these editors, wasting the time of the readers and then publicly slandering the journals and their fields. It is the right of any university to investigate fraud perpetrated by its employees.”

They also wasted the time of reviewers — you know that reviewing papers is unpaid service work for professors, right?

But guess who is defending Boghossian: Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker. Of course.

At least we’ve got the authors on record now admitting that their “study” wasn’t a study, and wasn’t even any kind of scholarship at all.

I’m afraid

My wife is something of a packrat, especially with papers — she has a dread of losing some important documentation, so she keeps it all. All of it. Bank statements from 1995, that sort of thing.

Then last night she started watching this Marie Kondo show. I’m cringing. I want Kondo to stop smiling like a manic mannequin. I’m getting annoyed that she shows up at these people’s houses, does next to nothing other than making a few suggestions, like how to fold clothes, and tells them to get to work and turn their belongings upside down…and then leaves. The family then gets to work and does everything.

She does have some good ideas, but the weird meditation thing at the start, and thanking the clothing you’re throwing out…no thanks. I don’t need the bogosity layered on top of the practical.

But my wife is getting a gleam in her eye, and has suggested that we should watch another episode or two tonight. She also moaned with delight when these couples talk about how cleaning together has brought them closer together. I’m worried that I’m going to get dragged into the KonMarie cult, even if it does mean we’ll finally get rid of all those boxes full of useless, ancient paper. Has anyone else been suffering through this? Does anyone know any good deprogrammers?

Sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their heads, and they still managed to screw it up

Aquaman. My favorite comic book as a kid, about a guy who can breathe underwater and talk to fish. I was looking forward to this movie, and the trailer had some promising hints…like when, as a boy, Aquaboy is being bullied in an aquarium and all the fish come to the glass and intimidate the bad kids by staring at them. That’s the Aquaman I wanted to see, where the power was all about communication and cooperation with marine creatures.

That’s not what we got. It’s another fantasy movie about a muscle-bound lunk getting his way. I had so many problems sitting through this crap.

  1. Jason Momoa can’t act. He’s big and hairy and flippant, but that’s it. There’s zero chemistry with the love interest that’s shoe-horned in — we’re never given any reason why Mera would find him interesting or attractive, other than that maybe she’s shallow and only interested in his hunky body.
  2. What is his superpower?. He seems to be a wet superman. Early on, he’s shot by what looks like a hand-held cannon with exploding shells — they knock him down, but all he says is “ow” as he gets back up. Yet later he’s pierced by a trident through the upper chest and shoulder (it’s only a flesh wound of course, he’s all better a few minutes later). His vulnerability fluctuates as the plot requires.
  3. Everyone is superpowerful. It gets to be a bit much. There’s a scene in the trailer where Mera and Aquaman casually jump out of an airplane flying over the Sahara Desert — they fall thousands of feet, hit the sand with a bit of a whoomf, and then walk on to their destination. Later, there are a couple of literal cliffhangers, with Mera rescued from falling into a chasm by Aquaman, and I’m just thinking — let her fall. She’ll bounce. There are no stakes here.
  4. The plot is a pathetic scavenger hunt. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: there’s a grand macguffin that will allow him to defeat the bad guy, and the hero has to follow a trail of clues around the world to find it. It’s the laziest plot device ever.
  5. The writers are too lazy to maintain even that thin thread of a plot. Step 1: Go to ancient cave in Sahara Desert, use widget to find map to Sicily and another widget. Step 2: Go to Sicily, use Widget #2 to spy two islands in the Mediterranean, then, aww, fuckit, this is boring. Skip islands. Steal fishing boat, putt-putt straight to the end boss to fight over macguffin.
  6. The world is tiny and weightless. How do they get from the middle of the Sahara Desert to Sicily? They just do. Walk, maybe? They take that stolen fishing boat to the Trench Kingdom, which is presumably somewhere deep in the Western Pacific. So…Sicily, through the Straits of Gibraltar, south to the southern hemisphere, round the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, north along the coast of South Asia…takes maybe most of the afternoon, and next thing you know their boat is being overrun by toothy Lovecraftian horrors. There’s no sense of place. It’s just The Ocean, you know, that single address.
  7. The villain is boring. It’s a white man who thinks he deserves to be King of the Ocean, so he can kill all the land-dwellers, for some reason. He has all the super-powers Atlanteans do, but his special talent is being able to open his mouth really wide and yell into the ocean. By the way, everyone is white in this movie, except the black human bad guy pirate, whose superpower is being very angry and wanting to kill Aquaman. OK, diversity is served by the merpeople, and the crab people, and the Lovecraftian horrors. If you identify as a slimy giant-eyed fanged monster, this is the movie that will finally give you some representation.
  8. Once again, medievalism. Atlantis is an advanced, super-technological society, ruled by kings, where only those with royal blood can grasp the macguffin, and kingship is established by trial by combat to the death. Fuck you, Wakanda. Black Panther had some virtues that allowed me to overlook the comically silly political system, but Aquaman doesn’t. Also, in Atlantis, miscegenation carries a death sentence. No wonder it’s so white!
  9. The bad guy is on a pointless quest. He’s trying to unite the multiple undersea kingdoms so he can get the title “Ocean’s Master” and then destroy the puny terrestrial humans. But early on, before he unites them all, he does a magic something that inundates coastlines with a huge tidal wave that throws all military ships up on the beach, and also flings all of the human’s garbage back up onto the land. Besides making Boyan Slat look even more ridiculous than he already is, that demonstrates immense power that we land lubbers can’t match. I surrender already. I, for one, welcome our new aquatic overlords.
  10. There are really only two women in the movie. There’s Aquaman’s mother, who is snatched away early in the story and fed to the Trench Horrors for breeding with a hoo-man. There’s Mera, another super-Atlantean princess, whose main role is to have flaming red hair and be Aquaman’s sidekick. She fights people, provides occasional bits of exposition, and is used by her father as a tool for dynastic marriage, but otherwise makes no contribution to the story at all. Strangely, neither Mera nor Aquaman’s mother have the kind of royal genes that would allow them to grab the magic macguffin — I guess it also senses Y chromosomes, or penises, or something. Maybe if it were an engulfing macguffin rather than a pointy stabby macguffin they could have been more useful.
  11. The physics is unbelievable. Water isn’t treated as a medium that might affect movement in anyway — poorly streamlined things just barrel through it with no effect. Also, they use whales as transport animals in Atlantis, and to fight deep in the ocean. Wouldn’t they be frequently rising to the surface to, you know, breathe?

On the plus side, if there is one, it’s a pretty movie, in a garishly over-cluttered CGI way. And, uh, that’s all I can think of.

No, really, I’m racking my brain, and there’s nothing to commend this incoherent mess with a star whose charisma rests entirely in his pecs.

The kindest critic of them all

My favorite book reviewer, Dana from Glenville, sent me a present. That was very kind of her.

I appreciate that she even included instructions on its use, but, generous as she is, I’m not going to dab mysterious liquids received in the mail on myself. Instead, I’m going to save it close at hand in case there is an outbreak of vampires.

I did consider putting it in an atomizer to see what effect it might have on my spiders, but right now I don’t have any to spare for experimentation.

If they actually were logical, it would be easy to crush them

You know that familiar Star Trekkie trope where a human makes a computer explode by leading it into a logical contradiction? It doesn’t work. It never works. Otherwise the final panel of this comic would be the freezepeacher alien melting down into a puddle of goo.

Any sentient brain will be at least subconsciously aware that it can’t encompass the entire universe of phenomena and so will be accustomed to shunting contradictions to the side. If it doesn’t fit the model of the world in their head, it’s ignored (or, in unfortunately rare cases, is used to modify the model).

That’s not the point of this comic, I know, but it just made me pine for a universe where the people who claim to be masters of objective truth actually would explode or disintegrate or whatever it is beings of pure logic do when logic fails.