As if we’ll now forget Galton and Pearson

Every year in my classes I’ll spend a little time talking about Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. It’s unavoidable. They were early pioneers in genetics and were extremely influential in their time, so I have been and will continue to bring up their contributions and their flaws. Galton was a wealthy guy who endowed a Chair in Eugenics at University College London, and Pearson was the first person appointed to it; just the strong association with eugenics ought to be enough to taint the history of the two men. I like to let my students know about how Galton, for a time, kept a device he called his ‘pricker’ in his pocket so he could surreptitiously score the attractiveness of women he met, which he later published as a list of the quality of women across the UK — the women of London were the most beautiful, while those in Scotland…weren’t. And you thought MRAs were a recent phenomenon!

We don’t need to bestow special honors on these harbingers of a century of racism and oppression, so UCL has decided to dename any buildings with their names on them.

In the meantime, the names have been changed to Lecture Theatre 115 (formerly the Galton Lecture Theatre), Lecture Theatre G22 (formerly the Pearson Lecture Theatre) and the North-West Wing (formerly the Pearson Building).

Not exactly poetic names, but better than trumpeting the names of racists.

Next up: all those corporations and rich alumni who buy the names of university buildings might want to consider the transitory nature of the honor, because when we start an accounting of the crimes of capitalism all those signs might come tumbling down. It’s always annoyed me that some rich dweeb with no real association with what goes on inside them gets to come along and have their name enshrined on the doors to a building.

Ooops, speaking of which, the Natural History Museum has decided that their new director will be the rich parasite who runs Amazon UK.

The new director has extensive experience of running online food businesses, and has also previously served on boards and acted as a trustee for high-profile museums. Gurr was the chair of the Science Museum’s board from 2010 to 2014, and was a trustee of the National Gallery.

He also acted as a non-executive director at the Department for Work and Pensions, which attracted criticism from the Labour MP and tax campaigner Margaret Hodge, who described his appointment as “disgusting” because Amazon was involved in a row over its taxes.

Oooh, “extensive experience of running online food businesses”. That doesn’t even make him qualified to run the museum cafeteria, but now he’s in charge of the whole show? This is a disaster in the making — rich executives are only good at figuring out how to loot and pillage, which, come to think of it, may be his best qualification to run a British museum.

Look for the helpers: Hsu has some peculiar friends

Yesterday, I told you that Stephen Hsu had gotten a bunch of signatures supporting his work, the effect of which was rather blunted by the fact that a lot of them were from racists. You’d think such a smart guy would have figured out that if you’re trying to argue that you aren’t an asshole, getting testimonials from other assholes doesn’t help. Well, now he’s got another major endorsement: Quillette and Claire Lehmann are backing him 100%. Oy. I guess he’s having his friends help dig his grave.

Lehmann’s defense is a real piece of work. She compares Hsu to Vavilov, and damns one person who criticizes him as…a democratic socialist.

Wow. So much wrong.

  • Vavilov was the victim of a Stalinist purge. No one is planning to send Hsu to a gulag.
  • Vavilov was a respected early Mendelian who was doing research within a theoretical framework that was well-respected in the world outside the USSR. Hsu is not a geneticist, he’s a loon promoting discredited ideas outside his expertise.
  • Lysenko was a political creature who exploited the wishful thinking of an ideology to claim facts that were not in evidence, or that had been disproven. That’s Hsu, too. He knows nothing of genetics, but he’s making absurd claims to prop up support for eugenics.
  • Lehmann caricatures ideas about genetics and the environment. Lysenko was a horrible fraud, therefore acknowledging any contribution of environment to the expression of genes makes you a modern Lysenko. Being a pure Mendelian who believes genes are fixed and invariant in their effects makes you a noble martyr to truth. It’s all bullshit.
  • Hsu is not being targeted “for his research and writing”. I haven’t seen anyone even mention his research in theoretical physics as a problem. It’s his dilettantish dabbling in fields outside his experience and playing on his authority in physics to justify his claims about biology that are a problem.
  • Hsu is not being misrepresented as a racist and sexist. He advocates for racism and sexism, he has a following of racist, sexist friends, and he publicly endorses racist, sexist ideas. His version of condemnation is to say, ‘I am not a racist, but hey, how about them differences in IQ scores?’
  • Hsu is not at risk of losing his livelihood. He may be asked to resign his title as Vice President for Research and Innovation (he may lose a bit of salary for that, but also gets out of some administrative duties). He’ll still get paid as a high-ranking professor, not to mention that he has made millions founding and selling a couple of Silicon Valley companies. He’s not at the slightest risk of starving to death in a prison camp.
  • I’m with Kevin Bird. Seeing the oppressive capitalist foundations of American wealth inequality getting shaken up is a good start. It’s not quite the change we saw with the fall of the Berlin Wall, though — we’re going to need to see Wall Street dethroned from its power and influence on government to be comparable.
  • Having the craniometry cabal at Quillette backing him is not evidence that he’s not a racist. Quite the contrary.

I’m hoping that the activists in Michigan can just point to the dishonest support of Quillette as confirmation that Hsu is a goddamned racist who has no right to be leading anything at MSU.

Dave Rubin is a first class twit

Here’s another thing conservatives fear: children’s programs against racism.

I have two grandkids who are two and under, who both love Elmo. I’m happy to have them learn that racism is bad.

(I know, Rubin will deny that he’s a conservative — he’s a “classical liberal”, don’t you know. But really, he’s a right-leaning conservative who only approves of liberal ideas that benefit him directly, like all conservatives.)

Stephen Hsu strikes back!

Since Hsu is getting pestered by these accusations of scientific racism and demands that he be dismissed from his administrative (not academic) role, he has decided to refute those claims with a letter and petition of his own. Curiously, he isn’t able to deny the accusations with evidence, which doesn’t stop him from simply asserting his denial, and has decided instead to respond with signatures from his scientifically authoritative friends in his support.

What’s amusing is that those signatures are from a bunch of known scientific racists. It’s like getting a bunch of Aryan Nation skinheads to testify that no, he ain’t racist, nosir, not racist at all. Very convincing!

As Kevin Bird says,

To be clear, all these academics are free to research, write, speak, and publish as they wish. However, in the context of defending a colleague against accusations of scientific racism, a more strategic decision may have been to not sign at all. Furthermore, a concern for MSU is that many academics of questionable reputation and/or people who have been misled about the campaign and charges against Hsu are jumping to defend freedom of inquiry despite it’s inappropriateness in this case. The inability of counter-campaign proponents to distinguish academic freedom from the powers and privileges of university leadership is a substantial shortcoming of the counter campaign.

Hsu is free to do all the physics he wants, that is what he was hired for. His extra-curricular ravings about biology can be dismissed out of hand, and really, he shouldn’t be rewarded with a high position in the administration where it looks like he’s representing Michigan State.

“Death of the author” dies at age 53

A satire site summarizes JK Rowling’s swan dive into the sewer:

“What’s amazing is that not only has J.K. Rowling positioned herself as the female Orson Scott Card,” said comparative literature professor Nicole Mathews, “but she has also done so in a fraction of the time. It took Card decades to fully explain his deeply upsetting hatred and many more years to face backlash. Rowling is managing to accomplish this in a matter of weeks. That’s powerful. That’s progress.”

“And just like Orson Scott Card, Rowling included a ton of pro-trans symbolism in her books without realizing it,” Mathews added. “What was once Ender’s soapy naked bathroom fight with another boy is now the magical Sorting Hat that places you into a category when you are born into the school, forcing you to figure out your own place for yourself.”

Now explain HP Lovecraft. He was an out, hate-filled racist from day one, and wasn’t embarrassed by it, and his work still holds a certain degree of squeamish respect. Could it be the hypocrisy of pretending to be a liberal, open-minded progressive while hiding the rotten blemish at your core is the damning part? Maybe not…Card was always a conservative Mormon at heart.

Maybe what’s dying here is the “death of the author” itself.

The real terrorists

There’s a protest in New Mexico. Some of the protesters try to tear down a statue to a conquistador. The shooting starts. Who’s doing it? Why, the gentlemen in military costumes, carrying military firearms, who are then treated respectfully by the police.

The right-wing militia and the police are rather hard to tell apart in that picture. It’s also amazing how when it’s an armed mob of white people with obvious violent intent, they get treated so gently, and how the murder militia responds so calmly and meekly. They know they’re not going to be spontaneously throttled or battered or executed. They aren’t worried at all.

This is the future, as illustrated in this excellent comic.

I’m not afraid of black people, but man, these armed white terrorists are the big worry.

The guy they shot is in critical condition but recovering, by the way. The whole gang of marauders need to be tried for attempted murder.

The terrorist has been identified and arrested. His name is Stephen Ray Baca. He’s scum.

“The heavily armed individuals who flaunted themselves at the protest, calling themselves a ‘civil guard,’ were there for one reason: To menace protesters, to present an unsanctioned show of unregulated force,” New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) said in a statement. “To menace the people of New Mexico with weaponry — with an implicit threat of violence — is on its face unacceptable; that violence did indeed occur is unspeakable.”

Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller (D) said the statue would now be speedily removed as an “urgent matter of public safety” until authorities determine a next step.

Fine. So when a bunch of soldier-wannabes in costume show up waving guns at a protest, tell the police to speedily remove them, too.

Hsu is rightfully embattled — he shouldn’t have any authority

Look, I don’t hate physicists — I have friends who are physicists! They can use my bathroom any time! It’s more that there a few rotten apples who insist on ignorantly stepping into my discipline and making grand (and false) pronouncements about how biology works, apparently because knowing physics makes them think they know everything. And it’s annoying, especially when they get grant money for it (e.g., Paul Davies), publish rubbish in physics journals without question, and get fawned over by the mass media for it. I’ve also noticed that there’s a kind of thin actinic line of other physicists who reflexively rally to the defense of any of their own, no matter how inane, against interlopers from outside the domain of physics — which is kind of hard to imagine, since they simultaneously believe that everything is in their domain.

I have to snipe again, though, because another physicist is in the news. Students and others are calling for the removal of Stephen Hsu as VP of Research and Graduate Studies at Michigan State University.

Some physicists think that because they know physics, and physics is difficult, that they are qualified to work in other disciplines. Sometimes a physicist wandering from physics turns out fine, particularly if they make use of their obvious quantitative skill; I’m thinking here of David Layzer’s well-known critique of Arthur Jensen’s IQ work. Other times it is disastrous, such as William Shockley’s eugenic proposals. Yesterday evening the Graduate Employees Union (GEU) of my own university, Michigan State University, posted a long Twitter thread that shows that the Senior Vice-President for Research and Innovation, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Stephen Hsu, here at my own university, Michigan State University is much closer to Shockley than he is to Layzer.

I’ve written before in this space on how scientific racism gains purchase when supposedly mainstream sources publish and promote it. I find the evidence in the GEU Twitter thread to be good examples of Hsu promoting outrageous figures by appearing with them on podcasts and Youtube videos, such as that of the loathsome Stephan Molyneux.

Hsu shares a conceit all too common among physicists: that “it’s really high math ability that is useful for discovering things about the world — that is, discovering truth or reasoning rigorously.” But his behavior shows that this is manifestly untrue. All the quantitative sophistication in the world does not help in disciplines that require interpreting texts in historical contexts, understanding social nuance, or properly recounting the past for present-day audiences. Add in a heaping dose of conspiracy arguments and you can quickly end up promoting racist, especially antisemitic interpretations of history. This is what happened when Hsu interviewed his friend Ron Unz last year. The Senior Vice-President for Research and Innovation at my University heaped praise on a promoter of Holocaust denial on his podcast; clear evidence of Hsu’s complete lack of scholarly and intellectual judgement.

This isn’t some harmless academic argument, like how many aliens are dancing on the planets of the galaxy, but the promotion of bad ideas that do great harm to people. Hsu consorts with racists like Stephen Molyneux and Ron Unz; he openly promotes eugenics; he holds ridiculous ideas about the unlimited perfectability of human genetics, despite being pig-ignorant of biology; he believes women are inherently less suited to careers in science and engineering. His views are rejected by the American Society of Human Genetics, but I guess his authority in theoretical physics overrides that. The real shocker here is that MSU was willing to promote a blatant, unapologetic bigot with ties to racist, white nationalist organizations to a prestigious position in their administration. I guess believing in the intrinsic inferiority of minority students is no obstacle to putting the guy in a position of power at a university.

I tangled with Hsu a few years ago, ripping into his belief that we can breed people for an IQ of 1000, as if IQ is a real entity and breeding people is like breeding chickens. Remember the chickens, the mainstay of his argument?

That fat chicken is your brain. Let the dumbass physicist control your breeding, culling the less brilliant progeny from your line, and eventually your many-times-great-grandchildren will have great huge brains and be many times smarter than Stephen Hsu, and nah, there won’t be any side effects and we’ll just ignore the inhumanity of the process and we’ll pretend there aren’t any physical limitations. All you have to do is imagine an immense perfectly spherical brain floating in a frictionless vacuum.

They’re afraid!

The thin blue line is cracking. A few members of the Minneapolis Police Department are realizing that their jobs are in peril, and are ready to throw Derek Chauvin to the media wolves and an angry citizenry, and wrote an open letter disavowing any association with the ‘bad guys’ of the police force.

Members of the Minneapolis Police Department spoke out on Friday out against former police officer Derek Chauvin in an open letter addressed to “everyone — but especially Minneapolis citizens.”

“Derek Chauvin failed as a human and stripped George Floyd of his dignity and life. This is not who we are,” said the letter, signed by fourteen MPD officers. “We’re not the union or the administration,” the letter says.

“We stand ready to listen and embrace the calls for change, reform and rebuilding,” says the letter, which comes as powerful police unions across the country are digging in, preparing for a once-in-a-generation showdown over policing and new polls that indicate that most Americans now acknowledge that African Americans are more likely to be mistreated or even killed by police.

“There were many more willing to sign, but the group opted to showcase people from across the PD as well as male/female, black/white, straight/gay, leader/frontline, etc. Internally, this is sending a message” said Paul Omodt, a spokesperson for the officers who penned the open letter.

Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t believe you, and fuck you. The MPD has had a reputation for brutality for decades, and the minority population of Minneapolis has a rich collection of stories. Where were these police in 2010, 2000, 1990, 1980? Prioritizing loyalty to a corrupt union and fellow gang members, that’s where. Standing in unity with bad cops. Probably getting in a few licks of their own. This is like those cops who now take a knee for a photo op before heading out to bust heads with a baton or shoot bystanders with rubber bullets or hose down crowds with pepper spray. I’m not impressed.

That is who they are.

Don’t be swayed when the bully starts sniveling and begging for mercy. They all do that.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about the unintended consequences of technology — I hadn’t thought about it before, had simply taken it for granted, but the ability of popular cell phones to record video is only about 12 years old, and has progressed rapidly to the point where the majority of consumers won’t accept a phone that lacks video recording technology. Better and fancier phone cameras are a major selling point! They are now used all the time to record the viciousness of the police, and are much more reliable than the body cams that somehow magically get turned off just before a cop kills someone.

I might have been much more sympathetic to a subset of cops making a plea for “change, reform and rebuilding” in 2005, before it became apparent that they were going to have problems getting away with brutality, and before all those videos emerged revealing how horrifically cruel and callous the police were. It’s too late for them now.

Fly any flag you want at NASCAR! Maybe.

NASCAR, a sport I have negative interest in following, has decreed that Confederate flags are no longer allowed at their events, which have always been characterized by good ol’ boys waving traitor’s flags and decorating their cars with them. Bold move! I imagine a fair number of their fans are choking on their chaw right now. One of them, Ray Cicarelli, has announced that he will no longer be participating.

Ciccarelli said he does not like the direction NASCAR is headed, adding that he does not believe in kneeling during the National Anthem, nor does he believe in taking away the right for people to fly whatever flag they choose.

What an interesting position to take! So you can fly whatever flag you want…although I’ve noticed a remarkable dearth of these flags at NASCAR, but then, I haven’t paid much attention. I think you’d get beat up pretty bad if you tried.

So you could commend his commitment to free speech, except that he also declares that you shouldn’t be allowed to kneel during the Glorious Patriotic Drinking Song, which means his reasoning isn’t at all based on personal liberty. What could his rationale be?

I mean, the reason the Confederate flag is on a shit list is because it represents white supremacy, bigotry, and oppression — and also, incidentally, slavery — so it’s easy to understand why The Libs think it is inappropriate. Is Mr Ciccarelli in favor of those things?

The real reason Ciccarelli is leaving the game:

Impressive. A perfect record.