Leakers! At Google!

While James Damore is out virtue signaling with the alt-right (he’s already been interviewed by Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux, you know Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan are drooling at the prospect of getting him on, and I hear that Gad Saad has sent him an invitation — the deplorables already love him), Google had to cancel a town hall meeting because of growing harassment.

On Tuesday, a 4chan-related Twitter account posted screenshots of fourteen Twitter profiles of Google employees, ranging from rank-and-file engineers to Sundar Pichai himself. Every Googler targeted was either a woman, trans man, or a man of color. This tweet may not have been the origin point of this list of Googlers, but it was spread widely.

Because if you’re not a cis-het white man, you deserve to be attacked by 4chan. Most troubling is that internal screen shots are being leaked by people at Google, who know exactly what’s going to happen to their colleagues.

The targeting of those specific Googlers might have been the work of outsiders, but anxieties are running high inside the company because of the publication of screenshots from the internal Google+ on alt-right channels. On Tuesday, Gizmodo reported that a meme depicting whistleblowers being beaten was being shared on an internal meme generator.

On Sunday, alt-right blogger Vox Day published screenshots from the internal Google+, showing employees criticizing the Damore memo. On Monday, Breitbart published an even larger set of internal screenshots. Names and profile pictures were not redacted. “What really gets me is that when Googlers leaked these screenshots, they knew this was the element of the internet they were leaking it to,” a former Google employee tells The Verge. “They knew they were subjecting their colleagues to this type of abuse.”

It’s a big company, and it’s to be expected that there will be a fair number of Silicon Valley misogynists working there, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that anything disseminated within the company will eventually find its way elsewhere. It’s just sad that there are these people with so much contempt for their coworkers that they’ll sic 4chan dorks on them.

And then if they’re caught, they’ll be so outraged at getting fired.

David Avocado Wolfe doesn’t care about the truth, anyway

Yvette d’Entremont might have pissed off David Avocado Wolfe with her article, DAVID AVOCADO WOLFE IS THE BIGGEST ASSHOLE IN THE MULTIVERSE, because he went on an angry Twitter spree against those damned people who think science works recently. Or maybe he just howls angrily all the time…I don’t know, it seems like that’s the latest thing for big assholes, just spluttering away on the Twitter. I wonder if historians will look back on this decade, wonder what people were thinking, and call this time the Twitting Twenty Teens (I’m kind of afraid there won’t be any historians looking back on the next decade, and if there are a few survivors, they’ll call it the Smoldering Wreckage of the Twenty Twenties.)

Anyway, Wolfe’s latest weird assertion is about lunar and solar eclipses.

You see, gold cannot ‘crystallize’ during a solar eclipse because, like Superman, it derives all of its power from the rays of our yellow sun (just to remind you, the nonsense about “wavelengths” and “vibrations” is common currency in nerd literature, as well as in the New Agey BS), while similarly, silver will not solidify during lunar eclipses, because obviously, it shares mystical wavelengths with the moon.

Wolfe does not explain how he knows this. He also does not give details; is it only in the track of totality during the brief period of the eclipse that gold and silver become recalcitrant, or is it worldwide? Do the metals just mold more slowly during a partial eclipse? Do dentists find that gold fillings set more rapidly if they make them in front of a sunny window than if they do them under fluorescent lamps? How does gold and silver ‘know’ what wavelengths are bouncing around in the room? Inquiring minds want to know, because we could actually test this claim. Woo-woo minds don’t want us to know, because we could actually test this claim.

It reminds me of the time back in the Dismal Nineties made the mistake of telling us that gelatin would not set during a void-of-course moon. He gave us all the details we needed, and since gelatin is cheap and easily available, so guess what a number of us eagerly did? We tested his claim!

It didn’t work.

The annoying thing, too, is that if Wolfe did give details, which he might do since he is the Biggest Asshole in the Multiverse, there are people who would waste their time while in the eclipse of doing the experiment of testing the physical properties of certain metals. There will be no change. And afterwards, like my astrologer, he’ll invent new excuses for why it didn’t work.

So don’t bother, people.

Demand that he demonstrate the phenomenon first, and document it. Or better yet, ignore him, because he is a big lying asshole.

I get email

Man, I thought Catholic fanatics were bad, but they’ve got nothin’ on anti-feminists.

great article about the google diversity

hey,

i just wanted to take the opportunity to tell you that you are a huge (literally nice man tits) cuckold f4gg0t and one day you may be hanging from a rope.

cheers!

He seems nice.

The philosophy of Pickle Rick

I saw the Pickle Rick episode of Rick & Morty last night, and all I can say is…that was pure raw genius. Short synopsis: Mad scientist Rick turns himself into a pickle to get out of a therapy appointment, and then has to construct an exoskeleton out of cockroach and rat parts save himself after falling into a sewer.

Yeah, you’re saying that sounds nuts.

Stick with it, though. It’s amazing. After this elaborate series of improbable events, Rick does finally end up with the therapist and there’s this wonderful dialogue (taken from Film Crit Hulk, which really gets into this episode):

Therapist: “Rick, why did you lie to your daughter?”

Rick: “So I wouldn’t have to come here.”

Therapist: “Why didn’t you want to come here?”

Rick: “Because I don’t respect therapy. Because I’m a scientist. Because I invent, transform, create, and destroy for a living. And when I don’t like something about the world, I change it. And I don’t think going to a rented office in a strip mall to listen to some agent of averageness explain which words mean which feelings has ever helped anyone do anything. I think it’s helped a lot of people get comfortable and stop panicking, which is a state of mind we value in the animals we eat, but not something I want for myself. I’m not a cow. I’m a pickle – when I feel like it – So… you asked.”

Therapist: “Rick. The only connection between your unquestionable intelligence and the sickness destroying your family, is that everyone in your family, you included, use intelligence to justify sickness. You seem to alternate between viewing your own mind as an unstoppable force and as an inescapable curse. And I think it’s because the only truly unapproachable concept for you is that it is your mind within your control. You chose to come here, you chose to talk, to belittle my vocation, just as you chose to become a pickle. You are the master of your universe. And yet, you are dripping with rat’s blood and feces. Your enormous mind literally vegetating by your own hand. I have no doubt that you would be bored senseless by therapy. The same way I’m bored when I brush my teeth and wipe my ass. Because the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is – it’s NOT an adventure – There’s no way to do it so wrong you might die. It’s just… work. And the bottom line is some people are okay going to work and some people, well, some people would rather die. Each of us gets to choose.”

That last bit — after 20 minutes of unbelievable adventure and violence and exotic super-science — suddenly grounds the whole story in mundane reality and speaks of a far deeper truth than is possible with a talking pickle.

It would be good to use this cartoon in a discussion of bioethics, except that I fear students might be more distracted by the hyper-violence that comes before. But man, I know a lot of people who would nod enthusiastically to everything Rick says, and would spit on everything the therapist said…when the therapist is the one to bring some real insight.

Maintain, everyone.

“Starter wife”?

I know that Elon Musk has said and done some stupid things publicly, but I had no idea that his personal life was also such a mess. His first wife, Justine Musk, has some stories to tell. It seems he regarded her as his Starter Wife, who he tried to shape into his Trophy Wife, and who he then discarded when she was sufficiently obliging.

Still, there were warning signs. As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” I shrugged it off, just as I would later shrug off signing the postnuptial agreement, but as time went on, I learned that he was serious. He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa, and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home. This, and the vast economic imbalance between us, meant that in the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic began to take hold. Elon’s judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking. “I am your wife,” I told him repeatedly, “not your employee.”

“If you were my employee,” he said just as often, “I would fire you.”

He maintains that same transactional, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, and treats his assistants like disposable crap.

Here’s a good lesson for anyone thinking about asking for a raise. In his biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” author Ashlee Vance tells us what happened when Musk’s assistant, Mary Beth Brown, asked for a big raise after working for him for 12 years.

According to Business Insider:

In response, Musk told Brown to take two weeks off, during which he would assume her responsibilities and see if she was really critical to his success.

When Brown returned after two weeks, Musk told Brown he didn’t need her anymore.

Musk also told Vance that he offered Brown another position at the company, but she never returned to the office again after that.

That is also, by the way, a really out-of-character article for BoingBoing. It essentially blames Brown for asking for a raise from a billionaire, and tries to advise her on the proper way to be an indispensable corporate slave. I guess that it would also explain to Justine Musk that, despite having five kids by him, she was a terribly inadequate Starter Wife and deserved to be discarded by Musk.

James Damore’s shoddy defense

I’ve been getting two kinds of arguments from the people who support the Google Manifesto creep.

I keep getting told that James Damore loves diversity. It’s the first thing he says in his manifesto.

I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes.

Did you know that Ken Ham loves science?

Answers in Genesis (like other creationist groups) affirms and supports the teaching and use of scientific methodology, and we believe this supports the biblical account of origins.

So does Kent Hovind.

I, for one, love science and the thousands of advancements it has brought us.

I wonder if these people who keep trying to present Damore as some kind of champion of honest assessment of equality and diversity ever bother to think beyond the superficial claim that he makes as an opening gambit to consider what he actually writes? These are the kinds of people who read Lolita and think Humbert Humbert is the hero.

The other line of argumentation is that it is Science. Science is used as the magic incantation; you can’t argue with Science! Unfortunately for them, yes, you can, and in fact argument is central to science — there is not a miraculous science machine that plops out unquestionable Facts somewhere that are then Done and allow no further discussion. Everything in science is a hard-earned interpretation that was built by constant questioning and evaluation by swarms of disagreeable people.

And often science gets it wrong. It’s remarkable how often science has been used as a rationalizing engine for social biases. We have centuries of bad science used to justify slavery, the inferiority of women, the greediness of Jews, the laziness of Africans, the devious cunning of the wicked Oriental, and the shiftless, heritable criminality of the Poor. We have moved on from claiming scientific ‘proof’ of those stereotypes (I wish), but we didn’t get there by deciding that because Galton published something, it must be true.

I actually had someone state that because Debra Soh cited the scientific literature in her awful article, she must be right. It’s hopelessly naive: here’s a contentious subject with a lot of conflicting results in the literature, and mentioning one or a few articles that back up her position means that she “wins”. Never mind that anyone with a broader perspective on the volume of papers knows that, by the testimony of the range of contradictions and special cases, consensus has not been reached on any one detail, and that any difference is likely to be subtle and weak. Do I even need to mention that publishing, especially in fields like psychology, is hopelessly poisoned by the need to find a p value that shows a statistical difference, and that papers that find no significant difference are difficult to publish? Just the fact that differences are so elusive despite all that bias tells you something.

Simply put, Damore’s conclusions are not backed up by the scientific consensus.

Throughout his memo, Damore linked to many Wikipedia pages as justification for his claims – but neither news media organisations nor scientists accept Wikipedia as a credible source of information, especially when used in policy recommendations.

To back up the “people over things” hypothesis, Damore cited a study published in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass in 2010; however, that work never suggests that the gender differences it lists have a proven biological basis.

In fact, the study says the opposite: “Although most biologic scientists accept that sexual selection has led to sex differences in physical traits such as height, musculature, and fat distributions, many social scientists are sceptical about the role of sexual selection in generating psychological gender differences.”

A 2000 review of 10 studies related to gender differences in empathy also suggests men and women don’t have innate differences in this area. The researchers found that such distinctions were only present in situations where the subjects were “aware that they are being evaluated on an empathy-relevant dimension” or in which “empathy-relevant gender-role expectations or obligations are made salient.”

Rather than citing Wikipedia, though, talk to an actual evolutionary biologist, who will tell you that his arguments are “despicable trash” Suzanne Sadedin dissects his manifesto, and summarizes the deep flaws.

Yes, men and women are biologically different — which doesn’t mean what the author thinks it does. The article perniciously misrepresents the nature and significance of known sex differences to advance what appears to be a covert alt-right agenda. More specifically, it:

  • argues for biologically determined sex differences in personality based on extremely weak evidence
  • completely fails to understand the current state of research on sex differences, which is based in neuroscience, epigenetics and developmental biology
  • argues that cognitive sex differences influence performance in software engineering, but presents no supporting evidence. Available evidence does not support the claim.
  • fails to acknowledge ways in which sex differences violate the narrative of female inferiority; this shows intellectual dishonesty
  • assumes effective meritocracy in its argument, ignoring both a mountain of conflicting scientific literature and its own caveats (which I can only assume were introduced to placate readers, since their incompatibility with the core thesis is never resolved)
  • makes repugnant attacks on compassion and empathy
  • distorts and misuses moral foundations theory for rhetorical purposes
  • contains hints of racism
  • paradoxically insists that authoritarianism be treated as a valid moral dimension, whilst firmly rejecting any diversity-motivated strategy that might remotely approach it.
  • ultimately advocates rejecting all morality insofar as it might compromise the interests of a group.

There is a lot of good stuff in that article. Honestly, any time anyone brings up the nature/nurture dichotomy as an implicit part of their thesis, you know it’s trash.

His implicit model is that cognitive traits must be either biological (i.e. innate, natural, and unchangeable) or non-biological (i.e., learned by a blank slate). This nature versus nurture dichotomy is completely outdated and nobody in the field takes it seriously. Rather, modern research is based on the much more biologically reasonable view that neurological traits develop over time under the simultaneous influence of epigenetic, genetic and environmental influences. Everything about humans involves both nature and nurture.

I also endorse this criticism and plan.

As mentioned before, this likely evolved because males are biologically disposable and because women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men.

Talking about males being biologically disposable is nonsense. The mean fitness of males and females is equal; every individual has a father and a mother. What you might mean is that low-status men have historically been used for cannon fodder and other dangerous roles because powerful men regard them as disposable. That’s about sociopolitical structures, not evolution. There’s no reason to think we can’t correct it culturally — our ancestors maintained egalitarian societies in most places for countless millennia, until the invention of farming allowed them to concentrate resources across generations and thus reinvent chimp-like hierarchies. In fact, this correction is a project I think feminism should adopt; I call it destroying the patriarchy.

We shouldn’t even have to make these arguments anymore. Damore has already destroyed his credibility with some ghastly stupid choices after his firing.

Who’s the first person he ran to for an interview? Stefan Fucking Molyneux. Who’s the second? Jordan Goddamn Peterson. It’s an admission that he can only find support among MRAs, racists, and demented ideologues. Weak, dude.

I am not alone in despising Ready Player One!

That was a book that was one of those profound disappointments — I heard so much gushing over it, so much praise and enthusiasm, that I opened it with high expectations…and instead found page after poorly written page of drivel wrapped around 1980s pop trivia. It’s a crappy work of soppy nostalgia for bad computer games and bad TV and bad fiction. I read the first couple of chapters in disbelief, and then riffled through the rest looking for any redeeming qualities at all, and they just weren’t there.

So now Steven Spielberg is turning it into a movie — a sappy, treacly movie that he probably likes because it’s about his glory days and also features lots of praise for sentimental old Spielberg movies. There is so much good science fiction that could be turned into a movie, and this is what he chooses to throw millions of dollars at? I am so disappointed, and so unsurprised, since this book was a calculated attempt to cash in.

My repulsion for this book was so great that I am relieved when I see reviews that share my views — I’m not an out-of-touch weirdo after all!

Jeb Lund tears it apart at length, and he’s also not impressed with Spielberg picking it up.

Spielberg is 70 now, nearly 20 years removed from his best films and on a mostly downward trajectory from challenging work. He’s burrowed into American nostalgia, reflexive emotional cues and variations on modern myth. He couldn’t even let you walk out of Saving Private Ryan with your own conclusions about a nonfictional war, instead bookending the film with scenes that forced you to measure the worth of the story in terms that were either cloying or extortionate.

By those lights, Ready Player One might have seemed a luxury. There’s no need to fretfully anticipate how audiences will respond to the story because it’s made exclusively from preexisting stories that have already been successfully audience tested. His only job is to put his stamp on iconic elements of other movies—images, gadgets, effects and stakes already provided by the history of film and television. Spielberg finally gets to do Blade Runner without worrying about lacking the temperament to explore its alienating meditation on consciousness. (And, in any event, Cline gives him no means to either.) There are other films for him to copy and paste from anyway.

If you removed every nod, homage, riff, and instance of outright poaching from this book, it would cease to exist. Wiping the movie WarGames from the face of the earth would destroy the first act, just as doing the same to Holy Grail would annihilate the finale—both of which entail earning points for literally parroting the scripts in time. There is little of the plot—or its entirety—that can’t be condensed to a Hollywood elevator pitch. “What if The Matrix was also The Last Starfighter?”

Alex Nichols is even more brutal.

Nearly every one of Ready Player One’s faults is a direct result of Cline’s authorial narcissism. The writing process appears to have begun with the question: What if the entire world revolved around me, and the specific video games and movies I like? The rest was assembled around that essential core. Cline is far from the first author to write a self-insert wish fulfillment narrative, but he may be the first to write one this lazy and self-indulgent. To place oneself in the character of Wade Watts, an 18-year-old video game trivia knower, requires no imagined heroism or personal growth. It simply constructs a world around the reader, where his comfort zone, his passively acquired knowledge of retro video games and Star Wars, is enough to effortlessly make him a Great Man of History. A fantasy this mundane is barely a fantasy at all — just a desire to be unjustly rewarded for mediocrity. And, thanks to Steven Spielberg, Cline’s mediocrity has been rewarded beyond his wildest dreams.

I agree with both reviews of the book. I can’t imagine that the movie can improve on its awful source material, so it’s definitely one I will skip — the nausea I would feel on an attempt to cheerfully revisit the era of Reagan is unimaginable.

So you think your religious beliefs are ancient, inspired truths…

There are some things I think I’ve said a few thousand times to try and break through the certainty of some devout evangelical Christians.

  • Young Earth Creationism is not in the Bible.
  • A “literal interpretation” is still an interpretation; “literal”, in this case, is empty of meaning.
  • The radical young earth interpretation of Genesis would have been considered heretical only a hundred years ago. This is not an eternal truth of Christianity.
  • The Bible is actually a messy, complex book full of contradictions and changing perspectives. You can’t treat it as the spiritual version of your car repair manual.
  • Christianity actually has a long history of trying to reconcile faith with scientific evidence; it’s only with this creationist nonsense that they’ve given up and resorted to outright denial.
  • Your Holy Book is not the Bible, but Whitcomb & Morris’s 1961 fan fiction, The Genesis Flood. Look it up. It’s a rationalization derived from Seventh Day Adventist prophecies.
  • You can be a solid Christian and still accept evolution; you just have to realize that the Bible (or The Genesis Flood) is not a science textbook. Quit trying to pretend it is.
  • Creationism seems to appeal most to people who only read the first page of the Bible and think they have all the answers. Surprisingly, most of the book says absolutely nothing about origins or evolution, and the core concepts of the faith are not found in Genesis 1.

(By the way, sometimes I have to remind atheists of these things, too.)

I never convince anyone with these lines of criticism, of course, because I’m a satanically inspired atheist. But there are a lot of theologians who will tell you the same things, and even more heretical stuff, because they’re far more familiar with the sausage-making of Biblical analysis and know where all the bugs and grit and organ meats have found their way into the grinder.

So sometimes you just have to admit that Christian Bible scholars can be more effective at dismantling the lies behind the weird cult that is Answers in Genesis.

This is what I find so fascinating about Ken Ham’s organization. Not only are all the “answers” they give actually not in Genesis (let alone anywhere in the Bible), but the answers they give are nonsensical in and of themselves.

Ken Ham likes to claim that he is a “biblical creationist,” but the fact is, he isn’t. It’s about time we stop letting him use that title. His claims about the natural created world are not biblical at all. Not only does he reject basic science, not only does he make up supposed biblical answers that aren’t actually in the Bible, but he ignores the historical and literary context in which Genesis 1-11 was written.

He is so obsessed with trying to prove Genesis 1-11 is a modern scientific description of origins, that he willfully ignores basic rules of biblical exegesis, rejects basic scientific facts, and comes up with completely impossible and incompatible claims that he doesn’t even take the time to recognize are impossible and incompatible…with each other.

Yeah. It’s all remarkable fringe garbage of poor quality, from dubious Protestant sources, yet somehow it has infiltrated itself into Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, and folk religion to the point where people actually argue that the nonsense of young earth creationism is a fundamental part of the Abrahamic faiths. All it really tells you is that most religious people don’t care enough about what their religion says to even try to study it, because what it really is is a tribal marker, nothing more.

Bug guts and bad writing

I feel terrible for being critical of this science story, but it annoyed me in a couple of ways. First, it’s kind of a cool idea — they’re using micro-CT to scan living insects in 3 dimensions, and then they can just fly through the tissues. Neat!

It’s also significant that they’re doing it on living animals that survive the procedure, so you can repeat it later, opening the door to longitudinal studies of developing tissues in individual animals.

But here’s what bugs (get it?) me about the story: the story is all about the wrong things. There’s a lot of fluffing of the institute that did it (it’s interdisciplinary!), chatter about how new all this is (micro-CT has been around for years, and anesthetizing insects with CO2 has been routine for decades, so no, it isn’t), and then there’s all the clueless bullshit scattered throughout. It starts this way:

Until now, insects have been too wriggly to make good subjects for scientists wanting to understand more about insect innards.

Wrong. Insects have been model systems for development and physiology for ages — if a reporter had come into any of the insect labs I worked with 30 or 40 years ago and announced that the research subjects were “too wriggly” for the work they were doing, they would have been quietly shooed away.

The team has managed to create spectacularly detailed, three-dimensional views of insects’ insides—without harming them in any way—by using carbon dioxide to place them into a state of temporary suspended animation.

That’s nice. The anesthesia is trivial, though. Say something about what they’ve learned.

And this is just irritating.

The resolution shows detail to 20 microns (about five times smaller than the width of a human hair) and clearly shows the organs, reproductive system and other internal morphology.

20 microns is also more than twice the size of a typical cell, 10 times larger than an axon, 200 times larger than a filopodium. This is pretty coarse. The stuff I’m interested in would require subcellular resolution, and this doesn’t even come close — but there are interesting questions that could be asked on the organ level, like how trachea develop, if only the damned article had bothered to ask any of them.

This kind of formless, clueless goo is typical of university PR departments, and phys.org, unfortunately. Science journalists need to be informed enough to ask the right questions and focus on the relevant science, rather than getting distracted by shiny buttons on the gadgets.