“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.

Dangerously incompetent

Donald Trump is blustering at North Korea.

North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening – beyond a normal statement – and as I said they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which the world has never seen before.

This is total madness: mad threats against a paranoid semi-religious cult of personality. It can only lead to the death of millions.

Mark Bowden gives a detailed analysis of our options, none of them good. Bowden, you may recall, is the author of Blackhawk Down, so he has some experience in examining military cluster-fucks, and this looks like the cluster-fuckiest of them all.

I visited Seoul a while back, and it is a lovely, prosperous city of about 10 million people. It will be the first casualty if Trump decides to John Wayne his way against an egomaniac with a wall of artillery aimed at the place, and Tokyo would be next on Kim Jong Un’s list of targets. We have to shut down our American version of Kim Jong Un before he unleashes unspeakable tragedy.

The free speech absolutists have a martyr in James Damore

James Damore, the author of that dumbass Google manifesto, has been fired. Now he wants to sue Google, and all the usual suspects are howling about “Free Speech!”

It’s absurd. This really isn’t a free speech issue.

  • Damore was working for a private company; constitutional free speech rights apply to limits on how the government can regulate expression. He would be a fool to try and sue on free speech issues.

  • His position did not include a contractual proviso that he was allowed to use company resources and time to promote his ideas. This wasn’t a job, like tenured professorships, that encourage some degree of independence of expression as part of the job.

  • Even when free speech is part of your employment, there are restrictions. I can’t decide to teach invalid bullshit to my students, or sexually proposition my colleagues, without getting slammed hard and losing my job (admittedly, after a lot of painful bureaucratic entanglement, but even positions with public recognition of their independence have limits.)

  • Employers can have a code of conduct, and Damore apparently violated Google’s. That gives them the right to decide that one is unsuitable for a job.

  • Imagine that Damore, through incompetence or malice, had disrupted Google’s computer network. We’d have no problem seeing that that was a fireable offense, because it affected property and things. Damore in this case had deliberately disrupted the people who worked at Google. Why do we struggle to see the equivalence? His manifesto was blind to the importance of empathy and social concerns, but that doesn’t mean a multi-billion dollar organization has to be.

Most embarrassingly, Damore has a Ph.D. in Systems Biology. How the heck do you get an advanced degree in biology and hold the kind of false biases about human nature written in that manifesto?

But don’t you worry about James Damore. Julian Assange is offering him a job, and he’s guaranteed to fall upwards into the arms of rich MRA/racist asshats. He’s found regressive notoriety among these kinds of people:

Eric Weinstein, managing director of Peter Theil’s investment firm Thiel Capital, wrote a widely shared tweet to Google asking the company to stop teaching my girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to HR.

“Your girl” ought to have the freedom to code without ignorant assholes writing manifestos to poison the work environment against her; she deserves the freedom to fight back against lies, like those of Damore.

And isn’t it ironic that Damore is now achieving infamy not by his skill in coding, but in his primitive incompetence at social issues, which now requires him to find success not in coding, but in placating an alt-right mob?

At least he didn’t reveal the secret Darwinist handshake

In another response to the awful A.N. Wilson article, Jules Howard exposes our secret.

The truth is that – and this is worth saying a million times over – most scientists probably don’t think about Darwin very much in their day-to-day studies and would consider themselves as much “Darwinist” as they would “round-Earthers” or “wifi-users”. This is, after all, the best working theory we have to understand the nature that we see around us. Also, I think we are all OK with entertaining the idea that, if a more scientifically accurate way of explaining the diversity of life on Earth comes along, Darwin would be ousted. It’s just that, based on current evidence, Darwin’s ideas still seem capable of explaining much, if not all, of what we see in nature. Hence, our kids learn about him in schools and popular science books that refute his influence are treated with understandable confusion, concern or disdain.

It’s true. I probably think about Darwin more than most, simply because I teach and think it’s important to toss in some history and philosophy of science with the subjects I cover. But otherwise, I don’t have a shrine to Darwin, I don’t worship him, most of the papers I read in evolution, development, or genetics don’t even mention him. It’s a fine example of projection when creationists assume that Darwin is our Jesus-substitute.

Unfortunately, this fact can be turned around into another creationist trope: Darwin (and therefore evolution, because Darwin and evolution are synonymous in their minds) isn’t a necessary component of biological science, because you can do experiments without ever thinking about the old man, and because the literature contains millions of papers that don’t mention Darwin, he’s obviously superfluous and we only continue to bow to his shrine out of religious fervor.

Of course, I watched Game of Thrones on the ol’ TV the other day, and I didn’t think of Philo Farnsworth even once; I also have to note that my TV is one of those flat-screen jobs that doesn’t even have a cathode ray tube in it, so it’s far advanced over anything he ever did. Therefore, since Philo and TV are synonymous, I couldn’t actually have watched it.

I guess I’ll have to put up a Farnsworth shrine in my house and pray to it if I want to see the next episode.