It’s cute how the awareness that Jordan Peterson is just a cranky, opinionated ass is slowly seeping into the general zeitgeist.
Don’t worry that this perception is going to hurt Peterson. I’ve found estimates of his net worth that range from $10 million to $90 million. He really should just sit back, hang out with his family, take long vacations, maybe get a hobby (spider watching is a good one). We’d all be better for it.
This is what NASA does. They launch stuff to smash into asteroids, and I’m here for it. Here’s a video of the final seconds of the DART space probe, before it smashed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos (Dimorphos orbits a larger asteroid, Didymos). Wheee!
That video ends abruptly, as you’d expect. The probe launched a separate camera to record the collision, though, and that looks like this:
Very pretty. All those rocks and dust streaming out of the moonlet…
It’s since been acting a bit weird, although more accurately, we ought to say that it acted unpredictably. The moonlet exhibited a slight slow deceleration for a prolonged period.
The DART team has since confirmed that Dimorphos did indeed continue slowing in its orbit up to a month after the impact — however, their calculations show an additional slowdown of 15 seconds, rather than a full minute. A month after the DART collision, the slowdown plateaued.
What caused Dimorphos to slow steadily for a month, before reaching equilibrium? A swarm of space rocks could be to blame: Recent observations of the asteroid have revealed a vast field of boulders — likely shaken loose from Dimorphos’ surface during the impact — strewn about the area. It’s possible that some of the larger boulders fell back onto Dimorphos within that first month, slowing its orbit further than anticipated, DART team member Harrison Agrusa told New Scientist.
I guess we have another reason to think the movie Armageddon was schlock. We can’t calculate the ultimate outcome of space collisions — there are just too many parameters.
My impression of the ex-CNN news announcer, Jim Acosta, was that he at least had some principles. He quit cable news, after all, and that’s a positive mark in my estimation. Unfortunately, he has now indulged in the cheapest, sleaziest, most ghoulish stunt of his career.
If you are sufficiently prolific on the internet, people can take your stored writings and videos and build a model of “you”. For instance, I would be good candidate for this kind of program — over 30 years of nearly daily commentary, all stored in online databases, you could probably make a decent predictive model of my internet behavior. Would it be “me”? No. It would be a crude simulacrum of just my public persona. You could also take the voluminous writings of St Augustine or Albert Einstein and make a similar model, but it would all just be window dressing and wouldn’t actually “be” the person.
Some grieving parents compiled the internet output of one of the students killed in the Parkland shooting into a video talking head. I can sort of understand the desire — they want to hear their child’s voice again — and it’s the same sort of impulse that would make someone preserve an answering machine voice message so they can hear a loved one again after their demise. It’s not the person, though, it’s an echo, a memory of someone.
So Acosta “interviewed” the model of a dead student.
Jim Acosta, former chief White House correspondent for CNN, stirred controversy on Monday when he sat for a conversation with a reanimated version of a person who died more than seven years ago. His guest was an avatar of Joaquin Oliver, one of the 17 people killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
The video shows Oliver, captured via a real photograph and animated with generative artificial intelligence, wearing a beanie with a solemn expression. Acosta asks the avatar: “What happened to you?”
I feel like asking Acosta “What happened to you?”
“I appreciate your curiosity,” Oliver answers in hurried monotone without inflection or pauses for punctuation. “I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence while at school. It’s important to talk about these issues so we can create a safer future for everyone.” The avatar’s narration is stilted and computerized. The movements of its face and mouth are jerky and unnatural, looking more like a dub-over than an actual person talking.
Ick. Why not dig up his corpse, attach marionette strings, and have a conversation with it? That wasn’t Joaquin Oliver. The only insight you are going to get from it is possibly the interpretations of the person who compiled the code.
Here’s another example:
Others have likewise used AI avatars to simulate the speech of victims of crimes. In May, an AI version of a man who was killed in a road rage incident in Arizona appeared in a court hearing. Lawyers played an AI video of the victim addressing his alleged killer in an impact statement. “I believe in forgiveness, and a God who forgives. I always have and I still do,” the victim’s avatar said.
The presiding judge responded favorably. “I loved that AI, thank you for that. As angry as you are, as justifiably angry as the family is, I heard the forgiveness,” he said. “I feel that that was genuine.”
Jesus. That was not evidence before the law — that was an appeal to the judge’s sentimentality, and it worked.
If you follow RetractionWatch, you know that there a lot of bad papers published in the scientific literature. But there you just see the steady drip, drip, drip of bad research getting exposed, a paper at a time. If you step back and look at the overall picture, you begin to see the source. A lot of it comes from paper mills and bad actors conspiring to allow their pals to publish trash.
(PubPeer is a site that allows post-publication peer review and catches many examples of bad science.)
Nature jumped on an analysis of the people behind swarms of retracted papers on PLoS One, and exposed some of the editors. The problem can be pinned on a surprisingly small number of researchers/editors.
Nearly one-third of all retracted papers at PLoS ONE can be traced back to just 45 researchers who served as editors at the journal, an analysis of its publication records has found.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on 4 August, found that 45 editors handled only 1.3% of all articles published by PLoS ONE from 2006 to 2023, but that the papers they accepted accounted for more than 30% of the 702 retractions that the journal issued by early 2024. Twenty-five of these editors also authored papers in PLoS ONE that were later retracted.
The PNAS authors did not disclose the names of any of the 45 editors. But, by independently analysing publicly available data from PLoS ONE and the Retraction Watch database, Nature’s news team has identified five of the editors who handled the highest number of papers that were subsequently retracted by the journal. Together, those editors accepted about 15% of PLoS ONE’s retracted papers up to 14 July.
Wow. These are people who betrayed the responsibilities of a professional scientist. They need to be exposed and rooted out…but they also reflect a systemic issue.
The study reveals how individuals can form coordinated networks and work under the guise of editorial duty to push large amounts of problematic research into the scientific literature, in some cases with links to paper mills — businesses that churn out fake papers and sell authorship slots.
Yeah, it’s all about money. And also about the use of publications for professional advancement.
So, about the individuals who are committing these perfidious activities…Nature identified many, but I’ll just single out one as an example.
In their analysis of PLoS ONE’s publication records, Richardson and his colleagues identified 19 researchers — based in 4 countries — who served as academic editors between 2020 and 2023, and repeatedly handled each other’s submissions. More than half of the papers they accepted were later retracted, with nearly identical notices citing concerns about authorship, peer review and competing interests.
Nature’s analysis identified 3 of those 19 editors. Shahid Farooq, a plant biologist at Harran University in Şanlıurfa, Turkey, topped the list of PLoS ONE editors ordered by the number of retracted papers that they handled. Between 2019 and 2023, Farooq was responsible for editing 79 articles, 52 of which were subsequently retracted. All of the retraction notices stated that the papers were “identified as one of a series of submissions” for which the journal had concerns about authorship, competing interests and peer review. Farooq also co-authored seven articles in PLoS ONE that were later retracted with identical retraction notices.
That’s a batting record that ought to discredit all of Farooq’s work, and ought to taint all of his coauthors and the researchers who had their work “reviewed” by him. Fortunately for all of us, he has lost all of his editorial duties.
Farooq says that PLoS ONE removed him from the editorial board in 2022, and that he subsequently resigned from his editorial positions in other journals, including Frontiers in Agronomy and BMC Plant Biology.
My editing experience has changed to not editing any paper for any publisher, as the publishers become innocent once any issues are raised on the published papers,he added.
That’s a remarkable excuse: he got caught, so it’s all the publishers’ fault.
Purging a few bad apples isn’t going to fix the issues, because the problem is only getting worse.
In the PNAS paper, Richardson and his colleagues compiled a list of 32,786 papers that they and other sleuths flagged for bearing hallmarks of paper-mill production, such as duplicated images, tortured phrases and whole copied sentences. Only 8,589 of these papers have been retracted. They report that the number of suspected paper-mill articles is doubling every 1.5 years — outpacing the number of retractions, which is doubling every 3.3 years.
Hey, you know, this is where AI could be really useful — I think a lot of these fraudsters are using AI to generate the AI-slop papers, but we could turn it around and use AI to detect the conspiratorial web of collaborating authors as well as the bad writing in these papers.
At least the caterpillars are thriving.
A historical analysis reveals something that will probably sound familiar.
“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.
Do you know anybody who fits that description? Can you think of maybe a large number of people like that?
“History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”
…
it is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status, he says. “Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”
Uh-oh.
Kemp says his argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark traits is borne out today. “The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.”
“Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,” he says. “They’re basically amplifying the worst of us.”
Kemp points to these “agents of doom” as the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse. “These are the large, psychopathic corporations and groups which produce global catastrophic risk,” he says. “Nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, are only produced by a very small number of secretive, highly wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and the fossil fuel industry.
It’s all a bit on the nose, I think.
Maybe I should take up farming as a hobby.
But maybe our leaders will turn out to be enlightened and kind?
Last year, I would go outside in the early morning, when the dew was on the grass, and see my yard dappled with grass spider webs. Dozens of them!
My yard was a village full of these little tent-like structures.They would appear in July through August, and I’d also see the grass spiders steadily taking over other micro-environments, creeping up the walls of my house and displacing the Parasteatoda who had been living there in early summer. I wasn’t thrilled about that — grass spiders were ubiquitous and so common that I would rather see more interesting spiders.
But this year…I went outside around 6:30am on a humid (but cool) summer day, and could see all the grass and clover dotted dew. What I didn’t see was grass spiders. Zero spiders. No webs. It’s August! This is prime spider population time, and my familiar little friends are gone. This is the first time in my 25 years here that they’ve been absent.
I missed an opportunity. If I’d been tracking these things all along, I’d have an easy metric to tally a sample of the spider numbers — if I’d counted last year, I’d guess the daily numbers in August would have been between 20 and 30 grass spider webs in my lawn, but I didn’t because I assumed they’d always be there. So I’ll have to start tracking now. The number is…ZERO.
On the bright side, the number can only go up from here. Or stay dead forever.
Maybe it’s just a weird seasonal fluctuation? Why would all the spiders disappear from a lawn with a diverse plant population, never in all these years years treated with pesticides of any kind? WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THIS PLANET?
I’d begun to forget that Jordan Peterson exists — does anyone still find him credible? — when potholer54 comes out with a new video demonstrating that he’s a pretentious fool who doesn’t understand basic science, and that he contradicts himself all the time.
It’s amazing how nonsical Peterson is and has always been.
The Steatoda borealis spiderlings have finally emerged from their egg sac! They are slow, plump, and numerous.
I spent a good chunk of the morning plucking them out one by one and putting them in separate vials. Tomorrow, once they’ve laid down some silk, they’ll get many fruit flies and will be able to make their first kill.
I ran across this ridiculous comment, and it struck me that the interesting thing isn’t that Joseph Martin is outright wrong, but that he presents his stupid ideas with such absolute confidence.
Men, even today, would rather marry a virgin than not, but a virgin woman today is like trying to find a needle in a hay stack. The reason why men would indeed prefer to marry a virgin woman is because when a virgin bride marries a man, a woman’s vagina is molded to the man to whom she married, and that is a virgin brides vagina is becomes a mold to her man’s penis, and if a woman then cheats on her husband, the husband of a virgin bride then knows her wife has cheated on him because that mold has been broken, lol. Although this is true, women can also do vagina exercises that strengthen their vagina muscles, and allow a women to then control her vagina in pleasing any man she may lay with, and if a woman trains and maintains the muscles in her vagina, she can then even pick up a pencil with her vagina from just having control of the muscles in her vagina, lol, and when a woman has such control of her vagina muscles, can fool any man with regards to her faithfulness to him.
Vaginas don’t “mold” themselves to a penis. They’re flexible and muscular, and they don’t conform permanently to the first object that enters them; they also don’t evert themselves to grasp things. This series of assertions is written by a man who has never been intimate with a woman.
The weird thing is the certainty. He has to know that he has no direct personal information about the subject, yet he goes ahead and says it in public. There’s a psychopathy here that I think is incredibly common — we live in a country tainted by the collective sin of certainty that people use to make decisions about everything, politics, religion, relationships, whatever. Have you noticed that this is Donald Trump strategy? Just state half-assed nonsense with blithe confidence, and then he finds willing believers who will follow him without question, simply because he said something they want to hear.
