Undergraduates: xkcd is not a good source for career advising

I must object to the methodology and the conclusions of this comic.

The choice of prefixes to sample is arbitrary and shows a bias towards common physics terms. Why not use “evolutionary” or “genome” or “analytic” or “necro-” or “chrono-“, to name just a few more. The sample space has hardly been touched.

The idea that low Google scholar counts is an opportunity is ludicrous and confuses cause and effect. “Clown” is a prefix that doesn’t show up for either physics or biology or engineering (curiously, there are 3 entries for “clown chemistry”, 5 for “clown psychology”, 1 for “clown dentistry”, and 13 for “clown theology”). I don’t think this implies there is a hot market for clown physicists.

Although, I do think that high-energy clown physics might be a fun field.

What are the responsibilities of geneticists?

Still works. Just replace “philosophy” with “genetics”

Janet Stemwedel has published an essay in Scientific American. It’s good. You should go read it. It’s also on a subject that I, someone who teaches genetics to college students, worry about. All you have to do is look at racists on the internet, or any of those gomers of the “Intellectual Dark Web”, and you’ll find them chattering away about their version of genetics, citing genetics papers they’ve read or glanced at, but barely understand, and drawing sweeping, and unlikely, conclusions from, for instance, GWAS studies. We’re all so interested in what we can do that we aren’t cautious enough about saying what we can’t do, and what are the invalid interpretations that can trap people searching for genetic certainty in their genomes.

She has some strong suggestions.

For one thing, they [scientists] must be frank and vocal about the weakness of studies that purport to find correlations between race and differences in traits like intelligence or propensity violence. This includes methodological weaknesses like treating IQ as a good proxy for intelligence, or treating “race” as something with clear genetic grounding. A finding that particular genes or sets of genes are associated with a complex behavior does not demonstrate a causal relation or rule out the importance of environmental factors—and indeed, the assumption that genes and environment vary independently is usually false. An average difference in a trait associated with a set of genes between two populations does not rule out that the individual variations within those populations may be greater than the average difference between populations. All of which is to say it’s hard to draw conclusions that are strong, clear and well-supported from much of this work. To the extent that race science is just bad science, scientists have a duty to call it out, rather than letting it stand unchallenged.

I’ve been thinking that I ought to incorporate one of Richard Lewontin’s books into my genetics class — something like It Ain’t Necessarily So : The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, maybe. The catch is that in a traditional genetics course, we have an obligation to teach the core concepts, and taking time to teach about how genetics is misused is sometimes premature.

For another thing, scientists must do some soul-searching about why they are so motivated to look for evidence that traits like intelligence or propensity to violence are written in our genes, or that they would be different for people in different racial groups. Of all the bits of truth they could discover about our complex world, why this focus? Could it be that scientists are following their preexisting hunches, biases that come from being humans living in a culture built around those biases—or that funders are seeking scientific validation for their biases? Any scientist who dismisses this possibility has forgotten that objectivity requires the communal project of scrutinizing scientific conclusions to find how they might be mistaken.

I’ve got a few awful books on my bookshelf, often written by evolutionary psychologists, that make me wonder about the mental state of the authors. They have some grand theory about human behavior that I know can’t possibly be backed up by significant genetics research, but apparently the public wants that nice pat answer to explain why everything is the way it is.

Also, a lot of those kinds of books seem to be written by professors of marketing. Seriously, if you see a book that purports to be about biology, and the author is employed in a business school, don’t waste your time. Which leads into Stemwedel’s next point…

There’s a further question scientists ought to ask themselves when reflecting on why they study the scientific questions they do: What will the knowledge I’m building be good for? How could it be put to use? Do scientists imagine that a finding of genetic differences in intelligence among racial groups would be used to drive more school funding to Black and brown communities, or as a justification to focus school funding on white communities? Or that a finding of genetic differences in propensity for violence among racial groups would be used to do anything but double down on current overpolicing of communities of color?

In the case of James Watson, for example, I think he’s made a career of trying to buttress evidence that he is an intrinsically superior person. They didn’t call him Lucky Jim for nothing — he stumbled into a major discovery, and I wonder if he wonders what might have made him so fortunate. It can’t possibly be that anyone with the right training could have done it, so he finds a refuge in the fact that he’s Scots-Irish. Others know that the status quo has treated them well, so they want to perpetuate what is currently a racist society for the benefit of themselves and their children. Others, I think, are so steeped in a culture of racial bias that they don’t even think about it — black people must be inferior, so let’s search for a rationalization for holding what is an odious belief.

It’s probably a messy mix of all of those things, and more. I’m pretty sure that if genetics has broad fuzzy edges that psychology is probably even worse.

Three stupid sources ought to be an automatic rejection

I shouldn’t have even started drilling down to the source. I started at Answers in Genesis, a mistake I know, but at least the ridiculed (for the wrong reasons) the next article in the chain, which was in The Daily Mail. Here’s the Daily Mail headline:

Hey, how about if you demonstrate the existence of intelligent space-faring aliens before you start speculating about their motivations? But they’ve got a scientist who’s doing the speculating, and the Daily Mail loves scientists who agree with their biases.

Sci-fi films and TV shows have routinely depicted a brutal race of aliens visiting Earth in their spaceships and enslaving unfortunate Earthlings.

But according to one expert, extraterrestrial life may actually be too scared of ‘dangerous’ and ‘violent’ humans to want to come here.

Dr Gordon Gallup, a biopsychologist at the University of Albany, argues that humans are ‘dangerous, violent and ceaselessly engage in endless bloody conflicts and war’.

How do you become an expert in alien biopsychology, I’d like to know. We’re about to bottom out, though, since we’re about to learn where he published these claims.

Dr Gallup has presented his argument in an open access paper published in the Journal of Astrobiology this month.

Oh god. AiG, the Daily Mail, and the Journal of Astrobiology? Is this Dumpster Diving Friday or something? Have mercy. Here’s the abstract for the paper.

We evaluate claims for extraterrestrial intelligence based on the logic behind assertions such as the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. To assess intelligence elsewhere in the universe we outline two of the principle scientific claims for intelligence on Earth. One involves the idea that intelligence involves working out the reasons for our own existence. The other involves self-awareness and the capacity to make inferences about what others know, want, or intend to do. The famous quote from Rene Descartes “I think; therefore, I am” needs to be revised to read “I am; therefore, I think.” Some of the conclusions we derive about intelligence include the idea that most species on planet Earth have clever brains but blank minds (no self-consciousness); humans are the only species where what you know could get you killed; if humans become extinct it is highly unlikely that human-like intelligence will re-emerge on this planet and the odds of human-like intelligence evolving on other worlds is infinitely small. However, if intelligence exists elsewhere in the universe it may not have revealed itself because humans are dangerous and are perceived as posing too great a risk.

I’d reject it out of hand for the blatant human exceptionalism and the false claims right there: most species on planet Earth have clever brains but blank minds (no self-consciousness). Most species on Earth don’t have brains, for one, but additionally, have you met my cat? Not very clever, but definitely full of herself and quite aware of herself. There are a lot of claims in this abstract that the author does not adequately justify in the remainder of the opinion piece (it is not a scientific paper).

Then, in the first paragraph of the introduction, he cites Rhawn Joseph three times. Ugh. He’s an affiliate member of the Panspermia Mafia, I think we’re done.

I couldn’t help myself. I took a quick look in the table of contents to see what ol’ Rhawn was up to now. He’s still poring over NASA’s Mars photos, drawing circles and arrows on them, to claim now that there are tube worms and crustaceans on Mars.

At least he’s got the Daily Mail and Answers in Genesis to continue pretending he has any credibility at all left!

How animals feel pain

On Saturday, I wrote this bit about whether animals feel pain, and I said then I’d follow up that day or the next. I didn’t! I’ve been doped up on painkillers and my brain is all soft around the edges. I finally decided to give up on them this morning when I woke up, had breakfast, and then fell asleep for a couple of hours. Enough already. Now I have to recover from some potent drugs as well as my back pain.

Anyway, where were we? Oh, right, we had taken down William Lane Craig’s argument that humans (and maybe some other primates) are the only creatures on the planet that actually feel pain, that other animals are mere meat robots who act out a superficial script that looks like they are in pain, but really, they have no consciousness to experience the pain.

I don’t think he is making this argument to warrant or excuse animal torture, but rather he’s trying to justify human exceptionalism. See, humans have this special god-granted ability to perceive suffering and pain, which is why we have souls and animals don’t, and why we have to worry about that Final Judgment, since we can sense and appreciate the harm we do to others. At least, that’s my charitable assessment.

Curiously, in order to make this argument, Craig feels a need for some scientific backing, some recognizable neuroanatomical feature that shows humans are special. I don’t get it. He already believes in something invisible and intangible, the soul, so why not just say humans posess an invisible magical flimflam that the scientists can’t see or experiment on, neener neener, therefore humans are unique in having a conscience or ghost or pneuma that gives them the abilty to really truly deeply feel pain and suffering?

Often the physical substrate for feeling pain is determined in a backwards sort of way: we find some feature of the human brain that is only found in us, or is more pronounced in us, and we decide that, aha, that must be where this higher ability resides. Some of the common culprits are our enlarged pre-frontal cortex (PFC) or more narrowly, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC was a favorite of Francis Crick, for instance, who thought that not only was it the seat of awareness, but also of free will (I think free will is a non-existent phenomenon that makes no sense, but I’ll defer on discussing that to another time).

I don’t think the hypothesis is far out of line — there is evidence that lesions in this area do cause sensations of dissociation, and it is entangled in a lot of higher brain functions. But on the other hand, other animals have these structures, so how do you use this phenomenon to make humans exceptional? You can’t.

This leads me to an article in a journal called Philosophical Psychology, Against Neo-Cartesianism: Neurofunctional Resilience and Animal Pain by Halper et al.. Mixing philosophy with psychology and throwing in a lot of ethology and neuroscience sounds like a potent way to address the issue, don’t you think? Especially with a feisty abstract like this one:

ABSTRACT: Several influential philosophers and scientists have advanced a framework, often called Neo-Cartesianism (NC), according to which animal suffering is merely apparent. Drawing upon contemporary neuroscience and philosophy of mind, NeoCartesians challenge the mainstream position we shall call Evolutionary Continuity (EC), the view that humans are on a non-hierarchical continuum with other species and are thus not likely to be unique in consciously experiencing negative pain affect. We argue that some Neo-Cartesians have misconstrued the underlying science or tendentiously appropriated controversial views in the philosophy of mind. We discuss recent evidence that undermines the simple neuroanatomical structure-function correlation thesis that undergirds many Neo-Cartesian arguments, has an important bearing on the recent controversy over pain in fish, and puts the underlying epistemology framing the debate between NC and EC in a new light that strengthens the EC position.

In one corner, the Neo-Cartesians like William Lane Craig (there are also secular philosophers who like this idea).

In the other corner, the Evolutionary Continuity camp, which I would happily attach myself to, which argues for “a non-hierarchical continuum with other species and are thus not likely to be unique”. Yay Team EC!

The paper quickly dispatches part of the argument. All mammals have a prefrontal cortex, although the human PFC is relatively larger. So now you’re going to have to argue, if you think the PFC is the seat of awareness, that a quantitative difference leads to a qualitative change, and you’re also going to have the problem of a continuum of PFC sizes. Where do you draw the line?

Well, maybe it’s the anterior cingulate cortex, rather than the whole PFC, that matters. They have a case study that refutes that. Patient R is a man whose brain was devastated by herpes simplex encephalitis, yet survived with normal intelligence and anterograde amnesia (loss of the ability to form new memories). Most importantly to this point, he has retained full self-awareness.

Patient R, aka Roger (Philippi et al. 2012), provides us with a novel angle for assessing certain versions of the NC hypothesis. Roger has extensive damage to his PFC as well as his ACC and insula, bilaterally. He has been probed for self-awareness (SA) in numerous ways, some standard, some novel with positive results for all probes. The authors of the 2012 study concluded that SA is likely a function of the interaction of multiple brain regions, with some redundancy, rather than dependent upon one particular region.8 Roger’s case, like others described in the literature (Damasio et al. 2013), seems to demonstrate fairly conclusively that the PFC, the ACC, and the insula are not needed for SA, including SA of a fairly sophisticated sort, a sort we need not presume animals to have to make our case here.

Patient R also has a normal physical and emotional response to pain — if anything, he now reacts more strongly.

So now if you want to argue for a discrete localization of self-awareness in the brain, you’re either going to have to pick a different brain region or claim that Patient R is a p-zombie. Or, perhaps, that the brain has a lot more flexibility than was thought. I like this last idea, but then, that makes the pursuit of a feature unique to humans futile.

Further, these cases suggest an alternative to the rigid structure-function correlation thesis. Resilience of function following brain damage suggests the existence of degrees of freedom in the relationships between certain functions and neuroanatomical structures (Rudrauf, 2014). Anatomical regions and networks normally supporting central psychological functions (like the emotional appraisal of pain) may simply be the usual defaults. In patients such as Roger, functional resilience after such extensive and irreversible anatomical damage cannot be explained by structural plasticity, in the sense of anatomical restoration or large-scale “rewiring” (e.g., dendritic sprouting and axon regeneration) to restore structural connectivity. Large-scale functional networks supporting key psychological functions, however, can be maintained or restored even when the integrity of normal anatomical networks is massively and irremediably compromised.

This suggests that a different concept of flexibility is more apt, namely what Rudrauf (2014) has called “neurofunctional resilience”. This concept is based on the phenomenon of preserved function in spite of large-scale architectural changes, is not limited to one specific class of mechanisms or levels of observation, and indicates a relative openness in implementation at various levels of a functional hierarchy. The neurofunctional resilience framework, while in need of elaboration and refinement, makes more sense of lesion cases like Roger’s, observed variation in structure-function relationships in imaging studies, interspecific structure-function variations, the relative unimportance of lesion locales versus lesion size vis-à-vis functional deficits in the developing brain (Pascual, 2017, 5; Battro, 2000), and better fits general theoretical considerations about multiple realizability drawn from computational neuroscience. In realizing that a crude, “phrenological” localizationist structure-function paradigm (even one incorporating plasticity) is unable to account for these observable phenomena, one need not, of course, embrace the old holistic, “equipotentiality” theories of brain function (see Finger, 1994, ch., p. 4). A new, subtler approach is needed.

My first thought would have been that Patient R is an amazing example of neuronal plasticity, but the author is right: this is something more impressive. Big chunks of the brain are just gone; minor self-repair mechanisms, like neurons regrowing around a damaged pathway, are not sufficient. This is as if your car had the electronic engine timing system blown off, so the wires were rerouted to make use of circuits in your car radio instead. Be impressed! Brains seem to have a biological imperative to assemble themselves into some kind of cognitively functional structure, in spite of massive damage.

But never mind human brains — they’re too complicated, and you can’t do experiments on them. What about fish brains? Do they feel pain? And what about cephalopods?

As Godfrey-Smith (2016, 94 f.) notes, flexible behaviors and preference changes related to pain avoidance and analgesia-seeking (observed in both fish and chickens) in entirely evolutionarily novel situations and perhaps certain grooming and protecting behaviors associated with bodily damage are arguably best explained in terms of the presence of consciously experienced negative pain affect. And when one considers the overall behavioral, affective, and cognitive repertoire of, for example, cephalopods, as Godfrey-Smith does at length, the notion that such an animal, whose nervous system is so different from ours, does what it does in the absence of consciousness begins to look implausible and continued commitment to it perversely skeptical.

It seems more reasonable to follow the approach of Segner (2012, p. 78) who, in considering fish pain, looks at seven relevant properties: (1) nociceptors, (2) pain related brain structures homologous or analogous to those found in humans, (3) pathways connecting peripheral nociceptors to higher brain regions, (4) endogenous opioids and opioid receptors in the CNS, (5) analgesic-mediated reduction of response to noxious stimuli, (6) complex forms of learning, including avoidance learning of noxious stimuli, and (7) suspension of normal behavior in response to noxious stimuli. Humans and fish, Segner concludes, unequivocally share all but item (2), which is partially shared: we share subcortical structures with fish but not the neocortical structures. However, given the evidence reviewed in this section, it is clear that the neocortical structures commonly thought to be necessary for pain affect are not required in any case (cf., Merker, 2007; Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2019) Surely the other similarities are sufficient to make reasonable the inference to the presence of consciously felt fish pain (cf., Tye, 2017, 91ff.). For mammals, as we have seen, all of these similarities are in place.

That “phrenological” approach doesn’t work well for fish, and even less well for cephalopods which have virtually no homology with our brains. Those seven criteria are a useful rubric for figuring out if a given brain can be aware or feel pain, and like the authors say fish meet all of the criteria except #2, having homologous pain-related brain structures. But we also just saw that Patient R fails to have homologous pain related structures. It would be strange to then assert that an organism that has the other six features would have failed, in its evolutionary history, to have incorporated them into an integrated pain awareness system.

Segner codifies the basic analogy argument for the presence of negative affect in animals that goes beyond the one we all spontaneously draw from our admittedly fallible raw intuitions. On our view, this basic analogy argument coupled with the considerations about neurofunctional resilience (and evolutionary analogies) we have adduced yield a reasonably high probability for the claim that negative pain affect is present in mammals, avians, fish, and cephalopods. Even if we are mistaken about the latter three, however, these considerations make the claim that it is present in mammals so probable that the more ambitious NC thesis of M. Murray and W.L. Craig is cast into nearly insurmountable doubt.

The paper goes on to discuss in detail the specific question of whether fish feel pain (short answer: yes), cetaceans, the issue of blindsight, and much more briefly, consciousness, which would require a stack of books to consider. I’ll stop here, though, disappointed that nowhere does the paper discuss spider pain, or any invertebrates other than cephalopods. Invertebrates are so alien and distantly removed from us that it is nearly impossible to discern a pain affect in them, but they also meet 6 of the 7 Segner criteria. The pain pathways in vertebrate and invertebrate systems also show homology at the molecular level, and it’s possible to see similarites across many phyla.

Maybe that’s for a different day. I’ve been having a fun time lately diving into an area I’ve neglected for a while, developmental neuroscience, and maybe I’ll be motivated to tell you all why you should be kind to bugs, because they have feelings, too, and maybe even experience suffering.

The J-F Gariépy/Epstein connection

One among the long list of “scientists” sponsored by Jeffrey Epstein was, to my initial surprise, Jean-François Gariépy, but then after I thought about it, I realized they were perfect for each other. If you’re unfamiliar with JF, as he’s called, his RationalWiki page is informative. He’s one of those alt-right YouTubers with an extraordinarily creepy history — he’s a Jew-baiting advocate for a white ethnostate, and he has a thing for sexual relationships with young women with severe intellectual disabilities. He’s just a terrible, horrible person all around.

But he also has some science credentials — he was a post-doc in a neuroscience lab.

Jean-François Gariépy (1984–) (usually called JF or JFG), is a French-Canadian alt right YouTube talker who promotes race realism, ethnostates, and other reactionary views. From 2012 to 2015, he was a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Duke University, but was allegedly fired due to sexual misbehavior, although he claims that he left on his own accord.

Gariépy rose to prominence as a paid co-host of Andy Warski’s YouTube show. After getting into a spat with Andy over antisemitic comments made by a guest, Gariépy left the Warski show, and started running his own show called “The Public Space”, where he frequently invites guests associated with white supremacy, such as David Duke and Richard Spencer.

He parlayed that connection into a gift from Jeffrey Epstein.

Gariépy was a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Duke University in 2014 when his nonprofit, NEURO.tv, received $25,000 from Epstein to make a series of YouTube interviews with experts in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The project is still the lead item on the dormant website of the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation.

Since posting the NEURO.tv videos, Gariépy has gained a following as a far-right YouTuber whose recent guests have included the white nationalist Richard Spencer. In 2018, the Daily Beast described Gariépy’s child custody battle, in which his ex-wife alleged a history of abusive behavior toward women. Gariépy denied the allegations.

“I am a white heterosexual male libertarian who believes in freedom, sovereignty and self-determination for all people including mine,” Gariépy told BuzzFeed News by email. He also railed against “false allegations by females.”

Dang. No one ever gave me $25K to play on the internet, but then, I have a strict policy of not taking money from rapists or pedophiles. That seems to greatly limit funding sources, I guess.

What I specifically found interesting though, is that Gariépy requested additional money from Epstein to write a book. He did not get that funding, but he did write the book! It’s called The Revolutionary Phenotype, and the description sounds kind of nuts.

The Revolutionary Phenotype is a science book that brings us four billion years into the past, when the first living molecules showed up on Planet Earth. Unlike what was previously thought, we learn that DNA-based life did not emerge from random events in a primordial soup. Indeed, the first molecules of DNA were fabricated by a previous life form. By describing the fascinating events referred to as Phenotypic Revolutions, this book provides a dire warning to humanity: if humans continue to play with their own genes, we will be the next life form to fall to our own creation.

It’s an interesting combination. He’s clearly endorsing some kind of Intelligent Design, so maybe the Discovery Institute would like to take him on as a Fellow. He sounds exactly like their kind of guy.

The other part, though, is the anti-genetic engineering stuff, which is odd to hear from a “scientist”, but then, as a white racist, maybe he’s also concerned about the purity of his germ plasm.

I’m not motivated enough to find out, though. If anyone (non-racist, non-rapist, non-pedophile, that is) wants to donate $25,000 to me, however, I’ll grab a copy and read it and post a review here. I should warn you, though, that just looking at his book online has sent me a barrage of targeted ads for other books about the “Jewish Question” and white genocide and other such trash, so I’m already thinking it may not be worth it.

How to force-fit preconceptions about gender into science

I mentioned this persistent idea that male variability explains their “superior” intellectual abilities in my last post. There’s another example of the prevalence of this odd, unsupported idea going around — a twice-retracted paper that purports to find a mathematical basis for a sex difference.

The variability hypothesis generally states that the males of a species vary more widely in physical and physiological traits than the females. This theory is controversial because, since the beginning of the 20th century, it has mostly been used to refer to cognitive abilities—the purported greater frequency of both lower and higher extremes in intelligence among human males compared with females.

As Penn State University professor of psychology and women’s studies Stephanie Shields covered in her 1982 historical review (and in a follow-up 2016 review), scientists in the early 1900s asserted that there was a difference in the variability of mental traits between the sexes and attributed this difference to genetics, not considering environment and societal factors.

Again, I don’t find the idea credible at all. It’s entirely based on wishful thinking and a strange idea that nature is fair, and tries to support it with an unsupported belief that all biases must be symmetrically distributed. This paper was rejected for more specific, detailed problems, though.

The major flaw in the paper, according to Mark Kirkpatrick, a mathematical geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin who has published models of the evolution of mating preferences and selected traits, is that the rules of inheritance are not taken into account. “The paper’s conclusions are simply wrong,” he says. “The genes of the successful individuals in a population are transmitted to the offspring and [Hill’s] model does not have any equation that links up the genes of one generation with the genes of the next generation.”

Reed Cartwright, a computational evolutionary geneticist at Arizona State University, agrees. “My primary issue with Hill’s model is that it lacks any notion of genetics, and you cannot ignore genetics and make evolutionary conclusions,” Cartwright writes in an email to The Scientist. The model also ignores the role of gene-environment interactions, which are particularly important for complex traits, according to Cartwright. “Hill did not appreciate that if the difference between his two populations of males was due to environment and not genes, then his conclusions would be invalid.”

Yeah, if you invent an evolutionary model that handwaves away that awkward necessity of a mechanism of inheritance, you’re going to find that biologists are unimpressed. It reminds me of the time I attended a lecture by a mathematician/computer scientist on epidemiology, and she had tested her hypothesis with a simulation of viruses that she started by explaining that her model was the first one that used male and female viruses. Nope nope nope nope.

It has always been thus

We look at the world now and wonder how the alt-right could possibly have any popularity at all — such odious ideas, such terrible ignorant people. But the seeds were planted a long time ago. I was just reading Starship Stormtroopers, a 1977 essay by Michael Moorcock, in which he looks back on recent issues in science fiction, colored by the experience of the Vietnam War and the protests against it. I remember that time, and what I think of are the hippies, and campus radicals, and revolutionary music, and peace and love and rejecting bourgeois capitalism. And now I wonder how did that generation grow up to populate the worst, most corrupt, most destructive government in our history?

The answer is right there in that culture of the 60s-70s. We just didn’t notice the contradictions imbedded in it, which Moorcock points out in the context of the popular SF readings of the day.

There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them — a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants — a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence — a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn’t disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkein or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began. Most of it warns the world of ‘decadence’ in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping — not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.

Ouch. I read all of those authors, but at least I can say I came to detest them, with the exception of Lovecraft, which I’ve always read as hilariously badly written dystopian kitsch. But otherwise, I agree — even Tolkien, who has become even more popular today thanks to that series of wildly successful movies, created a wierdly asexual, regressive, pastoral universe where old traditional values, like aristocracy and kingship, were revered. Moorcock also hammers on that.

The interesting thing was that at the time many of the pro-US-involvement writers were (and by and large still are) the most popular sf writers in the English-speaking world, let alone Japan, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, where a good many sf readers think of themselves as radicals. One or two of these writers (British as well as American) are dear friends of mine who are personally kindly and courageous people of considerable integrity — but their political statements (if not always, by any means, their actions) are stomach-turning! Most people have to be judged by their actions rather than their remarks, which are often surprisingly at odds. Writers, when they are writing, can only be judged on the substance of their work. The majority of the sf writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto-fascists to a man and woman! There is Lovecraft, the misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism and the left, who, like many a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of ‘good leadership’; there is Tolkein and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly disguised working class agitators — fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances. To all these and more the working class is a mindless beast which must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security) — the answer is always leadership, ‘decency’, paternalism (Heinlein in particularly strong on this), Christian values…

Leading to the present day, where that paternalism is worshipped, and yelling about decency and Christian values is a mask over the most atrocious corruption.

At least his characterization of John Campbell is vastly entertaining, if horrifying.

Indeed, it’s often been shown that sf supplied a lot of the vocabulary and atmosphere for American military and space technology (a ‘Waldo’ handling machine is a name taken straight from a Heinlein story). Astounding became full of crew-cut wisecracking, cigar-chewing, competent guys (like Campbell’s image of himself). But Campbell and his writers (and they considered themselves something of a unified team) were not producing Westerns. They claimed to be producing a fiction of ideas. These competent guys were suggesting how the world should be run. By the early fifties Astounding had turned by almost anyone’s standard into a crypto-fascist deeply philistine magazine pretending to intellectualism and offering idealistic kids an ‘alternative’ that was, of course, no alternative at all. Through the fifties Campbell used his whole magazine as propaganda for the ideas he promoted in his editorials. His writers, by and large, were enthusiastic. Those who were not fell away from him, disturbed by his increasingly messianic disposition (Alfred Bester gives a good account of this). Over the years Campbell promoted the mystical, quasi-scientific Scientology (first proposed by one of his regular writers L. Ron Hubbard and aired for the first time in Astounding as ‘Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind’), a perpetual motion machine known as the ‘Dean Drive’, a series of plans to ensure that the highways weren’t ‘abused’, and dozens of other half-baked notions, all in the context of cold-war thinking. He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were ‘natural’ slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery, that the moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest and that the blacks were ‘against’ emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in ‘leaderless’ riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles! I was speechless (actually I said four words in all — ‘science-fiction’ — ‘psychology’ — Jesus Christ!’- before I collapsed), leaving John Brunner to perform a cool demolition of Campbell’s arguments, which left the editor calling on God in support of his views — an experience rather more intense for me than watching Doctor Strangelove at the cinema.

Now I’m left feeling like nothing ever changes.

Inmates, asylum, yadda yadda yadda

I do believe I said something about that cultural marxism lunacy that’s been floating about in the far right fever swamp for several years. Now would you believe Charles Pierce has found an astonishingly incoherent policy statement that reads like it came straight out of that swamp?

Culturally conditioned to limit responses to such attacks as yet another round in the on-going drone from diversity and multicultural malcontents, these broadsides are discounted as political correctness run amuck. However, political correctness is a weapon against reason and critical thinking. This weapon functions as the enforcement mechanism of diversity narratives that seek to implement cultural Marxism. Candidate Trump’s rhetoric in the campaign not only cut through the Marxist narrative, he did so in ways that were viscerally comprehensible to a voting bloc that then made candidate Trump the president; making that bloc self-aware in the process. President Trump is either the candidate he ran as, or he is nothing. Recognizing in candidate Trump an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative, those that benefit recognize the threat he poses and seek his destruction. For this cabal, Trump must be destroyed. Far from politics as usual, this is a political warfare effort that seeks the destruction of a sitting president. Since Trump took office, the situation has intensified to crisis level proportions. For those engaged in the effort, especially those from within the “deep state” or permanent government apparatus, this raises clear Title 18 (legal) concerns.

…

Academia has served as a principle counter-state node for some time and remains a key conduit for creating future adherents to cultural Marxist narratives and their derivative worldview. The Deep State – The successful outcome of cultural Marxism is a bureaucratic state beholden to no one, certainly not the American people. With no rule of law considerations outside those that further deep state power, the deep state truly becomes, as Hegel advocated, god bestriding the earth. Global Corporatists & Bankers – Exploitation of populations, unfettered by national protections and notions of personal morality and piety. Democratic Leadership – The democratic leadership has been a counter-state enabler that executes, sustains, and protects cultural Marxist programs of action and facilitates the relentless expansion of the deep state. Republican Leadership – More afraid of being accused of being called a racist, sexist, homophobe or lslamophobe than of failing to enforce their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution,” the Republican Establishment accepts and enforces cultural Marxist memes within its own sphere of operations. In doing so, knowingly or not, it becomes an agent of that.

Pure madness. Except this doesn’t come from some fringe nutter on Twitter. It’s from a guy named Rich Higgins, who was serving on the National Security Council. The conspiracy theorists have taken over the state.

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.