More TV tonight!

Maybe for you, maybe not for me. PBS is supposed to show the documentary The Revisionaries tonight, a show about the Texas Board of Education and it’s horrendous abuse of the educational system, but looking at my local television schedule, I can’t see it. We’re in a conservative rural area with a rather chickenshit public broadcasting channel that often either disappears these ‘controversial’ shows or schedules them at bizarre early morning hours. I’ve been cursed over this show; the makers were going to send me a screener, and assured me multiple times that it would be mailed to me, and it somehow never arrived.

At least I can see the trailer. Maybe my blood pressure can be thankful that I may not get to see the rest of it.

Grrrr. Don McLeroy. The personification of the banality and jovial stupidity of evil.

Good news! Errm, or is it bad news? It is being shown here in the Morris area tonight. The trick is that the stations aren’t advertising it as “revisionaries”, and they aren’t mentioning creation/evolution. Look for “Independent Lens”, a documentary about textbooks.

Morris people: it’s on channel 10 at 9pm tonight. The makers did write to me, though, and say that the PBS version had a half hour cut from it to make it fit the time slot — we’ll see what gets on.

#giantsquid time!

I’ve fired up the television and am tuned to the Discovery Channel. What is this godawful crap about rednecks and moonshine leading in to the documentary on the giant squid? It does not bode well.

Ooh, they’re teasing us with short clips right at the very beginning. Good start. Less “monster” talk would be welcome, and more biology and ecology would be welcome.

Boy, they really threw money at this project: multiple submersibles, multiple film crews, cameras all over the place. Also infrared lighting, which accounts for the appearance of some of the video previews.

I would like to know what the recipe for that gloppy squid lure Steve O’Shea is mixing up. He calls it a squid “aphrodisiac”…and he tasted it. Squid breath!

Ah, the aphrodisiac is squid bits run through a blender, a squid milkshake. Do not try something analogous if you are looking for a human aphrodisiac.

Hmm. They’re kind of setting this up as a conflict between the three scientists involved — Widder, O’Shea, and Kubodera, and portraying O’Shea as ‘controversial’. Really? We’ll see if there’s any real drama or if this is exaggerated and contrived (I suspect the latter).

Real science is often tedious. This show is just giving us the highlights — O’Shea just went on a 7 hour dive in a submersible, we got to see a couple of brief shots of some lovely jellyfish and a couple of small squid (which were nice!)

I guess this is build up. 45 minutes in, we’ve seen all three scientists do a dive, and all three fail. That’s OK, I think they’re illustrating how science is done about as effectively as you can with a television entertainment.

This so reminds me of going fishing, trying different lures semi-randomly to find out what they’re biting.

Oh, wait, they are fishing!

I’ve been watching for an hour and ten minutes, and they finally flash a glimpse of a large squid at us. Need…more…data. Getting a little thin here.

It figures. All the people hanging about underwater in submersibles…nada. Unmanned probe left to record unmonitored for 30 consecutive hours…success!

It is now sinking in that that 30 seconds of a giant squid lunging at a robot probe has been padded out to an hour and a half. It’s spectacular footage, but there really isn’t that much of it.

OK, stop this. Last 15 minutes seem to be solid commercials interlaced with one minute segments of documentary. This is getting ridiculous.

Finally! A giant squid just hangs onto some bait while brightly lit for 23 minutes…and they show us about a minute of it. Why not just drop that fluff and have the last half hour be nothing but continuous footage of the 26 foot long beast hanging there? That’s what I want!

My final assessment: mixed. They got some really, really good video, but apparently they didn’t think it was enough, and so they padded it out way too much. There were some half-assed attempts at the beginning to play up conflict and drama between the researchers, but they didn’t pan out and weren’t at all relevant; the stuff about “monsters” was distracting; the occasional attempts to compare this search to bigfoot, UFOs, and the Loch Ness monster — only real — was just annoying. There was some promising set up of the methodology, but not enough about the biology.

The people who made the show clearly didn’t think just the video footage of the squid was sufficiently engaging. They were wrong. They also clearly felt a need to milk it for every penny of commercial time they could get.

I look forward to when just the raw footage of the squid is released. That’s what I want to see.

But I thought he was going to argue with me!

The other day Paul Fidalgo asked permission to quote something I said on our super-secret backchannel (there is no backchannel, no, we do not talk to each other on FtB; it’s all a lie, pretend no one said anything about it), and I got the distinct impression that he was going to pick a fight with me over it. So I said yes, because I enjoy a good argument. Imagine my disappointment, though, because he ends up agreeing with me, mostly.

So now what do I do? I’m disarmed, I’m helpless, I’ve got nothing to lash out against. Now I’m very uncomfortable. What a devious move!

A certain philosopher who will not be named has taken exception to Fidalgo’s post (he’s “very angry”!), calling him a “bully enabler” who has “written a piece justifying bullying” which makes the “situation much worse”.

What? Telling people they should shut up and listen to other people’s arguments, especially when they have more experience in the subject than you do, is now “bullying”? That makes no sense at all. So now if someone yells at me that I’m totally wrong, and I sit back and think about it and listen to their case rather than instantly barking out a rebuttal, I am engaging in bullying?

I don’t get it. I really don’t.

I’m also baffled by what “the situation” might be. I fear the situation might be something as awful as someone sometime listening to that asshole Meyers again.

Can you see through this ploy, Arizona?

A group of Republican legislators have proposed a new anti-science bill in Arizona. It doesn’t come right out and say that it’s anti-science, of course: they know better than that. They claim instead that the purpose of the bill is to promote “critical thinking skills,” which we certainly all endorse. But they give the game away with the details.

The targets of the bill are explicitly listed in a section that presents as legislative findings that "1. An important purpose of science education is to inform students about scientific evidence and to help students develop critical thinking skills necessary to become intelligent, productive and scientifically informed citizens. 2. The teaching of some scientific subjects, including biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning, can cause controversy. 3. Some teachers may be unsure of the expectations concerning how they should present information on such topics."

Somewhat redundantly, SB 1213 provides both that "teachers shall be allowed to help pupils understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught" and that state and local education administrators "shall not prohibit any teacher in this state" from doing so. The bill also insists that it "protects only the teaching of scientific information and does not promote any religious or nonreligious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or nonbeliefs or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion."

Wow. These people have no imagination at all, no creativity in the slightest. This is essentially boilerplate taken from every goddamn creationist bill proposed in every legislature for the last decade or so. Singling out a few specific ‘controversies’, like evolution and climate change (which actually aren’t controversial at all); “strengths and weaknesses”; the denial that this is promoting a particular religious doctrine; these are such a familiar drone that my brain falls asleep reading them anymore.

Time for the residents of Arizona to rouse themselves — it’s not as if you’ve been suffering from a barrage of lunacy and bigotry lately, right? — and write to your representatives and yell at them to kill this stupid Senate Bill 1213.

A common complaint I hear a lot nowadays…

If you’re loafing about on a Sunday morning and looking for something to read, here’s a long form argument requesting skeptical consistency regarding political economy. Oh, man, is this familiar.

Unfortunately, the majority of high-profile skeptics in our community seem to promote scientific skepticism and so do not address political economy, citing a pre-requisite of hard data in forming skeptical conclusions: SGU doesn’t do politics (and when it does, as with Rebecca Watson’s work on feminist issues, you end up with petitions calling for their removal.); Brian Dunning, amongst others, blithely say that skepticism is not applicable to political “values”; and economic and political issues are barely represented at conferences, on podcasts, and in blogs, despite the disproportionate suffering it causes compared to staple feed such as homeopathy and psychics.

Yes. Yes. Yes. The modern skeptical movement is built on a very narrow foundation; a lot of the Old Guard spend an incredible amount of effort restricting the range of allowed topics to a tiny set of staples, which means that too often we hear lots about the bogosity of Bigfoot, but almost nothing about the bogosity of an economic system that maintains gross social inequities. And which belief do you think does greater harm?

We’ve been struggling for years just to get the established skeptics to recognize that religion, that citadel of lies, is a legitimate target for public criticism. The arguments to exclude that topic have been strained and absurd; most commonly, we’re told that since the claims of religion are completely evidence-free and untestable, True Skeptics™ are not able to address them…and usually these gatekeepers are as bad as creationists in claiming that they have the mantle of science in so constraining their range. They disregard the fact that scientists tend to be extremely dismissive, and appropriately so, of extravagant claims made in the absence of substantive supportive evidence.

Similarly, I can predict that skeptics will now struggle to exclude politics and economics from any debate; economics is notoriously fuzzy, and politics is wracked with extremes of opinion. But of course both fields do have hard evidence that can be addressed. Does the American political and economic system cause great hardship for many people? Does it promote stability and international cooperation? Are some of our expenditures unnecessary and others insufficient? Are there evidence-based alternative strategies that work better? Can we compare economies in different countries and assess their relative performance?

And most importantly, should rational skeptics take a stand on these issues, discuss and debate them, and come to reasonable conclusions? I don’t think it’s true that they are unresolvable.

Unfortunately, opening up the skeptic community to actually discussing these topics would lead to Deep Rifts that make the one over religion look insignificant. We’re riddled with wacky libertarians and their worship of the capitalist status quo (or worse, demanding a greater reduction in government and compassion). A libertarian speaker who openly espoused the opinions of a loon like Ron Paul — and there are people in this community who regard him as a saint — would pretty much guarantee a kind of noisy riot in the audience, and lead to a big chunk of organized skepticism decamping in fury.

Which would probably be a good thing.

You can’t buy good teaching

This little talk from Lawrence Krauss is one I agreed with right up to the last little conclusion, which is a complete non sequitur.

That first part is excellent: good education does involve getting students to ask questions and think deeply, rather than being able to recite answers back at us; I also think it’s true that a good science educator has to be comfortable in the field and be competent in the topic. And that means investing more in teacher training. It also involves paying them more to attract better teachers, because sometimes what happens is that a person with a family or special needs will find they can’t meet all their obligations on a teacher’s salary.

So far, so good. Here’s the concluding paragraph that I find disagreeable, however. It’s the one where he proposes different pay scales for science and math teachers rather than those other teachers.

I don’t think that science and math are more important than writing; I believe in communication. It’s incredibly important. I write. But for better or worse, in the free market, if you have a training in science, in general, you can go out and not become a teacher and earn more money than you would if you were a teacher. So I think we have to consider paying in order to recruit better teachers who have a training in science and mathematics, the possibility of differential pay scales to accommodate the free market. I know many teachers unions would be vastly opposed to that. But I think we at least have to consider that possibility if we want to recruit the people with the skills into the schools to be able to connect with the students.

My problem here is that after praising the value of asking good questions, critical thinking, general competence, and all that jazz, suddenly we switch gears to talking about competition in the free market. That is something completely different with no relationship to the values previously stated.

Teachers of English, theater, history, philosophy, art, music, etc. can also be inspiring, inquiring critical thinkers who lead students to deeper understanding, who get students to ask insightful questions. In that context, it’s silly to single out science and math teachers as somehow special — in my personal history, science and math teachers have been more likely to fall back on rote and massive data dumps than teachers in other fields, and also, at the college level at most universities, teaching skills are less valued in the sciences than in other more liberal artsy disciplines; the number one job skill for scientists is getting grant money. It’s very much a free market thing.

But that’s the other side of the coin, too. Why would anyone think free market competition for higher salaries would attract more people with better teaching skills? An economic battle between educational institutions and for-profit industry is going to have one foregone conclusion: the schools will lose. Demanding stable funding so the schools can hire people at a reasonable living wage is one thing, but trying to draw scientists from industry (where teaching is not a major factor in advancement) into the schools with financial inducements is not going to work, and is going to prioritize the wrong set of values.

Way back when I was on the job market, I had the choice of better paying jobs in tech fields, vs. the Research I rat race, vs. the low paying liberal arts track. I was tempted by bigger money, but what won me over was finding places where good teaching was actually respected and rewarded. That’s how you get good teachers: treat them like their skills are respected and important, give them opportunities to improve and learn, and let them explore new ideas. That’s why I’m in this business; it’s certainly not because of the pay scale (although if it were low enough it would drive me away), but because it lets me do what I love doing.