Avi Loeb has an opinion

The greatest mass extinction in the history of the world took place 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian. 99% of all species died off at that time.

Avi Loeb has an idea.

Popular opinion considers the Permian-Triassic extinction to have been triggered by volcanic eruptions that created the Siberian traps, and humanity to be the first technological civilization on Earth 250 million years later.

Oh. Popular opinion says it was caused by formation of the Siberian traps. Except I have a big problem with that statement: Popular opinion is mostly unaware of the traps, has no idea when the Permian occurred or what happened there, and would be clueless if you asked the average pedestrian what caused the extinction. Popular opinion is irrelevant.

What matters is the evidence that geologists bring to bear on the question. The Siberian traps are real, the massive lava flows that created them too place right around the Permian-Triassic boundary, and they are likely to have been a major contributor to the extinctions — there may have been other factors as well, but look at the scale of the catastrophe that we know occurred coincident with the end of the Permian.

That’s not opinion, that’s real. I’d rather listen to the evidence given by geologists than the weird-ass speculations of a weird-ass physicist.

Yeah, Avi Loeb has an alternative “hypothesis.”

Is it possible that the devastating global warming event was caused 252 million years ago by industrial pollution from a technological civilization? This would have required first intelligence to emerge only 6 percent earlier in the 4,540-million-year history of Earth.

Wait, so geology is an opinion, but this dumb brain fart is worth considering? He even admits that he has no evidence whatsoever for this claim.

Any technological infrastructure left on the surface of Earth from that early civilization could have been demolished by geological activity including subduction, covered by water or tarnished by meteor impacts and weathering.

Instead, he suggests that vague reports of unidentified objects supported by daft nebulous statements from politicians are best interpreted as relics from intelligences that destroyed vast swathes of Planet Earth a quarter of a billion years ago.

The Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, submitted two recent reports in 2022 and 2023 to the US Congress, admitting the existence of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) whose nature is unclear, some of which exhibiting trans-medium maneuvers between air and water. Could these relics be evidence for a civilization that predated us on Earth 252 million years ago?

This possibility would overcome the challenges associated with UAPs arriving to Earth through interstellar travel and the puzzle of why such UAPs are here right now despite the vastness of cosmic space and time.

And if I had a slice of ham I could have a ham sandwich if I also had some bread. He’s got no evidence of an alien civilization, and he’s got no evidence that UAPs exist as material technological phenomena, but slap those two dumb ideas together, and he thinks he has something. He’s an incredibly bad scientist.

This is a familiar progression, though, if you’ve watched the UFO fashions come and go. First they were spaceships from Mars, then they were from distant stars, then they were vessels from the Hollow Earth, then they were psychic manifestations piloted by Bigfoot, etc., etc., etc. They’re all just fever dreams from fanatical weirdos, like Loeb.

You just gotta…

Conservative jerks like Rufo are pushovers

Chris Rufo strutted into a lecture at a school of business at the University of Texas, which you’d think would be a friendly environment for him. It wasn’t. He got torched to the ground.

Rufo brought his anti-DEI argument to UT on Monday and because he is – like many on the right – a catastrophist, he gave it an apocalyptic twist, claiming that initiatives like DEI have made public universities frightening, insecure places. I think people from across the political spectrum would acknowledge a sense of anxiety [at the universities], he said. A sense of fear. A sense of foreboding. Something has gone quite wrong.

I’m at a university. He’s got the atmosphere turned around about 180° — if there’s any foreboding, it’s over the fact that conservative cultists like Rufo are hell-bent on eviscerating liberal thought on campus — he said as much outright, announcing that “it is necessary to replace liberal voices with conservative ones at institutions like UT.” Combine that with Republican legislatures constantly cutting funding, and yeah, something has gone quite wrong. I’d start with the fact that philistines like Rufo get speaking engagements on campus.

I needn’t have worried, though. My professional colleagues stepped up to the plate and showed that Rufo was an idiot.

Afterward, Rufo took questions. Naomi Campa, a classics professor at UT, challenged Rufo to define what he meant by “truth, beauty, and goodness,” a standard he had repeatedly referred to in his remarks that he said higher education should re-prioritize. A numbing digression followed in which Rufo complained that leftists reject the concept of beauty. He did not, however, offer any insight into what he considers truth, beauty, and goodness to consist of. “I would like some actual examples,” Campa replied with a note of impatience, “not some argument that says beauty is anti-diversity. … I agree that people give word-salad as answers but I challenge you not to do the same thing – because that was word salad.”

I would like to see examples, too. Leftists do not reject the concept of beauty at all — after all, I find beauty in spiders. I suspect that what he means is that we reject beauty because we can see beauty where he can’t, because, like Jordan Peterson, he thinks the only true beauty is white.

He couldn’t give a specific answer because it would give away the game when he specified a bunch of white supremacist ideals.

Ten minutes later, Polly Strong, an anthropology professor and the president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Rufo that she believed in intellectual diversity but that a commitment to the concept wasn’t what she heard from him. She said her personal hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom, due process, and neutrality in higher learning and asked if Rufo supported those values.

Rufo thanked Strong for her question but his words came faster and more insistent than before. He derided Dewey, saying it would have been better if he’d never been born, and dismissed his values. “Academic freedom, due process, neutrality – those are means, not ends,” Rufo said. “If you have an erasure of ends, what you get is sheer power politics, you get everything reducible to will and domination, and then you get an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” Rufo concluded by saying that academics who continue to adhere to Dewey’s principles, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”

Strong was completely unawed by the implied threat. “The ‘ends’ of academic freedom, due process, and shared governance is education for a democratic society,” she said simply. “That is the basis of John Dewey’s vision and many, many university professors believe that today.”

Oh, man, I could have told her ahead of time that conservatives despise John Dewey. The guy who said “Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous”? They hate democracy. “A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young” — they want students who recite cant.

I do wonder what Rufo thinks is “coming.” Is he already planning the pogroms?

The phrenology remark is amusing, because it’s the people who are backing him who believe in genetic determinism, that race is quantifiable, and who publish in their favorite ‘journal’ of phrenology, Quillette.

The audience was silent after Strong’s remark. It had become clear that Rufo wasn’t dominating his opponents. It got worse for him when Samuel Baker, a UT English professor, came to the mic. Baker reiterated that Rufo’s veneration of beauty and truth was meaningless if he provided no idea of what the concepts mean to him, and he criticized Rufo’s use of violent imagery like “laying siege” and deserving “what’s coming.”

“I just want to be honest with you,” Baker said, “your rhetoric in relation to barbarism and the way you smugly say that the university is not going to like what’s coming – I think that in the context of the world right now, where there is a lot of really tragic violence, that we ought to be careful to remove ourselves from that and from groups with white supremacist associations. I really think you should rethink the glibness.”

Wait for it. Baker doesn’t just point out how shallow Rufo’s ideas are, he nails Rufo on his racist, fascist underpinnings.

By “white supremacist associations,” Baker was referring to reports linking Rufo to the figures who constitute a new alt-right bro culture, including the recently disgraced Richard Hanania – a visiting professor of the Salem Center who was, in his words, canceled after revelations that he’d written pseudonymously for white supremacist publications a decade earlier. Rufo also associates with anti-democratic voices like Bronze Age Pervert, as well as people from the Claremont Institute, who advocate for the overthrow of the 2020 presidential election, and Charles Haywood, an extremist who has called for a war of extinction against the left through his “No Enemies to the Right” philosophy. (Haywood is speaking at a far-right conference in Austin next month, by the way.)

Rufo responded to Baker’s remarks directly: “Well, well – be straightforward. What are you saying? You’re alluding, you’re insinuating –”

“That you hang around with fascists?” Baker replied. “Is that what you’re insinuating I’m insinuating?”

And there it was. The colloquy between Rufo and Baker continued for a moment more before Rufo launched into a strident self-defense, claiming he is more sensitive to fascists than anyone because of his family’s history in Italy. But the damage was done. Minutes later the Salem Center’s Carlos Carvalho hustled him out of the building as Baker and Campa tried to continue the back and forth.

Excellent. I’m proud of my professorial colleagues for smacking that lying poseur around. Do more of that, everyone!

The prey proves unable to read the mind of the predator

This is what Orcas do to Great White Sharks.

Face it, Orcas are pretty damned metal.

Let’s be honest: as much as we all love a shark, orcas are definitely in with a shout of earning the title of Most Metal Animal In The Sea. Firstly, they’re absolutely massive. Secondly, they feast on other animals. Thirdly, they wear corpsepaint. Fourthly, they’re nicknamed killer whales! The defence rests.

And don’t forget, the Orcas around Spain and Gibraltar have had enough and are out there thrashing yachts for sport.

So somebody came up with the ‘clever’ idea of trying to deter attacks by playing a death metal playlist over underwater microphones. Do you think it worked?

One unexpected tactic that is currently doing the rounds in the marine community is to blast heavy metal at the fearsome sea mammals. According to a new report in the New York Times, Captain Florian Rutsch and his crew found themselves in uncomfortably close proximity to a pod of orcas around the Iberian Peninsula earlier this month, and attempted to drive them off with a specially curated playlist of metal bangers titled Metal For Orcas. The mix included cuts by death metal mainstays such as Aborted, Dying Fetus and Ingested, and was played via an underwater speaker.

Unfortunately for the crew, it didn’t work: the orcas attacked the rudder of their catamaran, causing enough damage to leave the boat stranded and its occupants requiring rescuing via local authorities. Captain Rutsh described the situation as “scary”, adding: “No one knows what works, what doesn’t work.”

Hell no. That was a mix of music that was either going to attract them to a wild party, or was going to enrage them. If you really want to scare away Orcas, I’d recommend trying a mix of Kenny G and Enya first.

The problem with Zoom…confirmed!

I was complaining about the effect of Zoom on students — it doesn’t encourage engagement and leads to apathy — and oh, look, someone did a study on “zoom fatigue”.

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, looked for physiological signs of fatigue in 35 students attending lectures on engineering at an Austrian university. Half of the class attended the 50-minute lecture via videoconference in a nearby lab and a face-to-face lecture the following week, while the other half attended first in person, then online.

Participants were monitored with electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) instruments that recorded electrical activity in the brain and their heart rhythms. They also participated in surveys about their mood and fatigue levels.

The researchers searched for physical changes correlated with mental fatigue, including distinctive brain waves, reduced heart rate and hints the nervous system might be trying to compensate for growing exhaustion during the lecture.

There were “notable” differences between the in-person and online groups, the researchers write. Video participants’ fatigue mounted over the course of the session, and their brain states showed they were struggling to pay attention. The groups’ moods varied, too, with in-person participants reporting they felt livelier, happier and more active, and online participants saying they felt tired, drowsy and “fed up.”

Overall, the researchers write, the study offers evidence of the physical toll of videoconferencing and suggests that it “should be considered as a complement to face-to-face interaction, but not as a substitute.”

I know, that’s a tiny n, tested on a yet another WEIRD group. I also think that for Zoom to work, you have to completely revamp how you teach, and this is obviously just presenting the same content in two different media. Given those problems with the study though, it aligns with my personal experience, and I’ll use it to further justify my decision to cut Zoom out of my life next semester.

Lectures are boring unless you can get some questions and other interactions during it, and I’ve noticed that, when I make my in-person lectures simultaneously available over Zoom, I get zero responsiveness from the online part of the class. I suspect I’ve put them all to sleep.

Toughness

Big Bluestem roots

Good deep roots make a difference. The photo to the right is from the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, and it shows how deep and strong and tangled the roots of the prairie bluestem are. It’s impressive how robust prairie ecosystems are, and we rip them up and replace them with Kentucky Bluegrass, which has the most pathetic shallow mat of a root system. See?

My mother is in the hospital right now — she’s been declining for years, but she keeps bouncing back because she has deep strong roots. I’ve taken her for granted for my entire life, because she always perseveres. I’m hoping she pulls through this time, too.

Well, now I know how spiders celebrate Thanksgiving

I was in the lab this morning, and found the Steatoda borealis in an odd position: face-to-face, chelicerae almost touching, and they were pulsing. I put this pair under the microscope, and actually saw that the male had one massive palp extended all the way to the female’s epigyne, and he was literally throbbing as he pumped her full of his semen.

Jeezus, this sounds like a porn novel.

I tried to get a photo of them in the act, but wasn’t quick enough. This [sorry, no spider photo here. You can see it on my patreon or instagram] is the moment after; the male had pulled back slightly, and was busy licking his palps clean. First he puts it in the female, and then he pulls out and puts it in his own mouth — at least you won’t find that in most porn stories, I don’t think.

I’m expecting eggs in a few days now.

Not in my home!

No barbarous carnivores here! Well, except for the spiders.

Our plans have changed. The original idea was that we were going to stay at home, and I’d grade lab reports and make a vegetarian shepherd’s pie. My son called, though, and now we’re driving to St Cloud (about 2 hours away) to join him for a mid-afternoon meal, probably at an Indian restaurant. I’ll make the pie and grade the lab reports tomorrow.

We won’t have Michael Voris to kick around anymore

I’ve featured Michael Voris several times here — he was the front man for an organization called the Church Militant, a small mob of disgruntled TradCaths, and Voris does a YouTube show called The Vortex which is usually him complaining about the gays, the liberals, the Pope, that sort of thing.

Michael Voris has resigned. Can you guess why?

I still don’t know. He rambles on about “demons” and “moral failings” and “horrible stuff” without dishing out any details.

Here’s another Church Militant weirdo who makes an empty statement on his resignation. Near as I can tell from this evasive complaint, Voris stopped praying with the staff a few years ago. Prayer is so important! No wonder he lapsed in some mysterious way.

We do know that he was “asked to resign for breaching the Church Militant morality clause,” so there was probably something sordid going on, like that he kissed a boy or donated to a social justice organization or, you know, didn’t pray enough. As much as I would be entertained by a tale of decadence and degeneracy, I suspect that his downfall was brought about by some simple thing that the rest of the world would find quaint, but that his insane community would have been horrified by.

What is going on with OpenAI?

It’s mystifying. I’m not a fan of the company, OpenAI — they’re the ones hyping up ChatGPT, they’re 49% owned by Microsoft that, as usual, wants to take over everything, and their once and future CEO Sam Altman seems like a sleazy piece of work. But he has his fans. He was abruptly fired this past week (and what’s up with that?) and there was some kind of internal revolt and now he’s being rehired? Appointed to a new position?. Confusion and chaos! It’s a hell of a way to run a company.

Here, though, is a hint of illumination.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was unexpectedly fired by the board on Friday afternoon. CTO Mira Murati is filling in as interim CEO.

OpenAI is a nonprofit with a commercial arm. (This is a common arrangement when a nonprofit finds it’s making too much money. Mozilla is set up similarly.) The nonprofit controls the commercial company — and they just exercised that control.

Microsoft invested $13 billion to take ownership of 49% of the OpenAI for-profit — but not of the OpenAI nonprofit. Microsoft found out Altman was being fired one minute before the board put out its press release, half an hour before the stock market closed on Friday. MSFT stock dropped 2% immediately.

Oh. So this is a schism between the controlling non-profit side of the company, and the money-making for-profit side. It’s an ideological split! But what are their differences?

The world is presuming that there’s something absolutely awful about Altman just waiting to come out. But we suspect the reason for the firing is much simpler: the AI doom cultists kicked Altman out for not being enough of a cultist.

There were prior hints that the split was coming, from back in March.

In the last few years, Silicon Valley’s obsession with the astronomical stakes of future AI has curdled into a bitter feud. And right now, that schism is playing out online between two people: AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky and OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman. Since the early 2000s, Yudkowsky has been sounding the alarm that artificial general intelligence is likely to be “unaligned” with human values and could decide to wipe us out. He worked aggressively to get others to adopt the prevention of AI apocalypse as a priority — enough that he helped convince Musk to take the risk seriously. Musk co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit with Altman in 2015, with the goal of creating safer AI.

In the last few years, OpenAI has adopted a for-profit model and churned out bigger, faster, and more advanced AI technology. The company has raised billions in investment, and Altman has cheered on the progress toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI. “There will be scary moments as we move towards AGI-level systems, and significant disruptions, but the upsides can be so amazing that it’s well worth overcoming the great challenges to get there,” he tweeted in December.

Yudkowsky, meanwhile, has lost nearly all hope that humanity will handle AI responsibly, he said on a podcast last month. After the creation of OpenAI, with its commitment to advancing AI development, he said he cried by himself late at night and thought, “Oh, so this is what humanity will elect to do. We will not rise above. We will not have more grace, not even here at the very end.”

Given that background, it certainly seemed like rubbing salt in a wound when Altman tweeted recently that Yudkowsky had “done more to accelerate AGI than anyone else” and might someday “deserve the Nobel Peace Prize” for his work. Read a certain way, he was trolling Yudkowsky, saying the AI theorist had, in trying to prevent his most catastrophic fear, significantly hastened its arrival. (Yudkowsky said he could not know if Altman was trolling him; Altman declined to comment.)

Yudkowsky is a kook. What is he doing having any say at all in the operation of any company? Why would anyone sane let the LessWrong cultists anywhere near their business? It does explain what’s going on with all this chaos — it’s a squabble within a cult. You can’t expect it to make sense.

This assessment, though, helps me understand a little bit about what’s going on.

Sam Altman was an AI doomer — just not as much as the others. The real problem was that he was making promises that OpenAI could not deliver on. The GPT series was running out of steam. Altman was out and about in the quest for yet more funding for the OpenAI company in ways that upset the true believers.

A boardroom coup by the rationalist cultists is quite plausible, as well as being very funny. Rationalists’ chronic inability to talk like regular humans may even explain the statement calling Altman a liar. It’s standard for rationalists to call people who don’t buy their pitch liars.

So what from normal people would be an accusation of corporate war crimes is, from rationalists, just how they talk about the outgroup of non-rationalists. They assume non-believers are evil.

It is important to remember that Yudkowsky’s ideas are dumb and wrong, he has zero technological experience, and he has never built a single thing, ever. He’s an ideas guy, and his ideas are bad. OpenAI’s future is absolutely going to be wild.

There are many things to loathe Sam Altman for — but not being enough of a cultist probably isn’t one of them.

We think more comedy gold will be falling out over the next week.

Should I look forward to that? Or dread it?

It’s already getting worse. Altman is back at the helm, there’s been an almost complete turnover of the board, and they’ve brought in…Larry Summers? Why? It’s a regular auto-da-fé, with the small grace that we don’t literally torture and burn people at the stake when the heretics are dethroned.