These people are mad

In all senses of the word. This has been a disease raging through certain people since at least the Gamergate days — they are ideologically warped, committed to a bizarrely hateful perspective.

So here’s this guy, playing the shiny new role-playing game du jour, and he gets to the beginning character creation screen, a staple of these kinds of games since Dungeons & Dragons. It asks what pronouns his character will use, and he fucking melts down.

Jesus, guy. It’s a game. A role-playing game. You’re going to have to save some of that energy and fury for when it asks if you want to be an elf or a dwarf or whatever (I haven’t played Starfield. Martian or Venusian? Whatever.)

schadenfreude for hippie-wanna-bes

So sad. A bunch of privileged people who wanted to be hippies for a few days while ripping up the desert went to Burning Man on the playa, and got a surprise.

It rained.

Everything turned to mud. They’re stranded because all the transportation is stuck, and they’re having to slog on foot through the glop, and they’re rationing the food.

Tsk, tsk. It’s another Fyre Festival. Maybe they’ll learn the lesson that fragile environments aren’t your playground? Nah.

Don’t put non-educators in charge of education

I encountered this little message on Shitter, and was appalled at all the comments that enthusiastically agreed. This is not a curriculum. It’s a hodge-podge of random topics that the creator thinks they have mastered, and shame on you if you haven’t.

Look, what educators do is design a program of instruction that builds the basics first, that the student can then build on to reach more complex topics. It’s a tree, where attention must first be paid to the trunk, and then the branches. The stuff in this cartoon is a collection of twigs…some useful, others specialized, others mostly irrelevant.

Look at the first one, for instance: taxes. You have got to be kidding me. Doing your taxes is an exercise in following somewhat arbitrary instructions, doing basic arithmetic a step at a time. In a sense, most education is already all about obeying a series of instructions, are you seriously suggesting that tax forms are an important or interesting part of your schooling? Fuck off.

Then, coding. I’ve noticed that a lot of programmers have an inflated sense of the importance of what they do — it’s useful, but not essential for most people’s lives. This is basically vocational instruction that’s not going to be at all useful unless you get into a career in IT. (I’m not an outsider looking in here: I spent about fifteen years of my life doing lots of coding for laboratory work. I enjoyed it, but I haven’t had to fire up a compiler in an even longer period of time.)

Cooking? Really? Schools already offer classes in cooking. It’s called home economics. It’s usually optional; in my education you could take either home ec or a shop class. I did both because I wanted to. I spent a year learning the skills I’d need to be a line cook (vocational ed again), and another year in shop, which at my school was largely about drafting and printing. Both were cool, I’m glad I took them, I acquired some simple skills I use even now, but mandatory? Students don’t have infinite time.

The rest are similar tiny twigs on the tree of education. Isn’t high school basically already a gauntlet compelling you to learn a combination of survival skills, social etiquette, and stress management? You think a class would be more effective than navigating the protocols and cliques of your first prom?

I notice what’s missing here: math, history, literature, art, science. Maybe they just assumed they’re already teaching those, but sometimes standards are terribly low. I remember learning US history, which is an important subject, but some of the students were lucky enough to get a teacher who was actually qualified to teach it (Hey, Mr Richardson, I saw what my peers got in that class, and I was jealous.) I got the basketball coach, and the class was a semester of pure jingo and superficial memorization of dates.

Forget this uninformed list of random topics, which was probably cobbled together by a programmer, and instead teach what educators say forms a good framework for learning, and maybe instead give teachers the resources they need and enforce good standards.

This looks like something an unqualified home-schooler would assemble, and that’s what I’m afraid of — that there are a lot of people thinking “basic home repaire” trumps spelling and math and civics.

The crunch begins

I have resolved that this year, I will get all student assignments graded within 24 hours of their scheduled due date. Guess what? First formal assignment was turned in yesterday for cell bio. I also had to compose a practice exam for Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, which was posted this morning and will be due on Monday.

I can tell already that my discipline is going to be murderous, requiring intense bouts of activity, since I won’t allow myself to drag things out over several days. Periodically intense pain vs. chronic pain? Which is worse? I’ll find out.

Avi Loeb found what he was looking for

You were expecting little green men?

Because of course he did, since he was going to happily declare anything he found to be of extrasolar origin. The preliminary analysis of the metal spheres he found at the bottom of the ocean has been published in ArXiv, as he announced on…the Michael Shermer podcast? I’m already prejudiced against believing him.

From a July expedition off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a collection of small metallic spheres was recovered from the sea floor, which famous Harvard scientist Avi Loeb said Tuesday are from outside our solar system.

Tuesday’s press release, first reported by USA Today, suggests that 57 of the 700 metallic spheres, which were recovered by using a magnetic sled the team dragged through the water and sand, are interstellar in origin “based on the composition and isotopes.” That is unmatched by existing material in our solar system, Loeb said in an interview on “The Michael Shermer Show.”

“This is a historic discovery because it represents the first time that scientists have analyzed materials from a large object that arrived to Earth from outside the solar system,” Loeb wrote in his Tuesday blog post on Medium.

The paper has also been posted on the X, formerly known as Twitter, shitshow.

Not peer-reviewed, obviously, and Shermer and X are the outlets used to display the results? Not impressive.

So what did he find? I don’t know. I’m not really qualified to interpret this result — maybe you are.

What he found is that the tiny little spheres he pulled up are enriched for beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium, which is unusual compared to C1 chondrites. Carbonaceous chondrites have an elemental composition reflective of the elements in the solar system as a whole, so this difference is taken as evidence that the meteor was from different star system altogether. Or, as was my first thought, that the meteor was not a carbonaceous chondrite. Or that the melting as it passed through the atmosphere altered the distribution of elements. Or that sitting in the ocean for a decade degraded the material in interesting ways. Or that his sampling technique was biased towards plucking out unusual samples. I don’t know, this is way outside my expertise, I just know I’m extremely suspicious of anything Avi Loeb says. I mean, he also declared that meteor was of interstellar origin based on a letter that used wobbly estimates of its speed and trajectory.

The interstellar origin of IM1 was established at the 99.999% confidence based on velocity measurements by US government satellites, as confirmed in a formal letter from the US Space Command to NASA.

I love the fact that he got 99.999% confidence from a third-hand letter based on largely confidential evidence. That tells me all I need to know.

But also, all the recent foofaraw about UFOs, like the recent congressional hearings, is rich old fools with no scientific background. They’re just certain that the aliens are here.

In a 2017 interview with 60 Minutes, Robert Bigelow didn’t hesitate when he was asked if space aliens had ever visited Earth. “There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence,” said Bigelow, a Las Vegas-based real estate mogul and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a company NASA had contracted to build inflatable space station habitats. Bigelow was so certain, he indicated, because he had “spent millions and millions and millions” of dollars searching for UFO evidence. “I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.”

He’s right. Since the early 1990s, Bigelow has bankrolled a voluminous stream of pseudoscience on modern-day UFO lore—investigating everything from crop circles and cattle mutilations to alien abductions and UFO crashes. Indeed, if you name a UFO rabbit hole, it’s a good bet the 79-year-old tycoon has flushed his riches down it.

If Loeb is famous now, it’s for quickly jumping on that cash cow and riding it hard. He found a UFO fanatic sugar daddy, and is milking him for everything he can.

From a scientific standpoint, all this money seems wasted on a zany quest that is akin to the search for Bigfoot or Atlantis. The same might be said of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s recent hunt for evidence of extraterrestrial life off the coast of Papua New Guinea, which cost $150,000 and was funded by cryptocurrency mogul Charles Hoskinson. Loeb’s polarizing claims of finding traces of alien technology and of having a more open-minded and dispassionate approach to fringe science have garnered a truly staggering amount of media coverage, but his peers in the scientific community are rolling their eyes.

It’s the latest stunt by Loeb, who also helms a controversial UFO project and previously drew the ire of his colleagues with outlandish claims about the supposedly artificial nature of an (admittedly weird) interstellar comet. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, recently told the New York Times: “What the public is seeing in Loeb is not how science works. And they shouldn’t go away thinking that.”

Exactly. Loeb is just the latest in a long line of ignoramuses and charlatans who claim to have extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims, but when asked to show it reveal a thimble full of cherry-picked dirt. Unfortunately, it’s another symptom of the inequitable and unearned distribution of wealth, which allows absurdly wealthy people to throw barrels of cash undiscriminatingly at anyone willing to endorse their delusions. They keep sucking up unwarranted acknowledgements from prestigious institutions as well!

Unfortunately, much of this nonsense has, at one point or another, been masked with an aura of legitimacy by prestigious institutions. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lent its imprimatur to an alien abduction conference in the early 1990s—which Robert Bigelow helped pay for. A generous benefactor to academia, Bigelow also gave millions to the University of Nevada during the 1990s to study supposed psychic phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance and the possibility of life after death. (In recent years, the billionaire has turned his attention and money largely to the afterlife.)

Indeed, there is a long tradition of fringe science at prestigious universities. The dubious field of parapsychology, for instance, owes its existence to the decades of pseudoscholarship churned out at Duke and Harvard University–and financed by wealthy private patrons. Some of our most illustrious thinkers, such as the eminent psychologist William James, have fallen for it. Belief in Martians sprang in large part from a wealthy amateur astronomer, Percival Lowell, who built the observatory that still bears his name. A University of Arizona psychology professor attracted criticism in recent years for taking money from the Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937 by textiles magnate to promote the racist science of eugenics.

You know, universities — especially the large already rich ones — are often fueled by capitalistic grasping at money, right? And when idiots have lots of money, they aren’t shy about pandering to them.

By the way, Loeb made this announcement on the day his new book, Interstellar, was released. Very convenient.

So a few billion people die? It’s just a number

The lunatics in Silicon Valley are in a panic about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), but they can’t really explain why. They are just certain that the results would be dire, and therefore justifies almost-as-dire responses to an existential threat. Just listen to Eliezer Yudkowsky…or better yet, don’t listen to him.

Consider a recent TIME magazine article by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a central figure within the TESCREAL movement who calls himself a “genius” and has built a cult-like following in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yudkowsky contends that we may be on the cusp of creating AGI, and that if we do this “under anything remotely like the current circumstances,” the “most likely result” will be “that literally everyone on Earth will die.” Since an all-out thermonuclear war probably won’t kill everyone on Earth—the science backs this up—he thus argues that countries should sign an international treaty that would sanction military strikes against countries that might be developing AGI, even at the risk of triggering a “full nuclear exchange.”

Well, first of all, it’s a sign of how far TIME magazine has declined that they’re giving space to a kook like Yudkowsky, who is most definitely not a genius (first clue: anyone who calls himself a genius isn’t one), and whose main claim to fame is that he’s the leader of the incestuous, babbling Less Wrong cult. But look at that “logic”!

Oh, but the alternative would be so much worse!

  • AGI will kill everyone (Evidence not shown)
  • All-out nuclear war will only kill almost everyone
  • Therefore, we should trigger nuclear war to prevent AGI

Yudkowsky then doubled-down on the stupidity.

Many people found these claims shocking. Three days after the article was published, someone asked Yudkowsky on social media: “How many people are allowed to die to prevent AGI?” His response was: “There should be enough survivors on Earth in close contact to form a viable reproductive population, with room to spare, and they should have a sustainable food supply. So long as that’s true, there’s still a chance of reaching the stars someday.”

That’s simply insane. He has decided that A) the primary goal of our existence is to build starships, B) AGI would prevent us from building starships, and C) the fiery extermination of billions of people and near-total poisoning of our environment is a small price to pay to let a small breeding population survive and go to space. I’m kinda wondering how he thinks we can abruptly kill the majority of people on Earth without triggering an extinction vortex. You know, this well-documented phenomenon:

Jesus. Someone needs to tell him that Dr Strangelove was neither a documentary nor a utopian fantasy.

But, you might say, that is so incredibly nuts that no one would take Yudkowsky seriously…well, except for TIME magazine. And also…

Astonishingly, after Yudkowsky published his article and made the comments above, TED invited him to give a talk. He also appeared on major podcast’s like Lex Fridman’s, and last month appeared on the “Hold These Truths Podcast” hosted by the Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw. The extremism that Yudkowsky represents is starting to circulate within the public and political arenas, and his prophecies about an imminent AGI apocalypse are gaining traction.

Keep in mind that this is the era of clickbait, when the key to lucrative popularity is to be extremely loud about passionate bullshit, to tap into the wallets and mind-space of paranoid delusionists. Yudkowsky is realizing that being MoreWrong pays a hell of a lot better than LessWrong.

I learned some Latin this morning

Mark Meadows, the creationist ninny who also happened to be Trump’s chief of staff and self-serving MAGA nut, rushed to testify in an Atlanta court on Monday. He was basically trying to get himself off the hook — I expect a lot of the indicted are thinking about how to get out from under a prison sentence — and his defense was the good ol’ “I was just following orders” excuse. The cute thing about that is that he just passed the buck to the ex-president.

It’s all the more curious, then, that Meadows decided to take the witness stand on Monday and assert that he was merely doing his job as Trump’s chief of staff when he partook in what Atlanta prosecutors call a pressure campaign to flip the vote there. Because in doing so, he’s essentially pointing the finger at his boss.

“He now cannot ever say, ‘I wasn’t doing this for the president, I was acting on my own,’” said Peter Odom, a former prosecutor at the Fulton County DA’s office.

Indeed, Meadows’ entire defense rests upon the idea that he was just doing his job, that his efforts to connect Trump with people who would help to overturn the election was at the direction of the former president himself. It’s precisely that point which Fulton County DA Fani Willis is trying to prove: that Trump was at the center of this entire criminal conspiracy.

Anyway, more important than yet another day of legal maneuvering is that I learned a Latin phrase!

“There’s an ancient legal doctrine: Respondeat superior. It’s Latin for ‘Let the master answer,’” which means that a boss is ultimately responsible if he “directs the agent to do something,” Carlson said.

That’s going to be so useful in the coming months.

Uh-oh, Florida

It’s looking ominous this morning for Florida’s Gulf coast. Is “ominous” maybe the wrong word? The situation is more than just threatening, they’re about to be slammed hard today by Hurricane Idalia. Just yesterday I was reading that meteorologists expected it would be a Category 3 hurricane with winds above 100mph, but today they’re saying it’s going to be much worse, with 130+ mph winds.

Idalia rapidly intensified to a Category 4 hurricane overnight as forecasters warned that a “catastrophic” storm surge and “destructive” winds were nearing Florida’s northern Gulf Coast. Idalia is set to make landfall Wednesday morning, the National Hurricane Center said. The agency warned Florida residents to prepare for long power outages and said some locations may be uninhabitable for several weeks or months. Parts of eastern Georgia and southeastern South Carolina also could experience damaging winds.

Unfortunately, hurricanes are not discriminating and this one won’t be selectively plucking up the idiots who voted for their climate-change-denying governor. I’ve never experienced winds that fierce — y’all stay safe now.