Dawkins embarrasses himself again

Oh no, Richard Dawkins, stop. He’s asked in an interview what he thinks of doctors being arrested for gender affirming care, and his old eloquence is completely gone. He stutters, he stammers, he struggles to get an answer out, and he looks for an excuse to evade the question — for adults, he asks, or children. Like it makes a difference, like there’s an age that justifies suffering. He finally gets out…

I would have strong objections to doctors injecting minors, children, or performing surgery on them to change their sex

Note that this does not answer the question. Should doctors be jailed for providing gender-affirming care? I don’t care if someone has opinions and objects, the question is whether it is right for the state to arrest care-givers for giving care?

OK, so he doesn’t think children should be treated for this issue — not that they’re getting sex change operations anyway, they might at best be given therapy and reversible puberty blockers. What about adults?

If they’ve thought about it properly

As if trans people don’t even think long and hard about it, and as if he’s the right person to judge if they’ve properly thought about it. He goes on to say that it might be OK if if they struggle and suffer over it. You can be trans, according to Dawkins, if you’ve been made sufficiently miserable.

What we’re seeing now is a fashion, a craze, mimetic epidemic which is spreading like an epidemic of measles or something like that

Oh, just go ahead and spit out the words woke mind virus, it’s what you really want to say, boomer.

That doesn’t even make sense. Is measles a meme now? Is it really a good idea to compare a fashion to a serious, life threatening disease? Is the state of being trans a biological disease at all?

Dawkins really needs to learn that if he doesn’t have an informed opinion on a topic, he should refrain from answering…especially if he’s just going to regurgitate that anti-trans crap that is so popular over there on the other side of the Atlantic.

Being a good scientist might be harder than you think

You know, this guy was a terrible scientist by most criteria

The ideas in this paper, Ten simple rules for socially responsible science, ought to be explicitly spelled out in any grad program, especially since many of the incentives in science careers tend to oppose their rules. Read the whole thing, but here are a few of my comments on their list.

Rule 1: Get diverse perspectives early on

Some people seem to believe in the myth of the lone genius who comes up with brilliant ideas and executes them…and then gets a Nobel prize. It doesn’t work that way. Ever. It’s totally collaborative. In my classes I literally force students to work in teams in the lab, and there are always a few students who insist on going it alone. That’s missing the point!

Rule 2: Understand the limits of your design with regard to your claims

It’s tempting to go too far and make extravagant justifications for your work. Studying spiders will lead to a cure for cancer! Not really, but it would be a big boost to getting grant money if it were true.

Rule 3: Incorporate underlying social theory and historical contexts

I’ve experienced this unfortunate attitude that the only work that matters is stuff that’s been published in the last five years. I’ve had students ask me if it was OK to cite a paper from 1991 in their thesis project. Yeah? Why not? I cited papers from the 19th century in my PhD thesis! Dig deep, go interdisciplinary, drink from the Pierian spring, it’ll make your work better.

Rule 4: Be transparent about your hypothesis and analyses

Obviously. An experiment is not a fishing expedition.

Rule 5: Report your results and limitations accurately and transparently

Uh-oh. It’s shocking that we have to spell that out.

Rule 6: Choose your terminology carefully

This is about jargon. I’ve written a few things where I’ve totally lost people because they don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s also very common for me to make lots of comments in first drafts of student papers that they need to spell out that acronym and need to explain their terminology.

Rule 7: Seek a rigorous review and editorial processes

It’s common to see resentment at reviewer comments, and sometimes they are wrong…but you have to try and see it as a process to improve your work. That’s hard, though, especially if you’ve got a job that only cares about the volume of papers pumped out. Administrators do not read your work for quality.

Rule 8: Play an active role in ensuring correct interpretations of your results

That’s a good idea. Science isn’t fire-and-forget, a paper is a long-term commitment to a set of ideas that may need defending. Also, to be honest, few people will actually read your paper — your bigger audience is the people who come to your public talks or hear your interview on NPR or read the blog post summarizing it.

Rule 9: Address criticism from peers and the general public with respect

Awww, do we have to? Yes. That “peer” specifier is critical, though: I’m not going to treat creationists, anti-vaxxers, or climate change deniers kindly.

Rule 10: When all else fails, consider submitting a correction or a self-retraction

You’d have to do that less often if you heed #1, #5, #7, and #8, especially #7.

Most of the web advice I see about how to be a good scientist involves basic personal attributes: curiousity, observational skills, quantitative measurements, etc., and all that is true, but you don’t see much about all the essential aspects of being a cooperative community member. Maybe if we spent more time on that in early education we’d have fewer sociopaths.

Nah, there’s no cure.

Context vs. Content?

I sure hear a lot about science education in New Zealand, and I don’t know why. The latest is some upset about the New Zealand science curriculum. I also don’t understand why.

Science teachers are shocked that an advance version of the draft school science curriculum contains no mention of physics, chemistry or biology.

The so-called “fast draft” said science would be taught through five contexts – the Earth system, biodiversity, food, energy and water, infectious diseases and “at the cutting edge”.

It was sent to just a few teachers for their feedback ahead of its release for consultation next month, but some were so worried by the content they leaked it to their peers.

Teachers who had seen the document told RNZ they had grave concerns about it. It was embarrassing, and would lead to “appalling” declines in student achievement, they said.

One said the focus on four specific topics was likely to leave pupils bored with science by the time they reached secondary school.

But another teacher told RNZ the document presented a “massive challenge” to teachers and the critics were over-reacting.

“It’s the difference from what’s existed before and the lack of content is what’s scaring people. It’s fear of the unknown,” he said.

Okay. I contrast that with the Minnesota public school curriculum, which delineates the big three science subjects of physics, chemistry, and biology — there’s a year dedicated to each of those, a very traditional approach. But obviously, that’s too broad to be practical, and we also have a more detailed breakdown of what specifically needs to be taught within each.

The NZ schools would provide a different framework. Instead of the traditional topical breakdown, it’s centered around broader themes and questions. Is that bad? The real test is in the details of implementation. They could also have science standards that are identical to Minnesotas, for instance, but placed within an interdisciplinary program (that’s what I see in those five contexts, which are all interrelated and overlapping with physics, chemistry, and biology). It sounds like it would be hard to do well, especially in comparison to well-established curricula, but the devil is in the details, and I’m not seeing any details anywhere, as is unsurprising if this is just a leaked draft.

I guess I’m interested in the fact that three of their five categories (biodiversity, food, energy and water, and infectious diseases) are so solidly built around biology, but at the same time they’re going to have to introduce a strong background in chemistry and physics to do them well. I also feel like you can’t teach those biological aspects without any general biochemistry, and there’s no biochem explicitly spelled out in the overview. It’s got to be there somewhere in the implementation details.

Also, I would object to “at the cutting edge” as far too vague. How do you teach that? What’s the point of discussing deep details if you don’t have the basic foundation?

Two hours of Shaun?

Oh god, two hours of anything on YouTube is absolutely deadly, but in this one, he absolutely shreds Kellie-Jay Keen AKA Posey Parker. You can’t listen to this without realizing that yes, she is a horrible anti-feminist Nazi sympathizer, and you can’t possibly argue against it.

Also, if anyone asks you to name one thing that makes JK Rowling a raging fascist TERF, thanks to this video, you can just point to her promise to use her wealth to shield Kellie-Jay Keen.

Fortunately, it’s mainly just the guy talking, so play it on your headphones like it’s a podcast while you get other stuff done.

Harnessing insomnia for the greater good

My wife and I tend to wake up far too early — just this morning she was complaining that she woke up at 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep. Me, I’m a lazy bones who snoozed until 4:30am.

But here’s a possibility: there are spiders that go hunting for sleeping prey at night, the Enoplognatha, or candy-striped spiders. All we need to do is get our boots on, gulp down some coffee, and drive out to a few places we know of that are frequented by hapless pollinators. Actually, maybe we should be checking out our backyard garden in late evening/early morning.

You know, you could help out, too. They’re pretty little spiders.

I hope William Deresiewicz never tries to defend me

He starts his little essay with an observation he claims is true.

“The army of unfuckable hate nerds”—Marc Maron’s term for the mass of young men who pollute the internet with their misogyny. “They play video games all day,” the comedian said on his podcast, “then they watch MMA, then they spend the evening jerking off to … porn, then they put a few hours” into attacking women online.

He’s right, of course. There are hordes of these young men (and, no doubt, of not-so-young ones). They congregate on Twitter, in comment threads, on forums and platforms like Reddit, Discord, Kiwi Farms, and 8kun, the successor to 8chan. They trade in misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and assorted other hatreds. Their words are violent and vile.

OK, but I would have gone on to qualify that with a “not all men,” because I do think he’s talking about a small vocal minority of horrible young men. That’s not Deresiewicz’s tack, though. Instead, he’s going to ask his readers to sympathize with them, because — brace yourself, he’s going to merge with the mob of misogynists — women are bad and have it so easy.

Any young woman who is even moderately attractive will be courted, complimented, paid attention to, by women as well as men. Older men will buy them things. People will hang on their words even when they aren’t interesting and laugh at their jokes even when they aren’t funny. They will have entry into places—private clubs, backstage after a show—young men can only press their noses against. They will be able to advance professionally by batting their eyelashes at powerful men. Young men, meanwhile—those losers, those loners, those apes—are left to pick their psychic zits on the periphery.

There’s more. Young women can have sex whenever they want. For most young men, persuading a woman to sleep with them is like trying to crack a safe. You understand that it’s theoretically possible, but you have no idea how to do it. Which means that you’re stuck with your hard-on. Unfuckable? No one needs to tell you that. You are unfucked: unwanted, unattractive; in the most literal sense, unloved.

Wow. No wonder he saw truth in Maron’s description. It’s because he was one of those awful women-hating young men, and he never outgrew it! He’s unable to see the world through the eyes of the women he describes, a world where they are rewarded for being subservient and dependent on older men, where they can advance by clinging to the coattails of men, where they are expected to submit to sex at will with men who might kill them.

I was a young loser once, too, but I managed to get over it by not thinking of women as bodies to be exploited, but as my peers who were trying as best as they could to make it through life. There are no excuses for “misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and assorted other hatreds.” But for Deresiewicz, the problem now is misandry. After stereotyping young women as having it easy, he thinks the solution is that we have to stop stereotyping young men and treat them with love and respect. Sure. Too bad he has no respect to offer women.

Man, Deresiewicz just let his ugly self hang out exposed, thinking that more misogyny would justify young men’s misogyny. It just doesn’t work that way.

Rich people poison everything they touch

This might just be the final straw for me. The head Twit is pissed off and flinging lawsuits at Mark Zuckerberg for launching Threads, the Twitter alternative, and since they called off the childish plan to fight each other, now Musk has an even dumber suggestion.

Look. Guys. You’re both toxic to your brand. We all want to see less of you, not more. Musk only appeals to weird libertarian Nazis and people who have fallen for his techie facade; Zuckerberg is a dead-eyed charisma void beloved of racist grandmas. The more you put your faces on your social media service, the more I’m going to attach unpleasant associations to using that service.

I’m still on Twitter, for now, but not happy about it. I’m on Threads, unenthusiastically, but I can’t link to my pzmyers account there because, for unfathomable reasons, Threads, like Instagram, is only supposed to be used on your phone. I prefer Mastodon right now, because there are no billionaires marking their territory there.

I think I’ll just hunker down on Pharyngula. Bring back RSS!