Ceci n’est pas une définition

I put a fairly substantial effort in critiquing that awful paper by Krylov and Co, and now my efforts are rewarded with a rebuttal by Lee Jussim. Oh no. I tremble in fear. But I will bravely acknowledge that his criticisms.

Ole PZ makes a zillion different points, nearly all wrong regarding our paper, but here I’ll just focus on one as illustration. He claims:

The first big problem, and one that plagues the whole paper, is that merit isn’t actually defined.

Ole PZ is a bit familiar for someone I don’t know, but I’ll overlook it. As he says, I made a zillion different points, so I have to congratulate him on wisely focusing on just one. It must be one that I really got embarrassingly wrong, so no doubt his refutation will be devastating.

He has chosen my claim that there is no definition of merit anywhere in their paper, so I anticipate that he will now quote the section of the paper that clearly defines merit, leaving me crushed and humiliated. I read on, dreading my imminent disgrace, and here it is, the part where he exposes me as someone who wasn’t able to understand their paper. This is where he defines “merit” for us all:

This is Figure 2 from the paper:

Of course, the “importance” of any given discovery, talk or paper may be pretty subjective until the fullness of time has weighed in. As our paper repeatedly acknowledged, scientists’ biases may creep in to influence judgments of merit. Nonetheless, we now know that discoveries that cigarettes cause cancer, that bacteria, not stress, cause ulcers and that genes influence many physical and psychological characteristics are pretty important, each of which was doubted, controversial or even dismissed at the time. It also took some time to discover that certain ideas lack merit (e.g., thalidomide is not safe to administer to women who are or might be pregnant; the implicit association test does not measure “unconscious racism”).

Uh, what?

I was expecting a howitzer shell to land on me and blow all my arguments away…but this is it? A graph with two quantitatively undefined axes, but merit still isn’t defined at all. Instead, we’ve got two additional magic words, importance and strength of evidence, with no explanation of how they’re assessed. How do we determine what is important? That’s the whole question here, and he has just deferred the meaning of merit to a different subjective term, importance, modified by another fuzzy parameter, strength of evidence.

OK, so where’s that definition of merit? This is the best he can do? I guess he instead decided to demonstrate the validity of my point, that merit isn’t actually defined. If it were, he would have trotted it out here.

Instead, we get a paragraph making excuses that merit may be pretty subjective and isn’t always going to be obvious. Great! So my comments must have been pretty accurate.

I’m relieved to have emerged unscathed from that rebuttal, but also disappointed. Why are my opponents always so pathetic? I set myself up with a strong claim, that Jussim noticed, and he wasn’t even able to muster a single logical point against it. Pathetic.

I really didn’t have to type all those words. Apparently I should just reply with a bad graph.

Dear god I hate this

This is terrible. All that graphics arts skill gone to waste as someone tries to illustrated something they don’t understand.

Evolution as a linear path towards a particular, narcissistic goal (of course, it’s all about us!) The implications of a teleological purpose. The self-centeredness. The trimming of diversity. Notice how everyone under genus Homo is stereotypically male — all the prior stages may have been masculine in the artist’s mind, too, but it’s hard to tell. This is going to fuel so many continued misconceptions.

At least the conclusion mentions that “Humans are still evolving,” but they should have shut up with that, rather than making predictions. Why should we all converge on a “‘Great Averaging’ where continuous, international mixing will create an average of all current physical differences”? Will drift and mutation stop? Will all population structures break down? Do chance and varied environmental pressures disappear, to favor one pattern of humans being “taller, more lightly built, and less aggressive with smaller brains”? Well, maybe the “smaller brains” is a reasonable extrapolation from our current experience.

I see the creator has “two Master of Science degrees (one in Geochemistry/Astrobiology, another in Biomedical Communications).” I can tell evolutionary biology wasn’t one of them.

I guess Dr Who was a documentary

No wonder Tucker Carlson fell for it — UFOs are like the Tardis.

The attorney told DailyMail.com that one alleged recovery, recounted to him by a supposed crash retrieval program insider, involved a 30ft saucer partially embedded in the earth, with some fantastical properties.

‘They tried to hook a bulldozer to it to pull it out. And it pulled out a shape like a pie slice, almost like it was part of the way it was constructed,’ Sheehan said.

‘When it came loose a couple feet, they stopped immediately. They didn’t want to destroy the integrity of the machine.

‘They had a guy go into it. He got in there, and it was as big as a football stadium. It was freaking him out and started making him feel nauseous, he was so disoriented because it was so gigantic inside.

‘It was the size of a football stadium, while the outside was only about 30 feet in diameter.’

Sheehan said that space was not the only warped dimension around the craft.

‘He staggered back out after being in there a couple of minutes, and outside it was four hours later,’ he said. ‘There was all kinds of time distortion and space distortion.’

Oh yeah. I’m convinced. It was in the Daily Mail!

The aliens took over Tucker Carlson’s brain!

Tucker Carlson started a new show on Twitter, of all places. It was ten minutes of Tucker in a barn spouting off conspiracy theories. He has already received a cease-and-desist letter from Fox News, saying he’s under a non-compete agreement.

It’s not going great, in other words.

Here’s his mission. He’s treading on Alex Jones’ toes!

What exactly happened on 9/11? Well, it’s still classified. How did Jeffrey Epstein make all that money. How did he die? How about JFK and so endlessly on.

Also, he’s more like an Art Bell wanna-be. His big story was this one:

Yesterday, for example, a former Air Force officer who worked for years in military intelligence came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. government has physical evidence of crashed, non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft.
…
It was clear he was telling the truth. In other words, UFOs are actually real and apparently so is extraterrestrial life. Now we know. In a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell, the story of the millennium. But in our country, it doesn’t.

He never did have a good handle on the truth.

Goodbye, Tucker. Even if you become popular again, it will be as a crackpot, a joke, a goofball on the fringe that everyone laughs at.

James Watt has been extremely deregulated

Most of you probably don’t remember James Watt. No, not that James Watt, famous 18th century Scottish engineer — you all know about him. I’m talking about James Watt, interior secretary under Reagan in the 1980s, notorious poltroon and anti-environmentalist. Those of us who lived through that era despised him.

Well, he’s dead now, so you don’t need to bother to look him up.

The dumbest way to secede

Minnesota Republicans must be desperately bored. They’ve been steamrolled this year, so they’re itching for something to do. Something…destructive and stupid. So one of them has come up with an idea he calls “The Rocks and Cows Act“.

Representative Matt Grossell (R – Clearbrook) along with fellow Greater Minnesota Representatives have introduced the Rocks and Cows Act. Members with districts along the affected borders have been especially supportive of this bill. This Legislation would create a State Boundary Adjustment Planning Commission to study and make recommendations on a pathway for North and South Dakota to annex desiring counties into their respective borders.

It’s a novel strategy for secession — we’ll let the border counties nibble at the idea, defecting one at a time to North and South Dakota. It would certainly generate an interesting western border for the state! Those are counties full of rural hicks and MAGAts, so they might even go for it. I notice they aren’t proposing that northern counties have the option to secede and join Canada, though.

Economic relief and hearing the voices of rural communities are important goals of this legislation. As taxes continue to raise and decision-making gets centralized around the metro many are looking for some independence. “We are standing up for the future of our families as Minnesota trends towards such extremes on tax and social policy.” Said Rep. Grossell on the motivation for leading the charge on the Rocks and Cows Act.

The economic argument is total nonsense. These are all lightly populated farm counties, and are basically revenue sinks for the state. They pay fewer taxes than the benefits they get from being associated with the rich counties on the east side.

The real game here is resentment of social policies — Minnesota respects gay and trans rights, and is protecting the right to abortion. That’s what the Republicans really hate. The Dakotas are nasty, conservative states with some of the most regressive policies in the country, so only a slimy troll would want to be part of that.

I notice that Grossell represents Clearwater county, which is not on the border (neither is Stevens county, where I live). He’s not going to disappear his constituents out from under his feet, and he’d probably rather not have to commute to work in Bismarck. Hey, you want to be a North Dakotan? Pack up and move there.

By the way, the governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum (who?) has announced his candidacy for the presidency of the USA. He doesn’t stand a chance. He’s another negligible and over-confident nitwit rushing to join the early stampede of wacky nobodies trying to get some attention. He’s also a horrible person.

As governor of the state’s fourth-least populous state, he signed measures this year advancing conservative policies on culture war issues. They include prohibiting schools and government from requiring teachers and employees from referring to transgender people by their preferred pronouns, barring transgender girls and women from competing in women’s sports, and banning abortion with few exceptions up to six weeks’ gestation, before most women know they are pregnant.

That’s what Grossell admires.