This is why administrators don’t teach

Academics get constant training — it seems like every week or two the university trots out a new “module” and duns our email with notifications that we are REQUIRED to take it, and if we defer the training to a more convenient time the notifications don’t stop. It’s a lousy system, but necessary. It’s just that the methods are so poor. For example, this article on sexual harassment in science offers up a few criticisms.

Sexual harassment includes forcing people into sexual activity, giving unwanted sexual attention to someone and making unwanted comments or threats to someone based on their gender. The negative effects of sexual harassment also apply to the people who witness it and the organizations involved. The first thing that experts say needs to be overhauled is traditional sexual harassment training.

The computer-based format of some training modules is familiar to anyone starting a new job, including us. We remember laughable scenarios that were, at best, out of touch with how real people behave, or showed only the most extreme examples of harassment. The training was unrealistic, unmemorable and something to click through as fast as we could. Such passive, simplistic training typically fails, as sociologists Frank Dobbin of Harvard University and Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University found in a Harvard Business Review analysis in 2020.

Training needs to be more in-person, according to experts. People can interact with a live instructor who has specialized knowledge of awkward topics and how to talk effectively about them. The trainers can take the backgrounds and ages of people in the group into account, answer questions in real time, and tailor their program to the organization; what people at a nonprofit might need could be different from workers at a big-box store or in an academic setting. And even in academia, training for scientists who work in the field could be different than for those who work in a lab.

This past weekend, after a week of emails telling me I am REQUIRED to take training in “Fundamentals of Disability Accommodations and Inclusive Course Design,” I did it. It was fundamentally terrible. I am 100% in agreement with the importance of the topic, and I took it very seriously and cleared my calendar and went through this self-paced online program in about an hour and a half. It consisted of a series of simple web pages emphasizing specific points, interspersed with 2-5 minute videos of faculty and students talking about how they solved certain problems. There were also short quizzes (a question or two) occasionally. It was totally trivial. I quickly realized that all I had to do was respect the students and work with them, the core lesson of the exercise, and I’d get everything right. That’s what I want to do, of course, but even if I were a student-hating psychopath, I could have easily breezed right through it all, and gotten my required email notification that I had taken the training and done well.

I’ve taken all the sexual harassment training the university offers, and many others on racial sensitivity and grant management, etc. They’re all the same, screen pages and short canned videos. Like the article says, the “training was unrealistic, unmemorable and something to click through as fast as we could.” It’s unfortunate — they can do better. The best training I had here was on implicit bias, which was not done on a computer, but in a room with other faculty and a specialist who came in and talked to us and answered questions interactively. It also helped in that faculty who were opposed to the whole idea of the training publicly exposed themselves and made for great counter-examples.

I’m just thinking that this is a university, and we have a lot of people who are very good at teaching, yet somehow we have to take these training courses that are the modern equivalent of those horrible filmstrips we had to watch in the 1960s. Imagine if I were to teach my genetics course in the style of these online training courses — I’d be hauled in front of an academic tribunal and chastised severely for my incompetence at my job. You couldn’t even run an online course in any academic subject with this degree of rote key-clicking and low information density pages.

If universities were serious about rooting out and correcting sexual harassment, they have to do a little more than the equivalent of putting a check box online that says “I am not a sexual harasser.” That would take a little more money and investment of expertise, though.

A lesson for parents of trans kids everywhere

The Washington Post has a nice article about Christine Jorgensen, the woman who became famous in the 1950s for her transgender surgery. There’s the usual, expected tales of bigotry — exclusion from bathrooms (that never changes), discrimination, prurient curiosity about her genitals, the New York Post declared that she wasn’t really a woman, etc. — but one thing stood out for me. When she went off to Denmark for her surgery, she informed her parents, and they replied back:

It was also time to tell her parents the reason for her trip, which she had withheld for fear of causing them hurt and confusion. In the letter that was soon to be shared with the rest of America, she reassured them their daughter was “healthier and happier than ever.”

Though her parents struggled to grasp the full meaning, they cabled back: “We love you more than ever.”

Awww. That’s how it should be for everyone — there are a lot of parents today, 70 years later, who need to learn what loving your children involves.

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!