Nick Bostrom wrote an email

Two of them, actually, the second to repudiate the first. They’re both pretty bad.

One of the world’s most celebrated philosophers has apologized for writing a racist email in which he used an appalling racial slur and said he believed it was “true” that “Blacks are more stupid than whites.”

Before we get to the flaming racist bits, I have to question that. “One of the world’s most celebrated philosophers”? Nick Bostrom? Seriously? He’s a bloodless weirdo who writes bizarre fantasy stories about the world being a simulation that seems to be mainly taken seriously by Libertarian Silicon Valley tech-bros. Is he really a celebrated philosopher? Or a fringe goofball who caught the imagination of a tiny group of rich dudes? Let me know, philosophers. And if that’s true, you all have some in-house cleanup to do.

Anyway, snapping back to the content…Bostrom was dismayed to learn that someone was snooping around in the archives of an old listserv he participated in, and was rushing to pre-empt the disclosure of some ugly things he shared 26 years ago. Among these unpleasant exposed bits of rubbish, which he’d intended to share with only the cozy fellow white dudes of this listserv, was this bit about “offensive communication styles,” where, as an example, he wrote:

Blacks are more stupid than whites.

I like that sentence and think it is true.

He then goes on to say that he thinks it probable that black people have a lower IQ than mankind in general (which is weird in itself — aren’t black people part of mankind?), and throws in a racial slur. He then explains his point:

My point is that while speaking with the provocativeness of unabashed objectivity would be appreciated by me and many other persons on this list, it may be a less effective strategy in communicating with some of the people “out there”. I think it is laudable if you accustom people to the offensiveness of truth, but be prepared that you may suffer some personal damage.

Please note precisely what he is saying: here is what he really believes, but it wouldn’t be expedient to say it in public. Honesty is admirable, but only if it is strategic, and otherwise, DON’T SAY THE QUIET PARTS OUT LOUD. But now, uh-oh, the normies are uncovering the stuff they weren’t supposed to here, and it’s time to cover his butt.

That was the message a quarter century ago. Now that it’s being exposed, yeah, it’s butt-covering time. That’s the whole point of Nick Bostrom’s new email, which you can read at the link. It’s an interesting exercise in loudly repudiating your old views while not actually repudiating them. He announces in bold:

I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago. It does not accurately represent my views, then or now. The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time, within 24 hours; and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.

OK, good, now stop. Stop, I said. Shut up! Dear god, why do you have to keep on babbling on, undercutting your own repudiation? Yeah, he did not shut up. After listing all the charities he donates to (see? He really is a good person), he decides to expand on that black IQ business.

Are there any genetic contributions to differences between groups in cognitive abilities? It is not my area of expertise [So shut the fuck up already!], and I don’t have any particular interest in the question [So disinterested he can’t shut up about it]. I would leave it to others, who have more relevant knowledge, to debate whether or not in addition to environmental factors, epigenetic or genetic factors play any role.

That’s how he “rejects utterly” his racist ideas from 26 years ago…by saying, oh gosh, I don’t really know, maybe my more racist friends ought to talk about it a lot more.

Then he goes on to ask, What about eugenics? Do I support eugenics? Hold on there. The old email doesn’t say anything about eugenics — why do you suddenly feel the need to go on and on about it? Are there some other emails you haven’t told us about where you talk about policy to take care of inferior races that you’re feeling guilty about? Really, you should definitely shut up.

If you’re curious about his position on eugenics, he is in favor of some uses and against others, which fits perfectly with his declaration of complete repudiation and utter rejection. It’s just more waffly shit.

So we’re now left to make a choice: should we believe his old email, which argues that you should like to hide your offensive views from us people “out there,” or should we believe his new email that claims his offensive views are totally false while being unable to simply say so?

It’s like a philosophical dilemma that is trivially easy to solve!

How do you tell someone their dad was a world-class jerk?

It’s a familiar story about Svante Pääbo being awarded the Nobel prize for his work on sequencing ancient DNA. It’s all very interesting, but I’ve heard it many times before…and then it gets upstaged by a tale from his personal life which I did not know about.

Behind the scientific success story is also one of considerable personal challenge. “My father had two families and we were the undisclosed one, the other was the official one. My father would show up on Saturdays, have coffee or lunch with me and my mum and then disappear again.”

WAIT, WHAAAT? Your father kept you as his ‘secret’ family?

His mother, Karin, who died in 2013, would have been “proud and thrilled” about his prize, he says. She came to Sweden from Estonia in 1944, escaping the Soviet invasion, and overcame linguistic and financial barriers to become a chemist.

The fact that his father, Sune Bergström, a biochemist, was himself awarded the Nobel prize (also for physiology or medicine) in 1982 for his work on prostaglandins, had little influence on Pääbo’s own scientific path he says. “Only to the extent that my mother met him through her work. It was rather her great fascination with science that was transmitted to me. She hugely encouraged my curiosity and supported me when I changed from medicine to natural sciences. She was by far the greater influence.”

When his father received the award in Stockholm, he was a graduate student in Uppsala and followed the ceremony on television.

“I had a different surname to him and only very few people even knew we were related,” he says. It wasn’t so much having to keep his famous father secret from his colleagues that was painful to him, “rather that his other, ‘official’ son knew nothing about us. We had several intense rows about it. I even threatened to seek out his family and explain it to them. So my father said he would tell them, but it never came to that,” he recalls.

In 2014 he told the Observer his father’s other family found out when Bergström died in 2005. “It was only then my half-brother learned about me. Fortunately he adjusted and we get on all right,” Pääbo said.

That is so fucked up, and Bergström sounds like a terrible father. That had to have left a few scars.

The things we don’t do in lab

I’ve told the story of Leeuwenhoek’s prudishiness to my students in the past — it’s amusing that the father of microbiology, who had horrified the public with the discovery of ‘animalcules’ living in drinking water, was himself disgusted by what came out of his own body, and was horrified that semen contained squiggly squirmy little creatures. He even wrote to the Royal Society to say he wouldn’t mind if his discovery was suppressed.

“If your Lordship should consider that these observations may disgust or scandalise the learned, I earnestly beg your Lordship to regard them as private and to publish or destroy them as your Lordship sees fit.”

Then there was the bit where he was practically falling all over himself to assure everyone that his sample came from proper conjugal relations, not from the sin of onanism or by any other less than blessed mechanism. It was weird, man.

“Without being snotty, Leeuwenhoek (the ‘van’ is an affectation he adopted later on) was not trained as an experimental thinker,” explained Matthew Cobb, a British zoologist and author of the book “Generation: The Seventeeth Century Scientists Who Unraveled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth.” Cobb recalled by email that when Royal Society Secretary Henry Oldenburg asked Leeuwenhoek to look at semen, the Dutch draper initially did not reply “because he felt it was ‘unseemly.'” Even though he eventually overcame his reservations, Leeuwenhoek added so many caveats to his semen research that it is clear he remained somewhat uncomfortable.

“He reassured the Royal Society that he had not obtained the sample by any ‘sinful contrivance’ but by ‘the excess which Nature provided me in my conjugal relations,'” Cobb explained. “He wrote that a mere ‘six heartbeats’ after ejaculation, he found ‘a vast number of living animalcules.” A few months later, he wrote the aforementioned letter saying that he would not at all mind if his discovery was suppressed. After all, in addition to being grossed out, Leeuwenhoek was not under the impression that he had found anything special.

Unfortunately, after laughing at such Puritanism in lecture, I once went to lab and discovered that a student had made a quick trip to the lavatory and made his own slide, which he proudly showed off in class. I had to be the modern prude and explain that we discouraged the collection of human fluids in lab because they are a source of infection and contamination, and handed him a bottle of 70% alcohol and told him to sterilize all the gear he was using and dispose of his sample in the biological waste container.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is the governor of Arkansas now

It sort of tells you all you need to know about the Republicans of Arkansas — that they would elect a whiny, lying, thin-skinned mouthpiece for the status quo with no administrative experience to a high position. What’s even more revealing, though, are her first acts in office.

Within hours of being sworn in as the new governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order Tuesday banning the term “Latinx” from official use in the state government.

It is one of the first, if not the first, executive order of its kind, Tabitha Bonilla, an associate professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University, told NBC News.

It was one of seven orders signed by Sanders, a Republican, right after taking the oath. The other ones focused on prohibiting Arkansas schools from teaching critical race theory, budgeting and spending as well as other government affairs.

That seems petty, that the first thing she does is have a snit over what some people call themselves. We must police the language, apparently, and that means dictating what words may be spoken and written in her presence, probably all in the name of free speech. It’s all about the “anti-woke agenda”.

For Ed Morales, the author of the book “Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture,” the governor’s seemingly sudden interest to ban the term Latinx — which is often derided by conservatives and debated among some Latinos — speaks to “this anti-woke agenda” the Republican Party has increasingly adopted.

“It is something that seems to be tied to things that they object to, which is really anything that prioritizes marginalized people and marginalized points of view,” Morales said.

Anti-woke is just another way of saying white supremacy. Every little thing she does is going to be about white supremacy, as you can tell from her first priorities.

The Science Fair experience

Today, I have witnessed abominations of science. So many experiments shoe-horned into the model of “The Effect of X on Y,” which is fine, but then you discover that they didn’t actually change X, or that nothing happened to Y, so they looked at Z instead. So many exercises in the obvious. Trivial phenomena measured, no thought to the underlying mechanisms considered. Experiments whipped together in a day. Tables of data with no assessment of variation, where you were lucky to see a mean reported.

I gave them all “A”s.

What else can you do when you ask a kid why they even did this experiment, and their answer is, “I don’t know, I like to do X, and I wanted to see what happened.” Gold star, kiddo, you understand science. That was exactly the right answer. Keep doing that!

Also gratifying: the kid who tested different kinds of stain removers, and hypothesized that the one he saw advertised the most would be most effective. They were all the same! Another gold star for concluding that maybe advertisers lied.

Big ups to the kid who had me baffled with his experiment — why would wheel size matter for his mousetrap car, when they are all propelled by exactly the same amount of force? He clearly explained that the design meant the axle would make the same number of rotations no matter the wheel size, therefore…oh, now I get it. Well done.

All of the students were well-prepared and gave solid summaries of their experiments, and I think I have to give a round of applause to the 7th & 9th grade science teachers at Morris Area High School, who really know their stuff.

That was fun! I should do it again next year.

Plumbing the depths of gullibility

I was reading some of Elon Musk’s claims from July, and marveling at how much he gets away with.

“Mars may be a fixer upper of a planet, but it has great potential!” the billionaire wrote.

User @PPathole responded, asking Musk what he believes is the “timeframe for creating a self-sustaining civilization” there.

“20 years? Self-sustaining meaning not relying/[dependent] on Earth for supplies,” he said.

“20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential,” the Tesla co-founder replied. “Assumes transferring ~100k each rendezvous and ~1M total people needed.”

I goggled at that exchange. Such blithe confidence! Where were those numbers coming from? He seems to believe plopping one million people (as if he could) onto the surface of Mars will trigger some miraculous auto-catalysis that will solve all the biological and engineering problems that he can’t even imagine. Throw enough people at this hostile world and they’ll figure everything out for him.

I don’t know that he actually believes in that. He seems to be an autonomous hype machine.

But then I wondered, are there actually people out there who listen to Musk and don’t constantly think, “that’s bullshit”? Are you one of them? I’ve never met a Musk true-believer, but if they exist at all, they’d be fascinating to have a conversation with…until it got too frustrating. Speak up! Explain in the comments how MuskMath works.

And finally, I wondered how a credible journalist could quote that claim without instantly raising objections (I know, it’s a Fox News link, so it’s a purely hypothetical credibility.) The commenters on that article, with a few exceptions, certainly are gung-ho, and amusingly, many are complaining that they are so old that 20 years is unattainable. Again, if you’re out there, explain here how you would support the claim. I know, it’s a bit like jumping into a shark tank, but hey, you’re the one who’d provide the math and engineering background.

As a starting point, let’s begin with a simpler example. You’ve been granted a large chunk of Antarctica as a gift (and a generous exception to international law), and have been able to lease a fleet of cruise ships, with a capacity of 5000 people each. You load them up, and make 200 trips from ports around the world, dropping them off on a rocky beach in Antarctica, along with tents and prefab buildings. How long until you have a self-sustaining colony that is sending profits back to you? How long until the distress calls go out and you have to rescue the survivors?

I’ve often wondered how, if erecting self-sustaining colonies is so easy, we haven’t been eagerly plundering our southern-most continent, which, while possibly a bit inhospitable, does have the little amenities of air and water, both lacking on Mars.

Shouldn’t we also consider the possibility that this is all an improbable fantasy of total civilian control by a breed of ignorant oligarchs, anyway?

Oh no! Classes begin one week from today!

Also, candidate visits for our chemistry position start in one week.

My genetics class is fairly well organized except for one thing: the stocks of brown (bw) eyed flies have almost completely crapped out. That’s always been a sickly line, but this year they’ve been pathetic. I’m desperately trying to nurse a handful of flies into vigor, and if they don’t get it together real soon now, I’m going to flush them all and order fresh flies. I’ve got a backup plan to do a different cross to keep the students busy for 6 weeks or so, but it’s also more difficult experiment, and I prefer to do the bw x st cross as a warmup.

We also have the board of regents visiting in March, and they’re being invited to sit in on the lab. Our students aren’t very happy with the regents as it is, and if they use it as an opportunity to ask pointed questions, I’m going to allow it. I’ll probably encourage it.

Today and tomorrow are the local high school science fair. I’m one of the judges. That should be interesting, around here we get a mix of brilliant kids with creative ideas and kids who like an excuse to shoot things.

I’m feeling mildly distracted right now — and this stupid cold, while gradually abating, isn’t helping much.

I believe they are all witches

There is no bar too low. A recently elected Republican representative from Florida, Anna Paulina Luna — you know this is a poor start to anything — is squabbling with a competitor, and has sued him to get him to retract defamatory claims.

A letter obtained by The Daily Beast reveals that the Florida Republican retained the high-powered law firm Holland & Knight to go after a would-be rival who leveled a series of outlandish allegations against Luna on the Bubba the Love Sponge radio show in the fall.

The letter demands that Matt Tito, a pal of Roger Stone who mulled challenging Luna in a primary, apologize on video for his accusations, which include claims that Luna was fired from a job—and that she had a sexual liaison with Rep. Matt Gaetz.

Oh, what a world…that a show called Bubba the Love Sponge would have any credibility, and that it would even exist, is an indictment of the Florida radio audience. OK, but I agree, an accusation that one had sex with that slimeball Matt Gaetz is grossly insulting. Focus on that…oh wait, she’s more concerned about a different accusation?

“You said that Ms. Luna (a devout Christian) practices witchcraft,” Lisko added.

“You are hereby demanded to publicly and immediately retract each and every defamatory statement you made about Ms. Luna on the show,” Lisko continued. “Because you do not have the ability to distribute your retraction widely on your social media, you are demanded to apologize and retract your statements on the Bubba the Love Sponge Show or by making a retraction and apology video that you send to me that Ms. Luna will distribute via her social media.”

Tito is not backing down. He claims to have evidence that she is a witch based on hearsay statements from “MAGA figures,” so we’re already relying on dubious sources.

Tito claimed he learned about Luna’s purported background from other MAGA figures.

According to Tito, Hispanics for Trump associate Paloma Zuniga said that “Luna practices witchcraft.”

“That is where I heard that from,” Tito said. “She puts spells on people.”

Their reasoning is remarkable.

Another failed California Republican congressional hopeful, Omar Navarro, suggested the unsubstantiated rumors must be accurate because so many people were repeating them.

“It has got to be true to a certain extent,” he told The Daily Beast. “It’s fair enough to say that it’s spread among people in the Republican Party.”

So Ted Cruz actually is the Zodiac killer? All it takes is enough people saying something is true for it to be true? If enough of us simply say that all Republicans are witches, they’ll all be run out of office, or they’ll use their sorcerous powers to enchant the public into believing them.

Who is to say that last possibility isn’t already true? Witches, every one.

The NYTimes hired a new opinion columnist?

Given their track record, pardon me for expecting the worst.

Also, hey look, they hired David French, meeting my very low expectations.

French served as a senior counsel for ADF, a legal advocacy group that has opposed any expansion of LGBTQ+ civil rights as an attack on so-called “religious freedom.” ADF has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

During his time as an ADF counsel, he defended a Georgia graduate student who sued her university after being told that her anti-gay “Christian beliefs” were incompatible with the standards of her desired profession as a psychological counselor. The student considered homosexuality an “immoral” “lifestyle choice.”

French signed onto a 2017 religious right document called the “Nashville Statement,” which said God designed marriage to be only between a man and a woman. The document also stated “it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism,” and called transgender identity and homosexuality a sin and “at odds with God.”

I seriously wonder how their hiring meetings operate. I’ve participated in a few here at the university, and they always being with a meeting with HR, where they go over our criteria, which are typically stuff like, “must teach organic chemistry,” with an HR person to remind us that nothing about our search criteria excludes women and minorities, and then when we’ve got a preliminary list of candidate for phone interviews, that list is sent to HR where they inspect it for bias (“why is your list only white men?”), and after we winnow the list down over the phone, we send it to HR for approval before we invite anyone for an in-person interview, while carefully justifying each exclusion (“did you drop this person from the pool because they have an accent?” “Heck no, it’s because they want to do quantum neurochemistry and we don’t have the facilities.”) Every thing is about making sure we do all our selection on the basis of assessment of ability.

The NY Times, on the other hand, seems to have a simple process in which they look for a conservative white dude, and then a Sulzberger rubber-stamps the name. “Oh, he’s a gormless bigot? Love him already.”

They still pay David Brooks for his babbling. Every choice they made after that is suspect.