What lesson should I learn?

I’m still awfully sick with a nasty ugly cold, but I showed up in class today to teach, feeling like I have no choice in the matter. Precautions taken: I wore a mask (I always wear a mask anyway), I canceled all personal appointments where I’d have to meet with students one-on-one, and I’m just generally staying away from all contact. I can’t imagine canceling class, which would have all kinds of downstream effects — canceling the second week of class? For a bad cold? Why not just abort the semester, you wimp?

I ended up just channeling my inner university administrator. We don’t care about no infectious disease, we’re about delivering product to our customers, so damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

I was providing synchronous zoom access, and about a half dozen students were taking advantage of it. If a bunch of students come sniffling up to me in the next week complaining about feeling as bad as I do right now, I will be fully sympathetic and do what I can to accommodate them. But otherwise, I just have to follow the American model of handling disease.

The religion that is destroying America

Sometimes, I too can swaddle myself in cherished delusions and believe for a time that the world might get better. Look! The “nones” are gradually increasing in number, and less than half the American population denies evolution! The trends are going the right way! Then, unfortunately, I have to read some uncomfortable facts.

Pentecostalism, broadly speaking, now has as many as 600 million adherents worldwide, or more than a quarter of all Christians. It has a huge presence in Brazil, where it played a decisive role in the rise of the populist demagogue Jair Bolsonaro; in Hungary, where it helped elevate the explicitly illiberal Viktor Orbán; and in Guatemala, where Pentecostal evangelicalism was exported from the United States to counter the influence of the Second Vatican Council and the rise of liberation theology. It is surging among migrant workers in Gulf states, where some Pentecostal networks provide key services to the disempowered, and also in Nigeria, where human trafficking organizations have infiltrated certain Pentecostal networks. From the perspective of some global leaders of the movement, the United States looks like an aging and corrupt capital—the kind of place where missionaries must go as much as the place where they come from.

The evidence suggests that their timing is good. “Pentecostalism represents a rare feat in American religion—a tradition that is growing,” according to Ryan Burge, assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. “The Assemblies of God, which stands as the largest Pentecostal denomination, has seen a 50 percent increase in membership over the last three decades, while every other prominent Protestant denomination has seen their membership decline precipitously.”

Katherine Stewart calls them “Spirit Warrior Christians”, and we’ve all seen them in action. They’re the wackaloons who go into hysterics about the gays and the trans, who serve as prayer leaders and spiritual consultants to Republican politicians, and regard deep ignorance as a good qualification to serve in government. They are best defined by who they hate.

The demons that merit the emphasis of reactionary Pentecostals and neo-charismatics today often have to do with the belief that the secular liberal world is infested with “the LGBT agenda” and, in particular, “transgender ideology.” Whatever one makes of the policy details, considered abstractly, the relentless focus on this single issue is an expression of hostility toward a perceived liberal establishment. If evil has a face, it is that of the “expert,” the professor, and perhaps above all the liberal nonbeliever who urges everybody to pursue their own ideas of good and base their moral code on the principles of empathy and rationalism, rather than biblical truth.

You talkin’ about me?

It’s way past time we started doing something about the root causes of this lunacy, and it’s not about evangelizing atheism at people. It’s about correcting the inequalities in society.

The most fruitful line of investigation and response has to focus on the root causes of the religious transformation. Religion in America is starting to look more like religion in Brazil and Guatemala because America, in some aspects, is starting to resemble Brazil and Guatemala: increasingly unequal, bitterly divided, corrupt, rife with disinformation, and unstable. If we want people to choose different gods, we might think about tackling the conditions that lead them to prefer one kind over another.

The oligarchs have plowed the land of America, and found it fertile.

The eugenicists are always oozing out of the woodwork

What do you mean, “enhancement”? Who are you to decide what’s better?

Émil Torres explores the relationship between long-termism/effective altruism and scientific racism.

longtermism, which emerged out of the effective altruism (EA) movement over the past few years, is eugenics on steroids. On the one hand, many of the same racist, xenophobic, classist and ableist attitudes that animated 20th-century eugenics are found all over the longtermist literature and community. On the other hand, there’s good reason to believe that if the longtermist program were actually implemented by powerful actors in high-income countries, the result would be more or less indistinguishable from what the eugenicists of old hoped to bring about. Societies would homogenize, liberty would be seriously undermined, global inequality would worsen and white supremacy — famously described by Charles Mills as the “unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today” — would become even more entrenched than it currently is.

I would have predicted the connection long ago. EA trips a whole bunch of red flags in my head.

  • The incessant chatter about IQ. We don’t know what IQ is, other than a number generated by an IQ test, so making the concept central to your philosophy is a bit like building your reason for living on phrenology. Sure, you can actually measure the bumps on your skull and use scientific-looking tools like calipers and quantitatively calculate their dimensions, but does it mean anything about how your brain works? No, it does not. At the first mention of IQ, run away.

  • The lack of relevant qualifications. Look at the big guns of EA: Bostrom, MacAskill, Yudkowsky, Alexander, Hanson (I’ll even toss in Sam Harris, although he doesn’t seem to be deeply involved in EA). Do any of them have any background in genetics at all? They do not. Yet they go on and on about dygenesis and eugenesis and trends in populations that have to be countered, or they defend Charles Murray’s (also not a geneticist) racist interpretations of traits of whole populations. This problem goes all the way back to the founders of the eugenics movement, who weren’t geneticists at all, like Francis Galton, or immediately used the crudist, most primitive forms of Mendelism to justify bad science, like Davenport.

  • Transhumanism as a tool for improving humanity. I have some sympathy for the idea of modifying genes and bodies by individuals; that’s a fine idea, I wish we had greater capabilities for that. Where I have problems is when it’s seen as a method of social engineering. Underlying it all is a set of value judgments defining how we should regard diversity in our fellow human beings. If you’re arguing we ought to use gene therapy or drugs to eradicate obesity, or autism, or color-blindness, or whatever, you’ve already decided that a whole lot of existing attributes of the human population are dysgenic or undesirable, yet you don’t know what all the correlates of those traits might be. You’re also viewing those people through a lens that highlights everything about them that you personally consider bad.

    The thing is, we’re all born with a range of traits that are basically random, within certain limits. Everything about you, all 20,000 genes, is a roll of the dice. A philosophy that does not insist that every combination deserves equal respect, equal justice, and equal compassion is an anti-human philosophy, because it denies a fundamental property of our biology.

Those are just the general red flags that can be thrown by a whole suite of common ideas. EA throws one that I would never have imagined anyone would take seriously, this bizarre idea that we ought to consider the happiness of hypothetical, imaginary human beings far more important than the happiness of real individuals in the here and now. I can’t even…this is crazy cultist bullshit. I do not understand how anyone can fall for it. Except…yeah, they’re using the universal excuses of the modern Enlightenment.

And no one should be surprised that all of this is wrapped up in the same language of “science,” “evidence,” “reason” and “rationality” that pervades the eugenics literature of the last century. Throughout history, white men in power have used “science,” “evidence,” “reason” and “rationality” as deadly bludgeons to beat down marginalized peoples. Effective altruism, according to the movement’s official website, “is the use of evidence and reason in search of the best ways of doing good.” But we’ve heard this story before: the 20th-century eugenicists were also interested in doing the most good. They wanted to improve the overall health of society, to eliminate disease and promote the best qualities of humanity, all for the greater social good. Indeed, many couched their aims in explicitly utilitarian terms, and utilitarianism is, according to Toby Ord, one of the three main inspirations behind EA. Yet scratch the surface, or take a look around the community with unbiased glasses, and suddenly the same prejudices show up everywhere.

“Science,” “evidence,” “reason” and “rationality” are supposed to be tools to help lead you to the truth, but it’s all too easy to decide you already possess the truth, and then they transform into tools for rationalization. That’s not a good thing. You can try to rationalize any damn fool nonsense, and that’s the antithesis of the scientific approach.

I hope I don’t wait 10 years to bust loose

I’m 65. Barry Mehler is 75, and he’s still teaching. Well, he was. After he gave this introduction to one of his classes, his university fired him.

I agree with all that he said (except I don’t use a Calvinist predestination method to assign grades). I did chastise my students for not masking up this year, without the profanity. I guess I have an aspirational example to follow.

So they fired him. After a legal wrangle, he settled for $95,000, which is a nice retirement payout. Another aspiration to meet.

I guess the administration is going to have to keep a close eye on me over the next few years. I’ve already been called to the carpet once for expressing my contempt for the university’s cowardly COVID policy in public.

Fog, two different kinds

Here’s the pretty kind. We’ve been getting dense fog and sub-zero temperatures, which does interesting things to the trees.

Then there’s the horrible kind, brain fog. I thought I was over my cold, but it has come roaring back with stuffed up sinuses, a bad cough and sniffles, and some kind of brain goo. I’ve been struggling with it this weekend, just trying to get Monday’s lecture in shape, and it took far, far longer than it ought to.

One consolation: I ran out to the store to pick up some cold relief and cough drops and the like, and the place had been cleaned out! Bare shelves! I couldn’t get anything, but at least I can tell myself the entire goddamn town is suffering with me.

Every state should do this

At least Minnesota has the right priorities.

Today, lawmakers in the Minnesota House of Representatives voted to pass HF 1, the Protect Reproductive Options (PRO) Act. This bill protects Minnesotans’ right to contraception, the right to carry a pregnancy to term, and the right to abortion, and ensures the right to privacy for personal reproductive health decisions. It also prevents interference by politicians who seek to enact or defend medically unnecessary barriers to comprehensive reproductive health care.
…
The bill enshrines protections for all reproductive health care, including but not limited to contraception, sterilization, preconception care, maternity care, abortion care, family planning and fertility services, and counseling regarding reproductive health care. The bill now awaits action from the Senate.

Also, keep it up, Leslie Jones.

You know you’re in a fascist state when they plan to arrest librarians

Right next door to me is the state of North Dakota. They’re up to no good.

Books containing “sexually explicit” content — including depictions of sexual or gender identity — would be banned from North Dakota public libraries under legislation that state lawmakers began considering Tuesday.

The GOP-dominated state House Judiciary Committee heard arguments but did not take a vote on the measure, which applies to visual depictions of “sexually explicit” content and proposes up to 30 days imprisonment for librarians who refuse to remove the offending books.

You might be wondering what the libraries are peddling. Hard core porn? BDSM? Incest how-tos? Nah. The Republicans are happy to tell you what disturbs them.

House Majority Leader Mike Lefor, of Dickinson, introduced the bill and said public libraries currently contain books that have “disturbing and disgusting” content, including ones that describe virginity as a silly label and assert that gender is fluid.

But…virginity is a silly label! And gender is clearly fluid! He goes on to whine that being exposed to such ideas diminishing conservative myths causes addiction, poor self esteem, devalued intimacy, increasing divorce rates, unprotected sex among young people and poor well-being. I would argue instead that insisting that a person’s worth is measured by the presence of a hymen, or that non-heterosexual desires make you a bad person, is far more damaging to people’s well-being.

Another thing that bugs me is that borders aren’t magic. Minnesota is generally progressive, but that’s largely thanks to the urban population on the east side of the state. I live in far western Minnesota, practically next door to the Dakotas, and I suspect the general sentiment of the rural population here is far more sympathetic to the North Dakota frame of mind. It makes me much less inclined to associate with many of the townies, and deepens the town-gown divide around here. It’s hard to get to know your non-university neighbors when you’re afraid of turning up that Dakota flavor of bigotry and ignorance.

Stock up on boxes!

My brother and I, as kids, were once stopped by the police and told we could go to jail because we’d found a couple of large cardboard boxes and were rolling around in them, crashing into each other. Refrigerator boxes were the best! We sheepishly ended our fun and took our boxes to a nearby dumpster. We should have told them we were training to combat the Skynet takeover (although, this was before the Terminator movie, and would only have been appreciated if they understood we were also time travelers from the future.)

But I’m serious. Large cardboard boxes, or possibly a pine tree, are all we need to defeat the rogue AIs, as explained in this book.

When this thing shows up at your door, you better have a cardboard box handy, or you’re going to have to turn a lot of somersaults.

It’ll be great when they work out the quirks in AI

For instance, the Arabian Journal of Geosciences has a problem: their articles are too obviously fake.

Some titles of the farkakte research: “Simulation of sea surface temperature based on non-sampling error and psychological intervention of music education”; “Distribution of earthquake activity in mountain area based on embedded system and physical fitness detection of basketball”; “The stability of rainfall conditions based on sensor networks and the effect of psychological intervention for patients with urban anxiety disorder.” A complete list of the retracted papers can be found here.

They read a bit like a college student throwing around big words to cover up a lack of understanding. Though purportedly written by humans, the content of each paper definitely reads as if it were put together by a computer that doesn’t quite grasp speech patterns or grammar. The papers are filled with redundancies and generally lack logic.

Right away, I noticed a problem: they should have used the more formal German “verkakte” rather than the alternative Yiddish spelling. Oh, right, and the paper titles are absurd, too.

I see two sources of problems: institutions that demand frequent publications, even where it isn’t warranted, and extremely lazy journal editors who rubberstamp everything.

As amusing (or alarming) as the idea of earthquakes being connected to basketball might be, the screwup highlights issues in science publishing that let farcical research slip into the realm of real work. As highlighted by the Chronicle of Higher Education in August, when the 400-odd papers in the geosciences journal got expressions of concern attached to them, many suspicious papers appear to have been written by scholars affiliated with Chinese institutions, where researchers are incentivized (sometimes financially) to publish in notable journals and where many doctoral students must publish a paper before graduation. The founder and editor-in-chief of the Arabian Journal of Geosciences told the Chronicle at the time that he reads every paper published in the journal each month (which would mean about 10 papers per day, including weekends), and that he thinks the fabricated research got into the journal through hacking.

Sure. Abdullah M. Al-Amri, editor-in-chief of the journal, reads every submission, and all those ridiculous papers must have been hacked into place. He reads every article, except he never takes a look at the journal once it’s been published. And he never reads the correspondence from legit researchers who point out the kind of crap getting splattered all over the pages. He just failed to notice that “Structure of plain granular rock mass based on motion sensor and movement evaluation of dancers” got published.

Just wait until Chinese researchers discover ChatGPT. We desperately need our pseudoscientific garbage to be more readable.