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.
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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.

The stark truth

There I was yesterday, teaching, and one of the first things I told my students was that the pandemic was not over, we all ought to be wearing masks and social distancing, but that the university had decided not to enforce any precautions, and I couldn’t do anything to make them do anything even as simple as wearing a mask. The best I could do is offer to teach the class synchronously over Zoom. Of course I was wearing a mask. I might have been the only person in the building doing so. I know none of the students were. I can’t blame them, since everything from the president of the US to local campus policy is telling them the pandemic is over.

It’s not.

Here’s the truth: the pandemic is not over. It’s much worse than you have been led to believe. And unless you’ve spent the past several years reading scientific studies on the subject, it can be hard to convey just how wrong the public perception of COVID really is. Everything from how it’s spread, to how it’s prevented, to what it does once it’s in your body, is being tragically misunderstood.

None of this is an accident. It’s not your “fault” if you aren’t a virologist, immunologist, epidemiologist, or evolutionary biologist. It’s the job of experts and trusted voices to convey the truth and give you guidance. Not only have they failed at this, they have engaged in an active disinformation campaign dedicated to making the pandemic “disappear”. This has not been the result of a classic caricature of conspiracy — some tiny council of elites, gathered in the shadows to craft policy out of whole cloth. What we’re actually witnessing is the quiet collusion of class interest. This form of conspiracy is a feature of cultural hegemony, and it has aligned itself in direct opposition to public health and scientific reality. A “conspiracy” of this sort takes place in full view of the public. Every actor within it has openly telegraphed motivations that we are all taught to see as acceptable: keeping the current economic system intact at all costs.

From the moment humanity learned of the novel coronavirus, uncertainty swirled. SARS-CoV-2, named for its terrifying viral cousin, seemed to be even worse than SARS: more deadly, more transmissible, better at evading detection. A singular question arose in the minds of two very different classes of people: “How do we survive this?” For one of those classes, the question was literal: how do we avoid being killed by a disease that seems to be spreading and killing invisibly and indiscriminately? For the other class, the question being asked in boardrooms and capitols was really: “Could this dislodge our grip on power?”

That last question is a good one. Who is worrying about power?

One good place to check is the World Economic Forum in Davos, where all the richest and most influential people in the world converge every year to talk about controlling the masses. Are they concerned about dying of COVID? Do they have plans to protect themselves from the virus? They sure do.

The first thing attendees get is a rapid COVID test and an electronic badge. The badge is linked to a conference database that controls a little light that only activates if you pass the test. You will not be admitted to the meeting unless your badge indicates that you’ve taken the daily test and are free of the disease.

Tests are free. Masks are free. The staff are required to wear them, but the rich people are not.

Inside the annual meeting’s venues, areas will be cleaned, disinfected, and ventilated several times a day. Additional state-of-the-art ventilation systems have been installed in areas with restricted air circulation. Hand sanitizers will be widely available throughout the meeting venues.

Similar precautions have been taken in the offices and factories of attendees, to protect the workers. Ha ha, fooled you, of course they’re not expected to do that. That would cost money.

Do the richest people in the world know something you don’t? They certainly do, because they’ve been investing a lot of effort in keeping you ignorant and confused. Otherwise, we might demand unthinkable things like improved air circulation in our classrooms and labs, and a routine testing policy, and required masking with good masks provided by the university (to be fair, the university did provide N95 masks to the faculty last year. We got 3. Just 3.)

Do you realize that you’re an exploited peon yet?

Politics is for the kids who never grew out of high school

I may be old, but I still remember high school. Do you? The cliques, the drama, the petty squabbles, the abusive Mean Girls and jocks? It’s all coming back.

The Republican party supported Herschel Walker because he was a football player, never mind that he was as dumb as a post, and Oz, because he was rich.

They’re handing committee memberships to George Santos, despite the fact that he’s a constitutive liar who cheated his way into office.

It’s clear that the Republicans are the Superficials, the in-group of people who strive to look glossy and fashionable, no matter how dull their minds are. What clinched my recognition that we’re back in high school is that Boebert and Greene are bickering.

The crest of the battle was played out on Jan. 7 in the speaker’s lobby ladies’ room, The Daily Beast reports, when a source says, “Greene questioned Boebert’s loyalty to McCarthy.”

Another source reportedly said that Greene asked Boebert, “You were okay taking millions of dollars from McCarthy, but you refuse to vote for him for Speaker, Lauren?”

Unaware Boebert was in the bathroom when she emerged from the stall, the first source told The Daily Beast that Lauren said to Greene, “Don’t be ugly,” and then “ran out like a little schoolgirl.”

Fighting in the girls’ room. Oh, grow up.

What’s particularly appalling is that Jacinda Ardern is resigning from her position as prime minister of New Zealand. What a contrast.

Ardern won praise for her calm stewardship of the Pacific nation through a number of major events, including the coronavirus pandemic, a volcanic eruption and the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack. She spearheaded legislation to ban military-style semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles just six days after the attack, in which more than 50 people were killed.

Can you imagine a Boebert or a Greene in a similar position? Oh hell no.

I want a transfer to that other high school on the far side of the Pacific Ocean.