We have a pet bold jumper in a terrarium in our kitchen, and it’s true — they are pleasant little animals, highly interactive, and not at all threatening.
Our bold jumper might be flattered by this video, except for the bit where he talks about the spider’s tiny little brain. I disagree, they’re very smart!
Haidt seems to have realized how profitable outrage can be
Never go full Peterson. Unless, that is, you want to tap into the usual conservative grift.
So Haidt has announced that he’s quitting his professional society because they expect a statement about how their work contributes to the greater community. This is a great affront, especially since asking a super-privileged white guy to address issues of equity, inclusion, diversity, and anti-racism is profoundly offensive, I guess.
Last week the New York University (NYU) psychology professor announced that he would resign at the end of the year from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, his primary professional association, because of a newly adopted requirement that everybody presenting research at the group’s conferences explain how their submission advances “equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals.” It was the sort of litmus test against which he has warned, and which he sees as corroding institutions of higher learning.
“Telos means ‘the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institution aims,'” he wrote in a Sept. 20 piece published on the website of Heterodox Academy, an organization he cofounded that promotes viewpoint diversity on college campuses, and republished by the Chronicle of Higher Education. “The telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of medicine is to heal, and the telos of a university is truth.” [I’m sorry, that pegged my meter measuring pretentious pomposity in academic jargon]
“The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)—recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth,” he added. “I was going to attend the annual conference in Atlanta next February to present some research with colleagues on a new and improved version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was surprised to learn about a new rule: In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining ‘whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.'”
Such diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements have proliferated at universities and in academic societies, he notes, even though “most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity.”
This is absurd faux outrage, worthy of a Jordan Peterson. How can you get this upset at a request to justify the social consequences of your research? Is there something wrong with NYU that you can have a long career there and never have to explain how your work fits into the greater “telos” of the institution? Because it’s not simply “truth”, it’s deeper and more complex than that. Universities play a role in society, and it’s not to simply spit out abstract facts. To deny that is to deny a truth.
Also, it wasn’t a litmus test of any kind. The society is not requiring that you meet any diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements to submit an abstract; you’re asked whether your work advances their anti-racism goals. You could say “it doesn’t”, and your work will still be assessed on other criteria. I suspect this new statement is part of an intelligence-gathering effort, to see whether the society as a whole is making contributions to address the problem of racism. From that perspective, maybe Haidt dropping out is going to improve their metrics.
So I took a look at the onerous demands of SPSP. Here they are; they request a short statement to accompany abstracts submitted to their professional meeting.
- Equity & Anti-racism:
Evaluate the extent to which the submission advances SPSP’s goal of promoting equity, inclusion and anti-racism. To do so, please consider the equity statement as well as the submission as a whole. Submissions advancing equity, inclusion, and anti-racist goals may include (but are not limited to):
- Diverse research participants (e.g., understudied or underserved populations)
- Diverse research methods (e.g., methodology that promotes equity or engages underserved communities or scholars).
- Diverse members of the research team (e.g., those from underrepresented sociodemographic backgrounds, from an array of career stages, from outside the United States, or with professional affiliations that are not typical at SPSP such as predominately undergraduate serving institutions, minority-serving institutions, or outside academia)
- Presentation content (e.g., prejudice and discrimination, critical theories, cross-cultural research).
So? How could anyone find that difficult, or contravening the truth, to answer that honestly? That’s routine stuff. Any socially conscious institution could help you address those points with very little effort.
I made that point on Twitter myself.
Complaining about justifying the social contributions of your work speaks for itself. I work on spiders, for chrissakes, and would have no trouble discussing its relevance to equity, inclusion, and anti-racism.
— PZ Spyders 🕷 (@pzmyers) October 2, 2022
I got so many responses from people who simply can’t imagine how I would address the social relevance of spider research, like it’s impossible that a biological subject could possibly have any influence on the human world. I think these bozos have a real problem. The SPSP has provided a list to tell you exactly how to answer their concerns.
I’d probably get my work rejected by the SPSP because it’s way outside the field of psychology, but not because I’m unaware of wider consequences. What blows my mind is that Haidt is a psychologist, studying “moral foundations”, and he blows a gasket because he can’t be bothered to explain, briefly, what this has to do with anti-racism, or diversity, or equity? What’s going on here? Does he only study the attitudes of wealthy white college students, or does he only bring white students into his research lab, and does he refuse to acknowledge the existence of other cultures in his work? I don’t believe any of that could be true (and if it were, it would call into question the validity of all of his research), and it ought to be trivial for him to check off the criteria for presenting at the meeting. At the very least, NYU has to have a diverse student body.
Instead, he chooses to posture and protest and complain. That will endear him to racists and knee-jerk freezepeachers, but it’s not going to cut it with the majority of his peers, who are, I’m sure, seeing this requirement not as a hurdle but an opportunity to make the broader significance of their research more explicit.
If you’re at all interested in how religion wrecks people’s brains, take a look at the Freedom From Atheism Foundation (also on Facebook, where it’s updated more frequently. All the worst shit is on Facebook.) I thought the cartoon on the right was typical, because the little kid’s reply in no way addresses the point Cartoon Dawkins was making, but apparently they think it’s cogent.
It turns out they’ve been claiming that I support them, which is weird. That claim was noted on RationalWiki.
This webshite website is so biased and full of hate that many would consider it to be a “hate group”, as it frequently uses lies, generalizations, and intentional misrepresentations to defame atheists — but then of course, if they do all of that, then they are totally not a hate group, you intolerant, militant atheist. In fact, the FFAF even claims to “love” the very people whom they work so hard to dehumanize. In a brilliant display of deliberate dishonesty, the Freedom From Atheism Foundation also falsely claimed that they were “endorsed” by PZ Myers, despite the fact that he openly stated in his blogpost that he does not at all agree with them, criticizes their claim that “atheism is a religion”, and states that their goal is “all about restricting religious freedom.”
Never be ironic in titling your posts about them, because they won’t get it…or will deliberately misrepresent it.
Conservapædia doesn’t get it, either.
Atheist activist PZ Myers issued a statement on May 9, 2014 called “I support the Freedom From Atheism Foundation”. In this statement, Myers stated “I am happy to agree that atheism should be kept out of the public square, if religion is also excluded. There’s this principle called secularism that I think is a good idea, and the only way to accommodate a religiously diverse community.”
I hope the title of this post clarifies everything for those little minds.
It looks like the Ukrainians are currently winning, although who knows what will happen when the Russians throw 300,000 conscripts into the meat grinder. What I’m getting out of the news, though, is how bloody and brutal the war is in reality. It’s not shifting lines on a map, it’s dead people. Every gain costs lives.
The Ukrainian soldiers waved, hooted and raised their fists in triumph as they drove out of the strategic eastern city of Lyman on Monday, riding M113 armored personnel vehicles provided by Western countries. They passed eight corpses of enemy Russian soldiers who died trying to run from a Ukrainian counteroffensive that swept through the area and is still going, putting the lie to President Vladimir Putin’s annexation claims.
What I find shocking in that Washington Post story is that it goes on to describe the bloated corpses. I did not expect that. I guess there’s a fine line to be drawn here — you don’t want to sanitize a violent war.
Along the same lines, here’s a blog that consists of transcribed text messages from a volunteer fighting in Ukraine. The volunteer is an American veteran who went off to war (my thought: what the heck is wrong with him? Going to fight, just because fighting is what he does.) It’s all about making people dead.
This has got to end sometime, but I don’t see an end in sight.
Trump just forwarded a prayer to his followers on Trump Social. I think he’s broken and desperate.
I think that if there were a god, such a being would see right through Trump’s chicanery and know that he’s far more creepily secular than his opponents, and would immediately strike dead with a lightning bolt any MAGAt who had the affrontery to make that prayer.
Are those red hat fools still milling around out there? There is no god. QED.
Walleye fishing is a big deal here in the upper midwest, and fishermen may be known to exaggerate the size of their catch somewhat, but this is going too far. In a fishing competition, one team did more than just talk up their catch, they committed abuse of an animal corpse to pad their numbers.
The competition in Cleveland was supposed to last two days but was cut down to just Friday because of bad weather. Fishermen in roughly 65 two-man teams started the day in a specific location on Lake Erie and had eight hours to catch the biggest set of five fish.
That was going to be Runyan and Cominsky, until Fischer pulled 10 weights totaling seven pounds out of their entry, the tournament director said. Plus, Fischer added, he found filets from other fish that had been stuffed down the walleyes’ throats to beef them up. Unlike weights, filets escape the notice of metal detectors.
“It was just simply walleye filets inside of a walleye,” he said.
Wow. That’s just blatant. Those two guys are going to be so intensely ostracized in the fishing community, and they’re never going to be trusted again, that they ought to just hang their heads in shame, throw their gear in the trash, and never set foot in a boat again. If you think cancel culture is harsh on the internet, getting caught lying to such an extreme is going to utterly ruin these guys’ hobby.
Chase Cominsky, left, and Jacob Runyan, right
Wait, those guys’ coats are splattered with commercial logos? Did they have pro sponsorships? Kiss those goodbye, too.
We must unionize to defeat the evil giants.
Back in the 1970s a fiercely pro-union Odin took on the evil of capitalism, the ultimate super-villain, in the pages of THOR #240. One for the “SJWs are ruining my childhood”/“keep politics out of super-hero comics” crowd for sure… #comicsgateisahatemovement pic.twitter.com/aCr5cvTmkH
— Andy Oliver💙 (@AndyWPOliver) October 1, 2022
From the 1970s, huh? At a time when I would sometimes read comic books to my staunchly pro-union father. No wonder I got no pushback from my parents when I was avidly reading that trashy stuff — it was fundamentally righteous.
After all, we can study spider evolution too, and it’s a notably branchy tree, especially compared to those loser primates who are in decline.
That last number, 62 spiders in 10-30 species living in our homes, is probably a very conservative estimate. That’s close to what I’ve seen in my cold northern home, and I know I’ve grossly undercounted everything.
First up, look who won the 2022 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine: it’s human evolution! As represented by the paleogenomics work of Svante Pääbo, who has been recovering ancient genomes, digging up old Homo sapiens and Neandertals and Denisovans.
I do have one reservation, though: the Nobel announcement claims “the ultimate goal of explaining what makes us uniquely human.” I don’t think we can accomplish that by decoding genome sequences. Identifying the different ancestral groups that led to us is interesting and informative, but let’s not get hung up on just DNA.
For the last few months, my home office has been plagued with these annoying fluttering moths. I swat them as fast as I see them, but their numbers have been increasing, and last night was the worst — they were trying to fly up my nose, my ears, my wherevers, and there was just a cloud of them in the house. It was these guys:
Rice moths. Ick. Evil incarnate. We finally realized where they were coming from — the kitchen pantry is right next to my office. I had proudly stashed away maybe 50 pounds of dry goods, in preparation for the zombie apocalypse, and they had found my repository. Everything was double bagged, wrapped in plastic and stashed in storage containers, so I thought we were safe.
No, we were not safe.
We went through the containers and found that almost everything contained eggs and web clusters (except the lentils — apparently they don’t care much for lentils). Everything had to be thrown out. We dismantled all the pantry shelves and washed them down with bleach and hosed everything down. I wanted to cleanse it with fire, but Mary thought soap, water, and bleach would do the job. We’ve got some glass canisters that will go in the pantry once we’ve reassembled everything.
This was not how I wanted to spend my Saturday, but at least I can say the moth swarm in my office is currently greatly diminished.
I need more spiders in my house, although maybe the rice moths were just too disgusting to consume.
