It’s a brain! Don’t trust it

Well, ain’t this a kick in the pants. Here’s a compilation of failed concepts in psychology, for example, the oft-mentioned Stanford Prison Experiment is a badly done botch, the Pygmalion effect is small and inconsistent, the Milgram experiment is full of experimental errors, etc., etc., etc. It’s rather depressing.

As someone who spends a lot of time online, though, I was relieved to learn that’s not responsible for feeling low.

Lots of screen-time is not strongly associated with low wellbeing; it explains about as much of teen sadness as eating potatoes, 0.35%.

So you’re saying I should cut potatoes out of my diet, then?

The impression I get is that a lot of the popular ideas that have emerged out of psychology arise not because the experimenter is rigorous and cautious, but because they either conform to conventional wisdom or are surprisingly contrary. There’s also something analogous to the TED Talk effect, where people are convinced more by the certainty of the presentation of the story than by the data. I’m beginning to develop my own rubric for assessing psychological claims: if it’s so simple that it gets condensed down to just the investigator’s name, it’s probably shoddy work with questionable validity. I’m calling it the Myers Rule.

The author of the list says something I think is worth keeping in mind, though. They’re talking about the concept of Ego Depletion, which has a substantial wiki page.

It’s 3500 words, not including the Criticism section. It is rich with talk of moderators, physiological mechanisms, and practical upshots for the layman. And it is quite possible that the whole lot of it is a phantom, a giant mistake. For small effect sizes, we can’t tell the difference. Even people quite a bit smarter than us can’t.

If I wander around an old bookshop, I can run my fingers over sophisticated theories of ectoplasm, kundalini, past lives, numerology, clairvoyance, alchemy. Some were written by brilliant people who also discovered real things, whose minds worked, damnit.

We are so good at explaining that we can explain things which aren’t there. We have made many whole libraries and entire fields without the slightest correspondence to anything. Except our deadly ingenuity.

Human brains are so easily diddled by grand simplifications (religion, for instance) that they’ll then turn phantasms into sweeping, detailed rules for existence. It’s all superstitious behavior in the psychological sense — we’re all searching for patterns so obsessively that if they aren’t there, our minds start imposing them on the world.

I’m so glad I’m not working in psychology. Evolution and developmental biology would never cultivate popular errors. Wait — but those sciences are studied by human minds, which are clearly kind of squirrely.

Follow-up on ID at conferences

The other day, I posted about the Discovery Institute’s end of year wrap-up. One of the things that bugged me about it was that while Brian Miller said, In 2022, I participated in several conferences and private events in which I interacted with prominent scientists, he failed to mention any of these conferences or the names of these prominent scientists. That’s a striking omission! Waving vaguely in the direction of unspecified conferences and scientists is the opposite of persuasive. So I browsed through the archives of the Disco Institute to see if he mentioned any of them at the time they occurred.

This is not definitive at all — these are just the conferences he mentioned on Evolution News & Views. Maybe he was jet-setting around the world attending an international conference every week, but then it’s peculiar, given the braggadacio of his year end post, that he never brought them up before. Here is just the 2022 conferences he mentioned. There weren’t many of them.

  • In November, he attended a Catholic conference on creation.

    I’m back now from a conference this past week at Notre Dame, titled “‘And It Was Very Good’: On Creation,” hosted by the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. The Center described the conference as follows:
    In the created world, Pope Francis writes, we are able to perceive “a grammar written by the hand of God” (Lumen Fidei). If creation is a language, what can we discern regarding the creator? The de Nicola Center’s 22nd annual Fall Conference will explore the many facets of the created world and the act of creation, including questions of cosmology, teleology, natural ends, natural law, the Imago Dei, creaturely status, ecology, stewardship, cocreation, recreation, redemption, and more.
    The organizers accepted my abstract for a talk titled “The Return of Teleology to the Natural Sciences.” I presented the talk as part of a panel with two other scholars, and it seemed well received.

  • In September, he mentioned a conference, but it’s not clear that he attended.

    As an engineering professor at Bristol University and Cambridge, Stuart Burgess has researched biomechanics for nearly thirty years. He is one of the leading engineers in the UK. Earlier this year, he presented a talk at the Westminster Conference on Science and Faith titled, “Why Human Skeletal Joints Are Masterpieces of Human Engineering: And a Rebuttal to the ‘Bad Design’ Arguments.”

  • In May, he was at a conference on science and faith.

    At the recent Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, Discovery Institute physicist Brian Miller gave a great talk on the convergence of biology and engineering. It’s up now on YouTube and eminently worthy of being shared. Miller’s theme is that “you see the same engineering principles in human engineering as you see in life.”

    (Yes, he wrote the article, and is referring to himself and the great talk in the third person. Weird.)

  • I don’t know that this one should count, but in March he was promoting a Disco Institute summer seminar. He doesn’t say, but I assume he participated in this yearly event in 2021? Maybe?

    In 2016, I attended the Center for Science & Culture’s annual Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design, and that fateful week pulled me into the epicenter of the design debate. For years, I had studied and lectured on the evidence for design in nature.

I’m being generous in noting the conferences he talked about, but note: none of these are professional conferences, and they all have a religious agenda. It’s not that religious people can’t be excellent scientists, but these are not events that would attract a diverse group of scientists — all the attendees would have had a certain bent towards favoring creationist explanations to varying degrees. It makes his implication that he was reasonably representing the views of many prominent people in the sciences a bit suspect. Talk to creationists, you tend to find they like creationism…news at 11.

He may have also attended real, secular, professional conferences as well that he didn’t tout, but I have reservations about that, too. He has a Ph.D. in physics. Not to demean physicists, but few of them have the kind of knowledge of biology to be able to appropriately assess the evidence for evolution, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some brilliant minds in physics are part of the crackpot fringe in biology.

I suspect that a creationist who wanted to present his theorizing on gods and design at a physics conference would get the same response Paul Nelson got at a biology conference — uninterested neglect. Lonely indifference.He sure wouldn’t have cause to brag about his reception.

It’s all hilarious until it isn’t

The central character on the internet for the last few days has been Andrew Tate, macho posturing kickboxer and sleaze merchant, previously banned on Twitter but allowed back on by Elon Musk (of course). He was recently mocked by, of all persons, Greta Thunberg, who teased his “small-dick energy”, followed by Tate making a video bragging about all his expensive cars, thereby proving her point. This was quickly followed by the Romanian police busting in and arresting Tate, purportedly tipped off by the box for a local pizza delivery site letting them know where he was (I don’t really believe this — the police knew where he was, and already had a case against him.)

Funny stuff. Bragging idiot gets his comeuppance, perfect Twitter fodder, right?

Until you read what the Romanian police charged him with.

Following the communique no. 1 of 12.04.2022 and the interest shown by media representatives, the Information and Public Relations Office within the Organized Crime and Terrorism Investigation Directorate is empowered to bring the following to public attention:

On 29.12.2022, the prosecutors of the Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism – Central Structure together with police officers from the Bucharest Organized Crime Brigade implemented 5 home search warrants in a case in which investigations under the aspect of committing the crimes of constituting an organized criminal group, human trafficking and rape.
In the case it was noted that, at the beginning of 2021, 4 suspects (two British citizens and two Romanian citizens) constituted a criminal group organized in order to commit crimes on the territory of Romania, but also of other countries, such as the United States of America and Great Britain, of the crime of human trafficking.
Victims were recruited by British citizens by misrepresenting their intention to enter into a marriage/cohabitation relationship and the existence of genuine feelings of love (the loverboy method). They were later transported and housed in buildings in Ilfov county where, by exercising acts of physical violence and mental coercion (through intimidation, constant surveillance, control and invoking alleged debts), they were sexually exploited by group members by forcing them to perform demonstrations pornographic for the purpose of producing and disseminating through social media platforms material having such a character and by submitting to the execution of a forced labor,
So far, 6 injured persons have been identified who were sexually exploited by the organized criminal group.
With regard to the crime of rape, it was noted that, in March 2022, an injured person was forced, on two different occasions, by a suspect through the exercise of physical violence and psychological pressure to have sexual relations.
At the headquarters of the Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism – Central Structure, 4 people who are reasonably suspected of being involved in criminal activity were taken for questioning. Following the hearings, the prosecutors of the Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism – Central Structure ordered the 4 persons to be detained for a period of 24 hours.
The activities were also attended by police officers from the Ilfov Organized Crime Service and the Service for Combating Human Trafficking, as well as gendarmes from the Special Intervention Brigade of the Gendarmerie.
We make it clear that during the entire criminal process, the investigated persons benefit from the procedural rights and guarantees provided by the Code of Criminal Procedure, as well as the presumption of innocence.

[translated from the original Romanian]

Jesus fucking christ. Not funny at all. Tate and his brother were luring women into their grasp, imprisoning them, using them to make internet pornography, and raping them. And people have been idolizing him? If convicted, I hope they spend many years in a Romanian prison; if not convicted, please let this be the end of Tate’s reputation as a man to emulate. He’s a cowardly abuser of women and a rapist.

The enduring futility of Intelligent Design creationism

It’s almost sad how pathetic the Discovery Institute has become. Every year they have a little roundup of their “accomplishments” of the year. This year, they got some guy named Brian Miller (sorry, I’ve lost track of the shifting roster of employees at the Fail Institute) to write up the grand summary. Let’s see if you notice what’s missing from this account.

So let’s review. In 2022, I participated in several conferences and private events in which I interacted with prominent scientists. Several acknowledged the strength of our arguments critiquing the current scientific orthodoxy and defending the evidence for design in life. At a recent conference, I spoke with one of the most recognized and admired evolutionary biologists. In a private conversation, he accepted that the arguments for design based on engineering analyses of living systems were substantive. And during a public lecture, he even tacitly conceded that the information central to life points to design. He stated that he wished to wait for future research to potentially explain the origin of biological information through natural processes. But his tone of voice suggested that he doubted whether such an explanation would ever materialize.

At another meeting, I sat on a panel with one of the leading evolutionary theorists. He stated that standard evolutionary analyses addressing nontrivial transformations typically are severely deficient in their mathematical cogency. He also thanked scholars in the ID network for addressing with rigor and nuance such questions as the rarity of functional protein sequences and the required timescales for generating coordinated mutations. At another conference, top-level biologists affirmed the strength of my arguments for the challenge of evolving new proteins that perform complex tasks. Many still wished to wait for natural explanations for the origin of novel protein structures, but they now much better appreciate the severity of the challenge.

I think he deserves a participation trophy! That’s all he did. He interacted with prominent scientists at conferences — all unnamed. He spoke to one of the most recognized and admired evolutionary biologists who tacitly conceded some ID talking points. They aren’t named, so we can’t assess the relevance of their discipline or their prominence. Then he was on a panel with a leading evolutionary theorist, again unnamed. Then he went to another conference with “TOP MEN” who affirmed ID … their names are a mystery.

Is it name-dropping if you fail to actually name any of them?

In addition to that hopelessly vague summary, they have an annual countdown of the top ten ID news stories. Shall I go through them all? No. Too boring. Too trivial. For instance, #6 is Megalodon, written by the most tediously pedantic nitwit in their stable, Günter Bechly. After a couple of paragraphs about the majestic size of Meg and it’s tremendous teeth, and noting that they are definitely entirely completely extinct, we get the dramatic exciting reason their contribution to intelligent design is being acknowledged here.

Sharks possess many remarkable biological features, of which some clearly point to intelligent design, such as their complex olfactory and electromagnetic sense organs. The latter are situated on and around their snouts and are called ampullae of Lorenzini (Bellono et al. 2017, Weiler 2017). The discovery of this electromagnetic sense by Adrianus Kalmjin is a fascinating story (Shiffman 2022). A recent study revealed further secrets, such as the fact that sharks only use these organs to find prey, while the related skates and rays also use them for electric communication (Weiler 2018). For more information on evidence for intelligent design in marine organisms like sharks and whales, I highly recommend the Illustra Media documentary Living Waters (Evolution News 2016).

That’s it! That’s all he’s got! Nothing new at all, some old news that sharks have a sophisticated sensory system, and none of the cited papers so much as mention Megalodon or discuss problems in evolutionary theory. I’m sure David Shiffman would be surprised to learn he’s being cited as a creationist authority.

So, for their great grand end of the year summary of the majestic progress of their agenda, all they have to show are vague assertions that the lurkers support them at conferences and that non-creationists have learned things that they can distort into some imaginary support for design theory. Mediocre.

Remember, they codified their plans back in 1998, in the Wedge document. Here’s what they were supposed to have done by 1993.

Five Year Goals

  • To see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory.
  • To see the beginning of the influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science.
  • To see major new debates in education, life issues, legal and personal responsibility pushed to the front of the national agenda.

Those all flopped. What about their goals for 2018?

Twenty Year Goals

  • To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science.
  • To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its influence in the fine arts.
  • To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.

2023 is time for their twenty five year goals, which they didn’t specify in the original document. Here, I’ll help them out:

Twenty Five Year Goals

  • To have a few anonymous scientists whisper tentative support off the record that they might support us.
  • To appropriate random discoveries by legitimate scientists as, in fact, intelligent design discoveries.
  • To employ an array of no-name wankers to write puff-pieces on our website.

Finally, mission accomplished!

It’s not a difficult choice at all

How’s it going, Mastodon?

Twitter rival Mastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform’s non-profit status.

Mastodon, an open-source microblogging site founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko, has seen a surge in users since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October amid concerns over the billionaire’s running of the social media platform.

Rochko told the Financial Times he had received offers from more than five US-based investors to invest “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in backing the product, following its fast growth.

But he said the platform’s non-profit status was “untouchable,” adding that Mastodon’s independence and the choice of moderation styles across its servers were part of its attraction.

“Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter,” said Rochko. “The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It’s the difference in paradigms [between the platforms].”

Meanwhile, on Twitter:

Somebody has been grandpa-proofing their child

I am supposed to be allowed to spoil my grandchild. It is a time-honored privilege that I have been denied.

I went on a walk with the granddaughter and ended up at the coffeeshop, where I had promised to buy her a cookie. She picked one out — chocolate chip, of course — and we sat down, and she said, “I have to athk my mom if I can have a treat.” And she didn’t eat it! We had to bag it up and bring it home, where her mom did say she could have it.

It’s the Marshmallow Test on steroids! I am totally foiled in my cunning plan to totally spoil the child before she goes home.

Also, what a weird kid. I’m beginning to question my grandpaternity.

Help! We’re being held hostage by a maniac child!

Our daughter and granddaughter are here, and the little one is in control. She has plans. Yesterday we played veterinarian for hours. Last night, before she went to bed, she wrote down her agenda for today: she wants to build a castle, and put name decals on her scooter, and feed some spiders, and ride her scooter (I helped with the last one, because she was using the list to procrastinate bedtime.) She put checkmark boxes next to her plans.

We’re in trouble. She’s a little girl with a clipboard, and an agenda, and she gives orders. I’m hastily scribbling this in our bedroom before she wakes up. I fear the daylight.