He’s getting desperate

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.

Cheaters!

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.

The gods themselves oppose the bosses

We must unionize to defeat the evil giants.

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.

Waiting for an arachnologist to win their Nobel

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.

It’s Nobel week, and paleogenomics wins!

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.

Infested!

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.

What “myth of the tech genius”?

Was there ever such a myth? I guess it’s been shattered now, since Musk’s battles with Twitter have forced him to reveal the contents of his cell phone. It’s a mess of banality and unwarranted confidence and egotism.

What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.

In no time, the texts were the central subject of discussion among tech workers and watchers. “The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks fucking dumb,” one former social-media executive, whom I’ve granted anonymity because they have relationships with many of the people in Musk’s texts, told me. “It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”

You might be wondering who has the privilege of chatting to Elon Musk. It’s a gang of rich idiots.

Appearing in the document is, I suppose, a perverse kind of status symbol (some people I spoke with in tech and media circles copped to searching through it for their own names). And what is immediately apparent upon reading the messages is that many of the same people the media couldn’t stop talking about this year were also the ones inserting themselves into Musk’s texts. There’s Joe Rogan; William MacAskill, the effective altruist, getting in touch on behalf of the crypto billionaire and Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried; Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (and the subject of a recent, unflattering profile); Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, NIMBY, and prolific blocker on Twitter; Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who was recently revealed to have joined a November 2020 call about contesting Donald Trump’s election loss; and, of course, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO. Musk, arguably the most covered and exhausting of them all, has an inbox that doubles as a power ranking of semi- to fully polarizing people who have been in the news the past year.

Few of the men in Musk’s phone consider themselves his equal. Many of the messages come off as fawning, although they’re possibly more opportunistic than earnest. Whatever the case, the intentions are unmistakable: Musk is perceived to have power, and these pillars of the tech industry want to be close to it. “I love your ‘Twitter algorithms should be open source’ tweet,” Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, said, before suggesting that he was going to mention the idea to members of Congress at an upcoming GOP policy retreat. Antonio Gracias, the CEO of Valor Partners, cheered on the same tweet, telling the billionaire, “I am 100% with you Elon. To the mattresses no matter what.”

Lonsdale is also one of the money men behind the University of Austin. Don’t you just love his casual assumption that he gets to talk to members of Congress, and they’ll listen? I don’t have that privilege. You probably don’t, either. Money is the only factor that gives you access.

Believe the evidence, ignore the cranks

Isn’t this a fairly obvious strategy? To set transgender policy, look to the evidence. It’s what I would recommend. Unfortunately, that’s not how policy is established.

The current spate of anti-trans positions has little to do with evidence-based research, science or data.

Here’s one example. Anti-trans campaigners often argue that allowing trans women to use women’s toilets and changing rooms will increase sexual assaults. In fact, research has shown the opposite. One study tallied criminal incidents related to assault, sex crimes or voyeurism in public toilets, locker rooms and changing areas in parts of Massachusetts that had laws against trans discrimination, and compared them with those that hadn’t. It found no evidence that these laws put women at risk, and concluded that “fears of increased safety and privacy violations as a result of nondiscrimination laws are not empirically grounded” (A. Hasenbush et al. Sex. Res. Soc. Pol. 16, 70–83; 2019). Furthermore, there is evidence that transgender children who cannot use toilets and locker rooms that match their gender identity are at increased risk of assault (G. R. Murchison et al. Pediatrics 143, e20182902; 2019).

Nevertheless, a false ‘protection’ argument has been used to justify anti-trans ‘bathroom bills’ in Alabama, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Tennessee, and to buttress trans discrimination in the United Kingdom.

Politicians’ claims also have little to do with empirical evidence when it comes to gender-affirming care. Alabama’s law banning provision of such care to minors described the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapies as “experimental”. It did not mention that 22 US medical associations endorse these medications as well-established treatment for gender dysphoria in young people.

Case in point: Graham Linehan. He says we literally don’t know who to believe.

He’s against trans rights, and now he’s doubting the existence of COVID (citing Bret Weinstein!) and climate change, all because he’d rather listen to hucksters lying about the evidence than accept something contrary to his biases. He is getting sucked right down into the conspiracy theory pipeline, and you can trust that he’s going to get worse and worse. He is actively demonstrating crank magnetism.

That Nature article has a good suggestion on where to start. There’s plenty of research and evidence on these matters…the problem is that it all says Linehan is WRONG, so he won’t look at it.

Much evidence-based research is already available. More is still needed, but it is either a lie or a cop-out to say that there’s not enough research to make informed policy decisions. Instead of whipping up arguments to churn culture wars, elected officials and those around them should look to the evidence.

You could also start by unsubscribing from Weinstein’s podcast.

Musk’s demo was bad, and he should be ashamed, and his cheering stans should be embarrassed

Yesterday was Elon Musk’s “AI Day”, and I don’t know whether to say it was a letdown, or that it was exactly what I expected.

The Optimus robot was not ready for prime time. Its motors worked: the curtains were pulled back, it took a few steps, it waved mechanically, it turned around, done. It did not interact with anything or anyone. It did not have to deal with any novel situations. It did not exhibit any behaviors beyond what you might get out of a Disney animatronic.

I’ve seen more impressive animated mannequins in the Christmas window displays at ZCMI in Salt Lake 25 years ago. Come on, guy, show me something that requires intelligence and flexibility on the robot’s part.

I guess I can call myself an artificial intelligence researcher now. When I was 13, a friend and I built a Frankenstein’s monster in my bed, which could sit up (with the aid of strings we pulled) and roar horribly (tape recorder in its chest) and best of all, spurt red blood when I pushed a button on a pump. We invited my siblings to witness our creation in a brief little skit and then chased them out of the room as the monster rose up.

Oh, what I could have accomplished with a bunch of actuator motors, some shiny strings of blinking lights, and a Raspberry Pi.

Musk also showed some videos of Optimus picking up boxes and of using a watering can to water some office plants. Very short videos. Again, nothing that demonstrated any artificial intelligence capabilities at all. He brought out a second robot that waved at the audience, and it wouldn’t be a Musk demo without some embarrassing gaffe.

Yet he was promising that a home robot would be available in a few years, that they were going to mass produce millions of them, and that they’d cost around $20K each.

Musk himself is a terrible showman. He mumbled and “ummm”ed his way through a poorly practiced, short speech that had no pizzaz — he relies on overpromising rather than actually expressing some genuine enthusiasm. He’s no Steve Jobs, who could get up and announce “one more thing” that was an overpriced watch and get people rushing to spend a thousand dollars on it. I’ve been coaching undergrads in making scientific presentations for the past few weeks, and they’ve been so much better than Musk — spontaneous, smooth, well-organized, and demonstrating some genuine passion for their projects. They actually rehearse what they’re going to say and are careful about being accurate. I’d suggest that maybe Elon Musk would do better to hire some UMM students fresh out of graduation, except that I hope to Dog that none of them ever end up in a job that requires them to go through the motions of empty hype and lie with more enthusiasm than their over-valued billionaire boss.

Liz. Can’t. Read.

Here comes that peculiar political blindness again. Conservatives idolize Ronald Reagan, the greatest political disaster of my lifetime, to the point that they can’t even read criticisms of his policies without stupidly translating them into praise. Here’s Liz Truss failing to comprehend a book that she thinks was wonderful.

As I reported this summer, Liz Truss’s favourite historian is Rick Perlstein, the great chronicler of the rise of the new right in its Nixonian and Reaganite forms between 1960 and 1980.

She told journalists that she read ‘anything’ he wrote. Interviewers noticed Perlstein’s books on her shelves. In a strange compliment to the American historian, Truss or sources close to her briefed The Spectator’s Katy Balls with precise (if unacknowledged) quotes from his account of the rise of Ronald Reagan.

I sent Perlstein my piece and asked for his thoughts. Let me put it like this: he may be her favourite historian, but she is not his favourite politician. Not even close. Not even in the top 1,000.

‘Liz. Can’t. Read.’ he replied, and began a long – and for British readers frightening – account of how and why our new government of wannabe Reaganites have crashed the economy.

Perlstein said that, if she read his books with the attentiveness she claimed, she would not have risked our pensions and mortgages with a naïve belief that tax cuts would stimulate economic growth and raise revenue for the Treasury. Far from paying for themselves, Reagan’s income and capital gains taxes in the early 1980s sent public debt from 26 per cent GDP in 1980 to 41 per cent GDP by 1988.

I wonder if Truss will continue to cite Perstein as “her favourite historian” after that comment.