Traitors, traitors, traitors

I did not watch the Jan. 6 Committee hearings last night, but my wife did. I’m suffering from a serious lack of capacity to sit in horror watching pretty much anything, and today I’m waiting on medical information. Yesterday I got an X-ray to check out the state of my spine, and now that they know I’ve got one (it’s leaked out that I’m a registered Democrat, so the existence of a spine had to be tested first), I’m awaiting a probable MRI and an informed treatment plan.

I’ve seen a bit of the hearings on video, and caught up with summaries in the newspapers. At least I’ve confirmed that Liz Cheney has a spine, I guess my party had to import a Republican to get one.

I like the tenor so far: this was a violent insurrection by traitors to the country, and the person responsible was the man at the top, Donald J. Trump. They’re definitely implying that the end result of these hearings is going to be justice for the wicked, and they’re doing a fine job of laying the groundwork of the magnitude of the crime, but I’ve been an American for so long that I’ve become cynical, so I’m anticipating a failure of nerve and a complete collapse of the case, followed by a feeble handslap and prizes and applause for the assholes who collaborated, but are now playing the role of pious witnesses (I see you, Bill Barr and Jared and Ivanka Trump, you ought to be in a holding cell right now.)

I’m just saying, I don’t expect the Democrats or the media to maintain a strong position. Liz Cheney might, though.

Tell me I’m wrong. I wish I had more faith in our political system.

Yay! Egg sac!

If you’re on my Patreon, you already knew about my little catastrophe: one of my Steatoda triangulosa had produced a beautiful fluffy egg sac, I’d rewarded her by feeding her a mealworm, and in the ensuing struggle, the eggs had been smashed. Mama Triangulate Combfoot had her vengeance, and sucked that mealworm dry, reducing it to an empty husk. But the eggs were demolished.

Well now she’s gone ahead and produced a brand new egg sac. Look at it, it’s beautiful.

These look very different than Parasteatoda egg sacs, which are finished off with a light brown leathery casing, but they’re both the same otherwise — a nice wooly blanket of spider silk suspends and cushions the eggs inside. Now begins the pregnancy watch, with hatching expected probably next week sometime.

Other countries have judicial systems that aren’t as screwed up as the American ones

On Saturday, the international squad here at FtB will be providing diverse perspectives on judicial systems and government. It turns out it’s useful having a number of non-Americans around.

I’m hoping to make it, but no promises right now. I just got zapped with X-rays, and tomorrow I probably will get an MRI, and who knows what’s wrong with me. I could get needles, I could get knives, maybe it’ll be a load of addictive narcotics.

Not the happiest update

I’ve been dealing with this back pain by going to physical therapy twice a week. It’s not working. There was an initial improvement that has since sunk into general achiness with occasional eruptions into sharp stabbing pain. I’m about to go in for an appointment with a regular doctor, to maybe arrange some imaging to figure out what’s going on.

That’s my life right now, anyway.

Neoreactionaries, a gang of idiots

I read Neoreaction a Basilisk a few years ago. It was a hard slog, trying to wade through all the neoreactionary conservative garbage, and stories about Thiel and Yudkowski and Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug. They’re all terrible writers and communicators who are only intelligible to people who have already been infected with their mind-virus. No, don’t try to defend Less Wrong to me — I tried giving them the benefit of the doubt long ago, and found myself sinking into a quicksand of nonsense generated by people who insisted they were the most logical and rational people on Earth.

I don’t generally recommend the book, because it’s very much a specialist tome. It’s like maybe a professional journal on the psychology of mass murderers is a good thing for experts to read, but for the rest of us, no thank you, we don’t need the nightmares. That’s Neoreaction a Basilisk, thorough and expert, but my god, it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of hemlock.

If you really want to savor the flavor, Tucker Carlson interviewed Yarvin. It’s amazing. Carlson starts by saying that pretty much all of modern philosophy is an exercise in narcissism, but Yarvin is one of the few philosophers who sees through all the liberal nonsense. Yarvin is not a philosopher. He’s a software engineer with no expertise in philosophy at all, which tells you something about Carlson honesty and neoreactionary pretense.

Maybe this interview with the author, Elizabeth Sandifer is enough of a taste to let you know how awful and horrible and inane the whole neoreactionary movement is, without listening to pair of pompous asses on Fox News.

Her summary of Yarvin:

I think that there is a long tradition of right-wing “philosophy” that’s really popular among right-wing nutters and as soon as it gets outside that little bubble, it gets absolutely shot to hell by other philosophers. And I think to describe Yarvin in terms he would probably take as a compliment—and I very much mean as an insult—he’s kind of a modern day Ayn Rand.

So his broad philosophical idea is he’s just really obsessed with order. He thinks that order is the absolute best thing that can happen. Chaos, unruliness, rebelliousness—all these things are inherently very, very bad.

And so his belief, as he expressed back in his Moldbug days—and he’s not really backed down off of it in any substantive way—is that basically, California should secede, become its own nation, and simply impose a CEO with monarchic, godlike powers. At the time, he suggested Steve Jobs would be a particularly good pick for the absolute monarch of California and that the purpose of owning California and running it as a corporate monarchy is explicitly for profit. That was also a part of Yarvin’s philosophical vision for what the world should do.

I don’t want to pin him too much with the slightly satirical and deliberately over-the-top clickbait-y idea of making Steve Jobs king of California—that is him using a rhetorical device to get attention. But he does very, very much believe that rich elites should be in absolute control of everything, and people who are not landowners and do not have a ton of money should basically be thought of as the equivalent of slaves.

I think you can see why he appeals to authoritarians. I love this pithy summary of the whole movement.

To engage in Alt-Right thinking is to turn oneself into a vacuous skinsuit animated by raw stupidity. There is literally not a single shred of non-stupidity in the entire thing. Mencius Moldbug, stupid. Milo Yiannopoulos, stupid. Donald Trump, Vox Day, stupid, stupid, stupid. MAGA and The Daily Stormer are stupid. Every single detail of every single aspect of this entire cratering shitstorm in which the human race seems hell bent on going extinct is absolutely fucking stupid.

Yes! That is the entire right wing right now. It’s true of Republicans, creationists, and flat-earthers. Tucker Carlson, stupid. All the idiots saying we can’t enact reasonable gun control, stupid. The people demanding that we punish women for getting abortions, stupid. Billionaires, stupid.

If you get through that interview, you might also enjoy Sandifer’s deconstruction of Slate Star Codex, yet another scion of the poisonous bowels of Less Wrong.

The stupidity might be congenital.

How can anyone believe in a benevolent god?

Once again, the god side defeats their own claims.

I’m trying to figure this out. So if you don’t compel your children to pray to your god, he will send a gunman to murder them in school.

Do they even realize that that is not a benign act? That’s the logic of a tyrant and the rationalization of a fool. It’s so much easier to recognize that this cosmic villain does not exist, but that wicked people use the threat of this monster to compel others to do as they want.

Counterpoint: here’s a teacher who prayed earnestly and sincerely while the gunman god sent to remind everyone to pray killed all 11 of his 4th grade students.

In this world of gullible prayers, a good god would grant Arnulfo Reyes wish and send Steven Scalise to hell. I think I know how this will turn out, and we should learn that if god did exist, he’s a motherfucking Republican.

We’ve only just started. Look at this Christian!

A Texas-based Christian extremist preacher is calling on the government to round up “every single homosexual,” put them on trial, convict them, and put them to death by shooting them in the head, which he falsely says Jesus Christ commands.

Dillon Awes of the Stedfast Baptist Church on Sunday also falsely claimed every gay person is a pedophile, every heterosexual pedophile is a “fag,” and “sodomites” are responsible for school shootings. None of those claims are factual.

Everything is only going to get worse.

The taint of the Minnesota twin studies lingers on

Except when it doesn’t bother with the DZ part.

For me, it all began with the Mike Douglas show in the 1970s. If you’re not old enough to remember, that was an afternoon talk show, pre-Oprah, pre-Ellen, etc., sort of a primordial congenial-host-with-a-panel-of-guests kind of thing, and my mother often watched it, just as I was coming home from school. That’s where I learned about the Minnesota twin studies, as a nerdy teen in middle school/high school. I found that kind of stuff fascinating, anything about science would draw me to the TV. Or science-fiction/horror movies, although my mother tended not to have those on.

Douglas is the one on the left.

So I’m watching this, expecting to learn a little biology, but the Minnesota people (it might even have been Bouchard, I don’t recall) were doing a dog-and-pony show, very light on the science and rich in pandering to people’s biases about human nature, and my developing skeptical antennae were twitching. I remember them talking about how one pair of twins separated at birth had both grown up to be firemen. My future job was written in my genes, really? Another pair were married to women with the same first name. Now just hold on there, you’re telling me that somewhere in my genome was a hard-coded response to potential mates based on the sound of their name? Worse, another pair had given their dogs the same name (not the same name as their wives, the two dogs had the same name). There was no evidence that maybe there was a single locus for wife’s name/dog’s name.

I was taken aback. This sounded like complete bullshit. Are you telling me I can’t trust Mike Douglas?

I started researching the topic, back in the days when there was no google, and you had to physically go down to the library and read books to figure out what was going on. I quickly found lots of material, besides the sheer unbelievability of the nonsense they were spewing on daytime TV, that questioned the whole idea. It wasn’t hard. Now that I do have Google, here’s an an article that points out the methodological problems of twin studies.

  • Twins aren’t actually separated at birth. In these studies, 33% were separated after a year or more spent growing up together;
  • 75% of the pairs of twins still had contact with each other while growing up;
  • More than half (56%) were raised by a close family member;
  • In 23% of cases, the twins ended up being raised together again at some point or lived next door to each other.

Besides the fact that they were obviously cherry-picking coincidences for talk-show audiences, their premises were deeply flawed. These were bad studies with exaggerated conclusions drawn from flimsy data.

That link will also take you to this paper, A Reevaluation of the 1990 “Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart” IQ Study. It’s a damning analysis of one crucial result from the twin studies.

In 1990, Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. and colleagues published the widely cited 1990 “Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart” (MISTRA) Science IQ study. To arrive at the conclusion that “IQ is strongly affected by genetic factors,” Bouchard and colleagues omitted their control group reared-apart dizygotic twin (DZA) IQ score correlations. Near-full-sample correlations published after the study’s 2000 end point show that the reared-apart monozygotic twin (MZA) and DZA group IQ correlations did not differ at a statistically significant level, suggesting that the study failed the first step in determining that IQ scores are influenced by heredity. After bypassing the model-fitting technique they used in most non-IQ MISTRA studies, the researchers assumed that the MZA group IQ score correlation alone “directly estimates heritability.” This method was based on unsupported assumptions by the researchers, and they largely overlooked the confounding influence of cohort effects. Bouchard and colleagues then decided to count most environmental influences they did recognize as genetic influences. I conclude that the MISTRA IQ study failed to discover genetic influences on IQ scores and cognitive ability across the studied population, and that the study should be evaluated in the context of psychology’s replication problem.

Whoa. So the control group for their study of IQ in separated monozygotic twins, who are mostly genetically identical, was supposed to be measurements of IQ in dizygotic twins, who share on average 50% of their genes. That’s basically an essential comparison, as far as I’m concerned.

The Bouchard paper didn’t bother to do that comparison!

My mind is blown. They had the data, they must have done the statistical analysis, but they didn’t publish it in this well-known paper. They instead just compared identical twins to each other without bothering to look at how similar or different ordinary brothers and sisters were to each other, and declared that the numbers they got were sufficient to declare IQ to be significantly heritable!

The paper above dived in and re-did the analysis with the MZ twins and the DZ twins, and found that IQ was no less heritable in DZ twins than MZ twins. This does not fit what was expected if IQ was determined by genetics alone. Environment must play a significant role.

Never fear, hereditarians! Bouchard et al. had a prepared excuse to cover that eventuality. You see, environment is genetic!

We have seen that after bypassing their model-fitting procedures and their DZA control group data, Bouchard and colleagues based their conclusions about IQ heritability on the claim that the MZA correlation alone “directly estimates heritability.” However, they reached their conclusions only because they decided to count most environmental influences as genetic influences.

Bouchard and colleagues wrote in their 1990 Science article that one of the three “implications” of their genetic “findings,” and of behavioral genetic findings in general, was that MZA behavioral resemblance caused by the impact of environmental influences “is counted as a genetic influence,” because MZA pairs’ “identical genomes” cause them to create more similar environments for themselves (pp. 227–228). They continued,

MZA twins are so similar in psychological traits because their identical genomes make it probable that their effective environments are similar.… It is a plausible conjecture that a key mechanism by which the genes affect the mind is indirect, and that genetic differences have an important role in determining the effective psychological environment of the developing child. (Bouchard et al., 1990a, pp. 227–228)

The above statement is not an “implication” of the researchers’ findings; rather, it is an assumption upon which they based their findings.

Wow. That is remarkable. So everything is genetic! Therefore they didn’t have to worry about other variables or the confounding effect of differences in environment (or in the case of their flawed, not-actually-raised-apart twin studies, similarities in the environment) because, no matter what result they got, it was genetically determined.

I said at the outset that I was having problems accepting these twin studies when I was 15 years old. I was not a super genius 15 year old. As a teenager, I hadn’t even taken any classes in basic genetics, and even if I had, my experience of middle school science teaching tells me it would have been mediocre. I don’t think the published work of intelligent, established scientists should be rejected because it makes a teenager queasy.

But, man, the stuff they were trotting out on the talk show circuit was embarrassing. Somebody among them must have had similar reservations, and you’d think they would have tried to inject some meat into those public events. Why didn’t they? What was going on at the University of Minnesota?

It seems that Bouchard had some deeply seated bigotries, and he got the answers he wanted.

In a pre-MISTRA 1976 chapter entitled “Genetic Factors in Intelligence,” Bouchard argued in IQ-hereditarian fashion that “human intelligence,” as supposedly measured by IQ tests, “is largely under genetic control,” that social “class differences in intelligence have an appreciable genetic component,” and that due to reproduction patterns, the possibility of a decline in national intelligence “should be subject to continual scrutiny” (Bouchard, 1976, p. 193). Two decades later, Bouchard (1995, p. 417) and Lykken (1995, pp. 216–217) endorsed Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s conclusion in The Bell Curve that “both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences” in IQ scores (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, p. 311).

Holy crap! I don’t think Bouchard said those things to Mike Douglas.

It’s clear that we’re still seeing the legacy of Francis Galton and eugenics, that too many scientists have a bias favoring genetic determinism. We’ve been struggling to eradicate the weedy toxins of eugenics, but we have to dig deeper and clear out the ongoing poison of these badly done twin studies. We’re probably going to have to bear that burden for at least another century.

Then we have to start on all the badly done GWAS studies…

This whole vertebral column thing was a bad idea

I’m sitting here with a writhing lump of chronic ache at the base of my spine. It’s a cruel beast that occasionally stabs out with daggers of pain, and it’s capricious in that there are no rules specifying when it will lash out. I’m lying in bed, unmoving: knife up the right side! I’m walking carefully, everything moving smoothly: lance that kidney! I reach out to flush the toilet: oh, don’t do that, here comes the spiked mace. I’m having a tough time finding any motivation to do anything.

There is good news: I’ve got a doctor’s appointment in an hour! Modern medicine will fix me right up, won’t they? Of course modern medicine has to first figure out what’s wrong, and modern medicine hasn’t done the greatest job of that the last few weeks.

In other good news, the first wave of textbooks expelled from my shelves has reached various recipients. If you haven’t got it yet, it’s coming. Meanwhile, there’s a third giveaway waiting for volunteers to accept the burden of knowledge.