So…you wanna be a science communicator?

Good for you, but I have to warn you that there some discouraging developments. There is a peculiar segment of society that will want to outlaw you.

Abortion is on the ballot in South Dakota. Insulin prices were a key issue in the June debate between Biden and Trump. The U.S. Surgeon General declared gun violence a public health crisis, and the Florida governor called the declaration a pretext to “violate the Second Amendment.”

In an intense presidential election year, the issue of anti-science harassment is likely to worsen. Universities must act now to mitigate the harm of online harassment.

We can’t just wish away the harsh political divisions shaping anti-science harassment. Columbia University’s Silencing Science Tracker has logged five government efforts to restrict science research so far this year, including the Arizona State Senate passing a bill that would prohibit the use of public funds to address climate change and allow state residents to file lawsuits to enforce the prohibition. The potential chaos and chilling effect of such a bill, even if it does not become law, cannot be understated. And it is just one piece of a larger landscape of anti-science legislation impacting reproductive health, antiracism efforts, gender affirming healthcare, climate science and vaccine development.

It’s a bit annoying that the article talks about these dire threats to science-based policy, but doesn’t mention the word “Republican” once. It’s not that the Democrats are immune (anyone remember William Proxmire, Democratic senator from Wisconsin?), but that right now Republicans are pushing an ideological fantasy and they don’t like reality-based people promoting science.

One other bit of information here is that science communication does not pay well, and you rely on a more solid financial base: a university position, or a regular column in a magazine or newspaper, anything to get you through dry spells. You can try freelancing it, but then you’re vulnerable to any attack, and hey, did you know that in America health insurance is tied to your employment? I’ve got the university position, which is nice, but that’s a job, and your employers expect you to work, and it’s definitely not a 40 hour work week sort of thing.

It doesn’t matter, though, because those employers are salivating at the possibility of replacing you with AI.

But AI-generated articles are already being written and their latest appearance in the media signals a worrying development. Last week, it was revealed staff and contributors to Cosmos claim they weren’t consulted about the rollout of explainer articles billed as having been written by generative artificial intelligence. The articles cover topics like “what is a black hole?” and “what are carbon sinks?” At least one of them contained inaccuracies. The explainers were created by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and then fact-checked against Cosmos’s 15,000-article strong archive.

Full details of the publication’s use of AI were published by the ABC on August 8. In that article, CSIRO Publishing, an independent arm of CSIRO and the current publisher of Cosmos, stated the AI-generated articles were an “experimental project” to assess the “possible usefulness (and risks)” of using a model like GPT-4 to “assist our science communication professionals to produce draft science explainer articles”. Two former editors said that editorial staff at Cosmos were not told about the proposed custom AI service. It comes just four months after Cosmos made five of its eight staff redundant.

So the publisher slashed its staff, then started exploring the idea of having ChatGPT produce content for their popular science magazine, Cosmos. They got caught and are now back-pedaling. You know they’ll try again. And again. And again. Universities would love to replace their professors with AI, too, but they aren’t even close to that capability yet, and they have a different solution: replace professors with cheap, overworked adjuncts. They won’t have the time to do science outreach to the general public.

Also, all of this is going on as public trust in AI is failing.

Public trust in AI is shifting in a direction contrary to what companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft are hoping for, as suggested by a recent survey based on Edelman data.

The study suggests that trust in companies building and selling AI tools dropped to 53%, compared to 61% five years ago.

While the decline wasn’t as severe in less developed countries, in the U.S., it was even more pronounced, falling from 50% to just 35%.

That’s a terrible article, by the way. It’s by an AI promoter who is shocked that not everyone loves AI, and doesn’t understand why. After all,

We are told that AI will cure disease, clean up the damage we’re doing to the environment, help us explore space and create a fairer society.

Has he considered the possibility that AI is doing none of those things, that the jobs are still falling on people’s shoulders?

Maybe he needs an AI to write a science explainer for him.

Shut up, AI

A tragedy in the making

We have some little friends making a home near our front door.

We’re leaving them alone and letting them go on about their business, but haven’t informed them of their terrible mistake. They’re building outside our door, but inside the screen door — they’re going to have virtually no protection from the terrible Minnesota winter. I’m figuring they can have their happy late summer endeavor, but later, when temperatures hit the negative 20s, I’ll chip their frozen home free and toss it into a snowdrift a few blocks away.

OK, Megan, which is it?

Here’s an example of standard transvestigator methodology, consistency, and accuracy:

Megan McArdle: People are shockingly good at visually distinguishing males from females, even when you choose relatively androgynous models, and even when you strip visual cues like hair.
…
Megan McArdle, a little later: My experience is that the people who misgender me are generally not really looking at me. They are store clerks, security guards, etc who have glanced my way, registered “tall”, converted that into “man”, and then called me “sir”.

Shockingly good.

She’s a regular columnist for the Washington Post, which, using her typical logical analysis, simultaneously looks like a liberal newspaper and is easily mistaken for a conservative rag.

Hey! She wrote a book titled “The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.”. She clearly specializes in contradiction disguised as a deepity.

Teachers, soldiers, and women shouldn’t vote for these guys

Working hard to focus on the only electorate that counts.

Trump campaign spokesperson Caroline Sunshine said Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz “never held a real job in his life” — despite his years of teaching and serving in the National Guard.

During a Wednesday interview on Real America’s Voice, host Terrence Bates complained to Sunshine that reporters were not questioning Walz “on his repeated lies about his military service and every single other thing that seems to come out of his mouth.”

“Tim A. Walz, as I like to call him, because when Tim was asked to, you know, answer the call to service and deploy and fight for our country, he chose to step down and run for Congress,” Sunshine replied. “He’s never held a real job in his life, by the way. He spent all of his life running for Congress, running for office or in office.”

Terrible. He could have been a lawyer, or a venture capitalist, or a real estate speculator…you know, a real job. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been a failure my whole life, ‘working’ as a teacher. My daughter is a researcher at a university, my middle son is a major in the Army, not real jobs, obviously. Fortunately, my oldest son rescues the family reputation, since he does financial stuff in a law office (don’t ask me what, I lack the ability to comprehend real labor).

As a professor, I’m not just a lazy slacker, I am the enemy.

My wife does have a productive life…oops. Nope. There’s only one thing she’s good for.

So…the Republicans are doing their best to alienate teachers, men in the military, women, and everyone in congress. Can they win the presidency on the backs of just white male lawyers who haven’t held political office?

Hey, Elon! This is how you’ll be remembered

Not as a genius, not as a real-life Tony Stark, not as a champion of free speech, because you’re none of those things. You’re a guy who bought a hagiographer to hide your flaws and amplify your accomplishments. Unfortunately, you also have weird beliefs about spawning lots of children, which means you created witnesses to your real nature.

Vivian Wilson is at it again. This time her focus is on Walter Isaacson, the hack who wrote Musk’s biography, and this piece on Threads is going to be a big chunk of his reputation. Hooray for free speech!

Let’s talk about the Walter Isaacson book. For those of you unaware, he wrote a biography about Elon in which I am featured. This is what I have to say on the matter. It’s a bit heavy, so bear with me.

To Walter Isaacson, you threw me to the wolves in what was one of the most humiliating experiences of my entire life. Elon was your darling Tony Stark apartheid-american hero with a semi-tragic backstory who was saving the world and you were too fucking cowardly to write anything other than a sad excuse for a puff-piece. To further this goal, you portrayed me in a light that is genuinely defamatory and I’m not going to mince my words.

I was treated as a VILLAIN BACKSTORY-ORIGIN to excuse or explain away his behavior. As if my whole existence was nothing but an inconvenience to HIM. God bless the poor soul who abused his child, that must be so fucking hard for him. I was deadnamed, and misgendered for no conceivable reason and made to seem like I was just too stupid or too “communist” or too brainwashed or too what-fucking-ever to understand the 4d chess behind the reasons I was traumatized.

My identity was trivialized, my reasons for seperation were misconstrued, and I was treated as naïve; stupid, unfairly unforgiving and unreasonably moralistic. Worst of all, this was the section that was released early as part of the “promo” because you knew it would catch headlines as part of this culture war bullshit. You knew that conservatives and ‘reactionaries’ would take this and run as far as they could with it to get clicks, or to smear my name for their own self interests.

I was never asked, interviewed, or contacted to say anything for this poor excuse of pages you call a book. I know that you claim that you “reached out to me through family members” but I found out about this thing’s existence literally a MONTH before it was released. So either you are completely fucking incompetent at the most basic aspects of your “job”, or you are weaponizing your own lack of effort to try to lift the blame off of yourself because you knew damn well what you were doing.

I know for a goddamn fucking fact that you had the information necessary to contact me directly and you didn’t. It’s not exactly neuroscience when all you had to do was ask for my fucking phone number. Therefore, this “omg we like totally tried….” act isn’t gonna work. You deliberately failed because you knew the angle you were going for, and that my testimony would’ve fucked up your pretty little portrayal of an irredeemable human being.

I was content to sit in my silence up until now and to be your queer villain. You knew that I was gonna be used as an example of “how the children are being brainwashed by the trans agenda” because you did it yourself and then proceeded to blast it to every news organization to use as an ad to sell more copies. The fact that this book may have been used as justification by parents to not let their trans child obtain potentially life-saving medical treatment fucking HAUNTS me. It always will.

I’ve been waiting on talking about this subject because it genuinely hurts so much to remember. That memory of sobbing my eyes out in a dormitory worrying that I didn’t have a future because of the damage this thing did to my reputation will forever stay with me. You, your editors, and your publisher are a fucking joke for letting this thing be released into the public. I had to see posters of this thing for MONTHS afterwards.

I go by Vivian by the way, not Jenna as the book implies. Jenna is what my friends from high school and my mom calls me. If you genuinely knew what you were talking about that’s how you would’ve referred to me. It is genuinely impressive that you somehow managed to find a way to even fuck up my NAME. I think that goes to show how much research actually went into this. I am not letting this narrative continue any further.

I must request that people don’t seek out and send hate to Isaacson, I don’t think that reflects well on anyone.

Now I’ll never sign up for Disney+

You know those interminable, petty, long-winded End-User License Agreement that you’re expected to sign when you get some new tech thingie? I’m afraid I’ll never bother to read all that lawyerese, even though apparently it can affect your life in surprising ways.

Disney is trying to get a wrongful death lawsuit filed by a New York University doctor’s grieving husband tossed — because he signed up for the Disney+ streaming service years earlier, court papers said.

Kanokporn Tangsuan’s bereaved husband Jeffrey Piccolo is currently suing the theme park juggernaut claiming that she suffered a fatal allergic reaction shortly after eating at a Disney Springs restaurant in Florida last October.

But Disney is now claiming the $50,000 suit should be moved out of the courts because Piccolo agreed to arbitrate all disputes with the company when he first signed up for a one-month trial of the Disney+ streaming service back in 2019, court documents charge.

Wanting to see Star Wars or Marvel movies should now be considered a deleterious disease, like gambling or alcoholism. Who knows what else is buried in that EULA? Disney will own your first-born, has droit du seigneur, can garnish your wages, owns all the minerals stored in your corpse. You won’t find out until a lawyer knocks at your door.

It begins again

I want you to know that I always give my spiders fresh, live flies.

I’m going to be handing out flies like candy today, because I have to have something pleasant to do when I go to work, and I’ll start with a meeting of the Latrodectus horde. This is it, the semester is starting now, and as usual, we start it with…committee meetings. We start today with a meeting of my biology colleagues, so at least we’ll be discussing stuff that matters. On Thursday we all meet with administrators, which won’t matter at all and just sucks more time away.

Maybe I should bring a couple of bottles of flies to share?

I don’t meet with any students until Monday. That’s so backwards — we should start the semester by engaging with students, and then later, in our spare time, the administrators can yammer at us.

The end is imminenter, maybe

Nature reviews Ray Kurzweil’s latest tome of foolishness, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. They came up with the perfect illustration for the review.

Ray Kurzweil’s future is bad haircuts and silly gadgets stuck to your head.

The text is no less scathing. If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you know I despise everything Kurzweil publishes. I appreciate this pithy summary of Kurzweil’s bullshit.

Kurzweil repeatedly muddles computation with intelligence and consciousness. He flirts with materialism, dualism and panpsychism, contending that consciousness is “much like a fundamental force of the Universe”. Kurzweil then states that “it is the kind of information-processing complexity found in the brain that ‘awakens’ that force into the kind of subjective experience we recognize”. The words ‘complexity’ and ‘emergence’ are too often used in contexts in which ‘abracadabra’ might do as well.

That’s all muddled up with quasi-religious eschatological crap about the end of the world as we know it in the very near future. The singularity is imminent!

Kurzweil’s hyperbolic technological fetishism does not stop in ‘the cloud’. Apparently, the soul is digital and the body is mechanical. And so, the litany of fiction science, as I call it, goes on: the hype is squared as AI meets nanoengineering, in a revolution that “will enable us to redesign and rebuild — molecule by molecule — our bodies and brains and the worlds with which we interact”. He also argues that diligent people will achieve “longevity escape velocity”, living for much longer than we do now, by 2030. I can only hope that we would have reached bullshit escape velocity by then, too.

OK, you heard him. 2030. The eschaton will be here in 6 years. Maybe we’ll all live to see the prophecy go kablooiee, so we can all laugh at goofy ol’ Ray.

It’s just Texas, they won’t mind

SpaceX has been poisoning the environment for years, and have shown a reckless disregard for the effects their launches have on local residents and wildlife, and have been guilty of dumping toxic materials in waters nearby.

SpaceX’s Starship launches at the company’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas, have allegedly been polluting the local environment for years, possibly in violation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act. for years. The news arrives in an exclusive CNBC report on August 12, which cites internal documents and communications between local Texas regulators and the EPA

SpaceX’s fourth Starship test launch in June was its most successful so far—but the world’s largest and most powerful rocket ever built continues to wreak havoc on nearby Texas communities, wildlife, and ecosystems. And after repeated admonishments, reviews, and ignored requests, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) have had enough.

Don’t worry, though, Elon Musk is on the case. Here he is responding to a news report on his awful company.

CNBC sucks, Elon Musk tweeted in a reply to his company’s statement.

What this reminds me of is the bro who buys a bunch of illegal fireworks, heads down to the lake and blows stuff up and makes an obnoxious racket, and then leaves a mess of cardboard and paper and scorched debris to go back home and be an asshole to his neighbors.

It’s fine. I suggest that every state dump its garbage on Texas, they don’t care.