I think I’ve crossed some threshold

Either that, or advertising is becoming increasingly desperate. Every morning now I get dozens of emails from “company representatives” telling me they have wonderful opportunities to partner with some ad agency or other by putting their custom ads on Freethoughtblogs, or Pharyngula, or my YouTube channel (the latter is odd, I’m a very tiny fish in that sea, hardly worth bothering with). I ignore them all. It isn’t happening. The frequency of these requests keep going up, and I don’t understand it.

Either I’m far more popular than I think — my general experience with the internet is that I get far more hatred than appreciation — or capitalism is broke and is scrabbling for every penny they can find. My ego favors the former, but my intellect is hoping it’s the latter.

Oh, relatedly: I’m getting a lot of first-time commenters asking to be approved. It’s the same dilemma, hoping that it’s because they really like me, but suspecting that it’s just trolls trying to sneak in so they can vomit up more hatred. I approve them anyway, because honestly, being the janitor and cleaning up the foulness the trolls throw around is both satisfying and trivially easy.

The problem is all the qualified people have Imposter Syndrome

I think Marcus Ranum just diagnosed my problem.

I am so full of anger and hatred that it’s 3:00am and I can’t sleep.

Hey, that’s my problem! I just checked my dipstick, and yep, I’m overflowing with bile. No wonder I’m waking up in the middle of the night.

What’s making the bitter gall flow? It’s similar to what annoys me: Joe Rogan and the whole elaborate pile of bullshit that is the current ladder to success. Rogan is just one symptom, but hoo boy, his recent not-pology pushed all my buttons, too.

Then, Rogan made his elaborate not-pology, basically saying that he’s just a dumb jock, and he’s a curious guy who likes to interview trolls. Basically, he’s pulling the Oprah excuse, “I didn’t create ‘Doctor’ Phil, I just uh… promoted him and handed him my microphone. He’s the grifter, not me!” Everyone is playing the same song, and it’s edging perilously close to the “free speech” defense. You know, that one? It’s usually followed around by its nasty little cousin “Both sides”. And that’s where I have to stop and call ‘bullshit’ on the whole thing.

It’s grifters all the way up.

We have to be a lot less forgiving of the bullshit, “I am just trying to learn…” dodge. Let me speak as someone who used to teach (fairly well-reviewed and popular!) classes around the world: I would not give a 1 hour lecture on any topic whatsoever without developing the expertise, first. It usually took me most of a day to write any given 1 hour presentation and I already knew my topic. If someone offered me $1 mil to do a talk on virology, sure, I would do it but it’d be basically a wad of “this paper says this and this professor says that and isn’t it all cool?” That’s being a cheerleader, not an expert, but I’d take the $1 mil. Anyone who is trying to have a public conversation about any given topic, whatever, owes their audience the simple attention to detail to absorb the supporting knowledge necessary to have the conversation. That’s why I have to hoist another great big “fuck Joe Rogan” flag – he had Jordan Peterson on his show and simply batted the bullshit-ball back and forth; that tells me that he (and his handlers) didn’t do the simplest, most basic research, to figure out that Jordan Peterson is a sociopathic compulsive liar who doesn’t even bother to get his facts straight in the field he professes; never mind the other fields: the guy is omni-wrong. Interviewing Jordan Peterson is not the time to play dumb jock, it’s the time to pull out the verbal knife. That is the only way to get these people off the mainstream media: make them walk off the stage with the rhetorical equivalent a fat lip and a bootprint on the seat of their pants. Any “interviewer” who can’t hold their own against a bullshit artist is, ipso facto, a bullshit artist themself. Or they’re not qualified to hold a mic.

Right. I’m giving a one-hour lecture today, on a subject I’m familiar with and have been teaching for a couple of decades, and I still have to sweat over it for a few hours, reviewing material, trying to figure out better ways to present the topic, thinking ahead to how it will fit in the rest of the curriculum, putting in late nights and early mornings on the class. I can’t get up to the lectern and bloviate with a fellow bullshitter for an hour. Where’s my million dollars?

And seriously, is Rogan even worth the hundred million dollars Spotify paid him? He doesn’t bring any expertise to the table. Just go down to the local bar and offer the motormouth (there’s always one) $50 and a case of beer to sit in front of a microphone. Oh, right: he’s paid to bring his custom-built audience of artisanal stupid people along. That’s his value-added.

Oops. Whoopi Goldberg just got suspended for two weeks over her Holocaust remarks. Black woman gets stronger corporate response than dumb jock, news at 11.

Welp, scratch that charity off my list

World Wildlife Fund UK just made the most bone-headed announcement. As a supposedly environment-friendly organization, you’d think they’d know that the most environmentally unsound investment you could make is in blockchain and NFTs, but that’s what they’re doing — selling NFTs.

I don’t believe that claim that “each transaction has the equivalent carbon emissions of a glass of tap water”. It’s built on a lie.

This was an enlightening response.

That’s the way of it. NFTs are hopelessly confusing and complicated, but there’s always some enthusiastic tech-bro who wants to see his personal investment validated, so he proselytizes fanatically and convinces a befuddled management that this really is the way to get more funding for their cash-strapped organization (and charities are always cash-strapped, and so are good marks for this kind of scheme).

Have you got a passionate NFT-proponent working for you? Fire ’em. You see someone on Facebook or Twitter with an NFT avatar? Block ’em.

I despised Bill Maher before it was cool to hate him

I guess the Left has moved towards me, then. Bill Maher is now claiming that, because right-wing Fox News has said the Democrats ought to make Maher a presidential candidate (I’m sure his bloated ego loved that), the Left has left him. So on a recent show he defended that endorsement from right-wing loonies by trying to argue that no, the Democrats are the loony ones. Yeah, right, our center-right political party is far crazier than the party that has embraced the anti-democracy racist misogynist position. He trots out a series of headlines from the Wall Street Journal and Forbes to prove that Democrats lack all common sense. It’s painful to listen to, especially since he has an audience that whoops and hollers to every stupid point he makes.

The solution: watch it with Dusty Smith who pauses it to take apart his every claim.

Man, Maher has always been every well-off white guy who thinks its funny when someone questions his sense of entitlement. I never cared much for him, and even disliked his atheist movie, Religulous.

Interesting. After posting this, I did my usual morning cleanup of the comments section, and what do I find? Our chronic homophobic/transphobic/misogynistic/antisemitic bigoted troll had erupted overnight, dumping 52 comments in various places, all totally uncreative, repetitive garbage accusing people of being gay. Everything from “seanbf” has been cleaned up now, but the curious thing is…he was inspired by Bill Maher. He kept citing that Maher segment above, declaring that Maher was correct, he loved Bill Maher. Good company.

Let’s talk about evo-devo and evolutionary novelties on Friday

It’ll be a casual science convo on Friday at 3pm Central. I’m not going to do a lot of prep work because I don’t have the time, but I can talk about new evolutionary features off the top of my head. How about mammary glands? You like mammary glands?

If you’re one of my patrons (only a dollar a month, cheap), you can also join in the Zoom call. If you hate long-winded livestreams, I’ll also pluck out one of the more interesting excerpts and post that on Saturday.

Debate as a tool for misinformation and propaganda

David Gorski rips on all those quacks and debate-me bros. It’s good stuff.

Challenges to “live debates” from science deniers are challenges that scientists should, with only the rarest of exceptions, generally decline. Nothing good comes of them, as they are theater, not science. Their purpose is not even really to persuade anyone. Rather, it is to represent pseudoscience as being worthy of being on the same stage (or Zoom meeting) as science, quacks as worthy of having their beliefs presented as being of similar credibility to science-based medicine presented by real doctors, pseudoscientists as worthy of being considered equally with scientists, and conspiracy theorists as worthy of being considered equally with real experts in a field. They are a tool of propaganda and almost never a tool to get at valid science. That’s exactly why cranks love “live public debate” so much, even when faced with criticism from an even crankier crank, and, even better for them, these forums allow them to puff up their egos by convincing themselves that they’ve bested a real expert.

If that doesn’t demonstrate why scientists should politely decline such requests, I don’t know what will. To paraphrase Scott Weitzenhoffer, such debates are like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory. Depriving them of that opportunity not only drives them up the wall, but it prevents them from using you, as a scientist, physician, or science communicator as a tool to foil to use to spread their misinformation.

Maybe we ought to have some kind of pledge where we all agree to not give those people oxygen. David has been more consistent than I have in spurning the debate-me bros, but I’d sign it, too.

I have to disagree with him mildly on one thing, though.

I can’t resist spoiling the answer to this question by saying right away that the answer is no. All truth does not come from “live public debate.” I won’t say that it’s always a bad idea for a science advocate to agree to a debate like the sort in the “challenges” by Dr. Oz and Steve Kirsch. After all, Steve Novella showed me how it’s done back in 2012 when he accepted a challenge of convenience to debate Dr. Julian Whitaker about vaccines at FreedomFest in Las Vegas in 2012. (The Amazing Meeting was being held the same weekend in Las Vegas; so he and I were there already.) However, it turns out that Dr. Whitaker was very bad at the deceptive debate techniques that cranks use, but also Dr. Novella was very, very good at anticipating and responding to common antivaccine arguments. Even though Dr. Novella basically mopped the floor with Dr. Whitaker, I still had misgivings, as I did when Bill Nye similarly wiped the floor with creationist Ken Ham in a debate of science versus pseudoscience with respect to evolution. Basically, I view these examples as the exceptions that prove the rule that scientists really shouldn’t debate cranks…

Floors were neither mopped nor wiped in those debates. They’re still filthy. I agree with Novella and Nye, so I agree that they did a fine job of presenting their position, but no, the “loser” of those debates did not see the error of their ways, and the majority of their fans did not change their minds. I don’t pay any attention to this Whitaker person, but I do check in on Ham now and then — and he brags about his debate. He believes he triumphed, and his followers slavishly agree with him. See also Kent Hovind, who claims to have been in 260 debates, and to have won every single one of them with half his brain tied behind his back. He even claims to have won a debate with me, which didn’t occur!

If those are our best examples of victories, I’m going to go ahead and say it: it’s always a bad idea for a science advocate to agree to a debate.

It’s time to register for Convergence

Yesterday, I got email from the Convergence con, an event that used to be a regular summertime highlight for me. I have fond memories and have really enjoyed it in the past, but it’s been disrupted the last few years by this annoying thing, rhymes with schmandemic? And I haven’t gone. It’s back this summer, and they’re doing all the right things, requiring proof of vaccination to get in the door and requiring masking at all times, but I reluctantly decided I’ll have to skip it again.

There is just too much uncertainty right now — I’m not doing anything that involves large groups of people in the foreseeable future. Maybe the year after, when the entire country comes to its senses and has taken active measures to stop the spread? Ha ha, I made a joke. I’m just going to be a contributor to anything that might increase the spread of a disease for a while.

Also, another factor: I looked over the scheduled panels, and noticed a real dearth of science & skepticism talks. They used to have a well-populated science track at this con, but it seems to have withered away. I can guess why: in previous years, I and others would get involved in the planning stages and submit long lists of prospective panel topics that the con committee could select among, and which were then a further draw for more science participation. I wonder if that specific group of people have had low confidence in the safety of attending, and therefore have withdrawn from the planning sessions? I know that’s the case for me, personally. Instead, there’s going to be a lot more video game stuff this year.

I’m afraid that if I’m too cautious to attend the American Arachnological Society meetings in person this year, I’m not going to attend a meeting that’s just for fun. Joy is dead, don’t you know?

There are so many symptoms of brain rot around us

I wonder how history will look back on the first decades of the 21st century. When I was growing up, this was supposed to be the century of miracles and wonders, of science and technology leading us to a golden age. It hasn’t panned out that way.

America throwing away its freedoms in a frightened response to terrorism. Spastically bombing and blowing up distant countries in a futile 20 year war that ended in defeat. Electing the dumbest bumbling president in our history, then doubling down by later electing a corrupt clown. QAnon. Billionaires getting richer, unchecked, while demonstrating their idiocy. Our public intellectuals are Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. The IDW. A congress that sits on its thumbs while trying to decide if an insurrection to take over the capitol should be punished or not. Previously mentioned corrupt clown planning another presidential run while announcing his intent to jail anyone who disagreed with him…and not being arrested. Black people being murdered at will by cops. Climate change, and its neglect. The MAGA movement. Brexit. Boris Johnson. A serious pandemic that is approaching a million deaths in the US alone (although, to be fair, the US has been the absolute worst at making a coherent response to the threat.) Anti-vaxxers. And, to put the slimy icing on the shit-flavored cake, blockchain and bitcoin madness.

Here’s another story about how cryptocurrency is a giant Ponzi scheme. It was obvious from the beginning that it was a scam. It divided the population into three groups: the wealthy grifters who have been promoting it, the gullible marks who happily handed over their money to the lying con artists, and the rest of us, who were smart enough to see that it was another fraud by the rich to bleed the less well-off. Perhaps just as damning is the fact that our government closes its eyes to this massive Ponzi scheme running unchecked — perhaps because our government is run by and for the kind of people who benefit from it — when there are solutions.

Going after fly-by-night stablecoin issuers will devolve into a hopeless game of whack-a-mole. The only real solution is to ban the trade of private cryptocurrencies entirely. We cannot stop foreign actors from issuing unbacked stablecoins and manipulating crypto prices on unregulated exchanges. But we can make it illegal to sell cryptocurrencies on banked exchanges, such as Coinbase, operating entirely legally while they cash people out of the Ponzi scheme.

This would, of course, kill off cryptocurrency almost entirely, relegating it back to an oddity of the tech enthusiast. No one should shed a tear. Cryptocurrencies have virtually no legal use case. They’re great for facilitating ransomware, laundering money, distributing narcotics and child porn, running Ponzi schemes, and… not much else. They fail as currencies due to high transaction costs. They fail as “digital gold” or a “store of value” because they consume ludicrous amounts of energy to run what is essentially a glorified spreadsheet.

China already banned cryptocurrencies entirely, and India and Pakistan are poised to do the same. Other countries have also made moves to prohibit or constrain cryptocurrencies, but Western liberal democracies are notably permissive. This is in no small part due to aggressive industry lobbying, which includes hiring former financial regulators and compliance officers into the industry to influence policymakers.

We do nothing. Congress has been bought.

So yeah, I’m curious. How will the world summarize this moment we’re living in from the perspective of the 22nd century? So many problems, all with solutions that we talk about but never act upon, future citizens will wonder whether it was a consequence of contaminated tap water or some brain-eating fungus, because it’s otherwise inexplicable. Unfortunately, I’ll never know, because even if I had a time machine, the histories will probably be written in Mandarin, and all the ones in English will all be censored.