The return of the probability argument

We should have known. We’ve heard it for so long. Creationists love the Argument from Big Numbers — if we chain together a whole series of improbabilities and multiply them, we can get a really big exponent, therefore God. This approach is so familiar there’s a FAQ by Ian Musgrave on the errors in the calculations of the evolution of proteins.

Problems with the creationists’ “it’s so improbable” calculations

1) They calculate the probability of the formation of a “modern” protein, or even a complete bacterium with all “modern” proteins, by random events. This is not the abiogenesis theory at all.

2) They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed sequences for each protein, that are required for life.

3) They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than simultaneous trials.

4) They misunderstand what is meant by a probability calculation.

5) They seriously underestimate the number of functional enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences.

We’ve seen it all. People seem to be fundamentally statistically innumerate and, without training, incapable of grasping the basic principles. There are whole books about innumeracy and its consequences.

So I wasn’t surprised at all when I saw that the Texas Attorney General had filed a lawsuit claiming there was a less than one in a quadrillion chance that Biden could have honestly won the Texas election, and that it’s based on a familiarly stupid argument. Also unsurprising: that an old talk.origins compatriot, Wesley Elsberry, would jump on the faulty reasoning. We’ve all been here before.

Texas filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court against four other states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia). Others have already weighed in on how unserious a lawsuit this apparently is.

But I want to have a look at something that is a bit more approachable, which is the statistics opinion that Texas Attroney General Ken Paxton relied upon in crafting the lawsuit. It makes some remarkable claims:

The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the
four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—
independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m.
on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in
1,000,000,000,000,000. For former Vice President Biden to win these four
States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one
in a quadrillion to the fourth power (i.e., 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,0004). See Decl.
of Charles J. Cicchetti, Ph.D. (“Cicchetti Decl.”) at ¶¶ 14-21, 30-31 (App. 4a-7a,
9a).

Read Wesley’s post for a thorough deconstruction (or this thread for a similar take), so I’ll keep it simple. What kills Paxton’s claims are the assumptions: he assumes that voters should have voted exactly as they did in 2016, that people who voted early on election day would have the same statistical preferences as those who voted later, that people who voted in person would vote the same way as those who voted by mail, and that different precincts would show no change in their preferences over time. He doesn’t seem to realize that what he has shown is not that Biden couldn’t have won, but that his assumptions were all wrong.

Now this has gotten me thinking about genetics, and it’s too early — this is my break, people — and the very first cross we’re going to do. It’s a boring cross to get heterozygotes out of two true-breeding strains, just a preliminary to the real experiment, but I have the students do observations to test their assumption that they’ll get half males and half females. They never do, and the statistics all say it’s a significant difference, with more females than males. Further, when you sample the population at different times after eclosion, it changes, with more females eclosing early. You don’t get to say, “it’s supposed to be 50:50!” and pretend your results are wrong — you’re supposed to question your assumption that sex is a random binary choice. There are a lot of factors that bias the outcome!

So, this is what it’s like to live in a gerontocracy

This story about Diane Feinstein makes me sad. She’s exhibiting signs of severe cognitive decline, and is hindering progress by Democrats in the Senate with her inability to function.

In a hearing on November 17th, Dianne Feinstein, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, at eighty-seven, is the oldest member of the Senate, grilled a witness. Reading from a sheath of prepared papers, she asked Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, whether his company was doing enough to stem the spread of disinformation. Elaborating, she read in full a tweet that President Trump had disseminated on November 7th, falsely claiming to have won the Presidential election. She then asked Dorsey if Twitter’s labelling of the tweet as disputed had adequately alerted readers that it was a bald lie.

It was a good question. Feinstein seemed sharp and focussed. For decades, she has been the epitome of a female trailblazer in Washington, always hyper-prepared. But this time, after Dorsey responded, Feinstein asked him the same question again, reading it word for word, along with the Trump tweet. Her inflection was eerily identical. Feinstein looked and sounded just as authoritative, seemingly registering no awareness that she was repeating herself verbatim. Dorsey graciously answered the question all over again.

She’s a symptom. The whole Senate is sclerotic with these ancient, decrepit geezer. It’s how we ended up with a 78 year old Democratic president, and a senate full of old people shaking their canes at each other.

Meanwhile, the Feinstein situation has triggered the latest round in a larger generational fight in the Democratic Senate caucus. Unlike the Republican leadership in the Senate, which rotates committee chairmanships, the Democrats have stuck with the seniority system. Some frustrated younger members argue that this has undermined the Democrats’ effectiveness by giving too much power to elderly and sometimes out-of-touch chairs, resulting in uncoördinated strategy and too little opportunity for members in their prime.

A glimpse of the discontent became visible last month, when Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, who at sixty-five is considered a younger member, challenged the claim of Richard Durbin, the seventy-six-year-old senator from Illinois, a long-serving member of the Party’s leadership, to be next in line to fill Feinstein’s seat as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.

That’s depressing. I’m 63 and I’d be a young babe in that place, and that just isn’t right.

I am not suffering any kind of cognitive decline (I think, but then I wouldn’t know, would I?) but I am suddenly thinking that I should be considering retirement. I’ve never seriously thought about it before, just assuming I’d keep going and going until I dropped dead in front of a class (also not something I think is imminent), and retirement was not something that would ever be an option for me. But now, I’m contemplating it, not just because Feinstein is setting a bad example, but because this stupid pandemic has been traumatic, and I wouldn’t want to keep teaching this way. It would probably serve the students better if I were replaced with a younger, more up-to-date person (not much hope of that, either, with university finances being hit hard recently, so if I left, I’d probably be replaced with nobody).

Anyway, I’m putting my retirement on the agenda. At some point. I should start squinting at the calendar. And my finances. All I’m saying is that if I’m still at UMM when I’m 70, you all have the job of yelling at me to stop being selfish.

Oh, and if I do take the option of dropping dead before retiring, yell at my corpse even harder that I was so selfish.

The worst takes on Elliot Page

I’m seeing two kinds of negative reactions to Elliot Page’s revelation. One is outright denial, verging on rage; the other is dull, stupid incomprehension. Neither are particularly attractive, or complimentary to the character of those making them.

The loudest example of the first is this editorial by Brendan O’Neill, in which he deadnames him and goes on and on, stupidly upset that a woman cannot just click her fingers and become a ‘he’. It’s about what I would expect from O’Neill, who is one of those peculiarly British reactionaries, a shrieking Trotskyite who always favors conservative authoritarianism. I really don’t get Brendan O’Neill, he’s such a strange creature. But here’s what he says about Elliot Page:

So that’s it, is it? Ellen Page is no more? She’s been disappeared? She’s been shoved down the memory hole, left to stalk that netherworld of people whose names must never be uttered out loud, like Bruce Jenner, Frank Maloney, Voldemort? Ellen Page, the actress most famous for starring in irritant quirkhouse movie Juno, has now declared that she is Elliot Page and that she’s a he. And, boom, just like that, Ellen’s gone. She’s being erased from film history. People are getting into trouble even for saying the word ‘Ellen’. ‘Who?’, woke identitarians ask, as if they’ve all gone mad.

It goes on and on like that, but the gist of it seems to be that he acts as if “Ellen Page”, the female, has been dragged out and shot, to be replaced by “Elliot Page”, the male, and that we’ve betrayed her by accepting their evolution. It’s an odd view that isn’t believed by anyone. There was a person, a human being, who was assigned female at birth, and who lived and grew and realized that the identity forced on them by the conventions of culture was not the identity they held inside. The person isn’t gone or erased, they’re still here — they just aren’t the person you thought they were, and they definitely don’t fit into the one of the binary cartoons you wanted them to conform to…but then, nobody does. Get over it.

The second type of anti-trans sentiment I’m seeing is the chickenshit sarcastic ‘skeptic’ who is Just Asking Questions, because they want to be able to run away fast if called out on their bigotry. Who else could better represent that view than Michael Shermer?

What a buffoon.

Oh, he’s serious (not trolling). Do I need to point out that he’s published many books, which he likes to claim are the product of “research”, and that he should have the tools at his fingertips to find all kinds of sources that could explain to him in great detail how to answer those questions? Does he usually “research” his books by asking leading questions on Twitter of his followers, who, he must know by now, tend to have a bit of a bias against the progressive views that he’d need to listen to? Shermer is definitely trolling. He’s just playing the dumbass to build some plausible deniability, and to pretend to be more open-minded than he actually is.

Also, he left off the question he really wants to ask. If Michael Shermer thinks Elliot Page is attractive and wants to assault him, would that make Shermer gay? Go away, Shermer, you’re just an awful person.

I tried imagining this, and then I throwed up

Wow, the naiveté. There was never a time when I thought this would be a good idea.

Imagine a world is ruled by scientists, not by politicians.

I don’t know who the guy on the bottom right is, but I hope he’s embarrassed to have been lumped in with that crowd of people, none of whom have any qualifications in governance.

Also, the bad grammar — this seems to be an image patched together by some guy who has nothing but a twitter account, Physics-astronomy.org, a Facebook page, and an ugly news-aggregator site, Physics-astronomy.org, none of which are affiliated with any organization of physicists, and which seems to be a site that skims off articles on science from other sites and posts them without attribution. It’s the product of a no-talent parasite, in other words, so it’s doubly embarrassing to see that kind of stupid arrogance.

It’s a shame that so many atheists are suckers for this kind of crap.

Crashing. Crashing hard

I must have been wound up tight for the last three months, because after finishing grading yesterday, I thought I’d be able to relax and do some fun productive stuff. Nope. Brain melty. Joints achey. Everything hurts, but simultaneously so sluggish the pain can’t get too acute.

Oh well, the student complaints about their grades are already trickling in, so the tension will tighten back up to normal soon.

Ha ha ho ho

I went into the office to pick up my mail, among other things, and look what someone sent me!

Oh, look, it has a cute little reindeer sticker! It’s probably a Christmas card. How sweet!

Although, as I do with all mystery mail, I checked the return address. “Living Way Lytle Creek”…my spider sense is tingling. The back of the card confirmed my expectations.

Everything beneficial that atheism has ever contributed to society is referenced herein…. Does anyone want to guess what’s inside? Go on. I bet you can.

[Read more…]

This is for real?

“A Recipe for Seduction,” a Lifetime Original mini-movie:

Hard to believe, but it is real, and just as tawdry as you might expect. It’s actually a maxi-commercial.

KFC had teamed up with Lifetime to deliver its own holiday mini-movie – “A Recipe for Seduction,” which will air on the Lifetime channel on Sunday.

The 15-minute mini-movie (or jumbo-commercial) features Mario Lopez, who has also starred in other Lifetime features such as “FelizNaviDAD.” Lopez will take on the role of Colonel Harland Sanders in the film.

It’s getting a lot of press, so it’s already successful…which means we can expect more cheesy depictions of company mascots appearing in bad miniature dramas. Look for the Borger King to appear in one of those Hallmark holiday movies with royalty, or the Little Caesars guy to show up on the History channel, or McDonald’s Grimace on Shudder.

How will we pay for it?

Get ready, you’re going to hear that question a lot from the Republicans in coming years. Just keep this in mind:

The fossil fuel lobby has actively worked in many countries to protect their subsidies and avoid the imposition of carbon taxes. Doing so protects their profits.
US spent on these subsidies in 2015 is more than the country’s defense budget and 10 times the federal spending for education

Funny how cutting oil subsidies and defense never end up on the chopping block.

Pinker does automatically love the Patriarchy

Steven Pinker rushed to defend an overpaid Eton school teacher who had been fired for making a video called “The Patriarchy Paradox”. You can watch it if you must, but it’s incredibly bad — he seems obsessed with movie portrayals of men as being an accurate representation of True Masculinity. His first examples are of Marvel superheroes: The Marvel movies showed that in popular culture, masculine archetypes, such as Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man, described by the philosopher Edward Feser as a patriotic soldier, the son of a heavenly father come to Earth, and a strutting capitalist alpha male, retain their appeal. The whole thing sounds like that. He relies mainly on fictional sources, bad statistics, and biased presentation of data to make a case for the intrinsic superiority of men, therefore justifying patriarchy. I mean, really, how can anyone be persuaded by this bullshit?

He then uses a clip from Goodfellas of Henry Hill beating up his neighbour for molesting his girlfriend as evidence that ‘male aggression is a biological fact… whether we like it or not’ (25:42). He also seems to agree with Scarface’s Tony Montana’s observation that ‘first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women’ (29:12), as if psychotic, murderous, cokehead gangsters are a valid voice of reason.

It is notable that many of Knowland’s arguments would not look out of place on an incel Reddit forum. Knowland repeatedly says that women use their sexuality to their advantage, stating that they can ‘exploit their power of sexual choice to get males to compete to do things for them’ (22:32). This is classic incel rhetoric: believing that women use their sexual appeal to manipulate and control men, and that if men can’t get sex, it’s because of women withholding it from them. This is a terrible message to teach teenage boys. The problem is not a discussion of such claims, the problem is with Knowland’s presentation; his lack of analysis, his failure to question the assertions made in his video. If this incident raises questions of free debate, then where’s the debate?

If you’re so deluded that you can’t tell that Henry Hill and Tony Montana are psychopathic monsters and the villains of those movies, you aren’t fit to be a teacher.

But, surprise surprise surprise, Steven Pinker was among the very first well-known academics to try and defend this guy and make ludicrous claims of protecting academic freedom, and even bigger surprise, he now admits to never having even seen the video!

Keep this in mind if ever you have to evaluate Pinker’s opinion on anything.

I heard about this case last week as I was deep in the throes of grading, and the first thing I did before judging this Knowland guy was to check out his video, and then I judged the hell out of him.

By the way, that video has 5.7K upvotes and only 524 downvotes. YouTube remains a cesspool of misogyny.