I worry about Mad Philosophers doing Mad Experiments

We’re all familiar with the Mad Scientist trope. You know, demented but highly intelligent guy pursues insane and obviously dangerous goal of, for instance, breeding giant spiders with which to take over the world, and no one thinks to ask why such a smart guy would think 20 foot tall arachnids would grant him geopolitical domination and power even as his experimental subjects devour him and a band of local villagers armed with flamethrowers torch his work, the end (or is it?). At least you get a little spectacle out of it all, even if the story makes no sense and any sensible person would see the flaws in the plan*.

But what would a Mad Philosopher do? Those people are really dangerous, as the people of Athens realized over 2400 years ago. They play games with people’s heads.

So Aaron Rabinowitz, classic Mad Philosopher type, did a little experiment. He created a private Facebook group, only accessible by invitation or submarine, filled it with lefties and then intentionally invited right-wing goblins to join in, too. He called it Monster Island and said it was an experiment in free speech. Yeah, right. And when I open a jar of angry wasps at a picnic, it’s just an experiment in human agility and speed.

As the resident mad scientist, I saw Monster Island as more than just a containment system for some of the worst people I’ve ever experienced: it was a place to experiment on those monsters, myself included. I wanted to study if it was possible for people from radically different worldviews to debate in an environment that had informal guidelines but no officially enforced rules. It was already clear in 2016 that the regulation of online speech was going to be a rolling disaster, producing an endless stream of rage against the moderators, who were invariably cast as biased against the right. Donald Trump himself has claimed that sites like Twitter and Facebook discriminate against right wing speech. Respectable experts have raised concerns about the lack of oversight for algorithmic moderation. Our failures to address this problem proactively seem to promote a desire in some to return to a “golden age” of the internet, before things got so big that moderation of speech on an epic scale became necessary. I had my doubts that less moderation was really the solution to our problems, and Monster Island presented a perfect chance to test my theories.

Ha ha ha. No. I could predict exactly how this would turn out: in flames and destruction. It did, and worse.

Almost immediately we had to add the guideline “no deleting” as individuals started to delete sections of posts to mess with arguments or cover spots where they’d messed up. I call it a guideline because at this point we hadn’t had to actively enforce anything beyond stating the norms. What became clear though was that even the existence of those unenforced guidelines was an affront to some monsters’ sensibilities, and so they set to work testing the fences for weaknesses. They used all the typical troll techniques. Do things that are very close to breaking the guidelines and then force everyone to argue over whether they count. Look for other horrible things they could do that weren’t technically in violation of any guidelines, just to see if it would force us to develop new guidelines in response. It was always a losing battle, because there is a fundamental asymmetry between order and chaos, and chaos always has the advantage in tempo. One troll named Ryan Balch, whose name I have not changed, for reasons that will become apparent, openly declared his intentions to destroy Monster Island, just to prove he could. Several trolls joined his cause.

The result was several years of the purest banality of evil. We ended up needing to add rules against doxxing, blocking admins, explicit threats of physical violence, and taking photos from people’s personal profiles and photoshopping them into sex acts with military dictators. Meanwhile, the quality of discourse deteriorated from semi-functional, where some folks could have actual arguments or at least do a dance that looked vaguely like presenting evidence, to endless spam of the most disturbing memes you’ve thankfully never seen.

He kept his experiment going for four years. That takes either a level of patience or of masochism to a degree beyond the scope of my imagination. I’ve been running my own Monster Island (it’s a blog called Pharyngula) for almost 20 years, and the only way I’ve been able to cope is with ruthless moderation, keeping the nasties on edge by viciously banning them when they start typing their vileness. Just picture the chaos if I did the opposite, seeding the comment threads by actively inviting creationists, TERFs, racists, and Republicans (oops, repeated myself) to participate. It would be lively, I guess, in the same way that the sack of Rome was an interactive event with an extraordinary degree of audience participation. This was the same kind of thing that happens when you give Libertarians free rein. Someone is going to be eaten by bears.

There was a predictable conclusion to the Rabinowitz Experiment.

By year three it became clear that I’d gotten all the results I was going to get from this experiment, and the toxicity of the island was consuming more and more of my time and life-force, so about a year ago I gave up and swam for shore. Many would say it’s absurd I stuck with it that long, others would call me the worst monster of all for letting the experiment go on as long as I had, and they’re all probably correct. Some of the members seemed to still enjoy the group though, so I passed control over to Peter, set sail, and never looked back. I felt comfortable concluding that unmoderated discourse faces a tragedy of the commons no different than any other unregulated communal resource. There are places online where people who strongly disagree, up to a point, can engage productively. What those groups have in common is substantial rules and heavy moderator enforcement.

There was also a Surprise Twist Ending. Like any good horror story, you may destroy the Island, but the Monsters escape and turn up in the sequel.

It’s hard to believe that a person from a Facebook group with fewer than 400 members ended up directly connected to vigilante violence against protesters. When we saw the news, Peter and I decided it was finally time, and Monster Island sank back into the internet ocean. I’m happy to see it gone, but I’m haunted by the dark irony that Ryan Balch ultimately made good on all his promises. He got out in the streets, and in doing so he destroyed Monster Island.

Go ahead, look up Ryan Balch. He turned up in the news involved in real world bloody violence.

You also get some curious cross-fertilization of bad ideas. They interbreed and recombine and you get strange new monsters that infest the world.

James Lindsay from New Discourses shared this a tweet from Christopher Rufo, a director at the creationist think tank the Discovery Institute

I’m sorry, Aaron. The Mad Scientists’ Union may have to show up at your door with torches and pitchforks, a cup of hemlock, or a trolley. Nothing personal. It’s just that your experiments are terrifying.

*As we all know, breeding small, prolific, fast spiders with aggressive temperaments and gloriously potent venom that you can smuggle onto Air Force One, the Supreme Court, and the floor of the Senate would be far more effective. Bwahahahahaha!

Don’t be fooled by the Barrington Declaration

Even as COVID-19 infection rates are rising, there are people out there lobbying for decreased diligence. Open all the businesses! Party on! If everyone gets the disease, we’ll acquire herd immunity! That latter is from people who previously pooh-poohed the concept in order to defend anti-vaxxers, who now don’t give a damn if a few million people die in order to reach the unreachable goal. Worst of all, the right-wing think tanks are backing the nonsense. A small group of conservative shills have formulated something they call the Barrington Declaration.

The declaration, which calls for an immediate resumption of “life as normal” for everyone except the “vulnerable”, is written by three science professors from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, giving it the sheen of academic respectability. But there is much to set alarm bells ringing. It makes claims about herd immunity – the idea that letting the virus rip among less vulnerable groups will allow a degree of population-level immunity to build up which will eventually protect the more vulnerable – that are unsupported by existing scientific evidence. The professors do not define who is “vulnerable”, nor do they set out a workable plan for shielding them. The declaration sets itself up against a straw proposal that nobody is arguing for – a full-scale national lockdown until a vaccine is made available. There is no acknowledgement of the massive scientific uncertainty that exists with a new disease.

It’s coming out of an organization called the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), which, as you might guess from the name, is not a medical or scientific institution, but one focused on making money for its sponsors or throwing out noise to prevent sensible initiatives that might save lives, but reduce profits. It’s fake.

The statement claims to have been signed by more than 6,000 medical scientists, but anyone can sign up claiming to be one (there are a number of fake medical signatories on the list, including a Dr Harold Shipman). When Sky News pressed one of the co-authors on this, he said: “We do not have the resources to audit each signature.” Consider what this approach would mean for scientific endeavour were it applied more broadly. And what are scientists doing fronting a campaign whose back office is run by a thinktank that flirts with climate change denial?

(The Shipman name is fake, I hope, since Dr Harold Shipman was a serial killer who committed suicide.)

This phony declaration business is a familiar tactic used by cranks, quacks, and profiteers, and I’ve run into it many times. There are a lot of gullible people who fall for it, though — false authority is a useful tool to sway the suckers, I guess. But today I first learned that there is a handy, succinct name for it from David Gorski.

I’ll discuss why that’s the case in a moment, but first I’d like to take a trip down memory lane to revisit various examples of science denialists using similar “declarations,” “petitions,” and “open letters” to give the false appearance of strong scientific support for their positions. Why? Because declarations like this, although they can be used for good (such as when US climate scientists recently signed an open letter to Congress reaffirming the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is the primary driver of climate change and the overall warming of the climate), more frequently such letters are propaganda for pseudoscience. Indeed, such “declarations,” “open letters,” and “petitions” signed by physicians and scientists represent a technique that goes back at least to the tobacco companies lining up lists of doctors to testify to the safety of cigarettes. (One particularly ludicrous example from R.J. Reynolds in the 1940s claimed that 113,597 doctors preferred their cigarettes.) The idea was (and is) to give the false impression of a scientific controversy where none exists and to appeal to the authority of scientists and doctors to support their claims. It’s a technique that John Cook has referred to as the “magnified minority”:

Nice, “magnified minority”. I’ll remember that.

As usual, Gorski is thorough in describing past “magnified minority” operations, and documents the phony signatures on this one, as well as the absurdity of their proposal and AIER’s shady history as a climate change denialist outfit funded by the Koch brothers. Really, why anyone listens to anything by them is beyond me at this point: “funded by the Koch brothers” ought to be the kiss of death for any organization.

Why would you buy a newspaper if all you want to do is dismantle it?

Lee Enterprises bought a small town newspaper, the Floyd Press, for $140 million dollars. You’d think for that sum that they’d want to invest and maintain it, but no — they started firing the people right away. Did they think a newspaper was a collection of printing machines and nothing more? They kept paring away until the staff was reduced to one person, Ashley Spinks, who was the sole reporter, editor, and publisher, and someone whose job was selling ads. They were only paying her $36,000 per year, so it’s unclear what they thought they were buying for that $140 million.

An article discusses Spinks and Lee Enterprises cutting staff on newspapers all over the place, and it’s clear that they also don’t understand what they’re selling. They’ve got a fleet of small town newspapers that don’t have reporters writing about local news. The subscribers notice, too, but they’re a captive audience. These little newspapers don’t have to worry much about competition, and don’t do much investigative work. The one time in our lives that we subscribed to the Morris newspaper was when we had kids, and they’d regularly put up photos of local children doing local children activities. Right now I’d say that most of the interesting reading in our paper is on the op-ed page, where residents are providing all the content.

After that article, though, Lee Enterprises immediately fired Ashley Spinks.

Now the Floyd Press has no reporters at all. I presume they’ve still got the person selling ads.

I’ve always thought of a newspaper as a collection of journalists at heart, with the thing on paper just being the medium. What is a newspaper without reporters and editors? Is art just a bunch of nicely framed canvases? Who needs a poem when you can just buy a rhyming dictionary? Would you pay to visit an empty zoo with a nice array of cages? Is science a lab with some fancy glassware and machines that go ping? Somebody is missing the whole point.

I suspect there’s some greedy capitalist motive driving Lee Enterprises that has nothing to do with informing the public about the news.

Traditions, adapted

Every year, UMM has a haunted barn attraction on campus for Halloween, with spooky decorations and a few jump scares. That’s impractical in the era of a pandemic, but I’m still happy to see they’ve just modified it a bit. Wear a mask, get a tour, maintain social distancing.

Most importantly, visit the beautiful horses.

(Yes, we have a stable on campus. It’s a good place for spiders, too.)

Welp, that puts everything in perspective

My stress levels are sky high right now, I occasionally emit an uncontrollable moan as I sit in my office, and I’m backlogged in grading still. But somehow, it could still be much, much worse.

I’m sorry, Professor Wilson, your situation does sound truly terrible, but am I bad if I say it made me feel so fortunate and happy about my situation? It’s all relative. There’s always somebody who’s got it worse.

I’m working on corrupting my granddaughter, too

An inspiring story for us all.

Although, to be honest, Iliana seems to be building her own interests without my help, and is more excited about owls than spiders. And that’s fine. We’ve just got to grow that interest in the world around us.

The Halloween fundraiser has begun!

We’re doing another fundraiser! Don’t panic, like the last one, this will be fairly unobtrusive and you can ignore it altogether, but if you like us, please do drop a few dollars in the tip jar.

We are obviously going to have a Halloween theme, with scary stories and a Halloween-themed game. Check out our fundraising page for the details!

The events have already begun. We’re gathering Fall- and Halloween-themed photos at Affinity, and reader submissions are requested. You’ll be able to view all the photos in our fundraiser in the gallery. Send in photos of the Fall colors, of your kids in their costumes, of spiders, whatever makes you think of this time of year.

Contemplate the past and how you got here

I had an hour before class, so I decided to take a short walk in the fall sun in this, the land of the Dakota peoples. On the way I met an older man holding a newspaper, and he stopped in front of me — wearing a mask, of course, and 2 meters away from me. He said, “It’s Columbus Day! They’re tearing down statues in Portland!” He seemed distressed.

I was going to say, “Good. Portland is in many ways a progressive city, and I’m pleased that they’re acting to address injustices. Columbus was a genocidal monster who enslaved and tortured and murdered native people, and we should all be tearing down the statues and the myths of our nation that have so far honored mainly cruelty and oppression.”

Unfortunately, I am unable to say that in Anishinaabemowin, which would be the most appropriate language to use, so I just gave him a thumbs up and walked around him.

A remorseful Indigenous Peoples’ Day to all my fellow colonizers! Take a moment to think about the true history of the land you’re living in!

How dare a corporation cater to a market segment that isn’t mine?

Oreo has come out with rainbow colored cookies. I hear the commercial is positive and heartwarming and appreciative of the LGBT community, but I haven’t seen it, so I’ll just have to trust the buzz.

That’s nice, but I’m not in the market for cookies myself. If I were, I’d probably like them, although they do look a bit garish. The one thing I wouldn’t do is regard them as a sign of the collapse of civilization. But then, I’m not Rod Dreher.

At least there’s a sensible take on that.

Yes, Rod sees a corporate decision to monetize apparent support for queer people and their hetero friends and family as a totalitarian act of revolution (???) because his movement demands that adherents be mad about something at all times.

But that something can’t be anything a normal person would get mad about. Normal people look at this and think “Where can I get some?” or perhaps “Yuck, Oreos.” They do not think totalitarianism or revolution because even if they are assholes, they aren’t assholes who have nothing better to do except Be Mad.

As an aside, I’m still torn by corporatized queerness. Yes, I know that this is driven by the desire to increase revenue and the production or sale of rainbow colored items is no guarantee that a company treats its own queer employees with respect. But, I’m old enough to remember the before times so I still think it is nifty.

Also, it makes dimwits like Rod beclown themselves, and that’s never a bad thing.

There are lots of things that are not marketed for me: sports video games, bass fishing boats, accordions, toupees, MAGA hats. They’re fine. You want one, go ahead, but please don’t pretend the people making those products love you personally. I’ll just shrug and move on.

One exception: if you’re trying to sell me on the weird religious opinions of a conservative dingleberry, I’ll say “Yuck, Dreher” and cuss you out.