Hsu is rightfully embattled — he shouldn’t have any authority

Look, I don’t hate physicists — I have friends who are physicists! They can use my bathroom any time! It’s more that there a few rotten apples who insist on ignorantly stepping into my discipline and making grand (and false) pronouncements about how biology works, apparently because knowing physics makes them think they know everything. And it’s annoying, especially when they get grant money for it (e.g., Paul Davies), publish rubbish in physics journals without question, and get fawned over by the mass media for it. I’ve also noticed that there’s a kind of thin actinic line of other physicists who reflexively rally to the defense of any of their own, no matter how inane, against interlopers from outside the domain of physics — which is kind of hard to imagine, since they simultaneously believe that everything is in their domain.

I have to snipe again, though, because another physicist is in the news. Students and others are calling for the removal of Stephen Hsu as VP of Research and Graduate Studies at Michigan State University.

Some physicists think that because they know physics, and physics is difficult, that they are qualified to work in other disciplines. Sometimes a physicist wandering from physics turns out fine, particularly if they make use of their obvious quantitative skill; I’m thinking here of David Layzer’s well-known critique of Arthur Jensen’s IQ work. Other times it is disastrous, such as William Shockley’s eugenic proposals. Yesterday evening the Graduate Employees Union (GEU) of my own university, Michigan State University, posted a long Twitter thread that shows that the Senior Vice-President for Research and Innovation, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Stephen Hsu, here at my own university, Michigan State University is much closer to Shockley than he is to Layzer.

I’ve written before in this space on how scientific racism gains purchase when supposedly mainstream sources publish and promote it. I find the evidence in the GEU Twitter thread to be good examples of Hsu promoting outrageous figures by appearing with them on podcasts and Youtube videos, such as that of the loathsome Stephan Molyneux.

Hsu shares a conceit all too common among physicists: that “it’s really high math ability that is useful for discovering things about the world — that is, discovering truth or reasoning rigorously.” But his behavior shows that this is manifestly untrue. All the quantitative sophistication in the world does not help in disciplines that require interpreting texts in historical contexts, understanding social nuance, or properly recounting the past for present-day audiences. Add in a heaping dose of conspiracy arguments and you can quickly end up promoting racist, especially antisemitic interpretations of history. This is what happened when Hsu interviewed his friend Ron Unz last year. The Senior Vice-President for Research and Innovation at my University heaped praise on a promoter of Holocaust denial on his podcast; clear evidence of Hsu’s complete lack of scholarly and intellectual judgement.

This isn’t some harmless academic argument, like how many aliens are dancing on the planets of the galaxy, but the promotion of bad ideas that do great harm to people. Hsu consorts with racists like Stephen Molyneux and Ron Unz; he openly promotes eugenics; he holds ridiculous ideas about the unlimited perfectability of human genetics, despite being pig-ignorant of biology; he believes women are inherently less suited to careers in science and engineering. His views are rejected by the American Society of Human Genetics, but I guess his authority in theoretical physics overrides that. The real shocker here is that MSU was willing to promote a blatant, unapologetic bigot with ties to racist, white nationalist organizations to a prestigious position in their administration. I guess believing in the intrinsic inferiority of minority students is no obstacle to putting the guy in a position of power at a university.

I tangled with Hsu a few years ago, ripping into his belief that we can breed people for an IQ of 1000, as if IQ is a real entity and breeding people is like breeding chickens. Remember the chickens, the mainstay of his argument?

That fat chicken is your brain. Let the dumbass physicist control your breeding, culling the less brilliant progeny from your line, and eventually your many-times-great-grandchildren will have great huge brains and be many times smarter than Stephen Hsu, and nah, there won’t be any side effects and we’ll just ignore the inhumanity of the process and we’ll pretend there aren’t any physical limitations. All you have to do is imagine an immense perfectly spherical brain floating in a frictionless vacuum.

How do physicists get away with publishing this crap?

And further, why does the media give them attention for it?

As the Guardian credulously claims, New calculations come up with estimate for worlds capable of communicating with others. That number is…36. What a load of bullshit. I think I’ve finally realized what the Drake Equation is good for: it’s an arbitrary formula that allows physicists to freely tweak the parameters and get a new number that they can publish. No, really, that’s all this paper is — they came up some new numbers to plug into the cascade of bullshit numbers in the Drake Equation, and got a new number. Surprise!

GIGO. It’s all GIGO.

The Guardian does get quotes revealing some of their assumptions.

Basically, we made the assumption that intelligent life would form on other [Earth-like] planets like it has on Earth, so within a few billion years life would automatically form as a natural part of evolution, said Conselice.

Wait, what? Automatically? Every Earth-like planet is going to form intelligent life within a few billion years, as a natural part of evolution? That certainly is a simplifying assumption, I guess. It means their number is hugely inflated.

He’s not done, though!

[If intelligent life forms] in a scientific way, not just a random way or just a very unique way, then you would expect at least this many civilisations within our galaxy, he said.

Oh. If the evolution of intelligence is scientific, then it produces intelligence. If chance or unique conditions play a significant role, then it’s not scientific. I hope evolution is listening. Maybe it should take some physics courses?

He added that, while it is a speculative theory, he believes alien life would have similarities in appearance to life on Earth. We wouldn’t be super shocked by seeing them, he said.

life on Earth. Like it’s one thing that he can picture in his mind. What exactly does life on Earth look like?

Is this it?

Or this?

Maybe it’s this, which Dr Physicist wouldn’t be at all shocked to see.

I have a few new rules:

  • No more papers that use the Drake equation. It’s been done to death, it can be manipulated to produce any answer you want, and most of the parameters are indeterminable fantasies. It’s like publishing horoscopes.
  • Physicists don’t get to publish papers on life in the universe unless accompanied by a responsible evolutionary biologist. All these godawful cocky physicists do is demonstrate that they don’t know jack about biology — they know less than your average non-scientist, because they’re stuffed full of bogus assumptions about how it must work.
  • The media can’t just gather a couple of like-minded physicists to comment on a “life in the universe” paper. Somehow, they always manage to find a creationist to give a “fair and balanced” perspective on biology, but a physics boffin is an unquestionable source, no matter how stupid his ideas are.

I still have my old rule: when a physicist opines on biology, throw overripe tomatoes.

I do wonder if physicists are even capable of feeling embarrassment or shame. Somebody should do an experiment.

Does anyone on FtB think Rowling has a point? No.

The Geeky Humanist has weighed in on l’affaire Rowling, and comes to the same conclusion most people have: Rowling is wrong about everything. I warned Sarah that posts about Rowling are a magnet for obnoxious trolls, but you know how it goes: Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, it must be addressed.

You know, HJ and Brinkman and GAS have also been punching up at a certain rich TERF, and then I noticed that Rhiannon was on the case before the Screed was published, and Caine had Rowling pegged 3 years ago.

Kent Hovind thinks he’s going to win a half billion dollars in a lawsuit

As you know, I’m not impressed with the American legal system — it has built-in deep injustices and biases, and also, while I benefit from many of them as a white man, it also has loopholes that allow every crank and bad actor to manipulate the system, shaking it as if it’s a piggy-bank to harass people and dream of getting rich. Wouldn’t you know it, Kent Hovind is one of those delusional manipulators who wants his money. He was in jail for 9 years for his money schemes — Dinosaur Adventure Land wasn’t just a tool to evangelize, but an illegal money-making operation for the Hovinds to get rich off of — and was legally convicted of his crimes, and also lost an appeal. Now he and his crackpot lawyers have convinced themselves that there was an error, a technicality, that will allow them to invalidate his conviction and sue the federal government for $500 million. It’s a fantasy. He was caught playing games with his money to avoid taxation, and he can’t deny that. What he is now claiming is that the federal government needed a “verified complaint” to even begin action against him, and therefore the entire trial should be thrown out.

As Peter Reilly explains, it’s a nonsensical complaint. What triggered his arrest, trial, and conviction was a grand jury indictment that evaluated the evidence at the time, and concluded that there was cause to pursue the matter further. Hovind is making yet another Sovereign Citizen style argument based on Imaginary Law. He’s not going to clean up and get rich with this lawsuit, but is only going to pour more money down a legal rabbit hole. I guess I can’t complain about that.

I am a little concerned about Reilly’s analysis, though.

Robert Baty alerted me to the filing. I think there are others involved but he seems to be the prime mover behind Nightmare. Kent has a tendency to refer to his critics, other than those who have deserted him, as atheists. Baty is not an atheist, but rather a Christian who has a problem with Young Earth Creationism.

Baty is a retired IRS agent and Kent maintains that Baty has been called out of retirement to “get Hovind”. I find that accusation highly implausible. My evaluation of Robert Baty is that you should never underestimate a cranky old man with a couple of obsessions, an internet connection and time on his hands when he is not watching the grandchildren.

<gasp> I feel seen!

By the way, Kent Hovind posted another comment in my latest video.

How can you BELIEVE the amazingly complex genetic code in ANY form of life happened by random chance over billions of years? How can you teach the silly evolution religion to students and still sleep at night? Call 855-big dino ext 3 to schedule a debate on the very best three evidences you have for evolution. I’ll post the debate unedited (unless profanity needs bleeped) on my kenthovindofficial YouTube channel where my rebuttal of your position was posted a few weeks ago. Come visit our Dinosaur Adventure Land REAL Science Center in Lenox, Alabama and I’ll give you a tour. :) Kent Hovind

I don’t believe organisms evolved entirely by random chance, so as usual, his criticisms are not based on reality. I’ve informed him, though, that my fee for wasting my time in debate with idiots has risen to $7000/day, a special rate just for him. Maybe when he wins his absurd lawsuit, he’ll be able to afford my rates. Unlike him, though, I’m not counting on the windfall, ever.

Snide and funny!

This guy makes a series of smart points about fascists. I found it amusing.

I am fine with statues being torn down and military bases being renamed. This is not the destruction of history, it is the correction of distortions of history, a process that historians do all the time. Some people seem to think history is fixed and absolute, but then it would be done — and historians are well aware that our understanding of the past requires constant sifting of new evidence and reassessment of past interpretations in the light of new knowledge. US history, in particular, has been the victim of political attacks to change people’s perception of the Civil War, and to erase the struggles of black communities. It’s about time we rose up and rejected these weird ideas that Robert E. Lee was heroic, that the Civil War was about state’s rights, that the American Revolution was led by noble idealists who cared about liberty most of all, that colonialism brought enlightenment to barbarous parts of the world. Every generation lies about its virtues, and it’s the role of subsequent generations to correct the record.

If you need further dissection of JK Rowling…

Portrait of JK Rowling

I was only able to handle a single sentence of Rowling’s screed — it was too stupid to bear — but if you’re unclear on why the rest of it was so awful, Ashley Miller slogged through the whole thing, and if you’d rather see it analyzed from a trans perspective, Dawn Ennis looks at it and the context of the response to it. As far as I’m concerned, JK Rowling is dead to me and I won’t be reading anything by her ever again.

I don’t find that a particular loss. When the Harry Potter books came out, I was happy to get them for my kids — they were enthusiastic, there was some peer pressure from their friends, it got them reading, although that generally wasn’t a problem with my nerdish offspring. I read the first couple. I didn’t care for them personally. They were just too formulaic — does every book have to revolve around Quidditch, a game which makes no sense — and Hogwarts as an institution was far too offputting, seeming to fit better with the kind of British culture that thinks sending kids off to be tortured for a few years in a boarding school builds character. The movies bored me, and if you asked me now what happened in any of them, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Uh, um, there was a Quidditch match. There were monsters? Harry Potter is tormented, but never seems to do much of anything? I dunno.

She seems to be trying to churn out spinoffs from the Harry Potter universe now. I didn’t care before, I am actively repulsed now. JK can just toddle off to her mansion and her well-earned irrelevance, and the Harry Potter phenomenon can be recognized as the peculiar phenomenon it was.