Death to Facebook!

I’m giving notice: I’m abandoning Facebook in two weeks, on the 25th of January. I usually put a link to anything I write here (including this post!) on Facebook, but I won’t be doing that anymore. I’ve maintained my Facebook account mainly to keep in touch with family and friends, but even that has been poisoned with saturating levels of targeted ads and stupid paid ads. Facebook is the Fox News of social media, leeching off my interest in social contact to sell soap and provide a platform for bots and trolls to thrive.

Then I read about how Facebook lies to drain money out of the people that use its services.

“In order to beat YouTube, Facebook faked incredible viewership numbers, so [CollegeHumor] pivoted to FB,” former CollegeHumor writer Adam Conover presciently tweeted last October. “So did Funny or Die, many others. The result: A once-thriving online comedy industry was decimated.”

Facebook agreed to pay $40 million last year to settle a lawsuit after advertisers sued the social media giant for inflating video metrics by up to 900 percent. But many former CollegeHumor staffers blamed the pivot to Facebook, which couldn’t deliver on its advertising promises, for the previously successful company’s collapse. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday.

“The slow (and then quick) death of CollegeHumor, Funny or Die, and your other favorite online comedy sites was not an accident,” Conover tweeted Wednesday. “It was the result of Facebook’s deliberate effort to kill the indie video industry, in part by massively falsifying viewer data.”

Or this, from 2018.

Comedian Luisa Omielan thinks so. “Facebook, to me, is becoming unusable as an artist or a creative,” she says. Three years ago, a video of Omielan’s standup went viral on the social platform, and has now racked up 41m views. “The algorithm wasn’t as intense as it is now,” she says. “When I first started standup, I created a page for comedy, and initially it was fine, I’d post about a gig and it would reach my audiences. Now, they [Facebook] limit any post of mine about anything comedy-related, so it might be seen by, like, 100 people when I’ve got over 200,000 people following my page.”

With a post’s reach being stifled, users are encouraged to “boost” their content, with Facebook charging the creator to show their post to more fans of their page. “That video that got 45m views? I don’t get any revenue from that,” says Omielan. “Yet Facebook gets revenue from me because I have to boost things to promote it within my own page.”

Nothing against Omielan personally, but Facebook is charging people to have their stuff shoved in my face? Not interested. The Holy Algorithm is just plain bad, too — I once looked up some microscopy gear that I couldn’t afford out of curiosity, and for months I was constantly dunned with ads for stuff there was no way I’d ever buy, that I was aware of after I’d already looked it up, and had dismissed long ago. Also, don’t look up PVC elbow joints or the Internet will decide you’re a plumber. None of that helps me at all, but it does allow Facebook to turn to microscopy companies or plumbing supply houses and promise oodles of eyeballs if only they’d pony up some cash. It’s a scam, and we’re all contributing to it. So I’m out.

The change is not because I’m a grumpy misanthrope who hates interacting with people online, but because Facebook is such a crappy medium for doing that. If you want to keep in touch, there are still plenty of ways to do that:

I’m @pzmyers on Mastodon.

I’m pzmyers on MeWe.

I’m pzmyers on Instagram.

I’m @pzmyers on Twitter.

I’m pzmyers#2563 on Discord.

(I sense a pattern here.)

We’re also beginning to set up a Discord server for Freethoughtblogs as a whole.

And of course, Freethoughtblogs is not going away.

I am still in Colorado, although Orac is making me regret it

My daughter is working towards a Ph.D. in computational linguistics (I think…when she talks about her research I only understand every third word) at the University of Colorado Boulder. I’m just hanging out with my granddaughter this week, and I cringed at the chewing out Orac delivers to the institution — there is a unit of UC called UC Health that is publishing the most outrageous quackery, most recently an article touting the benefits of acupuncture in winter, written by a quack with a Masters degree in Oriental Medicine from the Southwest Acupuncture College. That’s gotta be a joke degree, right? If someone applied to my department with that on their CV, we’d have a good laugh and round-file it on the spot.

Anyway, now I feel like marching down to the university administration and giving them a good talking-to. How dare they dilute and devalue my daughter’s hard work with this nonsense?

How to make science more inclusive

We can be better, and the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology shows how it’s done. Their journal published an article describing the steps they were taking to make SICB more inclusive and representative, and show the state of affairs in their membership.

The ethnic (top panel) and gender (middle panel) composition of SICB membership and the ICB editorial board (data from 2019) compared with the US and NSF census (data from 2015 US census and 2017 NSF survey). Bottom panel: Gender composition of the ICB editorial board since the journal’s foundation (median per decade).

The top graph is the ethnic distribution, and while the percentage of people of color in the society is somewhat lower than it is in the population of Ph.D.s, and significantly lower than the overall population, the key thing is that the population in leadership roles, that is the editorial board of their journal, is proportional to the population in the general membership. That sets the direction they’ll be taking.

The second graph is the gender distribution, and it’s roughly a healthy 50:50; maybe women are a little over-represented on the editorial board, but that’s also a smaller population with more variation. It’s worth noting, too, that over half the population of Ph.D.s in the country are women, so you’d better start paying more attention. Before the usual neandertals start whining about how women are in more ‘soft’ disciplines, note that over half the population of SICB, a highly technical field, are women. I should also point out that it doesn’t matter what discipline you’re talking about, all those non-STEM fields also require rigor and discipline and hard work.

The real eye-opener is that third graph, which shows the history of SICB. Sixty years ago, it was a very ‘masculine’ organization, with only about 10% of the SICB editorial board women; it rose to about one quarter women in the 80s, surging abruptly to 60% this year. That is a big deal. Changing the gate-keepers opens up new opportunities.

Researchers from non-prestigious institutions or minority groups face hurdles in publishing and in obtaining funding; for example, female scientists publish relatively less and get fewer citations than their male counterparts due to bias, such as gender differences in self-citation. Just as female and non-white authors remain underrepresented in the USA, so do authors from low-income and Global-South countries. In many scientific areas male, majority ethnic, and US scientists remain over-represented as gatekeepers (peer reviewers, editors) and lead authors. Although editorial boards have become more inclusive, most journals in the life sciences are still led by editors from US institutions and by men: in 2018, of the top 100 journals in life sciences as ranked in a 2009 study, 78 had a male editor in chief and 68 had an editor in chief affiliated with a US-based institution. Of the 22 female editors in chief, 17 were affiliated with US-based institutions. In contrast, women made up more than half of all PhDs granted in the USA in 2017 (Fig. 1), and the USA granted fewer than a quarter of doctoral degrees worldwide in 2018.

I’ve been to SICB a few times (not as much as I’d like, but their January annual meeting time doesn’t fit my schedule well), and there’s always been a lot of interesting work presented there. The directions they’re taking only make me want to go more often.

You ain’t no fortunate one

When I was in high school, the Vietnam War was still going on, and remarkably, it was never discussed in any of my classes. I suspect that if we had, any conversation would have been strongly shaped by those authority figures, the teachers, and I had a good idea that most of them were middle-of-the-road, conservative leaning people who would have praised the American government — or worse. I knew the PE coach would constantly play the “Ballad of the Green Berets” and praise John Wayne as an ideal American. Fortunately, that meant I got most of my training in the ethics of war from Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Bob Dylan, Creedence, Pete Seeger, and CSNY.

Here we are now, 50 years later, and I’m afraid that the loudest voices expressing opinions about war are Fox News, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk, who are all, I’m afraid, jingoistic assholes. The counter-culture lies bleeding on the ground, wrecked by the profit motive, and if we rely on the populist expression of thoughtful sentiment from mass media outlets like YouTube, I guarantee that we are fucked. One of the failures of the atheist movement is that it ought to have been a solid platform for global humanist ethics, but do you think Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, or any of the major atheist organizations are going to condemn our current actions? They’re most likely debating whether they ought to express an opinion on these matters, or gearing up to exult over the deaths of Muslims.

At least Nathan Robinson is talking sense, giving clear lessons in how to avoid being swayed by the deluge of war propaganda we’re swimming in right now. Follow his lessons, and you’ll see all the lies you’re being told.

He even criticizes the approach our Democratic candidates take. Far from being the terrorist-appeasing saps that the Right would like to paint them in, they’ve swallowed a lot of the pro-war justifications as implicit in their premises.

We have to be clear and emphatic in our messaging, because so much effort is made to make what should be clear issues appear murky. If, for example, you gave a speech in 2002 opposing the Iraq War, but the first half was simply a discussion of what a bad and threatening person Saddam Hussein was, people might actually get the opposite of the impression you want them to get. Buttigieg and Warren, while they appear to question the president, have the effect of making his action seem reasonable. After all, they admit that he got rid of a threatening murderer! Sanders admits nothing of the kind: The only thing he says is that Trump has made the world worse. He puts the emphasis where it matters.

I do not fully like Sanders’ statement, because it still talks a bit more about what war means for our people, but it does mention destabilization and the total number of lives that can be lost. It is a far more morally clear and powerful antiwar statement. Buttigieg’s is exactly what you’d expect of a Consultant President and it should give us absolutely no confidence that he would be a powerful voice against a war, should one happen. Warren confirms that she is not an effective advocate for peace. In a time when there will be pressure for a violent conflict, we need to make sure that our statements are not watery and do not make needless concessions to the hawks’ propaganda.

We saw it happen with Vietnam and Iraq — we got this incessant messaging that the Other Side was Evil, making it impossible to support anything but total war unless you wanted to be painted as a traitor, and look what happened: we ended up in these futile, bloody wars that accomplished nothing other than to make defense contractors rich. Now it’s happening again. The stock market is happy, people are implicitly justifying assassination because the victim was Evil, and our president, echoed by the gullible media, is spewing nonsensical jingo nonstop.

It’s a good time to stop and ask ourselves how much of our lives are being wasted at war, and how little we’ve accomplished, and how much the USA is hurting the world.

Pay attention this time around, people.

Some folks are born made to wave the flag
They’re red, white and blue
And when the band plays “Hail To The Chief”
They point the cannon at you

No spiders!

I took Iliana on a little survey trip around her house, and was mildly disappointed. She lives in this housing development of too-big houses that have some kind of disturbing style of permitted paint jobs — absolutely everything is in muted earth tones. Dull browns, grays, an occasional dark brick color, but nothing bright at all. The wildlife around here is the same. We spotted a prairie dog colony that yip-yip-yipped at us.

Brown everywhere. Then I found a fly on Iliana’s house, and was amazed: this is the color template for all the houses around here! The developers must have seen these little flies buzzing around and decided to paint everything to match.

There were no spiders in sight. Finding spider food gives me hope, though.

Minnesota has white people

These are the fine residents of Beltrami County in Minnesota.

Fun fact: these white people just voted to forbid settlement of any refugees in their county.

Another fun fact: This is Beltrami County.

Those big lakes in the center of the county? That’s the location of the Red Lake reservation. Southwest of the county is the White Earth reservation. Leech Lake reservation is just to the southeast.

So this county just voted to ban non-native foreigners. The hypocrisy is hilarious.

Hello from Longmont, CO

Hey, I’m visiting my granddaughter for a few days — she gave me a shy smile last night, so we’re off to a great start — and we have a busy day ahead of us, entertaining and being entertained by the child, but I also noticed their garage is a promising place to look for spiders, and the temperature is so much warmer than Minnesota that I’ll have to explore outside, too.

I’ll probably post pictures later. You’ll have to take bets on whether they are of adorable giggling baby, or of spiders. Which would you prefer?

The virtues of vengeance

We had a little fracas in our front yard yesterday. My wife has several bird feeders out there, and a tree branch is draped with disgusting lumps of suet which have attracted multiple species and individuals of woodpecker — there are a couple of big pileated woodpeckers that hang out around here regularly now. Unsurprisingly, this concentration of happy birds attracted an unwelcome visitor.

There was a lot of squawking and frantic fluttering and panic-stricken birds flying away from our house.

That got me thinking. The woodpeckers are rather helpless, with the choice of eating or being eaten. If I were in that position of a predator blocking my access to food and threatening to kill and eat me, I’d be pissed off and talking to the neighbors about what to do about it. Maybe we’d contact local communities and trade goods and services to recruit samurai — you know, like maybe 7 of them — to hunt down and kill the predator that I’m personally helpless against, so that I can resume gnawing frozen fat off a tree branch.

Woodpeckers don’t have that capability, but humans do. It seems to me that this attribute of revenge and organized overkill might have been a major advantage in our evolution. Other animals certainly make the effort to eliminate competition, but we’re really good at building cooperative specialists to mob anyone who interferes with our living, or annoys us a little bit, or makes a rude comment on Twitter.

We may have overdone it, but our local woodpeckers would probably appreciate being able to find an ally to chase off the bad guy.

Actually, they do have Mary, who’ll go out and wave her arms and yell at the offending bird, but she’s going to go away for a few weeks. I’ll still be here for most of that time, but I’ll probably just watch the drama and muse about the evolutionary pressures imposed by predation.