Welp, looks like capitalism broke another scholar

It’s a tragedy, but increasingly common. Evgeny Morozov rages against the culture that fostered Epstein, Ito, and the association of science and money.

Is it so surprising, then, that when a colleague cautioned Ito against meeting Epstein – who used to list his interests as “science and pussy” – Ito described him as “really fascinating”? Brockman, for all his realism about low intellectual standards of the tech community, also couldn’t resist Epstein’s charms, describing him, in an email to me, as “extremely bright and interesting”.

If the “third culture” is so much more sophisticated than its predecessors, how come most of its card-carrying members – famed scientists-cum-brands, courtesy of the Brockman empire – got caught up in the Epstein mess? It’s not uncommon for intellectuals to serve as useful idiots to the rich and the powerful, but, under the “third culture”, this reads like a job requirement.

Are the costs of living with this culture – eg the prostitution of intellectual activity at “billionaire dinners”– worth it? And can we still trust what the leading intellectuals of the “third culture” actually have to say, given, also, what they have to sell?

The answers to these questions are self-evident. And yet, while it’s easy to attack the rotten apples such as Ito or Negroponte, a more radical transformative agenda should ask for more: close the Media Lab, disband the Ted Talks, refuse the money of tech billionaires, boycott agents like Brockman. Without such drastic changes, the powerful bullshit-industrial complex that is the “third culture” will continue unharmed, giving cover to the next Epstein.

It’s time to get radical, I agree. But shutting down the old avenues of support is pointless without alternatives. Science ought to be maintained by government support, and you ought to mistrust the bilge that relies on a billionaire’s largesse…especially when that billionaire doesn’t read about or care about science, except for the prestige it grants them. Of course, how do I explain to my university administration that I’m rejecting a million dollar grant because I think the donor is a parasite? (Note: Purely hypothetical. No million dollar offers are knocking at my door.) The people who benefit most from these cash prizes are the donors, who get to pretend to be contributors to science when all they’ve done is successfully undermined egalitarian mechanisms for promoting good science. Like these people:

One of Brockman’s persistent laments was that all the billionaire techies in his circle barely read any of the books published by his clients. Not surprisingly, his famed literary dinners – held during the Ted Conference, they allowed Epstein (who kept Brockman’s Edge Foundation on a retainer) to mingle with scientists and fellow billionaires – were mostly empty of serious content.

As Brockman himself put it after one such dinner in 2004, “last year we tried ‘The Science Dinner’. Everyone yawned. So this year, it’s back to the money-sex-power thing with ‘The Billionaires’ Dinner’.” Was “the money-sex-power thing” that very potent “new mode of intellectual discourse” promised by the “third culture”? If so, we’d rather pass.

Also…TED talks are terrible. One in a few hundred might be informative, but most are exercises in formulaic hype.

I sure am triggered and owned!

This is Laura Ingraham sucking on a plastic straw stuck in a piece of red meat imbedded with incandescent light bulbs. In order to own the libs.

I am rather surprised at the astounding success of our plan to get conservatives to do incredibly stupid, pointless things in public. Be sure to let them all know how much your feelings have been hurt by these performances! Maybe they’ll escalate. I sure am glad that no one told Laura that there are regulations about contamination of meat that we’d hate to see violated, and that libs think it’s a bad idea to smash those light bulbs and put broken glass in your cheerios.

It, Chapter Two reasons I hated it

The version of Stephen King’s It that came out last year wasn’t bad, and in some ways was better than the source material. The young cast was wonderful, I was impressed with the acting, and the monster was weird and creepy and memorable. It ended with these kids beating back the monster that was terrorizing the town, but not killing it, and they knew they’d have to return to finish the job in its next cycle, 27 years later. Chapter Two was therefore inevitable.

Now adults, the same people, played by older, different actors who are still pretty darned good, return to Derry, Maine to reprise their monster-killing efforts and finally finish It off.

It (the movie) is unwatchably bad. It (the monster) is going to be defeated (spoiler? It (the book) is 33 years old and there have been multiple versions of the thing on TV and movies) by…random geegaws and the Power of Belief, none of which makes any kind of logical sense — the whole thing is going to build to a nonsensical conclusion. Which means that the appeal of the movie cannot rely on the ending, or the satisfaction of seeing the plot come together. Which means the movie lives or dies on the quality of the storytelling. This movie dies a grisly death, I’m sorry to say. There were many flaws, but two gigantic ones that made it impossible for me to enjoy the movie.

1. It slimed me with sentimentality.

The primary characters were wise and good and kind, with little flaws of no consequence that they agonized over, just to show how important their self-improvement was. Their difficult childhoods and youthful tragedies did not change their inherent wonderfulness, but only gave them a glow of saintly martyrdom. King has always had this mawkish strain running through his books — it’s a significant tool in his bag of tricks for getting readers to identify with his heroes — but it is indulged to the max in It. Kids are always revered innocents in a Stephen King story, with great potential and power.

But never forget: King slaughters kids in horrible, detailed, bloody ways to keep his stories moving. The little angels get dismembered, disemboweled, and decapitated, because there is some warped element to King’s psychology that he, as an author, bravely exposes for his audience to weep over, but Jesus, man, I really don’t want to see that shit.

2. It killed its momentum with flashbacks.

Oh god, this was the worst. Remember, there was an It, Chapter One that told the story of the heroes’ childhoods…but that was last year. We can’t trust that the audience remembers anything from the prior movie! Therefore, everyone has to be reminded. The movie doesn’t do this with, for instance, a little prelude that recaps the first movie. Oh, no…throughout the movie, we’re going to be fed little fragments from the first for each of the characters, and then some, and they’re going to do it intermittently. There are 6 hero characters, one of whom dies before any action occurs, and they all get multiple flashbacks to tell their back story, even the dead one. There are others, like Henry, who was a villainous switch-blade wielding teen in the first, and is now in a mental institution — even he wins a couple of flashbacks, to remind us of his menacing presence. It was wasted because all he is in this movie is a jump scare who is readily dealt with.

The central action the story is simple. The characters from the previous movie gather in Derry; they separate to gather little mementoes of their childhood that will have magic powers in their encounter; they gather in the sewer to summon and do battle with Pennywise, the evil clown. That’s it. But we get non-stop, fragmentary flashbacks to remind us why this relic from their past has personal meaning to them, and other flashbacks to explain why their lives are damaged, and more flashbacks to reveal Pennywise’s wickedness, and it pads the whole thing out to a miserable 2 hours and 47 minutes. Unlike most horror movies where I might twitch at the jump scares, this one had me cringing at every sudden backflip into 1989.

Goddamn, it ended after their triumph on a flashback to sunny, summery Maine in 1989, with smiling kids on bicycles and a haze of heartwarming sentimentality over everything.

Hated it.

Them goofy city-folk and their weird ideas

It’s a bad day for the MIT Media Lab. Hot off the resignation of their corrupt leader, Business Insider breaks a bizarre story that sounds a bit like the Theranos story: a non-functional technology turns out to have been pumped up with fake data and even faker promises. It’s something called The Personal Food Computer, which was going to revolutionize agriculture. Or maybe just urban agriculture. Or maybe just impress city-boys (excuse me: “nerdfarmers”. That’s what they actually call them) who have never seen a farm.

It’s a plastic box with some widgets under control of a computer that watch temperature and pH and lighting and spritz a plant inside it with water and nutrients. Just think, no dirt, and a computer will make sure it gets watered if you forget, and at the end of a few weeks or months, you find food inside the box, maybe a sprig of basil or a tomato! This box, and your hypothetical tomato, will only cost you about $500 to build and take up a desktop in your apartment.

(I literally groaned at Harper’s naive babbling about genetics, I’m afraid.)

Am I alone in thinking this idea, even if it worked, was ridiculously stupid? I’m living in the Midwest, in the midst of farm country. When I drive to the big city of Minneapolis, I pass through about 150 miles where all I see on either side of me is corn and soybeans, each individual plant of negligible value, growing with negligible individual care (in aggregate, it’s expensive in time and labor), without computers tweaking each plant along. It’s what plants do. Farmers don’t have the time or money to nurse each 1m2 of cropland along with personal attention and a dedicated computer. I don’t understand the point of this gadget at all. My wife planted a little circular garden in our backyard, maybe 5 meters in diameter, and right now I’m buried in somewhere around 50kg of tomatoes.

This box is the most useless over-hyped technology ever. I wonder how much Jeffrey Epstein invested in it?

That’s assuming it worked. Surprise! It doesn’t!

The “personal food computer,” a device that MIT Media Lab senior researcher Caleb Harper presented as helping thousands of people across the globe grow custom, local food, simply doesn’t work, according to two employees and multiple internal documents that Business Insider viewed. One person asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.

They had to salt their demos with plants bought elsewhere. Even the one use I could imagine for them, as educational tools in schools, flopped.

In the Spring of 2017, Cerqueira was part of a pilot program that delivered three of Harper’s devices to local schools in the Boston area. Initially, the idea was for the students to put the devices together themselves. But Cerqueira said that didn’t work — the devices were too complex for the students to construct on their own.

“They weren’t able to build them,” Cerqueira said.

In response, Cirque’s team sent three MIT Media Lab staff to set up the computers for them. Of the three devices the staff members tried to setup, only one was able to grow plants, she said. That one stopped working after a few days, however.

When Cerqueira and her coworkers would visit the school, students would joke that the plants they were growing in plastic cups were growing better than the ones in the personal food computers, she said. The pilot ended shortly thereafter.

On another occasion, her team sent two dozen of the devices to classrooms across greater Boston as part of a curriculum being designed by one of MIT Media Lab’s education partners.

“It’s fair to say that of the 30-ish food computers we sent out, at most two grew a plant,” Cerqueira said.

I like that there plastic cup with dirt technology. I’ve done that. It works. Cheap, too. Maybe “nerdfarmers” should try investing in that.

MIT isn’t exactly basking in glory lately. It’s a shame.

Ito out!

As expected:

Forward email sent to provost, cc-ing President:
“After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as Director of the Media Lab and as a Professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately.”

I bet he gave it much thought. He knew all along; he’d worked hard to keep Epstein’s involvement secret. And then, boom, the day a major article reveals how snout deep in the trough he’d been, he decides now would be a good time to resign.

I don’t think he’d planned this until he was caught blinking in the floodlights.

Ito knew, Ito lied

Joi Ito is toast. The latest revelations about Epstein’s association with MIT are damning.

The M.I.T. Media Lab, which has been embroiled in a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than it has previously acknowledged, and it attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him. Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as “disqualified” in M.I.T.’s official donor database, the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds, and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university. Perhaps most notably, Epstein appeared to serve as an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors, soliciting millions of dollars in donations from individuals and organizations, including the technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black. According to the records obtained by The New Yorker and accounts from current and former faculty and staff of the media lab, Epstein was credited with securing at least $7.5 million in donations for the lab, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, gifts the e-mails describe as “directed” by Epstein or made at his behest. The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or “he who must not be named.”

All this was after Epstein was convicted of raping children. MIT had judged him “disqualified” from making donations on paper, but the MIT Media Lab had continued to clandestinely allow Epstein to slip them money under the table, and get influence in return. Further, billionaires like Bill Gates were still listening to Epstein’s advice and following his recommendations about where to make donations. Ito knew, and kept the pipeline open secretly.

Then there’s this little anecdote. His colleagues and coworkers are squeamish about being associated with a pedophile, so Ito makes arrangements for a visit that objectors won’t know about, and Epstein is so blatant that he won’t go anywhere without his retinue of young attractive women.

In the summer of 2015, as the Media Lab determined how to spend the funds it had received with Epstein’s help, Cohen informed lab staff that Epstein would be coming for a visit. The financier would meet with faculty members, apparently to allow him to give input on projects and to entice him to contribute further. Swenson, the former development associate and alumni coördinator, recalled saying, referring to Epstein, “I don’t think he should be on campus.” She told me, “At that point it hit me: this pedophile is going to be in our office.” According to Swenson, Cohen agreed that Epstein was “unsavory” but said “we’re planning to do it anyway—this was Joi’s project.” Staffers entered the meeting into Ito’s calendar without including Epstein’s name. They also tried to keep his name out of e-mail communication. “There was definitely an explicit conversation about keeping it off the books, because Joi’s calendar is visible to everyone,” Swenson said. “It was just marked as a V.I.P. visit.”

By then, several faculty and staff members had objected to the university’s relationship with Epstein. Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor, had voiced concerns about the relationship with Epstein for years. In 2013, Zuckerman said, he pulled Ito aside after a faculty meeting to express concern about meetings on Ito’s calendar marked “J.E.” Zuckerman recalled saying, “I heard you’re meeting with Epstein. I don’t think that’s a good idea,” and Ito responding, “You know, he’s really fascinating. Would you like to meet him?” Zuckerman declined and said that he believed the relationship could have negative consequences for the lab.

In 2015, as Epstein’s visit drew near, Cohen instructed his staff to insure that Zuckerman, if he unexpectedly arrived while Epstein was present, be kept away from the glass-walled office in which Epstein would be conducting meetings. According to Swenson, Ito had informed Cohen that Epstein “never goes into any room without his two female ‘assistants,’ ” whom he wanted to bring to the meeting at the Media Lab. Swenson objected to this, too, and it was decided that the assistants would be allowed to accompany Epstein but would wait outside the meeting room.

On the day of the visit, Swenson’s distress deepened at the sight of the young women. “They were models. Eastern European, definitely,” she told me. Among the lab’s staff, she said, “all of us women made it a point to be super nice to them. We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them.”

I guess the dollar signs in Ito’s eyes were obscuring his ability to see what he was enabling, but not enough that he was unaware of how ugly this would all look to outsiders.

He’s done. He should resign post-haste, before the university decides to throw him to the sharks in a forlorn attempt to save face.

A remarkably delicious exposé

I’ve probably seen the name “John Glynn” around — he was prolific, and was getting published all over the Rightosphere and elsewhere. He even got published in the Huffington Post, so some left-leaning pubs had stuff with his byline. But I would have sailed right over it, because his work was all bumblingly ideological and built on evolutionary psychology BS, which immediately flagged him as a charlatan, despite his claimed status as holder of a doctorate and professorships at several universities. Really, people, saying you’re a professor doesn’t make you infallible!

But some people, especially those gullible enough to favor EvoPsych and conservative positions, were taken in, including Michael Shermer.

To his slight credit, Shermer exposed the guy as a fraud. He became suspicious, not when Glynn submitted glib garbage to his magazine, but when Glynn asked for a loan. You can lie about science all you want, but when you start eyeballing a right-winger’s wallet, their ultra-sensitive sensors start pinging. Anyway, it turns out with a few questions it was determined that Glynn did not have an advanced degree, and did not work for any university. Everything was a lie. He’d persevered in publishing crap all over the place, successfully, and fooled Skeptic magazine for three years. The key was offering to write stuff that catered to the biases of publishers, leaping right past any critical evaluation.

Look where else Glynn published! Areo, where the “grievance study” nonsense was published, where Helen Pluckrose is an editor. Quillette. The American Thinker. The Federalist.

The credibility of Skeptic magazine and Shermer has been nonexistent for years, and they’re cruising along on the support of people who still buy into the garbage Glynn was peddling, so they’ll be fine — in fact, they’ll probably be praising Shermer as a true skeptic for identifying the fraud, ignoring the fact that he’d been publishing him for years. John Glynn will be fine, since he’s an insubstantial, lying wraith. He’ll just invent another pseudonym and another set of fake credentials, and continue making contributions to the trash heap of bad media. So I’m chagrined to say that, while this revelation is amusing, it’s not going to make a speck of difference.

So much wrong in one little story

Here’s some smug sanctimonious Christianity for you, all inflicted on a helpless baby.

On Wednesday, Martina Obi-Uzom was found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm to an 11 month old baby boy. She was entrusted to look after the baby while his parents went away one weekend. During that weekend, she took the baby to London to be circumcised, in accordance with her own Nigerian Christian beliefs. She knew the baby’s mother did not want her baby circumcised. So she posed as the child’s mother, recruited a man to pose as his father, and convinced a Jewish circumciser to perform the procedure.

You are probably rightly horrified right now. Wait until you learn what happened to Ms Obi-Uzom.

She was given a suspended sentence of 14 months. She was also ordered to pay costs of £1,500 and a £140 victim surcharge, which seems paltry compensation for amputating part of a person’s genitals without consent or medical need.

…

Judge Freya Newbery said although the offence merited a prison sentence, “circumstances” meant she decided to suspend the sentence. The judge said she accepted that Obi-Uzom’s intention “wasn’t to harm the boy” and that she was of “impeccable character”. She also said she was a “professional person” and “highly qualified”.

I’m going to guess that the judge overlooked the mutilation of a baby because the perpetrator’s “impeccable character” consisted of being Christian. Anyone who took a knife to harm a baby for any other reason would be dealt with far more severely.

Friday Spider

I knew who I was cheering for — my spiders are combfoots, too, and the behavior I see in this video is exactly what I see in my colony. The careful guarding of egg sacs, the swift wrapping of prey, that disabling bite once the target was helpless is exactly what I was watching in the lab this morning. Very cool.

We also got several new egg sacs this morning. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, paternally. Anyone want pet spiders around here?

(The answer is no. Well, I’m just going to have to drop them off in their forever homes without the knowledge of their new parents.)

I’m working on this attitude

Yeah, I just got out of lecture and am a wobbling blob of nerves and sweat, as usual, and it’s good to see an inspiring message. I’m not a woman, I don’t have major mental health issues, so it’s helpful to see that I ought to be able to handle my petty concerns.

All I need to do is stop drinking coffee and take a shower, and I’ll be normal again.