The Templeton Foundation honors another gullible apologist

Marcelo Gleiser has been awarded the Templeton Prize. When asked what he’d done to deserve it, his answer was his belief in humility, which is pretty darned unhumble, if you ask me. Especially since he then goes on to make some arrogant pronouncements.

I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” Period.

But he has no problem with those people of faith, like the Templeton people who awarded him this great lump of money, who think, “I do believe even though I have no evidence for my beliefs, simply I do believe.”

He also gets atheism wrong. Of course there are a lot of dogmatic atheists who are all about simply refusing to believe and think that is sufficient, but a lot of us are instead making a point that is implicit in Gleiser’s own words: that evidence is important. An idea must have concordance with our observations of the world. An atheist is simply someone who has certain expectations and standards for sweeping declarations of how the universe works, and rejects the poorly supported assertions of religion…and further, sees no hope of progress in understanding from the mystical approach.

It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations.

Oh, bullshit. Here are some declarations.

Vaccines are effective in the prevention of disease.

The Earth is a sphere, moving through space in compliance with laws of celestial mechanics.

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

“I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method.”

We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.” And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that. This positions me very much against all of the “New Atheist” guys—even though I want my message to be respectful of people’s beliefs and reasoning, which might be community-based, or dignity-based, and so on. And I think obviously the Templeton Foundation likes all of this, because this is part of an emerging conversation.

No, the Templeton Foundation likes that because they favor and promote the hypothesis that there is a god, and agnostics like you are a useful tool for making excuses that their beliefs are rational and supported by the evidence.

A scientist (and an atheist) can make the declaration that a particular hypothesis is incoherent and unsupported by any plausible evidence. We do all the time. Those “New Atheist” guys are all happy to say that all you have to do is clearly define what you mean by “god” (first point of failure: no religion does) and provide reproducible evidence for this being (second failure), and they’ll listen and revise their beliefs accordingly. That the godly have consistently failed spectacularly in accomplishing either of those aims is actually pretty good evidence that they’re making it all up.

Gleiser is willing to admit there is “no evidence for God or any kind of god”, but he is too chickenshit to draw any rational conclusion from that. He’s also unwilling to ask the next question that follows — “So why do you believe in a god?” — and drill down into what the actual mechanisms behind this unsupported belief might be, which makes his unwillingness to pursue the truth incompatible with the scientific method. I’ve always thought that method involved questioning everything, but he seems to think it stops at the point where it makes big-money donors uncomfortable.

The best gods are the spider gods

This True News Story missed the most important detail.

After long eras of systemic racial discrimination by humanity, God has clarified he will keep inventing new, terrible kinds of spider until we stop.

“Okay guys,” said God after Donald Trump’s second attempt at a travel ban, while screwing giant mandibles onto the front of a new tarantula model. “You brought this one on yourselves, though.”

If they’d thought to look closely at the god doing the speaking, they might have noticed that he looks like this:

Or this:

Everyone knows the True Name of God is Iktomi, or Anansi. He’s creating new spiders to build webs in our bones if we don’t stop. He’s not trying to get you to stop, though, he’s just anticipating that your eye sockets and rib cages will provide plenty of homes for his children.

s/creationist/fascist/

Wow. I was listening to this video and thinking, “I’ve heard all this before — these are the arguments against debating creationists from 20 years ago!” They’re all there: the “for the audience” claims, the Gish gallop, every lie takes 10 seconds to give, 10 minutes to refute, etc., etc., etc. It was, like, deja vu, man.

The only difference is that the creationists were never arguing for genocide. I don’t think.

It makes me regret those debates I had with creationists.

What’s the etiquette for wearing ironic fash bling to a memorial service for people killed by the fash?

Dear Abby,

I was going to pay my respects to the innocent dead murdered by a terrorist who praised Donald Trump and made various fascist dogwhistles to online fascists. Is it cool if I wear my red MAGA hat and smirk a bit? Or will it make me look like an insensitive, arrogant ass?

P.S. I’m a Canadian in Canada. Trump2020! 14/88!

Jeez, these boys are dumb.

I thought The Onion was a satire site

But this is just a little too on-the-nose.

Warning that users who call for the suspension of bigoted accounts might just be afraid of a real debate, Facebook representatives told reporters Tuesday that classifying hate speech can be difficult because some posts actually make very interesting points. “At Facebook, we are committed to combating violence and hate speech on our platform, but can you really call these posts hate speech when a lot of them are based on science and logic?” said Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook, claiming that unless you’re a sheep who just swallows everything the mainstream media sells you, a number of these posts had a lot to consider, and even if you don’t completely agree with the attacks on race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, it should not be a crime to make people think. “If you’re as open-minded as you claim, you will see that while some of these posts cross the line, many of them are really nuanced and make good points. Of course, everyone should feel safe on Facebook, but it’s hard to determine what’s threatening because the more you watch these videos, the more you realize that Islam might be incompatible with west. Maybe people are just scared of hearing the truth.” Bickert added that if people were such big fans of policing speech, she had some eye-opening videos on globalism she could share on Facebook.

Maybe Sam Harris is moonlighting as a writer for them now.

The meritocratic lie

That admissions scandal ripped off the bandage and exposed the suppurating ulcer of the “elite” university system, and gives me a handle to vent decades of frustration. I’ve known about this for a long time, but if you try to tell people that Harvard and Stanford are profiting off a facade rather than their actual, material quality, they don’t believe you — the names of those universities have become short cuts to an illusion of earned intelligence. Read this, Higher Education and the Illusion of Meritocracy, though.

The recently revealed admissions scandal seems to have it all: Three Stooges levels of ineptitude, crude Photoshops, six-figure payoffs, corrupt coaches, and a cadre of low-level celebrities for good measure. But those who see this scandal as anything other than a moment of levity are missing the forest for the trees. The U.S. Department of Justice filings confirm what we already knew — or should have known: Elite-college admissions exists chiefly to replicate class privilege.

This became depressingly clear to me during my three years as an assistant dean of admissions at an elite college. I saw how the system is rife with inequities and loopholes; how unscrupulous wealthy people are willing to pay admissions fixers to exploit those loopholes; and how grifters adjacent to the process cash in on whatever influence they wield. As I wrote in The Chronicle Review a little more than a year ago, “Admissions at elite institutions can make a fool and a liar out of anyone.”

It’s not just the abberrant criminality of this event, though, because the whole system is rigged.

Meritocratic admissions at elite institutions is the real scam. The idea of a phony soccer player is goofy for its novelty; Division III athletes being tipped into admitted classes through a warped quota system that benefits wealthy white men is a grim reality. The construction of a fabricated profile with illegitimate test scores and extracurriculars is tragicomic; a prep-school applicant carefully curated by elite counselors, tutors, essay writers, and independent admissions advisers is routine.

In short, the real corruption of elite-college admissions is more mundane than this scandal suggests, though far more deleterious to America’s meritocratic ideals. To view this scandal as the problem is to unintentionally reinforce the actual problem: In a truly meritocratic society, higher education should correct inequity; instead, elite higher education exacerbates inequity.

Worse — even if you get in (which is unlikely if you’re not a member of a privileged class), you’re screwed and are just perpetuating a criminally capitalistic system.

Jack outlines how top colleges and universities are and have long been havens of the wealthy. In 2017, a team led by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty found that students coming from families in the top 1 percent—those who make more than $630,000 a year—are 77 times more likely to be admitted to and attend an Ivy League school than students coming from families who make less than $30,000 a year. Furthermore, the study found that 38 elite colleges have more students who come from families in the top 1 percent than students who come from the bottom 60 percent (families making less than $65,000 a year). In other research, Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, have documented how just 14 percent of undergraduates at the most competitive schools—places like Stanford, Princeton, and Columbia—come from families who make up the bottom half of U.S. income distribution.

This got me pissed off enough to make a video about it last week, although I don’t think it’s very good — it’s too long, and I could have been a lot more pithy. I should have said “fuck” more.

But then this week I watched The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and realized that she’s just another symptom of the whole rotten system. She was a Stanford drop-out, which isn’t an indictment of Stanford … it says the system is screwed up when people attend that university, not for the knowledge they can learn there — which is the core function of the university, which they do very well — but for making the connections that will make them rich and be the entry way to the 1%. Holmes dropped out as soon as she realized that she didn’t actually need to learn engineering, or biochemistry, or medicine, or pharmacology, or any of the actual utility of a university education. She comes from a family with connections, she could make more connections with bald-faced lying. The chief lesson she learned from that “elite” university is that the pretense of merit is more valuable than the substance of merit.

She didn’t have to convince anyone in biomedicine. She knew where the power lies: in old white men. In James Mattis and George Schultz, Sam Nunn and Henry Fucking-Burn-In-Hell Kissinger. She got the backing of Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison and Bill Clinton. None of these people have any competence in biomedicine (one could even argue that they don’t have much competence in anything, other than leeching off the public, which they are very, very good at). The corruption runs all the way from an overly ambitious and not very knowledgeable 19 year old, to retired heads of state who’ve been coasting on wealth and power to more wealth and power.

You want to know where the rot in the “elite” universities leads? Straight to Elizabeth Holmes, the poster girl for pseudo-meritocracy. It was so predictable that on the day the Wall Street Journal broke the story of the Theranos fraud, Holmes was unavailable because she was off being inducted into the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows. Of course she was. Rich liars are exactly the kind of people they want at the top of university administration.

Seriously, look at the Theranos board. It’s a web of connections to other wealthy people, nothing more. If you see any of those names on any company anywhere, run. They’re empty figureheads who’ll screw everything up. Holmes belongs in prison, but so do all those untouchable fat cats who manipulate the system.

A hangout about science communication

I’m getting together with some nerds, Jackson Wheat, Phrenomythic, and ScientistMel, to talk about the challenges of communicating science on YouTube, a medium which seems to favor posturing twits, Nazis, and Nazi twits more than it does people with actual content. It’ll be a public conversation at 5pm Central time today, right here:

If you have your own questions and comments, leave them here, or tune in and leave them in the chat. Another thing: there are successful science youtubers out there. I have a long list, but if there are others you want to call attention to, let me know!

We brought up a few channels that are worth checking out:

3Blue1Brown
AronRa
Ben G Thomas
Brief Brain Facts
Draw Curiosity
Frankus Lee
Kurzgesagt
Mathologer
Neurotransmissions
PBS Eons
Paulogia
SciShow
SciStrike
Scott Manley
Shawn
Stated Clearly
Step Back History
Tony Reed
Trey the Explainer
Up and Atom
WeCreateEdu

And of course, our own:

Jackson Wheat
Phrenomythic
PZ Myers
Scientist Mel

Is ‘litigiosity’ a word? It ought to be.

Good news for lawyers everywhere! We have managed to completely pay off our lawyer, Marc Randazza! The Carrier lawsuit is over, ending in victory for the side of goodness, he says, as he gazes out over the shambles of his finances. We paid him off, but all of us defendants together are in the hole for <gulp> $20,000, so we’re not closing our fundraiser yet, and I’m still holding out my hat for personal donations. Good lawyers, it turns out, aren’t cheap, and litigious assholes willing to sell their soul to misogynistic, racist haters can mobilize more cash than we can.

And our society does breed for litigious assholes. Case in point: Devin Nunes is suing Twitter, “Devin Nunes’ Mom”, and “Devin Nunes’ Cow” for $250 million dollars. It’s absurd. It’s doomed (although his lawyers will profit). All it accomplishes is to further promote people who are laughing at him. I would never have seen this, for instance, if it weren’t one of many insults featured in his filing:

You may be thinking that the defendants might need some help protecting themselves from this frivolous and excessive nuisance, but really, Twitter’s lawyers are laughing themselves sick right now. If you are inspired to help an underdog, donate to me instead.

Man, I’m thinking that if there were a poll to name the dumbest person on the internet, and the choices were Jim Hoft, Jacob Wohl, Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump, or Devin Nunes, I wouldn’t know who to vote for.