No. A Portland professor is not being railroaded.

“No” is usually the right answer when an article is headlined with a question. Jesse Singal has authored an article in NY Magazine titled, Is a Portland Professor Being Railroaded by His University for Criticizing Social-Justice Research?, and think we can cut through all the garbage by simply saying “no.” Singal tries to present both sides, but one side is not at all convincing.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a mini forum which showcased a variety of different views on the subject. “The entire force of their stunt lies in the fact that they managed to get several satirical papers published,” wrote the University of Washington biologist Carl T. Bergstrom. “But it makes no sense to judge the health of a field by looking at what an insincere author can get through peer review.” On the other side was Yascha Mounk, a Harvard lecturer in government, who condemned the circling of the academic wagons and what he viewed as unfair attempts to undermine the hoaxsters. “[E]ven if all of the charges laid at the feet of Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian were true, they would have demonstrated a very worrying fact,” he wrote. “Some of the leading journals in areas like gender studies have failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit.”

I think Bergstrom already answered Mounck’s objection. You can find bad papers getting published in every field, even, for instance, molecular biology. That there are swarms of worthless submissions and that a few of them leak through is inevitable and to be expected; we shouldn’t be blithe about it, of course, and we should act to tighten up procedures where ever the problem arises, but there was no serious, responsible call to action by the “grievance studies” experiment, other than to simply abolish all of gender studies.

I would point to one extreme example of bad science in molecular biology: the ENCODE project. Does the existence of that badly executed and interpreted project mean that all of molecular biology has “failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit”? I don’t think so. And before you whine about the inclusion of morality as a criterion, I remind you that ENCODE cost $200 million dollars, and if you don’t think sucking away that much money lacks both scientific and moral consequences, well, I don’t think you’ve got much in the way of an intellectual contribution to make.

Here’s the money shot from Singal’s article, though, and why it’s safe to answer “no” to that question.

For the purposes of Peter Boghossian’s case, three facts about IRBs matter a great deal: “study” is defined rather broadly in the federal guidelines; possible risks to humans — even ones that non-IRB nerds may view as negligible — are taken very seriously; and IRBs tend to look especially closely at studies involving deception. For these and other reasons, each of the four IRB experts I spoke or emailed with agreed that yes, the grievance-studies hoax needed IRB approval; yes, it clearly involved human subjects; and no, PSU’s decision to investigate it on that front cannot be reasonably viewed, on its own, as politically motivated. In other words: This particular aspect of the university’s response smells more like a standard reaction to improperly vetted research than a witch hunt.

All the rest is noise; yes, people complain about the onerous paperwork of IRBs, and sometimes the committees tie up research, but only a fool would suggest that we get rid of them altogether.

One other point is that Boghossian is afraid he might get fired. He should be! Not because this one “study”, but because he’s already on somewhat shaky ground. Boghossian is a non-tenured, non-tenure track assistant professor! He has no path to promotion, and he’s probably on a year-by-year contract. This is not to say that it is a good thing how PSU manages their faculty: they have 9 tenured/tenure track philosophy faculty, an equal number of adjuncts, and 6 full time non-tenured instructors, of which Boghossian is one. He’s employed as long as his department finds him a useful contributor to their teaching needs, but if the negatives start to outweigh his utility, they could easily let him go at their next contract review. And this is academia…it’s not as if there aren’t heaps of philosophy Ph.D.s who’d love to get a full-time appointment in a lovely city like Portland.

I doubt that this fuck-up he’s made will get him fired, but it will put a black mark on his record, and administrators will remember it. I would suspect that he’s already signed a contract for next year — no one likes last minute, rushed job searches to fill an abruptly vacated position — so what will be interesting is what PSU does next year, after all the hubbub about this issue has died down, and it’s decided whether his appointment is renewed.

If I were him, I’d be shopping my CV around right now. Although he might be instead banking on notoriety to help him squeeze donations out of alt-right fanbois, since he’ll have his very own grievance to tout.

A day at the science fair

I’ve been off at the local high school, judging the local science fair. It’s a strange experience. An awful lot of the experiments involved playing with guns, which I guess is to be expected in a rural area.

They were still a bit disturbing.

And then you occasionally run into a peculiar rationale, in this case for an experiment involving weighted Hot Wheels cars.

I also had the student who thanked me afterwards, saying “Thank you for judging me.” I had to tell him I wasn’t judging him, I only judge the project.

Anyway, it didn’t matter if they did odd, off-the-wall experiments on phenomena that I didn’t find at all interesting. What mattered is that they actually tested their hypothesis appropriately, and how well they presented their data. And they were all good kids.

Jordan Peterson gets email

He gets evidence that those damned Leftists are corrupting the purity of STEM, and shares it with the world. It’s embarrassing. He doesn’t understand anything he’s talking about.

Well, I’m just going to have to spit out what went through my mind as I read it.

I would like to inform you that your assertion about post modernism bastardizing the sciences is an accurate one.

Anyone want to take any bets on whether either of these bozos understand what “post modernism” is?

I am taking a Big Data certificate program at York University. We are, for no apparent reason, being forced to read a book about how data analytics is creating inequality and discrimination in our society.

If you bet that he did, you lose. Post modernism is not the same as recognizing structural inequities in society. Expecting students to understand the consequences of their work is not outside the bounds of a course.

Oh, but he is being FORCED to read a textbook for no apparent reason. I would think that a fellow academic colleague would know about this bad attitude: a student comes into a class, thinking they already know it all, and anything the professor assigns is a priori deemed irrelevant. They why are you taking the class, bucko? Did you forget that you’re here to learn new things?

I think there is an apparent reason the student is assigned that book. It’s because Big Data fucking matters. It has an impact on society. You need to be conscious of that fact, here’s a book that is going to make you think about what you are doing.

Unless, of course, you’re a cocky Peterast who thinks actions don’t have material outcomes.

This seems wholly inappropriate for a course that is fundamentally structured around learning computer programming.

Where you, the student, know better than the instructor what is “appropriate” in a subject you haven’t learned about yet.

The specific author we are being forced to read is Cathy O’Neal

FORCED!!! Wait, wait. Cathy O’Neil? MathBabe? @mathbabedotorg? She’s brilliant. Your course sounds like it must be very good, sharing interesting perspectives.

who is part of occupy wall street, black lives matter, and who is a blue haired third wave feminist who uses her credentials to push her ideology.

Yeah, credentials! Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard, taught at MIT, left academia to make money in the financial industry, left that after discovering how soulless it is, has written several well-received books on data science, you know, that subject you claim to be studying. But she has blue hair.

Here’s a short video in which O’Neil explains how data science algorithms are not intrinsically objective.

That sounds like an important perspective, to me. Maybe you ought to pay attention in class, Big Data Person.

She has written about how all university admissions are biased, not just Harvard’s, and this is primarily because the SATs and other intelligence testing is correlated to income, and without proof, concludes that this necessitates bias towards privileged people.

If you find in your data analysis that rich people are preferentially getting into college, then that is evidence of a bias. If your hypothesis is that rich people are more intelligent, you need to provide independent evidence that that is the case. (I know what to expect: the circular argument that well, rich people are admitted to college, therefore they must be smart. I got into college, therefore I am smart enough to spot a logical fallacy at a thousand paces.)

It is actual insanity that this woman is regarded with high enough esteem to be teaching her perspective to people who are learning data analytics techniques.

Why is it insane? Because she has blue hair and is a woman, therefore everything is ideological? Read her book. Learn to analyze the information she presents, because that’s what she does. It is, supposedly, what you are taking a class to learn more about.

It appears they want to instantiate an ideological motivation into our purpose for analyzing data.

I know this one, too. You want to pretend that your ideology that data is totally objective and unbiased is not an ideology. You cannot simply “analyze data” without awareness of the assumptions and hypotheses that surround that analysis.

I see this sentiment at my job as well where we have employees who are PHD level social psychologists conducting research projects around the concept of implicit bias testing even though they claim a comprehensive understanding of quantitative analytics.

I don’t get it. This clown is writing to Peterson, a PHD [sic] level psychologist, implying that PHD [sic] level psychologists can’t possibly have a comprehensive understanding of quantitative analytics? I know a few psychologists. Many of them have a better understanding of statistics and mathematics in general than I do. Yet Peterson considers this a valid complaint? Much confusion here.

Also, that understanding of implicit bias comes from a quantitative analysis of data. Try reading the literature…which is what your instructor is trying to get you to do, while you run crying and screaming to Jordan Peterson to get the bad blue-haired lady to stop making you think.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to take my place in this realm with confidence when I am being force fed this propaganda on all fronts.

FORCE FED!! How dare teachers make you aware of what you don’t know. It might hurt your self-esteem. Where’s the hug box for aspiring data scientists who don’t want to be FORCED to think about the meaning of their work?

It is hard to move forward with this constant bombardment of counter factual forces that we are being obliged to follow or be termed unqualified for the position.

FORCES! If you refuse to consider the effects of and reasoning behind the algorithms you use, then it’s true: you’re unqualified for the position. You want to be a mindless coder. That is not what a data scientist does.

Man, that was painful. That Jordan Peterson thinks it was persuasive in any way, rather than just the entitled whine of a selfish child who doesn’t want to learn, should tell us that he is just another know-nothing anti-intellectual.

Startling prescience

This is from a 1958 TV western. I think it might have been inspired by some kind of magical morphic resonance echoing backwards through time.

It looks real — I recognized some of the actors, who were familiar faces from the olden days of black & white TVs (wow, Robert Culp looks really young), but also Snopes confirms it, and also found a copy of the full episode.

I liked the ending. Maybe that’s a prophecy, too.

How not to clean up the ocean

For those of you who have been follow Boyan Slat’s debacle — you know, the pretentious kid who claims to have figured out how to clean up ocean garbage — you should be reading Deep Sea News for all the Ocean Cleanup Schadenfreude. You might also learn a little physical oceanography, which is cool. I was startled in that article by the discussion of Stokes Drift, which I hadn’t heard of, but I know all about Stokes Shift, which made me wonder if they’d been discovered by the same guy. They were. Now I’m imagining a Victorian gentleman going around discovering scientific principles and giving them rhyming names. Did Stokes Thrift mean he gave cheap Stokes Gifts? Was Stokes Sift used to excavate Stokes Rift?

I’m punchy. I need a nap.

Anyway, I don’t know oceanography. What convinced me that this was a con was how young Mr Slat & Co. treated Dr Miriam Goldstein and Dr Kim Martini. Dismissing relevant expertise is a bad way to build a real initiative.

May their booms keep on breaking.

Call to arms, Minnesota!

I got a letter from the Minnesota Science Teachers Association. It seems there is some skullduggery going on to undermine our state science standards, from the Minnesota Rural Education Association. Well, cool: I’m an educator in rural Minnesota, but I know nothing about the MREA. I’m sympathetic to the idea of an organization that opposes/complements those elitist tyrants of the Twin Cities <shakes fist eastwards>. So what does the MREA want?

Minnesota Science Teachers and Citizens:

Science education in Minnesota is at a crossroads. As the Science Standards Revision Committee works to produce a new set of state science standards, the Minnesota Rural Education Association (MREA) is going to the state legislature this session in an attempt to reword statute 120B.023 thereby diluting the quantity, quality and rigor of the state science graduation requirements. Their proposed wording to the statute would still require biology and either chemistry or physics, but would reduce the current third science credit to a set of electives that does not require that “all academic standards in science” be met. This essentially removes earth and space science standards as part of the graduation requirements already in state statute 120B.024 (4) (ii.) and would allow districts to choose what science standards they will or will not teach.

If we, as science educators and citizens, want our students to receive a balanced, comprehensive background in all science disciplines, i.e., be scientifically literate, it is essential that you act now.

Below are samples of letters/emails that can be reworded or used as is and sent to your state representative and state senator. (These letters are also attached as a Word doc to this message.) Your voice must be heard or our new state science standards will be reduced in rigor and merit. Hand-picking which benchmarks will be taught in our schools harms science education for all students. A strong response from science teachers and citizens will tell the Legislature that our students deserve the best science education possible.

Go to https://www.leg.state.mn.us/ to find the names and e-mail addresses for your state representative and senator.

Please e-mail your state representative and senator as soon as possible. Be sure to include “Don’t Cut Science Education Standards” in the subject line. Thank you for your continuing efforts to provide our students with a quality, comprehensive science education.

Shorter version: they want to change the standards to allow high school students to focus narrowly in meeting their science requirements, and also want to open school districts to allow them to decide what science to teach. The first part I’m already disinclined to support because public school educations are already general enough — I’d rather they get a solid overview of multiple disciplines, because I care more about a broad background than that students get to ignore geology or chemistry if they want. As for the second part…I don’t trust rural school districts that much. State standards are there to make it harder for schools to compromise.

But OK, let’s be fair. What does the MREA say about their own plan?

MREA Executive Director Fred Nolan encouraged the state to amend the benchmarks statute 120B.023 that states, “Schools must offer and students must achieve all benchmarks for an academic standard to satisfactorily complete that state standard” by adding that high school students must meet the benchmarks in biology, physics or chemistry, and one elective set of benchmarks from the following: physical sciences, life sciences, earth and space sciences or engineering, or technology and the applications of science. Schools must offer at least two of these elective sets of benchmarks.

So currently, high school students should take biology, physics, and chemistry, and one of a defined set of electives. The MREA would like to change that to an or, and let the schools decide what the additional science elective ought to be. Why? They don’t do a good job of justifying the change.

Minnesota faces a well-documented skilled-worker shortage and Minnesota Academic Standards currently hold high schools back from providing the education and training needed to effectively prepare students for their future jobs. Today’s system operates on a one-size fits all approach for students no matter their plans after graduation.

Ugh. Education as a purely vocational enterprise. No, thank you. I have a lot of respect for good vocational training, but that’s not what public school should be about — it should be about giving citizens a broad, basic background knowledge so that they’re better informed, and know better what they want to do with their life after schooling. No matter their plans after graduation, students should have at least a rudimentary understanding of science (and art, and history, and language, etc.) Focusing on JOBS is counterproductive.

I also find it weird that they say they’re concerned about a skilled worker shortage, and their solution is … to teach less science? Strange. I think there must be other motives they aren’t talking about.

The MnSTA provides some sample letters for Minnesotans to use if you want to write to your rep. I’ll include them below the fold.

[Read more…]

Piers Morgan. Can he get any more repulsive?

That’s a challenge. I’d like to see him try. He and Tucker Carlson have this thing going where they screw up their faces and pretend to ignorance, as if it were to their credit, and the routine is getting old fast.

His latest schtick is to declare that women are disgusting if they don’t shave off all their body hair.

Morgan and co-host Susanna Reid were discussing the new campaign ‘Januhairy‘, which encourages women to not shave their armpits and embrace their natural hair.

But Morgan was repulsed by the idea, and after being shown images of celebrities who have decided not to shave – including Lady Gaga, Madonna and Julia Roberts – the GMB presenter said he died inside.

Reid asked Morgan if he shaved his pits, to which he replied a firm, No.

“Is that laziness?” Reid then asked.

No because women don’t have a problem with that. But men don’t fancy women who let it all out in January.

Apparently, someone needs to urgently inform Lady Gaga, Madonna and Julia Roberts, and all other women, that it is their duty to satisfy Piers Morgan’s sexual kinks. I think they need to grow even more body hair, because if a few tufts of armpit hair make him die inside, a bit more fuzz might make him die the rest of the way, which would be nice.

Also curious if women out there really want to know anything about Piers Morgan’s armpits, because I didn’t. I could have lived a long, contented life without ever considering Morgan’s body hair, and I feel like him forcing me to think about it was a terrible violation.

Here’s something even worse: Kate Smurthwaite appeared on Susanna Reid’s show (Morgan is just the dull sidekick there) to talk about why women shouldn’t feel compelled to shave, and he got totally sidetracked with the revelation that Smurthwaite is polyamorous…so he had to jack up the creepiness quotient by pestering her with prurient little questions.

Kate Smurthwaite, a comedian, was describing how her hairy armpits have never stopped her from finding a lover, and Piers was desperate to get back to his conversation.

He asked her: Can I talk about your polyamorous thing for a minute, because I’ve never heard of this thing? What does that mean?

Oh god. He’s never heard of this thing. Right. That was just an excuse to continue to probe into a woman’s sex life, in public.

Why does this horrible little man appear on television? Promise me, English-type persons, you’re not going to someday elect him to be prime minister, are you? Because that seems to be a common trajectory in our little colony, rising from cheap bigoted ‘entertainer’ to high office. I’d hate to see it happen to you.

If you’d like to see the whole episode, here it is. Morgan was more of a sleazy prat than I imagined, and Smurthwaite was smart, classy, and funny.

Ken Ham wants to argue that his fake boat is an objective part of a secular program of education

Ken Ham is pissed off. The FFRF has been telling local schools that field trips to the Creation “Museum” and Ark Park are violations of the separation of church and state, and that they don’t get to pretend that going to a religious venue has a secular purpose. Ham insists that public schools trooping their students off to his exercise in bibliolatry is not unconstitutional.

As leading civil rights attorneys will tell you, if classes tour the Ark or museum in an objective fashion to supplement the teaching of world religions, literature, interpretation of history, etc., the field trip is an educational experience. Now, if students were brought to the Ark or museum and told by their teacher that the religious content should be accepted as truth, then we would acknowledge that the Establishment Clause of the Constitution would be violated.

As educators are aware, however, it is well established in the law that the Bible may be used in the classroom objectively, as part of a secular program of education. As long as the teacher doesn’t express a personal opinion about the Bible, there is no issue whatsoever.

This is a weird argument. So a teacher could take their class to a church service, and as long as they kept a straight face and didn’t say whether the hour-long ceremony they sat through wasn’t true, they’re off the hook? It’s just a secular fact-finding expedition? I call bullshit.

The entire purpose of those AiG carnival shows is to tell visitors that their “literal” interpretation of the Bible is true, that the scientific evidence must be reinterpreted biblically, and that science is wrong. They can’t seriously propose that their stuff is not religious and evangelical. I guess we already know that honesty isn’t one of the things AiG practices, though, so that’s not going to stop Ham from this grand lie.

But I’m not a lawyer. I actually have problems with trying to block creationists on purely Constitutional grounds of the separation of church and state, although I know that’s often been the bulwark of our defense against creationist incursions into the schools.

You ought not to take students to the Ark Park because it’s pseudo-science and flagrant science denialism. Why would you trek across the state to some obscure caricature of a “museum” where your students will be intentionally misinformed when you could go to the Kentucky Science Center or the Cincinnati Museum Center? Are you a responsible educator who looks for the best opportunities to teach, or are you a hack who drags kids off to irrelevant tourist traps where dogma won’t be challenged?

Jesus, I see stories about religious kooks a thousand miles away organizing bus trips to that garbage site, when they could be going to the Field Museum or the AMNH or the Smithsonian instead. It makes no sense. It’s not as if great science opportunities aren’t available all around the country, so you have no recourse but to go to a bad freak show and make up stories about how you’re exposing them to secular interpretations of science.

Ken Ham is just a con artist.

I also don’t read the Daily Stormer. Wonder why?

I once looked at Quillette. I immediately broke out in hives and started retching. It was obvious from the get-go that this was a haven alt-right hacks, racists, genetic determinists, and apologists for the status quo, so I stopped reading it and haven’t gone back since.

Now Slate has published a review of sorts of the site. I don’t read Slate all that much either, but at least it isn’t all aggrieved white people complaining about the Left. It’s not a great review — the author seems more concerned about comparing Quillette to Slate than actually discussing the flaws in Quillette — but it does make a few good points.

In November, Politico Magazine published what was billed as “the first serious profile” of Quillette.com, and of the website’s founder, Claire Lehmann. The crowdfunded online journal, which Lehmann launched from her home in Sydney in 2015, has gained a major following among aggrieved rationalists, oppressed contrarians, and sundry other stifled surfers of the Intellectual Dark Web. As of this year, 1 million unique visitors are said to visit the site each month, and its output of politically incorrect, freethinker-y essays on identity politics, campus protests, and evolutionary psychology has been cheered by IDW celebrities such as Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, and Sam Harris.

You can just stop there. That’s enough. Now you know why I don’t read it — it’s more conservative garbage and unscientific bullshit. But I thought this next paragraph was amusing.

Lehmann describes her online magazine as “a space for unusual viewpoints” that is free of “puritanical partisan hysteria” and protects “the freedom of expression and conscience that allows imagination and fearless creativity to thrive.” Here’s another slogan for the site, which Lehmann shares with pride: Back in 2016, before Quillette attained its present notoriety, the A-list atheist Jerry Coyne instructed his readers to “think of it as Slate, but more serious, more intellectual, and without any Regressive Leftism.”

Apparently, freedom from “partisan hysteria” means that you call the Left “regressive” and don’t allow their views to be expressed. Allrighty then. No irony here, no sir.

Also, “A-list atheist” has long since stopped being a term of praise. I think I might have been a B-list atheist once upon a time, I’m still trying to live it down.