Why you a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y do not need a personal website as a scientist

I have to criticize this claim that YOU A-B-S-O-L-U-T-E-L-Y NEED A PERSONAL WEBSITE AS A SCIENTIST, because it’s wrong. You don’t.

So, you need a personal website. Why? Because you need to stand out. Because you need to have a consistent presence when you change employers. Because the university profile isn’t sufficiently yours, and an academic networking site is too closed off. Because it gives you the opportunity to learn to communicate to a wide variety of audiences, including your peers.

There’s empirical evidence against this claim: there are many scientists far more prominent than I am who don’t have a website (and some who do), and there are scientists who are less prominent than I am who do (and some who don’t). Why, it’s almost as if having a website is irrelevant to success in science.

I’m on a university committee engaged in a job search. I’m a web nerd, and I didn’t do a single search to see if any of our candidates have a website. It wouldn’t matter if they do. My fellow committee members would look at me funny if I tried to suggest that Candidate X was particularly enticing because they had a website. We look at their CV, teaching statement, research plans, and recommendations…not what they say about themselves on the web. Get real: maintaining a web site takes time and effort, and we’d rather see that potential colleagues are doing good work in the classroom and the lab. It’s a matter of priorities, and “personal website” is very low on the list.

That said, however, a web presence is important for public outreach and communication. If public engagement is one of the criteria for a science position, not having some sort of actively maintained web presence is definitely a failure. There aren’t that many jobs that have that criterion, however. You could argue that we need to get better at reaching out to an electorate that keeps putting anti-science ignoramuses into high office, but that does not imply that everyone needs to become a PR expert. People who can inspire students and can generate new knowledge are still essential.

Men have got some learning to do

Well. You know that #NotAllMen hashtag? Somebody quantified it to find out exactly how many men, and the results are not encouraging.

The research group asked over 1,000 Americans “What do you think counts as sexual harassment?” in an online survey. They were told to select all that apply.

The survey found that 91 percent of women and 83 percent of men thought “being forced to do something sexual” fit the bill.

If that doesn’t count as sexual harassment, what does? Who are the 17 percent of men and 9 percent of women who don’t agree?

Men were even less likely to characterize behaviors that didn’t involve physical touch as sexual harassment. Twenty-four percent thought flashing someone doesn’t count and 30 percent thought making sexual comments about someone’s body isn’t harassment.

So…1 in 6 of your male friends think they can find an excuse for forcing themselves sexually on a woman, and 1 in 4 think that sending a dick pic is not harassment. So it’s true, it’s not all men, but it’s also not just a couple of nasty felons hanging out in a dark alley — it could be 80 million ordinary, ignorant, selfish American men.

Creationist castle

The Creation “Museum” is losing money, so Answers in Genesis is going to try and shore up profits with a renovation. It’s not looking good.

They’re going to upgrade the theater with 3-D projection. This is the theater where they currently show Men in White, a short movie that is so bad that when I visited the “museum” I only lasted 30 seconds before concluding that I wouldn’t be able to sit through it, or the gimmicky shaky seats and water sprays. Now they’re going to have plesiosaurs looming out at you as an excuse to drip water.

But the big deal they’re bragging about is that they’re going to redesign the entrance to include…new displays! Static displays with no evidence! More apologetics! I’m not feeling the urge to visit it a second time.

Wait, what’s that in the center of the exhibits? Those red balls? That looks familiar.

It is familiar! I’ve seen that so many times. It’s the centerpiece of many of Ham’s droning talks.

They have taken this cartoon, and plan to turn it into a 3D diorama.

You know, this doesn’t suddenly make it more true or believable. It does discredit the “museum” even more that they think it a noteworthy addition to create a sculpture of an old cartoon by a creationist hack. Why? Was Ben Garrison unavailable?

Oh, gosh, what can Matt Lauer do to redeem himself in our eyes?

I guess Matt Lauer is full of regret and is soul-searching and wants to repair the damage he has done, so he is weeping to the press.

There are no words to express my sorrow and regret for the pain I have caused others by words and actions, Lauer said in the statement released to the network. To the people I have hurt, I am truly sorry.

Lauer said that some of what he has been accused of is untrue and mischaracterized but said, there is enough truth in these stories to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed.

Translation: he’s sorry he was caught, can he get back on the gravy train now, please?

I’m sure he is embarrassed now. But the man had a trapping button installed in his desk — you came in to meet the boss, he’d press his secret button, and click, you were trapped in there with him and couldn’t get out until he let you. Not only is that creepy as hell, but required forethought and intent and planning and assistance to install. Was that one of the incidents he now claims was mischaracterized?

Here’s the deal, Matt. You screwed yourself while trying to screw others, and no one feels any particular reason to redeem you. You were a dime-a-dozen talent who was paid $25 million a year, doing a job that any of thousands of women could have done better, with more class and insight than you ever demonstrated…and they wouldn’t be leaving a trail of slime everywhere they went. You’ve got millions of dollars socked away, I’m sure, and can just go sink out of sight, to everyone’s relief. Disappearing without a fuss would be in your interest, too, because all you’re doing now is reminding us that you have a fat bank account full of undeserved loot, and a trail of women whose careers were stunted by your selfish actions.

Vanish, little man. Your deflation has only just begun.

Gilded Ages are not times of human flourishing

Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are, together, richer than the half of the population of the United States. Bezos was the fortunate recipient of an abrupt surge in the value of Amazon stock that has given him a net worth of over 100 billion dollars. Which makes this comment particularly appropriate:

One of the best soundbites I’ve heard about modern economics is (paraphrased)) “It’s not possible to earn a billion dollars. It is possible to steal a billion dollars.”

There is nobody smart enough, hardworking enough, trained enough and dedicated enough to earn a billion dollars without leveraging corrupt systems and exploiting people.

The poverty threshold in America is $11,490 for one person. If someone has a billion dollars, that is 87,032 times the poverty line.

It’s possible for someone to be twice as smart as another worker. It’s possible for them to be four or five times as hardworking. It’s possible for one person to have ten times the training of another person. So if you have one person that is half as smart, a fifth as hardworking, and a tenth as trained, they should reasonably earn one percent of the other. That’s the very outside figure. But anyone who takes in more than a million dollars per year did not earn that, they stole it. They found a vulnerable system to exploit or they found a group of people to cheat. Maybe they did it legally. Maybe they paid someone to make it legal to do that. It happens. But “earn”? Actually -deserving- that much money because of their merits and efforts? No.

I don’t mind some inequities in wealth — I buy into capitalism just enough to think that a motivating reward system for human behavior is a good thing — but we’re well beyond what is fair or reasonable. I can live with some people making a million dollars a year, but only if we’re also making sure that no one has to live in rank poverty. But someone “earning” billions while huge numbers can barely keep food on the table, can’t afford rent, can’t go to a doctor when they need to, and their children have no opportunities for a good education…that is an obscenity.

woke up got out of bed dragged a comb across my head

My phone chirped at me that Matt Lauer has been fired for sexual misconduct. Donald Trump is re-tweeting bigotry and hate from Britain First. This isn’t how the song goes.

Fed the cat, took a shower, made the coffee. I guess the whole pot is for me today, since my wife is flying off to Syracuse right now.

Checked my email — only 3 hate-o-grams that I’m a faggot who deserves to have his head cut off by ISIS? Delete, delete, delete. At least that’s a good start. Pulled up my file of review questions for my class today. Gotta edit ’em down to a reasonable subset that we can get through in an hour. They can cope with amino-acyl T-RNA synthetases and spliceosomes and Cro/CI regulation, right? Sure. They’re smart.

Second cup of coffee. Doing good.

Jordan Peterson is such an ass.

Remember to bring in the stack of assignments I’m returning in the cell biology lab today. Also printed out the list of interview questions the search committee is going over this evening — we’re beginning phone interviews tonight. I’m not getting home until after 8pm.

Hmm. I may not be able to get away for dinner today. Ate a banana. Just in case.

Uh-oh, what should I post to the blog this morning? I got nothin’. This long crowded full day ahead of me is ballooning up inside my cranium, squeezing everything else thinly against the walls of my skull, and then it pops and everything lofts loose and drifts outward and upward, through the windows and past the skeleton trees clawing at it, upwards and away, bobbing and floating.

Northwest, I see. that’s a good direction. If I were free, that’s the way I would go, too.

Jordan Peterson is peddling IQ myths and fallacies

Jordan Peterson is notorious for his desire to annihilate a liberal arts education, wanting to throw out the humanities and social sciences (except psychology, apparently) as tainted by post-modernism. We’re supposed to fire all those bad professors who teach bad ideas, false facts, and unacceptable interpretations of the evidence.

I guess that means we can fire Peterson, then.

This article correctly identifies him as The Professor of Piffle. In addition to his intolerance and failure to understand modern literary criticism, it turns out that he, a professor of psychology, doesn’t understand how the brain works.

To fully grasp the depth of Peterson’s belief in power hierarchies, take his commitment to IQ testing: “If you don’t buy IQ research,” he has told his students, “then you might as well throw away all of psychology.” Peterson rejects the theory of multiple intelligences (emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, and so on) and insists that all of human intelligence is biologically determined, essentially unalterable, and expressed in a single number that can be ranked. Your IQ, he says, will govern where you end up in life: with an IQ of 130, you can be an attorney or an editor; at 115, you can be a nurse or a sales manager; at 100, you can be a receptionist or a police officer; at 90, you can be a janitor.

Peterson’s defence of IQ rests on shaky foundations. While he tells students that IQ was empirically established through Charles Spearman’s factor analysis, he does not share the well-known critique of that method: factor analysis supports both of the contradictory causal explanations of intelligence (intelligence as innate versus intelligence as the product of environmental advantage). Peterson then stacks the deck in favour of biology, citing brain size and neural conduction velocity (essentially, the speed at which an electrical pulse moves through tissue) as the determinants of IQ. Again, he does not tell students that both explanations were discredited by later research.

In the tradition of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century pseudo-scientists, phrenologists, quacks, and scientific racists, Peterson’s commitment to IQ is simply the reflection of his commitment to an unalterable hierarchy of human beings. And this is why his dismissal of “unnatural” and “made up” gender pronouns, alongside his casual sexism—his belief that women would be better served by having babies than careers and that male feminists are “creepy”—turns out to be central to his intellectual project, which seeks to resurrect the conventional patriarchal pecking order. For Peterson, transgender people and powerful women upset the “male dominance hierarchy” that forms the centerpiece of his thought. His world view is predicated on the promise of restoring authority to those who feel disempowered by the globalism, feminism, and social-justice movements he derides.

I have to object to the phrase “stacks the deck in favour of biology”, because no sensible biologist would accept that load of crap as in any way valid. It is not good that “the most famous professor in Canada”, as the article calls him, is promoting bad science.