Republican royalty

Track Palin, son of Sarah and Todd Palin, was arrested for breaking and entering. Ooh-er, it is a sordid story.

He apparently was doped to the gills on alcohol and painkillers, and had broken into the house and beaten up his father for denying him a truck or car, and then strutted about the house while armed. My favorite line in the police report is this one:

Communication was attempted which failed due to Track yelling and calling myself and other officers peasants and telling us to lay our guns on the ground before approaching the residence.

The family really does think of themselves as royalty, don’t they? Comes with being a Republican, I guess. Their prominence is a legacy from John McCain, after all.

I’m more afraid of Elon Musk than I am of rogue AIs

Ted Chiang cuts straight to the heart of issue: it’s not artificial intelligence we should fear, it’s capitalism and its smug, oblivious, excessively wealthy leaders.

This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” Doomsayers have been issuing similar warnings for some time, but never before have they commanded so much visibility. Musk isn’t necessarily worried about the rise of a malicious computer like Skynet from The Terminator. Speaking to Maureen Dowd for a Vanity Fair article published in April, Musk gave an example of an artificial intelligence that’s given the task of picking strawberries. It seems harmless enough, but as the AI redesigns itself to be more effective, it might decide that the best way to maximize its output would be to destroy civilization and convert the entire surface of the Earth into strawberry fields. Thus, in its pursuit of a seemingly innocuous goal, an AI could bring about the extinction of humanity purely as an unintended side effect.

This scenario sounds absurd to most people, yet there are a surprising number of technologists who think it illustrates a real danger. Why? Perhaps it’s because they’re already accustomed to entities that operate this way: Silicon Valley tech companies.

Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.

I’ve always thought the dread of AIs was overblown and absurd and not at all a concern. Chiang exposes it for what it is, the fear that lies in the id of Musk, and Bezos, and Zuckerberg, and every greedy gazillionaire who is frantically pointing “over there!” to distract us from looking at where they’re standing: the fear that someone else might be as rapacious as they are.

Why am I seeing this everywhere?

It’s odd. Suddenly, in social media and email, I’m seeing this little cartoon everywhere.

Why does Trent Reznor have a reputation for ruining Christmas? I had Nine Inch Nails cranked up on the stereo all weekend — I’m home alone, and it’s great music for grading. I’m in the godless Christmas spirit already!

Also, I found Nine Inch Nöels. Finally, some good Christmas carols.

Definitely not safe for work, though.

Cloaking hatred with a thin veil of love

One of the podcasts I listen to regularly is The Scathing Atheist, and it lives up to its name. One of the regular bits on the show is called the diatribe, where they just cut loose and fulminate for a few minutes on some subject that has sparked their rage, and while I don’t always agree with it, I do have to respect a righteous rant. Last week, they focused their fire on Ray Moore, and the topic of the diatribe was how Christianity has become, or perhaps always has been, a religion of hate. It has become a reliable motivator of evangelical Christians lately — they will throw away all their principles, cast off even the illusion of morality, and vote for whatever racist, sexist pig screams the loudest and angriest about Muslims or the gays or the liberals or the transgenders or the Chinese or whatever other has caught their eye this week. It has become an ideology that serves only tribalism, without regard for any positive belief.

I agree with that diatribe. Religion is not a benefit to mankind in any way, and we’d be better off without it — or more fundamentally, we’d be better off without this tribal thinking that divides humanity into Us and Them. But I also think the show didn’t bring up two other important points (which is OK, if they threw in everything the podcast would be longer than my gym time).

One is that religion is often a master of Orwellian subterfuge. You can point out how often religious thinkers are endorsing hate, but the true believer will simply look a millimeter deep at the holy texts and tell you that they are all about love. I’ve seen no clearer example of this than a recent declaration by the United States Council of Catholic Bishops. It’s all about love and understanding and forgiveness, don’t you know.

At the outset they make their position crystal clear.

As leaders of various communities of faith throughout the United States, many of us came together in the past to affirm our commitment to marriage as the union of one man and one woman and as the foundation of society. We reiterate that natural marriage continues to be invaluable to American society.

We come together to join our voices on a more fundamental precept of our shared existence, namely, that human beings are male or female and that the socio-cultural reality of gender cannot be separated from one’s sex as male or female.

We acknowledge and affirm that all human beings are created by God and thereby have an inherent dignity. We also believe that God created each person male or female; therefore, sexual difference is not an accident or a flaw—it is a gift from God that helps draw us closer to each other and to God. What God has created is good. “God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).

No gay marriage — it’s unnatural. There are only two genders, male and female, and you will accommodate yourself to the one God gave you. That, bluntly, is what this document is about: a gang of old celibates are here to inform you of the truth about sex and gender and identity, and in the name of love will tell you who you get to love.

But they’re going to surround their authoritarian perspective with a good amount of fluffy padding. The only difference between Westboro Baptist and the Catholic Church is the amount of pretense they package around their hate.

A person’s discomfort with his or her sex, or the desire to be identified as the other sex, is a complicated reality that needs to be addressed with sensitivity and truth. Each person deserves to be heard and treated with respect; it is our responsibility to respond to their concerns with compassion, mercy and honesty. As religious leaders, we express our commitment to urge the members of our communities to also respond to those wrestling with this challenge with patience and love.

Sensitivity and truth, patience and love…we know members of our communities are struggling with the complexities of identity and desire, and we’re going to listen attentively to you before we crush your concerns with brutal simplifications. And then we’re going to go all But the children! on you. You transgender men and women are hurting the children and destroying our society, but we love you anyway, if you’ll conform.

Children especially are harmed when they are told that they can “change” their sex or, further, given hormones that will affect their development and possibly render them infertile as adults. Parents deserve better guidance on these important decisions, and we urge our medical institutions to honor the basic medical principle of “first, do no harm.” Gender ideology harms individuals and societies by sowing confusion and self-doubt. The state itself has a compelling interest, therefore, in maintaining policies that uphold the scientific fact of human biology and supporting the social institutions and norms that surround it.

Religious leaders who claim their adherence to the scientific fact of human biology while dispensing fact-free ideological recommendations to medical institutions are disingenuous hypocrites. Fuck off, you frauds.

The movement today to enforce the false idea—that a man can be or become a woman or vice versa—is deeply troubling. It compels people to either go against reason—that is, to agree with something that is not true—or face ridicule, marginalization, and other forms of retaliation.

Read that paragraph again. Who is facing ridicule, marginalization, and other forms of retaliation? It’s not the frequently bullied transgender boys and girls, or the young people who are asexual or bisexual or androgynous or queer. These old assholes fear that acceptance of people’s identities will lead to them being ridiculed for trying to enforce a false binary. They are the victims, in their heads. How troubling!

We desire the health and happiness of all men, women, and children. Therefore, we call for policies that uphold the truth of a person’s sexual identity as male or female, and the privacy and safety of all. We hope for renewed appreciation of the beauty of sexual difference in our culture and for authentic support of those who experience conflict with their God-given sexual identity.

They desire health and happiness for all who accept the narrow dictates of the Church, who ignore the sexual identity expressed in their minds, and adopt one of two (and only two!) gender roles, the traditional masculine and feminine. And the genitals you were born with had better well align with those roles!

This is all counterfactual assertion and raw denial, with the intent of condemning and ostracizing the people who refuse to conform to their rules. It is a call to the tribal majority to reject the outsiders, the weirdos, those strange Others who do not accept their arbitrary rules, or their supernatural justification for them. But notice how they mask it all with the language of kindness and love. I’m sure the Inquisition also thought the thumbscrews were a loving way to bring heretics to the grace of God.

Hey, there’s a second point I wanted to make, but it’s one I’ve made before, and maybe I’ll let it rest with just a brief mention. If we’re going to rail against the hateful tribalism of religion, we should do likewise with atheism. There’s a significant component of the atheist movement that has sent it sliding off the rails: those atheists who equate reason and rationalism with hating Muslims, all Muslims, or with contempt for feminism. This represents a cheap appeal for popularity that is as vile as Catholic bishops spitting on gay marriage, and on transgender men and women — it’s an attempt to fuel the movement with hate. It might just work, as far as growth goes. But it also produces a framework for thinking that I don’t want to be a part of.

Can atheism, at least, be an idea that is willing to accept people for who they are, rather than trying to wedge them into ill-fitting pigeonholes?

Marketing bros are the worst. Especially when they mangle science to fit their preconceptions

Taylor Pearson is this fellow who clearly knows nothing about evolutionary theory, has missed the point of the most basic concepts, but has no problem with appropriating evolution to justify his simplistic versions of business. No, really, he’s got this article titled Cambrian Leaps: One Way to Apply the Genius of Warren Buffett to Your Life which doesn’t actually have anything to do with Warren Buffett, dispenses useless, vague advice, and along the way trashes punctuated equilibrium while praising his flawed understanding of it.

He starts off by praising Darwin and evolution, because his insight helps us understand…marketing.

More than that, it provided a metaphor for many other systems in the world around us. We talk about people, marketing, and ideas evolving in the same way species do.
However, Darwin got one thing wrong in On the Origin of Species, which has an important implication on how you think about evolution as a metaphor for how to change your life.
He believed species evolved gradually and linearly.

Wrong. We could argue about “gradually” — Darwin was necessarily vague about the rate of evolution, and what seems slow and gradual from a human perspective might actually be rapid from a geological perspective — he definitely did not argue for linearity. The most famous illustration from his notebooks says otherwise!

He clearly had branching cladogenesis in mind. What does Pearson have in his ill-informed mind? Apparently Gould and Eldredge’s punctuated equilibrium. But he doesn’t understand that, either!

This phenomenon, called punctuated equilibrium, is the way that most natural systems evolve. Understanding punctuated equilibrium is essential to understanding how to change your life.

The left image is a gradual, linear view of Darwin’s theory of evolution where species emerge gradually and consistently over time. The right image is a “punctuated equilibrium” view of evolution where there are long periods of very little change and short periods of “explosions” with huge amounts of evolutionary activity.

No, that’s not a good model of punctuated equilibrium. All he’s got in his head are two versions of anagenesis, or gradual evolution within a single lineage in the absence of branching. In his left cartoon version, he’s got everything involving continuously at the same rate. His species 1, 2, and 3 are simply chronospecies that blend insensibly into one another. In the right cartoon, there are variations in the rate of evolution, nothing more, but you’ve still got a single lineage progressing into a couple of different species over time. That’s a poor and uninteresting model for punctuated equilibrium.

As well as not understanding the theory, he doesn’t get the facts right.

The Cambrian explosion is the most well-known example of the rapid growth stage of punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary history.

Over a period of only 20 million years (a short period in evolutionary time representing only 0.5 percent of Earth’s 4-billion-year evolutionary history), almost all present animal classes appeared.
Before the Cambrian explosion, most organisms were simple, composed of individual cells. By the end of that time period, the world was populated by a huge variety of complex organisms.

The Cambrian explosion was an adaptive radiation. That’s different from punctuated equilibrium. Multicellular animals preceded that Cambrian by about a billion years. There was a long period of soft-bodied complex animals that were evolving before the Cambrian. “Class” has a specific taxonomic meaning; most animal phyla arose before or during the Cambrian, but not most extant classes — there was no class Aves or Mammalia anywhere near the Cambrian. This is just a horrible mish-mash of mangled concepts. I’d give it an “F” if it were an undergraduate essay I was grading (grading is on my mind right now, as finals week ends).

But his gravest, most fundamental error is that he doesn’t grasp that evolution is a property of populations, not individuals. It means that all of his analogies make no sense at all, or even suggest models that contradict what he’d like to be true.

This is revealing. He gives all this pseudoscientific background to justify his picture of how people’s progress in a career works. He’s trapped in a mode of thinking that is narrow and linear.

So, because people’s individual lives are not a constant monotonic rise to ascendancy, but have stops and starts, he thinks it’s useful to use punctuated equilibrium as a model.

Gah. This isn’t how it works. Think instead about peripatric speciation.

Here’s a better analogy. Taylor Pearson starts a company to sell polka-dotted widgets. He’s doing fine, there’s a stable demand, he’s got a 100 people staffing the phones, pushing those widgets. Some of those salespeople are doing great, hitting their quote, making their bonuses, but others are lackluster and uninspired and just flopping…so he lets them go, hires fresh people, he’s still got a hundred employees and is keeping up with demand.

But a couple of those fired employees get together and resolve to try something new — they start working for themselves, selling paisley widgets. The market is thrilled. They were tired of those boring polka dots, and soon the paisley widget sellers overwhelm everyone, Taylor Pearson is out of business, reduced to peddling polka dot widgets out of a tin can on a street corner. Maybe with his free time he can hang out in the library more, actually reading up on evolution.

That’s punctuated equilibrium. All the observer from the outside sees as they’re digging through the rubbish heaps left by this civilization is that polka dot widgets were the default widgets for years and years, and then fairly abruptly there was a shift, and almost all the widgets in higher strata were paisley. You could decide that all the individuals in the widget population underwent a simultaneous, gradual transition, or you could argue that an emergent novelty in a small subpopulation led to a sweeping expansion of that group and replacement of the prior dominant group. The latter is more likely.

I have to ask, though, about a more substantial criticism than the fact that he’s got the facts and theory all wrong. What do these marketing people gain by slapping an inappropriate label on an observation about variable rates of success? When Pearson says, How To Change Your Life with Cambrian Leaps, what does that mean? He’s attached a buzzword to a phenomenon, but naming it doesn’t suddenly give insight into how to take advantage of it, even if there were some relevancy to the phrase. It’s all empty noise.

And then I read the comments, which were all full of praise for his brilliant insight. I realized that this isn’t about providing useful knowledge — it was about self-promotion. It’s about selling Taylor Pearson as the marketing guy who knows about Science! Unfortunately, he’s only going to fool the people who know even less science than he does, and to the rest of us, he’s just the half-assed bullshit artist who is cultivating an audience of wanna-bes. I guess it’s a living.

I still have a few questions

I’m sure you’ve heard by now that the Trump administration has informed the CDC that they’re no longer allowed to use the words “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based”. That’s weirdly specific and random, in addition to being contemptibly authoritarian. There’s something funny going on here. I have questions.

Why? This is strangely like telling someone “Don’t think of an elephant” — don’t think of a vulnerable transgender fetus with your evidence-based brain, people! So what are the scientists at the CDC supposed to think when, for instance, they see statistics on Zika-induced developmental abnormalities? As Tara Smith points out, scientists were also given alternatives: instead of talking about science, they should say CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes. So we’re supposed to consider what people wish were true? All right, I wish I had the body of a 30 year old and a million dollars.

Damn. Doesn’t seem to be having an effect.

But I also want to know why those specific seven words. Why not “homosexual”, “abortion”, “euthanasia”, “pollution”, “climate change”, “infertility”, and “tampons”, which conservatives would also find enraging? What specific input triggered the need to dictate censorship of these words?

Who? This edict came from somewhere, from someone who thinks they have the power to police the language. This is really mysterious. The HHS, which is in charge of the CDC, is currently leaderless, although Alex Azar has been nominated to run the show. Azar is an Indiana Republican who ran HHS under the Bush administration, and since has worked as a lobbyist and division head for Eli Lilly, a big pharmaceutical company. His appointment hasn’t been approved, so would he have any say at all? Why would a “pharma shill” object to science and evidence? The Indiana connection is ominous (is Pence tinkering behind the scenes?) but it sounds like maybe, once again, it’s underlings running amuck while the system is rudderless.

What’s next? If they think they can purge a useful, non-ideological word like “vulnerable”, there’s nothing to stop them from getting rid of all of the substance coming out of work from scientific organizations and replacing it with nothing but bureaucratic glurge, which, it wouldn’t surprise me, might be their real goal.

You know, I was also just wondering why anyone would want to be known as a Trump appointee. It seems to carry the taint of corruption and incompetence. I know if Trump tapped me to run the CDC (a position for which I’m completely unqualified), I’d have a terrifying moment of introspection in which I’d wonder what horrifying crime against nature and humanity I’d committed to deserve this rebuke.

Is “celebrity” synonymous with “hemorrhoid”?

I’m beginning to think so. The latest asshat to have used his influence to engage in sexual harassment is “celebrity” chef* Mario Batali, who then issued an apology for his behavior as his business and reputation flamed out with spectacular rapidity. He’s resigned from his multiple restaurants, he’s lost his TV appearances, and Walmart and Target aren’t selling his line of crap anymore. I’m a little exasperated with the big rich guys who suddenly decide an apology after the fact will rescue their crumbling empires, but Batali took it to the next level. His apology starts out well, but then…

How can you possibly hold groping unconscious women against me? I give you pizza dough cinnamon roles! Delicious!

Do the substitution. Hemorrhoid Chef Mario Batali. You’ll never want to eat there again.

The star war was…OK

Star Wars: The Last Jedi was one of the better ones, actually, which isn’t saying a heck of a lot, but it does mean you won’t be embarrassed by it, as you were by the horrible prequels or the patent marketing ploy of the Ewoks. It also survived the most unpleasant test of a movie ever.

About halfway through the showing here in Morris, someone in the theater crapped their pants. It wasn’t too near me, so all I suffered through was the occasional eddy of air passing through bearing the odor of hot buttered popcorn and poop, and fortunately I hadn’t bought any popcorn or snack food, so it was only sporadically unpleasant — but no one left the theater. Not the poopy pants person or anyone seated near them. So I think we can say the movie was at least that engaging.

Just a hint of etiquette, though: you may think it’s a good idea to test the dedication of an audience, but still, when you’ve shat your drawers please excuse yourself and clean up.

The burning question, though, is about the plot. No spoilers here, but remember how the last one was practically a remake of the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, and you could slot all the characters into analogs of the first movie’s cast, with some of that cast also making significant appearances, and the plot was just “blow up the Death Star”, only with an even bigger Death Star? Yeah, this one shows it’s bones are the same as the second movie, The Empire Strikes Back. Those bones have been creatively jiggered around, so you’ll still get some surprises. The ice planet battle with rebels in trenches fighting the oncoming, ponderous army of massive imperial battle machines is still there, it’s just been put near the end instead of the beginning, for instance.

It’s such a clone that there’s even a scene where the whiny Darth Vader copy, Kylo Ren, breaks the heart of the Luke version, Rey, by informing them of their parentage during a climactic battle. Don’t worry, though, it’s not something like, “I, Kylo Ren, am your third cousin twice removed” and Rey goes, like, “NOOOOOO. It can’t be!” It’s a little more realistic than that.

Also, the movie is overstuffed with irrelevant side-conflicts and tangents and sudden swordfights which turn the whole story into a sloppy turducken of confusion, but it’s OK, they’re entertaining, just go with it.

The porgs were clearly tossed in as comic relief. They weren’t very amusing. That’s the level of humor we’re working at here, so don’t expect much to laugh at. Do not buy the inevitable porg toys, or I will have to unfriend you.

The primary plot devices are all about Force magic. The hokey religion angle is wearing thin, but OK, it’s a fantasy story, I guess we need to allow it.

By the way, is it now a requirement that every sf/fantasy movie include one character rendered so badly that it breaks all suspension of disbelief? In this one it’s Yoda. He still looks like a cheesy foam puppet made in the 1970s, and his scene just goes on and on. He’s dead. He’s a Force ghost. Let him rest in peace, ‘k?

Bottom line: if I were twelve years old again, I’d probably be saying “This is the greatest movie ever!!!” I’m not, unfortunately, so I’m just going to say it’s fine, light, forgettable entertainment. It would be improved by having an audience that could control their bowels, but otherwise it’s exactly what it says on the label and as long as you don’t expect depth or greatness, and it truly is a nice representative of the Star Wars genre.

How to purge yourself of The Gay

I was darned close to a perfect 0 on the Kinsey scale, exclusively heterosexual. But let’s face it, we’re all able to experience some degree of same-sex attraction — even I could feel a little internal tremor when I saw Jason Mamoa. But no more. I have achieved a perfect 0. You might ask how, how can you too drive yourself to Absolute Heterosexual Manliness? And I will tell you.

I started reading this interview with Matt Damon, who I might once have said was reasonably attractive in the right light. But as I read deeper, I first felt that there was something mildly disturbing here, like, how can he be so self-centered about accusations of harassment? Then when he starts rationalizing about how we ought to forgive Louis CK because he has been punished enough, the self-loathing started to well up. And then by the time he says his response to a hypothetical accusation against himself would be to lawyer up and buy her off, my journey was complete: I now hate all men. Jason, I’m sorry. I couldn’t bear to spend any time with you now.

I thought that was enough. I was now pure. But I didn’t know that Tom Hanks — sweet, avuncular, gentle Tom Hanks — was going to speak up.

He he told the New York Post newspaper’s Page Six column: If you threw out every film or TV show that was made by an a**hole, Netflix would go out of business. I think you do just have … to wait because this is a long game.

Fuck damn. I’m thoroughly suffused with the spirit of misandry now. All of my Y chromosomes are cowering in a dark corner of my nuclei. This might be sorta like a massive autoimmune reaction, and I might die.