cab67
cab67's JournalSomething I've noticed on social media -
As far as I’m concerned, Will Smith and Chris Rock should both be ashamed of themselves.
I said this on Facebook and immediately noticed something - there was a disparity in the responses. Most of my friends agreed with me, but a handful - all of them high school acquaintances to whom I’m not very close - disagreed. They put the blame all on Will Smith. One of them even stated that he found Rock’s joke to be funny. When I pointed out that ge was basically mocking someone for a medical condition, he replied with ‘it’s not life-threatening, and she and her husband should lighten up.’
Those who said things like this are all Trump voters.
I hear this all the time from the right - people are too sensitive and should learn to take a joke.
It’s what my teachers told me as I was bullied severely up through mid-high school. Suck it up and all that.
A large part of the voting public now openly condones bullying as a normal approach toward life.
Why I'm not panicking about Dan Patrick's push to end tenure in Texas.
Bills to end tenure at public universities show up in state legislatures with great regularity. They appear in my own state's legislature annually. Only once did it get out of its first committee hurdle, and it didn't go very far beyond that, in spite of having a governor and legislature far enough to the right that they clearly want us to be an exclave of Texas or Florida. And the current lieutenant governor of Texas appears determined to end public higher education tenure in his state.
Such bills allow right-wing legislators to appeal to a lot of people, many of whom aren't necessarily aligned with such legislators in other ways. Why should professors get lifetime guarantees of employment when ordinary blokes don't? Especially when these arrogant, elitist professors are wasting their time and taxpayer dollars on worthless "research" and sticking their noses in the lives of everyone with their liberal indoctrination?
It's actually comparatively easy to debunk such statements. Applied research gets nowhere without basic research that, at first, may seem to have no practical benefit. Our lifetime appointments are similar to those of judges, and the reason is the same - we don't want to see massive faculty turnover whenever the governor's office switches parties. And yes, tenured professors can be fired.
But these points, however valid, don't always seem to take hold.
And yet very few anti-tenure bills even make it to the floor for a vote, much less pass.
There are a couple of reasons for this. So, yes - as a tenured faculty member at a public university, and as an alum of the Texas public university system (MS and PhD from the University of Texas), I am concerned about these bills, but not really panicking.
1. Businesses, by and large, like the tenure system. They want universities to promote innovation. Anything that might drive the best and brightest from the higher education system - which tenure will do (see below) - will be opposed by businesses that rely on what higher education provides.
The reason anti-tenure bills never go far in my own blood-red state is because, as soon as they start picking up any sort of traction, business lobbying groups go apeshit. This is especially true of the tech sector, which is even more important in Texas than in my current digs. It's also true of the oil and gas industry, which relies on research at public universities to improve exploration and extraction technology. (I know this for a fact, because my department at UT-Austin was one of the premier departments for such research. Many of my office-mates were headed for jobs in the oil industry. It's also why tenure is most likely safe in Oklahoma and Louisiana.)
A lot of these businesses are also aware that those they recruit from out of state will want to see a robust public university system for their own kids when they're old enough.
I'm serious about this. Businesses will mobilize to prevent Patrick's social science windmill-tilting from hurting their bottom line.
2. The closest we've come to actually eliminating tenure was in Wisconsin, which didn't end tenure per se, but which weakened it substantially. The result was the loss of several prominent faculty members and massive expenditures to retain faculty who were about to bolt. It's still having an impact on hiring at Wisconsin's public universities. It's a good bet the Texas legislature, no matter how far up the ass of the Orange-Skinned Eater of Other Peoples' Boogers* who occupied the White House until mid-January 2021, won't want to repeat that mistake.
Yes, we've got to be vigilant. This could, indeed, go badly if we aren't. But it's not yet time to panic.
*I've got a very creative 6-year-old daughter. She comes up with the best insults.
editors, reporters, tyrannosaurs, and dirty professional secrets.
Last week, we were all treated to the news that Tyrannosaurus rex, everyone’s favorite dinosaur, was actually three distinct species. This was according to a paper that was published in a peer-reviewed journal, though associated news reports suggested the idea was “controversial.”
I think this incident reveals a lot about weaknesses in the peer-review system and the way the media report scientific developments. I’d like to discuss these with y’all’s indulgence.
First, my qualifications – I’m a professional vertebrate paleontologist. My career has largely been devoted to crocodyliforms (crocodiles, alligators, gharials, and their extinct relatives), but after finishing grad school, I spent time as a post-doc at a large natural history museum working on a very infamous tyrannosaur skeleton. I won’t divulge much more except to say this particular theropod’s common name rhymes with “due” and that they shouldn’t have hired me. They should have hired a priest. I still say it screams when you throw holy water on it.
Anyway –
The paper arguing that T. rex is three separate species is terrible. Awful. Laughable. One of the worst papers I’ve ever seen in the peer-reviewed literature. It makes mistakes the average undergraduate with one or two biology or historical geology courses under their belt would know to avoid. There are portions that actually qualify as “unintentionally funny.” It demonstrates nothing, when one considers the actual evidence we have.
A lot of us are still trying to figure out how, exactly, it got through peer-review. I know one person who submitted a review, but the recommendations in that review were ignored. We don’t know if the celebrity status of the lead author – not an academic, but an accomplished and well-known (if iconoclastic) paleoartist – influenced the editors, or if someone on the editorial team knew the authors. It wasn’t published in an open-access journal, so the whole “pay to play” scenario is very unlikely to be the case. It’s entirely possible the authors submitted this to multiple journals until they found one willing to run it. But whatever the reason, this was a lapse of editorial oversight. The paper should never have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
This highlights a problem we academics understand, but the general public generally does not – that, to corrupt a quote from Winston Churchill, peer review is the worst possible form of editorial oversight, except for all of the alternatives that have been tried from time to time. Peer review is run by fallible human beings. It’s no better than the fallible human beings involved. It's something of a dirty secret that no one's tried to hide, but which hasn't gotten a whole lot of attention.
I’ve heard people equate peer review with censorship, but in fact, it’s a whole lot easier to get bad research into the peer-reviewed literature than to prevent something cutting edge and controversial, but prescient, from being published. In fact, it’s gotten much, much easier because of the proliferation of journals, and especially of open-access journals in which authors pay a publication fee, in recent years. Some open-access journals are legit, but a lot of them aren’t – they’ll publish anything just so long as the author pays up.
But even without this, peer review has its limitations. I encounter this all the time in my own little field because of its cross-disciplinary nature. Papers using molecular data to work out the relationships and divergence timing of crocodylians are regularly published. They often make basic mistakes in using the fossil record to calibrate rates of evolution, or they make comparisons between their results and outdated paleontological work. There’s nothing nefarious about this; the authors, in these cases, were trained as molecular biologists and don’t really have the background in paleontology needed to fully grasp the literature. These are honest mistakes, not rhetorical gymnastics. (We paleontologists, by contrast, usually have some training in molecular biology and can swim through their literature reasonably well.)
The problem is with the editors. Papers on molecular systematics are usually reviewed by other molecular systematists. It doesn’t dawn on the editors that it might be good to have the manuscript reviewed by a paleontologist. Papers that could have been excellent are diminished because of some honest mistakes a reviewer should have caught.
There are other reasons peer review fails. Sometimes, it’s because some of us are assholes. They may feel threatened by something written by a younger scholar that challenges their work. Or they may be sexists, bigots, racists, or some other species of dirtbag. If they have some sort of clout, they can submit an unnecessarily harsh review that kills the manuscript. And because some fields are small, it may be impossible to avoid such fuckwits as reviewers.
Peer-review can, indeed, fail if a manuscript contradicts the consensus. But if it does, this is rarely because it bucks consensus. It's usually because it doesn't have enough support to do so. Wegener's theory of continental drift (which, granted, was presented before peer review was a thing) was rejected not because it ran against common wisdom, but because the evidence he marshalled, though interesting, wasn't enough to shift opinion. That he had no mechanism to drive it didn't help. (He actually thought continents plowed through oceanic crust. In fact, oceanic and continental crust move together.) The consensus shifted when a sufficient volume of new observation met a workable mechanism. Geologists weren't closed-minded; they just didn't see enough to force a revisit of the paradigm.
Some journals use a double-blind system for peer review, but in my experience, it generally doesn’t work. Our fields are fairly tight; it’s all but impossible to remain anonymous. Most authors can figure out it’s my review whether I sign my review (and I usually do) or not. And an established jerk is going to go nuclear on a paper challenging their work no matter who the authors are.
I’m not saying we should abandon peer-review. We need some sort of quality control in science, and this seems to be the best we can manage. But the mere fact that a paper was peer-reviewed doesn’t necessarily mean it’s reliable. We must all keep this in mind.
The T. rex paper also laid another phenomenon bare – the way reporters try to convey what looks like exciting science.
News reports uniformly expressed that this paper had generated “controversy.” In fact, the only controversy it’s generated is how, exactly, it got through peer review. Scientifically, it’s been more or less universally rejected by experts in the field. But news sources can’t get much traction from “bad paper elicits dismay from professionals.”
I wasn’t contacted about this particular paper, but I’ve been asked for comments before. Reporters are cool with disagreement, but what they want is something like “this is so cool! We have to re-write our textbooks!” As long as you include something like that, you might get quoted and, just maybe, a qualifier will squeak through.
I’m pretty sure reporters in this case were shocked at what they encountered. Every single person they called for a comment said what I would have said – that this is an awful paper, it doesn’t demonstrate a damned thing about tyrannosaurs, and it shouldn’t be given air time.” They were literally unable to get “cool” or “re-write the textbooks.” So they went with “controversial.”
And you know the worst part? It’s entirely possible that T. rex might be divisible. I HIGHLY doubt it’s divisible into more than two, and it’s extremely unlikely either of these would have co-occurred. That could be a cool study. It would involve a modern approach to variation and a thoughtful approach to the nature of species. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened with this paper. We’re learning some lessons, but this isn’t one of them.
(And no, I'm not going to do that study. Crocodiles are objectively better than dinosaurs - we don't need special effects to see them eat people. I've got plenty enough to do with them.)
What Putin's war will cost Russia
Chechnya. Ingushetia. Dagestan. South Ossetia. Most of the Caucasus, in fact. Some are de facto independent. I'm sure leaders in these regions are paying attention to the effictiveness, or lack thereof, of the Russian Army in Ukraine.
And if I was Russian, I wouldn't get used to Crimea being a part of Russia on a map.
Probably going to get in trouble here (university building names, eugenics, and Nazis)
As many of you know, Montana State University-Billings is going to rename a building named after its first president, Lynn Banks McMullen, because he is now known to have spoken in favor of Nazi eugenics policies.
Although I’m going to add some context around McMullen’s statements, I am NOT defending what he said. Not even close. It was bigoted, repugnant, and ignorant. I fully support MSU-Billings’ decision to re-name this building. Adding context, in this case, no more justifies what he said than adding context can justify slave ownership prior to the Civil War. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.
That being said, some context –
I’m concerned that people are focused on only one aspect of what McMullen said – namely, that he approvingly acknowledged Nazi German policies in 1935. He did, but leaving it at that oversimplifies the situation, and it does so in a way that prevents us progressives from learning an important cautionary tale – that just because anti-scientific attitudes are more closely aligned with the Republican Party today, liberals are not immune to the allure of pseudoscience, and we must remain vigilant to ensure neither we nor our political allies never again follow such a dark path. For we were once leaders on some parts of that trail.
McMullen’s comments were directed in support of eugenics – the idea that we could improve the human condition and society in general by encouraging people with desirable characteristics to have children and discouraging, or even preventing, those lacking these characteristics from doing so. This arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, followed by its merger with the new science of genetics (the “modern synthesis”), began to take root in intellectual circles.
This may be a distinction without a value, but although the quotes I’ve seen attributed to McMullen decry what he saw as the mixed blessing of immigration – that not everyone who came here was good and virtuous – I couldn’t find anything explicitly anti-semitic. I’m not saying he wasn’t anti-semitic; only that I couldn’t find anything demonstrating that in what he said. It’s entirely possible he was, and that I simply haven’t found the right quote. But his support for Nazi German eugenics wasn't necessarily anti-semitic, either, because eugenics in Germany in the 1930’s wasn’t single-mindedly directed at Jewish people. Sterilization and euthanasia were being applied to those deemed mentally ill and/or physically handicapped. It’s possible McMullen was expressing agreement with this, and not with anything explicitly racist or antisemitic.
The moral repugnance of this idea is self-evident, but it also arose from a very deeply flawed assumption. When it came to such things as criminality, intelligence, mental illness, and anti-social behavior, the nature-vs-nurture pendulum was way over on the nature side. One’s behavior and intelligence were seen as largely the product of your genes. If you tended toward criminal activity, you were a born criminal. If you want fewer criminals, the reasoning went, make sure those who would pass along criminality-promoting genes didn’t contribute to future generations. Fewer children being born to criminals meant fewer criminals and, thus, less crime.
This is, of course, straight-up bullshit. A lot of what was targeted for eugenic elimination had far more to do with poverty and institutional racism than biology. But too many people at the time believed otherwise.
This almost certainly arose from the ambient bigotry surrounding those expressing these thoughts, but it also reflected the newness of evolutionary biology and genetics. They were the Next Big Thing! The internet was supposed to level the information playing field back in the 1990’s. Nuclear power was going to make energy too cheap to meter back in the 1950’s. There was no end to what electricity and magnetism might achieve in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which led Mary Shelley to suppose a collection of sewn-together body parts could be jump-started to life. Same thing.
As a result, many states passed laws intended to further the cause of eugenics. In their extreme, they mandated forced sterilizations for certain classes of people - and these sterilizations actually happened. At least three states that I know of have agreed to pay reparations to those who were forcibly sterilized under these laws.
Given the correlation between race, poverty, and the social problems arising from poverty, you’d suspect that such laws were mostly in the Jim Crow South- but they weren’t. They were passed all over the US. And this is because much of the early impetus behind eugenics came not from racists or reactionaries, but from the intellectual left.
Many of these people were operating from a sense of improving society. They either blinded themselves to the inherently racist core of their ideals or found some way to accommodate it. They might argue, for example, that by preventing people of color with criminal histories from having kids, they were promoting the progress of races often thought to be at some sort of lower evolutionary status. It’s scientific bologna, but it wasn’t an uncommon perspective for a progressive prior to the Second World War.
By no means was eugenics limited to the left. Those who openly embraced white supremacy obviously weren’t interested in improving anything beyond their own goal of keeping the white power structure in place. It also found favor among ardent imperialists and social Darwinists. (Indeed, the seeds of eugenics predate the publication of Origin of Species; Thomas Malthus, whose arguments on reproductive excess influenced Darwin, would have been called a social Darwinist had they not been published 11 years before Darwin was born.)
But it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that, like the most virulent science denialism of today, eugenics was an exclusively right-wing concept.
Progressives did eventually abandon eugenics. Partly, it’s because the nature-nurture pendulum was moving toward nurture. But it’s also because the world saw what can happen when eugenics is taken to an extreme when the facts of the Holocaust came to light. The moral consequences of eugenics were shoved in their faces.
I actually cover this point in my large-enrollment undergraduate courses. I state that although there is nothing inherently anti-scientific about conservatism, and although there are certainly anti-scientific attitudes to be found in some liberal circles, the Republican Party is far more beholden to its anti-scientific constituents than the Democratic Party. We don’t see too much effort by Democrats to abolish all forms of animal-based research, foods made from transgenic crops, or market-based approaches to conservation and sustainable use that actually work. But laws preventing the teaching of what modern science teaches us about evolution, climate, human sexuality, and public health? From Republicans? All the bloody time.
But I also make the effort to point out that while conservatives have the harder row to hoe these days – they have to bring their party away from leaders who deny physical reality – us progressives aren’t excused from vigilance. The history of eugenics is a big part of that. It happened to us before. It can happen again.
Anyway – MSU-Billings is doing the right thing by renaming that building. But let’s understand the full context of the reason to ensure dead concepts stay dead.
ADDED ON EDIT: In case anyone accuses me of both-sides-ism, that's nowhere near what I'm saying. In fact, there's a profound difference between the kind of anti-science we see on the left and on the right. Left-wing anti-science is usually expressed as opposition to some sort of application of science. Right-wing anti-science is steeped in denial of the underlying science itself. I might disagree with a fellow progressive over the safety of GMO crops, but we would both agree on how evolution, hybridization, and gene splicing actually work. A right-wing blowhard is likely to deny that evolution even happens.
We also see more concentrated efforts on the right to distort scientific reality to support a policy opinion. Hard-core abortion opponents frequently claim, for example, that abortion increases breast cancer risk. Except that it doesn't.
And like I said, the Republican Party is wholly in the thrall of those who refuse to accept the world around them for what it is.
Ukraine is teaching the world how to do psy-ops.
I don't know if it's coordinated or if it's individual Ukraine servicemen working on their own, but their use of social media to send messages to attacking Russians, while letting the whole world listen in, takes the whole concept to a new level. It's a work of collective art.
Partly, I think it's because Ukrainians understand their enemy. We haven't understood ours since perhaps the First World War.
And Ukrainians certainly understand Russians more than Russians appear to understand Ukrainians.
language question out of curiosity
Something I've wondered for a while - are the Ukrainian and Russian languages mutually intelligible when spoken?
I realize it's not an important question.
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