Category: Culture and society

The tech industry is filled with people who do not respect scientific inquiry.

At most every company I’ve worked for, there have been coworkers who held beliefs that seemed antithetical to what I expect from the tech savvy. I equate tech-specific knowledge with general scientific knowledge, and that hasn’t been the case. Some previous examples that contradicted my expectation: a Young Earth creationist who worked on low-level hardware drivers, a CTO who proudly told the company how his wife prayed for, and contributed to, a fix to some server downtime, another CTO and a lead developer who felt the scientists behind the New Horizons mission “knew nothing,” and the manymany who didn’t believe in anthropogenic climate change. The New Horizons insult coming from programmers about other, better programmers was stunning, but the downtime prayer was particularly insulting since it insulted those who worked long overtime hours to actually troubleshoot and fix the issue. Religion was a key factor in all of these, but it doesn’t diminish my shock at such prejudice coming from tech people. It does diminish pride in my profession.

More recent mania has been coming in the form of junk science beliefs from sources that use loose cherry-picking of data to build a, let’s say, non-canonical picture of the natural world.

One subject discussed was based on the common belief that natural equals good and man-made equals bad–or at least less good. This is a noble savage approach to our interactions with the environment. Do we go through periods on the man-made of over-optimism (early 1900s utopianism or late 1950s plastics/drugs/space mania) and of excessive mistrust (the late 1800s Arts and Crafts movement, the 1960s return-to-nature)? The article Manmade or natural, tasty or toxic, they’re all chemicals … (where the image at the bottom was taken) explains the nuance of categorizing what is healthy and not. The split rings of natural/man-made and their 90-degree rotated overlap with toxic/non-toxic is a clean, clear shorthand for the messy reality. Not exact, but more correct that not. Natural can be deadly and man-made can be healthy.

Similarly, there was a discussion on the health and provenance of current dietary choices. This is a subject frequently examined in American culture through decades and multiply at any point in time… does this obsessive-like behavior exist in any other country? So there’s a documentary called What the Health that criticizes the reasoning behind and validity of common choices of food consumption.

I have not watched it.

I have, however, read the rebuttal from Vox titled Debunking What the Health, the buzzy new documentary that wants you to be vegan. It argues that the documentary is filled with cherry-picked details from WHO research and exaggerations of results. An extended section:

The film is filled with bad gotcha journalism
Abuses of science aside, Andersen also repeatedly engages in poorly executed gotcha journalism in an attempt to suggest patient groups are trying to cover up the truth about diet he’s stumbled upon.

On numerous occasions during the film, he calls these groups, such as Susan G. Komen or the American Heart Association, which he correctly points out often take money from the food industry. He then asks receptionists long-winded and detailed questions about nutrition science. When the receptionists, caught off guard, say they can’t answer his questions, Andersen huffs in frustration, apparently hoping to imply there’s a conspiracy afoot.

In another instance, Andersen interviews an official at the American Diabetes Association who won’t get specific with him on diet because, he says, the research doesn’t support very specific claims. Andersen also reads this as a conspiracy.

There’s no doubt food companies have distorted nutrition science and health research, and have tried to influence health guidelines and the lifestyle advice people get. Patient groups like the ADA and the American Heart Association do have deep ties to industry, as I’ve reported. But Andersen’s pseudo-sting operations are silly and reveal nothing of these facts. They also offer no evidence that disease groups are engaged in a vegan cover-up.

I may just be rigid in my adherence to the rigors of science but, of course, I don’t believe so.

Updated 8 Feb 2019

I was having a conversation recently about the pros/cons of the Internet as social media and how it differs from similar forms throughout history.

Means of individual and group communications sent to an audience–one-to-many or many-to-many as opposed to one-to-one–include: the town crier (ancient BCE up to ~1900 CE), the broadsheet (from ~1700 up to its blending into…), newspapers (from 700s CE by Chinese dynastic governments, then privately produced Chinese media ~1580, from 1500s-1700s by the Italian government, from the 1600s throughout Europe and America), magazines (1600s), fanzines (1800s (!) literary to mid- late-1900s pop culture), TV (1900s), Usenet and BBSs (1970s), blogs (1990s), social media (late 1990s).

The original forms were government-controlled with broad distribution, then later forms were introduced for private groups but with smaller distribution, and ultimately company-controlled with a broad distribution. In the last 50-or-so years the ability for individuals to broadcast to a potentially large audience became more widely available. Broad distribution was accessible only to governments at first, then corporations, and finally individuals. The progress from fanzine to blog to social media were the forms that provided that increasing access.

The ability of the individual to communicate to the many equates to the ability to affect their social environment. The older newspaper, magazine, and TV forms contained consumable information that provided little opportunity for the consumer to produce any of that information. The only means were in the form of popularity feedback via advertisements, or that of letters-to-the-editor filtered through the editors themselves. These are considerably constrained forms of influence.

Affecting your environment provides a sense of agency and control and perhaps reduces feelings of increasingly narrower importance in communities that are increasingly wider. Someone in a small town now more likely understands, via the Internet, that they are only part of a near limitless whole. (This understanding is addressed defectively by Jordan Peterson’s romanticizing of “small, rural communities.”)

The ability to affect your environment comes in different forms. Similar to the broadcast of ideas are the choices to spray paint graffiti or play loud music in a public space: the city controls you and so you try to take some of that control back. This gets maybe into the difference of lower class disaffection and response versus middle class response, but that is probably too simplistic. (Even, further afield, the choice to get a tattoo is a choice to control a body that was given without choice.) In the initial discussion that prompted this entry, we also talked anecdotally about how the game Pong amazed us as children and how, obviously, it appears simplistic. From tinker toys to VR Minecraft. Similar to sending your messages to potential millions, controlling what appeared on a TV screen that was previously consumption-only gave the individual control over previously un-controlled content. The thrill of making dots on a TV screen do what you want comes from the same source that drives us to post a picture of food on Instagram or pass along our belief in a government conspiracy on Facebook. Within every success is a failure.

Updated 8 Feb 2019

Origins of journalism and conservative hatred of journalism in The New Yorker article Does Journalism Have a Future?

Correcting/clarifying my loose reading of Wikipedia history, newspapers qua American newspapers started in the 1830s. Hatred of news by conservatives started earlier than I expected: in the 1950s with McCarthy and heavily in the 1970s by Spirow Agnew (who I recently/embarrassingly just learned was Nixon’s VP pre-Ford and resigned prior to Nixon in a nearly-as-corrupt cloud). He states that “good politics for us to kick the press around” which sounds grindingly similar to Trump’s “fake news” quips”. But we knew that?

And there’s a satisfaction that Bill Kristol denounced the press at the time as fake-news-ish and then the shuttering of the iconic magazine he founded, The Weekly Standard, was celebrated by Trump. What Rick Wilson keenly calls “Everything Trump Touches Dies” I express as a canonical example of a monster eating its creators. Good. Fucking. Riddance. Hate begets destruction.

Notes:

• Jour means day, newspapers were daily, journalism
• TV made newspapers from descriptive to interpretive since tv was visually descriptive

In No thank you, Mr. Pecker, Jeff Bezos reveals that The Enquirer attempted to blackmail him in order to have the newspapestarter he owns (the notable WaPo) stop pursuing stories re their (The Enquirer’s) politically-motivated catch-and-kill activities w/r/t Trump. Representatives for the not-so-notable Enquirer spoke to him about photos they found (“found” being key) with him naked and/and genitally erect with a woman-not-his-wife while wearing his wedding ring, and then sent him emails (holy shit wire fraud!) saying same. He published their threat and the content thereof. Billionaires are justifiably getting shit right now, but his response as the billionaire was satisfying in a hero-we-need way:

Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here. If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?

Jacques Peretti, post modernist, then started Buzzfeed.

Arianna Huffington was anti-feminist

Alan Rusbridger from The Guardian:

Our Generation had been handed the challenge of rethinking almost everything societies had, for centuries, taken for granted about journalism.

This is untrue. Journalism has always been mutable, but we just forget.

 

 

Updated 12 Jun 2018

Updated 9 Jul 2018

We are in a cold war of public insult and offense.

It all “started” with Michelle Wolf’s routine at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. She took the news media to task–with only partial humor, predominantly viciousness–for their complicity in Trump’s success at shaping his mass media persona without balancing it with context (e.g. lies were often left un-addressed). She also threw sharp critiques at Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, seated 10 feet away, for her many lies during her White House press conferences. Wolf’s set also included references to Sanders’ smoky eye makeup and her similarity to a female collaborator in A Handmaid’s Tale. No matter the target, Wolf delivered it with a smiling vulgarity that is her signature and, indeed, that of many comics before her. The right, and some on the left, felt she had gone too far; none that I had read addressed the content of her message.

More recently Rosanne Barr compared a black woman to an ape. I’m trying to find a similar depth of metaphor as Wolf’s comments but, as with most racist comments, cannot. Both sides justifiably and nearly unanimously recognized what true vulgarity was and Barr’s extremely popular show was quickly cancelled.

Prior, Bill Maher gave one of his many virtuosically angry monologues about Trump while displaying a picture of an orange-haired orangutan on the screen. Unlike Michelle Wolf, this was a caricature without content. He may have been making a point about Trump’s buffoonery, but it came across as purely visual. After the Rosanne affair, Conservatives resurrected Maher’s Trump comparison. I can’t begin to see how they’re equivalent, especially given that his contentful monologue was the primary message and, of course, that absence of racism.

Then we jump to Samantha Bee’s use of the phrase “feckless cunt” to describe Ivanka Trump. More outrage ensued. (In this subset of examples, it seems that female comedians have a predilection for vulgar insults.) I have to admit I love this phrase and it’s pure Samantha Bee (as racism is pure Rosanne Barr) but have been told that cunt is a word that Cannot Be Uttered Even By Another Female. That being said, feckless is a pretty accurate description of Ivanka.

Mostly ignored in the coverage of these events are the many vulgar statements made by Donald Trump, arguably someone who should be held to a higher standard than comedians. This again is an example of the news media basically giving him a pass. Most of the insults were directed at him and those around him–and he publicly railed against Michelle Wolf’s and Samantha Bee’s comments because of that–but his past, similar transgressions went unaddressed. Well, unaddressed in the news media but the irony was often brought up on Twitter and elsewhere.

Of these examples, I obviously have a bias.

During the same Bill Maher episode with the orangutan “guest”, his panel compared and contrasted the actions of Roy Moore, Al Franken, Harvey Weinstein, and others who have paid the price of their actions thanks to the Me Too movement’s ascendancy. All agreed that Franken’s groping pantomime was far removed from Moore’s predatory actions and Weinstein’s public masturbation et al. This fact should be obvious. The summary of the panel’s discussion was that actions that are similar are not necessarily the same (also obvious) and that people need to stop thinking in simply black-and-white. It’s a tough point to make while discussing vulgar jokes, but nuance seems to have become a forgotten skill.

Updated 12 Jun 2018

Robert de Niro: “I’m gonna say one thing: fuck Trump [applause, standing ovation]. It’s no longer ‘down with Trump’ it’s ‘fuck Trump’.”

This rises to a new level of cathartic anger.

Criticism was split on the left and right, with many on the left saying he should have “gone high” a la Michelle Obama and many on the right withering in a manner that’s absent for similar outbursts by Trump. And there was the inevitable accusation of left-wing, Hollywood elitism snubbing an everyman.

People have been saying this-and-statements-like-this for the entirety of Trump’s presidency and campaign, but none so publicly, succinctly, and from a point of such visibility and fame. To state the obvious: de Niro’s statement contains none of the nuance of Wolf or Maher or Bee and more of the simple vulgarity of Trump (“son of a bitch,” “shithole countries,” “go fuck themselves,” etc.). Several articles past and present document the pejorative peccadilloes of previous presidents (These Are the Most Foul-Mouthed Presidents, and How Donald Trump Compares from Culture CheatSheet and A Brief History of Presidential Profanity from Rolling Stone). What’s to be learned from these articles is that although every president swears, few match the magnitude and frequency of Trump.

The social noise continues to escalate.

Updated 9 Jul 2018

Continuing the outbreak of politicians getting confronted in public.

Kristin Mink, a progressive school teacher, confronted Scott Pruitt at a restaurant in DC and enumerated his abysmal environmental policies and corruption (details: Kristin Mink: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know and I confronted Scott Pruitt not for his corruption but for his environmental crimes).

A group followed Mitch McConnell leaving a restaurant in Louisville, KY and asked questions about the missing children and demanded he abolish ICE (details Protesters confront McConnell leaving Kentucky restaurant).

Steve Bannon was called a piece of trash in Black Swan Books in Richmond, VA (details Steve Bannon called ‘piece of trash’ by heckler at bookstore). Stephen Miller was yelled at by a bartender at a sushi restaurant in DC (details From Kellyanne Conway to Stephen Miller, Trump’s advisers face taunts from hecklers around D.C.).

Arguments for confronting politicians in public are that they are public servants (true, even with Bannon who is an ex-advisor). Against, at least what I’ve read, are that we should respect their privacy (restaurants and book stores are public spaces) and we should instead vote to change policy (people can both confront and vote).

I hope this keeps up.

Updated 25 May 2018

Updated 4 Jun 2018

Updated 31 Dec 2018

I’ve been ignoring Jordan Peterson because his ideas are so monumentally idiotic and sexist that the time spent would be wasted. But, like reading reviews of horrible movies, there are just so many good take downs they need documented. His world view echoes in quality and spirit ex-Google employee James Damore’s “manifesto” from August of last year (who also had cogent and detailed takedowns). Both pseudo-science their way across biology, the social sciences, psychological archetypes, biological imperatives, and any other subjects that, when combined with conspiracy-like selectivity, can be used to get the results they want (think of how quantum theory’s Heisenberg uncertainty principle is used to explain some sort of fungible reality in the macroscopic world). Nonsense can be harmless, but with Peterson and Damore’s fractured extrapolations, too often violence, and not hilarity, ensues.

The adventure started (for most) last Friday with the NYT excellent and terrifying article titled Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy. Peterson’s been around for a while, examined most notably by David Futrelle on his website We Hunted the Mammoth, but the effects of Jordan and his ilk have only really risen to the surface of culture in the last couple of years, showcasing disaffected male teens as they lash out with cars or guns against women and POC. As one commenter elaborated: the angry privileged are manifesting as self-described oppressed white males railing against perceived social slights, incels against perceived gender injustice, and Trump, as leader of a superpower, against a bullying world.

Like the Google misogynist, Jordan Peterson has a wealth of scientist detractors eschewing printed rebuttals instead for justifiably casual Twitter rebuttals.

First thread (ht ladycrumpet) has Sarah Taber providing better examples of human biological tendencies than Peterson’s beloved lobsters (surprise! it’s humans and other primates):

https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/998385720992595968

Then there’s Bailey Steinworth’s deep dive into how lobsters et al. actually interact:

So apparently Jordan Peterson has a section in his book about lobster social behavior. I’ve never written a long twitter thread before but YOU COME INTO ~*MY*~ HOUSE? Let’s talk marine invertebrate social behavior:

— Bailey Steinworth (@baileys) May 19, 2018

Lobsters aside, the On Point segment ‘Incels’: The Movement Behind The Toronto Attack has host Meghna Chakrabarti speaking with a psychotherapist and several reporters, including David Futrelle. Subjects: the many, unacknowledged instances of terrorism against women, and the viscous cycle of self-hate that keeps Peterson followers as followers.

One phrase often used during discussions of Peterson and his type is that of an “intellectual dark web.” This is used as shorthand for any idea the speaker feels is too dangerous for consideration from, or suppressed by, the scientific community. This gets to the key cause. As people flock to Oprah-level bland life lessons and advice from her charlatan doctor (now part of Trump’s White House), they simultaneously rail against years/decades of documented science in favor of an Insidious Conspiracy. Occam’s whatever be damned.

Eye. Roll.

Updated 25 May 2018

Further critiques, both commenting on Peterson’s black-and-white view of “equality of opportunity” and the ideas coming from the intellectual dark web (a subject all on its own) among others.

An essay titled Reconsider the lobster by philosophy professor Kate Manne in The Times Literary Supplement. She looks at the book that started it all, Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, and walks through each “rule” for “life”.

On his romanticizing of the past:

“It was easier for people to be good at something when more of us lived in small, rural communities”, he reflects. Strictly speaking, this seems false, or at least vulnerable to counter-examples. It was just easier to seem good relative to other people when one knew less about their exploits.

On his blind spot for the violence coming from those traditionally in power:

Greater equality of opportunity is of course a necessary condition and symptom of social progress. But new opportunities and better odds for at least some members of historically subordinate social groups cannot be expected to come as good news to all of history’s traditional winners. It may result not only in disappointment and shame among some of them, but also resentment and violent outbursts among others.

And the quotes from the more radical of his followers are chilling and bizarre.

Another essay, Jordan Peterson Does Not Support ‘Equality of Opportunity’ by Eric Levitz from New York Magazine. He examines Peterson’s frequent cherry picking and kind of fallacy of composition logical errors.

The reason (most) progressives posit the gender-wage gap or racial disparities in incarceration, or income inequality … is that they believe that in a society as racist, sexist, and economically stratified as our own, it is safe to assume that such inequalities are not solely rooted in meritocracy or social utility.

The main point of both is that Peterson’s sweeping generalizations and flawed metaphors ignore, to the detriment of his followers, a more nuanced examination of our society and of humanity. We can hope that, much like the downfall of Richard Spencer, Peterson will face a similar reckoning through isolation now that his toxic views are more fully broadcast.

Updated 4 Jun 2018

I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous – A detailed history of Peterson’s time as a professor at the University of Toronto, written by Bernard Schiff, a close co-worker of Peterson’s and a former professor there.

One student, however, hated the course because he did not like “delivered truths.” Curious, I attended many of Jordan’s lectures to see for myself.

Remarkably, the 50 students always showed up at 9 a.m. and were held in rapt attention for an hour. Jordan was a captivating lecturer — electric and eclectic — cherry-picking from neuroscience, mythology, psychology, philosophy, the Bible and popular culture. The class loved him. But, as reported by that one astute student, Jordan presented conjecture as statement of fact.

Jordan Peterson may be a ‘public intellectual’, but his latest theory isn’t very clever – from Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. She quotes his absurd response to the New York Times article in his blog, On the New York Times and “Enforced Monogamy”, and offers a sharp, counterpoint:

[He states that] “socially enforced monogamous conventions decrease male violence” [yet] up to 70% of women globally have been abused by their partner, and two women a week in England and Wales alone are killed by former partners. No, we’re just told we should cure violent men with our magical vaginas, and if we fail to do so, our vaginas were presumably insufficiently magical [emphasis mine because holy shit that’s a good line].

Updated 31 Dec 2018

He believes that the image of two coiled snakes present in ancient art means the civilizations knew about DNA.

https://twitter.com/zei_nabq/status/997575537089564672

I believe [the entwined snakes] is a representation of DNA.

He believes that birth control is bad for civilization.

https://twitter.com/zei_nabq/status/1078382175949590528

I think it’s partly also a consequence of the fact that we haven’t adapted to the birth control pill yet. It was a major technological revolution, the birth control pill, and it’s only been 50 years, and we haven’t figured out what it means for women to have control over the reproductive function and what the consequences of that should be socially. The leftist types, especially in the 60s, thought you could just blow sexual morality apart completely because now people are free to do what they want. That isn’t working. There’s a backlash against that on the left as well.

I’ve been following activism a lot lately.

The Parkland Kids—my mental shorthand for the thrust-into-action students from the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting—re-ignited my social concern. I’ve been humbled, having followed their precocious media expression and coordination and joining in their country-wide protests. They make my 16-year-old idiot self ashamed. And the Slavic miscreant band Pussy Riot are the international avatars (for the firm of David, Goliath, et al.) that represent the effortlessly intelligent, punk, fuck you of this generation’s rebel movement. And though I don’t know how I found them (re-tweets, prolly), The Root has been a great, simmering, sarcastic, black-centric source of racial gut-punches. Their Twitter feed is a wealth, if you can metaphor the subjects of its reporting as a valuable commodity, of white social stupidity. Why the hell does a trashy white chick call the police on people BBQ-ing?! And, of course, why does a cop give a running kick to the head of a guy already pinned head-first to the ground? (I didn’t need to prefix the word “black” to the people being attacked in the previous sentences because of course.)

So I read this quote recently:

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

And—though maybe a little teen-earnest or maybe on point—I really stuck to it. Anyway, the way I found it made its provenance uncertain so I did some tracking. I first saw it linked from a Daily Kos blog entry, possibly previously linked from a tweet that I don’t remember. That Daily Kos entry credits @stimmyabby and links to a fire-walled Tumblr post. From there I delved the depths of the second-and-further pages of Google and found an entry on a blog posted on the Odyssey blogging platform titled, simply, “Respect” (I am nothing if not not original). That page credited the author as Brenna Twohy and linked to her Tumblr site. That site has an infinite number of Next links so it’s unsearchable for the actual entry. More Google and I find where B. Twohy references the quote back to… @stimmyabby.

Some time wasted, but I just really wanted to know and make known the truth of something I respect.