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Clarification

Posted by Jeff Morris on August 7, 2019
Posted in: Academia, Politics. Leave a comment

Wow, that’s the most hits this blog has ever gotten. Hope you’re all enjoying my content. Plenty of stuff for y’all to get angry about, I imagine.

Not that it is likely to matter, but I would like to clarify one point as clearly as humanly possible. The intention of my tweets last night was to point out how reckless it is to throw around wild accusations of white supremacy toward people who are not white supremacists. It was most definitely not to defend or excuse white nationalism. I was not attempting to defend Jared Taylor; I was insulting Rashida Tlaib by saying she was worse than he was.

Now that that’s cleared up, welcome to my blog. There’s plenty for everybody.

Why I Left Twitter

Posted by Jeff Morris on August 7, 2019
Posted in: Academia, Politics. Tagged: , , , , , . 20 Comments

So after contemplating it for several months, I decided to deactivate my Twitter account. I’ve been 8 years or so on there, and over that time it’s slowly changed from a useful networking tool to a soul-crushing hellscape that was poisoning my real-life interactions with people, so I had to let it go. I’m writing this blog post for anybody that wonders where I went.

The proximal cause for my decampment was a series of four political shitpost tweets I sent out the evening of Aug 6. The tweets were motivated by a rash of news reports of prominent Democrats unironically accusing President Trump of being a “white nationalist”, and taking the position that his supporters (with whom I proudly count myself) represent a “white nationalist” movement that supports terrorism against “people of color”. This concept struck me as so over-the-top and irresponsible, and so dangerous coming from such prominent, powerful people, that I felt I really needed to say something. Unwise, certainly, but I honestly couldn’t stand silent while that kind of bullshit attack was being lobbed at people I care deeply about. Below I’ll talk about the tweets, and I stand by each of them, but it occurred to me even as the hate responses started coming in that it was pointless to try to defend them since the responders are True Believers that the President is an Evil Naughty Person, so I left the field of battle before getting dragged into some big thing. Sure, I ran away — but not just from this fight, but from all the other ones I knew were coming between now and November 2020 as the US tears itself apart again like it did starting in the summer of 2015. I just have no interest in suffering through the next year and a half on that garbage platform; I have plenty of better things to do with my time.

Since I deleted my Twitter, I don’t have the exact text of the tweets, but I can reconstruct them pretty faithfully. Let’s have a look:

TWEET 1: “The idea that ethnonationalism is intrinsically hateful or terroristic is just ignorant. It’s probably the most common form of social organization on Earth.”

This is self-evidently true. Something like what we call ethnonationalism today was probably the ONLY system of social order through most of human history, and is still the dominant political force in a lot of pretty stable countries. It’s more of an emotion than a coherent ideology, and it naturally emerges from the affection one feels toward close kin and the familiar comforts of home and hometown. The evils of the colonial period created situations that disrupted that organic unity, but arguably it was ethnonationalism that helped preserve many unique cultures as their countries were settled by foreigners. Ethnonationalist ideas are hugely varied, ranging from completely biological ideas of who gets to be part of a state (e.g., ancestry requirements to be a part of Native American tribes) to completely social ideas of who gets in (e.g. Israel, or the multi-racial civic nationalism espoused by Trump). They also run from the open and pluralistic (again, Israel and the US) to the sealed-off and totalitarian (e.g. Nazi Germany, North Korea).

The important point here, though, is that there is literally no reason to expect that a person who understands their country to have an ethnic basis, would therefore “hate” people of other ethnicities, or would support using terror or violence against people of other ethnicities. Sure, they might, but people have hateful or violent attitudes for all sorts of other reasons as well. Ethnonationalism, including when it is practiced by various kinds of “white people” (whatever that means), is not synonymous with hatred or terror.

Which bring us to…

TWEET 2: “Let’s be honest: “White Nationalist” is just a racist slur used to incite hatred and violence toward people because of the color of their skin.”

There are actual “White Nationalists” in the world that fit the definition commonly understood by the left: people who believe in the creation of a “white”-only ethnostate of some kind. These people are rare, and run the gamut from calm studious types who disavow violence (see below) to Nazi prison gangs that sell drugs and kill people for fun. People who advocate for a “white” ethnostate are rare, however, and the dangerous latter type are despised by nearly everybody (including other “White Nationalists”).

But in the news, we have Very Important People claiming that the 50,000,000 Americans who voted for Trump, or at least a large fraction of them, are White Nationalists. Most of these people (including me) would laugh at the ridiculousness of forming a “white”-only state. Indeed, both Trump and his media supporters bend over backwards to elevate “people of color” who support Trump, and these are not insignificant in number. Sure, some of this pandering is super cringy, but it’s still really odd behavior for people who want to build a white ethnostate. No, there’s no reasonable way you can claim that a large number of Trump’s supporters are true-blue White Nationalists.

So why do those Very Important People say such things? Simple. It scares people, and scared people vote. If they can hoodoo enough “people of color” into believing that Donald Trump and the Russians are going to try to put them into concentration camps, they will show up in droves to vote him out of office. Never mind that it’s completely fatuous to draw a line connecting “civic nationalism that is concerned about unchecked immigration” with “violent psychopaths that want to kill Mexicans”, it’s still a brilliant campaign strategy, especially if you own enough media outlets to completely saturate the airwaves with your propaganda.

That’s dirty politics, which is of course business as usual in any democracy. But the problem you can’t get past is that concentration camps aren’t something you can just overlook, or take your chances at the ballot box about. Let’s be clear — if you genuinely believe that millions of your countrymen want you dead, how can you not support violence against them? What kind of coward, believing that the government was planning to exterminate his neighbors, wouldn’t take up arms to stop them? Especially in a country where you can just skedaddle down to the local gun shop and buy a semi-automatic assault rifle for $500. You want to talk about dog whistles?? Calling the President a White Nationalist is a straight-up dog whistle to every antisocial leftist nut in the country that it’s time to start shooting. It’s an open call for civil war, for no reason except to win elections.

TWEET 3: “Anyone who believes that mild-mannered scholar Jared Taylor is a hate-filled terrorist but Rashida Tlaib is an ambassador of love and tolerance is literally insane.”

And that brings us to “civility”, a concept the left despises, and why it’s so important. These two people are in some ways very different — Jared Taylor is a White Nationalist pariah, Rashida Tlaib is a left-wing icon and congresswoman. But they also have a lot in common, in that they are both racists who share a cartoon understanding of “white people” that they use to explain how our society works. Both seem to agree that “white people” and “people of color” can’t peacefully coexist under the current order, and would be better off either separated, or with one of those groups presiding over the other. It’s all very dumb, since both “white people” and “people of color” are comprised of dozens of different ethnicities with radically different histories, social networks, and modern interests, such that imagining that they represent coherent political groups is completely silly. But nevertheless, that’s how these guys think.

The reason I bring them up is that they clearly flip the concept of “hate” on its head. Taylor is this old professor dude who writes calm, philosophical pieces on his beliefs about social organization and the history and future of humanity. I’m no Taylor expert, but from the couple of pieces I’ve read and his Wikipedia article, there’s no indication that he has EVER advocated violence, or expressed any emotion toward “people of color” that could be viewed as “hateful” without really butchering the common understanding of that word. Leftists reject Taylor’s civility by insisting that there’s no way to form an ethnostate without massive violence — and while that MIGHT be true, Taylor doesn’t seem to believe so, and goes to great lengths to disavow violence and support voluntary separation of “white people” and “people of color”. Let me be clear, I deeply disagree with Taylor’s vision for the ideal future of the United States, but there is simply no reasonable way that one could see this genuine White Nationalist as a terrorist.

On the other hand, Tlaib is a wild-eyed demagogue that doesn’t shy away from using incendiary, racially-charged language to whip up crowds. While she ostensibly represents “diversity” and “tolerance” and the other virtues of “Wokianity”, she is clearly motivated by a visceral hatred of conservative “white people”. I mean, you can see it on her face — scorn, contempt. She sees us as vermin, “White Nationalist terrorists”, lumping millions of people together into a single sub-human, disposable class, based purely on the conditions of our birth and the color of our skin. And she know she’s using words that flame that hatred in others — she obviously chooses them for that effect. If you’re looking for a Hitler analogue, there you go — an angry ranting demagogue who gleefully blames all the world’s problems on a single hated ethnicity.

Again, let me be crystal clear, I don’t agree with either of these people. I’m a civic nationalist who believes the US has a traditional ethnic character comprised of multiple distinct ethnic groups, whose uniqueness should be preserved by limiting immigration. Both Taylor and Tlaib believe things that would threaten that traditional nation. But there’s only one of them that I believe would support using violence and terror to achieve their stated goals, and it ain’t the “White Nationalist”.

(As an aside, it’s maybe worth noting that one of those two people is also a rabid anti-Semite, and it’s not the one you’d expect…)

TWEET 4: “But if you want to sign up with a hateful mob and attack people like me because we were born with the wrong color skin, at least have the common decency not to ask me why I feel the need to own a gun or twelve.”

And this is where it ends, and it’s pretty much how Twitter makes me feel. Over the last 6 years I feel like I’ve watched the country fall apart, and now we’re teetering on the edge of civil war, with one party in our country convinced that the other is comprised of Nazis led by Russian secret agents. If they believe that, how could they not want to use violence against us? And how could I not want to protect myself and my family as best I can? It’s not the world I would choose, but it’s the one we apparently have.

So what I try to tell myself, though, is that Twitter isn’t the real world. In the real world, I know few people who believe any of this crazy bullshit. I can talk about politics with people on the left without getting into shouting matches or even feeling like we were fighting after we’re done. I have friends and colleagues from many countries, with many varied beliefs and colors and interests. Even those colleagues who I see on Twitter RTing hateful political shit from leftist pundits, are pleasant enough in person, and it’s hard for me to believe they think I’m a White Nationalist or a Russian Stooge. Maybe they do, and they’re just being polite, but fuck, why can’t they be polite online too?

So Twitter isn’t real life, and Twitter makes me angry against real life people and probably makes many real life people angry toward me. I used to have meaningful interactions with scientists on there, but most of that has ebbed away over the years, leaving nothing behind but sports news and angry politics. So I’m gone. For that matter I also deleted my Facebook account. I’m actually completely free of social media at this point.

Just a reminder, I’m still a real-life person, and you can get in touch with me the old-fashioned way, via email or even a phone call. I know you’ll miss my paper retweets and opinions on heavy metal music, but you’ll live.

Hurricanes and Climate Change: A Primitive Analysis

Posted by Jeff Morris on September 7, 2017
Posted in: Data. Leave a comment

A lot of people are apparently convinced that climate change is responsible for Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. These destructive storms are conspicuous and terrifying, and therefore they provide an easily visible and emotionally powerful centerpiece for political arguments about the need to curtail fossil fuel emissions. Only problem is that the data connecting storms to climate change is sketchy at best.

I’m not going to go into the output of real climate scientists here. My understanding is that the prediction that the future will hold more and stronger tropical storms is based on models, much like predictions about the future of Earth’s temperature. These models are based on a combination of historical observation and theory about the underlying causes of weather patterns. Models are very useful for these sorts of things — but I’m often miffed at how science reporters fail to convey to the general public the limitations of models, or give an honest representation of the “error bars” on future predictions. Regardless, doesn’t matter, in this blog I’m not going to talk about the models at all.

Also, I want to preface this by saying that I don’t consider myself to be a climate change skeptic. Number one, I’m a scientist that works on questions involving anthropogenic global change. Moreover, I believe humans are changing the composition of Earth’s atmosphere and that those changes appear to be causing the planet to warm at some rate. I agree with most other scientists that for that reason, and a host of others, humans need to figure out another way than fossil fuels to provide for their energy requirements.

But also as a scientist, I get angry when people misrepresent facts and overstate conclusions. The argument that storms will get stronger in a warming world makes theoretical sense, but the problem is that it isn’t clear i) that it’s actually happening or ii) if it is, how much of an effect it actually has. For instance, Hurricane Irma has record-breaking wind speeds of 185 mph. How much of that, if any, is due to forming over warmer oceans? If Irma had formed in 1990, would she have had 181 mph winds? 150 mph winds? Would she not have formed at all? These possible effects of climate change run from the insignificant to the apocalyptic, and all seem plausible to me at first glance. Moreover, hurricanes are relatively infrequent, so my gut-level intuition as a scientist who works with real datasets is that we can’t come to any conclusions about the effects of climate change on storms unless those effects are quite large.

Fortunately, the internet has lots of data, so it’s pretty easy for a concerned citizen to go download some pretty good numbers to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations for a first pass at assessing these claims about climate change and tropical storm intensity, which is just what I did. I whole-heartedly encourage all of you to do the same about this and any other controversial political claims — don’t just rely on the prognostications of Internet Science Guys, pull the numbers yourself. The analysis I’m going to talk about here took me less than half an hour to do.

First, let’s consider the hypothesis that storms are becoming more frequent with time. I pulled data for Atlantic tropical storm frequency from 1851 to 2015 from the awesome website WeatherUnderground.com. Per year, it lists number of total tropical cyclones, the number that eventually became hurricanes, and the number of deaths reported.

HurricaneFig1 Figure 1

By doing a simple linear regression (figure 1), we see that the number of storms has significantly increased (p << 0.001) over this time period, by about 0.04 storms per year each year.

HurricaneFig2 Figure 2

The number of hurricanes has also increased (figure 2, p = 0.004) but by a lesser amount of 0.01 hurricanes per year, per year. This seemed odd to me — if rising temperatures are creating storms, wouldn’t we expect a similar increase in both types of storms?

HurricaneFig3 Figure 3

So I looked at the change in the percentage of tropical storms that became hurricanes eventually (figure 3), and discovered that this value actually significantly DECREASED (p << 0.001) by 0.13% per year over the time frame considered.

These observations may support the idea that climate change is increasing storm frequency, but it contradicts the idea that it’s making storms worse. Another, more likely possibility is that storms aren’t actually becoming more frequent or milder, but that our technology for detecting them is just improving, meaning that storm frequency for the earlier years in the dataset was underreported, and was biased toward large storms (hence in some earlier years 100% of reported storms became hurricanes). To test this, I constrained my analysis to just the “satellite era” when we gained the ability to see storms from space even if no one was around to experience them. This technically started in the 1960’s, but I used a relatively arbitrary cut-off of 1976 to give the technology some time to come into routine use. With this limited dataset, we still see storms in general increasing significantly (p < 0.001) at the even faster rate of 0.22 storms per year per year, but hurricanes no longer increase significantly, and the decrease in the percentage of storms becoming hurricanes becomes even more pronounced (-0.005% per year, p = 0.01). I feel this tentatively supports the hypothesis that the appearance of increasing storm frequency is an artifact of increasingly sophisticated and careful reporting; but regardless, it fails to support the hypothesis that climate change is producing stronger storms, even if it may be favoring a greater number of less powerful ones.

I wasn’t able to find easily mineable data for top wind speed or lowest barometric pressure for historical storms, but another metric we can use to estimate storm intensity is the loss of human life. It’s relatively easy to lose track of simple tropical storms, harder to ignore hurricanes, but it’s really hard to ignore dead bodies. So I ran a regression analysis of number of deaths from tropical storms per annum from 1851 to 2016, and discovered there was no significant increase in the lethality of storms during this time period, nor was there a difference when the analysis was run just using the 1976-2015 data. But this understates the case. When I normalized deaths against the US census for the population size of the state of Florida across the same time period (hopefully a reasonable proxy for general population increase over the same time frame), we see that the risk of death by tropical storm DECREASES significantly (figure 4, p = 0.001) by about 0.013% per year over this time period.

HurricaneFig4Figure 4

This isn’t surprising, since our ability to predict landfall and prepare for its effects have surely increased dramatically since 1851. For instance, in 1870, you had a ~1.5% chance of being killed by a hurricane, the equivalent of Irma killing 250,000 Floridians today! However, when we just consider 1976-2015, we still don’t see an increase in risk of death by hurricane, despite the fact that we know that large storms like Katrina are still capable of killing many people despite our best preparations. Thus, the hypothesis that storms are becoming more lethal is soundly refuted by this simple analysis.

I’m sure there are much more sophisticated data analysts out there, and accept that they might be able to come up with superior analyses to the very simple one I’ve done here. However, I think it’s important to look at this, because the reality is that the assertion that climate change is affecting hurricanes, and that the deaths in Houston and the Caribbean this year can be put on President Trump’s bill, really doesn’t pass the first smell test. There is ample reason to be skeptical of these claims, and they aren’t based on ignorance or climate myopia.

Measles Don’t Matter Because Math

Posted by Jeff Morris on February 14, 2015
Posted in: Data, Evolution. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Not too long ago I wrote about the silliness of all the hysteria surrounding the smidgen of ebola cases entering the United States. Of course, ebola’s gone from the news cycle (though Africans are still dying by the thousands, concerned Americans), but now hysteria has raised its ugly head again with the measles outbreak in California. A few dozens have been infected, all a lovely gift from Disneyland and the anti-vaccination fad.

Of course, everybody is looking for somebody to blame. The majority (all?) of the people who got sick were unvaccinated, as is the case in every measles outbreak for obvious reasons. Therefore, it’s those goddamn antivaxxers making everybody sick, right? It’s irrational child abuse not to vaccinate your kids, so let’s force them all to get their measles shots. Or maybe it’s the goddamn Mexicans, bringing their filthy third world diseases illegally across the Rio Grande. Let’s close the borders.

Whoa, pardner. First of all, those dirty foreigners apparently have higher vaccination rates than Americans. Second of all, before we go railing about how irrational the antivaxxers are, maybe we should step back and take a second look at that question.

Vaccination is a classic case of a Public Goods game. Vaccination obviously greatly reduces the risk of getting sick, and it also provides “herd immunity” — the more people around you have been vaccinated, the more protected you are even if you haven’t been vaccinated. There’s obviously a cost associated with being sick (as in you could possibly die), so it’s good to not get sick. But, as the antivaxxers remind us, there is also a potential cost to getting a vaccine, in that you might suffer a side-effect, also possibly killing you. Because of herd immunity, the benefits of vaccination are shared by the community, including the unvaccinated people who don’t accept the costs of vaccination.

Why it interests me is that there’s a clear partitioning of the benefit of vaccination between a private component — the near-complete immunity of vaccinated people to the disease — and the public component, the lower risk of being infected in a population containing many vaccinated people. Public goods that have that partitioning are what we call Black Queen functions, and they have the interesting property that they allow co-existence between “helpers” (in this case, vaccinated people) and “cheaters” (antivaxxers). In other words, it makes rational sense for a certain number of people to remain unvaccinated in society.

We can use some math to figure out what that number is. Now, let me preface this by saying I’m neither a mathematician nor an epidemiologist, so if this is all over-simplified or algebraically wrong, I apologize. I’ve definitely made a lot of simplifying assumptions for mathematical tractability. But here goes. Let’s define a system as containing three groups of people: iMmune people (M) who have been vaccinated and can’t get sick, Anti-vaxxers (A) who haven’t been vaccinated and can get sick, and iNfected people (N) who are currently sick. The whole population of people is thus P = M+A+N.

The population as a whole grows and shrinks by normal birth and death, with death being a constant function d of the current population size for each group, and births occurring at a certain maximum rate b that drops to 0 at a rate controlled by a constant, k. M‘s and A‘s grow and die at the same rate and always reproduce their own type. Absent disease, we can describe the normal disease-free growth of the population as a differential equation:

dP

Now let’s add in the expectations of the Black Queen evolutionary system. First of all, there’s a cost to vaccination. Some number of M‘s will suffer severe consequences from vaccination, resulting either in death or an inability to reproduce. Let’s say this takes place at rate s; then we can describe the dynamics of M with:

dM

Importantly, M‘s never get sick. A‘s, on the other hand, get sick at a rate determined by an infection constant i and the number of infected people — N‘s — in the community. N‘s on the other hand, either get better at rate r (thus reverting to A’s) or they die at rate m. Now we can describe the dynamics of A‘s and N‘s:

dA

dN

Lots of things can happen inside a model like this, but we’re only going to concern ourselves with its equilibrium point — or where everything stabilizes and quits moving around. We do that by setting the “dX/dt” side of the equations — the differential, which describes movement — to 0 and solving for the three variables representing our population members. If we assume that all the N‘s get over their illness reasonably quickly (relative to the long-term birth/death process of the population), we can say that r+m=1. Thus, the total of antivaxxers and infected people in the population at equilibrium becomes:

Ahat

Okay, let’s break this down. This equation describes the number of antivaxxers we expect if everybody is acting rationally — it balances the costs of infection with the costs of immunization exactly. This number is largely controlled by the danger associated with the vaccine — s, which makes the number go up — and i, or how infectious the disease is, which makes the number go down. To put it in human terms, it makes sense not to get the vaccine if you see more people having side effects to the vaccine than you see people getting sick with measles.

(Note that this is a generic problem with preventive measures: if they work, it starts to seem like they’re useless, because the thing they prevent becomes so rare as to seem inconsequential. A very similar argument could be made about the value of individually-owned firearms to society: nobody in Somalia would argue about the value of owning a rifle, but in whitebread suburbia — suffused with armed cops lurking in the wings — guns seem superfluous.)

Let’s plug in some real numbers. As best I can tell, the probability of having a severe side effect from the measles vaccine is about 1 in a million, but let’s go crazy nuts and say it’s 100 times that high, and 1 in 10,000 people who get immunized are either killed or sterilized by the measles shot. Since you only need one shot in a whole lifetime (let’s call that 50 years), the rate constant s works out to 0.000002 per year. The death rate for people infected with measles is also quite low — roughly 2 in 1000 in the developed world — so m = 0.002. Finally, the infection rate is very high, so let’s set i = 0.95, representing a 95% chance of getting sick if you’re surrounded by sick people. With these values, the total number of antivaxxers and infected people supported by the system is: 1 per square mile. In fact, assuming s is very small, the abundance of antivaxxers reduces to 1/i, entirely dictated by the likelihood of being infected when you encounter a sick person.

Interestingly, this value doesn’t change if we raise or lower the total population size, although we can calculate how population size affects the proportion of the infection pool to the total population. The algebra is a little hairier but eventually you get:

Mhat

So, the proportion of cheaters goes down as k (i.e. population size) goes up — meaning it’s more likely you’ll see the use of vaccinations when you’re in a big city with lots of people than out in the country by yourself. Makes sense, no? If we plug some numbers into this equation — b = 0.003 per month, d = 0.0007 per month, and k= 1000 people per square mile — we arrive at an equilibrium proportion of cheaters of about 0.03%. In the United States, that would work out to about 90,000 people.

We’re clearly not at this equilibrium point now — there are way more antivaxxers than that. It’s possible that right now, the number of N‘s is so low and health care is so effective at isolating illness (lowering i) that it’s really hard to get sick. Presumably, if the antivaxxer fad continues, the prevalence of measles will increase until more and more A‘s get sick, eventually causing their numbers to start to drop towards a stable equilibrium.

I know people like to attribute “insanity” to movements like antivaccination. However, I suspect that antivaxxers (and other conspiracy theorists) are normally rational people with mistaken beliefs. When confronted with obvious evidence in the form of sick antivaxxers, they’ll change their tune. But regardless, the equations suggest that the risk even to them is low, and to those of us who are vaccinated, the risk is extremely, vanishingly low.

We COULD force the antivaxxers to get shots. This would save a very very small number of lives. It would also cost a fortune and would involve using force to shoot drugs into people, which seems exceedingly creepy to me. Before I’m willing to sign on to a policy like that, you’ll have to show me a disease with a much higher m than measles. Till then, there are more important things to spend our money fighting.

Dear readers: if you’re enjoying reading my rants, consider sharing or re-tweeting! ASD needs more cultists.

ASD: Not a Very Nice Guy

Posted by Jeff Morris on February 1, 2015
Posted in: Academia, Politics. Leave a comment

Apparently I’m good at making people angry. A few weeks ago, a person for whom I have tons of respect sent me an email warning me that some of my writings in this blog — posts about religion and politics — have really offended some people. This individual’s concerns were couched in terms of the effects the blog might have on my career: my views might alienate people, potentially keeping them from wanting to work with me. However, and maybe it’s just me being paranoid, there was also a subtext to the email that maybe my blog was giving off cooties that could harm people who are connected with me professionally, and make them need to distance themselves from me.

I realize that I say some pretty unalloyed things on here, but I wonder what in particular sets me beyond the pale? True, I have called Richard Dawkins an insufferable douche on multiple occassions, but that’s a pretty common opinion both in and out of academia. I’ve singled out a few others by name that I believe are “part of the problem” when it comes to the politicization of evolutionary theory. I’m generally ornery, and use a lot of curse words. But where’s the unacceptable over-the-topness that might make my colleagues want to wash their hands of me?

In re-reading my posts, perhaps the most aggressive word I use, and use often, is my referring to Christians as “Christers”. I use that word because about half of my posts could be read as apologies for Christian fundamentalism, and I want to be as clear as I can be that I’m not a Christian, nor do I actively support their wrong, discriminatory, and superstitious behaviors. I look at fundie Christians the way I look at ugly endangered species; they have a right to exist in the habitat where they’ve always been, and however obnoxious they may appear, our world is richer for their presence. That, and in the modern world, particularly in the circles I move in, they are weak, and much of what is said about them strikes me as cruel bullying unworthy of serious people. But while I’m skewering the antireligious leftists who abuse them, I have to also skewer the Christers with a little name-calling. Fair and balanced, mon ami.

So… I’m coarse, I curse a lot, I call people names and say things that aren’t polite. I thought I had been pretty good about keeping this blog in an obviously exaggerated persona. I think my angry backwoods metalhead shtick is pretty funny, but I guess I’m not as amusing as I thought.

I admit to being totally floored by this email from my colleague. I absolutely didn’t see it coming, and it frankly crushed me that this person might look askance on me for speaking my mind. I remember feeling the same way when, shortly after 9/11/01, my parents said some things that made me feel like a cold-blooded traitor for my view that the US provoked the attacks and our moronic foreign policy was as much to blame as the terrorists themselves. In both cases, I felt torn between unpopular (but correct) viewpoints and my desire to have the respect of the people closest to me.

I think the most likely source of tension that this blog generates is from my criticism of many members of my profession — academic scientists — for their outspoken left-wing partisanship and hatred of religion. The individual who wrote the email to me kindly pointed out that in real life I’m very personable. Like most people, I have the common decency not to talk lightly about politics and religion in public. In most workplace environments these topics don’t come up much because nobody wants a fight. Unfortunately, academia is so monolithically leftist that there’s no reason for partisans not to hawk up their diatribes on the job. Who’s gonna fight when everybody already agrees? People freely bring up politics and religion all the goddamn time at work. They talk about how awesome their leftist altruism is; they pat each other on the back about how progressive they are for rejecting the superstitions and prejudices of the old world.

An anecdote: I spent my (recent) 40th birthday at a scientific meeting. That night, we went out to eat as a group, and I found myself sitting next to an imminent scientist, with several other senior people nearby: I was by far the most junior person there. The man sitting next to me went into a diatribe about how people who disagree with President Obama are racists. Not because he murders American children, or steals my money and uses it to violate my civil liberties — I don’t like him because he’s black. Everybody within earshot vocally agreed with him, even when he piled on and got more and more extreme and insulting to whites and Republicans. Now, if anybody in any other profession had said such a thing at a business dinner, he would have had to deal with at least a handful of angry retorts. But in science? Everybody agrees, so you can be as extreme and brutal as you want and nothing happens. Poe’s law was made for this world.

Living like that — constantly biting your tongue when people are unknowingly mocking you right in front of your face, day in and day out — is exceedingly frustrating. I could engage them in debate, but a lifetime of experience arguing with leftists (and Christers, for that matter) suggests that they would just gang up on me and life would be even more uncomfortable for me afterwards. So I vent on the blog.

But beyond just venting, I believe it’s important to say the things I say on ASD, if for no other reason than to let other people like me know they aren’t alone. Increasingly we try to think about who we’re pushing away from science. For instance, we struggle to figure out why women and some racial minorities remain underrepresented in science despite decades of efforts to increase their numbers. One prevailing idea is that the culture of science causes many such people to feel uncomfortable, unwanted, or unhappy amongst us, such that they tend to stay away. Some people have the single-minded focus to say to hell with feeling bad, and these people often succeed in science. But most people have the sense to move away from environments that make them feel like crap.

Well honey, let me tell ya, science culture is openly hostile to people with even vaguely traditional worldviews. Conservatives, libertarians, the religious, one-earner families, people who aren’t convinced Europeans are the cancer of world history, and anyone else who disagrees with the leftist Weltanschauung are often going to feel alienated and isolated in this world. If we’re trying not to drive people away from science, how can we not take notice of this mistreatment of 42% of the US population?

The leftist authorities want to remind us how important diversity is — people from different backgrounds bring different viewpoints to a project. Can the same thing not be said about political temperaments? There’s as much evidence that politics are genetically hard-wired as there is that, say, sexual preference is hard-wired. When prominent evolutionary biologists fill there supposedly-about-science blogs with dipshit nonsense like marking out “God” on the backs of dollar bills, how can we even pretend we aren’t systematically excluding even the mildly religious from science? This sort of thing isn’t an intellectual debate about the merits of faith — it’s vile, unadulterated mockery, and it’s literally everywhere in my profession.

I can’t help but note that the individual who wrote me this email about how ASD is dangerously over the top doesn’t mind linking to the aforementioned “evolution” blog.

In deference to my career I’ve removed links to this blog from anything connected to my real world persona (not that it would be that hard to figure out who I am). I’ve also killed anything that links directly to people I’ve worked with over the years: I can’t expect others to choose to make this fight with me, and don’t want to force them to make a choice between working with me and disavowing my politics. But I’m not going to shut up, and if anything this email has solidified the nascent focus of this blog. Women and minorities have tons of advocates online. ASD will be the voice of the right-wing minority in academia, and the legions of traditionalist people driven away from our profession by rampant discrimination and mistreatment.

Plus music reviews.

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We Don’t Need No (More) Education

Posted by Jeff Morris on January 25, 2015
Posted in: Economics, Evolution, Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

OMG, President Obama is gonna give free college to everybody! Poor kids everywhere, rejoice, a high-paying tech job is right around the corner! How could anybody be against this?!!? Bless his sweet Hawai’ian heart, let’s just forget about the murders and the civil rights violations and all the fascist spying bullshit and just hire him on for a 3rd term, Putin style!

… despite being a college educator himself, ASD is very skeptical about the utility of this plan.

Ask yourself this… Do we really need more education? Specifically, what do you get out of community college (CC) that you couldn’t get out of high school?

Some fields are very specialized and require long-term exposure to a vast body of knowledge and previous practice to master. Think engineering, law, medicine, academic research. Even if you could squeeze the basics of these fields into high school, you’d still need some years immersed in the field’s culture before you truly got it. It’s also probably good for the role models of our society — the doctors, lawyers, politicians, scientists, whatever — to have a broad liberal arts education underlying their specialized knowledge, since they help preserve, transmit, and define our culture.

CC doesn’t prepare anyone for this kind of job: it’s purely vocational. You get degrees in things like programming, network management, and accounting. While those are all laudable skills, do you really need 14 years of education to do them? I humbly submit that you do not.

A couple decades ago vocational training came on-the-job. You got hired knowing nothing but the basics (reading, writing, ‘rithmetic), and within a month or so you learned whatever the company wanted. However, at some point it changed so that to get that same job, you had to spend 2+ years of your life sitting in a CC classroom, probably while you worked at Wal-Mart, just to get in the door. There’s a large opportunity cost in spending two years in college. You’re not building career experience; you’re spending money, not making it; you’re making no useful business connections; you’re broke, so you’re probably not getting married and having kids, either.

The President says he wants to improve workforce preparedness in the US and cut education debt. He could push high schools to teach more useful skills, thus reducing the number of people who have to go to college at all. For instance, there’s a big movement (which I wholeheartedly endorse) to teach basic computer programming to middle and even grade school kids, thus lifting the myth that you need two semesters of calculus before you can understand a command prompt. Probably the best jobs you can get with CC are IT jobs, but if kids came out of high school knowing how to code… just that one simple policy, which would cost virtually nothing, would revolutionize the American workforce.

If CC isn’t needed to learn how to do a job, and the skills it teaches are more economically taught in high school, then what’s the point of going? As ASD is wont to do, let’s take a run at this question using evolutionary theory.

Think about the job market as a Malthusian system: more people want good jobs than there are good jobs, so competition is high. As we’ve already covered above, getting a job usually doesn’t require already knowing how to do that job. What determines whether you get it is: do you look more competent on paper and at the job interview than the other people applying for the job?

Thus, fitness in the job market — how well you compete — is about looking better to the hiring committee. Your resume — since they see it before they meet you — is probably the most important element of fitness. What you need to outcompete your conspecifics is more lines on your resume. The best lines are work experience, but when you’re a noob fresh out of high school, you can pay for lines by going to college.

In Granddad’s day, not everyone had a high school diploma, so if you had one you were competitive. Once 12 years of free education became a human right, you needed some college to get a job. These days some job markets are so glutted that you need grad school to be competitive. This is painfully obvious to anybody in science grad school: we compete like starving pit bulls to produce resumes solid enough to get us into good postdoc labs, with the hope that someday we might look good enough to get an entry-level academic job.

The longer resume competition continues, the more impressive the resume has to be to get the same job. In evolution, we call this a Red Queen race. The name comes from the Red Queen Hypothesis, originally proposed by Leigh Van Valen to explain the apparently constant probability of a species going extinct in a given time period. Briefly, the hypothesis says that a species’ environment is constantly deteriorating because of the evolutionary improvement of the species’ competitors. When your competitor adapts, you need to get an even better adaptation or risk going extinct, producing a never-ending evolutionary arms race — the Red Queen race. The analogy comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, in which the Red Queen from a chess set has to run faster and faster just to stay where she is.

Red Queen races are great for stimulating rapid evolution, and as such they can be good for a species in the long run. In the short term, though, the race is wasteful: the definition of competition is that both competitors lose, but one loses more than the other. Indeed, some Red Queen races don’t improve a species’ lot at all, and just elaborate pointless vanity characteristics. Consider the case of the peacock’s feathers, which are very useful for competing for mates against other peacocks but probably actually increase the likelihood of getting caught and eaten by predators. That’s a pretty good descriptor of resume competition, methinks, and one might argue that government intervention should be directed toward avoiding such useless frilleries. On the contrary, the President’s plan actually worsens the Red Queen race: now literally everybody will have a CC degree, which will make them completely useless for getting a good job.

The Red Queen race makes us addicts to higher education: we can’t jump off the merry-go-round without killing our competitiveness. Why would government support such a thing? I’m sure it has nothing to do with education being a big business, and subsidizing it lets the bigwig politicos sink their fangs into it and vampirize it to further enrich themselves. I’m also sure such a motive has nothing to do with government’s obsession with health insurance or real estate or oil — all markets that have been manipulated just enough by government to encourage addiction, and to allow the politically connected to take profits.

The President’s CC plan is thus useless for improving the workforce and reducing debt. In fact, it will probably do the opposite by reducing the number of years of work a person can do in their lifetime, and by forcing more people to get 4-year degrees to remain competitive. Worse, the President says he’s going to tax 529 college savings plans to pay for the program. I’m sure the good childless leftists think only the super-rich use 529’s, but that’s stupid — rich people pay for education out of pocket, but marginal middle-class families need investments to pay for the Red Queen-inflated tuition their kids need to get jobs. As usual, the upper-crust left pinches the middle class to enrich themselves, using poor people as an excuse.

The President’s plan really is a wonderful bit of left-wing politicking, though. It sounds really great and inspiring — let’s uplift the poor with the light of education! But at the same time it increases the share of the population that’s in debt, out of work, alone, and miserable, thus inflating the voter roles with Democrats. Gold, man!

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God, Schmod: ASD‘s Obligate Charlie Hebdo Rant

Posted by Jeff Morris on January 17, 2015
Posted in: Politics, Religion. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

So, crazy muslims are killing people again. Everywhere I see good modern atheists lamenting the barbarism of religion. “Remember that time that radical atheists killed all those people? Me neither,” they say. If people would just see the light of reason and give up these silly caveman superstitions, all of this violence would go away.

Point one: Radical atheists have killed WAY more people than radical muslims.

Here are a few examples:

  1. Communism is to its very core antireligious. “The opiate of the masses” and all that. Even disregarding the massive famines, plausibly caused by characteristic leftist innumeracy rather than genocidal malice, communists murdered 38 million people in the 20th century. If we want to compare apples to apples, let’s just think about all the Commie bombers and terrorists active in the 60’s and 70’s in Europe, like the Red Brigades.
  2. The French Revolution abolished Christianity and set about enacting the destruction of Catholicism in that country. In less than a year, the Reign of Terror enacted by the revolutionaries claimed 40,000 lives, including some 2,000 Catholic clergy.
  3. In a similar vein, the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century resulted in a regime that despised the Catholics. The non-religious Plutarco Calles was “president” of Mexico in the 20’s, during which time thousands of priests were executed and literal wars were fought between Calles’ regime and the overwhelmingly Catholic population of Mexico.

This isn’t meant to suggest that atheism prompts mass murder; it’s just to make the point that atheists aren’t exactly immune to radicalism and extreme violence.

Rather than blaming religion, perhaps we should blame ideology. The notion that any of our airy philosophies are worth more than actual human lives may be the only truly evil thing that exists.

Point two: Even if you eliminated religion from the picture entirely, Arabs in France would still be pissed off and violent.

Obviously it doesn’t fit with the proper multicultural worldview, but I’m convinced that the only way Arabs and French will really get along is if it becomes impossible to tell them apart. I would say the same thing about any other pairing of ethnic groups, in any other country, anywhere in this world or any other one.

I’m biased in this thinking by my training as an ecologist and an evolutionary biologist. It’s clear that if you put two populations in the same environment, competing over the same resources, you’re going to end up with only one population after not too long. Either the two will blend together, or one will outperform and supplant the other. There are ways around this, but those are the two most likely outcomes.

Not only is conflict guaranteed between two distinct populations in the same environment, but there are good reasons to suspect that the conflict will usually favor the resident population over the immigrant. This is especially true when you have organisms that extensively engineer their environments or depend on complicated social arrangements — both things that are important in human societies. Culture has an infrastructure — all the buildings and art and language and even modes of transportation that accumulate through the industry of a people acting in a place for many lifetimes. Every last bit of that infrastructure is designed by and for the resident group. Whatever the resident’s peculiar strengths are, you can bet those will be enhanced and emphasized by that cultural infrastructure. Moreover, you can pretty well guarantee that that infrastructure has been adapted specifically to give the residents an edge over their nearest neighbors, who incidentally are also the most likely to immigrate.

On a “level playing field” then, the residents will usually win out over the immigrants. We can try to make things more equitable by giving the immigrants a ‘leg up’ or by hamstringing the residents in various ways — but even then, all those policies will be designed by the residents, using the resident’s cultural infrastructure, and will still usually wind up screwing the immigrants. The only way those poor bastards can come out ahead is either to conquer the residents or to marry them and cease to exist as a distinct ethnicity.

Because we believe so strongly in multiculturalism, we are basically incapable of thinking about this UNTIL the situation gets so out of hand that heads are being lopped off. So we encourage immigration, and inevitably the immigrants figure out that the game is inherently stacked against them forever, no matter what anybody does. This results in very pissed off people, often in large numbers.

Pissed off immigrants might be forgiven for lashing out at the resident population, who is in fact the proximal cause of their problems. Even if the residents welcome the immigrants, their very existence restricts the success of the immigrant population.

And how do pissed off poor people fight the resident authority? Do they call up the reserves and field their tank armies? Do they whip up votes in the legislature and sink billions into lobbying for their interests?

No, they use terrorism. It’s the only weapon they have. Acting surprised when poor immigrants blow up soft targets is like acting surprised when a dog bites you after you poke him in the eye. What did you think he was gonna do, call the cops?

Terrorism is the curse of a globalized humanity, where people move around so much that every moderately successful country has large populations of failing immigrants growing progressively more radical and angry. There are no good solutions to this situation, but one might predict that ethnic nationalism in Europe and elsewhere will continue to grow in popularity, both as a defense mechanism for immigrants and a solidarity movement for residents.