Tag: science

SJWs hate science too

One of the most important things to understand about SJWs is that there is no end game for them. They exist to complain; if you submit to their demands and give them what they claim to want, they will promptly produce new and even more ridiculous demands. They are salami-slicers, which is why you cannot give into even the most reasonable-sounding, polite requests for fairness and justice and appeals to your better nature and human decency.

Doing so will only signify your weakness, which will cause them to make every more insane demands in ever-more demanding ways. The only thing that is important to them is their pinkshirt agenda. Consider the SJW response to the historic news that the European Space Agency landed a spacecraft on a comet earlier this week:

I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing. That’s one small step for man, three steps back for humankind.

Yesterday the European Space Agency landed the Philae spacecraft on a comet, a powerful step forward for humanity and science alike. However, slightly before the big moment, coverage of the event reminded us how much progress remains to be accomplished back on Earth.

A number of the scientists involved on this incredible project were interviewed in the hours leading to contact by Nature Newsteam. One of those Rosetta scientists was Matt Taylor, who chose to dress, for this special occasion, in a bowling shirt covered in scantly clad caricatures of sexy women in provocative poses.

“This is going to be a very long day but a very exciting day,” said Taylor. “I think everyone should enjoy it because we’re making history.”

No one knows why Taylor chose to wear that shirt on television during a massive scientific mission. From what we can tell, a woman who goes by the name of Elly Prizeman on Twitter made the shirt for him, and is just as bewildered as he must be that anyone might be upset about her creation. But none of that actually matters. What matters is the fact that no one at ESA saw fit to stop him from representing the Space community with clothing that demeans 50 percent of the world’s population. No one asked him to take it off, because presumably they didn’t think about it. It wasn’t worth worrying about.

This is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering certain scientific fields. They see a guy like that on TV and they don’t feel welcome. They see a poster of greased up women in a colleague’s office and they know they aren’t respected. They hear comments about “bitches” while out at a bar with fellow science students, and they decide to change majors. And those are the women who actually make it that far. Those are the few who persevered even when they were discouraged from pursuing degrees in physics, chemistry, and math throughout high school. These are the women who forged on despite the fact that they were told by elementary school classmates and the media at large that girls who like science are nerdy and unattractive. This is the climate women who dream of working at NASA or the ESA come up against, every single day.

That is the mentality that we’re dealing with in #GamerGate. What is significant about #GamerGate is that it represents the first time that a male-dominated community has stood up and collectively said: FUCK OFF to the SJWs utilizing their conventional entryist tactics. The hardcore gamers of #GamerGate would rather be attacked and publicly portrayed as evil, outdated, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, death threat-issuing, blood-drinking, serial-killing rapists than give another inch to the SJWs attempting to infiltrate and destroy the game industry.

And that’s why you should support #GamerGate even if you don’t play games. That’s why you should learn from #GamerGate’s staunch refusal to back down, its tactics, and its willingness to go on the relentless offensive against the pinkshirts.

They are the incarnation of Dickson’s fictional Chantry Guild. They will cast aside everything, games, books, tradition, religion, science, Western civilization itself, without hesitation, because they simply do not understand the intrinsic relationship between cause and effect.

Nothing but a lie

The co-founder of the Weather Channel declares the obvious: there is no anthropogenic global climate change:

John Coleman, who co-founded the Weather Channel, shocked academics by insisting the theory of man-made climate change was no longer scientifically credible.

Instead, what ‘little evidence’ there is for rising global temperatures points to a ‘natural phenomenon’ within a developing eco-system.

In an open letter attacking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he wrote: “The ocean is not rising significantly. The polar ice is increasing, not melting away. Polar Bears are increasing in number. Heat waves have actually diminished, not increased. There is not an uptick in the number or strength of storms (in fact storms are diminishing).

“I have studied this topic seriously for years. It has become a political and environment agenda item, but the science is not valid.” He added: “There is no significant man-made global warming at this time, there has been none in the past and there is no reason to fear any in the future.

“Efforts to prove the theory that carbon dioxide is a significant greenhouse gas and pollutant causing significant warming or weather effects have failed. There has been no warming over 18 years.”

 Always keep AGW/CC in mind whenever you see someone appealing to “scientific consensus”. Scientific consensus is democracy. It is politics. It is collective opinion and it should not be confused with the actual scientific process (scientody) any more than the contents of the sewage system at a convention of scientists are.

So, astrology is now science?

That appears to be a possibility in light of this latest science news:

Researchers studied 400 people and matched their personality type to the season when they were born. The scientists claim people born at particular times of the year have a greater chance of developing certain personality traits. They said this was because the seasons had an affect on certain chemical substances in the brain, such as dopamine and serotonin, which control mood. They discovered that babies born in the summer were much more likely to suffer mood swings when they grow up.

In contrast, those born in spring tended to be excessively positive, upbeat and optimistic. They also found that those born in the autumn were less likely to be depressive, while winter babies were less likely to be irritable.

As the scientific research progresses, it would be interesting to map these “chemically generated seasonal personality types” to the various astrological signs and see how well they match. It would certainly be amusing to see the expression on the faces of various science fetishists upon learning that they were henceforth to be deprived of one of their favorite rhetorical devices.

Universal order is restored

John C. Wright celebrates the recataloging of the Solar System and the astronomical return to reason:

Take THAT, you vile Pluto-Haters!

I, for one, rejoice that Planet X is once again a planet! I welcome our new Mi-Go overlords, I applaud the hideous and unspeakable Fungi from Yoggoth, cheer the colony of semifourthdimensional yet cowardly organisms from Palain VII while they are busily dextropobopping, acclaim the forward military base of the hivequeen creatures we call ‘Wormfaces,’ and greet the resting place of Kzanol the Slaver, who will arise an obliterate the Earth!

(Hmm … wait a minute…. I wonder if there is a downside to this ….)

Pluto is once again a planet, eight years after being relegated to the status of dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). At least, that is, according to the audience at a debate at Harvard. Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysicists (HSCFA) debated the topic “What is a planet?” The debate was needed following the confusion that arose once Pluto was deemed too small to be a planet. The defining characteristics of a planet (a round thing which orbits the Sun and has ‘cleared the neighborhood’ around its orbit) “baffled the public and classrooms around the country,” according to the HSCFA. “For one thing, it only applied to planets in our solar system. What about all those exoplanets orbiting other stars? Are they planets? And Pluto was booted from the planet club and called a dwarf planet. Is a dwarf planet a small planet? Not according to the IAU. Even though a dwarf fruit tree is still a small fruit tree, and a dwarf hamster is still a small hamster.”

I have to admit, I do very much enjoy my household. When I announced that Pluto’s planethood had been restored to the lunch table, the news was greeted with a rousing cheer.

“Hurray!”

“Wait, why are we cheering?”

“Because Pluto is a planet again!”

“Oh, okay. Hurray!”

One can learn a lot about an individual by virtue his position on Plutonian planethood. Anyone who opposes it on the grounds of the usual specious logic cited or pedantic, overly literal planetary definitions is probably an atheist, has a high Asperger’s Quotient, possesses a lamentably insufficient respect for tradition, and should therefore be regarded with all due suspicion.

As humanity did not deem Tom Thumb any less a man for being small, it cannot in good faith deem Pluto any less a planet for being miniscule or icy or devoid of atmosphere. I applaud, therefore, the result of the Harvard debate and accordingly insist that the International Astronomical Union alter its formal position on the matter.

The number of planets in the solar system is nine. It is not ten, or eleven, or eight, except in that one then proceedeth to nine.

Gladwell gets it wrong… again

The 10,000 hours rule is determined to be considerably exaggerated:

Recent research has demonstrated that deliberate practice, while undeniably important, is only one piece of the expertise puzzle—and not necessarily the biggest piece. In the first study to convincingly make this point, the cognitive psychologists Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli found that chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master.               

A recent meta-analysis by Case Western Reserve University psychologist Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues (including the first author of this article for Slate) came to the same conclusion. We searched through more than 9,000 potentially relevant publications and ultimately identified 88 studies that collected measures of activities interpretable as deliberate practice and reported their relationships to corresponding measures of skill. (Analyzing a set of studies can reveal an average correlation between two variables that is statistically more precise than the result of any individual study.) With very few exceptions, deliberate practice correlated positively with skill. In other words, people who reported practicing a lot tended to perform better than those who reported practicing less. But the correlations were far from perfect: Deliberate practice left more of the variation in skill unexplained than it explained. For example, deliberate practice explained 26 percent of the variation for games such as chess, 21 percent for music, and 18 percent for sports. So, deliberate practice did not explain all, nearly all, or even most of the performance variation in these fields. In concrete terms, what this evidence means is that racking up a lot of deliberate practice is no guarantee that you’ll become an expert. Other factors matter.

To put it bluntly, it’s bullshit. You will NEVER rise to the top of any skill-related activity through nothing more than determination and practice. I have played far more than 10,000 hours of soccer in my life, and while I am an effective club veteran’s team player, I still don’t have one-tenth the soccer ability that some of the club juniors had by the age of 13.

There is no question that one will improve with practice. But one does not achieve superlative mastery through practice alone. Talent matters, and it matters more in certain activities. No amount of practice will make the average individual into a mediocre sprinter; sprinters are born, not made. Nor will 10,000 hours of practice turn a 5’7″ man into an NBA center or a plodding wordsmith into Shakespeare.

Moreover, the entire concept is fundamentally based on a questionable foundation. Recall that the Swede and his colleagues asked various musicians at a single German academy to estimate how much time they’d spent practicing their instruments since the time they began playing it as children. That wasn’t science, that didn’t even rise to the level of credible polling.

The vanishing black hole

Laura Mersini-Houghton is taking the “women ruin everything” mantra a little too far in literally destroying huge swaths of science fiction, albeit not in the usual manner:

Black holes have long captured the public imagination and been the subject of popular culture, from Star Trek to Hollywood. They are the ultimate unknown – the blackest and most dense objects in the universe that do not even let light escape. And as if they weren’t bizarre enough to begin with, now add this to the mix: they don’t exist.

By merging two seemingly conflicting theories, Laura Mersini-Houghton, a physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place. The work not only forces scientists to reimagine the fabric of space-time, but also rethink the origins of the universe.

“I’m still not over the shock,” said Mersini-Houghton. “We’ve been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about.”

For decades, black holes were thought to form when a massive star collapses under its own gravity to a single point in space – imagine the Earth being squished into a ball the size of a peanut – called a singularity. So the story went, an invisible membrane known as the event horizon surrounds the singularity and crossing this horizon means that you could never cross back. It’s the point where a black hole’s gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape it.

The reason black holes are so bizarre is that it pits two fundamental theories of the universe against each other. Einstein’s theory of gravity predicts the formation of black holes but a fundamental law of quantum theory states that no information from the universe can ever disappear. Efforts to combine these two theories lead to mathematical nonsense, and became known as the information loss paradox.

In 1974, Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to show that black holes emit radiation. Since then, scientists have detected fingerprints in the cosmos that are consistent with this radiation, identifying an ever-increasing list of the universe’s black holes.

But now Mersini-Houghton describes an entirely new scenario. She and Hawking both agree that as a star collapses under its own gravity, it produces Hawking radiation. However, in her new work, Mersini-Houghton shows that by giving off this radiation, the star also sheds mass. So much so that as it shrinks it no longer has the density to become a black hole.

Before a black hole can form, the dying star swells one last time and then explodes. A singularity never forms and neither does an event horizon. The take home message of her work is clear: there is no such thing as a black hole.

Well, this is a little embarrassing now, isn’t it? How reliable can we consider the science that was used to show that nonexistent entitities emit radiation? I shall be very interested to see what Stickwick makes of this. And if singularities never form, what are the philosophical implications of this for the technocult of the Singularity and the rise of posthumanity?

Then again, as disappointing as it may be to be informed that black holes are bound to disappear from the science fiction of the future and go the way of Martians, steamy Venusian colonies inhabited by green-skinned babes, and other now-abandoned SF tropes, perhaps a fundamental reimagination of the fabric of space time will lead to some interesting new concepts with which we can play.

UPDATE: Astrophysicist Brian Koberlein says Ms Mersini-Houghton is wrong, black holes do exist, and women should stay out of science and remain in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, where they belong. Or something more or less to that effect in Yes, Virginia, There Are Black Holes.

The cults of faux science

Jenkins, Thiele, and Douthat need not worry. There is no deficit of cults these days, they simply tend to sell themselves in the “science” market rather than the “religion” market. As Steve Sailer observes correctly, this is hardly new:

Today, for example, it seems obvious that Freudianism was a cult, but it was treated with immense respect in post-WWII America. Vladimir Nabokov had the aristocratic self-assurance to scoff publicly and repeatedly at Freud, but how many other men of reputation dared?

For example, few called Stephen Jay Gould a cult leader, but the man who told his followers — “Say it five times before breakfast tomorrow; more important, understand it as the center of a network of implication: ‘Human equality is a contingent fact of history’” — can perhaps be understood as the type of soothsayer who tries to hijack the prestige of science for his own anti-scientific purposes in the tradition of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, and L. Ron Hubbard.

Indeed, how can one possibly look at either the global climate change cult or the “marriage equality” cult or the magic geography cult or the politically correct pinkshirts and conclude that people are any less disinclined to believe in bizarre and obvious nonsense than 100 or 200 years ago? To say nothing of Keynesianism, which is quite literally nothing more than Freudian concepts applied to economics.

It’s a little surprising that no one ever notices the link between Freud and Keynes, but this is most likely because it seems almost no one besides me ever seems to bother actually going back to read the original source, The General Theory of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money rather than a) an Austrian critique or b) a Neo-Keynesian extrapolation.

Even those few who get it, such as the author of “Keynes on the Relation of the Capitalist “Vulgar Passions” to Financial Crises” (PDF), don’t seem to trace the Freud-Keynes link back to its source. Consider:

“It is shown that, generally speaking, the actual level of output and employment depends, not on the capacity to produce or on the pre-existing level of incomes,
but on the current decisions to produce which depend in turn on current decisions to invest and on present expectations of current and prospective consumption. Moreover, as soon as we know the propensity to consume and to save (as I call it), that is to say the result for the community as a whole of the individual psychological inclinations as to how to dispose of given incomes, we can calculate what level of incomes, and therefore what level of output and employment, is in profit-equilibrium with a given level of new investment; out of which develops the doctrine of the Multiplier….

The fundamental psychological law, upon which we are entitled to depend with great confidence both a priori from our knowledge of human nature and from the detailed facts of experience, is that men are disposed, as a rule and on the average, to increase their consumption as their income increases, but not by as much as the increase in their income.”

Keynesianism is nothing more than applied Freudianism. And considering the spread of its current influence, combined with the tens of millions of adherents to other, equally ridiculous false sciences, it should be clear that there is no deficit of cults these days, they just don’t have the common decency to give themselves ridiculous appellations and keep a safe distance away from sane people anymore.

Teach scientists not to rape

I found this New York Times article by a female scientist to be amusing on several levels:

My story is not unique. In July, Kathryn B. H. Clancy and her co-authors Robin G. Nelson, Julienne N. Rutherford and Katie Hinde published a survey of 666 field-based scientists in the journal PLoS One and reported that 26 percent of the female scientists surveyed had been sexually assaulted during fieldwork. Most of these women encountered this abuse very early in their careers, as trainees. The travel inherent to scientific fieldwork increases vulnerability as one struggles to work within unfamiliar and unpredictable conditions, but male respondents reported significantly less assault (6 percent).

I know several women with stories like mine, but more often it is the men of one’s own field team, one’s co-workers, who violate their female colleagues. The women surveyed by Dr. Clancy’s team stated that their “perpetrators were predominantly senior to them professionally within the research team.”

The first level is the way in which the actual behavior of scientists contrasts with the way laymen are supposed to trust them. Remember, we are supposed to believe that these scientists are individuals who will only report the true and proper results of the scientific process without any bias or dishonesty or corruption because they are trained to do so. So, what can we conclude from the fact that they can’t go out into the field without raping their female colleagues? It would appear that they are not being taught not to rape, would it not?

Second, notice the way the woman blithely skips over the fact that the whole reason these “trainees” are brought along into the field in the first place is as science totty. Women in science, particularly attractive women in science, are handed every possible opportunity by their male superiors chiefly because those superiors are looking forward to the possibilities created by spending large quantities of time with them in exotic locations. It’s not an accident that this attractive woman, pictured to the right, “landed a position as a professor before I even started to write my dissertation.” She probably genuinely believes that her rapid advancement was solely because she was so “promising” and talented. This complete lack of self-awareness is perhaps understandable in a large-breasted weather girl, but it is both funny and sad that an otherwise accomplished scientist could be so inobservant.

Third, it would be very informative to know how many of the 74 percent of the female scientists surveyed voluntarily had sex with men “predominantly senior to them professionally within the research team.” Based on what I know of female science majors, I would estimate at least three-quarters of them, and 100 percent of the attractive ones, did.

Of course, the push to encourage women in science is only going to cause more such sexual assaults to take place, which is one more reason why it is a bad idea. Science doesn’t need more women, especially if more women in the field are going to help transform otherwise good male scientists into rapists and sex criminals.

The Ebola exponent

This, combined with socionomics will explain why we’ve been seeing all the pandemic-related television shows of late:

Right now we’ve had more than 5,000 cases of Ebola, and at least 2,600 people have died. Some scientists, like Alessandro Vespignani at Northeastern University in Boston, are taking numbers like that and putting them into computer models to see where this epidemic is going. “For instance, in our modeling, by mid-October, we’re already between 10,000 to 25,000 cases,” he says.

Five thousand cases of Ebola is bad; 10,000 to 25,000 is unbelievable. And that’s where the exponential curve comes into play. “Well,
an exponential curve is a curve that doubles every certain amount of
time,” Vespignani says. And with this outbreak, cases are doubling every
three to four weeks. So if help doesn’t arrive in time — and
the growth rate stays the same — then 15,000 Ebola cases in mid-October
could turn into 30,000 cases by mid-November, and 60,000 cases by
mid-December.

Meanwhile, aid efforts are hampered, to put it mildly, by the local fauna:

The bodies of eight people, including several health workers and three journalists, have been found days after they were attacked while distributing information about Ebola in a Guinean village near the city of Nzerekore, according to Reuters.

“The eight bodies were found in the village latrine,” Albert Damantang Camara, a spokesman for Guinea’s government, told Reuters on Thursday. “Three of them had their throats slit.”

Quarantine and closing the borders, as Sierra Leone is doing, would suffice to keep Ebola out of the West. So, naturally, the globalists in office prefer to literally import the disease and expose thousands of soldiers and aid workers to it in Africa, thereby risking a global pandemic, rather than simply leave the independent African nations to their own resources and permitting the epidemic to safely run its course.

And if the World Health reports that the statistics are being underreported are correct, the exponential curve may already be in effect.

Science does not need women

Science doesn’t need anyone except good scientists who actually understand and utilize scientage.

One of the main glories of science is that it is universal, or at least approaches universality as nearly as it is possible for a human activity to do. Within a few years of Commodore Perry’s opening up of Japan to the outside world, Japanese scientists were contributing to the (then) new science of bacteriology on an equal footing with Western scientists. But that is not at all the same as saying that science needed the Japanese. It could have got on very well without them.

It is true, of course, that women are demographically underrepresented in the ranks of scientists, but so are many other groups. (This means, of course, that others are overrepresented.) This may be for more than one reason: lack of aptitude or interest, for example, or deliberate or subtle obstructiveness. But historical attempts to recruit scientists according to some demographic criterion or other have not been met with success, even as far as the advancement of science itself is concerned, and have been made by the very worst dictatorships that in other respects have been abominable. Social engineering and engineering are two very different activities. It would be no consolation to know while on a collapsing bridge and about to plunge into the deep ravine below that it had been built by a truly representative sample of the population, and was therefore a monument to social justice.

If science needed more women, it would have more women. As it happens, science observably has far more women and more men than it needs, which is why more and more people are leaving science because they don’t wish to spend all their time playing the grant game rather than doing actual science. Science got along perfectly well for centuries without much in the way of female involvement, after all.

Every time – EVERY TIME – you hear someone say “X needs more Y”, you can be absolutely certain that they are useless parasites who are only capable of political activism and useless bureaucracy.