Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
I just encountered the phrase "#conservation of #worship" to describe the way #religious #fundamentalists assume everyone worships *something* just as fervently as they do, and that strikes me as brilliant.
The frantic need to deny that #racism exists in #Europe gets really old sometimes. Absolutely, positively, no doubt the #US is more racist than Europe on the whole. But it’s pretty telling that the only Europeans I’ve ever heard claim that racism isn’t a European problem are those with melanin content as low as mine.
It's a good time to be alive for those of us fascinated by things that no longer are. 🙂 Big #paleontology news today:
1. A new #Tyrannosaurus species. Unlike most of the other proposed new *T. whateveri* of the last few years, this one looks quite well-supported. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-47011-0
2. The earliest skin impressions ever found from any #amniote. Amniotes are #reptiles and #mammals, basically: animals which can lay eggs on land (or give live birth, in more derived forms) because the #embryo is protected from dessication. This is in contrast to #amphibians, the first #vertebrates to live on land, which absolutely require a long-term water source for reproduction. In that sense amniotes are the first **true** terrestrial vertebrates, and we wouldn't be here without those distant ancestors. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01663-9
The first will no doubt get about a million times more attention, because *Tyrannosaurus*, but the second is at least as big a deal IMO. Links via Thomas Holtz. I'll try to have my own relatively insignificant thoughts when I get time.
Posted for discussion, not for approval. The idea that the way to maintain critical old code is to feed it through an AI which is supposed to convert it to a newer language without any loss of functionality, and expecting it subsequently to be readable and maintainable, strikes me as literally insane.
https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson
There needs to be one of those internet laws to the effect that whenever anyone leads with "technically" or "to be pedantic," whatever they say next will just be wrong.
Skynet has tested our defenses, decided that we're much more useful *without* nuclear extermination, and decided to let things go for now. Carry on.
About that whole "#wolf - #sheep - #sheepdog" thing.
Certain men (almost always) like to think of themselves as #guardians of the flock. The night is dark and full of terrors. They and they alone stand between the innocent sheep, going about their daily business doing sheep things, and the ravening wolves who always lurk in the brush waiting to strike. Let the sheep be happy in their naivete: the sheepdogs are on guard!
I get it, I really do.
When I was a very young man—a boy, really, although I'd have bristled at that word at the time—I raised my right hand and swore an #oath to support and defend the #Constitution and #America and Mom's apple pie against the commie hordes, and damn, I felt good about myself. Honestly, I still do, although I'm not nearly so self-important these days. (Er, I hope.) That oath, and everything that followed from it, did a whole lot to shape who I became, and still am.
No matter how much of a strut that put in my step, I never once would have thought to describe my service with a metaphor that cast me as a different species from the people I swore to defend. My family, my friends, my community, my country: they were *people*, just like me. That was kind of the whole point. For that matter, so were whatever enemies I was defending against.
That's not what bothers me the most about the "sheepdog" thing, though. The much bigger and more immediate problem is what sheepdogs actually do.
See, sheepdogs don't just guard the flock. They also control the flock, a lot more often than they defend it. They *herd* the flock, and any sheep who don't do what the sheepdog wants it to do gets nipped.
Are you comfortable with human societies working that way? Because I'm sure as hell not.
People who convince themselves that their purpose in life is to protect others, who make that the basis of their identities, inevitably end up trying to take control. And when those others reject that control, they react ... badly. They become the thing the "sheep" need to protect *against*.
They're not wolves, or sheep, or dogs. They're just miserable excuses for human beings.
Recently I wrote, and then copy-and-pasted to a variety of places, about how #creationist and other #antiscience #propaganda is often "horrible effective." That was supposed to be "horribly effective," of course. On #Facebook and #Quora I can edit it, but on #Mastodon I can't.
So I think I'll just leave it in place. It has the ring of a missing couplet from #Kipling's #Tommy: "Ken 'Am's lies is bloomin' everywhere / An' 'orrible effective too!" Seems like it fits my life.
@fatsam Thanks for the boost!
I've received a lot of comments on this post, in various locations, to the effect of "don't bother, you're never going to convince these people anyway." So this is a copy-and-paste reply. My apologies for the impersonality, and please don't take this as a lack of interest in discussing the finer points of the issue.
Absolutely, there are many people who will never be convinced. I think there are, more or less, three types of people who hold #antivax / #creationist / etc. positions, and two of them are hopeless cases. But the third is a different story.
1. Hardcore believers. For #creationism, this usually boils down to "God said it, I believe it, that settles it." The others are more complicated, although there's often a religious element there too: e.g. "we're made in the image of God so #vaccines are blasphemy" (they never seem to object to wearing glasses, though) or "the Earth is a divine creation and we mere humans could never change the #climate." Once they make their beliefs clear, the best thing to do is walk away. No one in that debate is going to change anyone else's mind.
2. Propagandists. They may or may not believe what they're claiming, but they think they can gain some political advantage by doing so. "If you don't want #woke #liberals telling your kids they come from #monkeys, elect me to the school board!" That kind of thing. You're not going to change their minds either—especially since the #propaganda is often horrible effective—but it may be worth countering it to try to persuade the people they're trying to recruit.
3. People who just don't know any better. Members of the first two groups, particularly #2, are much more sophisticated than they used to be, and a lot of their propaganda is very slick and superficially convincing. So a lot of people with little #scientific #education (or *bad* science education: that's a separate post or ten) fall for it. The longer they believe it, the more resistant they get to alternatives—they can slide into #1 very easily. But if you can catch them at a critical moment, you can *sometimes* bring them around.
I know this is possible, because I've done it. Not often, and less often lately, with the hardening of political identities and the ever-stronger association of profoundly anti-scientific views with one political identity in particular. But it still happens now and then.
Of course if you assume everyone is in group #3, you'll waste a *lot* of time and energy on 1s and 2s. It's really dispiriting to put effort into a clear, simple explanation presented with tolerance and good humor, only to be met with dismissal or mockery or baffled rage. Telling the difference is a survival skill, and a tough one to learn.
No one should feel obligated to tackle every case they encounter, or even most cases. That's a game for the very young, and if you play too much of it you'll get old before your time. (Trust me on this.) But *when you can* ... well, sometimes you win. Those small victories feel pretty good. I have to believe they still matter.
I've received a lot of comments on this post, in various locations, to the effect of "don't bother, you're never going to convince these people anyway." So this is a copy-and-paste reply. My apologies for the impersonality, and please don't take this as a lack of interest in discussing the finer points of the issue.
Absolutely, there are many people who will never be convinced. I think there are, more or less, three types of people who hold #antivax / #creationist / etc. positions, and two of them are hopeless cases. But the third is a different story.
1. Hardcore believers. For #creationism, this usually boils down to "God said it, I believe it, that settles it." The others are more complicated, although there's often a religious element there too: e.g. "we're made in the image of God so #vaccines are blasphemy" (they never seem to object to wearing glasses, though) or "the Earth is a divine creation and we mere humans could never change the #climate." Once they make their beliefs clear, the best thing to do is walk away. No one in that debate is going to change anyone else's mind.
2. Propagandists. They may or may not believe what they're claiming, but they think they can gain some political advantage by doing so. "If you don't want #woke #liberals telling your kids they come from #monkeys, elect me to the school board!" That kind of thing. You're not going to change their minds either—especially since the #propaganda is often horrible effective—but it may be worth countering it to try to persuade the people they're trying to recruit.
3. People who just don't know any better. Members of the first two groups, particularly #2, are much more sophisticated than they used to be, and a lot of their propaganda is very slick and superficially convincing. So a lot of people with little #scientific #education (or *bad* science education: that's a separate post or ten) fall for it. The longer they believe it, the more resistant they get to alternatives—they can slide into #1 very easily. But if you can catch them at a critical moment, you can *sometimes* bring them around.
I know this is possible, because I've done it. Not often, and less often lately, with the hardening of political identities and the ever-stronger association of profoundly anti-scientific views with one political identity in particular. But it still happens now and then.
Of course if you assume everyone is in group #3, you'll waste a *lot* of time and energy on 1s and 2s. It's really dispiriting to put effort into a clear, simple explanation presented with tolerance and good humor, only to be met with dismissal or mockery or baffled rage. Telling the difference is a survival skill, and a tough one to learn.
No one should feel obligated to tackle every case they encounter, or even most cases. That's a game for the very young, and if you play too much of it you'll get old before your time. (Trust me on this.) But *when you can* ... well, sometimes you win. Those small victories feel pretty good. I have to believe they still matter.
@ringwoodunitarians Another excellent example, and probably why so many people default to economic ideologies instead of trying to find policies that more or less seem to work.
If I had a million dollars, I'd know immediately how to spend it. A billion dollars, I'm pretty sure I could figure it out. Trillions of dollars is just beyond any simple answers.
One common feature of various anti-science ideologies is that their adherents lack a sense of scale. #FlatEarthers don't understand distance, #creationists don't understand time, #climate change #denialists don't understand levels of emissions or rate of temperature change, #antivaxers don't understand population morbidity and mortality. Probably other types of looniness with which I'm less familiar have the same underlying problem.
In a way I sympathize with this, because the numbers are so far outside normal human experience. But learn the #math and suddenly everything makes a lot more sense. We're not talking about anything particularly advanced. Just grasp that intution breaks down when measuring something very large or very small.
Huh, my idea of #Assyrians doesn’t line up with my idea of #Minnesotans *at all*. But maybe that whole "#MinnesotaNice" thing is just a clever disguise for their #imperial ambitions.
@svigneau I like that distinction!
I think about this a lot. I've been making my living in #bioinformatics for almost twenty years (!) with a #PhD for ten: if I'm not "good at it" by now, I'm doing something seriously wrong. But #impostor #syndrome never stops whispering in the back of my head. Probably that's true of most competent people in most fields.
The problem is that while self-doubt may be necessary for competence, it's not sufficient. So you never really know.
https://www.quora.com/Does-having-a-Ph-D-in-a-subject-make-you-good-at-it/answer/Daniel-Dvorkin-3
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
