Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
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.
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.
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.
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
#Substack has always struck me as a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Not even in the entertaining way.
BWAHAHAHA.
I think the people running #Trump's campaign have no idea how much most #Coloradans want out-of-staters to stay that way.
Hilariously, this post seems to have brought me to the attention of porn spammers. "Check out our spicy gallery!" etc. Epic #datamining fail.
My new stock reply to cold-calling house brokers is "if you come near my house I will eat you," and it's been remarkably effective at reducing the number of such calls I receive. Feel free to use as needed.
Not posted for agreement or approval. If you share from my post, please leave my commentary intact. This has been a public service announcement.
This meme, and several others like it, are going around my friends list at the moment. A lot of the people sharing it are fellow #veterans, and I know why: it's an idea with strong appeal to those of us who were carefully trained in the capability for great #violence, and then given the tools to put that training to use. It does things to your head, and one way to deal with those things is to convince yourself that it made you meaningfully better in some way.
Unfortunately, it's crap.
First of all, practically *everyone* is capable of great violence, and has been since the invention of #gunpowder. You don't have to be a hulking armored #knight to mow down your enemies, or those you imagine to be your enemies. All you need is a working index finger. Sir Kittenfeeder isn't as special as you think he is.
(On the whole I think this is a good thing, although the ways in which it's ... not good ... are dramatic and horrible and in front of our faces with grotesque frequency. That's a different conversation.)
Second, yes, there are other levels of violence than the worst, and I think all in all it's good to have some familiarity with them. But there are matters of scale. Once upon a time I was at least a competent martial artist. I could have trained much harder than I did, every single day for my entire young adult life, and still never have been as good at it as the people born with the capacity to reach the top.
A very good but perhaps somewhat overenthusiastic #kickboxing coach told me I had the potential to be a pro. Some sparring sessions with actual pros—not champions, just those who were good enough to make a little money at it—demonstrated otherwise. Man's gotta know his limitations.
Third, and perhaps most important ... if you go around thinking all day about how capable of great violence you are, *you are not peaceful*. Oh, you may want to be. You may convince yourself and others around you that you are. If you and they are very lucky, you'll live your whole life without ever doing anything to break that peace. But you probably won't—and most likely those closest to you will pay the price.
The capacity to do violence, and the choice of whether or not to exercise it, are pretty much orthogonal. There are dangerous violent people, dangerous peaceful people, harmless violent people, and harmless peaceful people. We may fear and loathe the first, admire the second, pity the third, and not think much at all about the fourth because it's most people's default state most of the time. Good thing, too, because otherwise none of us would be here.
But any one of us can be any of the above, in different contexts at different times.
Absolutely, cultivate the capacity for violence if you want. In certain times and places, it's useful. Other times, it's at least good #exercise, and can lead to considerable self-improvement. Even as old and busted as I am, I still entertain thoughts of getting back into some kind of training one of these days. I miss it, and it did a lot to make me who I am.
Just remember it doesn't make you any better as a human being. Doesn't make you any worse, either. It's simply part of who you are, and it's up to the people around you to determine how good that is.
Oh yeah, and stop bragging, because that's not a good look for *anybody*.
Just found out that #DavidDrake died today. He'd been in poor health for a while, so this isn't exactly a surprise, but it's still an ugly shock. 78 years is a good run, but it's not enough. It's never enough.
We only met once, at World Fantasy Con thirty or so years ago. Corresponded occasionally after that. I won't claim him as a friend, but he was at least a friendly colleague—and he *did* regard me as a colleague, which was a hell of an ego boost for a young writer. Maybe one of these days I'll even live up to it.
He was badly damaged by his experiences in Vietnam, and that damage came out in his writing. A lot of readers bounced off his style, and a lot of others bounced off ... certain characterizations and plot elements. If you're in the latter group, you know what I mean. I came close, a few times. But I didn't stop reading his work. Couldn't, really.
His work helped me deal with a whole lot of the snakes in my own head, and I know a number of other vets, across multiple generations, who can say the same.
There is a very small number of military science fiction writers who get it right, out of a sea of hi-ho, we're off for jolly adventures—including a great many who are praised for their realism. Truffaut was right: it's impossible to make an anti-war movie, and maybe it's impossible to write an anti-war book too. I've largely abandoned the genre for a number of reasons, and that's one of them.
He never claimed to be anti-war. He wasn't pro-war either. He just looked unflinchingly at the insanity of the whole thing. And maybe that was for the benefit of his own sanity, but he brought a whole lot of us along for the ride.
Ave atque vale. I hope he'd appreciate that.
I drink lemonade to prove that I can CRUSH the cruelest of all citrus fruits and DRAIN ITS BLOOD and then GRIND THE BONES of sugar cane to make it as sweet as the TEARS OF MY ENEMIES while harnessing the POWER OF LIGHTNING to make it as COLD AS THE DARKNESS OF MY SOUL.
Any questions? Yeah, THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT.
Oh yeah, I also think it tastes good.
Possibly the last time I'll give an honest, non-snarky answer to this particular question. But maybe it's worth a try to get through to somebody. For ... the ... lurkers!
#feminism #malefeminist
https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-male-feminists-are-just-pretending-in-order-to-get-into-womens-pants/answer/Daniel-Dvorkin-3
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
