Category: meetings

Nooz and other doings in California

January 12, 2025 • 9:00 am

I am awake early, but since I also retired early, I’ve had a decent night’s sleep. It’s a good thing, too, as my panel is this afternoon: the penultimate event before Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE, talks about “How cancel culture destroys trust in expertise.” (You can see the full meeting schedule here: the meeting itself is called “Censorship in the sciences: Interdisciplinary perspective.”)

You can join the meeting for free by using this Zoom link.

Our own panel, livestreamed between 3 and 4 pm California time, is small, but involves two awesome women: moderator Julia Schaletzky, who worked for some years in the biotechnology sector before moving to UC Berkeley, where she is Executive Director of the Center for Emerging and Neglected Diseases, Drug Discovery Center. Her expertise is in life sciences entrepreneurship and innovation, so she knows a lot about science funding as well as the various incursions of “progressive” ideology into science.  I was delighted to discover that Julia is a jazz singer on the side, and you can see a sample of her work here.

Our panel is called “Censorship and pseudoscience in the life sciences,” and will use as a launching pad the paper that Luana Maroja and I wrote in 2023 for Skeptical Inquirer on “The ideological subversion in biology“, examining six areas of evolutionary biology where ideology has led to misleading statements: sex and gender, the evolutionary differences between men and women, the genetic differences between individuals of a group, the conclusions of evolutionary psychology, the claim that indigenous knowledge has coequal status with modern science, and the biggest hot potato: race.

Luana, who appears often in these pages for giving talks or helping me with posts (she is THE expert on woke intrusions into science), is a professor of evolutionary biology at Williams College and works on, among other things, speciation. She is an avid gardener and has a black belt in karate.

It will be the first true discussion I know of at the meeting, as none of us have prepared speeches and will just start talking to each other and see how it goes.

Highlights of yesterday’s meetings included Steven Ceci summarizing his and the entire corpus of research on sex equity in science (most of his work was done in collaboration with his partner Wendy Williams).  Ceci, presenting on Zoom,  showed seven papers investigating whether women were discriminated against in being evaluated, hired, promoted, funded, or given tenure in science. The data (now summarized in a paper cited below) are unequivocal: there is no sex discrimination in any of these areas save some weak (and he says, now nonexistent) evidence that women professors get worse teaching evaluations than do men, as well as a very small salary differential in favor of men.  In all other studies, women and men were equal in achievement—or women getting higher ratings—save for a very early paper with the lowest sample size (I believe it was 238, compared to 500-1000 individuals in the other six studies).

The paper summarizing all this, Ceci et al., involved collaborating not only with Williams, but with one of their adversaries, Shulamit Kahn, can be found HERE. Because they were adversaries trying to reach agreement about the data, the paper took five years to write.  The upshot: the widespread claims that science is rife with structural sexism are simply not true, yet people still cite only the single early paper with a small sample size showing discrimination while ignoring the other six papers (including meta-analyses) showing that this is not the case. This is one example how an ideologically favored narrative gains traction while substantive refutations of that narrative are ignored. But read the paper for yourself.

But I run on too long describing all the talks. More about disagreements now:

I particularly enjoy clashes of opinion, which of course are bound to occur, especially at a heterodox conference like this.

One person, whose name I can’t recall, stood up and rebuked us all for talking about ideology, DEI statements, censorship in science, and other seemingly trivial matters, while not paying attention to what he says are the BIG problems: China’s development of a hypersonic plane that can bomb the world, climate change, plastics in the ocean, and so on. This was a prime example of “whataboutery”, and although the problems he mentioned are indeed important, they were not the subject of this conference, and most of us are academic scientists concerned with keeping our own disciplines free from ideology. And that was the response he got from the attendees.  I get the same kind of comment often about things on this website (e.g. “Why don’t you criticize Trump more?”), and my response to the whataboutery is similar.

There was another kerfuffle in the panel on DEI statements, “Is compelled speech a form of censorship?” moderated by Bob Maranto with discussants (each gave a short speech) Michael Shermer, Abigail Thompson, and John K. Wilson. (Michael and Abbie have appeared in these pages, with Abbie often contributing invertebrate photos.)

Wilson was heterodox at a heterodox meeting, arguing, against the views of other panelists, that DEI statements could be a good thing so long as they came from the faculty itself and were not imposed upon universities by the administration or government.

Well, that got people’s dander up, especially Gregg Lukianoff, who was sitting in the front row and, as President of FIRE, has often vehemently opposed DEI statements (see here, for instance).  He rebuked out Wilson for giving distorted data and pointed out that at least half of university professors oppose these statements. Abbie, too, took issue with this. As you may know, she herself was demonized for writing about DEI statements as unacceptable and compelled loyalty oaths (see her WSJ op-ed here), with mathematicians and scholars, offended, calling for her firing and even her own chancellor denouncing her views as not representative of UC Davis’s views. But Abbie soldiers on.

Lots of people in the audience also objected to Wilson’s views, and I’m afraid that he came off the worse in this discussion. DEI statements are indeed loyalty oaths in practice, and you’d better espouse a preferred viewpoint if you want to get hired or promoted. They are likely illegal as well, leading to racial discrimination in favor of minorities. Better to adhere to the University of Chicago’s Shils Report:

The Shils report dictates that faculty at the University of Chicago must display distinguished performance in each of the following criteria when being considered for promotion:
  • Research
  • Teaching and Training, including the supervision of graduate students
  • Contribution to intellectual community
  • Service

None of this involves DEI, in case you think that DEI statements count as “service,” and DEI statements aren’t permitted at the University of Chicago. Nevertheless, some departments get sneaky and try to find ways around them for hiring new faculty. I think this duplicity is widespread in American colleges.

Today’s talks feature Wilfred Reilly talking about academic taboos, Sally Satel running a panel on “Censorship around gender research and medicine”, featuring my friend Carole Hooven, Jesse Singal speaking on “soft censorship” in media and academia, our panel, and the last talk, Greg Lukianoff speaking on cancel culture (see above).

The only journalist I know of at this meeting is Singal, and I hope he writes about it. The NYT’s Pamela Paul was scheduled to come, but had to cancel. That’s sad because she could have written an awesome column about “heterodox” views of science

*********

*Back in the real world, wildfires continue to rage in the L.A. area, with the Palisades fire (the biggest), burning largely out of control as the winds are expected to pick up.

*Trump’s economic advisor is proposing BAD THINGS:

To serve as an economic adviser to Trump, it helps to share his belief that tariffs make the U.S. richer. Not many economists meet that criterion.

Stephen Miran has made just that case. Miran, nominated to chair Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, has written that the U.S. could be better off with average tariffs of around 20% and as high as 50%, compared with the current 2%.

*And in California, a man gave raw milk to two of his cats, killing them since raw milk can be–and was in this case–infected with the bird flu virus. DO NOT GIVE RAW MILK TO YOUR CATS.

I’m trying to keep up this site despite being at meetings most of the day, so let’s have some tweets and memes.

From Things With Faces: someone’s pigeon with clown face markings on its body:

From Stacy:

And a very good one from Stash Krod:

From Nicole:

Screenshot

Masih is back showing the brave women of Iran defying their odious theocracy:

From Jez; Trump’s gonna face some stiff opposition:

From Luana; government control of FB:

A LOL from Simon, showing my beloved Claudia Sheinbaum (she’s Jewish, by the way):

Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum trolls Trump by displaying a 17th-century world map showing "America Mexicana"

— Outspoken™️ (@out5p0ken.bsky.social) 2025-01-08T18:35:48.013Z

From the Auschwitz Memorial: a Dutch family extirpated at Auschwitz:

12 January 1894 | A Dutch Jew, Levi van Thijn, was born in Alkmaar.In August 1943 he was deported to #Auschwitz together with his wife Leentje and their son Marcus. None of them survived.

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-01-12T12:00:24.887Z

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, where we get our outer ears:

The outer ear is a mammalian innovation but where did it come from? In our study in Nature, Mathi Thiruppathy and colleagues find that the outer ear arose from modification of an ancestral gill program first originating in marine invertebrates. http://www.nature.com/articles/s41… 1/n

— Crump Lab (@crumplab.bsky.social) 2025-01-09T16:48:56.813Z

Of this object from antiquity, Matthew says, “Yes, it’s a d*g, but. . .

Something lovely for the weekend! A very good boy! 🐾🐕😍 An amazing c. 3,400 year-old ancient Egyptian dog carved from ivory. This leaping hunting dog opens and closes its mouth, as if barking, by using a lever below its chest. 📷 by me#Archaeology

— Alison Fisk (@alisonfisk.bsky.social) 2025-01-11T12:30:52.855Z

Into the fire. . .

January 9, 2025 • 6:45 am

I am leaving for a week. The bad news is that I am going to Los Angeles, where wildfires are running rampant.

The wildfire that raced across the Hollywood Hills early Thursday, threatening a wealthy area indelibly tied to the American film industry, put additional strain on millions of Los Angeles residents already stressed by catastrophic blazes that have erased entire neighborhoods and streaked the sky with smoke and embers.

The fires have killed at least five people and burned more than 27,000 acres, equivalent to nearly 20,000 football fields. The largest ones, the Palisades and Eaton fires, have destroyed at least 2,000 structures and are already the two most destructive to ever hit Los Angeles.

Tens of thousands of Los Angeles residents were under mandatory evacuation orders or warnings on Thursday. Overnight, there was a palpable sense of anxiety as firefighting helicopters swept across a dark sky where orange embers were floating like lightning bugs.

There were traffic jams after a wildfire broke out in the Hollywood Hills near streets — Mulholland Drive, Sunset Boulevard — whose names evoke the grandeur of Hollywood movies. An evacuation order for that area was mostly lifted just before midnight.

A fire also reared up in the nearby Studio City neighborhood, burning several homes and prompting warnings of a potential evacuation. But it was quickly extinguished and no injuries were reported.

Residents feel vulnerable partly because strong desert winds and dangerously dry conditions — it hasn’t rained much in Los Angeles for months — are making it easier for more fires to start and spread. A shortage of water in local reservoirs makes it harder for crews to put fires out.

More than 16 million people in Southern California, from Malibu down to San Diego County, were under a red flag warning early Thursday morning. Forecasters warned that extreme fire danger would continue for at least another day.

There are three big ones.

From the Free Press newsletter:

Southern California is burning. Thousands have been forced to evacuate as wildfires rip through the area. There are five so far and not enough firefighters to deal with them, L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said yesterday, telling reporters his department was “prepared for one or two major fires… This is not a normal red flag alert.”

So far, five people have been killed. Over 130,000 residents have been told to evacuate. Hundreds of schools have been closed, as tens of thousands of acres go up in smoke. Not even the rich and famous have been spared. Actor James Woods lost his home. The Malibu mansion of hotel heiress Paris Hilton went up in flames. Palisades Charter High School, among the most iconic public secondary schools in America and which educated J.J. Abrams, will.i.am, and Katey Sagal, has turned to ash.

Late yesterday morning, on Truth Social, our president-elect railed against California’s “Governor Gavin Newscum,” blaming him for the wildfires currently ravaging the state. According to Donald Trump, Newsom blocked a water restoration project because “he wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt,” and that’s why California is burning. It’s not entirely clear what Trump’s trying to claim here—and believe me, I spent some time trying to figure it out. But the basic elements seem to be fire=bad, water=good, fish=tangentially related and controversial.

I am told that my conference, at the University of Southern California, is out of the fire zone and will go on. But I am also told that one friend whom I was going to visit has lost his home and everything in the fire. That is ineffably sad; the person was an artist and lost his studio as well. I cannot imagine losing everything you own, all at once.

I will report on the meeting and post when I can (I do my best). I am off to Midway Airport, where I hope to procure a giant coffee and a couple of sinkers at Dunkin Donuts.

 

Science-and-ideology conference at USC in January (with Prof. Ceiling Cat and friends)

November 10, 2024 • 11:00 am

From January 10-12 (Friday through Sunday), there will be a substantial conference at the University of Southern California on censorship in science, and by that they mean all the sciences: STEMM.  You can see details about the conference at the website below (click on screenshot), and view the preliminary program here.  (There was an sketchier announcement of the conference in August, but now things are in their final stages.)

You can register here; the fee is $200 ($100 for students), and that’s not a bad deal given that the registration includes lunches, coffee breaks, and receptions with drinks and food.  And the participants include, beyond a passel of working scientists, people like Jonathan Rauch, Jesse Singal, FIRE President Greg Lukianoff and, mirabile dictu, Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Science.

And of course there’s this by way of self-promotion (end of the meeting):

Yes, I team up again with my partner in crime Dr. Maroja, on a two-person panel moderated by UC Berkeley molecular biologist Julia Schaletzky.

I hear that space is filling up, so if you want to register, and have the time and ability to go to USC (in LA), I recommend registering ASAP.

A participant reports on last fall’s Stanford Academic Freedom Conference

January 13, 2023 • 11:00 am

Elizabeth Weiss, a professor of anthropology at San José State University in California, wrote a summary of Stanford’s Academic Freedom Conference this fall for Quillette (click headline below to to read). She was not only a reporter and a participant, but also a victim—professionally damaged by those who violated her academic freedom. That’s because she studies remains of Native Americans, and those remains are considered so sacred by Native Americans that scientists are barred from studying them before returning them to indigenous people. That, of course, prevents us from knowing a lot about human colonization of the Americas. But the law is complicated on issues about whether scientists really aren’t allowed to study the remains first or, importantly, whose remains are they given the copious of indigenous people in North America? In principle “fossil” DNA could settle that issue, but that’s not the way it’s done. Any group with a claim to the land gets what’s dug up on it. If valid claims can’t be established, I think the remains should be kept in scientific custody.

Weiss wrote about her travails in an earlier article. She was treated unfairly by her department: not only locked away from the anthropology collections but also forbidden to photograph or X-ray human bones—or even photograph the boxes in which they were kept.  The department also retaliated against her. Such is the conflict between indigenous “ways of owning” and science. My own view is that scientists should get the chance to extensively study the remains first, and then they can be given back to those who have a valid claim.

But you can read about the meetings below (yes, I do get a mention: I was part of a panel of four on the incursion of ideology into science), and you can see all the videos at this link. (Our science panel’s video is here). 

Weiss concentrates on the group of people suffered professionally via violations of their academic freedom (see this panel involving four of them), but I want to highlight one bit about the chilling of speech that was also part of this conference:

When it comes to possible solutions, Dorian Abbot called for the widespread adoption of his university’s 2014 Chicago Principles (and its much more venerable Kalven Report), which explicitly uphold academic freedom and serve to de-politicize the university’s mission. The Chicago Principles state that “the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.” They also dictate that while people should be free to criticize and contest views expressed on campus, “they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe.”

What this means in practice is that no department or unit of our University, nor its administration, can make any political, ideological, or moral statement. The reason is that such pronouncements could chill the speech of people who fear opprobrium or professional damage by bucking “received and official opinion” There are rare exceptions to this policy that involve the University speaking up against initiatives that violate its vital mission of teaching and learning. We’re the only school in the country with such a principle, but the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is about to get one, too. But that’s it: out of several thousand colleges in America, only two forbid the chilling of speech by official university proclamations about politics and the like. Every American college and university should adhere not only to the Chicago Principles of Free Speech, but also the Kalven Report.

Videos from the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference

December 4, 2022 • 10:45 am

The videos for the Academic Freedom Conference, held at Stanford on November 4 and 5, have now been collected at one YouTube site. There are 17 of them.  At the time, I though I’d write a lot about the various talks, but somehow I wasn’t inspired to do so. I was suffering from insomnia (still am), and had very little energy. But you don’t need my commentary, for you can watch all the videos, which include Q&A sessions, and in effect attend the conference vicariously. I’ll put up the video of the one panel I was in, about (the lack of) academic freedom in STEM, and excuse me for self-aggrandizement, though I was far from the best speaker in this group.

The speakers below include Mimi St. Johns, a Stanford undergraduate in computer sciences, who gave a great talk, as well as my friends Anna Krylov (physicist, USC), Luana Maroja (evolutionary biologist, Williams College), and me. Bari Weiss was there and got Luana to write up her talk for publication on Bari’s Substack. Luana and I have similar views on the infiltration of biology by ideology, and are collaborating on an article about the issue.

Other talks you might find interesting—even if you dislike the speakers or their politic—include Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson’s discussion about “The War on the West” (Murray was on Zoom from the UK), “Academic Freedom and What is it For?” with Greg Lukianoff, Nadine Strossen, Rick Shweder, and Hollis Robbins, “Rationality and Academic Freedom” with Steve Pinker, and the last panel, which comprised four academics who had suffered professionally for speaking out: “The Cost of Academic Dissent,” with Amy Wax, Joshua Katz, Elizabeth Weiss, and Frences Widdowson. (I’ve given links to the talks and discussions.)

If you wanted to go but couldn’t, well, pick your topics.

Livestream of upcoming academic freedom conference

October 24, 2022 • 1:00 pm

I previously announced and described the meeting on academic freedom on November 4 (Friday) and November 5 (Saturday) at Stanford University, and also gave the schedule of events.  Now, according to the announcement below (click to read), you can livestream it, seeing all the talks (and a panel with PCC[E]) in real time. (They’ll also be archived on YouTube.) Big fun, and the Woke are sharpening their knives and fangs. The site below reprises the schedule and speakers. Be there or be square!

 

h/t: Edward

The annual evolution meeting raises some questions

May 12, 2022 • 1:45 pm

The annual “Evolution Meeting” is taking place next month in Cleveland, and each year it gets woker: there is less emphasis on science and more on “harm”, “safety” and the oppression narrative. This year the meeting is a tripartite gathering of members from three evolution-related societies: the American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the Society of Systematic Biologists. You can see the website here, and try perusing it a bit. What you won’t see is the names of prizes that have been dropped because the famous scientists once being honored were found to be flawed.

Call me an old grouch, but in my view the organizers are consciously turning societies devoted to the promotion of science into organizations devoted to the promotion of social change. Yes, organizations should not discriminate against any class of people so long as they’re qualified to give talks or attend meetings, but it’s another thing entirely for a meeting to promote equity on the grounds that science is structurally racist. In fact, I think scientific societies should remain politically neutral while obeying any anti-discrimination laws. Effecting social change should be the purview of individual members of societies, as different members have different views (I know a lot of people who object to the fulminating wokeness of evolution societies.)

Whlle perusing the long list of diversity initiatives (14 of them), guaranteed to bring people together by separating them, I found this one:

Latines? What happened to “Latinx”, itself created to avoid gendering an ethnic group as well as not to offend LGBTQ Latinxes? Recall that “Latinx” was itself a term imposed on several (and diverse) ethnic groups by largely woke white people trying to demonstrate their compassion and virtue.  Most members of the Latina(o) community spurn the term:

Despite its increasingly frequent use, a Gallup poll claims only 5% of Hispanic Americans prefer the term “Latinx.” In contrast, 37% preferred the usage of “Latino,” and 57% preferred “Hispanic.”

Aren’t we supposed to call a group what they want to be called? So why not “Hispanic”? And where the deuce did “Latine” come from? The Tulane Hullabaloo explains:

These numbers beg the question, why can Hispanic not be used when referring to this specific ethnic subgroup?

Essentially, the two terms are not exactly synonyms. “Hispanic” typically refers to someone from a Spanish-speaking region, while “Latino” typically refers to people of Latin American descent. A Portuguese-speaking Brazilian man would not be Hispanic, but he would be Latino. A woman from Spain would be Hispanic, but not Latina. Despite the two terms describing large and often overlapping groups, the term “Latino” includes people that “Hispanic” does not — similar to how “African American” refers to fewer people than “Black person” does.

Got that? Now you can ignore it, because everybody knows that the regular use of “Hispanic” lumps these two groups together.

But what is this “Latine”? Get ready—it’s even woker than “Latinx”, and is again a term promoted by woke non-Hispanics to make up for the fact that they realized that the term “Latinx” could cause harm. 

The criticism “Latinx” faces is not for it being more inclusive, even harsh critics of the term acknowledge that it stems from good intent. Instead, some believe it is the anglicisation of a term that does not belong to English speakers — an effort to impose their ideals onto a language with entirely different rules.

While it was created with good intentions, “Latinx” is not made for Spanish speakers. Some people just see “Latinx” as a “White thing.” The kind of term that gets used in academics, but not at taquerias. If that is the chief issue, then input from Spanish speakers, particularly under the Latino umbrella, would be the key to making a term that both satisfies Spanish speakers and includes marginalized groups. Fortunately, such a term exists: “Latine.”

You don’t hear “Latine” at taquerias, either! But I digress:

“Latine” offers a more organic alternative to “Latinx.” On the surface, Latine and Latinx may strike readers as synonyms. Both terms are designed to be more inclusive than their gendered parents, specifically in reference to nonbinary people, and both terms are relatively new. So what justifies the use of the younger, less popular “Latine?”

Latine fills the void in a way Latinx never could, mostly because it was designed to work with the Spanish language. It is not an insertion; it is an evolution. A natural progression from gendered terms to neutral ones. As such, Latine can be pronounced and conjugated in Spanish, while “Latinx” cannot.

Any bets whether Hispanic Americans are going to proudly proclaim themselves as “Latines”?

I also found the event below, apparently based on the title of a book by Joan Roughgarden that I reviewed (critically) in the Times Literary Supplement of 2004 (email me for a copy of the review as it’s no longer online). Roughgarden, who had recently become a trans woman, made the case in her book that the diversity of sexuality in nature justifies human sexuality other than the “cis” form, and at any rate should erase our opprobrium towards members of the LGBTQ+ community. But this is an example of the “naturalistic fallacy”: we needn’t—and shouldn’t—see how animals express sexuality to inform our own morality towards those with different sexual expression. Here’s a screenshot of one paragraph from my review:

The event below, bearing the title of Roughgarden’s book, looks to me like the same kind of stuff: a romp through the diverse sexuality of animal species with the express aim of “supporting and retaining our LGBTQ+ students and colleagues.”  But the diversity of sexuality in nature is completely irrelevant to that aim: people of different sexual preferences, genders, and so on, should be treated as moral equals on the simple grounds that they are fellow humans and such equality is a boon to society.  I find it bizarre that this event (which costs $5 extra) is being given, assuming its aim is what they say it  is: