Is Lindsay Shepherd still in trouble?

December 10, 2017 • 12:45 pm

Most of you know know about Lindsay Shepherd, the graduate student at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) who was threatened by her advisor and her University for showing a short clip in class of Jordan Peterson’s views on using different pronouns for different genders.  Her university has apologized, as has her advisor, but it created a big kerfuffle in Canada, with most people being outraged that she was treated so poorly and harassed so mercilessly. Fortunately, the facts came out because Shepherd was savvy enough to tape her inquisition and to take it to the press. She’s since been all over the media, and that, of course, has simply emphasized that the Termite Feast has reached Wilfrid Laurier.

But is she off the hook now? Not according to columnist Christie Blatchford at the National Post, who talked to Howard Levitt, a Toronto employment attorney who’s defending Shepherd pro bono. According to Levitt—and this has been widely reported—there was no formal complaint on record against Shepherd for her behavior in class. Here’s an interaction between Levitt and WLU’s lawyer, Rob Centa, hired by WLU to investigate the whole affair:

Levitt. . . wrote Rob Centa, the lawyer Laurier hired to conduct the investigation, last weekend, asking for the details of the complaint or complaints made against her.

In reply, Centa told him “I do not believe there is a document that contains a ‘complaint’ made about Ms. Shepherd nor is there anything I would describe as a formal complaint under any WLU policy.”

What’s disturbing, though, is that Centra claims his investigation is not about free speech or academic freedom, but about employment:

Centa also answered Levitt’s question about the terms of his mandate by saying it is an employment-related matter.

“It’s certainly ominous,” Levitt told the Post in a phone interview Wednesday. He said it sounds like the university is taking “a backend run” at her, and that he’s advising Shepherd not to meet Centa.

“I think it’s a trap,” Levitt said.

And Blatchford adds that Centa himself “says he has been ‘retained to an independent, confidential fact-finding exercise with respect to employment-related matters’ arising out of the Shepherd tutorials.”

If there wasn’t a complaint against Shepherd, then why did her inquisition take place? Blatchford adds this (“Robinson” is an associate professor at WLU and program coordinator of its “Human Rights and Human Diversity” program):

Yet with Centa saying there was no formal complaint, and the [WLU] policy saying only official complaints can generate an investigation, Robinson asks, “If there was an official complaint, why isn’t Lindsay being provided with a copy of it? And if there wasn’t … why is the university conducting an investigation of Lindsay’s tutorial at all?”

Levitt says he’s not before had a case quite like this. “This is the new age,” he said. “Political correctness is descending into all strata of society.”

Well, if someone’s employment is still under investigation, it better not be Shepherd’s—not after WLU and her advisor apologized for how she was treated. The “employment” should be that of the inquisitors: two professors as well as Adria Joel, WLU’s manager of Gendered Violence Prevention and Support.

I don’t think anybody should be fired over this, but the three inquisitors should be reprimanded and told how to act in cases like this. For if Lindsay Shepherd is fired as a teaching assistant, it would be to the eternal shame of Wilfrid Laurier University. And although it would make Shepherd even more of a free-speech hero, I think she’d prefer to keep her teaching job.

Does hate have a home on the Left?

December 10, 2017 • 10:45 am

I’m seeing these signs all over Hyde Park, the part of Chicago where I live:

And of course they’re supposed to be signs of inclusivity and welcome, which is good. But are they sincere? According to Frank Bruni’s editorial in today’s New York Times, they’re not always true for the Left. Bruni is distressed by this editorial that appeared in the Texas State University (San Marcos) student newspaper, an editorial I wrote about before:

If you go to my original post, where you can read it, you’ll see it’s by Rudy Martinez, a Hispanic student who claimed that he almost never met a decent white person, as he sees the vast majority of them as privileged racists. The college op-ed was taken down, but Bruni’s piece, “An Abomination. A monster. That’s me?“, calls out not only the hatred (racism, really) of the author, but argues that such views play into the hands of Trumpian conservatives since “mirroring the ugliness of white nationalists and the alt-right just gives them the ammunition that they want and need.” And I think he’s right here, as things like this editorial, or the shenanigans of liberal students when people like Ben Shapiro, Christina Hoff Sommers, or Charles Murray try to speak, just let the Right broadcast that we’re violent, narrow-minded, bigoted, intolerant, and all the things we dislike about the Right.

Bruni says this about the column above:

Yes, this was deliberate provocation. By a college student. And he’s obviously right that people of color have been systematically oppressed.

But what college newspaper would have published a column by a white student telling his black peers that they’re a wretched lot? What, beyond catharsis, did the column’s author accomplish?

And what has happened to our discourse — and how we do we make necessary progress — when hate is answered by hate, prejudice is echoed by prejudice, extremism begets extremism and ostensible liberalism practices abject illiberalism? Isn’t that how Donald Trump wins?

This wasn’t just one student or one campus or college campuses in general. This was a manner of thinking and language too prevalent among those who correctly call out racial inequities and social injustices but wrongly fall prey themselves to the bigotry behind those ills.

The far right set the tone, but the left shouldn’t adopt it. Doing so won’t get us to the fairer place that we must inhabit, and it plays directly into Trump’s dirty hands.

Bruni gives several examples of this kind of behavior (my words, not his quotes):

  • The fracas at Evergreen State College when Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were demonized as racists despite their history of anti-racist activism
  • A professor at Delaware State University who said that Otto Warmbier, the student who died in North Korean custody after supposedly stealing a poster, “got exactly what he deserved”. (The professor, an adjunct, has since been let go.)
  • A professor at Trinity College in Hartford who, after the shooting of Republican lawmakers who were playing baseball, created a hashtag saying “let them fucking die”. (He’s since been put on leave.)
  • And this tweet from Ashley Feinberg, a senior editor at HuffPo (she’s since removed the tweet), alluding darkly to John McCain’s terminal brain cancer:

Feinberg has not been put on leave, and I don’t think the HuffPo has apologized or penalized one of their senior writers (they’d never do that for something like this)—but what a horrible thing to say! I’m not surprised, of course, as HuffPo has, as I often say, been driven literally mad by Trump’s election. But while I disagree with many of McCain’s political views, he’s nevertheless done some good things, like voting “no” on the Obamacare repeal, and I think he’s a decent man. To celebrate his terminal illness, or to use it as political snark, is unconscionable.

And just yesterday I saw on my Facebook page a remark by someone who, commenting on speculations that Donald Trump is ill because he’s recently slurred his speech, remarked that he hoped that Trump was really sick and died a horrible death. Much as I dislike Trump and what he and his administration are doing, I wouldn’t wish that kind of suffering on anybody or his family.

As Bruni says, a lot of this is promoted by the nature of social media, which allows you to broadcast your thoughts instantly, unfiltered, and often anonymously, and to say things to the world that you’d never say in person to another human. Would the Delaware professor tell Otto Warmbier’s parents that he “got what he deserved”? Would Feinberg tell McCain’s family that they should be glad that their inheritance will be tax-free after he dies?

We’re better than this—or should be. We can hate ideas rather than people, and we can behave civilly towards those who espouse ideas we don’t like. We don’t have to be kissy-kissy with white supremacists, of course, but we don’t have to punch them, either.

Being civil does not guarantee that the Left will once again become ascendant. But being uncivil does guarantee that our opponents will find plenty of extra ammunition against us.

New evidence for the multiverse—and its implications

December 10, 2017 • 9:00 am

As skeptical as I am, I think the contemplation of the multiverse is an excellent opportunity to reflect on the nature of science and on the ultimate nature of existence: why we are here…. In looking at this concept, we need an open mind, though not too open. It is a delicate path to tread. Parallel universes may or may not exist; the case is unproved. We are going to have to live with that uncertainty. Nothing is wrong with scientifically based philosophical speculation, which is what multiverse proposals are. But we should name it for what it is.

— George Ellis, Scientific American, Does the Multiverse Really Exist?

Well, Ellis’s uncertainty may not be permanent. This short film, on the “skydivephil” playlist, presents what they say is evidence for a multiverse. It was sent to me by reader Phil, who I believe is the eponymous creator .

A multiverse is a collection of all multiple, parallel universes; and in the set taken together, a whole panoply of different things happen: many alternative outcomes are instantiated somewhere. The idea of a multiverse first came from Erwin Schrödinger, and for a long time physicists thought that a multiverse was possible but impossible to test, as there was no way we could detect the presence of universes other than ours. The Wikipedia link two sentences prior gives a good summary, as does the video at the bottom.

Now, according to this video, we’ve gotten some evidence for the multiverse, though our Official Website Physicist™ notes (see below) that the new evidence isn’t terribly decisive. The evidence adduced is cosmic inflation, but not just that: eternal cosmic inflation, in which space grows forever. One of the implications of eternal inflation is, according to some (but not all) physicists, the multiverse.

The Physics Man who presents the results below is George Efstathiou, a British physicist at Cambridge.

When I saw this, realizing that it was above my pay grade, I wrote to Sean Carroll, our Official Website Physicist™, asking him this:

Does eternal inflation really constitute evidence for a multiverse? I know you favor multiverses, but I want to know how strong the evidence is. If you want to give me a quote to post, I’d be delighted to do that, but the most important thing is that I understand what this is about.
Sean responded, and I quote him with permission:
Of course it depends on what you mean by “evidence.” In a Bayesian sense, yes: there is experimental evidence that favors inflation (e.g., in temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background), and theory predicts that most inflationary models lead to eternal inflation and a multiverse, so in that sense there is evidence for a multiverse. But not in a direct, empirical sense, of course: everything we see in the observable universe is also completely compatible with ours being the only universe. And even the indirect evidence is quite weak; we don’t know for sure whether inflation happened, nor if it really does create a multiverse. So one’s credences for or against the multiverse shouldn’t be very close to 0% or 100%, they should be somewhere in between.
 The YouTube notes present a similar caveat:
A note of caution. In our opinion inflation is the dominant paradigm for early universe cosmology and most experts in inflationary cosmology seem to agree it leads to a multiverse. Does the mounting evidence for inflation then mean we should accept the multiverse? Well, inflation has passed every test to date but there is still one last hurdle and it may fail at this last test. It’s also possible that we haven’t understood inflation correctly. We need to wait and see if more data can give us a firmer picture of these fascinating questions. Whilst the evidence for inflation and the multiverse then may not be strong enough to call them facts, the statement that there is no evidence at all for these concepts looks dubious.
 Finally, here’s a list proponents and skeptics from Wikipedia, and there are Big Names on both sides:

Proponents of one or more of the multiverse hypotheses include Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Max Tegmark, Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, Michio Kaku, David Deutsch, Leonard Susskind, Alexander Vilenkin, Yasunori Nomura, Raj Pathria, Laura Mersini-Houghton, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Sean Carroll.

Scientists who are generally skeptical of the multiverse hypothesis include: Steven Weinberg, David Gross, Paul Steinhardt, Neil Turok, Viatcheslav Mukhanov, Michael S. Turner, Roger Penrose, George Ellis, Joe Silk, Carlo Rovelli, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Jim Baggott, and Paul Davies.

Now the multiverse has lots of implications for our views of physics, philosophy, and biology. Depending on how you conceive of a multiverse (and there are apparently several ways it could be), the anthropic principle—that the laws of physics seem “fine tuned” for our existence—is simply a result of different universes having different laws of physics, and the one with the “right” laws is the one that is ours, the one that allowed life to evolve. This, of course, blows the “fine-tuning” argument, and its supposed use as evidence for God, out the window. There are, of course, other implications for stuff like quantum entanglement, Schrödinger’s Cat, and other physical puzzles: many different outcomes would be realized in one universe or another. The cat would be dead in some universes, but alive in others.

Further, it means that the evolution of humans was inevitable somewhere. In one of those universes that permitted the evolution of life, it was inevitable that a thinking hominin would evolve. That, too, is evidence against theistic arguments—made famous by Simon Conway Morris—that the evolution of humans, which is taken as inevitable, is evidence for our position as God’s special creatures.

Finally, it may (and I’m not sure about this) constitute evidence for “you can choose” free will: that all possible decisions that could be the outcome of the laws of physics in our brain would be instantiated in some universe. [Rethinking this, I don’t think this buttresses “you can choose otherwise” free will unless it reflects quantum phenomena in the brain, which I don’t think is the case.]

Now I’m just speculating here, and these may not follow from any conception of the multiverse, but from what I’ve heard of the “many worlds” hypothesis, these things are possible.

If you want to watch the entire one-hour video from which the above is an excerpt, I’ve put it below.

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 10, 2017 • 7:45 am

My photo tank is getting low, so send me your good wildlife photos, please.  Posting will probably be light today as I’m crazy busy getting ready to go to India. A week from today, jet-lagged, I’ll be on the train from Delhi to Chandigarh to begin the first leg of the Jerry Coyne All-India Tour.

Today’s photos come from reader Karen Bartelt, who continues her photoodyssey in Texas with some photos of birds and butterflies (see part I here). Her notes are indented.

South Texas, Part II
We visited the Laguna Ascosta National Wildlife Reserve and some other areas in the Harlingen-Brownsville area.  More first-time birds and butterflies.
Plain chachalaca (Ortalis vetula); near Los Fresnos TX:
Soldier (Danaus eresimus); Laguna Atascosa NWR:
Gulf fritillary (Agraulis vanillae); Laguna Atascosa NWR:
Buff-bellied hummingbird (Amazilia yucatanensis); Hugh Ramsey Park in Harlingen TX:
Band-celled sister (Adelpha fessonia); Resaca de la Palma State Park near Brownsville TX:
Malachite (Siproeta stelenes); Frontera Audubon Center, Weslaco TX:

Sunday: Hili dialogue

December 10, 2017 • 6:45 am

It’s Sunday, December 10, 2017, both Ceiling Cat’s Day and National “Have a Bagel” Day; also, by UN decree, it’s International Mountain Day. There’s snow on the ground in Chicago right now, and the daily highs will be either below or just above freezing all this week.

And be aware that EVERYTHING THAT I LIST BELOW (NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS) HAPPENED ON DECEMBER 11 (TOMORROW), NOT DECEMBER 10 (TODAY). I screwed up yesterday, getting the date wrong (I write these in advance). I can’t be arsed to fix it, for it’s early in the morning and I haven’t had coffee; and I don’t know what I’ll do tomorrow.

Regardless, December 11 was not a day on which much happened. On that day in 1920, there were big depredations in Cork, Ireland, home of Grania. In retaliation for a recent ambush by the IRA, British soldiers burned and looted buildings in Cork, as well as shooting and robbing civilians. On December 11, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S. after the U.S. had declared war on Japan several days earlier after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Also on December 10, the U.S. reciprocally declared war on Germany and Italy. On this day in 1972, Apollo 17 became the sixth and final U.S. mission to land spacecraft and men on the Moon.  Finally, it was on December 11, 1990 that demonstrations by students and workers began in Albania, eventually leading to the fall of that communist nation—once, after North Korea, the world’s most secretive state.

Notables born on this day include Hector Berlioz (1803), Robert Koch (1843; see below), Max Born (1882), Amon Goeth (1908; you’ll remember him from “Schindler’s List”), Tom Hayden (1939) and Hailee Steinfeld (1996). Those who died on this day include Sam Cooke (1964) and Bettie Page (2008).

Cooke wrote and performed the greatest civil rights song of our era (“Blowing in the Wind” is a strong contender): “A Change is Gonna Come“. It was released on December 22, 1964, and still moves me immensely. I know I’ve posted it before, but you can’t here it too often. And his version is by far the best of many covers were made later.  Here’s some information from Wikipedia:

Each verse is a different movement, with the horns carrying the first, the strings the second, and the timpani carrying the bridge. The French horn present in the recording was intended to convey a sense of melancholy.

Cooke incorporated his own personal experiences as well into the song, such as encounters in Memphis, Shreveport and Birmingham, to reflect the lives and struggles of all African-Americans of the time. The lines “I don’t know what’s up there / Beyond the sky” could refer to Cooke’s doubt for absolute true justice on earth.  The final verse, in which Cooke pleads for his “brother” to help him, is a metaphor for what Alexander described as “the establishment” The verse continues, ‘But he winds up knocking me / back down on my knees.'”

There’s a Google Doodle today honoring Robert Koch, even though Koch was born on December 11, 1843, not today, December 10. For it was on this day in 1905, one day before his birthday and 4.5 years before he died (May 1910), that Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. What did he do? He proved that tuberculosis, rather than being an inherited disease as was then thought, was actually caused by a bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. As depicted by Paul de Kruif in his great book Microbe Hunters, many guinea pigs died in the service of this work. Koch, the father of modern bacteriology, well deserved his Nobel:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is showing unusual restraint:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m showing patience and waiting until my staff finish their breakfast.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Okazuję cierpliwość i czekam aż służba zje śniadanie.

A tweet from Matthew showing an optical illusion, one of his favorite things (see more about the illusion here). I have to admit, this one is amazing:

Here’s Harry, Matthew’s newest cat:

And an unusual flower:

From reader Charleen, a strutting cat in a tutu:

https://twitter.com/Elverojaguar/status/904073022386167809

From reader Barry:

And two tweets from Heather Hastie, whose birthday was yesterday (and I forgot!):

https://twitter.com/Elverojaguar/status/939188086524841985

Finally, what species is this bird and why is it getting rubbed with cotton swabs?

A compendium of atomic bomb explosions

December 9, 2017 • 2:15 pm

Here’s a compilation of various tests of atomic bombs which I’ve put up just because they’re mesmerizing and because this is one of the things that we have to worry about with North Korea.  It’s also amazing—and terrifying—that the human brain is able to manufacture something like this out of our neurons and substances in the earth’s crust.

Steve Paikin discusses freedom of speech with five Canadian professors

December 9, 2017 • 1:00 pm

Wilfred Laurier’s attempt to stifle/punish Lindsay Shepherd for playing a bit of Jordan Peterson video in her class has ignited a big debate in Canada, none of which would have happened had Shepherd not been savvy enough to tape the meeting in which she was admonished, and then to release the tape to the press.

The debate  goes on, below in a 40-minute television debate on Steve Paikin’s show The Agenda, a debate involving five professors:

Janice Stein, University of Toronto
Thomas Merritt, Laurentian University
Shannon Dea, University of Waterloo
Rinaldo Walcott, University of Toronto
Emmett Macfarlane, University of Waterloo

And after hearing it, I have to say, “O Canada!” The debate, about free speech and how to treat students, should arouse passion, but only three people show any: Janice Stein, whose views seem close to mine, and two Authoritarian Leftists, Rinaldo Walcott and Shannon Dea. Dea mouths the jargon of postmodern feminism, even arguing that Shepherd might have been on the side of Jordan Peterson (Shepherd says she was not), and Walcott sees white supremacy everywhere, to the extent that many of his answers aren’t responsive. The geneticist Thomas Merritt politely shows that Regressive Leftism has infected his class in genomics and genetics, to the extent that when teaching Jim Watson’s work he’s impelled to say that the man is a racist and a homophobe, and political scientist Emmett Macfarlane politely straddles the fence.

I suppose this is worth listening to to see how well the beavers have dined in Canadian universities, with only Stein sticking up for freedom of speech (Walcott even says that some speech, like Jordan Peterson’s views on pronouns, should not be allowed to be uttered in society).  If ever passion was needed to defend truly progressive principles, it’s now, and I fear, after hearing this, that Canadians are, by and large, too polite to muster that passion, and will simply go along with the demands of Regressives. Since this is only a sample of five professors (but there were two more in Shepherd’s “hearing”), I may be overly fearful.

Finally, I’ll say, as I have before, that Paikin is one of the best t.v. moderators around. He asks just the right questions, doesn’t intrude or dominate the discussion, but keeps it on track right up to the end. That there’s no agreement among these five faculty is not his fault.