Nature falls for one discredited aspect of autism: “facilitated communication”

May 17, 2023 • 10:30 am

As you know, autism runs the gamut between people who functional pretty normally to those who can barely function, require round-the-clock care, and cannot read, write, or speak.  It’s often assumed that this is a “spectrum”: that is, a disorder with a unitary developmental/genetic cause that has various degrees of expression.  Thus some groups that hope to ameliorate autism assume that the near-normal end of the spectrum require treatments similar in kind but not degree to those who show “profound” autism. Others think that the treatments needed are very different.  The high-functioning people with autism can express what they want or need, but what about those who can’t express themselves?

This is the subject of the new Nature article shown in the second screenshot below. It’s also the subject of a critique of one part of the Nature article—a critique that appeared in Skeptical Inquirer (SI). SI is the well known magazine from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), itself an offshoot of The Center for Inquiry.

SI and SCICOP have devoted themselves to debunking woo, and their SI piece, written by psychologist Stuart Vyse, takes issue with one brand of woo historically involved with autism research: facilitated communication.

Facilitated communication was a method that, people thought, could allow profoundly autistic people who couldn’t read, write, or talk to communicate with others. The assumption was that with some assistance, the hidden verbal and mental abilities of profoundly autistic people could be revealed.  This involved people helping the severely autistic people to “write” by using various devices.  And lo, a trove of hidden thoughts were revealed. Sadly, it was eventually found that the “helpers” were actually prompting the autistic to communicate, and it was pretty much a scam, although perhaps an unwitting one. (It’s the equivalent of a Ouija board, where people think that they are not guiding the pointer but really are.) Here, let Wikipedia describe the method:

Facilitated communication (FC), or supported typing, is a scientifically discredited technique that attempts to aid communication by people with autism or other communication disabilities who are non-verbal. The facilitator guides the disabled person’s arm or hand and attempts to help them type on a keyboard or other device.

There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and among disability advocacy organizations that FC is a pseudoscience. Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC, rather than the disabled person. The facilitator may believe they are not the source of the messages due to the ideomotor effect, which is the same effect that guides a Ouija board.  Studies have consistently found that FC is unable to provide the correct response to even simple questions when the facilitator does not know the answers to the questions (e.g., showing the patient but not the facilitator an object).  In addition, in numerous cases disabled persons have been assumed by facilitators to be typing a coherent message while the patient’s eyes were closed or while they were looking away from or showing no particular interest in the letter board.

Facilitated communication has been called “the single most scientifically discredited intervention in all of developmental disabilities”.  Some promoters of the technique have claimed that FC cannot be clearly disproven because a testing environment might cause the subject to lose confidence.  However, there is a scientific consensus that facilitated communication is not a valid communication technique, and its use is strongly discouraged by most speech and language disability professional organizations.  There have been a large number of false abuse allegations made through facilitated communication.

The article is remarkably strong for Wikipedia, and has a long section on documenting the flaws of facilitated communication.

At present, though, the method is still used, and is an important part of the Nature paper. Now it’s often done with the “facilitator” holding up an alphabet board and having the autistic person point to letters that, they say, give a message. The thing is that the boards are always held up by a facilitator, who can move them around, and the autistic person can look at the “facilitator” for approval.  They never do it with the alphabet board flat on a table and the facilitator out of view of the subject. Look at this video using the kind of facilitated communication touted in the Nature article, and you’ll see the issues. The facilitator moves the board around, and the subject looks at times at the facilitator, seemingly seeking approval.  And it’s hardly credible that someone who cannot either write, read, or speak could nevertheless convey complex messages this way. But you don’t have to guess: experiments have debunked the whole method.

In the article below (click to read), psychologist Stuart Vyse calls out Nature not for its whole article (for parts of it are enlightening and reasonable), but for buying into facilitated communication. Here’s the premise of the Nature article involving facilitated communication, as stated by Vyse:

This renewed controversy over communication methods has emerged in the context of a larger political fight within the autism community. The Nature story was about efforts on the part of some autism advocates to have people with autism more involved in the planning and execution of autism research. In theory this sounds like a good idea, but this effort has been largely dominated by verbal advocates on the higher functioning end of the autism spectrum. As it is now defined, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has a remarkably wide range that can include both highly verbal Harvard graduates and nonspeaking people who engage in repetitive and self-injurious behaviors. It includes both people who will be fine and may even thrive living independently and people who will never be able to live independently without substantial support.

Parents of children on the severe end of the spectrum argue that the needs of their children are substantially different than those of the verbal self-advocates on the other end of the spectrum. Furthermore, if the research agenda is driven by people on the less severe end of the spectrum, the approximately thirty percent of children with autism who will never develop speech will be left behind.

That’s why Nature is touting facilitated communication as a way of finding out how the severely autistic want to give input into their worldviews, their problems, and their therapy.

SI article:

The quote given in the Nature piece below (click to read) is taken from a severely autistic person pointing at a letterboard. And the entire quote, from Rachel Kripke-Ludwig, “a non-speaking autistic advocate and student based in Menlo Park, California” is even more complex (I’ve put the “communication” in bold below):

In the conventional approach, several researchers “are mostly working off the wrong set of assumptions”, writes Rachel Kripke-Ludwig, a non-speaking autistic advocate and student based in Menlo Park, California. “The best way to get it right is to listen to us.” 

Here’s a photo of Kripke-Ludwig from Nature shown using the letter board:

(from Nature): Rachel Kripke-Ludwig helps to ensure that autism research is relevant to autistic people.

Why does somebody always hold the letter board? It would be dead easy to see if people like Rachel could communicate without the help of a facilitator, but they won’t let scientists test that hypothesis, which would be dead simple to do. As Vyse says,

The new variants of facilitated communication involve the nonspeaking person pointing at a letter board with a finger or a pencil; however, rather than simply placing the letter board on a table, a “communication partner” holds the letter board in the air. It is not clear why this is necessary, but it is clear that the involvement of another person muddies the question of who is authoring the communication. Does the finger touch the letter board, or does the letter board touch the finger? Publicly available videos often show the letter boards bobbing around in the air while the nonspeaking person looks somewhere else. Furthermore, perhaps having learned a lesson from the 1990s, the purveyors of these letter board techniques have assiduously avoided participating in research that would definitively show who the author of the messages is.

Now testing this hypothesis is not a James Randi “million-dollar-challenge” issue—a simple debunking of woo. It is vitally important to know if profoundly autistic people can really communicate on their own. If they can, then it would overturn both the theories and treatment of autism, and also enable us to take advantage of their own ideas of what they need, which is the point Nature is trying to make. That is why this ability to communicate needs to be tested.

Nature takes it for granted that this is real communication. Click to read.

Not only does the article neglect the decades of work showing that facilitated communication is bogus, but presents statements by people like Kripke-Ludwig as if they really come from the subject and not the facilitator, and endorses the method (my emphasis):

Many autistic people see that as a step back to labels that they have rejected. “I am profoundly gifted, not profoundly low-functioning,” writes Payam, a non-speaking autistic advocate who is based in Atlanta, Georgia. Payam is not an exception, says his mother, Parisa Khosravi. “We need to presume competence and listen to our non-speakers,” she explains, “rather than assume intellectual disability.”

Many other autistic people who are non-speaking or have intellectual disabilities have found ways to speak up for themselves, says Zoe Gross, director of advocacy for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network in Washington DC. “It is completely inaccurate to say that as a group, autistic people with intellectual disabilities, or nonspeaking autistic people, can’t advocate for themselves,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Not all autistic people have access to a communication method that works for them, and for some people, the currently available communication methods may just not work.”

If they could write for themselves, or even point at a static letterboard without guidance, we might accept these statements, which could lead to profound advances in treating autism. But, since the facilitated communicators won’t let their method be tested, we’ll never know. This is one example of what is likely to be woo, or a quasi-scam, impeding science. Nature is not behaving scientifically here, and in fact may be impeding the treatment of people with severe autism.  Will different “facilitators” give different answers? How do we know they’re not in cahoots, making stuff up? They might mean well, or even believe that they are bringing out hidden words to help people, but we won’t know that without scientific testing of the methodology. As I said, such tests are not rocket science, and, when used on other means of facilitated communication, invariably show it’s a sham.

As Vyse notes:

Finally, in an odd alliance, some parents of nonspeaking individuals who believe in facilitated communication or one of its variants have been recruited to this fight by the advocates on the higher functioning end of the spectrum. Thus, you have the peculiar situation of an article in the scientific journal Nature, whose title is drawn from a quote that the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association says “should not be assumed to be the communication of the person with a disability.” We have no evidence that the person being quoted said those words, and yet she is being put forth as the poster child for a highly politicized movement. In my view, this is the real travesty. This person has achieved remarkable visibility, including quotes and a photograph in a widely read science journal, yet the available scientific evidence suggests that rather than speaking out for herself she has been silenced and someone else has substituted their voice for hers. All of this may have happened with the best of intentions, but if I am right, it is a substantial injustice nonetheless. And the journal Nature, which ought to know better, is complicit in making it happen.

To learn more about the perils of facilitated communication, visit facilitatedcommunication.org.

Frankly, this is a serious misstep on the part of Nature. Even if facilitated communication eventually did prove to work in some cases, Nature should, at the least, point out the serious issues with it.

UPDATE:  This Frontline Video, “Prisoners of Silence”, was noted by a reader in the comments; it shows how the method works (it’s always “facilitated”) and how it was debunked. The power of confirmation bias was strong; in fact, there was no evidence that facilitated communication worked. My one question is this: if the facilitators were sending the messages unconsciously through the subjects, why did so many of them produce messages that the subject was sexually abused?

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 17, 2023 • 8:15 am

We’re running quite low again, so if you want this feature to continue, please send me your good wildlife photos. Thanks!

Today’s batch are local Davis photos taken by Susan Harrison, UC Davis ecologist. Her narrative and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

 

Random animals of north-central California, spring 2023

Here are some sightings from the past couple of months in the area surrounding Davis.   It’s been especially fun to watch all the nesting activity.

The first five were taken at UC Davis’s Putah Creek Riparian Reserve, a local birding hotspot that’s a 5-minute bike ride from my home.

Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) mom and owlet:

Western Tanager (Piranga ludoviciana):

Tree Swallow (Tachycineta biocolor):

House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus):

Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana):

Red-Eared Sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans, non-native, left) and Western Pond Turtles (Actinemys marmorata, native, right) at the UC Davis Arboretum:

Indian Peacock (Pavo cristatus, non-native) at Lake Solano County Park:

Bushtit (Psaltriparis minimus) near Lake Solano:

Beaver (Castor canadensis) at UC Davis’s McLaughlin Natural Reserve:

Northern Rough-Winged Swallow (Stelgidopteryx ruficollis) along Cache Creek:

Cliff Swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) along Butte Slough:

 

Cliff Swallow apartment complex, a.k.a. an abandoned bridge:

American Bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus) at Gray Lodge National Wildlife Refuge:

Sutter Buttes, “the world’s smallest mountain range,” seen from Gray Lodge NWR:

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 17, 2023 • 6:45 am

It’s a Hump Day (“Jum il-ħotba” in Maltese): Wednesday, May 17, 2023, and National Cherry Cobbler Day.

Source (and recipe)

It’s also Dinosaur Day, National Mushroom Hunting Day, National Pino Grigio Day (meh), National Walnut Day, Galician Literature Day, International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, Norwegian Constitution Day, World Hypertension Day and World Information Society Day (International)

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 17 Wikipedia page.

Wine of the Day: I rarely drink Burgundy because my pockets aren’t deep enough, but occasionally one finds a good bottle that’s reasonably affordable, and by that I mean the price has two digits and is less than $50. And here is one: Aubert Lefas “Les Trois Follots” Pommard 2015.

I had it with a simple meal: a warmed-up crispy baguette with aged Cabot cheddar, and a bowl of sliced tomatoes and dried olives in good olive oil.  When I have a simple meal like that, I often want a fancy wine, and this one was 36 bucks.  It was excellent: full-bodied, redolent of cedar, cherries, and minerals, and with years to go. Reviews are scarce, but here’s part of one from the Chapel Hill Wine Company:

2015 is the finest red wine vintage in Burgundy since 2010, maybe better. It could rival the 2005… which is why small gems like this are in such high demand! Small producer, with no need to submit for reviews… exceptional quality at a ridiculous price.

. . . . The red cherry, rose petal and subtle spice notes should evolve into a beautiful wine. For near term consumption 45 minutes to an hour of decanting is recommended. Pommard has a long reputation for being a bit chunky, but this is made in a bit more of a fruit forward fashion. There is a bit of heft to this Pommard, but the weight of this wine seems to be revolving around the dark cherry fruit more than the oak. Wild mushroom based dishes, duck or sushi would pair perfectly. I like it with rich cheeses like Époisses, Comté or a domestic option like Red Hawk from Cowgirl Creamery!

If you have the dosh and want to try a tasty but not bank-busting Burgundy, you might essay this one (if you can find it).

Da Nooz:

*According to the Guardian, the court has ruled against fraudster Elizabeth Holmes’s bid to remain free while her conviction is appealed.  (h/t Gravelinspector). She’s going to jail.

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes must begin serving her prison sentence while she appeals against her conviction on charges of defrauding investors in her failed blood-testing startup and must jointly pay $452m in restitution to the victims of her crimes, a court in San Francisco has ruled.

Holmes, who rose to fame after claiming Theranos’ small machines could run an array of diagnostic tests with just a few drops of blood, was convicted at trial in San Jose, California, in 2022 and sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison.

She had asked the ninth US circuit court of appeals to pause her sentence on 25 April, two days before she was to report to prison. The court on Tuesday denied her bail application.

The judge will set a new date for Holmes, 39, to leave her current home in the San Diego area and report to prison.

In a separate ruling Judge Edward Davila held Holmes jointly liable for the restitution payments and ordered her to pay the $452m with her former lover and top Theranos lieutenant, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.

Justice is done—unless she flees. Her sentence is 11 years, and I now owe a reader $20 because I bet that she’d never be imprisoned. But I won’t pay off until the door of her cell closes behind her. (I don’t trust her to stay in the U.S.)

*Russia must be getting desperate because they’re increasing their missile strikes on Kyiv, strikes that violate international law.

The strikes, which could be heard for over 20 minutes in the capital, were among the most intense in months. The assault “was exceptional in its density — the maximum number of missile attacks in the shortest period of time,” Serhiy Popko, head of Kyiv’s city military administration, wrote on Telegram.

Ukrainian officials said the barrage offered the latest evidence that Ukraine desperately needs stronger aviation capabilities and more powerful, longer-range weapons.

Ukrainian officials claimed a perfect interception rate, and credited Western-donated Patriot air defense systems with thwarting attacks by the most sophisticated Russian weapons, including the hypersonic Kinzhal, or Dagger, which travels at more than five times the speed of sound. Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian air force, said Russia expended millions of dollars in high-end missiles in a failed attempt to hit targets in the Kyiv region.

“The enemy is attempting to achieve its goals,” Ihnat said. “Right now it had the goal of striking certain installations in the region of the capital. These could be next to the city, or in the city — we can’t know what the enemy had in mind, because we destroyed everything.”

Ihnat said the Russians fired from numerous locations. “They attacked with missiles from various bases: air, ground, sea,” he said. Russia also attacked the capital overnight with drones, Ihnat and other officials said.

Congrats to the Ukrainians for taking down those hard-to-hit hypersonic missiles. If they didn’t have Western help, Kyiv would be a shambles and the Russians would probably be winning big time. My own view: we should stand with our allies and keep the arms and aid coming. It’s people fighting for freedom, Jake!

*We’re only about two weeks away from June 1, the date when the U.S. debt limit will expire, and although talks between Biden and Republicans continue, not much seems to be happening.

The administration said that President Biden may cancel part of his seven-day foreign trip that starts this week as he and congressional leaders met for pivotal face-to-face talks on Tuesday, with time running out to strike a deal on the federal government’s debt limit.

The government could run out of money to pay its bills in a little over two weeks — a default that economists warned could cost Americans jobs and plunge the country into a recession.

Republicans have said they want to slash federal spending before lifting the debt ceiling. The president has maintained that raising the limit is a responsibility of Congress and should be done without conditions to avoid an economic disaster, even as he has said he is open to separate negotiations over spending.

. . .Neither side in the negotiations said they expected to resolve the monthslong dispute during the meeting. But Republicans and Democrats both privately signaled that they saw the session on Tuesday as a make-or-break moment — much more significant than a similar gathering at the White House a week ago and more urgent as the number of legislative days Congress has left to act dwindles.

The big question, of course, is was a deal made or was it broken. If this is to be resolved by Congress, which could raise the debt ceiling, they have only two weeks to do it. This is a big deal, because defaulting could set off a cascade of horrible economic consequences that could extend far beyond America.

*In the latest Israel-bashing episode of the UN, t least the U.S. isn’t participating by valorizing the Palestinians and calling Israel an apartheid state, though of course that seems to be the main business of the United Nations these days.  On Monday the UN held its first “Nakba event”, marking the 75th anniversary of the egress of Arabs (now called Palestinians) from Israel (this of course is the same day that Israel announced its independence, but nobody celebrates that. From CNN:

The United States and Western nations including the United Kingdom and Germany on Monday skipped an event at the United Nations marking the 75th anniversary of the dispossession of Palestinians after Israel called for a boycott.

The event, the first of its kind to be held by the UN, commemorated the Nakba or “catastrophe” – when roughly 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what is now Israel. The commemoration was boycotted by Israeli officials, who also urged diplomats of other nations not to participate.

On Sunday, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, sent a letter to other UN ambassadors “deeply urging” them not to take part in what he called a “shameful Nakba event,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by CNN. Erdan said “Such events only serve to demonize Israel and further push away any chance for reconciliation.”

The US and the UK were among 30 countries that voted against a UN General Assembly resolution in December to adopt this year’s commemoration. Erdan said he has managed to convince “a number of countries” to boycott Monday’s event.

The spokesman for the US mission to the UN, Nate Evans, said Monday that the US, along with other countries including Germany and the UK, never planned to attend Monday’s event, because it has “longstanding concerns over anti-Israel bias within the UN system.”

What upset me was that Ukraine, unlike the US, Germany, UK, etc. abstained from the vote to hold the Nakba event, but that’s an exception: they usually vote against Israel in the many UN anti-Israel motions.

*In what appears to be “news” or “news analysis” rather than op-ed, the Wall Street Journal discusses “What everyone—except the U.S.—has learned about immigration.” Apparently the lesson involves increasing legal immigration, and concentrating on skilled workers.

Government actions to attract foreign nationals for skilled and unskilled jobs have spread from Germany to Japan and include countries with longtime immigration restrictions and some with a populist antipathy to streams of foreign workers.

The U.S. remains an outlier. Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers have arrived through back channels, but the country isn’t openly welcoming more legal workers, despite the tight labor market. That hesitancy carries economic costs, including persistent worker shortages and wage inflation, according to economists and some U.S. officials.

Unemployment is at a record low 4.8% across the 38 largely affluent countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. These and other nations report a long list of open positions from truck drivers to baggage handlers to miners.

. . . Beyond being needed to fill pandemic-driven labor shortages, migrant workers are in demand to fill the gap left by retiring baby boomers and declining populations, economists and Western officials say. “The labor forces of richer countries are hollowing out,” said Michael A. Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University.

Germany is rewriting immigration laws to bring in more college graduates as well as blue-collar workers under a new points-based system. Points will be awarded based on age—younger people receive more—educational qualifications, work experience and German-language competency. Canada announced plans late last year to take in nearly 1.5 million more migrants by 2025. Western Australia recently sent a delegation to the U.K. and Ireland to recruit tens of thousands of workers, including police, mechanics and plumbers.

Well, I’m confused. Letting in more and more immigrants without regard to skills seems to be what constitutes the crisis. Perhaps a return to the original rationale: providing a refuge for those fleeing threats or persecution, rather than simple economic opportunity.

*In his NYT op-ed, John McWhorter, never afraid to be heterodox, asks and answers the question, “Is musicology racist?” I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that misicology, which is simply the study of music, should be accused of structural racism and whiteness, but of course McWhorter, a music buff, largely disagrees. (He does, however, say that the movement has had some positive effects in calling attention to neglected black composers.) In one place McWhorter even mentions our “merit” paper, of which he was one of 29 authors, and also Pamela Paul’s NYT column on that paper.

Among the many efforts to decenter whiteness in academia and other left-leaning institutions is one to take on the presumed racist tendencies embodied in musicology. It’s an issue that has nagged at me for years, and one exemplified by a new book, the Hunter College music professor Philip Ewell’s “On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone.” Ewell’s book, an expansion of his widely read 2020 article “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” is an impassioned argument that the study of music theory is infected by racism.

. . . Indeed, much of what Ewell recommends seems to entail relaxing requirements and expectations. In this, he joins similar calls in other fields, where sociopolitical intent is elevated over fact-finding, linear reasoning and basic curiosity (as described in this article, which my colleague Pamela Paul discussed two weeks ago and of which I am a co-author). We are encouraged to contemplate a physics without “white” empiricism and a math where getting the correct answer is optional. And here Ewell proposes a credentialed expertise in musicology that does not require the until now customary abilities to play the piano or translate from any foreign language, and where one is allowed, if desired, to get a degree on the basis of beat making or sound recording, which do not require the playing of any instrument.

. . . Ewell is seeking something more revolutionary than this: a complete overhaul of musicology’s focus, procedures and expectations in which much that is designated “white” is treated with skepticism and much that is not is presumptively welcomed — although Ewell offers few concrete examples of what this additional non- “white” material might be.

That’s all I’ll reproduce; I’m just bragging a bit.

*Finally, Chonkosaurus has made the New York Times! That was, as you’ll recall the name given to a giant snapping turtle seen last week sunning herself on a pile of chains in the Chicago River. (She’s called “Chonk” for short.) See below for why they think she’s a lady turtle.

In the video, which was posted on Twitter this month, one of the kayakers, Joey Santore, sounding astonished, cries with an expletive: “Look at the size of that thing!”

Mr. Santore’s friend, Al Scorch, gave the turtle a name befitting such an enormous reptile: Chonkosaurus.

At first, Mr. Santore and Mr. Scorch couldn’t quite make out what was sitting above the water. Then they paddled closer.

Perhaps the most valuable insight came from the men in the video who actually saw Chonkosaurus.

“Holy hell, you look good!” Mr. Santore says in the video. “I’m real proud of you. You’ve been eating healthy?” He asks the turtle if it has heard of liquid salad, and Mr. Scorch later says that Chonkosaurus is “thick but strong.”

Chonkosaurus’s nutritional pursuit does not appear to be completely selfish, however.

Chris Anchor, a senior wildlife biologist with the Forest Preserves of Cook County, said that the turtle is female — and most likely “loaded with eggs.”

Oh boy, more snappers in the Chicago River! This just shows how much it’s been cleaned up in recent years. It was a polluted mess when I moved here in 1986.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili admits a flaw!

Hili: I’m trying to be understanding.
A: And?
Hili: I’m poor at it.
In Polish:
Hili: Próbuję być wyrozumiała.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Źle mi to wychodzi.

. . . and a picture of Baby Kulka from Paulina, captioned “Paulina was hunting with her camera” (in Polish: “Paulina polowała z aparatem.”)

********************

From Divy:

From Now That’s Wild:

And a Recursion Cat from FB:

From Masih, multiple instances of civil disobedience by women in Iran. God help them, they’re SHOWING THEIR HAIR!  (sound up)”

I remember this Ricky Gervais clip, and think it was from the Golden Globes. And, yes, it was brilliant:

From Peter. I’d join this great party even though there’s a d*g!

From Malcolm.  I KNOW I’ve posted this before but I never get tired of seeing it.

From Barry, who says, “How nonsensical is this?”

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a family gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, who’s still beavering away in the Crick archives in La Jolla. First, the extremely bizarre slime molds; the tweet links to a popular-science article in Australian Geographic:

Matthew notes, “This is not planned, it is a series of individual spontaneous responses to the first short vid, which then cascade into brilliance.”

Yes, there will be hell to pay. . . .

 

Vanderbilt’s Chancellor sticks up for institutional neutrality

May 16, 2023 • 9:15 am

To me it makes eminent sense for a university to maintain a position of institutional neutrality—that is, to avoid taking public stands on moral, ideological, and political issues.  By taking such stands, the University, which is supposed to be a place where questioning and free speech are encouraged, chills the speech of its members. What graduate student or untenured faculty member would risk punishment by publicly taking issue with an official University position on, say, abortion, DEI, gun control, and the like? (Evidence of such punishments are widespread; I’ll mention a few below.) Official University statements serve to “chill speech”, which is inimical to the very purpose of a university.

In fact, up to now there were only two colleges in America that took an official position in favor of institutional neutrality. One was the University of Chicago, which has held that position since 1967, when the Kalven Report became policy. As I wrote two years ago:

At the University of Chicago we have a policy, based on the 1967 Kalven Report, that prohibits official units of the university from making moral, political, or ideological statements—unless those statements are about issues that directly affect the mission of the University. This includes university departments. The purpose is to promote freedom of speech by preventing the chilling of speech, for “official” university statements, by the nature of their “offficial-ness”, make those who disagree with them reluctant to speak out, including students, grad students, postdocs, and untenured professors. The University has refused, over the years, to issue any statements about stuff like Darfur, the Vietnam War, Communism and the Red Scare, and now about various forms of social unrest.  (Over the last few years I’ve written many posts on this issue.)

The one exception for us is that official statements may be all right if they bear on the mission of the University of Chicago. So, for example, our University supported the DACA program because kicking out students whose parents arrived here illegally would be unfair to students already in college and also force the university to vet the immigration status of applicants. But these exceptions are rare.

I’ll give one quote from Kalven, my favorite bit:

The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.

Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives. It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues.

The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints.

Can you seriously oppose those sentiments? If you do, then you see the University as a venue for taking sides in public debates at the expense of chilling the speech of its members.

I should add that nothing prohibits university members from taking personal stands on these issues; the statements just cannot carry any university imprimatur. (And because the university president’s stands may be conflated with “official stands,” it’s probably best for those at the top to keep their views to themselves.)

The second school that abides by Kalven, which recently adopted this policy, is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

But now we apparently have a third school: Vanderbilt University. Its Chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, recently declared that his school would embrace a possibility of “principled neutrality”. This is described in the Wall Street Journal op-ed below by Lamar Alexander, former President of the University of Tennessee, U.S. Senator from the same state, and U.S. Secretary of Education.  Yes, it’s in the conservative op-ed section of the WSJ, but do you really expect to see a defense of institutional neutrality (ergo free speech) in the liberal mainstream media? Click to read:

 

(Diermeier had laid out the basis of his stand in a short Inside Higher Ed piece in 2022.)

In this case, Diermeier’s declaration was prompted by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which outraged many (including me). Urged by his faculty and students to officially weigh in opposing that decision, Diermeier refused, declaring his principle:

When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, the University of California’s president denounced the decision as “antithetical” to UC’s values. Vanderbilt University’s new chancellor took a different approach. Daniel Diermeier, who was appointed in 2020, reaffirmed Vanderbilt’s commitment to “principled neutrality,” in which the college and its leadership refrain from taking positions on controversial issues that don’t directly relate to the function of the university.

If “principled neutrality” sounds anodyne, you haven’t been paying attention. Mr. Diermeier’s stand is boldly reassuring. That his policies are an exception among elite universities isn’t.

Even within Vanderbilt, Mr. Diermeier’s stance is under attack. “Many of us—faculty, students, staff and alumni—are ready for a divorce from the chancellor’s position,” Brian L. Heuser, a Vanderbilt professor, argued in an Inside Higher Ed column. Mr. Heuser wants the university to take a stand against the Tennessee Legislature’s votes on a variety of issues.

(I’ll deal with Heuser’s arguments in a moment.)

Diermeier’s stand arose from the same roots as Chicago’s: repeated demands that the University take stands on public issues. At the University of Chicago this began decades ago, when people demanded that our university take a stand against Communism and then the Red Scare. It refused, and likewise refused when asked to make statements opposing Vietnam, Darfur, and the like. From the WSJ:

Mr. Diermeier’s commitment—as well as the university’s embrace of free expression on campus—is a legacy from the time when I was a student at Vanderbilt. In the 1960s, the university was being pummeled from the left and right for hosting controversial speakers like Allen Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael and Strom Thurmond. Chancellor Alexander Heard said at the time: “A university’s obligation is not to protect students from ideas, but rather expose them to ideas, to help make them capable of handling and, hopefully, having ideas.” Vanderbilt doesn’t take positions on abortion, guns or climate change, but it will ensure that on its campus you are free to state your position and hear others’ viewpoints.

That freedom is of course chilled when the powers that be have official stands that differ from your own. And so Diermeier embraced Kalven, though the Kalven Principle, sadly, isn’t mentioned in this op-ed:

Principled neutrality isn’t enough to prepare students to be good and thoughtful citizens. Too many are “taking cues from the polarized culture around them,” Mr. Diermeier says—they’re declaring that those with opposing views aren’t merely incorrect but immoral. Such “moral tribalism” and a culture of condemnation has severely impeded the free exchange of ideas that is higher education’s lifeblood.

Colleges today, Mr. Diermeier believes, must teach students how to debate constructively and “avoid the us-vs.-them dynamic that can lead to a breakdown in discourse.”

Did I mention that Diermeier was Provost of the University of Chicago for four years before he took the Chancellorship of Vanderbilt? I like to think that his ideas are drawn in part from the Kalven Principles that reign here.

Now the existence of a mere three colleges embracing institutional neutrality out of the 4,000 degree-granting colleges in America is a pathetic proportion: 0.075%. (In contrast, nearly 100 colleges have adopted a version of Chicago’s 2014 Principles of Free Expression). Other schools really must join Chicago, UNC, and Vanderbilt lest America’s universities change from institutions of learning, teaching, and discussion into instruments of social change. Make no mistake about it: this will happen until college administrators wise up and make free speech their most important guiding principle.

Finally, have a look at Deirmeier’s opponents, exemplified by Vanderbilt Professor Brian Heuser in his Inside Higher Ed piece, “A Critique of ‘Principled Neutrality‘.” Heuser insists that universities must take stands on political or ideological issues to stave off threats to the well being of American citizens:

Despite the chancellor’s insistence that “staying neutral requires courage,” many of our university stakeholders are experiencing significant fear as Nashville’s social conditions have deteriorated for women and members of our LGBTQI, Jewish, Black and immigrant communities. In this context, such neutrality is better understood as a toxic form of indifference to the lived realities of our citizens. We have also experienced horrific gun violence arriving on our doorstep, and our undergraduate students have taken the lead in defending our community’s safety. In this context, such neutrality is better understood as a brutal fear of governmental intrusion into our affairs.

Due in large part to our exceptional stock of human capital and economic impact, universities can be powerful—even profound—actors in the public discourse. But adeptly leveraging this potential requires transformational leadership, political acumen and a steadfast commitment to prioritizing the common good. Universities can—and often do—create significant social cohesion by using their knowledge capital to shape the public’s understanding of and commitment to inclusive causes. But this potential must also be activated by administrators who believe that it is worth their time and effort to engage with their larger communities on difficult issues.

[Note the woke Social Justice language: “toxic indifference”, “lived realities”, etc.]

The problem here, as you’ve probably seen, is that all the positions that Heuser thinks the university should take are liberal or leftist positions. I happen to agree with them, but that’s not the point. The point is one that Christopher Hitchens always made when opposing censorship: who decides which positions are the official and approved ones?  What if a Catholic chancellor decides to issue a statement opposing all abortions? That would be allowable if institutional neutrality weren’t in play. Or, what if a Southern university issues statements opposing gun control because it’s in America’s interests for its citizens to protect themselves?  As political and moral views change, so must the university’s “official” stands, and those who oppose them risk being punished. It’s better to avoid taking any official stands, allowing free speech to proliferate on campus. Colleges are not, as Kalven states (again), instruments of political change:

A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.

No, a university is not a club, a trade association, or a lobby; neither is it a political party.

With respect to official positions quashing free speech, Heuser’s argument, I think, is dead wrong:

To be clear, the chancellor and I agree that universities require significant internal freedom—academic freedom—to enable the continuous free flow of ideas that leads to everything from drug discoveries to political revolutions. We also agree that universities have an obligation to safeguard the intellectual freedom of our stakeholders—especially when their views are offensive—so long as it is exercised in constructive and nonviolent ways. However, his assertion that advancing institutional positions on political and policy-making issues somehow undermines an institution’s commitment to free speech and open discourse is utterly wrong. To the contrary, it is impossible to guarantee the free exchange of ideas without first assuring the participants of those exchanges that their basic human rights will be protected and defended, internally and externally. Failing to publicly defend those rights permits faculty, students and staff to be interrogated (and marginalized) on the basis of their human identities, rather than on the merits of their ideas and scholarship. From this vantage, “principled neutrality” is intellectually unprincipled and incongruent with the tasks of assuring personal safety and equal opportunity for all members of our university community. It is best interpreted as a privileged position of political convenience rather than a requisite for rigorous intellectual engagement.

This is a “free speech but. . . ” argument.

Given the many examples of professors being deplatformed, sanctioned or even fired for taking positions against DEI and other university-approved positions, it’s risible that Heuser argues that free speech won’t be chilled by institutional non-neutrality. Has he heard of Joshua Katz’s firing at Princeton, or the three professors at Texas’s Collins College fired for making political statements? (Some of these statements, by the way, were from the Left, showing that “who makes the rules?” is the big objection to institutional non-neutrality.)

___________

UPDATE: I’ve just found that Vanderbilt has published an official statement on Freedom of Expression that includes both free speech and “principled neutrality”.  Welcome to the trio of free-speech schools, and raspberries to Dr. Heuser.

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 16, 2023 • 8:37 am

Today we have a batch of insect and arthropod photos from regular contributor Mark Sturtevant. Mark’s captions and narrative are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

This set of pictures, taken a couple of summers ago, begins with rather ordinary examples of the arthropods from where I live (in Michigan). But to our mutual delight, the later pictures become rather weird.

First, here is a new species of meadow katydid that I had found near where I work. Normally, the small meadow katydids that abound in late summer fields are a short-winged species. But this one was clearly different. This is the slender meadow katydid, Conocephalis fasciatus It is a small but still satisfying thing to be able find a new katydid after so many years in the hobby.

Next is a weevil that I always call “that lumpy weevil”, because I’ve seen many of them in our yard but have never photographed because they were the size of a poppy seed. But now I have a super-macro lens (the manual Venus/Laowa 2.5-5x lens), and that can make short work of small things like this. So here is a manually focus-stacked picture of that lumpy weevil. Because of this picture I now know that they are really called the plumb curculio (Conotrachelus nenuphar), and that they are serious pests of fruit trees. We do have a couple of apple trees, and we have a neighbor who somehow manages to have a peach tree. So there’s little wonder that the plum curculio is common in our yard.

Fall comes quickly here, with cold mornings even while the insect season is still thriving. I had gone out one chilly morning to a nearby field (I think it was to find critters to feed to a praying mantis), but of course the camera tagged along in case. On this occasion, I came across a female green darner dragonfly (Anax junius) nestled deep in a tree. She was much too cold to fly, and so it could be moved to a perch for pictures. These are manually focus stacked images. Soon after, the sun had warmed her sufficiently and she was off in a flash.

The next two pictures are of spiders, and they both came to me via a close friend who lives down the road. After visiting down the road one evening, I came home late at night but then noticed there was a tiny spider dangling from the brim of my hat. It turned out to be one of those ant-mimicking jumping spiders, but this one was definitely a new species to me since it had ginormous chelicerae. This little oddity is Myrmarachne formicaria, photographed with that Venus/Laowa wonder-lens. The large chelicerae means that it is a male, but what they do with them I am not sure although no doubt it has something to do with mating. This species was recently introduced into the U.S., and it may be the first recorded citing of it in my state.

The second spider arrived when the same friend called me on the phone to tell me that a spider had ridden with him on his motorcycle to a store and back. Do I want it? Sure! So he pulls up on his ride and the spider turns out to be a flower crab spider (Misumenoides sp.). Nice, but not unusual. Here she is, a little gritty from the road. But things became weird while processing this picture. First, look at those two frontal eyes in the middle of her face. Do you see the expanded dark areas of color around them? Those are pigmented retina cells inside the head of the spider, and you can see them because the cuticle is translucent.

While assembling the focus stack for the above picture, I noticed that the dark retina cells were moving around in the head. You can see that with this two-frame gif animation made from pictures that focused on the eyes.

What is going on? It is well known that jumping spiders, which have very large frontal eyes, use little muscles in their head to move their retinas around to look out in different directions. You can see this clearly from this video. But this crab spider was evidently doing the same thing! After some research, it was learned that being able to move retinas around from behind the frontal eyes is a pretty widespread thing among spiders, so jumping spiders are not unique in this ability. These discoveries are one of the great joys of this hobby. After an entire life being absorbed by insects and spiders and such, and years spent photographing them, there are still new things to learn.

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

May 16, 2023 • 6:15 am

Oy! It’s Tuesday (the Cruelest Day), May 16, 2023, and National Barbecue Day. Now THIS PHOTO BELOW is barbecue, Texas style, taken on my Pandemic Barbecue Jaunt in April, 2021. It’s at my favorite in the area: Black’s BBQ in Lockhart, Texas, a tiny town with three famous BBQ joints. Shown: a BBQ beef rib with pickles, raw onions, beans, potato salad, and a jalapeño corn muffin. (Sweet iced tea not shown.)

I’ve tried BBQ all over the US, and in my view Texas style brisket and smoked beef is the best.

It’s also Biographer’s Day,(but which biographer?), Dinosaur Day, Love a Tree Day, National Mimosa Day, and National Coquilles St. Jacques Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Turkey’s election this weekend was indecisive: Erdogan, unfortunately, beat the more liberal and democratic Kemal Kilicdaroglu by 4.6%, but neither got more than 50% of the vote. There will thus be a runoff.

Turkey’s nail-biter election will go to a runoff, election officials announced on Monday, extending a pivotal vote that has demonstrated that the incumbent, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is still a formidable political force, despite his failure to secure a first-round victory.

Turkey’s Supreme Election Council said the runoff would be held May 28 after official preliminary results showed that Mr. Erdogan had won 49.5 percent of votes and his main challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, 44.9 percent, with nearly all ballots counted. Mr. Erdogan, who has led Turkey for 20 years, appeared to be in a strong position to emerge with another five-year term.

After a tumultuous night during which the rival camps each accused the other of rushing to declare results in advance of official tallies, both sides said early on Monday that they would accept a runoff — and predicted they would prevail.

Sunday’s voting was closely watched around the world for how it could shape the course of Turkey, an important NATO ally with a wide array of diplomatic and economic ties across continents. Of particular interest was the fate of Mr. Erdogan, who has often flummoxed and frustrated his Western partners, including the United States, and faced growing discontent amid high inflation and the destruction wrought by earthquakes in February that killed more than 50,000 in southern Turkey.

Before the vote, most polls suggested a slight lead for Mr. Kilicdaroglu, the joint candidate of a newly formed alliance of six opposition parties. But the results showed Mr. Erdogan’s enduring appeal and influence.

As the paper notes, this is the first runoff Presidential election in Turkey’s history, the turnout was about 90%, and, given the parliamentary elections, it looks as if Erdogan has the edge. The article adds that Erdogan “escalated his criticism of the United States, even claiming on the eve of the elections that President Biden was seeking to topple him.”  The man is a wannabe autocrat, and I’m very afraid he will win the runoff.

*From reader Ken:

In an effort to burnish his reputation as culture warrior numero uno, and to revive his flagging presidential ambitions, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed his fourth death warrant in less than four months. Last month, DeSantis signed two bills passed by his lackeys in the state legislature making Florida’s threshold for imposing the death penalty the lowest in the nation.

As a follow up, and by way of comparison, DeSantis signed just three death warrants during his entire first four-year term in office as Florida’s governor.

Republicans sure have a right-to-life view when it comes to fetuses, but not for felons.  I oppose all forms of capital punishment, and won’t vote for anyone who campaigns on it. Even Biden said he would do away with the federal death penalty in the last election, But he hasn’t done squat, and even now Justice Dept. attorneys are fighting to get people executed. That was a campaign promise I counted on.

*Uh oh: woke language is changing once again.  The NYT reports that “Diversity and Inclusion” is changing to “Diversity, Incllusion, and Belonging,” and that the tradition DEI, “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” will presumably become “Diversity, equity,, inclusion, and belonging.”

Interest in creating more inclusive workplaces exploded after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Many corporations turned their attention to addressing systemic racism and power imbalances — the things that had kept boardrooms white and employees of color feeling excluded from office life.

Now, nearly three years since that moment, some companies are amending their approach to D.E.I., even renaming their departments to include “belonging.” It’s the age of D.E.I.-B.

A new initial, but, curiously, it’s not for the marginalized:

Some critics worry it’s about making white people comfortable rather than addressing systemic inequality, or that it simply allows companies to prioritize getting along over necessary change.

“Belonging is a way to help people who aren’t marginalized feel like they’re part of the conversation,” said Stephanie Creary, assistant professor of management at the Wharton School of Business who studies corporate strategies for diversity and inclusion.

She believes an abstract focus on belonging allows companies to avoid the tough conversations about power — and the resistance those conversations often generate. “The concern is that we are just creating new terms like belonging as a way to manage that resistance,” Ms. Creary said.

Ms. Foster contends that as a practical matter, there will be no equity if the people in power — “the straight white male”— feel excluded from the conversation. The people traditional D.E.I. practitioners “most want to enroll are the people they’re isolating and honestly ostracizing,” she said.

This seems to me palpably ridiculous. Am I going to feel more “included” if they slap the word “belonging” onto “DEI”? Do they think I’m stupid? This is just a semantic embellishment to make those who are easily gulled suddenly get with the program. But the program won’t change.

*From yet another of the Discord leaks, we find out that the head of Russia’s paramilitary and merecenary Wagner group offered, on a condition, to give Russian troop locations to Ukraine!

In late January, with his mercenary forces dying by the thousands in a fight for the ruined city of Bakhmut, Wagner Group owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin made Ukraine an extraordinary offer.

Prigozhin said that if Ukraine’s commanders withdrew their soldiers from the area around Bakhmut, he would give Kyiv information on Russian troop positions, which Ukraine could use to attack them. Prigozhin conveyed the proposal to his contacts in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, with whom he has maintained secret communications during the course of the war, according to previously unreported U.S. intelligence documents leaked on the group-chat platform Discord.

. . .Prigozhin has publicly feuded with Russian military commanders, who he furiously claims have failed to equip and resupply his forces, which have provided vital support to Moscow’s war effort. But he is also an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who might well regard Prigozhin’s offer to trade the lives of Wagner fighters for Russian soldiers as a treasonous betrayal.

The leaked document does not make clear which Russian troop positions Prigozhin offered to disclose.

Not being stupid, Zelensky isn’t going to accept this proposal:

Two Ukrainian officials confirmed that Prigozhin has spoken several times to the Ukrainian intelligence directorate, known as HUR. One official said that Prigozhin extended the offer regarding Bakhmut more than once, but that Kyiv rejected it because officials don’t trust Prigozhin and thought his proposals could have been disingenuous.

This is not, however, going to make Putin happy. Besides, Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut are hanging in there, exhausting Russian troops while preparing for their own Spring offensive. Still, I don’t see a viable end to this conflict, not as long as Putin is in power.

*By god, this is too damn much. THE GOVERNMENT IS THINKING OF BANNING CHOCOLATE MILK FROM SCHOOLS!  As a child, I simply couldn’t STAND regular milk, and so I dutifully paid my 2¢ every day in school for my half pint of the brown stuff. But of course the Leisure Fascists are always busy. The problem, of course, is sugar:

Chocolate milk, long a school-cafeteria mainstay, could be coming off the menu.

Concerned about the amount of added sugars children are consuming, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is considering a ban on flavored milk— including chocolate, strawberry and other varieties—in elementary and middle schools when it adopts new standards for school meals.

The issue has divided parents, child-nutrition specialists, school-meal officials and others. Supporters of restricting flavored milk say it has added sugars that contribute to childhood obesity and establish preferences for overly sweet drinks. But opponents, including the dairy industry and many school districts, say removing it will lead to children drinking less milk.

“We want to take a product that most kids like and that has nine essential nutrients in it and say, ‘You can’t drink this, you have to drink plain’?” asked Katie Wilson, executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, which represents 18 of the largest school districts in the country. “What are we trying to prove?”

I tell you, I would not have drunk any milk in school if they didn’t have chocolate milk, and I’m not obese. If they’re worried about sugar, can’t they put Splenda in the milk instead?  The next thing you know, they’ll be saying that ketchup isn’t a vegetable.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s being dramatic:

Hili: Every day we cross some boundaries without even noticing it.
A: That’s true but not every stream is the Rubicon.
In Polish:
Hili: Codziennie przekraczamy jakieś granice, nawet tego nie zauważając.
Ja: To prawda, ale nie każdy strumyk jest Rubikonem.

And a photo of the affectionate Szaron:

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From Jean, an Amy Hwang cartoon:

 

From the Not Another Science Cat Page on FB:

From Nicole:

From Masih, a very sad scenario:

From Malcolm, a nuclear reactor starts up:

From Dom, a great bird photo:

From Barry, who says, “Fisherman rescues monkey from a fishing net. There’s going to be some serious imprinting!”

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 13-year-old girl gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, who’s digging through the Crick archives in La Jolla. First, an Irish Virgin Mary (watch the second one):

Dude, the working cat, could stand to lose some weight. Sound up:

A funny tweet acting out a real situation. Elsevier is the biggest leech in the scientific publishing biz: