I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.

Only four (August 2021).

Do you remember where Piper said that? Somewhere on Xitter? It sounds familiar. (Edit: here it is. I remembered the “James Damore was egregiously wronged” part but had mostly forgotten the rest.)

Damore’s memo blew up in 2017; ScienceBlogs was a shambling husk after most of the serious writers left in 2010, when management decided to offer Pepsi an advertorial disguised as a “nutrition” blog. (I left too, but I wasn’t a serious writer by any stretch of the imagination.) That capped off a long trend of the Seed Media Group management not listening to the bloggers, even though SB was the best thing they had going for them. Complaints on the back-channel forum were downplayed or ignored, etc. SB puttered along under National Geographic’s ownership through the Damore era, but the writing was on the wall in 2010 that the site couldn’t last.

The community that had formerly focused on SB got another nasty knock a few years later, when sexual harassment allegations came out about Bora Zivkovic, one of the prime organizers of the ScienceOnline conferences. That was a real betrayal that wounded a lot of people, and the organization only held on for one more conference before going belly-up.

“Skepticism” that acts to cover for bad science that hurts people deserves a retraction, not a disapproving shrug.

More than anything else, it was the skeptic movement’s decision that “no actually, being sexist is more fun” which drove out everyone interested in doing more than relitigating Bigfoot.

The sewer-deep Islamophobia from “luminaries” like Richard Dawkins didn’t help, either. One thing that is perhaps easy to miss now in looking back at “New Atheism” is how much it inhabited a shortly after 9/11 cultural space.

And regarding the point above that the analysis needs “Explicit acknowledgement of the role of capitalism and colonialist tendencies in corrupting subcultures”, the term New Atheism itself was a branding gimmick imposed from outside (codified by and perhaps first used in Wired magazine, of all places, AFAIK). The people who were already “in” it looked around and asked, “OK, what exactly is new about it?”. As far as actual arguments went, there was little if anything that Paul Dirac had not already said in 1927.

Shermer is a “sociopath” in the GMS taxonomy. But he rose to prominence in the '90s, co-founding the Skeptics Society in 1991 and publishing Why People Believe Weird Things in 1997. He was considered the old guard by those who came to skepticism/atheism via the '00s blogosphere, who were some combination of “geeks” and “mops”. So, there’s not really the linear order to it that the neat and tidy GMS story calls for.

I know both Watson and Myers. Neither of them were interested in “being tastemakers”; both of them stood on the right side of trying to make the skeptic/atheist spaces less of a sexist waste dump, and both of them caught hell for it. Myers was the one who blew the lid off Shermer’s history of sexual harassment (and got blackballed from a lot of skeptics’ events because of it). He was also part of the effort to make Atheism Plus a thing, and Watson was in favor too.* Carrier sued Myers and others after being removed from FreethoughtBlogs on what we’d now call #MeToo reasons. The rage tsunami directed at Watson for saying “guys, don’t do that” was basically the trial run for GamerGate. More than anything else, it was the skeptic movement’s decision that “no actually, being sexist is more fun” which drove out everyone interested in doing more than relitigating Bigfoot.

Harriet Hall got into trouble for just-asking-questions transphobia.

*The McCreight mentioned in that blog post later chose the name “Jey” and uses they/he pronouns.

The best I ever saw was a reply to a news story to the effect of, “If I were ever invited swimming in the Murderkill River, I would just not go.”

(This might be the original. Then again, it might not.)

J. Mijin Cha writes:

My colleague reviewed a paper for the journal Climate and discovered it has been written by AI (citations that didn’t exist). Not only did the journal keep the paper, they asked her to re-review it. We are so cooked.

Climate is an MDPI journal. Finland’s journal-ranking service downgraded Climate to zero status.

I would simply not name my airplane company “Boom”.

Reported for being too soon

:-P

“How do you keep yourself from going insane?”

“I tell myself I’m a character from a book who comes to life and is also a robot!” (Hubert Farnsworth giggle)

Also discussed in last week’s Stubsack.

That ramble fails to note the obvious: that the stills from Every Angel is Terrifying are Evangelion on ketamine.

deleted by creator

No one point out that “keeping your head while all about you are losing theirs” is also a trope.

Handshake meme of Yud and Rorschach praising Harry S Truman

From the comments:

I got Claude to read this text and explain the proposed solution to me

Once you start down the Claude path, forever will it dominate your destiny…

Growing up in Alabama, I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it, but I definitely had the feeling when meeting some people, “Given the bullshit you alreasy buy, there is nothing in principle stopping you from going full fash.” I get the same feeling now from Yuddites: “There is nothing in principle stopping you from going full Zizian.”

The people who build these products aren’t bad or evil.

No, I’m pretty sure that a lot of them just are bad and evil.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence, we stand at a crossroads. This technology holds genuine promise.

[citation needed]

[to a source that’s not laundered slop, ya dingbats]

A belief system that inculates the believer into thinking that the work is the most important duty a human can perform, while also isolating them behind impenetrable pseudo-intellectual esoterica, while also funneling them into economic precarity… sounds like a recipe for delicious brownies trouble.

From Lila Byock:

A 4th grader was assigned to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking using Adobe for Education.

The result is, in technical terms, four pictures of a schoolgirl waifu in fetishwear.

Dr. Casey Fiesler reports,

I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let’s dig into the findings.

[…]

Did you guess “that paper does not actually exist”?

Did you also guess that NOT A SINGLE PAPER IN THEIR REFERENCES APPEARS TO EXIST? […] When I was searching in various places to confirm that those citations were fabricated, Google’s AI overview just kept the con going.

Jill Walker Rettberg in the comments:

There’s a peer reviewed published paper in AI & Society called Cognitive Imperialism and Artificial Intelligence which is clearly mostly AI-generated. Citations are real but almost all irrelevant. I emailed the editors weeks ago but it’s still up there and getting cited.