Views from Crestmont Drive

• By way of Jerry Coyne and Jason Arday, comments from Richard Dawkins about physics, natural selection, and human intuition;
• To JD Vance, a tumbling glass is evidence of God;
• Conservatives hate social responsibility, e.g. they would repeal helmet laws;
• A beauty pageant winner claiming discrimination based on her faith has a history of racist social media posts;
• MAGA obsession with Anthony Fauci is about nostalgia for Covid-era victimhood;
• Pettersson symphony #9.

There’s something going on recently about an academic called Jason Arday, as summarized in Jerry Coyne’s post today: The first MSM reviews of Jason Arday’s book, and a Dawkins take

Plagiarism perhaps. Racism perhaps. Academic obfuscation, perhaps. I’m not going to figure it out. But Coyne’s piece ends with some comments from Richard Dawkins that speak directly to one of my themes.

My point in quoting this is in the third and following sentences (highlighted):

Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic discipline expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Modern physics is genuinely difficult. Natural selection of Pleistocene man did not prepare our poor brains for Einstein or Heisenberg. Common sense, forged in a world of middle-sized objects travelling at medium speeds, must be sent away on compassionate leave when we open a book on quantum mechanics or relativity. Physicists have no need to language-up their writing. Their subject is intrinsically difficult. Naming no names, practitioners of a subject that any fool can understand may suffer from what has been called “physics-envy”. Longing to sound more profound than they are, what recourse have they but obscurantist language? Look, for example, at the following passage from Arday’s thesis:

“An important consideration which also formed part of the theoretical paradigm for the research recognised that the mentoring process is socially constructed, and therefore the relationship between the participants and the researcher needed to be tailored towards supporting the professional development of the student teachers, and making them autonomous social actors in this process, hence the researcher adopting the secondary position of facilitator within the research.”

I must ask: did the examiners at Liverpool John Moores University, who judged his thesis worthy of a PhD, actually read it? One trivial give-away: the thesis contains 332 instances where a plural noun’s terminal “s” is incorrectly followed by an apostrophe. There’s even one in the thesis title: “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” Where I come from, a PhD candidate has a research supervisor, with a duty of care. It’s hard to believe even he read the thesis before letting it go forward to examination.

At the same time, there are apparently other crises in academic publishing — the need to publish at all, to gain tenure; the replicability crisis especially in the ‘soft’ sciences; this notion of “physics-envy,” and so on. And now the infection of AI, as signaled by the apostrophe issue cited in the third paragraph above.

If there’s a solution, it has to lie with the application of rigorous standards and processes as I suggested in yesterday’s post, the “Capability Maturity Models” of engineering. As Dawkins suggests, those are the only things that work when dealing with reality outside our local experience. The very opposite of the way our current government is working, where loyalty, nepotism, and arbitrary timelines overrule any standards of integrity or experience.

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The more I think about it, the more I think the great left/right divide is analogous to objectivity vs subjectivity. Examples today.

• JMG, yesterday: Vance: God Sent Me A Message By Tumbling A Glass
• If you have “faith,” anything can mean whatever you want. Don’t they realize this? The entire random world is all about them.

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• This is also about social responsibility vs individual freedom. Left/right. The right doesn’t care that they’re spreading deadly viruses by refusing to wear masks; it’s about their freedom!
• JMG, today, Republican Reps File Bill To Overturn DC’s Helmet Law
• I think I predicted once that eventually they would go after seat belts in cars as being too much a part of the nanny state.
• You can try to explain to these people that society is better off, overall, when certain restrictions are put in place to save reckless people from themselves. It’s not just about them. It’s about everyone’s healthcare costs; it’s about the wise precautionary folks having to pay for the damage caused by the reckless.
• But, they don’t care. Freedom!

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• Once again, people use “faith” to excuse anything.
• Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, yesterday: Miss North Carolina USA said she lost her crown due to her faith. Then the racist posts surfaced.
• Subtitled: “Brittany Boltinhouse says her conservative Christianity cost her the title. Screenshots of her own social media posts tell a very different story.”
• What did she actually do? She posted a bunch of social media posts about “n*ggas.”
• Defending them as her faith.

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And a longer piece.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, today: MAGA has pandemic nostalgia, subtitled “Renewed harassment of Dr. Anthony Fauci is a sad attempt to reclaim a Covid-era victim narrative”

For people outside of Donald Trump‘s MAGA coalition, the renewed Republican harassment campaign of Dr. Anthony Fauci makes no sense. It’s been more than five years since the Covid-19 lockdowns ended. With the November midterms looming, most Americans are far more focused on present-day concerns, such as the high cost of living and a tough job market, than a disease that has faded from a “mortal threat” to a “minor annoyance” for the vast majority of people. But that didn’t stop Senate Republicans, led by Kentucky’s Rand Paul, to haul the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases before a Senate committee in late July to be harangued with coronavirus conspiracy theories — even though Fauci’s tenure ended four years ago.

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But the social media response to the Fauci hearing showed that one group of people wishes it could be 2020 all over again: MAGA diehards. Right-wing accounts went buck wild with posts reviving all their favorite lies from the pandemic, from claiming vaccines don’t work to insisting that the virus is a Chinese bioweapon.

This is an ongoing theme, but I haven’t quite boiled it down yet. Just collected lots of examples.

Yet there’s a certain victim narrative running through so many stories about Christians these days.

Why? Is it because their religious narratives are increasingly under assault by the evidence of the real world, and the victory of science and technology in having built our modern world?

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Currently my huge monitor is down, and I’ve been working from my laptop. The arrangement on my desk therefore makes it more difficult to use my CD player, which I do everyday while writing up my blogpost. Instead I’ve resorted to YouTube.

There are several videos of Allan Pettersson symphonies, including this one of the 9th.

Comments indicate this is a slower performance than usual; certainly, 1hr 25m it’s longer than my CD with conductor Alun Francis, at 69:52.

It’s slower, though only in a few selected passages. Alas, the video shows only landscapes, not the playing orchestra.