Scientific American Publishes False Information, Recklessly Stoking the Culture Wars

Three alleged specialists in communications who wrote this article at Scientific American could not be bothered to look up the easily available text of a Wisconsin bill that they are falsely criticizing. This is deeply troubling. This is magazine that purports to celebrate science, yet this article, which has nothing to do with science, blatantly misrepresents the facts (the text of a Wisconsin) bill in order to score political points. Here's the false information:

A bill passed by the Wisconsin Assembly, for instance, bans any books, educational materials, or classroom discussions that include terms like “racial prejudice,” “patriarchy,” “structural inequality,” “intersectionality” or, ironically, “critical self-reflection.”

It only takes 5 minutes to read Wisconsin bill 411 and clearly and immediately know that none of the above claims are true.  Jesse Singal comments.

I'm not taking a position on the above Wisconsin bill. Rather, I'm criticizing well-educated people in high places who deceive others from their perches in order to feel better about themselves.

This is not the first time Scientific American has run off the rails on cultural issues. See here, here and here.

RIP Scientific American.  I used to read and admire you because you tried to get your facts right and you wrote about science.

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Sizing up Diversity Training: Is it Education or is it Indoctrination?

At Counterweight, Chuck Almdale has offered a thoughtful list of ten warning signs in his article at Counterweight: "Ten Signs your Diversity Training Session is CSJ Indoctrination."

Here are the titles to the ten warning signs:

1. It’s mandatory.

2. “Listen with curiosity, without judgment.”

3. “Check your privilege.”

4. “How do you identify?”

5. “What are your pronouns?”

6. Black Allyship.

7. No humor.

8. Shaming for disagreement or critical questions.

9. Diversity of race, gender and ethnicity but not of thought or speech.

10. New terms, rarely supported or defined.

Here's an excerpt on point 8:

Questions are permitted only to increase your shame and acquiescence to their program, as in “How do I stop behaving as a privileged white woman?” Critical questions about their statements or behavior are not permitted. They’ll say, “You’re pulling a power play”—trying to resist them, trying to influence others, subverting the training, and your disagreement proves your racism, that you are “on the wrong side of history”; the future belongs to the Woke. Want to belong? “Do the Work.”

Don’t believe them if they say that the “still, small voice” of your inner self is your White Fragility, panicking at vanishing. If they succeed at inhibiting that voice, your psychological recovery from Wokeness becomes very difficult, as some psychological therapists and others have discovered. Psychotherapist Seerut K. Chawla, practicing in London, dislikes Wokeness for the damage it has caused to many of her patients. Mike Brooks writes in Psychology Today about how Woke shaming destroys compassion. Also in Psychology Today Rupert W Nacoste writes that name-calling is bigotry, not social justice. The pressure to conform from facilitators and other trainees can be overwhelming. Your ounce of resistance is worth a pound of cure. Resist. Question. Tell a joke. Humor subverts Wokeness. One voice of resistance can unleash a chorus of support.

I would add the following. If you are forced to attend such an indoctrination session, go in knowing that you are going to make a lot of people irritated by committing the sin of being honest.  You will be called names and you will be shamed.  You will survive and live another day.  In the middle of the shamefest remember that Martin Luther King put up with abuse a thousand times worse for a period of decades.  Talk loud, hold your head high and know that there are a lot of quiet people in that room who are proud of you and relieved that you are speaking up.

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Margaret Atwood Tries to have a Conversation with Trans Rights Activists

The resulting vomit of coarse and disrespectful language shocks even Buck Angel.  Click the images if you are not easily offended by extremely crude language.

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Look Who We Are Becoming: Joe Biden Accused of Flashing White Power Gesture

Amazing. Ridiculous accusation amplified by the media as conflict pornography, morphed into sadly hilarious denouement. Wokeness is universal acid (to borrow Dan Dennett's term). It will permeate everything. Martin Luther King offered a courageous, brilliant and hopeful alternative path.

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The Difference Between Information and Knowledge

I'm reading The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (2021). It has been a very slow read for me because it is such a impressive and detailed analysis of what is ailing us today. Here is a major distinction that is largely unappreciated. Information is merely "stuff," whereas knowledge must be carefully earned through the use of intricate institutions that coordinate, test and refine human observations and conclusions. This excerpt is from page 125:

What the institutionalization of modern, fact-based journalism did was to create a system of nodes—professional newsrooms which can choose whether to accept information and pass it on. The reality-based community is a network of such nodes: publishers, peer reviewers, universities, agencies, courts, regulators, and many, many more. I like to imagine the system’s institutional nodes as filtering and pumping stations through which propositions flow. Each station acquires and evaluates propositions, compares them with stored knowledge, hunts for error, then filters out some propositions and distributes the survivors to other stations, which do the same.

Importantly, they form a network, not a hierarchy. No single gatekeeper can decide which hypotheses enter the system, and there are infinitely many pathways through it. . .

Suppose some mischievous demon were to hack into the control center one night and reverse the pumps and filters. Instead of straining out error, they pass it along. In fact, instead of slowing the dissemination of false and misleading claims, they accelerate it. Instead of marginalizing ad hominem attacks, they encourage them. Instead of privileging expertise, they favor amateurism. Instead of validating claims, they share claims. Instead of trafficking in communication, they traffic in display. Instead of identifying sources, they disguise them. Instead of rewarding people who persuade others, they reward those who publicize themselves. If that were how the filtering and pumping stations worked, the system would acquire a negative epistemic valence. It would actively disadvantage truth. It would be not an information technology but misinformation technology.

No one saw anything like that coming. We—I certainly include myself—expected digital technology to broaden and deepen the marketplace of ideas. There would be more hypotheses, more checkers, more access to expertise. How could that not be a leap forward for truth? At worst, we assumed, the digital ecosystem would be neutral. It might not necessarily tilt toward reality, but neither would it systematically tilt against reality.

Unfortunately, we forgot that staying in touch with reality depends on rules and institutions. We forgot that overcoming our cognitive and tribal biases depends on privileging those rules and institutions, not flattening them into featureless, formless “platforms.” In other words, we forgot that information technology is very different from knowledge technology. Information can be simply emitted, but knowledge, the product of a rich social interaction, must be achieved. Converting information into knowledge requires getting some important incentives and design choices right. Unfortunately, digital media got them wrong.

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