Quotulatiousness

October 24, 2018

Temporal privilege

Filed under: Books, Britain, Health, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest issue of Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt discusses reading a recent historical novel that she nearly threw at the wall:

What brought about this rant is that I just read a Pride and Prejudice Variation written by someone who swallowed Dickens hook line and barbed socialist sinker.

Dickens was an amazing writer. What he was not was an historian or an impartial observer. What he put in his books has tainted people’s perception of the past and encouraged the cardinal “socialist virtue” of envy. It causes people to think those richer than themselves are callous bastards. It teaches people to see the past through that lens.

This book was almost walled when the woman assured us that the middle and upper classes did not care about the disappearance of a serving-woman.

It wasn’t many years after that the murder of a series of prostitutes set Victorian England aflutter, and yes, that included the upper and middle classes.

In the same way she waxes pathetic about how death was common among the poor in the Regency. B*tch, death was common in the Regency, period. If your entitled, propagandized ass were plopped down in a society with no antibiotics and uncertain house-heating, you’d learn really quickly how common. Young ladies in the upper reaches of society routinely made two baby shrouds as part of their trousseau. They were expected to lose at least that many children. And while we’re talking of children, yeah, death in child birth was really common too. As was death in any of the male occupations which, as is true throughout history, took them outside the house. Even noblemen were around horses a lot, and spent quite a bit of time — if they were worth their salt — managing their own lands, fraught occupations in a time when any wound could turn “septic” and any cold could turn “putrid” and carry you off.

Yeah. The people in these close-to-the-bone societies didn’t give money to people who’d waste it. They sometimes set conditions on distributing largesse. And they had definite opinions on what behaviors were “good” and which “bad.”

They weren’t tight-ass moralists, as the left imagines. They were following precepts and behaviors proven to lead to success. Mostly success in staying alive.

They were poorer than us and in that measure they were a lot more realistic.

They had to be. The other way lay death.

Spitting on our ancestors for not obsessing about gender-fluid trilobites is in fact the ultimate expression of “temporal privilege.” The left is yelling at people poorer, unhealthier and less able than themselves.

And they’re proud of it.

How long can you go without sleep? | James May’s Q&A (Ep 14) | Head Squeeze

Filed under: Health, Humour, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Earth Lab
Published on 5 Apr 2013

James May talks us through how long you can go for without any sleep.

October 23, 2018

Myers-Briggs Type Indicators as a “variety of psychobullshit rune-gazing”

Filed under: Books, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest issue of Reason, Katrina Gulliver reviews a new book on a pop psychology notion that escaped into the wild for a generation, wreaking havoc in corporate HR departments across the country:

The Myers-Briggs test and others like it were huge in the corporate world in the 1980s and ’90s. Individuals took them to see what kind of careers they should pursue; H.R. offices used them to decide who to hire or promote. In The Personality Brokers, Merve Emre explores how, precisely, this variety of psychobullshit rune-gazing was born.

Briggs and Myers were a mother and daughter who shared a personal fascination with psychology. Katharine Briggs, born in the last quarter of the 19th century, was one of the few women of her generation to gain a college degree. Like most female members of the upper-middle-class in her time, however, she didn’t pursue a career, instead marrying young and raising a family. Rather than the chemistry she had studied at college, children became her research subject.

With an intensity that sounds frightening, Briggs believed she could develop a scientific approach to raising well-behaved, intelligent children. She seemed to do a good job with her daughter Isabel, and other parents soon sought her advice. Briggs was well-connected — her husband was a Washington bureaucrat, so of course she knew magazine editors. Soon she was writing columns for various publications about ideal parenting and child behavior.

As a devotee of psychology, she developed a correspondence with Carl Jung. She drew on his psychological theories to interpret the personalities of kids, the better to advise their parents on behavior management. The 16 “types” of the Myers-Briggs index directly relate to Jung’s thinking, and Jung’s approval of her ideas offered validation for her explorations.

But the commercial Myers-Briggs test came later, and it was far more her daughter’s achievement. Isabel Myers was also fascinated with psychological type. But being a generation younger, she was better placed to pursue this professionally. Again, she had the advantages of social connection: Her husband was an attorney, and she happened to know Edward Northup Hay, one of the first personality consultants in the United States.

In 1943, Hay allowed Briggs — despite her having no formal qualifications or experience — to offer her test to his clients. The takers were few: mostly small outfits, sometimes just a single test for a potential employee. She continued working to perfect the evaluation, trying it on friends and neighbors.

Quantum Computing – The World of the Future – Extra History – #6

Filed under: History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 21 Oct 2018

Credit to Alisa Bishop for her art on this series: http://www.alisabishop.com/

What does the quantum revolution mean today? We talk about quantum computing application possibilities in machine learning, cybersecurity, environmental science, and more.

A tremendous thank-you to Alexander Tamas, the “mystery patron” who made this series possible. We finally found room in our busy production schedule to create and air this series alongside our regularly scheduled, patron-approved Extra History videos. A huge thank you to the multiple guest artists we got to work with, to Matt Krol for his skillful wrangling of the production schedule and keeping everyone happy, and to our Patreon supporters for your patience and support.

Support us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon

October 22, 2018

QotD: Aging gracefully

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Last year, for the first time, a young girl, French, offered me her seat on a crowded bus. I was surprised at how deeply I resented her. Health looms over the elderly like a threatening monsoon. No ache is innocuous. No lump or discoloured, sagging patch of body is ignorable except our toenails, which become the most sordidly repellent things in all nature. We covertly examine ourselves and our effluvia for the premonition of the dark humour that will carry us away. There is no such thing as a routine checkup. They are all life-or-death appointments.

Doctors start all their sentences with “It’s only …” But we’re not fooled. This generation is also the one that lingers longest over its departure. Death came to our grandparents with a clutched chest and a searing pain. For us it’s a slow, humiliating series of it’s onlys. What we worry about is dementia, a condition that did not exist in the popular lexicon when I was a child. Mind you, we also thought cancer was as shaming as divorce. Now Alzheimer’s is our abiding fear, the thing we can’t forget.

My chats with contemporaries are like bridge games where we try to fill in the gaps in each other’s sentences to make one coherent conversation. My dad died of Alzheimer’s. I once asked him how he was feeling: “Oh, quite well, except you know I’ve got this terrible disease, what’s its name?” So we go to the gym, we have trainers, I do Pilates. But it’s only maintenance. I’m not looking for a beach body, there’s no New Me in the cupboard; I just want one that’s supple enough to put on my own socks.

After giving up drink and drugs, I continued to smoke about 60 a day until 12 years ago and then I stopped. And people said, “Well done! How did you manage it? What willpower!”

It didn’t feel like well done. It felt like a defeat — the capitulation to fear. When I started smoking at 14 I was golden, immortal. I smoked around the world; I took pride in my ability to smoke with elegance, panache and skill. Smoking was my talent and I gave it up because I lost my nerve.

I don’t miss the cigarettes, but I do miss the me that smoked so beautifully.

A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.

October 20, 2018

Barley, beer, and climate change

Filed under: Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

There was a “study” recently released proclaiming the end of beer … or at least a huge hike in beer prices coupled with a drop in availability due to climate change. Tim Worstall explains why the report is — at best — misleading:

Barley (Hordeum vulgare) at the United States National Arboretum.
Photo by Flikr user “Cliff” via Wikimedia Commons.

You’ll have seen the various reports over the past few days that climate change is going to do terrible damage to the beer industry. The mechanism is that drought and heat will reduce the barley yield, this will then reduce the amount of beer that can be made. What follows is the explanation from the actual researchers of what they’ve done. It is, to put it mildly, nonsense. For their assumptions are wrong. Let us say that climate change does reduce barley yields on those lands currently planted to it. But we do know that as this happens then other, more polar, regions open up to being suitable for the growing of barley. So the initial worry is just untrue.

They then go on to insist that we’ll feed the cows on the barley that’s left rather than make beer from it. Thus the shortfall in beer is greater than that in barley. Nonsense upon stilts. Humans don’t work that way. We started this agriculture thing because we wanted the beer after all. Feeding the animals came later – and often enough the cows are fed on the barley after we’ve made the beer from it anyway. We’d put our minimal supply into booze not beasts.

Finally, they tells us that Irish beer prices would double. No, really, given the level of taxes there upon the stuff it’s really not true that even their 30% reduction in barley supply is going to double the price.

October 19, 2018

QotD: “None of us are standard issue”

Filed under: Health, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Our own age, still, has the “image” of the mass-producing society that brought unparalleled prosperity and riches to the world in the last century (along with some truly horrible mass killings.)

The mass killings, Marxism (which people inhale without knowing, even in American Universities), behaviorism, and a passion for numbered, standardized everything are part of the ethos of the industrial age.

It is perhaps too much to ask people working on standard machines, to produce standard sizes, using standardized movements to conform to the machine’s mechanical exactness not to think in terms of “standard sizes” and “Models.”

You see this more strongly in the works of early science fiction writers, who expected psychology to to be standardized, numbered and filed and then all problems of mankind would be solved.

This stopped around the forties or fifties, when there was starting to be a suspicion that humans were not in fact standard issues, and that they had a disturbing tendency to be … human on an individual scale. I.e. “Nobody is normal” started penetrating the collective consciousness, but people STILL try to be normal. A part of the craze for transgenderism (other than that the progressives decided this was the next hill to die on) is this idea that there are standard models of people. Note I don’t say every transgender person is the result of that. There are cases of such profound mismatch between mind and body that even flawed and ultimately mutilating surgery (which is all we can do right now) is preferable to going on with the mismatch. These cases are, needless to say, very rare. But I swear at least half of the generation after my kids identifies as transgender, or gender queer, or gender fluid, or some other form of gender nonsense that has absolutely nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the fact the poor dears have imbibed this flawed version of humanity as easily filable and definable. If you think that a girl who prefers trains and toy cars, a boy who prefers dolls […] a boy who is better at verbal than math, a girl who is the reverse, all of these are TOLD they are abnormal, if not in words, in the reaction of other people, until they feel they must have a problem.

In fact, none of us are standard issue. The very fact that, say, the medieval world, a communitarian world under stress (compared to us) of disease and famine, which needed to eliminate odds to operate, spent SO MUCH time decreeing what men and women COULD do meant that men and women kept blurring those lines, which for that time and place were FAR more clear than they are now. (I am an odd. In the world I grew up in, which retains a lot of medieval characteristics, I not only was pulled away from groups of boys I was playing with and told that girls play with girls and boys with boys (sounds like a motto for a gay bar) but I was also severely suppressed when I was about 8 and developed a fascination with whistling. I was told that women who whistle and men who spin (thread) are both going to hell. This must be a medieval thing, as I have clue zero why whistling should be masculine. In my family’s defense, this might have been an attempt at just getting the horrible noise to stop.

Sarah Hoyt, “Gears and Patterns”, According to Hoyt, 2016-12-16.

October 18, 2018

Canada legalizes cannabis … then takes the rest of the week off

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

What do you know? Justin Trudeau actually followed through on his promise to legalize marijuana across the country! Of all his election promises, that’s probably the one that most voters expected him to ditch as soon as the votes were counted, yet here we are in the second country in the world to legalize the stuff. So, everyone not here in Canuckistan, we’ll probably be back sometime next week as we’ve got a lot of mellowing to get done…

Oh, you want a blog post? Duuuude, just take another hit.

Oh, okay, here ya go:

An Abacus Data poll released this week suggests Canadians are ready for marijuana legalization even if their governments might not be: Strong majorities of respondents in every age group and in every region said they could support or at least “accept” the framework that goes into effect Oct. 17. Even 54 per cent of Conservative voters said they could support or accept legal weed.

[…]

The resistance continues, certainly. In a special meeting on Tuesday, just days before Ontario’s municipal elections, City Council in Markham, Ont., passed a bylaw restricting marijuana smoking to private residences. It had earlier voted 12-1 in favour of “opting out” of storefront retail, as allowed for under provincial regulations.

“When you’re taking your grandmother down the street for a walk, (we don’t want you) having to be exposed to a number of individuals potentially at a street corner participating in it,” says Mayor Frank Scarpitti.

Richmond, B.C., is another refusenik jurisdiction. Mayor Malcolm Brodie notes the city took a much harsher approach than neighbouring Vancouver to the proliferation of illegal dispensaries, throwing the book at the only one that attempted to open. And he credits the provincial government with listening to municipalities’ concerns and allowing them to go their own ways

Indeed, considering the Reefer Madness-level debate, it seems somewhat remarkable how peacefully this sea change is washing over the country — and it seems the patchwork of provincial and municipal rules, much derided by Conservatives, is partly to credit for that.

A quick run-down of the new rules.

Thanks to time zones, the first legal sale of marijuana happened in Newfoundland:

One of the first customers to buy legal recreational cannabis in Canada says he has no intention of smoking, vaping or otherwise consuming the gram of weed he bought at a store in St. John’s.

Ian Power, who was first in line at one of several stores in the country’s easternmost province that opened just after midnight local time, says he plans to frame his purchase.

Hundreds of customers were lined up around the block at the private store on Water Street, the main commercial drag in the Newfoundland and Labrador capital, by the time the clock struck midnight.

A festive atmosphere broke out, with some customers lighting up on the sidewalk and motorists honking their horns in support as they drove by the crowd.

Cannabis NL expected 22 stores to open on Oct. 17, but not all opted to open in the middle of the night to commemorate the event.

Licensed marijuana producer Canopy Growth Corp. opened the Tweed-branded store in St. John’s at the late hour, while retailer Loblaw Companies Ltd. planned to start selling cannabis at its 10 locations at 9 a.m.

October 17, 2018

Quantum Computing – Decoherence – Extra History – #5

Filed under: History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 14 Oct 2018

Credit to Alisa Bishop for her art on this series: http://www.alisabishop.com/

Quantum computing isn’t a replacement for classical computing … yet. Quantum decoherence happens when anything gets in the way of a qubit’s job, so sterile low-temperature environments are an absolute necessity.

A tremendous thank-you to Alexander Tamas, the “mystery patron” who made this series possible. We finally found room in our busy production schedule to create and air this series alongside our regularly scheduled, patron-approved Extra History videos. A huge thank you to the multiple guest artists we got to work with, to Matt Krol for his skillful wrangling of the production schedule and keeping everyone happy, and to our Patreon supporters for your patience and support.

Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon

October 16, 2018

Fast food outlets cluster in poorer areas – because they’re low-margin businesses

Filed under: Business, Food, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall debunks the “fast food restaurants are preying on the poor” myth:

Contrary to the musings of Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times there is a cause and effect going on over the placings of fast food restaurants or outlets in British towns. The provision of burnt chicken and maybemeatburgers to the hoi polloi is a hugely competitive business. This means that it is also low margin. So, where do you put the places that are in a low margin line of business?

[…] this is about clustering of those nosh joints. Why are they in the poor areas? Well, for the same reason the poor are in the poor areas. They’re cheap. This being rather the defining point about poor people, they look for cheap places to live. The two are therefore synonymous, poor and cheap. And what is it we’ve just said about nosh? That it’s a low margin business. Therefore purveyors of the deep fried and battered saveloy – that joy of the ages – are going to be clustered in the poor part of town where they can afford the rents.

And that’s our cause and effect. Some poor people are poor because they’re, or have been, ill. They’re in the cheap part of town because they’re poor. Fried gut shops are in poor areas because they don’t make much money therefore they’re in the poor part of town. Absolutely any analysis of the phenomenon which doesn’t account for this is wrong. And no analysis done by anyone does take account of it – therefore all current analyses of the point are indeed wrong.

There are also other factors to consider, including the fact that poor people are less likely to have the ability or facilities to prepare their own meals (or the habit of cooking for themselves), so the easy availability of high-calorie fast food or snacks is rather important to them. When you’re hungry and don’t have a fridge or freezer full of food at home, a burger or fried chicken has a much stronger appeal than it does to more wealthy folks with well-stocked pantries. If you’ve been raised on high-fat/high-salt foods, the “healthier” alternatives may not appeal, as they also are less flavourful than their fast food options.

October 13, 2018

It’s always TEOTWAWKI, and the demands are always the same

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sean Gabb on the message and tactics of the alarmists — whose chosen fixation shifts over time, but whose demands are always the same:

Once you cut through their verbiage, the enemies of bourgeois civilisation have two demands. These are:

  1. Put me and my friends in charge of preferably a one-world government with total power over life and property; or, until then, or failing that,
  2. Give us a lot of money.

When I was younger, the occasion for making these demands was something to do with poverty or economic instability, and the alleged need was for a bigger welfare state, or state ownership of the means of production, or playing about with money to “move the aggregate demand curve to the right.” The nice thing about these claims and their alleged solutions was that they all had to be debated within the subject area of Economics. Because most of us knew a lot about Economics, we could always win the debates.

By the end of the 1980s, winning was so easy, the debates had become boring. Since then, the alleged need has shifted to saving the planet from some environmental catastrophe. The resulting debates are now harder to win because most of us are not that learned in the relevant sciences. Though I am more than competent in Economics, my main expertise is in Ancient History and the Classical Languages. Much the same is true for most of my friends.

Take, for example, the latest occasion for making the two demands stated above. This is that the sea is filling up with waste plastic, and that this looks horrid, and is being eaten by the creatures who live in the sea, and that they are all at risk of dying – and that this will be a terrible thing of all of us. For the solution, see Annie Leonard, writing in The Guardian: “Recycling alone will never stem the flow of plastics into our ocean. We must address the problem at the source.” You can take her last sentence as shorthand for the usual demands.

What response have I to this? Not much directly. Give me half an hour, and I will explain with practised ease that the Phillips Curve is at best a loose correlation between past variables, and that there is no stable trade-off between unemployment and inflation. But search me how most plastics are made, how long they take to degrade, or what harm they do if eaten.

A short search on the Web has brought up some useful information. There is, for example, an essay by Kip Hansen, published in 2015 – “An Ocean of Plastic.” He says, among much else:

  • That the Great Garbage Patch said to be floating about the Pacific is a myth, and that the main alleged photographs of it were taken in Manila Bay after a storm had washed the rubbish out of the streets;
  • That the amount of plastic waste floating in the sea is very small per cubic metre of water, and that it is invisible to the uninformed eye in the places where this Garbage Patch is said to be floating;
  • That plastic waste quickly breaks down into tiny chunks that are then eaten by bacteria, who are not harmed by it;
  • That larger chunks eaten by fish and birds are easily handled by digestive systems that have evolved over many ages to cope with much worse than the occasional lump of polystyrene foam.

His conclusion:

    The “floating rafts of plastic garbage”-version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a pernicious myth that needs to be dispelled at every opportunity.

QotD: Evolution

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Science, Tools — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Look… Just because H. habilis was several branches back on the family bush doesn’t mean we’re supposed to stop being handy.

I get not carrying a pistol. It’s not for everybody and, if done with any level of seriousness, demands certain commitments and obligations that not everyone wants to undertake, and that’s cool. It’s still (mostly) a free country.

But how do you go through life without a flashlight and some kind of knife? Our most primitive ancestors carried sharp rocks around with them. Hell, carrying a sharpened rock around in case of future need is basically how we tell where the apes stop and the people start in our fossil family album. If they could have carried a light around without it burning their fingers or going out all the time, you bet they would have.

They make flashlights and knives small enough to accommodate any code, dress or legal, up with which you have to put.

Tamara Keel, “Look…”, View from the Porch, 2016-05-26.

October 12, 2018

Carbon taxes may be efficient, but let’s not rush into it quite yet…

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Terence Corcoran says we shouldn’t jump at the chance to kill our economy just because carbon taxes are efficient:

It didn’t take long for federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna to tweet out the news implying that the Nobel committee supported the government of Canada’s carbon-price scheme. The Montreal-based carbon-taxing NGO, the Ecofiscal Commission, hailed Nordhaus for having “demonstrated” that a universal price on carbon was the most “efficient” way to curb climate change.

Before jumping aboard the Nordhaus bandwagon, however, carbon-taxing politicians and all Canadians might want to take a closer look at what they are being led into.

[…]

Nordhaus and his co-winner of this year’s Nobel in economics, former Stanford economist Paul Romer, are great believers in “incentives.” As Romer said in a post-Nobel interview (tweeted by McKenna, naturally): “I believe, and I think Bill (Nordhaus) believes, that if we start encouraging people to find ways to produce lower carbon energy, everybody’s going to be surprised at the progress we’ll make as we go down that path. All we need to do is create some incentives that get people going in that direction, and that we don’t know exactly what solution will come out of it — but we’ll make big progress.”

But why a tax? If all we need to do is deploy the price mechanism, why impose a tax? Let’s ignore for a moment the dubious assumption that the science and economics of climate change are sound and settled. Would it still not be better to have the government set the carbon price, require the energy companies to charge it, but allow the revenue to flow not to government but through to energy companies and their shareholders, and others in the supply chain? That’s where market forces and the above-mentioned miracle price mechanisms — rather than government planners — would determine where to invest and what energy alternatives are best. (No gas retailer could possibly eat the cost of a 90-cent-per-litre carbon tax, so they’d have no choice but to pass at least most of it along to the customer).

One of the ironies of carbon taxation is the enthusiasm for “market mechanisms” and “prices” among politicians who otherwise abhor and resist market pricing of everything from roads to health care to rental housing to public transit to education to broadcasting and telecom and the internet and the price of cannabis, not to mention the Canadian price of milk and chickens. With carbon, market pricing is suddenly a great idea, no matter how fanciful the analyses and speculative the projections.

How Underwater Explosions damage Ships and Subs #Military101

Filed under: Military, Science, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Military History Visualized
Published on 15 Sep 2017

This video looks at how underwater explosions damage ships and submarines. Script was proof-read by a physicist and is based on US Navy/Army and/or academic sources.

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Military History Visualized provides a series of short narrative and visual presentations like documentaries based on academic literature or sometimes primary sources. Videos are intended as introduction to military history, but also contain a lot of details for history buffs. Since the aim is to keep the episodes short and comprehensive some details are often cut.

October 10, 2018

Bryan Caplan on “Sokal 2.0” or the “Grievance Studies Affair”

Filed under: Education, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Much has been said and written about the successful academic hoax pulled off by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian to get multiple bogus papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the “grievance studies affair”. Bryan Caplan rounds up several comments and then explains why he is impressed by the work of the hoaxers:

My idea has inspired multiple actual tests. But frankly, none of them are in the same league as Sokal 2.0. Three scholars who held a vast academic genre in low regard nevertheless managed to master the genre’s content and style expertly enough to swiftly publish enough articles to earn tenure! Frankly, if that doesn’t impress you, I don’t know what would.

The main question in my mind: Does Sokal 2.0 primarily show that the authors are intellectually strong… or that “grievance studies” is intellectually weak? Both can be partly true, of course. But the harder the authors had to toil to achieve their goal, the less they impugn the honor of their target. So how hard did they toil? The authors’ self-account:

    [W]e spent 10 months writing the papers, averaging one new paper roughly every thirteen days… As for our performance, 80% of our papers overall went to full peer review, which keeps with the standard 10-20% of papers that are “desk rejected” without review at major journals across the field. We improved this ratio from 0% at first to 94.4% after a few months of experimenting with much more hoaxish papers.

In other words, they barely broke a sweat. While you could accuse the authors of self-deprecation, this is a rare human failing. When we succeed, most of us like to highlight our own awesomeness, not the ease of our goals. While most people would have been less successful than the hoaxers, what they did was far from superhuman. And that, in turn, amply supports their main theses: the fields they hoaxed have low intellectual standards and don’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Does this mean that the subjects of race, gender, sexual orientation, body image, and so on don’t deserve to be taken seriously? Not at all. You shouldn’t blame subjects just because the fields that study them fall short. Identity is too important to be left to people who embrace their own identity. Still, until the researchers who study these subjects calm down, speak clearly, and treat dissent with civility, they will continue to produce little knowledge.

P.S. My main caveat about my positive evaluation of Sokal 2.0: I’ve seen too many hoax movies not to wonder if there’s a hoax within a hoax. Probably not, though.

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