Culture

The Cult Of Diversity & The Corruption Of Science: #ShutDownSTEM

The cult is growing and strength and number. Most of our leaders cannot stand against it, being either cowards, true converts, or in on the would-be color revolution.

It is spreading to all areas of life, across most of Western culture. Few countries are escaping or avoiding it. No subject is immune. Not even the glory of popular imagination, Science™.

I’ll say out loud that H Holden Thorp is an ass. He is either an opportunist or a cultist. I’m willing to believe either, but I’d bet the suck-up side. My guess is he’s crammed his nose up the nether region of politics in order to signal his virtue.

But I allow he may be, like many of the useful idiots on our screens, a useful idiot himself. These days you just don’t know.

Before we get to Throp’s calculated maneuver to keep or enhance his job, here’s something similar from the American Geophysical Union, an organization devoted to politics.

The article is “#GeoGRExit: Why Geosciences Programs Are Dropping the GRE”. Before I tell you, can you guess why?

Yes! White supremacy!

Geoscience graduate programs are increasingly abandoning the controversial test as an admissions requirement, a welcome development for equity and inclusion in the field. How can your school be next?

A lot is changing this year in higher education. Amid the ongoing pandemic caused by the infectious coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), universities and graduate schools have had to adapt to entirely online instruction and have canceled fieldwork, closed labs, and faced declining revenues.

This is included only to prove to you, once again, how political coronadoom was—and still is. Machinations will be blamed on it for at least eighteen months past the last attributed death.

Anyway, they want to drop the GRE—for which I offer no defense and do not care about—“as a step toward equity and inclusivity in graduate admissions and education”, asinine ideas we do care about.

Quote: “…the test is biased against women compared to men and against people of color compared to white and Asian people [Miller and Stassun, 2014]”. Note the faux blessing the academic-style reference gives the sentence.

By “biased” they mean men and whites and Asians outdo other groups, which is impossible under the cult’s belief in Equality. It is forbidden to think the consistent superior performance of white and Asian men on this quantitative test indicates genuine ability. Superior performance can thus only be due to nefarious causes. Whitness, and we suppose Asianness and testosterone, rays emanate from test takers, which depresses (somehow) the abilities of the female and “of colored”.

We can’t yet eliminate whites and Asians or men, but we can eliminate the tests. This is the only way to get more “black bodies” into Science. Which is to say, quotas.

This will necessarily cause inflation in science—and it already has, long ago, by pushing to up the percentage of non-males.

Back to to virtue-signalling Thorp:

It is easy to think that the problem is isolated to individual racists in the community and in the government, and that the scientific enterprise is immune to racism…

The U.S. scientific enterprise is predominantly white, as are the U.S. institutions that Science’s authors are affiliated with. The evidence of systemic racism in science permeates this nation. Why are so few Science authors from historically black colleges and universities?

Thorp, like I do, believes the question is rhetorical. We differ on the expected answer.

It is time for the scientific establishment to confront this reality and to admit its role in perpetuating it. The first step is for science and scientists to say out loud that they have benefited from, and failed to acknowledge, white supremacy. And then science and scientists finally need to listen to, and make space for, people of color to lead laboratories that publish great science and produce influential scientists, run institutions and their scientific units, and propel Science and other journals to promote structurally underfunded scientists and areas of science.

In other words, hard quotas will be implemented.

Science is already on the ropes for imbibing far too much politics. Global warming, coronadoom, most of sociology, psychology, and on and on. These quotas will happen, and when they do, math and science, as we have warned many times, will be redefined into whatever it is the quota hires can do. Feelings, self-discoveries, anti-white-supremacy. Black holes are white supremacist. All difficult subjects will be under grave suspicion.

“Briggs, you fool. That’s paranoia. People aren’t going to give on science so easily. Look at all the great things it did!”

They’re giving up on everything else great. Iconoclasm is now official policy.

Then there’s this: The hot trending Twitter tag “#ShutDownSTEM“.

All the best people are doing it:

The article that links to opens:

White supremacy is baked into science and academia, from racist language in textbooks to a culture that excludes Black scientists from innovating and advancing at the same pace as their colleagues. But rather than more milquetoast statements and diversity initiatives, researchers want action. Organizers are asking the scientific community to participate in a work stoppage on Wednesday, June 10 to bring attention to racism in the world of research…

Labs will still refer to various pairs of equipment as “master” and “slave,” while the most commonly discussed milestone in quantum computing is “quantum supremacy;” few, if any publishing outlets are actively working to evaluate this kind of language.

We warned you for years scientists and mathematicians were not immune from the mob. It has now come for them. Hard to be too sorry for them. They had the chance to fight back, but were too fearful and too cocky.

Not uncoincidentally, Lavoisier’s last words were “I can’t breathe.”

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Late addition SJWs are looting arXiv.org today This is from our friend Lubos.

Arxiv surrendered to the mob.

Categories: Culture

26 replies »

  1. @William – But surely we agree that science died some considerable time ago, don’t we? It is now merely a professional research-project bureaucracy directed by its funders; and as such a part of the single, cross-linked and hierarchical linked global bureaucracy.

    http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.com/

    The few Real scientists such as yourself (or my pals Michael Woodley of Menie, of Edward Dutton) must work outside the funded professional System of official (fake-) science.

    My point is merely that science is dead and gone. Anything ‘they’ do now is merely poking at a corpse.

  2. You forgot to quote the best part of the #ShutDownSTEM campaign from their website:

    “To be clear: #ShutDownSTEM is aimed at the broad research community who is not directly participating in ending the global pandemic, COVID-19. If your daily activities are directly helping us end this global crisis, we send our sincerest gratitude. The rest of us, we need to get to work.”

    It’ll be curious to see if people start stretching out the second-order effects of “COVID-19” into whatever research they’re doing as a gambit to try and deflect from the intersectional Red Guards. Either way, a new wave of Zhdanovshchina is certain, but we’ll see how much of the physical sciences and engineering survive on the margins, to reproduce a certain level of economic growth for the lumpenproles to be fed with, if nothing else.

  3. I hate to say it, but the best advice I’ve heard in the past few years has been “stock up on guns and ammo.”

    We are fast heading towards a confrontation between those who want to save a great society (note lower case) and those who want to tear it down and found Zimbabwe simply because they’ll be in charge of Zimbabwe.

    If you want to know how this turns out, Zimbabwe is how this turns out… short of a forceful intervention by the “racists” who want to protect their society.

    I know this doesn’t have anything to do with STEM or Science or whatever, but it’s the same overall endgame. Nobody has the balls to tell the ungrateful fools that they are ungrateful fools.

  4. I’m all for shutting down the Progressive cult of ¡Science!

    Real science died decades ago. Copenhagen put the first knife in, and the festering wound was infected by Leftism.

  5. NOT BLM, but Politically Useful Black Lives Matter. The remainder of blacks can suffer, be discriminated against, and die and can go to hell for all the anarchists care.

    Have you considered Holden Thorp may just be an evil, demon worshipper? That possibility is very real these days. (These are also useful idiots, having sold out everything they had and will do anything they are asked. They will be the first to go, but are blind to that reality.)

    The test (GRE) is biased against stupid people. If the people pushing for stupidity in science want operated on by a buxom blonde who is too stupid to breathe, I’m all for it. I’m finding the old guy who knows what he is doing. I hate women doctors anyway….

    “The U.S. scientific enterprise is predominantly white,” BECAUSE THE US IS PREDOMINANTLY WHITE, YOU FLAMING IDIOTS. I wonder if the US goes to say India and demands MORE WHITES in their universities. Of course not, because it’s about increasing stupidity, not race, not science. (I am not saying blacks, women, etc are all stupid. We literally HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING since the standards are totally different for said groups. I can’t imagine living my live knowing people think I’m an idiot and only got a job because I’m female, or black, or whatever. It’s the ultimate in demeaning, horrible treatment of a human being and the ultimate in sexism and racism.)

    Yes, Bruce, SCIENCE IS DEAD. We are living in Hitler’s Germany, where science was what Hitler said it was. It’s that simple.

  6. The white privilege, white supremacy slur originated, in America at least, in the Weathermen, and it’s use is intended to denigrate the intellect, industry and accomplishments of white men.

    Anyone who uses those racial slurs against you hates you and any man who accuses his own self of those Cultural Marxist political sins hates his own self and God who created him white.

    Using the language of the enemies is the first step on the path to thinking like them.

  7. #dumbdownstem Given it up Briggs and discover a deep love for the simple. Returning to the jungle is our future.

  8. By the logic being used here, the NBA needs to let short white and short Asian people play on every team so that way they can have a chance to be in the NBA. So the NBA can be completely mediocre. Just like they want everything else to be. Lets not appreciate people for their talents. Lets appreciate people for being whatever people they are and give them the status of having the talents. That way we can make minimal advancements, if any, instead of great steps forward for ALL of humankind. That’s what they seem to be working towards. This cult of diversity as you put it.

  9. One of the sadder displays on “Science Twitter“ is those against whom the GRE plots asking to be added as authors to forthcoming prominent papers and the original authors occasionally pledging not only to add them but to list them first. Isn’t this perhaps a sign that academia has died and that the buzzards are out rather than that academia is alive and well but being preyed upon by eagles?

  10. Thanks for again trying to articulate sanity, although it’s nearly impossible today.

    By coincidence, I just came across these sources addressing the definition of “racism” today: https://nypost.com/2020/06/09/merriam-webster-will-update-definition-of-racism-after-a-request/ . Of course, if some racial group is superior, others are inferior.

    The Roman Catholic Bishop Olmstead of Phoenix delivered this homily on the sin of racism on June 8: https://dphx.org/father-forgive-the-sin-of-racism/ . He adds “unjust” which justifies calling it a sin.

    I wish more people using the “R” word would at least try to define it, as its meaning continues to shift.

  11. I’ve been thinking the same thing about Zimbabwe over the recent events. Do people know what the black people did to white farmers? They sought revenge for the sins of others on innocent white men.
    That’s black justice.

    True Justice is blind.
    I don’t know if she’s blonde, but blondes do have more fun, evidently.
    Regarding statues:
    You have one in New York that’s a bit old now. She’s suggesting something about equality and ‘bring me your tired people and them with sore feet…..” or something. I’d like to see people try and take that down. Perhaps start an outrage group from the right? Blame the French! You people backed the wrong horse.

    Enough with the silly talk about science. It’s sour grapes.
    How do you think they made it back to the moon with space suits like Buzz lightyear?
    THAT was cool. I say sack all the scientists just keep the engineers. They have more fun too

  12. Science is dead eh?

    Why?
    Because a sizable number willfully corrupt it, or merely attach that label on something else to give an aura of credibility, or make honest mistakes, or cannot distinguish between credible work and incomplete or flawed or corrupt work.

    When the practitioner errs or even corrupts the use of the tool, the problem is the tool when the tool is science. Not the practitioner or propagandist.

    But when the practitioners of statistics, another intellectual tool, keep doing it wrong — miss-applying or using at all p-values, for example, the problem is not “statistics but the practitioner. Even as we simultaneously learn that the discipline of statistics itself is the source and provider of defective tools like p-values.

    The problem is assigned where we want, not where the evidence really points.

  13. Sheri
    We all know what you meant, so I’m being completely pedantic.
    It’s just you’re confusing your fascists.
    Hitler did have a diversity of science problem because he chased the best and the brightest out of science because they were not the right kind of people.
    Hitler very much needed science to help shore up resources that he was lacking. Hitler had lots of scientists working on lots of “solutions” to those lack of resources; unfortunately for him, those resource problems meant that he had to back the right horses.
    No, you’re thinking of Stalin and Lysenko, who despite failure after failure trusted the “science” they were pursuing and reality fell to the back

  14. 10/10 to Ken and a Gold star.
    It’s a piece of work for a statistician to untangle. A challenge of a lifetime.
    Maybe do like the celebrities do, dress up like batman and handglide off the Empire State Building. To raise awareness of the P value.
    Better still, print T-shirts. Give them out for free at your conferences and secret meetings.

  15. I AM of course completely ignoring Hitler’s version of Medical Science and THAT is a case you COULD make, but that’s for another day

  16. Ironically, the higher education system in communist china is a merciless meritocracy.

  17. Anyone that thinks science is there to extend their lives needs to look
    at the history of the eugenics movement from Malthus to Gates. The
    original model of population control by setting the masses at each others
    throats in one endless war upon the next having failed, despite 20th
    century world conflagrations killing tens of millions, was replaced by
    corporate medical and nutritional science. The two pillars of the eugenics
    movement today are the emphasis on carbohydrates in the food pyramid
    shoved down our throats from cradle to grave and the introduction of
    processed hydrogenated vegetable oils and the concomitant demonizing
    of saturated animal fats. These two highly publicized and medically endorsed
    movements have probably killed more people than all the wars in the last five hundred years. The exponential increases in cardiovascular disease and
    obesity throughout the 20 century are the only scientific facts you need to
    know. A multi-billion dollar and deadly Statin drug industry has been built
    around them and thrives today.
    Empirical Research on Research and the Reproducibility Crisis – J. Ioannidis – 4/13/2016
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO30X0YlZU0

  18. I did not know this until recently: past ‘redlining’ not only had, but also continues to have, deleterious effects on the economic, psychological, and physical well-being of black Americans. For example, historical redlining helps to account for the higher present-day rate of COVID-19 infection among them.

    However, discriminatory lending practices based on race rather than economic considerations (“redlining”) has a very shaky factual foundation. Indeed, the seminal 1992 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study that claimed to discover racial discrimination in lending practices refuted itself. (Yes, really).

    1.
    The 1992 Boston Fed study itself noted that according to census tract data, the default rates of blacks and whites who actually received loans were equal.

    https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f602/f9bbaacd93dc23579ff455ed9e159e27d79e.pdf

    This should have been the decisive point. It proved that the banks were assessing the risk of lending accurately, and lending to applicants without regard to race. Racism in lending would have been demonstrated if the black default rate were generally lower than the white default rate on the loans made. This would have proved that the banks were “leaving money on the table” and spitefully denying loans to equally-qualified black applicants.

    Instead, the Fed focused on the differing rejection rates of black and white loan applicants. The Fed deployed statistical models, which the Fed claimed “controlled” for all possible financial factors that might have explained the difference in rejection rates. After applying these adjustments, the Fed found a still-unexplained difference in loan rejection rates: blacks were still being rejected for loans (17% rejected after all confounders were eliminated) more often than whites (11%). This unexplained difference in loan rejection rates, the Fed study stated, was due to systematic racism among the banks in the study.

    But in fact, the equal default rates that the Fed itself reported, proved that the people who actually got loans, black or white, were both equally reliable at paying them off. Even if the banks were rolling dice or looking at a Ouija board — whatever the banks were doing — they were getting it right, and being race-blind in their lending.

    The Boston Fed made at least two fundamental errors. The reality of the actual census tract data was not as important or decisive to its analysts as generating models that expressed their own ideas (their ‘narrative’, if you will) about how banks ‘ought’ to make lending decisions. And they did this because they appeared to think that simply describing what actually happened (a process greatly distinct from predicting what future data might look like) requires elaborate statistical modeling. The Fed appeared to believe that simply looking at what happened — particularly if you suspect a difference, but don’t find one — can be extremely deceptive and fraught with errors. This appears to be a common belief among researchers.

    2.
    In the January 4 1993 issue of Forbes magazine (link unavailable), Boston Fed Senior Vice President and Research Director <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Munnell"Alicia H. Munnell, the lead author of the 1992 study, acknowledged to two Forbes magazine reporters that the equal default rates of the black and white loan applicants who actually received loans did not exactly demonstrate that racial discrimination in lending existed. She then said:

    Munnell: “I do believe that discrimination occurs.”
    Forbes: “You have no evidence?”
    Munnell: “I do not have evidence. … No one has evidence.”

    3.
    By 1996 Raphael W. Bostic, Division of Research and Statistics of the Federal Reserve, directly contradicted the 1992 Boston Fed study:

    https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/1997/199702/199702pap.pdf

    “This paper reexamines claims that non-economic discrimination persists in mortgage loan origination decisions. … [T]he claim that non-economic discrimination is a general phenomenon is refuted.”

    4.
    In 1998, Economists and Theodore E. Day Stan L. Liebowitz examined the raw data from which the 1992 Boston Fed study drew its conclusions. They wrote:

    https://personal.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/mortgage/mortgages.pdf

    “This paper examines mortgage lending and concludes that studies based on data created by the Boston Fed should be reevaluated. A detailed examination of these data indicates that irregularities in these data [for instance, Day and Liebowitz found seven loans included in the Boston Fed’s analysis in which the expense to income ratio was reported as zero, an impossibility, Ed.], when combined with the most commonly used research methodology, appear to have biased previous research toward a finding of discrimination against minority applicants. When the most severe data irregularities are eliminated, evidence to support a hypothesis of discrimination disappears.”

  19. It’s not just science magazines. Node.js (https://nodejs.org/) software developers also feel compelled to make politics part of their venue.

    It would be wrong for us to ignore the unearned privilege that exists in Node.js. Much of the project leadership is white, and a majority are men.
    : : :
    To Black folks looking for access: We’re here for you.
    To Black people looking for amplification: We’re here for you.
    To Black members of our community seeking collaboration: We’re here for you.
    The responsibility to dismantle white supremacy does not fall on the Black community. It falls on the rest of us.

    Um, yeah. Black folks really need collaboration with white male software developers. Make one wonder how they managed before this offer. How condescending can it get?

  20. @DAV:

    “It’s not just science magazines. Node.js (https://nodejs.org/) software developers also feel compelled to make politics part of their venue.”

    Add Rust. In the latest v1.44 release, at https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/06/04/Rust-1.44.0.html you can read this gem:

    “The Rust Core Team believes that tech is and always will be political, and we encourage everyone take the time today to learn about racial inequality and support the Black Lives Matter movement.”

    I do not believe that “tech is and always will be political”; but the Rust devs do. As a Catholic, visiting the BLM site I have the repudiate most of what they defend, so what am I to do? Bye bye Rust, it was fun while it lasted. There is no place to go, where a stinkin leftist will not follow you. The Benedict option is not an option; fleeing to the desert presupposes the existence of a desert, a space of inner freedom. There are no such spaces. It is a fight they want; a fight they have.

  21. Systemic racism seems to have the same properties as dark no pun intended) matter. We have no freaking idea how it works but it does serve a purpose. And when unsuccessful we will re-double our efforts to find it.

    I have faith in the physicists success more than Da.. sorry BLM.

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