Anna Krylov and the Peril of Bullshit part 3

PART 1 ~ PART 2 ~ PART 3 ~ PART 4

Now, as I was saying, when someone promotes an opinion within the realm of science that Anna Krylov disagrees with, they are "politicizing science." 

When Anna Krylov agrees with an opinion in the realm of science, it is The Truth.

In Philip Ball's response to  Krylov's essay The Peril of Politicizing Science, Ball wrote:

Krylov cites Robert Merton’s “clear separation between science and morality”. But Merton’s notion of a “pure science”, while it might have suited Heisenberg well, “sits in tension with the historical reality that scientists have always had patrons with motivations of their own, and which only rarely involved the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake”, according to Oreskes.(32)

“Seen this way,” Oreskes says, “the idea of science as a value-neutral activity is a myth.”(33) Not only is it patently untrue (as history shows again and again), but it is also a poor strategy for winning public trust. Why would you believe and trust someone who professes to bring no values to their work, to do it free from all ideologies, biases, and social preconceptions? And why would you want to? It is far preferable to lay our values on the table where they can be discussed and challenged than to pretend or insist that the scientific community is engaged in some rarefied pursuit free from all social, political, and ideological influence.

Scientific American published an article prior to Krylov's, in October 2020, entitled Yes, Science is Political which says:

Science, however, has always been political; the events of 2020 have only made the relationship between science and society more explicit. We are in the midst of a pandemic and a climate crisis, both solvable by centering scientific expertise. When our government ignores scientists, the consequences can be fatal, disproportionately so for Black, brown and Indigenous communities. Americans are suffering from wildfire-induced poor air quality. More than 200,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. Yet, as our nation grapples with the pandemic, our current (Trump) administration believes that “science shouldn’t stand in the way” of business as usual.

Krylov believes that an article praising Trump administration education schemes is "insightful" and evidence that Quillette is not a rightwing publication.

We've already seen that Krylov redefines the word "politicizing" to suit her own agenda. But it's even worse in her essay.

Krylov provides 14 examples of "cancellation":

1. Soviets changed the name of a city
2. Images of Trotsky and Kamenev erased from Soviet photographs
3. Soviets reconsider their former admiration of Stalin
4. The phenomenon where some people's reputations rising in relation to those whose reputations' have fallen
5. An article proposes avoiding the use of names in science terms
6. The renaming of a science prize
7. Renaming a science term
8. Renaming a science term
9. Renaming of a science term
10. Renaming of a science term
11. Burned at the stake
12. Asked not to show up at an awards ceremony
13. Chemical castration
14. A soap company reconsiders a word

So "cancellation" in Krylov's lexicon can mean anything from renaming a science term to murder.  She wrote:

The issue of science moralization and censorship is older than 20th century totalitarian regimes. For example, Giordano Bruno was canceled (burned at the stake in 1600) 

It appears to me she might be deliberately equating those who wish to rename science terms with murderers. 

Although perhaps it wasn't intentional - perhaps she was so inflamed by her own righteous indignation against "cancel culture" she couldn't be bothered to soberly assess her use of the term "cancel" in this essay.

But then Krylov asks rhetorically:

Do words have life and power of their own? Can they really cause injury? Do they carry hidden messages? The ideology claims so and encourages us all to be on the constant lookout...

Do words carry hidden messages? You tell me, Krylov - what does it mean to use the same word for renaming a science term as you use to describe murder? 

And if words don't cause injury, why is Krylov making such a big issue out of renaming science terms? 

Today’s censorship does not stop at purging the scientific vocabulary of the names of scientists who “crossed the line” or fail the ideological litmus tests of the Elect.11 In some schools,33,34 physics classes no longer teach “Newton’s Laws”, but “the three fundamental laws of physics”. Why was Newton canceled? Because he was white, and the new ideology10,12,15 calls for “decentering whiteness” and “decolonizing” the curriculum...

Who does it harm if Newton's Laws are called "the three fundamental laws of physics"? Certainly not Newton, who died almost 300 years ago. But a few paragraphs later, Krylov leaves no doubt that she believes that changing a term is a cataclysmic event:

The answer is simple: our future is at stake. As a community, we face an important choice. We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education into a farce. Or we can uphold a key principle of democratic society - the free and uncensored exchange of ideas and continue our core mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing attention on solving real, important problems of humankind.

Do words have life and power of their own? Which is it Krylov, are words lifeless and powerless, or does using different words to indicate Newton's Laws mean OUR FUTURE IS AT STAKE?

It's clear what Krylov means by "the free and uncensored exchange of ideas" - she means only ideas she agrees with. When others merely proposed a new approach to science terminology, she called that an example of "cancel culture."

Krylov appears to be having it both ways, in the Steven Pinker tradition and Pinker echos her in the tweet I shared in Part 1: "...she exposes the primitive word magic of language-cancellers: that words have dreadful powers, independent of usage, convention & context."

Krylov and Pinker scoff at the dreadful power of words, yet agree that swapping out words is an existential threat.

Now as it happens, I don't think it's necessary to change "Newton's Laws" to "the three fundamental laws of physics." I don't think retaining the original term "centers whiteness." As with many anti-racist proposals, this is ultimately useless and beside the point. The reason that whiteness is "centered" has nothing to do with the fact that Isaac Newton discovered laws of physics. The extreme racism that has prevented Black Americans from thriving in the United States is the result of complex socio-economic forces that will not be improved by changing science terms. 

The reason that there are so many of these kinds of band-aid proposals to fix racism is because affecting real fundamental change via socio-economic opportunity is so much harder to do, and it takes so much longer to accomplish.

But even band-aids make some people feel better, and they don't hurt me nor - contrary to Krylov's Pinkerite hysteria - anybody else. So why not go along with the change instead of promoting panic? 

After all they are "three fundamental laws of physics" so why is it so terrible to call them that? It seems to be an accepted practice to use the term Theory of Relativity. Does Krylov also throw a tantrum whenever Einstein's name is left out? 

And is "cancellation" always bad? Using Krylov's lexicon,  I will argue in part 4 that cancellation can be a good thing, even from Krylov's own point of view.

Anna Krylov and the Peril of Bullshit part 4

PART 1 ~ PART 2 ~ PART 3 ~ PART 4

Anna Krylov believes that when she advocates for women in STEM, it isn't political it's "fairness and merit-based approach." But those who propose a change in science term conventions are motivated by naive idealism or cynical power-grabbing.

I don't happen to agree that changing science labels, in most cases, will be efficacious in promoting fairness and a merit-based approach, but I am certainly willing to grant that those who wish to change the terms are every bit as motivated by a desire for fairness as Krylov claims to be.

Krylov's free and easy use of the term "cancellation" is not only curious because she uses it for such a diverse collection of things she doesn't like, it's also curious because she uses it, in one case at least, for something she surely must like. 

In her essay The Peril of Politicizing Science, Krylov provides this example of a series of cancellations - my highlight:

I grew up in a city that in its short history (barely over 150 years) had its name changed three times.2,3 Founded in 1869 around a steel plant and several coal mines built by the Welsh industrialist John Hughes, the settlement was originally called Hughesovka (or Yuzovka). When the Bolsheviks came to power in the 1917 Revolution, the new government of the working class, the Soviets, set out to purge the country of ideologically impure influences in the name of the proletariat and the worldwide struggle of the suppressed masses. Cities and geographical landmarks were renamed,4 statues were torn down, books were burned, and many millions were jailed and murdered.5 In due course, the commissars got to Yuzovka, and the city was stripped of the name of its founder, a representative of the hostile class of oppressors and a Westerner. In modern terms, Hughes was canceled. For a few months, the city was called Trotsk (after Leon Trotsky), until Trotsky lost in the power struggle inside the party and was himself canceled (see Figure 1). In 1924 the city became the namesake of the new supreme leader of the Communist Party (Stalin), and a few years later renamed to Stalino. My mother’s school certificates have Stalino on them. 

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the Communist party underwent some reckoning and admitted that several decades of terror and many millions of murdered citizens were somewhat excessive. Stalin was canceled: his body was removed from the Mausoleum at Red Square (where it had been displayed next to Lenin’s); textbooks and encyclopedias were rewritten once again; and the cities, institutions, and landmarks bearing his name were promptly renamed. Stalino became Donetsk, after the river Severskii Donets.

I think we can conclude that Krylov is not a fan of Stalin, since she writes: 

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the Communist party underwent some reckoning and admitted that several decades of terror and many millions of murdered citizens were somewhat excessive.

And yet, she summarizes anti-Stalin changes made by the Soviet Union to books, cities, institutions and landmarks as well the removal of Stalin's body from Red Square as "Stalin was canceled."

Surely Krylov is not complaining about depriving a murderous dictator of his former honors. She gives an example of renaming Stalino to Donetsk, after a river. Not even after another Communist overlord, but a river. 

So it seems fair to conclude that, sometimes, according to Krylov's own lexicon, cancellation can be a good thing.

Although she didn't respond to my last email, I emailed Krylov again because I was curious - does she consider removing the names of Confederate generals from public buildings, and the removal of Confederate statues and flags from public lands, examples of cancel culture? If she responds, I will report on it in another post.

Towards the end of her essay Krylov portrays Stalin as an exemplar of the follies of cancel culture, but those paragraphs also demonstrate the absurdity of Krylov's extreme paranoia over contemporary perils:

 In the late forties, after nuclear physicists explained that without relativity theory there will be no nuclear bomb, Stalin rolled back the planned campaign against physics and instructed Beria to give physicists some space; this led to significant advances and accomplishments by Soviet scientists in several domains. However, neither Stalin nor the subsequent Soviet leaders were able to let go of the controls completely.

Government control over science turned out to be a grand failure, and the attempts to patch the widening gap between the West and the East by espionage did not help.17 Today Russia is hopelessly behind the West, in both technology and quality of life. The book Totalitarian Science and Technology provides many more examples of such failed experiments.17

Today, STEM holds the key to solving problems far more important than the nuclear arms race: reversing climate change, fighting global hunger and poverty, controlling pandemics, and harnessing the power of new technologies (quantum computing, bioengineering, and renewable energy) for the benefit of humanity

Normalizing ideological intrusion into science and abandoning Mertonian principles24 will cost us dearly. We cannot afford it.

As discussed in part 3 of this series, Krylov compares "cancel culture" to murder. But the murder of Giordano Bruno was in 1600 and perpetrated by what was, at the time, the all-powerful Catholic Church. Another extreme example of cancel culture provided, the chemical castration (among other things) of Alan Turing, is from 1952. She also gives examples of "cancellation" from Soviet Russia, an infamously authoritarian state that no longer exists.

Of the 14 times Krylov gives examples of "cancellation," seven of them are contemporary:

1. An article proposes avoiding the use of names in science terms
2. The renaming of a science prize
3. Renaming a science term
4. Renaming a science term
5. Renaming of a science term
6. Renaming of a science term
7. A soap company reconsiders a word

So to summarize, the evidence for contemporary crimes against science are:

1. A renaming proposal
2. Five renamings
3. A corporation tweaked its marketing copy

It's likely the reason Krylov includes the extreme examples from the past is because her contemporary examples are laughably minor, and do not demonstrate anything close to the grave threat to science that religions or governments could. They are barely consequential actions - or just a proposal in one case - that Krylov does not agree with. But with no evidence, other than slippery slope ad absurdum, she asserts they are a threat to our very future. 

She truly is a member of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex.

Anna Krylov and the Peril of Bullshit, part 1

PART 2 ~ PART 3 ~ PART 4

Recently I came across Razib Khan retweeting Steven Pinker, promoting an essay, The Peril of Politicizing Science by Anna Krylov, and so I immediately suspected that Krylov's essay would be bad.

I was not wrong.

Krylov is a chemist, who, according to her Wikipedia page:

...is active in the promotion of gender equality in STEM fields, especially in theoretical chemistry.[25] She created and maintains the web directory Women in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, Material Science, and Biochemistry,[26] which currently lists more than 400 scientists holding tenure and tenure track academic positions, or equivalent positions in industry, national laboratories, and other leading research establishments. She has delivered several talks on gender equality in STEM including a lecture at the international symposium in Uppsala, Sweden.[27]

Now I happen to believe gender equality in STEM is a worthwhile goal but even I wouldn't argue it's not a political issue. 

Certainly it is a political issue for the Quillette/IDW industrial complex, of which Steven Pinker is a member in good standing. 

In 2017 James Damore was fired by Google for publishing a memo on a company discussion board, in which he argued that women were, as a group, not as good at STEM as men, using the standard evolutionary psychology reasoning that Pinker and most or all members of the IDW favor. 

And of course Steven Pinker was a vocal defender of Damore, tying the controversy directly to electoral politics:

Steven Pinker, a Harvard University cognitive scientist, said on Twitter that Google’s actions could increase support for Mr. Trump in the tech industry.

Steven Pinker agrees with Damore about women in STEM, and according to this Guardian article, Damore got his ideas directly from Pinker.

Damore, stupidly, sued Google for firing him. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2020. 

Pinker's book "The Blank Slate" discusses his evolutionary psychology views at length. The book also has heaping helpings of Pinker's own political views including his division of feminism into two camps, the "gender feminists" (the bad kind) and the "equity feminists" (the good kind.) He includes Camille Paglia, the pedophilia supporter, in the good feminist camp.

Although Krylov is on the opposite side of the women in STEM issue from Pinker, she is firmly on Pinker's side in her Peril article. But in all cases, Anna Krylov herself is just as guilty of politicizing science as those she criticizes. Hypocrisy seems to be an absolute requirement to be part of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex.

Anna Krylov cites Bari Weiss, a political operative, on the issue of changing terminology.

Bari Weiss tweeted a link to her own article "The Miseducation of America's Elites" with a pull quote about the renaming of "Newton's laws" to "three fundamental laws of physics." The article is on Weiss's substack account but it was originally in - and I assume written for and paid for by - the City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, funded by Charles Koch, among others.

Charles Koch is not interested in pure science. Charles Koch is interested in politics.

In her article, which was published a month after Weiss's article, Krylov cites Weiss:

Today’s censorship does not stop at purging the scientific vocabulary of the names of scientists who “crossed the line” or fail the ideological litmus tests of the Elect.11 In some schools,33,34 physics classes no longer teach “Newton’s Laws”, but “the three fundamental laws of physics”. Why was Newton canceled? Because he was white, and the new ideology10,12,15 calls for “decentering whiteness” and “decolonizing” the curriculum. 

Now I didn't expect Krylov would be in so deep with the Quillette/IDW industrial complex before I began reading her Peril article. I know, I know, even after doing this Pinkerite blog for almost three years I'm still stunningly naive sometimes.

In addition to Weiss, Krylov cites McWhorter (Quillette author, Koch employee), the blog of Jerry Coyne (race pseudo-science, reactionary and Pinker's #1 fanboy) and grifters Helen Pluckrose and James "your mom" Lindsay, employee of Christian identity extremist Michael O'Fallon.

But then I had an email exchange with Krylov and it gets even worse. More about that in part 2.

My letter to Pamela Paul ~ plus Bari Weiss, Peter Thiel and Chat GPT

Dear Ms. Paul

Your latest op-ed claims that "A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals” without mentioning that many of those who wrote this paper are associated with the “Intellectual Dark Web” and/or have written for racist far-right Thiel-funded Quillette.

I am including Jerry Coyne, Peter Boghossian, Anna Krylov, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Lee Jussim and Jay Tanzman - and those are the names I recognize immediately. 

I suspect they are not the only co-authors with right-wing views. I will investigate further - something that you apparently refuse to do. Or worse, you are deliberately hiding what you know about their political views.

After all, your former spouse was caught promoting race pseudoscience and his IDW friends rushed to his defense. It would not be surprising if you had your own IDW connections.

https://www.pinkerite.com/2020/05/four-koch-toadies-defend-race-science.html

I addressed Krylov’s dishonest, hysterical screed on the same topic on my blog a couple of years ago, and it's also available on Medium.

https://medium.com/@nancymcclernan/anna-krylov-and-the-peril-of-bullshit-31ca795583d5

You seem to be, at the very least, a deeply unethical employee of the New York Times.

Nancy McClernan

Pinkerite

-------------

The paper in question was published in "The Journal of Controversial Ideas" thus confirming that it is, along with Quillette, a tool of the Intellectual Dark Web which many of us always suspected it was.

The paper appears to have been organized by reactionary bullshit-swilling Anna Krylov, who I assume is by now on Peter Thiel's payroll. She was also an organizer for Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists. 

And while many of the co-authors are horrible reactionaries and hawkers of racist "science," the references for the paper are even worse - no less than three links to Quillette, plus citations of race pseudoscience promoters Pinker and Andrew Sullivan and grifters Pamela Paresky, Katie Herzog, Helen Pluckrose and the thoroughly grotesque Trump-loving asshole James Lindsay.

More and more it appears to me that Pamela Paul was hired to ensure that the NYTimes has someone to represent the interests of the Intellectual Dark Web, now that Bari Weiss has gone on to more obviously rightwing plutocrat-serving gigs. 

This is from TODAY. Note how Weiss describes right-wing ghouls Blake Masters and JD Vance as "anti-establishment." 

I think you mean fascist, you sleazy shameless handmaiden of stochastic terrorist monsters and babbling lunatics.

I asked Chat GPT about Weiss's connection to Thiel. 

Bonus link - Majority Report (again!): Bari Weiss HUMILIATED When Trans Child's Powerful Response To Her Lies Goes Viral. Pamela Paul is also infamous for beating the anti-trans hate drum.

NOTE: This must be investigated further, since ChatGPT is known to be factually unreliable.

UPDATE - someone put me on the "In Defense of Merit" mailing list and so I received an email today that links to this "In Defense of Merit" website. 

Apparently the people behind this grift felt that it wasn't clear enough that this is a project of right-wingers, race pseudoscience promoters and associates of the Intellectual Dark Web, so the page includes testimonials, not only from the odious Bari Weiss and Pamela Paul, the IDW-cheerleader twins, but from:

Richard Dawkins - anti-Muslim crackpot and instigator of the infamous stochastic terrorist pioneer event known as "elevatorgate"

Jordan Peterson - reactionary crackpot beloved by Quillette

Jeffrey Flier - Quillette author and a co-president of Pinker's Council of Academic Freedom grift 

Jonathan Rauch - Thielbucks via Quillette, Kochbucks via Reason Magazine

Jesse Sabatini - right-winger opposed to COVID lockdown

David Bertoli - right-winger who likes to retweet people like Nicholas Christakis and Conor Friedersdorf. Hilariously Bertoli tweeted the Upton Sinclair quote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” while praising people who are indisputably political operatives working for Charles Koch and Peter Thiel. The lack of self-awareness and/or hypocrisy of these IDW goons is always mind-boggling.

Judith Curry - climate change denier who "receives funding from the fossil fuel industry" - what a surprise. Maybe David Bertoli can lecture her on the topic of salary sources and not understanding things. Predictably, the Koch-funded City Journal loves her.

The College Fix - funded by Koch and other right-wing plutocrats

And best of all...

Noah Carl loves neo-Nazi Bo Winegard
and "human biodiversity" -  if
I had to guess, I'd say everybody
who contributed to this grift
is fine with race pseudoscience

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Noah Carl - hardcore but sneaky racist and promoter of race pseudoscience and co-author with neo-Nazi Quillette editor Bo Winegard. According to RationalWiki, Carl

is a British sociologist who, outside of his respectable sociology work, publishes racialist pseudoscience and wrote an Islamophobic paper for OpenPsych and a paper for the white supremacist journal Mankind Quarterly.[2] For this reason, he has been described as living a "double life".[3] After the latter was exposed in December 2018, hundreds of academics signed a letter calling for Cambridge University to reconsider the award of his fellowship and to stop employing him as a postdoctoral researcher.[4][5]

Krylov and her IDW pals are not even pretending anymore - they are just blatant about being far-right and racist ghouls.

I asked ChatGPT about Krylov and it said she

...holds the Stephen and Laura Hsu endowed chair in analytical chemistry.

Which certainly sounds plausible especially if that Stephen Hsu is the supporter of race pseudoscience. That Hsu can be seen Tweeting encouragement for her earlier attempt at building a culture war moral panic grift.

Like many other hawkers of race pseudoscience, Hsu gets serious funding:

...Even though mainstream science has pretty much scrapped the notion that race has any kind of biological basis long ago, that hasn’t stopped Steven Hsu from trying to link intelligence with race and getting a billion and a half dollars for research based in China. 

I don't think Krylov has ever met a race pseudoscience hawker she doesn't like. But Google couldn't find any evidence of Krylov's connection to this endowed chair and there's no mention of it on her USC page.

But WHERE IS PINKER? This IDW-heavy grift is right up his alley and he is pals with the two people I think organized the paper, Krylov and Jerry Coyne.

Pinker was hanging out with Anna Krylov at Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists and Coyne adores Pinker.

Pinker, left and Krylov  wearing glasses behind and on the right of him
at the very skewed old-white-man CPAC for racists keynoted by 
(and funded by, I suspect,) crackpot Republican fascist Peter Thiel
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Did Peter Thiel tell Pinker to stand down and focus his attention on his "Academic Freedom" grift?

Never fear, loyal Pinkeriteers, more about Steven Pinker tomorrow.

Anna Krylov embarrasses herself in print again

When we last discussed Anna Krylov, professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California, here at Pinkerite, it was to criticize her essay "The Peril of Politicizing Science" in which I demonstrated that Krylov was a hypocrite who believes that if she promotes a manifestly political position it is not really politics.

Then there is her logical incoherence - scoffing along with Steven Pinker at the idea that words have power, while simultaneously claiming a grave existential threat over changing the words in the names of science prizes and terms and even in an advertisement for soap. 

Finally there is her moral incoherence. She clearly thinks that "canceling" is bad - she even equated it with being burnt at the stake. And yet she appears to decry the removal of the name of a murderous Soviet dictator from towns and other public edifices as "canceled."

Well Krylov has published a new piece on the same old topic, this time in the horrendous Quillette, proving I was correct when I said, at the end of my previous critique of Krylov: "she truly is a member of the Quillette/IDW industrial complex."

She co-wrote the Quillette article with someone named Jay Tanzman. Tanzman is identified merely as "a freelance statistician." There is a Jay Tanzman mentioned in a few academic journals where the name is connected to "Tanzman Statistical Consulting, Los Angeles, California, United States of America" but a search for "Tanzman Statistical Consulting" shows no results for that company name.

Krylov reiterates her moral - or perhaps mental - incoherence in this new article (my highlight):

My own home town of Yuzovka, I noted, was called Trotsk (after Leon Trotsky), then renamed Stalino after Trotsky was purged, then Donetsk when Stalin was posthumously canceled by Khrushchev. Survey the stream of recent renamings of awards, buildings, and even laws of physics, and modern parallels aren’t hard to find. The intrusion of newspeak into science and education is truly Orwellian.

So her hometown started out as Yuzovka - which was named after a Welsh businessman named John Hughes. (Don't ask me how they got Yuzovka out of Hughes.) Then the town was renamed after Trotsky, then renamed after Stalin. Once again we see her say that Stalin was 'canceled.' Is that supposed to be a bad thing? She appears to be making a point in complete opposition to her belief that cancel culture is the great Satan.

Nowadays the town is called Donetsk - named after a river. I think we should all thank "cancel culture" for that.

I had to laugh at this section of her Quillette article:

I expected to be viciously mobbed, and possibly cancelled, like others before me. Yet the result surprised me. Although some did try to cancel me, I received a flood of encouraging emails from others who share my concern with the process by which radical political doctrines are being injected into STEM pedagogy, and by which objective science is being subjugated to regressive moralization and censorship. The high ratio of positive-to-negative comments (even on Twitter!) gave me hope that the silent liberal majority within STEM may (eventually) prevail over the forces of illiberalism.

Now of course she provides no evidence that anybody tried to "cancel" her. And we don't know what she means by the word "cancel" - in her lexicon it could mean anything from having your name removed from something to being burnt at the stake.

But clearly she drank the crazy Quillette Kool-aid before publishing the first piece.

The link on the word "others" in the cited paragraph is to a piece by reactionary academic Lee Jussim, whose entire career appears to involve repeating "stereotypes are real" over and over again. In the piece she links to, Jussim moans about, among other "cancellations," racist Bo Winegard failing to have his contract renewed at a college. Winegard holds such extreme views that he advocates for national ethnic quotas which sounds straight out of the Nazi playbook.

In her Quillette piece Krylov warns us, all evidence to the contrary, that there is a nefarious mob out there. How nefarious?

Their efforts are directed, often single-mindedly, at enforcing contortions of language and ideology within their own rarified institutions, forming task forces to rename equations, invent microaggressions, police language, rename moths and ants, and repackage soap. And they are completely vicious in the use of mob tactics to intimidate or cancel those who dare object to their extreme strictures. Again, the parallels with the USSR of my youth are rather obvious.

That's right - renaming things and repackaging soap are the equivalent, in Anna Krylov's mind, of the USSR. This position would be rational if the worst thing the Soviet Union ever did was rename things.

I think this might be the last time I write about Krylov. I am beginning to feel more pity for her than anything else, in her public displays of irrationality and fear-mongering. Writing an incoherent mess for a racist rag like Quillette is a complete embarrassment, especially for someone who had a reputable STEM career. 

When her career ends, I expect she'll claim she was cancelled, but I doubt the reason will have anything to do with her politics.

Anna Krylov embarrasses herself in print yet again

She's done it twice before - the first was her incredibly bad argument for why we should panic about renaming science terms - she equated renaming terms with being burnt at the stake.

Then she published in racist garbage rag Quillette.

And now her transparent grift, with Jerry Coyne, to create another stupid false panic about science, aided and abetted by Intellectual Dark Web friendly Pamela Paul in the New York Times. I've already written about it, but the American Prospect has more to say (my highlights):

The authors’ claim that their article was rejected by many scientific journals based on political criteria is false. In an interview, Anna Krylov, a professor of quantum chemistry at the University of Southern California who was one of the scientists who initiated the article, admitted to me that they had formally submitted their article to only one established journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which rejected it.  

 

What she and other co-authors had actually done was, in Krylov’s words, make “informal inquiries” to journal editors, about whether they might consider the article. This practice violates scientific norms of submitting articles to journals anonymously to avoid potential bias. Despite her efforts to use her and her colleagues’ networks to feel out journal editors, Krylov claimed that all of them discouraged her from submitting the article because of its viewpoint, but she offered no evidence from those conversations or emails. 

 

These authors know very well that the overwhelming majority of research articles submitted to serious scientific journals are rejected. The eminent journal Science accepts only 6.1 percent of submitted papers. Other prestigious journals have similarly low acceptance rates, including Nature (7.6 percent), the British Medical Journal (4 percent), The New England Journal of Medicine(5 percent), The Journal of the American Medical Association (4 percent), and The Lancet (5 percent). 

 

The one journal to which they formally submitted their paper, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), accepts only 15 percent of all submissions, according to Prashant Nair, a spokesperson for the journal. PNAS’s rejection is hardly evidence of the editors’ leftist bias. Krylov refused to provide copies of the evaluations of their article by the three reviewers solicited by the journal, but she did provide a copy of an email exchange between her and one of the editors, Zan Dodson, who asked the authors to clarify the differences between “merit” in scientific research and in other arenas, such as college admissions. According to PNAS’s Nair, the article “was sent for review, and the Editorial Board found that a number of claims made in the manuscript were unsupported by citations or additional argument. The Board concluded that it cannot recommend any particular protocol for improving the cogency of the arguments. As such, the manuscript was rejected.”

Conclusion: Anna Krylov and Jerry Coyne are lying grifters.

I assume they do it to earn their Thielbucks.

UPDATE: PZ Myers has an excellent response video.

What's that anti-woke fanatic Anna Krylov up to now?

"Western civilization" propaganda from Dorian Abbot and
the rightwing-funded "Minding the Campus"
which, of course, hates the 1619 Project
------------------------------------------------------------------

I've written a few times about Anna Krylov and her boyfriend Jay Tanzman (Jerry Coyne referred to
them as partners and Tanzman as a "freelance statistician") especially Krylov who wrote a screed against renaming science terms, hyperbolically comparing that to being burnt at the stake. Krylov and Tanzman have also written for racist Quillette - of course.

Recently they were seen publicly aligning with a whole bunch of racists like neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, co-authoring a paper which is yet another attempt by the racist right to "move the Overton window" and make race pseudoscience mainstream. I wrote about that here.

I guess that's why they put me on their mailing list. I recently found something in my inbox with the headline "A New Online Collection Documents Censorship in Science."

It says:

Following up on their perspective on scientific censorship published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, co-author Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman have published an online collection of scientific papers, viewpoints, and op-eds documenting the modern rise of censorship in science. The collection, titled Spotlight on Scientific Censorship, can be viewed here.

They mean following up on the aforementioned paper they produced with neo-Nazi Bo Winegard and the other race pseudoscience ghouls.

The collection is the usual right-wing garbage written by the usual racists and associates of the Intellectual Dark Web and its very own Austin University. 

This latest effort by the racist right to move the Overton window in favor of racism is being promoted on the Substack (of course) of Dorian Abbot, associated with Austin University.

Abbot was recently mentioned here on Pinkerite as part of the gang giving evolutionary psychologist Carole Hoover (fan of the hateful, Kiwi Farms-praising Gender Wars playing cards) an award for her support of hereditarianism.

A glance at Abbot's Twitter timeline shows that although he is a professor of geophysical sciences, he is far more interested in promoting right-wing political schemes. I suspect it's because being a right-wing political operative pays better than a geophysical sciences professorship. 

Abbot's Substack, "Heterodox STEM" also publishes... 

• Eric Rasmusen, a rightwing bigot, infamous for his misogyny
• Bo Winegard supporter Luana Maroja
• Ben Slivka, right-wing tech bro obsessed with wokism
• Peter Bonilla, Koch goon
• Randy O. Wayne, opponent of diversity, equity and inclusion
• Alex Small, member of the Heterodox Academy gang
• Julia Shaletzky, member of the Heterodox gang
• Michael Bailey, anti-trans extremist and creep, seen on Bo Winegard's extremist racist Substack Aporia, wants to "open the Overton window"
• William McNally, right-winger, likes all the other right-wingers
• Frank and Louie - "anti-woke" goons
• Mitt Castor, fan of right-wing extremist ghoul Christopher Rufo
• Judy Parrish, climate change denier
• Daniel Nuccio, contributor at the far right, Koch-funded College Fix
• Lee Jussim, contemptible "stereotypes are real!" ghoul - another participant in  Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists

And on and on, the usual collection of right-wing ghouls, goons and grifters.

And of course this latest Krylov/Tanzman effort is being promoted by a fellow participant in Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists (Dorian Abbot was there too) their travel buddy Jerry Coyne.

Weasellitude on display

What's it going to take for journalists
(except the Guardian), to ask Pinker about 
his warm relations with neo-Nazis?
---------------------------------------------------

I missed this article until just the other day: How the world left Steven Pinker behind in the New Statesman. 

Pinker's predilections for having-it-both-ways and weasellitude were both on display in this interview with staff writer Finn McRedmond:

Though, for all the talk of counter-Enlightenment trends, Pinker is at pains to stress that the world isn’t backsliding into the dark ages; there has just been a light, directionally concerning, shift. “Despite the setbacks of the last 15 years, I don’t think the future is a boot stamping on a human face forever. Liberalism is on a back heel, but there are still liberals.” Who are the liberals that might be able to wrest the West back from the iconoclastic populists Pinker holds in such deep contempt? “It’s probably not Gavin Newsom, it’s probably not Pete Buttigieg,” he says matter-of-factly. And then, as I have
come to expect of him at this point, neglects to provide a positive answer. 

When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Stephen Pinker and his wife, novelist Rebecca Goldstein, filmed themselves dancing in their home. But, the respite from this man – one who represents the inverse of everything Pinker believes in – was brief. The second election of Trump in 2024 “flabbergasted” Pinker. He cites Trump’s first election, in 2016, as the moment that events seemed to spin out of coherence. Not even Pinker’s voluminous talent and erudition – nor that of his fellow liberal peers – could reckon with these cosmic forces. I found Pinker someone reluctant to give a straight answer on small questions; no matter all that data, fame and institutional support. Perhaps we should not be surprised that he doesn’t have any answer to the big ones. 

That's Pinker, tout craché. Dismissive commentary but no straight answers. But of course he outsources answers to his race pseudoscience friends and has done so for the past quarter-century.

And since this is not the Guardian, Pinker is not asked about his connection to those friends even as he becomes more obvious about his alliances, even with actual neo-Nazis. 

What is wrong with journalism? Just in terms of interest, it would have jazzed up the article considerably to ask about Pinker's long-time support for racists. 

Instead the interview seesaws back and forth between passive-aggressive complimentary and then snippy observations about Pinker. His blue eyes don't get a mention this time, but his hair does.

Pinker is described as a liberal, but the interviewer doesn't mention that in spite of Pinker's dislike of Trump, in many ways the second Trump presidency is a dream come true for Pinker and his allies - from anti-trans hostility to anti-diversity, equity and inclusion.

But posing as a liberal while promoting hideous right-wing goals is what makes Pinker so valuable to the Intellectual Dark Web project of "moving the Overton window."

I did laugh aloud at this part:

...A cynic would call him pious. Instead, what I found in the man – as we spoke in a windowless room in Fitzrovia – was someone driven to distraction by the liquid rationality coursing through his veins; trading a faith in the divine for the higher, matter-of-fact power of data; permanently agog at the sea of unreasonable maniacs around him. If you were to burst him with a pin, I suspect he might explode into a shower of Excel spreadsheets.

Meanwhile it seems that Pinker has been a big influence over Anna Krylov. She used to promote women in STEM, a position I found puzzling considering her alliance with the IDW gang from Bari Weiss to Quillette to Pinker.

It looks like they've gotten her to come around to their way of thinking. P Z.  Myers has a great response:

Krylov has a prestigious position at USC and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She’s also a crank. She wrote an atrocious article equating soap companies using inclusive language in their advertising to Soviet-style purging of history, which was much loved by the right-wing opponents of DEI. Her latest criticism is even more absurd and contrived.

Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California (USC), said she had been invited to act as a peer-reviewer — a scientist asked to provide independent scrutiny — of a study being published in the journal Nature Communications.

In an open letter to bosses at Springer Nature, she said the topic was “within my field of expertise” and that she would “normally welcome the opportunity”, but asked if she had been contacted “because of my expertise in the subject matter or because of my reproductive organs”.

Wait, what? She’s highly qualified, she has expertise in the field, and her response to a routine request to review a paper is to ask if it’s because she has ovaries? The request says nothing about her sex, but is all about her skills, and she is reaching ridiculously hard to take offense. I would suggest that maybe her imposter syndrome has grown massive and malignant, but I think it more likely that she has found an angle that gets her a lot of attention. Either way, it’s a ridiculous complaint. 

 

And look — she gets support from Richard Dawkins!

Reposting Krylov’s letter on X, Dawkins said: “Nature used to be the world’s most prestigious science journals”, but claimed it was now among many who placed emphasis on the background of authors rather than only on “the excellence … of their science”.

Nature is still among the world’s most prestigious science journals, and he has not shown in this complaint that the excellence of their science has diminished. 

 

Unless… 

 

Maybe he thinks Anna Krylov is such a poor scientist that he’s dismayed that she was asked to review a paper? That asking Anna Krylov to review a paper is evidence that Nature is scraping the bottom of the barrel nowadays? This could be a devious insult, you know.

Sure, Krylov is a crank - and probably a grifter taking money from some organization controlled by Peter "and I know about the antichrist" Thiel -  but at least she is no longer in conflict with herself: I assume she's given up on her previous women in STEM efforts now that she's joined the far-right push to force women out of public life so they'll stay home and have lots of White babies.

The reactionary ghouls at X have recently been all a-twitter over a stupid women-are-losers piece by Helen Andrews that even annoyed some conservatives. 

But I don't know what the problem is. All these right-wing women with professional careers who think women are polluting institutions with their feminizing girl germs, like Steven Pinker's buddy Cory Clark - why don't they all go ahead and quit already and become tradwives? Who is preventing them? 

How about some quiet quitting?

Anna Krylov and the Peril of Bullshit part 2

PART 1 ~ PART 2 ~ PART 3 ~ PART 4

I was so appalled by Anna Krylov's bullshit essay The Peril of Politicizing Science I decided to email Krylov, although not really expecting a response, since it's pretty obvious I was calling her a hypocrite. 

I wrote:

I find it curious you oppose politicizing science, when your Wikipedia page indicates you “are active in the promotion of gender equality in STEM fields, especially in theoretical chemistry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Krylov

While I think the promotion of gender equality in STEM is a worthy goal, it is definitely a political one.

How are your political efforts in science different, or less perilous, than some of the examples you cite in your article, like changing the term “Newton’s Laws”, to “the three fundamental laws of physics”? 

Her response: 

I do not consider activities that ensure fairness and merit-based approach in science to be political. Fairness and merit-based evaluation is one of the core principles of the scientific enterprise, an essential part of the Mertonian norms (CUDOS). There is nothing political in requiring equal opportunity and equal recognition of people regardless of their gender or race!

I was astounded she would seriously claim "there is nothing political in requiring equal opportunity" - has Krylov never heard of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission? 

Since when has demanding equal opportunity in society ever been anything but a political struggle? It doesn't matter whether you agree that promoting women in STEM is a good idea (which I do), you can't just redefine a political struggle as non-political because you agree with the goal!

And of course I presented evidence in part 1 that the role of women in STEM is a controversial and politicized issue. I presented similar evidence to her in my later response.

But she wasn't done astounding me yet in this email which ends:

What my article speaks about is the intrusion of political ideology into science and education, which is already making a lot of damage-- see for example, this very recent article:
https://quillette.com/2021/08/19/as-us-schools-prioritize-diversity-over-merit-china-is-becoming-the-worlds-stem-leader/

Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. She actually cites the right-wing race pseudo-science promoting rag Quillette to support her position. In my response I said:

Do you not know anything about Quillette’s politics, or are you in agreement with them? Why on earth would you use Quillette to make a point?

Her response was to give me a condescending little lecture about science and truth and then she made unsupported claims about Quillette:

In science, we look at the essence of findings and not who said it or where it is published. This is also part of Mertonian norms. Truth is truth, irrespective of clothes. 

Are you really willing to dismiss an insightful article simply because it is published not in your favorite outlet? You should read the content and then decide for yourself whether these labels are justified. This particular paper is well supported by the data. Quileute is non-partisan and does not have a political agenda. Most of the authors are of liberal political orientation. 

Anybody who has read this Pinkerite blog knows what utter bullshit her claims are about Quillette. 

However, I was prompted by her response to read the article she shared, more carefully and I was not disappointed. The article, like just about everything else published in Quillette was dedicated to promoting right-wing positions. I wrote back, and couldn't resist getting a little snarky in response to her condescension:

Quillette is a right-wing publication and has been known as such since soon after its inception.

https://theoutline.com/post/2307/quillette-claire-lehmann-conservative-snowflakes

Continuing...

https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/quillette-claire-lehmann-intellectual-dark-web.html

Right up to the present.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/07/05/conservatives-have-no-plan-to-win-the-culture-war-but-they-intend-to-rule-anyway/

"In this age of dull-witted Fox News propaganda, Q-adjacent conspiracy nonsense, and sophomorically glib Quillette contrarianism, it’s not easy to find truly thoughtful conservative writing on American politics."

++++++++

It’s also a fact that one of Quillette’s known funders is right-wing Mark Carnegie.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/huge-gap-in-the-market-the-local-publisher-winning-where-others-won-t-tread-20190428-p51hz8.html

...You claim “most of the authors (of Quillette) are of liberal political orientation.”

Let’s have the data supporting that claim, like we do in, you know, science.

Finally, the article you shared is not “insightful” it’s the usual right-wing drivel, which is why the link it provides for “promising models” for schools is to an article by Rick Hess, director of Education Policy studies of the right-wing Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute, and that article praises charter schools including the controversial “Success Academy” and the Trump administration’s Betsy DeVos.

https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/opinion-portents-of-success-for-charter-schools/2017/06

An article in Quillette that links to a Koch operative - but I imagine Krylov would claim that's not political either.

But I couldn't find out because she didn't respond to me after that. The entire exchange is available here.

 I'd like to believe she gave up because she could see I had the much stronger position since I actually bothered to provide evidence, like we do in science, but who knows. She clearly has no qualms about re-defining words to suit her needs.

We saw Steven Pinker do something similar a couple of years ago, when he decided it would be perfectly fine to quote people in such a way that it made it look as though they agreed with him, when they did not. Phil Torres justifiably criticized him for this, and Pinker's response was "so what"? and then Michael Shermer called Torres a "cockroach" on Pinker's behalf. 

More about Krylov's curious relationship with words in part 3.

Great Man's Disease

Recently I quoted biologist P. Z. Myers talking about the problem with physicists, in this case Sabine Hossenfelder:

But then (Hossenfelder) did the stereotypical physicist thing: she studies the fundamental building blocks of the universe, energy and matter and mathematics, so she decided to slide over into a field she knows nothing about and explain it to us. That’s why people were pestering me to critique her recent video, titled Is being trans a social fad among teenagers? I guess having a Ph.D. in physics makes you an expert in psychology and sociology as well as biology.

I don't know if this happens more with physicists than other types of scientists, but it's been a named phenomenon since before 1996, as I discovered via Paul Krugman - from whom I also discovered the term "wingnut welfare."

Back in 1996, Krugman wrote:

In the scientific world, the syndrome known as “great man’s disease” happens when a famous researcher in one field develops strong opinions about another field that he or she does not understand, such as a chemist who decides that he is an expert in medicine or a physicist who decides that he is an expert in cognitive science. The same syndrome is apparent in some business leaders who have been promoted to economic advisers: They have trouble accepting that they must go back to school before they can make pronouncements in a new field.

This is an obvious issue for the scientists associated with the Intellectual Dark Web. Steven Pinker, a psychologist, Anna Krylov, a quantum chemist, Richard Dawkins and James Watson are all victims of great man's disease, which obviously can afflict women too.

In the case of Anna Krylov, for example, it is truly amazing that she can be so accomplished in her field and yet be an utter failure at reasoning, as I discuss on this blog. 

Her argument on the catastrophic dangers of "cancel culture," when examined for more than a minute, is incoherent: first she stacks the deck by declaring, seemingly at random, a wide range of things as examples of cancel culture, like 17th century murder by the Catholic Church; then she (and Pinker) mock anyone who thinks the names of science terms are important, while simultaneously claiming that changing those names is a threat to our very future; and then Krylov calls the rescinding of honors from murderous dictators an example of "cancelling" - which completely refutes her position that anything dubbed "cancellation" is pure evil.

And there are plenty more examples, most perniciously when Pinker, Dawkins and Watson support the seriously flawed claims of sociobiology.

One reason why it's hard to cure Great Man's Disease is because our idiot media accepts the high self-opinions of these scientists without question, turning the race pseudoscience-loving mediocrity Steven Pinker into a "celebrity intellectual." 

One of the symptoms of Great Man's Disease is the belief that you don't have opinions, only pure objective conclusions, based on perfect rationality, unpolluted by self-interest, while those who disagree with you are driven exclusively by politics and ideology. A good example is the conviction of Steven Pinker and his sociobiology gang that their critics have no actual arguments against their claims but rather are: 

People who belong or want to belong to a social group, whether centered around political views, or a country or school, ethnic or gender identity, can signal their loyalty to the group and its values by demonstrating their "moral purity."

And then Pinker ensures that he never hears any arguments from his critics by shutting out all but his most groveling fans. And the gullible, feckless media.

P. Z. Myers has an excellent post on this topic, about the case of Skeptical Inquirer and Coyne and Maroja:

Do they seriously think Coyne & Maroja’s BS is not ideological, and is entirely objective and empirical? Its conservative bias is naked and flapping in the wind, but apparently conservatism and prejudice and blind defenses of the status quo are not a subjective presentation of an ideology.

It’s only a must-read for anti-“woke” bigots who want their biases reaffirmed.

Oh no the wokes got muh BIRDS!

Visit the home of Effin' Birds here

 So I'm reading this article in the New York Times about no longer naming bird species after slavers and other monsters of history...

That means the Audubon’s shearwater, a bird found off the coast of the southeastern United States, will no longer have a name acknowledging John James Audubon, a famous bird illustrator and a slave owner who adamantly opposed abolition. The Scott’s oriole, a black-and-yellow bird inhabiting the Southwest and Mexico, will also receive a new moniker, which will sever ties to the U.S. Civil War general Winfield Scott, who oversaw the forced relocation of Indigenous peoples in 1838 that eventually became the Trail of Tears.

And of course I'm thinking "I bet those culture war hereditarians of the "Intellectual Dark Web" are going to start whining about this. "

So I scroll down the article. And sure enough, there's Jerry Coyne:

But to Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago who is an avid birder, the need for more descriptive names did not seem pressing. Performative acts like this “are really deeply injurious to science,” he said. “We cannot go back through the history of science and wipe out everybody who was not a perfect human being.” Dr. Coyne added that the effort to update so many names would be better invested in something more impactful to society, such as teaching underprivileged children about birds.

Does Jerry Coyne EVER get tired of being a right-wing reactionary?

Of course you know Coyne is whining on his blog too - the best part is his right-wing amen corner, sharing the outrage in the comments section.

Quick! Call his travel buddy Anna Krylov! A few years ago she wrote a panicked article about the horrors of changing science terms, making her argument by comparing name-changes to burning people at the stake. 

Read all about it in Anna Krylov and the Peril of Bullshit. I'm sure she'll reach new heights of right-wing panic over this bird situation - maybe this time she'll compare renaming to the Holocaust.

Krylov writes for Thiel-funded right-wing racist garbage rag Quillette because of course she does.

Jerry Coyne traveling with his "CPAC for racists" pals ~ are those THIELBUX?

In the past I have speculated that the reason Jerry Coyne is constantly posting photos from his deluxe vacations is because he's on the payroll of a far-right plutocrat.

His latest vacation pix don't argue against it.

He identifies his travel pals as Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman. 

Both have written for racist rag Quillette, and Krylov must be especially close to Peter Thiel through her work with his CPAC for racists.

I don't doubt this is part of their reward for doing what one or more rich men tell them to do, spreading race pseudoscience.

But hey, it's no doubt very easy money, if you don't have a conscience.

Speaking of Jerry Coyne, by request, I added my two cents worth to his Rational Wiki profile. Supposedly Coyne doesn't like Rational Wiki. I don't think he's going to like it any better now.

 More about Peter Thiel's funding schemes at Salon:

Then there was Compact Magazine, the hybrid "radical American journal" Ahmari co-founded last March with fellow Catholic Matthew Schmitz and Marxist populist Edwin Aponte. Its professed agenda was to wage "a two-front war on the left and the right" and promote "a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right." 

Although Compact has declined to specify who funds the magazine, a source familiar with its operations told Salon that it was launched with significant support from right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel — who has funded numerous other "new right" projects, from NatCon conferences to the political campaigns of J.D. Vance, Blake Masters and Josh Hawley — and Claremont Institute chair Tom Klingenstein (another top NatCon donor). Klingenstein did not respond to requests for comment. A source close to Thiel denied that Thiel has directly funded Compact, but couldn't rule out the possibility that an entity Thiel funds has in turn donated to the magazine. In a statement, Ahmari said, "Compact is an independent, for-profit publication supported by our subscribers. A group of investors helped us jump-start it. We respect their privacy and decline to name them."