Probably not – this is incredibly half-baked…

Wait, what are you talking about?

For those who weren’t there when the deep magic was written, in 2011, Rebecca Watson (of Skepchick fame) talked about an incident where she was accosted by a man in a closed elevator while returning to her room during an atheism conference. (An atheism conference, how quaint – but the 00s were a wild time!) Watson asked men to simply not do that because, obviously, a best it’s rude behaviour, and at worst can easily be perceived as threatening. That’s something we can all agree is a perfectly fine and reasonable request.

Right?

Famously, many prominent atheists disagreed, thinking it was an horrendous thing to say. After all – to summarise an overly-long, fairly racist comment by Richard Fucking Dawkins – other women in the world had it much worse. “Gosh, we’re having genitals mutilated, but at least creepy men aren’t been creepy in elevators! That’s so much worse!” was the short version of the whole thing.

Now, we can cover the flaws in that response all day, but the punchline is that this was really the beginning of the end for New Atheism as a movement. These people don’t publish much anymore… though when they do, it becomes obvious that most of them have departed the Left-leaning liberal circles and joined in with reactionaries on the Right, throwing their hat in with racists, homophobes (transphobes, obviously) and misogynists.

The bastions of reason who railed against the evils of religion the grounds of its terrible treatment of women, minorities, LGBT people… are now hanging around with the guys famous for their terrible treatment of women, minorities and LGBT people… though these ones are White, which makes the difference, I suppose?

Who would have seen that coming?

Why the Capital-A Atheists were a bit dim…

To be blunt, I kinda did. 2011 was when I was getting disillusioned with the whole of “movement” skepticism and atheism, noticing the cracks in the attitudes and logic. I was pretty much out of it by 2014-15. Ten years clean! I need a certificate and a badge or something.

Here’s what I think the difference is:

When they talked about science, and reason, and making the world a better place, they were doing it in the context of damaging religious fundamentalism, Ensuring that fundamentalists got worse treatment. And by religious fundamentalists, I mean Islamists. And by Islamists, I mean all Muslims.

And by that, I mean brown people.

They hated brown people, that’s what I’m actually saying. It’s pretty obvious when you watch your eleventy-first forum debate on the morality of torture or the prison camps that fell out of the Global War on Terror that their primary, underlying assumption was that their own skin colour was going to save them from that debate ever becoming more salient. As long as it was happening to Others, it was an abstract hypothetical that couldn’t affect them at all.

(Gods, I can almost sense the frothing rage that someone is about to type into the comments…)

But when I talked about making the world a better place, I guess I… I believed it? Genuinely. I thought if you’re not making the world a better place what is the point? What is the point of your personal view of morality if it just made it worse?

Along with that came another very important, and absolutely core, pillar: what I think makes the world better might not actually be right. I might think the right thing, and have the right motives, but I won’t always be able to convert that to something effective and useful.

So, I internalised the ideal quite a lot. Aware of falling short of it, compassionate of myself when I fail, but fully embracing the idea that this is what I want to do. It meant I got very bored of endlessly debunking homeopathy and creationism. It just didn’t feel like those were, in themselves, issues that were causing as much harm as advertised, and we weren’t doing the world as much good as advertised covering what we already agreed with for the 75,735^th time. Hence, when the atheism/skepticism schism eventually came, I landed on that lefty-woke-cuck-SJW-lefty-liberal-woke-SJW side. Which has its issues, sure, but is certainly better than finding myself agreeing with eugenicists and fascists and repeatedly finding my name associated with Jeffery Epstein.

Cognition vs affect

Ultimately, I think the New Atheism schism happened because a bunch of famous men (and they were almost all men) got extremely used to being right all the time, because all they did was play pigeon chess with creationists. That way, they never learned to truly turn a critical eye inwards. The moment they met someone who wasn’t an idiot, they faltered, and fell back on incredibly bad prejudices like “women are harpies” and “The Blacks should just get over slavery”. That’s because they never truly valued the idea of critical thinking and using reason or rationality to improve the world, they saw it as a cognitive exercise. While also assuming their cognitive prowess was more than sufficient to solve all problems without any further evaluation.

This is where I think we go wrong on many things. We assume something is a purely cognitive phenomenon – described by Bloom’s cognitive domain, naturally. We seek to know, then understand, and somewhat apply and create and evaluate. But what’s often forgotten when people cite Bloom is that there’s more than one domain. There’s also affect. To shorten and possibly oversimplify: it’s what you value.

Critical thinking and reason, evaluation and the pursuit of truth in the name of making the world better is something you need to value, to embody, and to act on as a core part of your character. This is a transformation that – like is said Fame – is paid in sweat (ask your grandparents, kids). It’s a long arduous process that involves you being wrong. A lot. It involves you making mistakes. It’s a hard-won status, and certainly doesn’t come from watching a debunk of some randomer on YouTube saying creationism explains why there are craters on the moon because Noah’s flood set jets of water into orbit.

You need to practice it.

And AI policy…?

“AI” has been a hot topic for years now. I’d love to go more than 12 hours without having to think about it, without having to hear another talk about it, read another headline about it, or hear another local policy reveal about it. I’d settle for 6 hours.

To just quickly state my own opinion and stance of using it in higher education, and education in general: I’m not inherently, 100%, unwaveringly against it. Intrinsically, there’s nothing wrong with the technology. It might be useful. It’s certainly very interesting that a bunch of linear algebra can spit out plausible sounding text and images. BUT: I have absolutely no faith in the people building and selling it. I have nothing but contempt and objections to how it’s sold to us: craft a perfect love letter with ChatGPT, write a bedtime story for your child with Gemini, never have to read a full report or book because Copilot can summarise it! It’s absolute bullshit with the express aim of deskilling the population, trapping them inside it, then jacking up the price once they’re hooked. It’s the worse of drug-pushing and capitalist bubble making combined.

Universities are leaning into it. I’m unsurprised; you don’t want to be seen to be the late adopter and left behind. But, also, we’re mindful of “cheating” and that we’re still here to teach people things. So it’s all covered with the idea of “critical thinking”. Yes, use Midbonk, but don’t forget to think critically about the response! Yes, get Summerly to summarise those papers, but think critically about it!

Use it, but think critically about it…

Think critically about it…

Think critically…

Think…

‘Critical’ Thinking or “Critical” Thinking or Critical Thinking…

Now, I can bring it back to what I wrote earlier. We treat critical thinking as a cognitive exercise. We conceptualise it as an employability skill – after all, employers demand “critical thinking” in the people we send to them. But what does that mean? It means whatever you like in that sense. It’s a buzzword.

But, really, it’s a value. It’s what you are, and an integral part of your personal affect. You need to value being critical. You need to value being correct – and that means valuing finding out that you’re wrong. It’s all that stuff you pay for with a long, long list of mistakes. This reflects what the New Atheists said, I’m unconvinced it reflects what they did. Their continued mistreatment of women, and their aim to make life worse for trans people shows that. It’s not an easy thing to launch yourself into, even for supposedly “smart” people.

And we expect 18-year-olds to come into university and just do critical because they were told to think critically?

It’s as if you sat down in front of a bunch of 6-year-olds, and said “Welcome, class. Today we’re going to learn addition. Now, get out your calculators. Type in two, and plus, and two, and equals. And that’s addition! Don’t forget to think critically about the answer!”

(not to be entirely disparaging in comparing undergraduates to primary school children, but once you hit ca.30 you realise how much of a fuckwit you really were back then)

All of the “Embrace this! But think critically!” opinions in HE are coming from people who already learned it the hard way and seem to have forgotten just how difficult it was. This is a perennial problem in education; when the teacher forgets how difficult it is to learn, it’s never going to create something good.

If you want three ChatGPT APIs in a trench coat to summarise a paper for you successfully, you have to spend time being able to read them yourself. You need to make those evaluative judgements yourself. And you need to be wrong about it yourself. Repeatedly. Because if you can’t do that, you’re never going to be able to “critically think” about the result a language model just gave you – because that’s what critical thinking actually is, it’s a thing you embody. It requires that practice.

The New Atheists got the easy ride dealing with the scientific errors of creationists – and ignoring the more complicated, and challenging, social draws of religion. The 00s skepticism movement got an easy ride debunking homeopathy for thousandth time – and turned away from Big Pharma’s shady practices in Africa, which gave people plenty of good reasons to distrust medicine. They all got so pre-occupied with hating the kind of misogyny the brown people did in foreign countries, they didn’t even conceive of the fact they were just as big an asshole to women in their own home. They simply got complacent, because they were right all the time thanks to tackling the low lying fruit of unhinged creationists and fundamentalists.

I suppose my point is this:

Taking the easy route through the easy stuff left the New Atheists incapable of tackling harder questions they weren’t used to: racism, women’s rights, gender and sexuality. By using AI to summarise those papers and draft those emails, you’re denying yourself the difficulty, the challenge, and the means by which critical thinking can occur. You may end up in the same position: convinced of your ability in narrow fields, but unable to critically tackle more diverse situations.

And, given what we’ve seen of the ‘guard rails’ on these bloody things, you might end up just as racist.

The party looks well and truly over for UK Universities, with Cardiff now looking to axe hundreds of jobs. That isn’t a small, challenged institution, either. The rot is spreading fast to places that thought they were immune. We’ve seen multiple others contract in the last year — and, full disclosure, I’m now an ex scientist because of one of them. Oh, well, at least “restructuring costs” have a functionally infinite budget so the voluntary severance package is pretty tasty.

When the £9,000 per year fee was introduced, it was a massive cash injection that caused almost every HEI to splurge on infrastructure projects and expansions, paid for by loans leveraged against promised endless growth and this increased fee.

(as per rants passim, I still think maintenance loans are the bigger scam)

I don’t begrudge universities doing this. HE infrastructure up until the 2000s was a crumbling mess. Anyone who has worked in a building that hasn’t been touched for 20+ years will attest to leaking pipes, broken lifts, unworkable heating and air conditioning and basic inaccessibility.

But it wasn’t sustainable because it was bought on a credit card that assumed the fees would remain high. Yet it never kept up with simple inflation (if it did, it would be worth closer to £15k now) and certainly never kept up with increasing costs of the expectations of student experience. Those top-notch VLEs, Office 365 subscriptions, ultrafast Internet, 24/7 libraries and computer rooms, and en suite halls of residence without exposed breeze blocks don’t come cheap, you know. The infinite growth promised by marketisation never materialised.

Who could possibly have seen that coming, eh…?

Universities have tried to cut down over the last few years. Wining, dining and luxurious travel expenses for conferences are now effectively unheard of. Even Vice Chancellors have almost entirely curtailed their long-haul, business class flights to foreign nations for “partnership” projects. New builds are slowing. Refurbishments are becoming increasingly modest. Now, all that’s left to cut is staff costs.

And… I’m going to be a little bitchy and spicy, here, and say that one of the reasons UKHE has such high staffing costs is the explosion of managerial professional services across the sector, often driven by senior people with power circling the wagons and protecting their teams at all costs. This preservation is much rarer on the cutthroat academic side of the coin, where letting a department shrink is simply the path of least resistance. A retiring professor’s teaching load is trivial to reallocate, and those fixed term contracts don’t need renewed, after all…

The result is that typical university payroll is significantly under 50% academic. The core function is not the primary expense.

I’m not going to be brave and bold enough to say what it should be (100% academic would be catastrophic, trust me), but how does the balance tip so far over?

The traditional way a university would operate would be to have multiple large, Departments to cover teaching and researching. These would have been somewhat chaotic and unruly, being quasi autonomous. Probably inefficient, but let’s not judge until we examine the alternative.

A Head of Department (a major job of extreme complexity often considered as more a punishment than career progression) would have budgetary responsibility over everything from the staff to the infrastructure, and also be a manager to the technical staff (in science/engineering) and office staff — who would take on everything from room booking to expenses to dealing with extension requests to receiving final year student dissertations.

(Was that latter one frequently undervalued pink collar work? Absolutely. But that aside, the user experience was second to none)

But, in the name of efficiency, all of that has been taken from departments across almost every UK HEI. It would be so much easier, so the argument goes, if academics don’t need to worry their little galaxy brains on things like managing attendance, or buying computers, or dealing with the budget, or admissions… The list goes on for some time, and really hits home the value of that aforementioned pink collar departmental office work.

Office staff, so the argument goes, can be managed by people who know office work, and wouldn’t it be nice if we shoved all the technicians together? Then, if one dealing with the Physics lab is ill, one from Biosciences can fill in. It’s the same job, right? Excellent!

This plan requires taking it all of that away from departments and academics and their disparate offices, and centralising it. If not physically, then at least organisationally. And if you centralise budget, you need a Chief Financial officer. And that means a finance office, with people covering multiple departments, or faculty groups. And that means you need a Faculty Finance Officer. For each Faculty (3-5 of those). And they can’t be doing the analysis, they need to work on strategic priorities, so they’ll need a Finance Analyst. In fact two or three. Per faculty. That means you have space for a Senior Finance Analyst. Not to be confused with the (much lower banded) Finance Officers who might actually do some banking and processing.

Now, Departments aren’t buying PCs themselves, so ICT will need a procurement team and relationship managers to sort out contracts with companies, with their own consultants, which is different to central procurement, who will also need analysts and senior analysts and procurement officers who don’t deal with ICT procurement. So far, so ‘big organisation’.

And, why are academics keeping track of attendance? That should lie with the Director of Student Engagement — not to be confused with the Director of Student Success and the Director of Student Experience. It should go without saying that not one single student will know who those people are, and the academic staff won’t until the day they receive an email about a new personal supervision policy that talks about “touch points” and “the student journey”, and is completely divorced from reality. They’ll also need their own teams of Student Success Officers and Pedagogical Consultants under them, too, to do the work they’ll use for their AdvanceHE conference keynote. That team is absolutely not to be confused with the Teaching Enhancement people who are there to fruitlessly convince academics who haven’t updated their lecture notes since 1998 to try active learning instead of 59-minute monologues. Those also shouldn’t be confused with the Technology Enhanced Learning team, who are trying to get said academic to use audience response software. And, if you’re really unlucky, you’re also going to get badgered by the Online Learning Team to start using the VLE for more than storing PDFs you scanned in terrible quality a decade ago.

So, now, you might notice that ICT’s budget looks like it could finance the Large Hadron Collider, but for some reason there’s only one person actually looking after the entire website (which is permanently broken) and only one person in the entire institution knows how SharePoint works. And Student Engagement and Transition might occupy an entire floor, but you swear you used to have five careers advisors in Science, and now you have two, and they’re shared with Engineering. And the people sending you emails to remind you to make everything accessible don’t have capacity to do it for you or help out, so you hope the 20-something teaching fellow will help you out, instead.

And despite an entire Moloch dedicated to HR and Business Intelligence, you still find yourself spending a week writing a business case (made much more difficult by the fact you don’t know what your budget actually is, and you strongly suspect Faculty Finance doesn’t know, either) for why you need a teaching staff to teach this new course the PVC has identified as a strategic priority, and you still need to interview and advertise the job (and write the spec) yourself because the central team isn’t the subject specialist so would mangle it. Hopefully they’ll get appointed in 12-18 months if the Dean and the Faculty Director of Strategy and the Faculty Director of Future Planning and the Director of Strategic People Management all approve it.

And, then, you find yourself monitoring student attendance manually in a notebook anyway because the new automated system that spies on student locations via their ID card hasn’t worked in six months because the scanners are broken, and Estates have had the ticket to fix it for ages but are currently swamped putting up Marketing’s new, branded banners on every blank surface — so you can’t turn around without seeing a cheesy stock photo overlaid with some asine strapline like “Inspiring Excellence” in a terribly kerned serif font — and ICT can’t deal with it, either, because they claim it’s Procurement’s remit because they bought the card readers, but they marked that project as “delivered” (the Head of Procurement’s LinkedIn post got a hundred likes more than the Director of Procurement’s) and are claiming it should be Student Engagement’s job to fix it because that’s where the Head of Attendance Montitoring actually sits after they were restructured out of Student Success.

And you also find yourself doing the timetable yourself anyway, taking hours to unpick the central team’s hash of it because they don’t quite get why you can’t host a 5 person tutorial in a 50 seat lecture theatre, and you end up with an above-average drop out rate after centralised Admissions admitted people they shouldn’t have, and your student numbers drop further because they also didn’t turn around decisions fast enough for people they should have admitted… and at some point you get sick of waiting for Digital to update the website with up-to-date staff photos, so before your know it you’re, like, “fuck it, I’m buying my own DSLR to do it myself” because you’re not allowed to use any of the five Nikon D-1-millions Marketing has access to……….

And then, you notice a student’s grade needs changed on the records system. You email the person you know ran the departmental office a decade ago because you don’t know who else to talk to about that.

She gets back to you 90 seconds later saying “done”.

It occurs to me that I spend a lot, and possibly an unreasonable amount, of time mocking Harry Potter across various platforms.

But, at the same time, I make comparatively little reference to JK Rowling’s public descent into single-issue TERFdom — including endorsing literal fascists and, since this was first drafted, a tiny bit of socially acceptable Holocaust denial.

There’s a few reasons this enduring clusterfuck is lower on my priority list than “good god, wizard-boy book bad”.

First, I think everyone I know and respect are already aware of Rowling’s descent to madness. They do not need reminded of it, nor their consciousness raised to it. For those with much more skin in the game, they probably don’t want a constant reminder that a prominent public figure would cheer on their genocide, backed by a coordinated media campaign to manufacture consent for it.

I also don’t think there’s much chance of convincing extant Rowling fans that what she does is bad. It’s been a few years now, so the thousands of people clogging up King’s Cross on September 1st have already indicated that this is not an issue for them. They’ve either decided that this obsessive hatred of trans and queer people is not a deal breaker, or worse, it’s something they would actively endorse.

You also have to bear in mind the usual retort: “what has she said that’s transphobic?”

It’s a rookie error to assume this is an honest question and a throw-down for you to provide evidence: It’s a statement to say that they don’t believe it’s a valid accusation. They will already be aware of what you’re going to say, and will have the rationale for why it “doesn’t count” pre-loaded and ready to go. Their model of reality includes Rowling’s opinions on trans people, and it precludes the idea that those are, in any sense, bad. There’s little arguing with this. You’re more likely to get traction with creationists and their highly movable definition of “transitional form”.

But another reason is that I don’t see her current obsession and main creative output as that surprising, nor is it remarkable.

Let’s compare with the usual author that crops up in these situations: the late Terry Pratchett, and a bit of a counterfactual thought experiment.

In 2017, long-time assistant and partner Rob Wilkins hired a steamroller to destroy Sir Terry’s hard drive, to permanently eradicate his unfinished manuscripts in accordance with his will. It’s hard to see all hope of ever seeing Raising Taxes get crushed, but it was The Right Thing To Do.

But, let’s think of an alternate reality for a moment. A proven revelation rocks the world: Pratchett had his hard drive destroyed to cover up the existence of countless essays on how Jews secretly rule the world, how LGBT+ people should be sent to concentration camps, and his opinions on the inferiority of lesser races. Perhaps even worse was on there.

In such an eventuality, I would — hopefully obviously — be beyond devastated. It would be a struggle, but the Discworld collection would be going on a bonfire for essential closure. But that hurt would be incomprehensible not just because someone I admire transpired to be a Total Wrongun, but because of the complete betrayal.

Pratchett’s novels are full of “militant decency”, respect for all life, and doing the right thing despite the difficulties. The text and subtext alike skewer homophobia, class oppression and racism (in deeper, more complex ways than “the green people hate the blue people…”) with unmatched fervour. There’s a reason his quotes appear so frequently in social justice circles.

The idea that the man himself thought otherwise…?

Such a thing would be so monumentally in opposition to every word he preached, in fiction and non-fiction alike. That is why it’s unthinkable, and — with as much philosophical certainty as I can muster — never going to happen.

By contrast, Harry Potter is flooded with so many red flags that the headlines should never have been “beloved children’s author turns out to hate trans people” and more like “we’re shocked it took until 2019 for her to come out and make it obvious”.

This is a series with shocking levels of casual racism, a visceral hatred of fat people, apologia for slavery and, of course, arbitrary morals where goodness is determined by the colour of your scarf and not the content of your actions. And none of this develops or changes through the series. At the start, Beloved old Hagrid magically disfigures a child for the crime of being mildly annoying (and fat) and faces no meaningful consequences. While the last thought to run through the hero’s mind before the close of the text is whether his magically indentured slave, from a lower race, should bring him a sandwich.

If anyone remembers the reported story of Rowling being bullied off a Harry Potter forum, we’re you surprised? Her books taught the fans how to do it: that it’s okay to attack and disfigure the people you don’t like, and even send them off to be assaulted by centaurs, provided you think you’re the main character. Or just laugh at them if they happen to display any sincerity towards disrupting the status quo. Her protagonists bully their way through life, and get away with it because they’re on the Right Team. And they’re not fat, of course; otherwise, how could you tell they were the Good Guys from the Right Team?

Rowling’s idea of an anti-authoritarian novel series has the main character become a cop, and the oppressive structures present at the start are still mostly maintained at the end — except, now, it’s under the new management of the Good Guys from the Right Team, so that’s fine and dandy.

All is right.

(at this point, just to throw it out there, Leigh Bardugo’s idea of an anti-authoritarian novel has six Chaos Bisexuals fuck up a bunch of rich people by any means necessary. Even King of Scars, which you’d expect to be full of Disney-like “Ah, but good kings are fine…” has our dashing lead take active steps to burn his own monarchy to the ground. 10 out of 10. No notes.)

Harry Potter, the character, would be the villain in a more competently written series. Sam Vimes would arrest him and figure out what to charge him with later, Kaz Brekker would rip his eye out and feel happy that there’s one less bastard in the world ruining the fun for everyone. Amos Burton would have a “quiet word” over a cup of coffee and within threateningly close proximity to an airlock.

Others have said this sort of thing before. They’ve said it more words, with more citations going down to the sentence level. They’ve said it for years, too. All I’m adding is that when Rowling came out as Queen of The Dickheads, no one should have been even remotely surprised. It’s all there on the page, out in the open for the best part of three decades.

That this all went uncriticised for so long, and that it remains popular despite the critiques now getting more attention, is (to me) far more interesting than her taking the next, utterly unsurprising and (to her) completely logical step and jumping on the transphobic bandwagon. It’s just another unremarkable trope that absolutely fits the person behind this literary dreck.

Have I mentioned I really dislike Harry Potter as a series and have done for 20+ years? Just trying to make it clear…

I recently read a comment to the effect that “platforms aren’t untrustworthy, people are” and that you need to evaluate information sources independent of platform.

The context being a partial defence of getting news and information from Twitter, in spite of prominent examples of fake information spreading over that platform. This is from someone pretty respectable (originally, I had a screenshot, but it adds nothing but their name, which is irrelevant) and I’m going to disagree with them on this bit. Partially. Maybe wholly.

First off, at face value, that is true. A rando on Facebook and a rando on Twitter have the same credibility. This is independent of the platform. We should learn to evaluate sources and interrogate them thoroughly.

BUT: some platforms structurally invite misuse and, either through ineptitude or disinterest of their owners, are more able to propagate misinformation and disinformation. Twitter is absolutely one of these. In my view it always has been: It’s structured around short posts, atomised from any context, and these posts are trivially boosted, with their surrounding context hidden from the home timeline. Information travels fast when it’s bitesize by design, and showing something to your followers as part of Twitter’s public performance is a single button click.

We don’t have such concerns about WordPress blogs, for instance, even though it is also a platform. It’s barriers to sharing on the platform are slightly higher, and the barrier to generating content a little higher. Misinformation may exist, but its propagation is slowed. The content is far more difficult to separate from its long form context.

A blog is, I’d argue, the structural antithesis of Twitter.

And that’s just pre-Musk Twitter. In it’s current incarnation, it’s very notable for putting in huge barriers to determining legitimacy of information. Most notably in having completely dismantled its verification programme, and allowing anyone to effectively impersonate a person or organisation, up to and including that blue-tick verified shorthand.

These aspects aren’t wholly unique to Twitter, but I think it’s a place where you can easily find all of them embedded into the system and its culture.

But, I think, an underappreciated problem is that it’s simply impractical to assess the source of each individual nugget of information. It’s far more effective, and almost as reliable, to pre-filter information broadly by its source. Your hit rate on identifying disinformation is just as good if you simply dismiss anything from, say, the Daily Express and wait for BBC News to report on it instead. So I’d argue it’s safe to be far more skeptical of something someone just twet. Especially if it’s a screenshot, where the contextual clues of whether that verified sign is “real” or paid for are hidden away.

That’s before getting into the fact that we should never have got to the point where you got news from a social media post, and not a verified platform or website, or from a vetted, professional source. A reasonable heuristic for that being a source that faces meaningful consequences if they deliberately publish misinformation. That’s still, mostly, the case for professional journalists writing articles, but not for Twitter accounts. Even Twitter accounts of known people. You can lie and mislead with no hit to your income generated by having a following on Twitter.

And, of course, we could also talk, at equal length, about how Truth on social media is determined by follower count. Not only does that determine the reach of “facts”, but the account with more followers can easily control the narrative of dissent entirely by force of volume. You can be contradicted in the comments, but if you have the weight of 100k followers to back you up, you can ruin someone’s day by clapping back — whether you’re right or wrong. The “Quote Tweet” feature of Twitter being a key weapon in this, because that pushes your reply directly to your followers. I raise this mostly to underline how Twitter is structurally ripe for abuse and disinformation in a way that many other platforms are not. It’s a platform where you need to threat-model responses to your posts — even absolutely insane responses that have misunderstood you intentionally.

So, yes, platform absolutely matters and we should take that into account when evaluating information. And, going forward into this post-Musk world of X and its Xcretions, outright dismissing tweets (and screenshots of tweets) as evidence of literally anything is going to become the simplest act of due diligence we can do.

Q “What did Crick and Watson discover?”

A: “Rosalind Franklin’s notes!”

Haha! Ha! HA!!

Ha…

I hate this joke. I absolutely despise it with a passion.

This has to be one of my most controversial and fart-in-a-spacesuit opinions: modern science communication, particularly with a feminist slant, is treating Rosalind Franklin way worse than she ever was back when she was alive.

There are a lot of other adjacent problems I have, of course. Science communication about women seems to be stuck in an “there’s only two chicks in the entire galaxy” loop: specifically Franklin and Skłodowska-Curie. Though that’s gotten better in recent years. We are just about allowed to talk about women who are still alive, for instance.

To understand my problem with science communication on Franklin, we need to look at this:

That’s ‘Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate’, Nature volume 171, pages 740–741 (1953). The authors being Rosalind E. Franklin and Raymond G. Gosling. And if the date and journal seem familiar, that’s because it was published at the same time that Crick and Watson published their own famous paper – the third in the series was the one by Wilkins. If you turn the page after finishing Crick and Watson, you find Franklin and Gosling.

It’s behind a paywall, because reasons, and you absolutely should not buy it. But it’s also difficult (not impossible) to track down full, decently scanned copies, especially since using Sci Hub to download a scientist’s papers started being treated as a worse criminal offence than murdering them.

Few people seem to understand that this paper even exists, never mind what its content is. I can probably count on one hand the times I’ve seen someone communicate the science behind the structure of DNA and mention it or explore it.

On one level, it’s easy to explain why this is. This paper is dull, boring, technical, and tedious to go through. The X-ray diffraction world has come on so far since that it’s almost quaint to read. It’s of interest to specialists, as most papers are, and there’s a very limited amount of interesting things you can extract to make good pop-science fodder.

If you wanted to unpack it, you need to know a few things first… and I think many of those things fly in the face of the usual Sunday School version of the DNA story.

• You need to know these people were not “discovering” DNA — it had been known as a molecule for a very long time,
• You need to know that there are multiple forms of DNA, based on its level of hydration — so they weren’t “discovering the structure” of DNA as much as refining what was known about the specific forms of it,
• You also need to know that they weren’t even establishing that it was helical — again, something that had been known, or at least very strongly suspected, for a while (you can read that in Franklin and Gosling, above).
• Hell, you might need to know that Rosalind Franklin isn’t even the first female crystallographer overlooked in the DNA story — that unfortunate honour probably belongs to Florence Bell, working in the Astbury lab!
• You might also, wait for it, need to know that Frankling didn’t acquire the famous Photo 51 — that was Gosling, which raises awkward questions about supervisors stealing credit for their students’ work.

That was all done throughout the preceding 20-something years before Crick, Watson, Franklin, Wilkins and Gosling published their famous papers.

What Franklin and Gosling’s paper adds is the specific qualities of the helix in DNA: how quickly it turns, and the distances between atoms and groups. This is essential fine detail for building a structural model of it. We can hazard a guess at what it looks like if we suspect it’s helical, but unless this number matches up with the molecular model proposed by Crick and Watson in the preceding paper, we have a problem. We’re after all the fine detail at this stage.

And Franklin and Gosling did this with some exceedingly tedious, complex and dull mathematics that match up X-ray diffraction patterns to the molecular structure. And make absolutely no mistake: that’s hard work, it’s a big challenge. It requires skill, learning, practice, experience, and time plus dedication. This is highly specialist, complicated stuff.

And there’s the problem.

A lot of the popular perceptions of science are built on this idea of lone geniuses who simply see the Matrix and figure things out with instinct. If we’re lucky, we might see them working hard instead. But, on some level, it will always come back to individual personalities working alone and making grandiose discoveries in that instant. It’s far easier to get “Franklin discovered DNA single-handedly and two men stole all her work” into your head than to understand the decades of work, near-misses, and steady accumulation of evidence by hundreds of people that lead to the double helix. It ended with the Nobel Prize going to Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick, and the abusive step-dad of DNA James Watson. They accidentally became the capstone on this massive scientific undertaking, it was never just them, and it never will be just one or two people working on problems of this size.

That’s what science is. It’s endless tedious accumulation of data to synthesise a conclusion that might be years in the making.

You might see the big speeches and announcements, and in the modern day the TikTok dances in the lab. But you don’t see the work. You don’t see the reading, the trial and error, the endless filling in of logs and lab books, ethical and COSHH applications (though that’s probably less applicable to the 1950s…) and more reading, and more questions, and more torn up notebooks of failure. That’s the part that isn’t talked about because it isn’t fun and it isn’t sexy. It’s tedious, and awful, and makes the job a job, not a “calling” or whatever people have described it as.

And if you dive into the work and contributions from Franklin, that’s what you find. Someone who has turned up, that has done the work, puts in the graft, and sticks her head down to prepare samples, acquire and process data, does the reading does the supervision, and writes it up at the end in excruciating technical detail.

In short, you find a competent, even masterful, scientist.

And she’s still reduced to a punchline of a joke.

Another from the drafts. Allegedly 2014-5-ish. The early 2010s was a transition period for me: it’s around the time I got very disillusioned with ‘movement’ atheism and skepticism. I stopped subscribing to blogs, vlogs, groups and mailing lists on the subject. So, technically, I don’t know if it’s still a Thing, exactly. Discussions with others suggests it has mostly fizzled out and/or ate itself; with the Athei-Bros becoming part of the reactionary man-o-sphere, and the Rebecca Watson apologists becoming queer activists. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but I honestly don’t actually care. I think I still agree with most of this one 8 years later. I’m pretty sure I’m on the right side of history with it. Even the fucking Prevent Strategy has stopped assuming all dark-skinned Muslims are secret Jihadist bombers. Christ-on-a-bike the 00s were a wild time…

I spotted this post from a popular Atheist group on Facebook a while back. I’ve screen-capped it below, but for the benefit of accessibility and context I’ll describe it a bit further.

“What is your most controversial opinion?” They ask.

The top two answers are 1) Islam is a big problem because it is, even more so than Christianity and 2) Feminism is a cult movement more concerned with sexism that exists in the western world than in the Middle East.

Controversial?

I dunno, really. I hate to play an Argumentum ad Dictionarium card, but if you gather that many up-votes, or if you can attract as many “likes” on your comment as the top level post, then your opinion isn’t really “controversial”. In fact, it’s positively mainstream, at least, in that community. I don’t think those court controversy at all, instead — trigger warning: social justice enthusiast wording ahead — these opinions pander to the white male demographic that dominates the weird beast that is Internet Atheism.

To be cynical and somewhat crude for a moment, those two opinions translate to “It’s totally that darkie foreigner religion that’s the worst” and “Bah, these bitches, eh? What can we do with them?”

And it’s pretty fucking depressing that, far from being controversial, they appear so mainstream.

Here, I aim to present some actual controversial opinions I have that are pertinent to atheism. These are opinions that will almost certainly get me down-voted to oblivion should they ever be posted to a mainstream atheist forum, or possibly have me banned from meetings should I speak them out loud. I dare not speak them lest a thousand grown men come to beat me with copies of a Sam Harris book, and then lynch me with rope made of Richard Dawkins’ pubic hair… oh, sorry, should I have trigger-warning’d that I was going to be mean to atheists? Sorry about that, I’ll give you your safe-space back soon.

1) Islam is not an extra special outlying problem

Islam definitely has its problems in its written ideology. No argument from me there.

So does Christianity; quite a few problems in fact, as evidenced by how you can mix up Bible and Qu’ran quotes and have lots of fun when people can’t tell the difference. And less said about what Scientology believes, the better.

Then again… so do Mayan and Aztec religions, which are especially nasty because they endorse human sacrifice, and that’s pretty scary in my oh-so-humble opinion. In fact, I’d like to say that, as ideologies, they’re some of the very worst.

“But wait!” You say, “No one follows those human-sacrifice religions anymore!”

Well, exactly, Skippy, that’s the point. If a religion could be apprehended in itself, and cause problems independently of the people following it, then saying things like “Muslims are fine, but Islam is bad” would make sense, and in more than just a trivial academic context. But by extension we’d also have to be scared of Aztec and Mayan religions coming to sacrifice us to their gods, because they’d be capable of causing harm independently of peoples’ existence. So instead, it makes much more sense to filter our problems with a text, or an ideology, through the lens of the people who write, interpret and act upon those texts and ideologies.

(Is that ‘structuralism’? I can never remember the terminology for this sort of thing… it’ll be an -ism of some kind. Oh, the humanities…)

“Ah, but terrorists…” You might add at this juncture. Well, quite. They certainly exist and (some) follow a religion – even if the word “terrorist” is one of those arbitrarily defined politicised things that people only use to strip (more) rights from one particular class of criminal. There might be some correlation in there, but it’d be like the “psychopath gene” all over again: many murderous psychopaths apparently have a similar genetic identifier, but so many people in the general population who aren’t murderous psychopaths have the same gene that it makes it utterly pointless to worry about. “Islam” fails as an explanation except in a trivial academic sense that exists only in a world where people don’t.

As it stands, out of a billion plus Muslims in the world, there are remarkably few terrorists. In fact, our little stereotype of them being violent middle-east dwelling sand-eaters is, put simply, false – because the largest Muslim populations are in South East Asia, not the middle-east.

And out of all terrorists, quite a few aren’t Muslim. Sure, Islam has those words that might cause people to become terrorists… but targeting Islam as a cause gives us hardly any explanatory power over who does and does not become a murderer.

Even then, Muslims killing is pretty rare in the grand scheme of things. Personally, I’m more scared of a white, English driver getting drunk and killing me than I am of an Islamic terrorist killing me. That’s reflective of simple statistics to say what is more likely. Do we then blame ‘Englishness’ as inherently problematic? Do we then say “English is the real underlying cause, so we need to criticise English… but it’s okay, the people are mostly fine, we just want to criticise English, the abstract concept.” No, because that’s fucking nuts.

Islam doesn’t scare me. Some of the people following it might, but there’s thankfully very few of them. The religion, in itself, scares me as much as Aztecs and Mayans do. Should they re-emerge and become a statistically viable threat to me, I’ll adjust my views accordingly. Until then, it’s as useful as “they breathe oxygen” or “the problem with the world is the universal wavefunction and the boundary conditions of the universe”. It explains nothing because it tries to explain everything, which makes “Islamdidit” practically the atheist version of “Flooddidit”.

And there you go. That’s a fucking ‘controversial’ opinion. It will have atheists from Reddit to Wikipedia frothing that I could be so stupid and so blind. How dare I choose not criticise a religion because us Atheists need to stick together?

Well, I don’t think that because…

2) Atheists are not the most oppressed minority

Even in the United States, which still keeps many laws on the books banning non-believers from public office, atheists are not actively oppressed.

For a start, most of the laws go unenforced, and when they do there are other legal protections against it.

Sure, people can be fired for it, and that’s bad… so long as it’s for that reason and not because they did the Atheist equivalent of telling all their co-workers they’ll burn in Hell and throwing Bibles everywhere. After all, I complain repeatedly whenever the Christian Legal Centre generates a manufactroversy by falsely claiming religious persecution, I have to be consistent and absolutely not accept it if an atheist does the same.

But, really, let’s be absolutely honest here: religion causes far more harm to LGBT groups than it does to non-believers. Atheists don’t have a higher level of suicide, they can still marry without controversy or denying who they are and what they believe, they tend to be from wealthy, affluent areas and get high paying jobs. As a class, they’re pretty stable except in extreme exceptions. But the damage done to LGBT people is reflected in laws across the world, including the supposedly civilised portion of it. You’re more likely to have fewer rights identifying as LGBT across the world than you are as “none” for religion.

There are parts of the world where atheism is oppressed and apostasy is punishable by death. But how many western atheists genuinely give a crap or do anything to help them? “Nah. Fuck off. That sounds like effort.” Far easier just to pretend your own western-centric experience is the only one that matters. It’s more smugly endearing to think that you, you poor non-believing dear, gets it worst out of everyone.

Religion’s treatment of women is also extremely pronounced, though mostly carried by social mores than religious edicts. A woman’s place is here, a woman’s place is there… no, she can’t do that, it’s a man’s job. And so on. You don’t get social pressure that “if you’re an atheist you cannot do that job”. Hell, if some surveys are to believed, atheism doesn’t even disqualify you from entering religious ministry!

What’s worse, of course, is that atheists take those social mores with them. They actually inherit many of the social problems that – so they claim – religion has generated. And then uncritically carry it forward. “Ha! Feminazis!!” they’ll cry “bothered about equal pay and depictions of women here when women are getting raped there!” – or, to translate that into English “Hey, quit criticising my misogyny, criticise theirs instead!”

Again, this likely to get me hounded out of the room for daring to criticise Glorious Atheism and how it will cure all social ills because Logic and Reason!

And speaking of Glorious Atheism…

3) Atheism is a fucking cult

“NO!” I hear you cry. “Atheism is NOT, NOT, NOT…” *bangs desk* “…a religion or a cult! Atheism just means not believing in g*d(s)!!”

Which is great, but “dictionary atheists” as I like to call them (“village atheists” has been used elsewhere) miss the point: such an idea doesn’t survive a head-on collision with the simple fact that people exist.

If atheism simply means “non-belief”, then why do atheist groups even exist? Why is their an atheist sub-reddit? Why is there an Atheism+ or a Brights movement? Why do books get written on the subject? Why are we even having this discussion?

Because people exist and movements and ideologies are way more than just their basic one-line definitions!

Atheism has a culture and a society that grows up around it. And, yes, while it’s hard to pin it down to just a single entity because those groups are diverse, and hold different opinions so can’t be lumped together (and if you agree to that but are happy to lump “Islam” and “Feminism” as great monolithic cult-like entities, we need to talk at a more basic level), it’s impossible to deny a society and a social expectation is raised around these groups.

As an Atheist, you’re expected to use “logic” and “reason” and be “rational”. They’re buzzwords. They’re verbal signals to identify each other. Be honest, when was the last time you saw an Atheist talk about “logic” and include something like “¬(¬A) ⇔ A“? Probably never. You’re more likely to see them name-drop the Dog Latin term for a (informal) logical fallacy and declare victory. Yet you’re still meant to be “logical” and “rational”, and use those words freely to describe yourself – religion, conversely, must be “illogical” and “irrational”, no matter the argument at hand. Never mind that something like the modal logic proof of God is logically valid (the issue is its applicability and scope), it has to be “illogical” because none of you fuckers know what “logic” means.

As an Atheist, you’re expected to agree with other Atheists. Stick together. Don’t criticise Dawkins because he’s a hero! But do criticise Feminazis because they’re illogical! Do bring up injustice in the middle-east, but don’t-you-fucking-dare mention injustice closer to home – and then promptly do nothing about it.

Atheism, at least when you spell it out and mention it out loud, comes with these social expectations. It’s all part and parcel, meaning “atheism” absolutely cannot refer only to the one-line dictionary entry “does not believe in g*d(s)”. Even if you object to the word being used to describe that social structure, you can’t deny the social structure still exists and in fact causes problems.

So, with three actual controversial opinions out there, you may now post this to Reddit and commence your Groupthink, suckers.