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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   30524 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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(At some point I’d like to write a post about an implication of this comic which Randall perhaps did not intend.)

A bit of an aside, but I'd be interested to read this. (The unintended implication that strikes me as funny is that dowsing works!)

Funny aside - while I was doing research on wells, plumbing, and septic systems(for reasons), I was honestly surprised at the author quoting a multitude of people whom bluntly state some variation of 'Yeah, I use dowsing when searching for water, and it works.' Alternatively, 'It may or may not work, but I'm still gonna use it'.

Then again, I have a dim view of XKCD and think he isn't really all that, so...

Edit: Corrected 'sceptic' to 'septic', because I am not a smart man and my fingers often get away from my brain. Though one could argue both systems handle the same thing...

sceptic systems

Surely a true sceptic system would require RCTs to determine the efficacy of dowsing?

Alternatively, 'It may or may not work, but I'm still gonna use it'.

I am reminded of the apocryphal tale of Niels Bohr’s horseshoe

The logic doesn't work that way. The proposition Randall makes is "dowsing works" => "companies would use it". If that statement is true (let's just say it is), then the contrapositive "companies don't use it" => "dowsing doesn't work" is also true. But your proposition is the converse of Randall's, which is not automatically true when the original proposition is true.

My personal favorite implication which Randall almost certainly didn't intend (and I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of those @Folamh3 has in mind) is that his logic disproves the gender pay gap (as stated by feminists anyways). If companies could in fact hire equally effective women for 70% of male wages, they would hire only women if at all possible. Every company would jump at the chance to cut their labor costs by 30% with no drawbacks! But they don't, which means that there is some drawback to hiring women, which means the gender pay gap isn't explained by just sexism.

But your proposition is the converse of Randall's, which is not automatically true when the original proposition is true.

Sure – the implication is there, though. It seems to me that Randall is nudging readers towards believing that relativity and quantum electrodynamics are true. And Randall doesn't put the check-mark next to the dowsing (or the hexing/cursing!) even though, arguably, he should.

My personal favorite implication which Randall almost certainly didn't intend (and I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of those @Folamh3 has in mind) is that his logic disproves the gender pay gap (as stated by feminists anyways).

Very close. What I was actually thinking was that it disproves a particular variety of the "female underrepresentation in STEM" claim. If women are just as interested in pursuing careers in STEM as men, but are systematically turned away from jobs in those fields because of a culture of entrenched sexism, then those companies are leaving money on the table by refusing to avail of great talent. Any company which made a point of hiring female coders would make a killing by hiring all the talent that their competitors are turning away for stupid reasons.

Suffice to say, I don't think there is any persuasive evidence that there are millions of talented female CS grads who can't find work as coders or similar because the hiring managers in STEM companies walked in off the set of Mad Men (a particularly implausible claim given the gender breakdown of human resource managers). To my knowledge, tech companies are champing at the bit to hire female talent, if only as project managers, product owners etc.. Female underrepresentation in STEM could still hypothetically be caused by other kinds of institutional sexism (e.g. women applying for CS programs but being turned away by sexist course coordinators, women being passed over for career advancement because tech is an old boys' club etc.), but the claim that female underrepresentation in STEM is caused by sexism at the hiring stage essentially requires us to believe that STEM companies collectively are more committed to misogyny than they are to making money. Which I find rather incredible.

Oh yeah that's a good one too! And:

To my knowledge, tech companies are chomping at the bit to hire female talent...

This is absolutely correct in my experience. Having a vagina is pretty much a cheat code for your career, from what I have seen. You aren't guaranteed to get jobs just because of that, but you have an automatic edge over everyone else. Ditto if you are black, and I would imagine the effect stacks if you're a black woman.

And the CIA really did have an occult warfare unit for curses, hexes and remote viewing.

The real issue with that line of the table is that "the military" is very much not a ruthlessly efficient capitalist enterprise, and accusing the CIA of being such is downright laughable. It is hard to imagine an organization less accountable to its supposed stakeholders.

It still casts doubt on XKCD’s central thesis though. “Lol well if it’s real why isn’t the military using it? Checkmate.” Well they did or at least spent a lot of effort and taxpayer money trying.

But that's not XKCD's central thesis. I think Randall would be the first to point out that the public sector routinely wastes fortunes on useless extravagances or projects which were doomed to failure from the outset, whereas private sector companies that devote too large a share of their budget to such projects eventually go bankrupt.

The claim is not "no companies are investigating this to see if it works, therefore it mustn't be real"; the claim is "if it was real, at least one company would have found a way to make money out of it". Even if you expand it to include public sector bodies, Randall's argument still holds: it's not "no companies (or public sector bodies) are investigating this to see if it works, therefore it mustn't be real"; the claim is "if it was real, at least one company (or public sector body) would have found a way to make use out of it, either by making money or by securing a competitive advantage".

If that was his point he wouldn’t have mentioned the military.

I think it's reasonable to conclude that the CIA (despite their best efforts!) never succeeded in securing a huge, unanswerable competitive advantage over their enemies using remote viewing. (One presumes if they had a functioning remote viewing unit in the 1970 or 80s, it would have taken them less than ten years after 9/11 to track down bin Laden.) The fact that they spent a fortune on something that didn't work proves nothing. Thus, Randall's thesis holds.

Or maybe remote viewing is 100% real, but the CIA doesn't have a huge, unanswerable competitive advantage over their enemies because those enemies have their own remote viewing programs.

What can I say, other than that I think a world in which every major power had a remote viewing program would look radically different from the one which we currently inhabit.

What makes you think the CIA wanted to track down their “former” asset and comrade in arms? The one who’s existence justified all those lovely imperialistic wars? Even without remote viewers, they had a ton of other resources that they were aggressively not using to find him.

The fact that they did, in fact, eventually assassinate him.

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Did they (or the Soviets) accomplish anything of note using said unit?

Supposedly.

This article doesn't even credit the CIA's remote viewing unit for accomplishing this. It says the CIA consulted a psychic, which to me sounds like the CIA paid someone who wasn't a staff member.

I think at least some of the people in the "CIA remote viewing unit" were on a contract basis. As I understand it, the intelligence agencies (reasonably!) had a lot of questions about if remote viewing was a thing that would work, so at least part of their M.O. was to go out and get people who were supposed to be good as psychic stuff and test them. I don't think this involved making them full-time employees. Maybe you wouldn't consider them part of the "CIA's remote viewing unit" even if they were getting tasked by the CIA (or whoever) to do remote viewing as part of the ongoing remote viewing project, I dunno.

Obviously Jimmy Carter is reporting something somewhat vaguely that he wasn't directly involved in, and perhaps the CIA went and got a psychic in a manner that was completely unrelated to the ongoing investigations into remote viewing, I haven't dug into it. The entire saga of the government's remote viewing project is kinda convoluted to me and I don't claim to be very familiar with the ins-and-outs of it – it moved around between different agencies and departments, with different sources of funding, and then was supposedly shut down, and then some people who were supposedly former staffers then came out and talked about the program, and who knows if they are telling the truth or not.

But that seems to me, off the top of my head, as the best example of "the CIA used a psychic to accomplish a tangible intelligence task" that seems somewhat credible because Jimmy Carter verified it.

The remote viewing program supposedly did. They identified a new type of Soviet nuclear submarine before it was deployed and before any other intel sources knew about it. They also found the location of an American general that had been kidnapped by a left-wing paramilitary in Italy. They were used to locate Iraqi surface to air missile sites during the Gulf War, with partial but incomplete success.

The occult warfare program (MK OFTEN) is more heavily classified and we know less about it. Probably for good reason: based on the personnel it employed it likely involved human sacrifice. In any case, it was probably being used for missions that would be illegal or violations of international law regardless of the method used to achieve them.

Both of these programs have ostensibly been shut down. That could definitely be true, but there are a lot of intelligence agency programs that get “shut down” and moved somewhere else before the congressional subcommittee hearings can kick into gear.

I don’t really know anything specific about the Soviet program if they had one.

Do you have a source for the remote viewing program?

Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that the CIA discovered the new Soviet submarine, the location of the general etc by other means, and attributed them to their remote viewing unit as a cover story? (See also the British Department of War covering up the existence of radar, using the cover story that British anti-aircraft gunners were able to spot Luftwaffe planes because they had exceptional eyesight as a result of eating lots of carrots.)

There’s an entire non-fiction book about it called The Men Who Stare at Goats. Regarding your point, I definitely don’t rule it out, but I would think if they were going to do that they would pick a less ridiculous cover explanation.

Doesn't sound significantly more ridiculous to me than "eating lots of carrots enables you to spot fighter jets from miles away, at night".

The other possible explanation is that after the A-Bomb, both the US and the USSR were willing to throw a lot of money at things that sound like bunk on the small off-chance that they’re not. A lot of Nazi German higher ups thought that nuclear weapons were fanciful sci-fi bullshit or intentional misinformation planted by Jewish physicists, and they got screwed out of a potential war-winner as a result. And magic might be especially tempting in that regard, since you don’t need a gigantic, Manhattan Project-tier investment to give it a try.

Yes, I think is is precisely what happened.

Correct. Seems like the Soviets did as well.

Dowsing works?

Oil companies use it (or at least did in the past) so the implication is that it works, yeah.

Are you sure this is not some kind of parallel construction scam where for some reason someone in the pipeline is trying to hide how they really made the discovery?

I don't think so but I can't prove it's never been used that way. I don't think the oil companies need parallel construction, though, they have a lot of other methods of searching for oil that are public.

If you hang around people in the oil and natural gas industry for long enough, you will find one who says ‘oh, we hired a Russian guy who’s the only one who can still do this technique and he found us our big strike’. This sounds like parallel construction to me, and I’ve never heard of dowsing being bragged about.

Why do you think they would be parallel constructing, to protect unknown technical knowledge?

I'm pretty confident dowsing been used to (attempt to) find oil in the past, though. I know someone who used to work in the industry, a very long time ago, and he talked about dowsing in that context, although it might have only been for water.

If you get any of your pals to cop to dowsing (or to know of dowsing being done) you should report back.

I think it’s parallel constructing because the mechanism is often something physically implausible, like ‘he knows how to run an x-ray with a gamma ray laser’ or some other Soviet super science fallen into a lone individual type trope. These are smart enough people to understand why you would want a gamma ray laser X-ray but rely on nobody wanting to double check whether it’s physically possible to build. It wouldn’t shock me if one of them came up with a story like that off of not wanting to admit using dowsing though.

And there’s a lot of small companies who’ve specialized in buying wells abandoned by the big dogs and getting the last drop of oil or gas out of them; they’re not going to want to disclose how they figure out which ones they make money off of.

The kinds of people involved in the oil industry probably would not use dowsing as the parallel construction.

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