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A review by lpm100
Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science by Alice Dreger
dark
informative
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
Galileo's Middle Finger
5/5 stars
"Resonances of Galileo's persecution by the Catholic Church in the actions of corrupt scientists"
*******
This is a fascinating, narrative and easy reading book. (It could have been about 50 pages shorter, but it was not so waffly that I had to take off a whole star.)
It's also a great cautionary tale:
Many like to read the story about the Catholic Church and Galileo as a tale about the dangers of religion.
The point is not the truth, but instead the power dynamics in one person trying to claim a monopoly on some type of knowledge, and the fact that it was the Catholic Church and Galileo was coincidence: it could be / has been one professional organization against a scientist or some cabal of scientists against another.
The exact same dynamics were (and are) at play in the current transgender hysteria.
*******
This centers around half-a-dozen-or-so very ugly stories of religious zealots masquerading as scientists/seekers of "truth":
1. Michael Bailey affair: he demonstrated that auto-gynephilia is a condition that looks like transgenderism, but it is not. Hate campaign death threats and fake sexual sodomy-of-his-own-kids calls to CPS by three Men Dressed in Women's Clothes. (I guess these creatures--Andrea James /Deidre McCloskey/Lynn Conway--identified as transgender and this concept of auto-gynephilia interfered with their perceived identity.)
2. RandyThornhill and Craig Palmer: These guys had the temerity to suggest that sexual attraction may play a role in rape. (What is it that so many young, attractive, fertile women are raped? But never baby elephant women.....) More death threats and police getting involved.
3. Napoleon Chagnon/J. Neel. An honest portrayal of Yanomamo Indians (rather than as the Peaceful Noble Savages that Fabulous White People like to imagine) has a bunch of false claims and comparisons to people like Joseph Mengele spread about and the career of a disinterested scientist ruined.
4. Rind/Tromovich/Bauserman. These authors studied in a quantitative way the damage experienced by children that were sexually abused, and they concluded that most children came through okay. Somehow, that finding was construed as supporting/giving carte blanche to NAMBLA.
5. Alice Dreger (author). A multi-year long battle to expose a corrupt/unethical pediatric endocrinologist - - and it was ultimately unsuccessful. Also, the fight against unnecessary genital surgery on intersex children.
6. E.O. Wilson. He coined the concept of sociobiology, and he was promptly smeared as a nazi/cryptonazi by people like Steven J Gould and Richard Lewontin.
There are also a couple of cameos from other hoaxes:
1. "Recovered" memories.
2. The purging and rehabilitation of Margaret Mead based on her studies in Samoa.
*******
I would have to say that this is a nice packaging of heuristics that most people should have in mind.
1. Medicine is a discipline that proceeds by falsification / via negativa: the only reason that medical science has some idea of what does work is because enough people have suffered through learning what does not work.
2. "Science" is not enough, and scientific things can be repurposed as religious movements (complete with unquestionable priests and heretic non-believers). It is emphatically not enough to say that something is "scientific", to remove all human mental deficiencies from a reasoning process.
3. (p.158): For people who are in the habit of going back and counting references, a lot of times huge numbers of citations are put there as padding. They may not cite what they claim to cite, or even point to a non-existent page in a book.
Second order thoughts:
1. "Academic freedom" is something that's really questionable:
a. Because it is practiced in institutions that are glorified government jobs.
Things have a way of being ruined when political actors get involved with them (you need look no further than the missteps taken during the initial years of HIV and similar missteps taken during the Covid Hysteria).
b. Because a lot of their products are damaging ("Burden of Bad Ideas," Heather MacDonald) and if so, the government can generate as many of these stupid ideas as they are willing to finance.
This adds up to MASSIVE moral hazard implications.
2. This is an example of an extremely specific institutional failure by government (these government bodies missed a lot of awful mistakes). If something with such a small number of highly educated people could go this wrong, what does it mean about institutional failures at much higher levels with larger numbers of people?
3. The fact that something is a "scientific consensus" as of a given moment could be coincidence. There's no reason that the consensus might not change.
4. The author talks about the vitiation of the "Fourth Estate" (journalism) by the internet--investigative journalism takes money, and the internet has made running such investigative departments financially unfeasible. It's interesting that Dreger lived through a time when newspapers were less than 150% false. (Whatever time that was--if it was-- it has been so far back that I myself can't remember.)
Verdict: Recommend
*******
Quotes:
(p.129): "One identity card after another was thrown down - - which only made sense in a feminist room where you win by simply having the most identity cards. I found myself thinking that women's studies is about as sophisticated a game as Go Fish
(p.156): ".....number one rule in making shit up: make it so unbelievable that people have to believe."
(p.137): "only people like us, with insane amounts of privilege, could ever think it was a good idea to decide what is right before we even know what is true........ could think that guilt or innocence should be determined by identity rather than by facts.
"... Industrial strength Catholics."
Galileo's Middle Finger
5/5 stars
"Resonances of Galileo's persecution by the Catholic Church in the actions of corrupt scientists"
*******
This is a fascinating, narrative and easy reading book. (It could have been about 50 pages shorter, but it was not so waffly that I had to take off a whole star.)
It's also a great cautionary tale:
Many like to read the story about the Catholic Church and Galileo as a tale about the dangers of religion.
The point is not the truth, but instead the power dynamics in one person trying to claim a monopoly on some type of knowledge, and the fact that it was the Catholic Church and Galileo was coincidence: it could be / has been one professional organization against a scientist or some cabal of scientists against another.
The exact same dynamics were (and are) at play in the current transgender hysteria.
*******
This centers around half-a-dozen-or-so very ugly stories of religious zealots masquerading as scientists/seekers of "truth":
1. Michael Bailey affair: he demonstrated that auto-gynephilia is a condition that looks like transgenderism, but it is not. Hate campaign death threats and fake sexual sodomy-of-his-own-kids calls to CPS by three Men Dressed in Women's Clothes. (I guess these creatures--Andrea James /Deidre McCloskey/Lynn Conway--identified as transgender and this concept of auto-gynephilia interfered with their perceived identity.)
2. RandyThornhill and Craig Palmer: These guys had the temerity to suggest that sexual attraction may play a role in rape. (What is it that so many young, attractive, fertile women are raped? But never baby elephant women.....) More death threats and police getting involved.
3. Napoleon Chagnon/J. Neel. An honest portrayal of Yanomamo Indians (rather than as the Peaceful Noble Savages that Fabulous White People like to imagine) has a bunch of false claims and comparisons to people like Joseph Mengele spread about and the career of a disinterested scientist ruined.
4. Rind/Tromovich/Bauserman. These authors studied in a quantitative way the damage experienced by children that were sexually abused, and they concluded that most children came through okay. Somehow, that finding was construed as supporting/giving carte blanche to NAMBLA.
5. Alice Dreger (author). A multi-year long battle to expose a corrupt/unethical pediatric endocrinologist - - and it was ultimately unsuccessful. Also, the fight against unnecessary genital surgery on intersex children.
6. E.O. Wilson. He coined the concept of sociobiology, and he was promptly smeared as a nazi/cryptonazi by people like Steven J Gould and Richard Lewontin.
There are also a couple of cameos from other hoaxes:
1. "Recovered" memories.
2. The purging and rehabilitation of Margaret Mead based on her studies in Samoa.
*******
I would have to say that this is a nice packaging of heuristics that most people should have in mind.
1. Medicine is a discipline that proceeds by falsification / via negativa: the only reason that medical science has some idea of what does work is because enough people have suffered through learning what does not work.
2. "Science" is not enough, and scientific things can be repurposed as religious movements (complete with unquestionable priests and heretic non-believers). It is emphatically not enough to say that something is "scientific", to remove all human mental deficiencies from a reasoning process.
3. (p.158): For people who are in the habit of going back and counting references, a lot of times huge numbers of citations are put there as padding. They may not cite what they claim to cite, or even point to a non-existent page in a book.
Second order thoughts:
1. "Academic freedom" is something that's really questionable:
a. Because it is practiced in institutions that are glorified government jobs.
Things have a way of being ruined when political actors get involved with them (you need look no further than the missteps taken during the initial years of HIV and similar missteps taken during the Covid Hysteria).
b. Because a lot of their products are damaging ("Burden of Bad Ideas," Heather MacDonald) and if so, the government can generate as many of these stupid ideas as they are willing to finance.
This adds up to MASSIVE moral hazard implications.
2. This is an example of an extremely specific institutional failure by government (these government bodies missed a lot of awful mistakes). If something with such a small number of highly educated people could go this wrong, what does it mean about institutional failures at much higher levels with larger numbers of people?
3. The fact that something is a "scientific consensus" as of a given moment could be coincidence. There's no reason that the consensus might not change.
4. The author talks about the vitiation of the "Fourth Estate" (journalism) by the internet--investigative journalism takes money, and the internet has made running such investigative departments financially unfeasible. It's interesting that Dreger lived through a time when newspapers were less than 150% false. (Whatever time that was--if it was-- it has been so far back that I myself can't remember.)
Verdict: Recommend
*******
Quotes:
(p.129): "One identity card after another was thrown down - - which only made sense in a feminist room where you win by simply having the most identity cards. I found myself thinking that women's studies is about as sophisticated a game as Go Fish
(p.156): ".....number one rule in making shit up: make it so unbelievable that people have to believe."
(p.137): "only people like us, with insane amounts of privilege, could ever think it was a good idea to decide what is right before we even know what is true........ could think that guilt or innocence should be determined by identity rather than by facts.
"... Industrial strength Catholics."