A Serious Post
Last edited Thu Dec 25, 2025, 07:26 AM - Edit history (17)
Hi DU,
This is somewhat different from most standard posts here. I wanted to share something with you guys here (the posters I see a lot/any others and EarlG/elad/if he is around still Skinner).
You may have noticed some strange posts in my journal this last year. To cut to the chase, I don’t have any mental issues. I never did.
Long story short, I am going to file allegations of misconduct in human subject research and malpractice in psychiatry against my former employer - a truly loathsome data mining and defense contracting giant, as well as its close partner Google. I have felt like a completely non voluntary subject in a large scale human experiment for the past 14.5 years.
I also plan to sue for RTI wrt anything relevant locally where I now live unless some reasonably democratic and civilized system handles this faster than this.
No monetary compensation or anything of that type. Just doing my duty by society - a concept alien to those douchebags. Sounds a bit pompous, but it’s true ;-/.
This is appalling and driven by corporations not anything like the NIH labs I knew.
That should send a warning to other “researchers” and companies (both here in my country as well as over there) who think that atrociously exploitative methodologies and the gross malpractice acceptable right now are going to go unchallenged. I will also probably file some harassment complaints locally.
I am posting this here, because I am not going to pretend that this is politically neutral. While I disapprove of some of the bogus technocratic and corporate malfeasance permitted by any administration, the Trump administration and MAGA are a joke even by Republican standards. And I never understood that worldview anyway.
So I don’t trust a Trump administration to handle such complaints (except in ways that would be useful to their cronies). I was a publicly funded scientist when I was in the US and politics aside, no part of Trumpian ways strikes me as remotely acceptable.
But it is worse than Trump. This overreach by corporations (largely in this one overhyped and junk filled field - computer science and from a few tacky schools like my sleazy and morally bankrupt former employer) using flawed economic models is taking over everything using bullshit about ai and other laughably manipulative rot. That garbage is replacing what used to be good science and better governance. They are basically the reason the POTUS is a petty tyrant like Trump whose main skill is reality TV rating manipulation and whose sycophants are toad eating toad eaters. They must not rehabilitate themselves after this.
Regarding that entire collection of creeps (Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Bezos, the Palantir creeps, Marc Andreessen, Alex Pentland) -those creeps are morons not brilliant and any society daft enough to keep their myth going because of cowardice or greed among the genuinely elite/general confusion is bound to be ..how did we say it back in the day over here (bot or not! Not a bot I promise ;-/ ) screwn. lol..
I am a flawed scientist and human myself. But I am not a fool and I have seen enough. I have never been corrupt or sleazy, whatever my other faults ( 
;-/ ) and I am tired of this.
I liked my actual colleagues/people at the NIH very much (even the ones at the loathsome institution..brilliant institution of choice though guys) and generally respect physicians and that was the only reason I endured this completely worthless and pointless nuisance this long.
Edit: I really hope my mentor at my last institution gets that I held off for this long because I respect his work/family. But at this point, I feel his work would actually in the long run be better with some pushback against his school. My main mentor was pretty awesome, but not burdened by a sleazy corporation tricked out as a school.
Thanks a lot a DU. Along with some very valuable sources like Current Affairs magazine and Yasha Levine, you guys have helped me in my extracurricular thinking. I do mean it.
Edit: I should also add in: Evgenia Kovda, Nandita Bajaj, Christopher Ketcham and last but not least Adam Becker (he is pretty awesome - a scientist and a rabble rouser).
Can’t forget Chauncey DeVega who is the main person I follow for news on Trump to gauge the non-techno strain of Nazi. And Sam Miller MacDonald.
My creepy former employer would probably want me to exclusively read The NYT and The Atlantic and give up on reality. Among other things Google has had a very bad effect on journalism, but somehow the rabble cannot entirely be shutdown. I think Lina Khan really pissed them off by not keeping things at the level of a joke. They never minded pretending to be liberal and liked the fraudulent “si valley is liberal and censures conservatives” brand of criticism. But that Si Valley suffocates the kinds of economic progress and prevention of ecocollapse and monopolizes reality..all that is angering.
I used to wonder how anyone was propping up their blatantly phony histrionics. But they call common demands for decency histrionic.
I bet my sleazy employer hopes what is implicitly conveyed in this screed is that, even if not insane, I am an ungrateful and infantile person who was a burden on good publicly funded science and should be “grateful” that I was given a chance to “sober up” and mechanically do a bunch of brainless crap and instead spewed a bunch of profanity, sent them a middle finger graphic and moved half way around the globe. Totally not as a joke or theatre.
It makes me angry all over again to remember just how shallow, callous, sleazy and driven by nothing but the most pathetic kind of rear covering it was. It was a strain on my mom, dad, my few friends. It took years to undo the damage to my brain. And they never bothered with even a commonly decent explanation and it has nothing to do with anything but complete lack of decency. Yeah well fuck ‘em. I wouldn’t believe a word those assholes said, but I am not crapping up a serious ideological issue with petty conflicts with some sleazy people, whose identities no one will know via me. Some gate-keepers tricked out as ..think that sleazy, dead-eyed concern troll Tristan Harris and that’s it.
Anyway I disagree with that BS that I am just a lazy, disgruntled fraud-I take research ethics very seriously whether it is my work or theirs so they can stuff it.
It’s not grandiosity to experience Accelerationism on a ghastly scale and feel an insult that huge requires a thought through and forceful pushback.
They have these pathetic narratives pathologizing harmless human vanities or flaws.
It is such a frog in boiling water situation as they race to peddle more mediocre, fluffy gate keeping narratives around the worthless rubbish. It’s not attacks on funding for education and impoverishing people with only BS jobs..it’s not any of that. People just don’t have any self control and are depressed addicts! Ruth Cain wrote the best piece I ever saw on mental health in The Conversation.
They seriously want most good research to die where inconvenient to the project of looting the damn place or only be done by industrial corporations and conducted like mafia organizations. I think the good guys would be Google and Facebook and the bad guys Musk and Palantir. I mean when you put it like that..
Unfuckingbelievably scammy and sleazy and pulling it off. I must shut up. It’s going on and on like that ass John Galt’s thing. If I have anything original to add, I must find someone like Nathan Robinson or Yasha Levine and tell them. Feel indignant..I really owe lefty media of the type in this post and in the one I vandalized DUer berniesandersmittens’ thread with. I was struggling to form a cogent worldview without that.
Trust me, any DU member would agree with this decision. This is about some of the worst offenders in the war on democracy/information etc that is ongoing.
I have to go finish a paper. I shall be back after that, blending in and trying to act normal 
.
I prize my anonymity since I have no wish to ever do anything but science at a very modest level and lead a quiet and dull life.
I really have appreciated DU. I couldn’t have used one of those noxious forms of media like FB,Twitter, TikTok etc. I have valued the presence of MIRT/EarlG/elad in a world of vanishing standards and mercenary transactionalism.
I have been embarassed by the writing in my own posts here, which I can rarely stand to go back and read because they sound like Trump’s “weave”.
But this was something that should have been in the annals of some sort of honest system and instead it is spilling out on the web. The only reason it is not objectionable is that this is an explicitly lefty website with underground in its damn name ffs.
It’s not “Democrats-who-want-to-be-on-teeveeee!!!.com.
It’s not yet another sad damn Mr.Beast stunt or something like that. Which would be my former employer’s style - loud and conspicuous, unless they were doing something sleazy like the scurrying beetle-like men from 1984. James Buchanan’s concept of “zealotry”. Why would anyone do anything that was not motivated by the crassest, sleaziest possible motivations?
Only someone as daft as Elon Musk would insist that Greta Thunberg has a “brand”. And these are the morons shaping perceptions of reality.
It has grated on me since I don’t consider this web based communication democratisation, but tabloidisation. That is not brainless snobbery. The same sleazy companies (Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/TikTok) destroying the public sector/public TV and regulatory bodies, want to take over the functions that were carried out and far better by experts of the right kind. Even sans ai it is not cool when it is a damn reality TV adjacent abomination.
HR professionals or other public sector experts of the best calibre can’t be replaced by online theatrics.
Even my loathsome employer had a decent the postdoc counselor. Had she been a Dean Walker type (Promising Young Woman ref), it would have made my abject humiliation worse. But they don’t let anyone decent help employees.
They are libertarian morons who want a YouTube version of Sesame Street, Mr Blippi. They hump RetractionWatch as it only attacks publicly funded science, but has no problems with the parasitic methods of data mining giants. Any sane take on psychiatry should have rejected as a joke the notion that a hellhole in bed with Google can be expected to honestly psychiatrically evaluate anyone.
If they ever acknowledge an error (but with a trashy new product - a musical!), who gives a shit? It’s like those apologies 200 years after the people they applied to are gone.
Google or Facebook’s methods in healthcare and education, deployed at scale are grossly exploitative.
Oh no no. Ioannidis is a truth teller and contrarian! Eric Schmidt is not totally sleazy! One should attack doctors and publicly funded scientists, but sports billionaire fueled “police reform”-totally credible! Google and mental health-awesome! Andy Rubin and Amit Singhal and Facebook’s stalkerish engineers..pfffft ..paranoia…What sane woman could object to a surveillance start-up run by Andy Rubin?
I can and do self-police and RetractionWatch can go fuck itself. I always took the responsibility of publicly funded science seriously, but I owe no explanations to hyper capitalist kayfabe.
Free market bro! Everything is then politically “neutral”. In this world, you don’t have to take every damn issue up, but there is no such thing as “politically neutral”.
This was not a sudden thing. I have enough “data”, after the 2022 overturn of Roe v Wade and Trump 2.0, the humiliation of public sector workers/federal employees by those brainless parasites of DOGE, anything Trump/JD Vance/Musk/Pichai etc. I can’t do much, but I can ensure that I finish this paper and file a seriois complaint against my former employer. I don’t see how that wouldn’t net be in the interest of everything decent if I can at some point find a lawyer similar in instincts Alec Karakatsanis or Lina Khan. They are among other things legit like Yasha Levine etc as they are also “zealots” not doing stuff for power, control, money or their “brands”.
I was not exactly Che Guevara myself..I was and am lame..But I found this one job that does least harm within the constraints of the world we live in-publicly funded science.
And I was plodding away at it with my signature mediocrity, but unlike Vance at least I am aware of it. Brainless pseudo-populist, Nazi jackass. But there comes a line where you go-this is too much.
I cut my teeth in a lousy EECS dept so I am very familiar with the superficial politics and very limited understanding of science and reality resulting when economics and computer science are all you get and the concept of even “okay this worthless piece of junk makes money but does it have any fucking actual value aside from that?” eludes you.
Oh no problem! We have checks, balances and discipline! Like private virtual prisons funded by Andreessen! They even have their own (tonedeaf) musicals!
It’s why most tech or ai criticism is a fraudulent humblebrag or gate-kept drivel. Props to Ed Zitron. I left him out, but he also attacks the creeps the right way unlike the humblebrag rot.
Prior to the take over of reality by Google and Facebook etc, I faced no real racism or sexism personally even in a red state..It is not that those things didn’t exist, but this nightmarish technofascist corporatist strategy is amplifying the worst things with bandaids in place of real fixes. Vaccines aren’t enough, wet markets and factory farms should be banned. Ransomware and ai leak patches aren’t enough-these methods must go away instead of cleaning product ads being the fix. This was an insult on a scale that requires as much real pushback as a lame random can cobble together. I just have to work out the actual details of that 
. I won’t be making a career of this.
I’ll tell you more about it later - if it is good for DU and for me. I have to go offline now. Haven’t enjoyed science in forever and that’s never good. These guys’ rubbishy products are not addictive. They are just a nuisance. Ai is rubbish (at least the rot these creeps are peddling) but the muscular use of force is real. Fuck those guys.
Also, chin up..it could get better..and I am notoriously pessimistic.. Awkward group hug ..but I mean it if that counts ;-/..we are a community ..hah..
I wanted to thank you all by handle, since you have shaped my worldview and in ways I support at any rate. But I would forget someone and so I didn’t ;-/.
I had also initially written a post supporting my former colleagues, but they know or should. This isn’t really my style overall, but as you guys here get, this isn’t a normal time and it hasn’t been for at least 15 years for me and finally I have seen enough to challenge rubbish about being a crazy stoned catlady.
Thanks,
jfz9580m
Final Edit: And misogyny or at least extreme sexism. How could I forget the defining feature of the whole thing whether it is the creepy methods or anything else? Thanks to the temporary abeyance of the noise that was bogus hustle culture “feminism”, I can reclaim the label of feminist and that school is unfit to assess the mental health of anyone but some sort of tradwife-girlboss. I’ll do what I can for women’s rights, civil rights, publicly funded science and medical research by filing complaints and taking action while not eschewing any responsibilities I have. I have no quarrel with good science, but the methods must truly be up to spec and not Googley.
I owe Promising Young Woman and the Scum Manifesto for scrubbing away the taste of lean-in feminism my sleazy former school stank of. And the Scum Manifesto is satire. It has only one line on prejudice (under Prejudice (racial, ethnic, religious etc)), but I bet she cared. Don’t like clunky hasty crap to check a box about stuff that matters. Again I am posting on a site with underground in its name. Unlike my sleazy employer if I am more delicate with immigration or race, it’s because I don’t like anything that sounds mechanical and thoughtless. I myself am sick of feeling like my brain is churned by a rusty fork. My last mentor used to get a little annoyed by my looking for “theories of everything” wrt a relatively simple model system..that problem hasn’t improved once my canvas has become “how technofascists are ruining reality” but with my limited and superficial (my brand!) understanding. Anyway, it has to benefit everyone if those bastards are seriously stopped rather than more jokey predicted fallouts. I hope my mentor is in a good position because he is probably in the same position as Yan LeCun..useful to those corporate parasites who run the place, but kept on a tight leash. They really are horrible people. Anyway I must go wrap up my work.
(One truly last note-predictions. That’s what it’s about. If you can grab the prediction making of various groups you despise extractively and repurpose them for your own gains then you can know just how much you can get away with and continue delusionally to think you will have total control and power rather than taking us all down. There would be no non-profit oriented scientists or public sector workers or activists to tell you that it is wrong.
It won’t work. That’s a different matter. They are wasting their time. The thought processes that allow people to understand sophisticated predictions better cannot fundamentally be understood by these horse tranquilizer addled, brain damaged morons.
And their ai will be garbage. You can’t hold outright stupid views like race and IQ are connected and have a machine that works. Or one that can never ever examine capitalism as a potential issue, unless it is in the context of the explicitly racist, totally insincere, pseudo populism of a JD Vance. Which creates these nightmarish syncretic mixes from hell. Neoliberalism with nothing to actually offer materially aside from some platitudes versus Nazi populism.
Especially by the time they have this little self control they can’t do science and that’s where you go when you have no concept of anything non crass..But that’s the sad, lame and pathetic idea..but the neoliberals are engaged in the same thing. No second chances is the only way forward. Don’t come back after this and claim you were actually BTS working for the right side etc rather than with no principles at all and no real observations just manipulating shit to see what happens. 2016 was the worst. With creeps like Pichai pretending to care about immigrants and JD Vance claiming he cares about Muslims. I felt totally alienated from society especially with what I had seen with these techies with their shallow crap claiming to be liberal or left. That is why we are still arguing about simple things like vaccines and abortion rights and glbtq rights over economics or god forbid maybe not completely trashing the planet. Bumper sticker politics.
One reason I trust Yan LeCun to not outright lie about ai is he is European and his politics are less hyper-capitalist. How can you have a model of any kind of intelligence that bumbling in the physical world aside, treats politics as non existent or this model of the world that kicks out all fields but computer science and economics? Anyway I must shut up. This furious monologue usually kept inside my head cannot keep going. None of it is original. But politics having been this directly personal and in such moronic ways..I must go work ;-/.)
See you guys on the other side. I am making a clean break from this lousy period of my life. I’ll only be back plus paper. I want to couple forward movement in science with the explicit decision to file allegations against Google, that school and any similar entities here like that (e.g.: that creepy guy Alex Pentland’s sleazy little surveillance industries, small creepy defense contracting cos here if any. The one sexual harasser I came across here was with such a firm and he had a Lockheed Martin contract at some point).
Thanks you guys here on DU. You were a huge help..at least I hope that cheers you up a bit as you navigate this hard time. Wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it.
Our organs of communication are diseased. Imagine if human communication meant that instead of something just being flat 1-D text on paper you could actually communicate what things really meant? I have myself looked dully at terms like “critical thinking” slack-jawed and vaguely thought that it sounds like both a good idea and a meaningless phrase. But lately I have these flashes of insight where I go “oh that’s what that actually means”. It struck me as I was reading Ciara Moloney’s piece in Current Affairs where she mentioned Plato’s Cave.
I suppose I should make this post less angry, but eh..it’s already out there with all the name calling etc so shrug….A bit late in the day for tut tutting by all the people who contributed way more to this shit reality than I ever did. I am exiting and going back to a normal life, but ensuring that the most forceful pushback that isn’t a damn gate kept joke results against Google and my sleazy former employer.
I had to painfully put myself back together after that nightmare using what inspiration I could find via lefty media like Current Affairs and Yasha Levine etc. it’s not personal, but as far as the institution/the admins go:
A final note on somewhat personal anger which. I largely have no interpersonal complaints for real, which is good. But there are a handful of people solely at my last school I do blame. Like a few my mentor boosted and this ageist neoliberal asshole of a random pi.
Well as the last paragraph in this screed, the anger I feel is especially directed at this Reid Hoffman/Mark Cuban like corporate pi who affected me more than my pi, who with all his hideousness wasn’t that bad (though he has his share of “tech will save the world!” techies in tow-callow morons ). It’s not important who they are. Think Tristan Harris and you are there.
This is the type of person who has the sense to calculatedly predict that a Nazi Reich may not be good for them either, but it would be dressed up as being this noble good guy. Well fuck them. I can say this much..I would not be happy if these nazis came for him. Aside from everything else a guy like that being lionized as anti-Nazi is bad for anti-nazis.
The thing about a lot of lefties is that while they are poor and powerless, they are much nicer people. It’s why I pay attention to them while I just tune out people like that asshole. God I hate that guy. He is not a creep. Just a shallow mercenary. If like UHC healthcare guy he ever kicks it, I’d totally want to go and post this under his obituary and I hope he knows:
. I’d want him to know that I will be cheering the day he dies. Do him good to know how much he is hated.
Truly last edit: After all, another edit would just ruin this clearly elegantly written verbal vomit fest erudite stream of consciousness, very much a product of its times. I felt bad singling out this one douchey pi from a school where with the exception of my mentor, 90% of the pis are sleazy, social climbing and callous douche bags. So I didn’t want to be exclusionary and restrict it to this one asshole because he was the in the adjacent lab, but say that if any of those pis keel over, you can be sure I will respond this way: . Many of them probably even voted Dem-their version of dem which is Cuomo adjacent. Or Mark Cuban adjacent. But the sad truth of our times is that people like these who are hated by anyone who knows them, serve as a vehicle for Nazis to purvey hate. I am uhhh “radical left” (horseshoe! Not really..if you see how things go, underneath these labels, “radical left” in this context is maybe saying shit like this instead of blatantly hypocritical drivel about some morally bankrupt, dead on the inside assholes. This is not in any way living up to your duties as publicly funded scientists and I will ensure that I do my part to see that you are judged by history after losing my mom rather than you sending a mob to smear me and using Nazis dislike of you mean that you are actually sane.
This was complete dereliction of duty in a publicly funded scientist and I know the type of scientists-greedy, cowardly and social climbing and..you are a disgrace. I never met people like these in science and I hope I never do. The doctors I meet here are decent. Most I met are okay. I never knew these people but I blame them because I can tell. Just because Nazis also dislike you, doesn’t mean everyone who dislikes you is a Nazi (they would totally try that laughable gambit and flounder because if I am weak in science, my understanding of reality is less weak since I am not fucking lying all the time for a corporatist agenda with no fucking decency. So I will only be reporting the institution and hold my peace from here on out to avoid bored mobs. But you can be sure that a not crazy person will be laughing when your disgraceful rear departs this realm. Shame on you. You are a disgrace to the scientific and medical professions. This wont age well. I have no idea how I will “age”, but I don’t really care as long as no one thinks I am a mean-spirited, heartless or cruel human who doesn’t care. Have a nice Christmas! Your institution will be facing malpractice and misconduct allegations at some point. Buh bye. Shame my mom died. If that had not happened - that was also a preventable death /she had an excellent onc and despite my head being all amuck I did everything I could for her- that shit school would have avoided this. Shame Trump got reelected. That ensured this. And don’t bother with stuff from the 50s on mental illness. I feel better in the two days since I have determined I will file allegations of misconduct and malpractice in psychiatry, the day I can. It feels like a load off my mind. I haven’t been myself. I felt from the start that that’s the right thing to do, but it’s such a serious charge and I was working more with info from the state of the world and …yes it’s politics. It’s a part of life. But not horse trading and self serving shit. This was appalling and I don’t blame my mentor. I blame the institutional culture the rest of the people there made. I went to work for him because he wasn’t..a nightmare. The rest of the place..totally sleazy..irredeemable. But I will wait till this Nazi administration is gone. Unlike these ahistorical people with an attention span of one business cycle or one news cycle, I can and will wait it out. Jerks..
Hey..I am only human. I try to be a team player etc as much as I can. But he has enough money and is okay and as I cunningly calculate unlikely to be able to mob me like my mentor’s add on techies. Normal anger at sexist rot is not borderline personality. I didn’t mean these few jerks when I mentioned the colleagues I care about above. That’s unforced cooperation and respect. With these few people, dislike of spectacles aside, I have no respect or liking for them.
It’s not many people, but fuck em. I do try but I am no angel. It was alienating, isolating and slanderous abd above all pretty damn stupid and sleazy. It’s not sensible to go along with rubbish like that..it’s sleazy.
And they could have prevented it, but they are assholes and at least off the record revisionism must not occur, when you cost me and my family this heavily and to this day don’t give a shit because you are morally bankrupt at the core. I would never be on the other side of this situation and that cannot be both sided. Aside from everything else, I am not cowardly enough to pass on all the misery to someone else and sit around predicting how to best curate my image. That was a difference wrt my pi’s wife and that old turd. She was a genuinely nice person. I only met her once, but women in my position have to make do with small amounts of info.
Thats all. Unfortunately it’s not humanly possible to make it totally conflict free and wholesome even wrt NIH labs. On the plus side it was a very small number of people, all of whom are a better fit for the private sector as it is these days. UHC Healthcare sounds like a good fit. Fuck those guys..
Night.
Edit: I finally feel at peace and ready to start work and move on. Lol..even after I finish this paper, improve my work, with my more openly radical views I have such a distaste for most things by now and only really like working on publicly funded science in my narrow field.. so I don’t know what I will do. But at least for now I can finally go focus on this paper which I wasn’t able to do for a year but really it was hard throughout this period. And I will figure out how to initiate a complaint against my former employer so at least they don’t have access to University employees they can induct into mercenary, sexist corporate hells. It was like going from a normal NIH lab into this disgusting fucking hell and that wasn’t a simulation or experiment. That’s who they are.
But if you are -you know, civilized, it’s like stepping into a Time Machine and going back the 1800s except with better surveillance and other crap tech to be more efficiently sexist, racist, classist or just plain hateful.
The reason it took me this long was, my experience at that disgusting men’s rights parasite central was nothing like my experiences in science before. I was relatively fortunate in largely meeting the best kinds of scientists after EECS ..My main mentor was a huge influence on me and he was such an implicitly feminist man with so much instinctive solidarity with students, postdocs..He didn’t even say anything. He rarely talked about stuff unconnected with science and was a mostly silent man. But he was always there in the background as this solidly supportive figure. Even my mom who visited both labs noticed it.
He was a family man and a very involved dad etc
It was like going back to some shithole from an era when I wouldn’t have thought women or nonwhite peopel would even be allowed to work in science to go to that disgusting hell.
We had a strong sense of solidarity in my main lab. It was not like being this isolated unhappy human.
So for years these two confusing formative experiences..one in one of the most decent labs you can find anywhere and the other in a lab that was okay but inside an institution that was basically like every one of the worst industrial corporations out there baffled me.
I always appreciated my main mentor. But paradoxically it made me extra confused by this second experience. All the sort of trust I had ended up screwing me over as I applied the trust and respect earned by one pi and his network to this hell.
Man I really hope I can stay anonymous. I don’t see how everything I just said wouldn’t be viewed as a damning enough to result in complete defunding immediately or my main mentor in this environment-feminist, solidarity with workers-the man sounds like a monster. Sadly not even a joke.
But that’s why it took this long for someone like me who was a fairly assertive and feminist woman to decide to file complaints as serious as I can ensuring that that school does not live this down. It is one thing I can do for other women-women in worse positions than mine, foreign students and postdocs etc.
Those bastards must not get away with this.
My mom died never seeing me improve my life or even finish this paper.
Btw I am not dissing my second pi. I would never have gone to work in his lab if he was the problem. He was cool when I met him away from his school. And his wife was decent. She wasn’t one of those Wojicki/Sandberg types of lean in women.
He was a really good scientist and I can understand the appeal to a scientist of access to the kinds of data sets you wouldn’t have access to. And he wouldn’t do bad science.
My guess is that he was roughly like Yan LeCun. Except LeCun being European is less insanely bullish on capitalism past all sense and reason. Wherever whatever else can be examined, any examination of capitalism must immediately be “Marxist!”
How is that not brainwashed?
I have rarely seen such a poisonous institution.
If I knew a parent or postdoc with multiple options I would tell them don’t send your kids there. Don’t go there. Especially if you are female. If you are a crass enough non-white male (Pichai/Nadella/Kash Patel etc) you would be okay. I guess if you are a crass enough female you would be okay. Well so if you are crass enough, you would be fine.
The science isn’t good and the people are worse. Go anywhere else.
It’s one of these:
MIT, Stanford, Dartmouth, Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, UPenn.
I think I have been careful enough over the years to not spill too much specifics wise.
Anyway that was nightmarish. I feel like my old self more now. That was hell. That school..
I really should watch that documentary “The Corporation”. It had the personality of a sociopath.
The only thing they got right was they sent me to a decent psychiatrist and therapist. The therapist even had poltiics close to mine. And the post doc counsellor was decent.
If there had been a tangible thing like a grope or an assault, I would have been horrified but known how to handle it. If it was a garden variety dispute I would have known how.
This was hellish in a way I can only ..I really owe Current Affairs Magazine, Yasha Levine, Ed Zitron (I looked at his piece “Never Forgive Them”) last night after my last edit to this post and right now people are at all different levels of awareness of just how bad tech is. It’s hard for a lay person to explain unless you are okay with being a pureyor of info that is inaccurate just how lousy it is..
My point is that it is such a frustrating bind. You don’t want to be someone who sets off some people who think 5G kills birds etc.
Zitron does convey it some. But one just sounds emotionally overwrought or something if one tries. But that’s not true. On a good day one can write about it better. On a bad day it’s worse. But it’s not mental.
This cannot go on. I am going to do my part. Right now..I can only think of finishing this paper. Because sort of how I work. I have felt like Boxer from Animal Farm at times..not the hard work etc. But wrt how few ideas I have beyond “paper” wrt changing anything.
And now it’s “paper” and “solidarity” over “I hate creeps”.
The modern white collar worker isn’t equipped for a world in free fall where you don’t trust anyone in the system to not gate-keep and dilute where standard issue. And where cool, you hope they at least keep their job over a futile quixotic attempt.
That’s why I haven’t and don’t really contact colleagues I trust.
Maybe it’s not that bad. But after my brush with my loathsome former school, I no longer expect institutions to not behave like sociopathic corporations. That has to change but I don’t see the change coming from inside.
It will take lawsuits like the one I plan to file. I won’t be suing for money but definitely for info..I don’t know. I will have to find a lawyer of the right kind pro bono with the right politics.
It is clear that women’s rights, civil rights, publicly funded science and democracy are way more precarious than we had any idea.
I remember thinking while I was working there..how is this possible? It was already like this nightmare Panopticon some 14 years ago, but pretty soon I caught on that I would be called a tinfoil nutter or ..anyway.
I have not seriously sought employment after my last hateful job.
Anyway I remember it all. And I don’t buy any excuses ..my mentor I don’t blame..aside from everything else, I have some sympathy to the desire to do science. It’s not naked careerism.
At least I can understand that. It’s why I forgave him. Again it’s an argument I have heard that I can get..access to data sets like you would have can be good for everyone in the hands of honest scientists and doctors but not this type..Pentland, Fei Fei Li, Sebastian Thrun etc.
Besides you want some honest scientists handling them not just this brainless type who look for marketplaces of junkware no one would seriously buy sold as healthcare or education.
Ed Zitron is also worth following. The humblebrags are not. Adam Becker is right..their rhetoric is out of step with what is being sold.
If what I was dealing with (which I now suspect was some sort of creepy AI agent) is the thing..yeah no. It may annoy the shit out of you. I suspect it broke t-tests on my computer in 2019. If that’s their AI..LOL.
My old workplace would be brainless and spiteful enough to insist that it is trained at the level of the users intelligence or knowledge. That’s bullshit. I didn’t have parents who work at Google and Facebook and rob the damn place sure. That doesn’t mean I am stupid and their thieving protégés are bright.
A scientist who doesn’t have the intelligence to consider politics beyond “If we aren’t total creeps China will do it! Being total creeps is the way to super AI!” This is such a failed way of thinking.
I can honestly tell you, these people are not taking jobs via competence. It’s the same smash and grab ongoing right now.
Yesterday I saw a post by DUer BumRushDaShow about how Musk’s DOGE accomplished nothing but gutted a bunch of programs.
That was my experience. They didn’t improve science or health or education but they destroyed my mom and dad’s lives and mine. Fuck those guys.
Unlike my mentor, I can’t understand this other type. I don’t think AI is anywhere close. But if it replaces anyone, it should start at the top and replace admins and managers like those at Google/Microsoft/Facebook and my creepy former employer. After all they don’t do anything but schmooze and loot the place.
Anyway I must go work. Because this is also theft of my time by my last school. This is all obvious stuff. But please don’t believe that these tech creeps are competent.
They are complete morons.
Btw I also owe Merrick Garland. Object lesson. He made me understand how wrong that kind of stuff being passed off as respect for procedure is. I was parroting that shit myself while it was only me, my family and few friends bearing the brunt of this while all those people at my last work place went on to have jobs, families, make money and carry on bullshitting about hard work and science. And probably shilling some other shit.
My main mentor was a Sanders supporter so he didn’t have that noxious a worldview.
But I was a mediocre scientist, I can be a slacker. I am a stoner. So if I was always assertive re basic rights and common sense, when it comes to science, the standards are genuinely so high that I kept confusing two separate things- rigor and standards in your basic work (people like JD Vance are full of shit. I pass the Dunning Kruger test which he wouldn’t). And common sense ethics when it comes to blatantly sleazy institutional inertia about Google and Facebook etc let alone Musk and Palantir and other outright nazis.
I do hope that as I was reading on Yasha Levine’s blog, this could be a time where people finally fight back.
I can’t physically start yet. But this isn’t a random post.
I am filing allegations of serious misconduct and malpractice against my last school and Google. It will take time but I will shoot for not Merrick Garland time.
I know a lot of people have it hard out there. It feels weirdly time shifted in that I was going through something like this back in 2011 and being told I am crazy. Hopefully things turn around for everyone else faster than that.
We are all in this together except for stragglers and the creeps doing all this. It’s not all machinic and about dynamics. That’s why I agree with Zitron’s post “Never forgive them”.
This is much less easy to pull apart than simpler instances of sexual harassment, classism, racism, sexism or exploitation but it’s the same thing. And these guys right now thinking that they are going to get away with it. They will get away with it if only Trump and Vance and Musk are held accountable. They should all be held accountable. Even the ones who are not explicitly GOP. It’s all definitely GOP tilted but Pichai, Fei Fei Li, Sebastian Thrun, Nadella, Alex Pentland etc are just mercenaries and they must not get away with it. If they do then we really are a failed species…
If you are submitting knowingly to colonization in 2025, there is no hope. I have just enough resources to not do that.
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You can call yourself whatever you want, an' nobody's kickin' your azz without goin' thru me! 
Thank you ..seriously.