Thread by @katherinegould

There are so many red flags in this piece I want to scream.

Time for a thread.

The ecologist who wants to map everything nature.com/articles/d4158…

Let's start with the subject, a 33-year-old boy wonder who is funded by a rich family

Sounds like they have good intentions, but let's remember that Google started with the motto "don't be evil."

Boy Wonder disdains the descriptive science that makes his razzle-dazzle computer wizardry possible. Natural history is the basis for experimental and statistical science, but to him it's nothing.

And when descriptive science is something, it's easy and therefore if no value.

Pro tip, maybe don't call people's hard work the easiest thing ever and then ask them to give it to you.

So Boy Wonder gets big finding, hires a "diverse" team, and sets about Fixing Everything.

I'm having flashbacks to Silicon Valley, where similar Wonder Boys have Fixed Everything by transferring the cost of business to workers. And I'm not the only one.

His "diverse team" is, from the pics, mostly young white men, and includes a geneticist who had never heard of the animal whose genome provides the basis for most of our knowledge about genetics. (!)

Throw in the requisite play culture--why play ping pong by the rules when we are Thinking Outside The Box--and you have the exact toxic culture of Silicon Valley that led to Gamergate

And oh yeah, to top it off, widely touted public claims that aren't supported by the science.

If you claim 3 trillion, but the margin of error is 1-10 trillion? To use his own words, that's not science. That's not even a stab in the dark.

But if course, well-funded Boy Wonder (he wears flip flops so he must be cool, right) gets published in Nature and Science, gets lots of international press, and belittles critics who suggest that maybe he should pay attention to details.

Guesses on how long it takes to find out his institute is actually a toxic clusterfuck and a huge waste of money?

Let's spread the money around, find real scientists doing the hard work and the nitty gritty analysis, and hire some actual diversity.

"We should plant trees" isn't groundbreaking. It's common sense. And we could have planted a lot of trees with the money wasted here.

UPDATE: The geneticist knows about nematodes.

It's just sloppy writing and fact-checking from the world's premier scientific journal

https://twitter.com/johandehoogen/status/1175671951064518656?s=19

UPDATE: The geneticist knows about nematodes.

It's just sloppy writing and fact-checking from the world's premier scientific journal

https://twitter.com/johandehoogen/status/1175671951064518656?s=19

Another update, in Tom's open words:

https://twitter.com/TWCrowther/status/1175795927879245825?s=19

I still feel deeply uneasy about a lab full of privileged white men at play.

And @nature , the editing on this piece is truly terrible