A Serious Post

[jfz9580m]

Last edited Wed Dec 24, 2025, 11:49 AM - Edit history (13)

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.
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.