Generally, your points are well taken. The only quibble I have on a factual basis is here: > 3. "Censorship" is when a person is not allowed to express their views. That is not what is being proposed here. This is about…
> The 2016 US Election in particular showed us what happens when a platform takes a "hands off" approach - the platform is absolutely saturated with false, hateful information... And yet, presumably you were able to…
Quarantined subreddits are analogous to downweighting a particular Facebook post in the FB algorithm: both are a form of "soft" moderation stopping short of outright censorship. Banning users who vote for Reddit's…
> Mere Monte Carlo state exploration is wasteful and doesn't provide much insight. Often we don't have error bars on model outputs to even know if an "improvement" in a metric is significant. The funny thing is, I…
> What's missing from current mathematics to make predictive models for biology? Well, I think that, no joke, there is a Nobel Prize waiting for anyone who knows the answer to that. I think this is the next big paradigm…
tl;dr: this is not an "age reduction breakthrough", it is both A) a confirmation of what we already knew, which is that parabiosis makes old mice healthier, and B) a finding that virtually proves the mAge clock has…
The question I am not seeing addressed in the many, many comments below is: why is there such a large pool of people willing to believe, and act on, ideas like "5G causes COVID-19 symptoms", "vaccines are harmful",…
It is also the basis of much conspiracy theorizing. The chain of logic is: 1. Group X has an incentive to do Y 2. We observe Y 3. We also observe specific instances of X doing Y 4. Therefore, all Y is caused by X The…
> The PhD wage situation in the US is simply shameful. It really isn't. I recently finished my PhD, and now I'm a postdoc. My stipend was $30K, but, crucially, I wasn't living in a place like Santa Cruz. It was very…
Well, for those of us who live in those flyover states, it does make us feel a little better about our own situations, as well as mightily perplexed about what people in SF, etc, are thinking. Where I live, a mid-sized…
You are right, and I altered a comment below to reflect this. I was trying to make a more general point and phrased it poorly. The general point is: the reason drug costs are high because of two things working together:…
To my knowledge -- keeping in mind this is not my area -- there are modest benefits for newer types of insulin. You have to dose less often. The variance in swings of blood glucose is lower -- newer types tend to be…
There is a fair amount of that. But I think the bigger problem is dogmatic ideology. Many of those on the right are just ideologically opposed to government spending on anything (that isn't the military). It is often a…
I work in medical research and mostly agree with this, but there are two major problems I see preventing this from becoming a reality: 1) Academic medical research is simply not well tooled, right now, to do the later…
The PDF takes the point of view that it is caused by various forms of cognitive bias. I generally agree with that. The reason that I don't think it's totally ethically neutral is that it is a basic responsibility of…
When you review a paper, no one knows who you are except the editor of the journal. If there are any incentives at all for the reviewer, it is not to be arsed to review at all, since it takes time and you get nothing…
> One obvious test: is the per-capita rate of publication increasing? It definitely is, in biology at least. My graduate mentor was really interested in publication metrics (as in, he published studies on them). The…
Haha, no. The more elite the institution, the more money you are expected to bring in. It is compensated somewhat by the fact that a big name institution will give you an advantage in getting grants. There is a bit of a…
That is correct. Even when reviewing papers, it is true. As a reviewer, you do not question, for instance, whether the authors did the experiments exactly as stated, or whether they tried to analyze the results 20…
> it simply doesn’t matter very much whether any particular paper is reproducible If we are talking about highly abstract types of science, I agree entirely. The problem is that there are strong incentives for…
> but also believe that being unable to reproduce a result can often be explained by their lack of sufficient information (or resources) to reproduce said results, rather than always assuming the other person must be…
Biology postdoc here, seconded. But what really gets me is the disconnect between "most scientists agree there is a reproducibility crisis" and "most scientists believe most of the papers they read are basically true…
Absolutely fascinating. I never thought about it this way. This would also imply that the Fredonian government would be highly incentivized to run at a constant deficit, more so than other governments, because its cost…
In my vague understanding, you can consider objects like electrons as either particles or as amplitudes in a field. Although these two (currently known) ways of viewing it lead for the most part to similar intuitions,…
You are right about how change comes about. It is just that there is a time and place for it. I said that the role of the ideologue is to introduce new ideas to society, not to harp on them constantly when and where…
Generally, your points are well taken. The only quibble I have on a factual basis is here: > 3. "Censorship" is when a person is not allowed to express their views. That is not what is being proposed here. This is about…
> The 2016 US Election in particular showed us what happens when a platform takes a "hands off" approach - the platform is absolutely saturated with false, hateful information... And yet, presumably you were able to…
Quarantined subreddits are analogous to downweighting a particular Facebook post in the FB algorithm: both are a form of "soft" moderation stopping short of outright censorship. Banning users who vote for Reddit's…
> Mere Monte Carlo state exploration is wasteful and doesn't provide much insight. Often we don't have error bars on model outputs to even know if an "improvement" in a metric is significant. The funny thing is, I…
> What's missing from current mathematics to make predictive models for biology? Well, I think that, no joke, there is a Nobel Prize waiting for anyone who knows the answer to that. I think this is the next big paradigm…
tl;dr: this is not an "age reduction breakthrough", it is both A) a confirmation of what we already knew, which is that parabiosis makes old mice healthier, and B) a finding that virtually proves the mAge clock has…
The question I am not seeing addressed in the many, many comments below is: why is there such a large pool of people willing to believe, and act on, ideas like "5G causes COVID-19 symptoms", "vaccines are harmful",…
It is also the basis of much conspiracy theorizing. The chain of logic is: 1. Group X has an incentive to do Y 2. We observe Y 3. We also observe specific instances of X doing Y 4. Therefore, all Y is caused by X The…
> The PhD wage situation in the US is simply shameful. It really isn't. I recently finished my PhD, and now I'm a postdoc. My stipend was $30K, but, crucially, I wasn't living in a place like Santa Cruz. It was very…
Well, for those of us who live in those flyover states, it does make us feel a little better about our own situations, as well as mightily perplexed about what people in SF, etc, are thinking. Where I live, a mid-sized…
You are right, and I altered a comment below to reflect this. I was trying to make a more general point and phrased it poorly. The general point is: the reason drug costs are high because of two things working together:…
To my knowledge -- keeping in mind this is not my area -- there are modest benefits for newer types of insulin. You have to dose less often. The variance in swings of blood glucose is lower -- newer types tend to be…
There is a fair amount of that. But I think the bigger problem is dogmatic ideology. Many of those on the right are just ideologically opposed to government spending on anything (that isn't the military). It is often a…
I work in medical research and mostly agree with this, but there are two major problems I see preventing this from becoming a reality: 1) Academic medical research is simply not well tooled, right now, to do the later…
The PDF takes the point of view that it is caused by various forms of cognitive bias. I generally agree with that. The reason that I don't think it's totally ethically neutral is that it is a basic responsibility of…
When you review a paper, no one knows who you are except the editor of the journal. If there are any incentives at all for the reviewer, it is not to be arsed to review at all, since it takes time and you get nothing…
> One obvious test: is the per-capita rate of publication increasing? It definitely is, in biology at least. My graduate mentor was really interested in publication metrics (as in, he published studies on them). The…
Haha, no. The more elite the institution, the more money you are expected to bring in. It is compensated somewhat by the fact that a big name institution will give you an advantage in getting grants. There is a bit of a…
That is correct. Even when reviewing papers, it is true. As a reviewer, you do not question, for instance, whether the authors did the experiments exactly as stated, or whether they tried to analyze the results 20…
> it simply doesn’t matter very much whether any particular paper is reproducible If we are talking about highly abstract types of science, I agree entirely. The problem is that there are strong incentives for…
> but also believe that being unable to reproduce a result can often be explained by their lack of sufficient information (or resources) to reproduce said results, rather than always assuming the other person must be…
Biology postdoc here, seconded. But what really gets me is the disconnect between "most scientists agree there is a reproducibility crisis" and "most scientists believe most of the papers they read are basically true…
Absolutely fascinating. I never thought about it this way. This would also imply that the Fredonian government would be highly incentivized to run at a constant deficit, more so than other governments, because its cost…
In my vague understanding, you can consider objects like electrons as either particles or as amplitudes in a field. Although these two (currently known) ways of viewing it lead for the most part to similar intuitions,…
You are right about how change comes about. It is just that there is a time and place for it. I said that the role of the ideologue is to introduce new ideas to society, not to harp on them constantly when and where…