"She bought her two-bedroom leasehold flat in West Hampstead, in a converted synagogue, in 2004 for £350,000. By 2016, the flat had been given a valuation of £800,000, so Davidson assumed that she was well on her way to making a healthy profit.
But after putting her property on the market for £725,000 last year – the amount an estate agent told her it was worth – she was unable to secure a sale."
Diddums.
That 2016 "valuation" looks highball to me. But it's true that London property prices are well off their peak. A good thing on balance, I'd say, although it will cause genuine problems for some people.
Well tough for those who see a property as an asset class and not a place to live.
The woman in this article is still well ahead on what she paid in 2004. Her expectation is above what the property is worth.
To be fair with the outrageous charges on leasehold flats and cladding issues, I would expect she has quite a lot further to drop, even if it is saleable
Well quite. It doesn’t mention how long the lease is either.
Is 4 grand a year service charge a lot these days for London.
When I had a flat in Brum I was paying around £1,000 a year but I left in 2000.
I pay £4K+ a year on my flat. I think it's worth it.
What do you get for that ?
Is it capped or can it rise by any amount each year ?
I guess the answer to my question depends on what you get for it.
Freehold in Scotland, no parasites bleeding you dry.
Though, truth be told, we've only just moved on from feudal times
He’s doing it to cause Labour trouble. It’s not a genuinely thought out policy, it’s done so he can claim Labour are once again aping him. I don’t think abolition is all that popular, but he’s not going to be the one who makes the decision.
I would say however that, although this isn’t the moment, there is a risk to him that being too clever by half will end up costing him.
He should have just promised to raise child benefit, ending the cap on benefits for more than 2 children only benefits those on universal credit
When they let an ambulance through how did they fail to stop a car following it through? Yet another police failure
Presumably he was on its bumper and they didn't want to get run over. Drivers routinely ignore road closures for events and no action is taken against them, perhaps the police will treat it more seriously in future (then the CPS/courts can let them off later). It still wouldn't have resulted in any incident if he hadn't tipped over into violent road rage, though the likelihood of a driver who tailgates an emergency vehicle through a roadblock erupting into road rage is clearly high.
I think the "drivers routinely ignore road closures with no action is taken against them" is a critical insight. And when no action is taken, it is just assumed that it is OK to ignore the law, and that then becomes an assumed entitlement, and anyone questioning it gets such a driver very, very angry and then the absolutely focus is on self-justification.
When people in my circles stop questioning such entitlement eg by knocking on the door of a house because the pavement is entirely blocked with a motor, it is usually because in the past they have been heavily abused or threatened with violence.
One of the strangest ones was when a wheelchair using friend came out of a shop in York to find that the pavement BOTH sides had been blocked by cafe tables placed on it. The cafe owners both sides proceeded to give her lectures about why they were entitled to completely block the pavement, rather than think about the impact of their actions.
Eabhal mentioned the woman driving her car past a "road closed" sign into the Plymouth Half Marathon in 2018. The idea that she was putting people in danger did not even occur, because she HAD to get somewhere and was yelling excuses out of the car window. As far as I can see she was just let off completely, with not even a careless driving ticket.
Here's the video of the 2018 Plymouth incident, with her "it was a stupid thing to do, BUT ...." justification. BUT I can ignore the rules, because I'm more important than public safety.
I don't think the Plymouth incident is unusual. In the events I've done there have been times where drivers have ignored the signage, but it usually ends safely when they realise there is a good reason for the closure. We even had people parked halfway across the road during the Edinburgh Marathon a few years ago, despite thousands of posters and leaflets letting people know not to.
"Main character syndrome" is what the kids call it.
(I think JohnLilburne has also experienced it. JosiasJessop does lots of events too,).
You are ignoring the fact most people who get a leaflet through the letter box usually consign it to the bin without reading it because 99% of leaflets through the door are marketing shite
Two counterpoints to that, Pagan, if I may:
1 - Driving into a crowd is something that no careful and competent (the expected standard) driver should *ever* do. I'd suggest it's a basic rule, as to drive into a crowd, especially a running crowd, is a deliberate decision to place human beings at risk of injury. You just stop and wait, or get out and ask someone for help.
It doesn't need a leaflet, or a policeman, or anything - just the most basic road sense.
2 - If you look at the video she drove through the coned off end of the sideroad, and past a sign in the middle of the junction.
I don't think I have used my photo today, so here you go:
I wasn't claiming it was an excuse for driving into people. I was merely commenting that just because you shove a leaflet through someones door about road closures does not mean they know about them
Yes - absolutely agree on that particular point.
We are increasingly bombarded by useless stuff where mail, signs on lampposts or social media. When its 99% irrelevant we learn to just ignore it and not bother reading it. Indeed I often throw unopened mail in the bin because even the stuff in an envelope is 99% junk mail
I'm reminded of the joke about the flood and the believer who says 'God will save me' whenever anyone tries to help him. He turns down the bloke in the canoe, the helicopter and the rnli and then ends up drowning. Arriving at Heaven he confronts God 'I was drowning and believed that you would save me! What happened?' God replies 'Didnt you see the canoe, helicopter and the RNLI?'
Your argument then is I should waste a lot of time reading irrelevant shit just in case sorry they can fuck off. If I read every piece of mail that has come through my door in the last 12 months I would have probably spent 24+ hours of my life doing it.....absolutely none of it was relevant.
Something I need to know, find a better way to communicate
I find it takes a moment to give a flyer a cursory glance, or to open an envelope and skim the contents. In fact I can do it on my way from the front door to the recycling bin, so effectively takes no time at all.
"She bought her two-bedroom leasehold flat in West Hampstead, in a converted synagogue, in 2004 for £350,000. By 2016, the flat had been given a valuation of £800,000, so Davidson assumed that she was well on her way to making a healthy profit.
But after putting her property on the market for £725,000 last year – the amount an estate agent told her it was worth – she was unable to secure a sale."
Diddums.
That 2016 "valuation" looks highball to me. But it's true that London property prices are well off their peak. A good thing on balance, I'd say, although it will cause genuine problems for some people.
Well tough for those who see a property as an asset class and not a place to live.
The woman in this article is still well ahead on what she paid in 2004. Her expectation is above what the property is worth.
To be fair with the outrageous charges on leasehold flats and cladding issues, I would expect she has quite a lot further to drop, even if it is saleable
Well quite. It doesn’t mention how long the lease is either.
Is 4 grand a year service charge a lot these days for London.
When I had a flat in Brum I was paying around £1,000 a year but I left in 2000.
I pay £4K+ a year on my flat. I think it's worth it.
What do you get for that ?
Is it capped or can it rise by any amount each year ?
I guess the answer to my question depends on what you get for it.
Freehold in Scotland, no parasites bleeding you dry.
The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 has improved leasheholders rights
When they let an ambulance through how did they fail to stop a car following it through? Yet another police failure
Presumably he was on its bumper and they didn't want to get run over. Drivers routinely ignore road closures for events and no action is taken against them, perhaps the police will treat it more seriously in future (then the CPS/courts can let them off later). It still wouldn't have resulted in any incident if he hadn't tipped over into violent road rage, though the likelihood of a driver who tailgates an emergency vehicle through a roadblock erupting into road rage is clearly high.
I think the "drivers routinely ignore road closures with no action is taken against them" is a critical insight. And when no action is taken, it is just assumed that it is OK to ignore the law, and that then becomes an assumed entitlement, and anyone questioning it gets such a driver very, very angry and then the absolutely focus is on self-justification.
When people in my circles stop questioning such entitlement eg by knocking on the door of a house because the pavement is entirely blocked with a motor, it is usually because in the past they have been heavily abused or threatened with violence.
One of the strangest ones was when a wheelchair using friend came out of a shop in York to find that the pavement BOTH sides had been blocked by cafe tables placed on it. The cafe owners both sides proceeded to give her lectures about why they were entitled to completely block the pavement, rather than think about the impact of their actions.
Eabhal mentioned the woman driving her car past a "road closed" sign into the Plymouth Half Marathon in 2018. The idea that she was putting people in danger did not even occur, because she HAD to get somewhere and was yelling excuses out of the car window. As far as I can see she was just let off completely, with not even a careless driving ticket.
Here's the video of the 2018 Plymouth incident, with her "it was a stupid thing to do, BUT ...." justification. BUT I can ignore the rules, because I'm more important than public safety.
I don't think the Plymouth incident is unusual. In the events I've done there have been times where drivers have ignored the signage, but it usually ends safely when they realise there is a good reason for the closure. We even had people parked halfway across the road during the Edinburgh Marathon a few years ago, despite thousands of posters and leaflets letting people know not to.
"Main character syndrome" is what the kids call it.
(I think JohnLilburne has also experienced it. JosiasJessop does lots of events too,).
You are ignoring the fact most people who get a leaflet through the letter box usually consign it to the bin without reading it because 99% of leaflets through the door are marketing shite
Two counterpoints to that, Pagan, if I may:
1 - Driving into a crowd is something that no careful and competent (the expected standard) driver should *ever* do. I'd suggest it's a basic rule, as to drive into a crowd, especially a running crowd, is a deliberate decision to place human beings at risk of injury. You just stop and wait, or get out and ask someone for help.
It doesn't need a leaflet, or a policeman, or anything - just the most basic road sense.
2 - If you look at the video she drove through the coned off end of the sideroad, and past a sign in the middle of the junction.
I don't think I have used my photo today, so here you go:
I wasn't claiming it was an excuse for driving into people. I was merely commenting that just because you shove a leaflet through someones door about road closures does not mean they know about them
Yes - absolutely agree on that particular point.
We are increasingly bombarded by useless stuff where mail, signs on lampposts or social media. When its 99% irrelevant we learn to just ignore it and not bother reading it. Indeed I often throw unopened mail in the bin because even the stuff in an envelope is 99% junk mail
I'm reminded of the joke about the flood and the believer who says 'God will save me' whenever anyone tries to help him. He turns down the bloke in the canoe, the helicopter and the rnli and then ends up drowning. Arriving at Heaven he confronts God 'I was drowning and believed that you would save me! What happened?' God replies 'Didnt you see the canoe, helicopter and the RNLI?'
Your argument then is I should waste a lot of time reading irrelevant shit just in case sorry they can fuck off. If I read every piece of mail that has come through my door in the last 12 months I would have probably spent 24+ hours of my life doing it.....absolutely none of it was relevant.
Something I need to know, find a better way to communicate
I find it takes a moment to give a flyer a cursory glance, or to open an envelope and skim the contents. In fact I can do it on my way from the front door to the recycling bin, so effectively takes no time at all.
I quite often look at the log or return address on the envelope and just bin it based on that. The number of 'Dear Railway Neighbour' letters I've had because I stay within some - I assume - legally defined 'thou shalt' regulation on the track company...
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
He’s doing it to cause Labour trouble. It’s not a genuinely thought out policy, it’s done so he can claim Labour are once again aping him. I don’t think abolition is all that popular, but he’s not going to be the one who makes the decision.
I would say however that, although this isn’t the moment, there is a risk to him that being too clever by half will end up costing him.
He should have just promised to raise child benefit, ending the cap on benefits for more than 2 children only benefits those on universal credit
I wonder if Farage even realises the cap doesn't apply to Child Benefit?
Most people in the media (and even many knowledgeable people on here) think it applies to Child Benefit and are blissfully unaware it's actually about the colossal additional sums (ie in addition to Child Benefit) of Universal Credit handed out to people with children.
We're heading for a debt crisis and a bailout. The government must reverse course on spending and cut £100bn from the current budget. Rachel Reeves is going to not only bankrupt the nation, she's going hand the country over to Nige.
The Tories need to prepare for this and get to a place where they're the only mainstream party that stands for fiscal responsibility. Get rid of Kemi and the party elders need to ask Jeremy Hunt to be leader and preach fiscal restraint, outline what the Tories would do to cut spending and stop living beyond our means. It's going to be very unpopular for two years but in the run up to the election where borrowing is out of control, bond yields in junk territory and rumours of an IMF bailout they immediately become the responsible choice.
They need to do this now and claim back the mantle of being the responsible party that stands for living within our means and cutting the size of the state.
There's a lot of work to do but Labour and Reform will take this country to it's first ever external default event and the road to Argentina.
I initially assumed you were quoting or summarising either the Times article or the IMF report. But I can't find anything in either to support your assertion.
- An economic recovery is underway. Growth is projected at 1.2 percent in 2025 and will gain momentum next year, although weak productivity continues to weigh on medium-term growth prospects.
- The authorities’ fiscal plans strike a good balance between supporting growth and safeguarding fiscal sustainability. It will be important to stay the course and deliver the planned deficit reduction over the next five years to stabilize net debt and reduce vulnerability to gilt market pressures. Further refinements of the fiscal framework could help minimize the frequency of fiscal policy changes. In the longer term, the UK will face difficult choices to align spending with available resources, given ageing-related expenditure pressures.
- The Bank of England (BoE) should continue to ease monetary policy gradually, while remaining flexible in light of elevated uncertainty. Calibrating the monetary policy stance has become more complex, given the recent pickup in inflation, still fragile growth, and higher long-term interest rates.
-The authorities’ Growth Mission focuses on the right areas to lift productivity. Given the breadth of the agenda, prioritizing and sequencing of structural reforms, along with clear communication, will be key to success.
Nothing about 'heading for a bailout' as far as I can see.
It will be important to stay the course and reduce fiscal deficits as planned over the medium term.
I assume this report was written before the pair of U-turns on winter fuel allowance and the two-child benefit cap?
I think that's a safe assumption, given the u-turns haven't happened yet. I think we have to see the scope of those u-turns, if that is what they turn out to be, and what the fiscal deficit position looks like as a result.
Brace yourself for a disappointment on the latter point - I suspect Reeves will ensure we continue to 'stay the course'.
The IMF paper is quite approving of what is being done, and even explicitly states that there is room to improve the position by raising various taxes - which to me is a far better option than a reductive orgy of neo-Thatcherism (ie without Thatcher's nuance):
The authorities’ fiscal strategy for the next five years appropriately supports growth while safeguarding fiscal sustainability. The new spending plans are credible and growth-friendly, taking account of pressures on public services and investment needs. They are expected to provide an economic boost over the medium term that outweighs the impact of higher taxation. As revenue is projected to increase, deficits are set to decline and stabilize net debt. ... staff recommends adhering to the current plans, and implementing additional revenue or expenditure measures as needed if shocks arise, to maintain compliance with the rules. ... Unless revenue is increased, for which there is scope, tough policy decisions on spending priorities and the role of the state in certain areas will be needed to better align the coverage of public services with available resources.
Starmer and Reeves need to hold the courage of their convictions, and to move us closer to the European norm from our current relatively low tax / low spend position.
Your last sentence is what both intrigues and concerns me. It's where I think the UK will end up, but I'm concerned that we will end up with a tax bill and government spending like the Nordics but without any of the accompanying quality of life, dynamic private sector or balanced budgets.
A high spend/high tax regime must not mean largesse.
We already have terrible public sector productivity, shovelling more money into it will make the problem worse. Increasing input by 10% will not increase output by 10%, on fact it will likely result in a decrease in output overall because the money will just get wasted and everyone will be poorer other than a few public sector fatcats and consulting firms.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
The man should be nominated for next year’s Nobel Prize for arrogance. I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone so utterly convinced he’s a genius while all around him are ignoramuses.
JD is head and shoulders above them all. Including Trump. Including everyone on PB.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
The man should be nominated for next year’s Nobel Prize for arrogance. I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone so utterly convinced he’s a genius while all around him are ignoramuses.
Really? I can only envy you for never having had to deal with Amanda Spielman.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
The man should be nominated for next year’s Nobel Prize for arrogance. I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone so utterly convinced he’s a genius while all around him are ignoramuses.
Really? I can only envy you for never having had to deal with Amanda Spielman.
I think we need a new version of Godwin’s law covering your interventions.
The man should be nominated for next year’s Nobel Prize for arrogance. I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone so utterly convinced he’s a genius while all around him are ignoramuses.
JD is head and shoulders above them all. Including Trump. Including everyone on PB.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I've no idea, but Vance seems to want to be Victor Orban. And doesn't give a shit about the damage the administration is doing to the US science base.
He’s doing it to cause Labour trouble. It’s not a genuinely thought out policy, it’s done so he can claim Labour are once again aping him. I don’t think abolition is all that popular, but he’s not going to be the one who makes the decision.
I would say however that, although this isn’t the moment, there is a risk to him that being too clever by half will end up costing him.
I posted earlier that his intervention might help Labour because they likely want to drop it, but are aware that it's actually quite popular.
What's amazing with Farage's intervention, is that polling suggests it's popular with most voters, but WILDLY popular with Reform voters.
We're heading for a debt crisis and a bailout. The government must reverse course on spending and cut £100bn from the current budget. Rachel Reeves is going to not only bankrupt the nation, she's going hand the country over to Nige.
The Tories need to prepare for this and get to a place where they're the only mainstream party that stands for fiscal responsibility. Get rid of Kemi and the party elders need to ask Jeremy Hunt to be leader and preach fiscal restraint, outline what the Tories would do to cut spending and stop living beyond our means. It's going to be very unpopular for two years but in the run up to the election where borrowing is out of control, bond yields in junk territory and rumours of an IMF bailout they immediately become the responsible choice.
They need to do this now and claim back the mantle of being the responsible party that stands for living within our means and cutting the size of the state.
There's a lot of work to do but Labour and Reform will take this country to it's first ever external default event and the road to Argentina.
I initially assumed you were quoting or summarising either the Times article or the IMF report. But I can't find anything in either to support your assertion.
- An economic recovery is underway. Growth is projected at 1.2 percent in 2025 and will gain momentum next year, although weak productivity continues to weigh on medium-term growth prospects.
- The authorities’ fiscal plans strike a good balance between supporting growth and safeguarding fiscal sustainability. It will be important to stay the course and deliver the planned deficit reduction over the next five years to stabilize net debt and reduce vulnerability to gilt market pressures. Further refinements of the fiscal framework could help minimize the frequency of fiscal policy changes. In the longer term, the UK will face difficult choices to align spending with available resources, given ageing-related expenditure pressures.
- The Bank of England (BoE) should continue to ease monetary policy gradually, while remaining flexible in light of elevated uncertainty. Calibrating the monetary policy stance has become more complex, given the recent pickup in inflation, still fragile growth, and higher long-term interest rates.
-The authorities’ Growth Mission focuses on the right areas to lift productivity. Given the breadth of the agenda, prioritizing and sequencing of structural reforms, along with clear communication, will be key to success.
Nothing about 'heading for a bailout' as far as I can see.
It will be important to stay the course and reduce fiscal deficits as planned over the medium term.
I assume this report was written before the pair of U-turns on winter fuel allowance and the two-child benefit cap?
I think that's a safe assumption, given the u-turns haven't happened yet. I think we have to see the scope of those u-turns, if that is what they turn out to be, and what the fiscal deficit position looks like as a result.
Brace yourself for a disappointment on the latter point - I suspect Reeves will ensure we continue to 'stay the course'.
The IMF paper is quite approving of what is being done, and even explicitly states that there is room to improve the position by raising various taxes - which to me is a far better option than a reductive orgy of neo-Thatcherism (ie without Thatcher's nuance):
The authorities’ fiscal strategy for the next five years appropriately supports growth while safeguarding fiscal sustainability. The new spending plans are credible and growth-friendly, taking account of pressures on public services and investment needs. They are expected to provide an economic boost over the medium term that outweighs the impact of higher taxation. As revenue is projected to increase, deficits are set to decline and stabilize net debt. ... staff recommends adhering to the current plans, and implementing additional revenue or expenditure measures as needed if shocks arise, to maintain compliance with the rules. ... Unless revenue is increased, for which there is scope, tough policy decisions on spending priorities and the role of the state in certain areas will be needed to better align the coverage of public services with available resources.
Starmer and Reeves need to hold the courage of their convictions, and to move us closer to the European norm from our current relatively low tax / low spend position.
Your last sentence is what both intrigues and concerns me. It's where I think the UK will end up, but I'm concerned that we will end up with a tax bill and government spending like the Nordics but without any of the accompanying quality of life, dynamic private sector or balanced budgets.
A high spend/high tax regime must not mean largesse.
We already have terrible public sector productivity, shovelling more money into it will make the problem worse. Increasing input by 10% will not increase output by 10%, on fact it will likely result in a decrease in output overall because the money will just get wasted and everyone will be poorer other than a few public sector fatcats and consulting firms.
High tax/high spend doesn't necessarily mean a bigger civil service, or even a bigger NHS.
If we were to increase it to French/Nordic levels, I'd do some combination of reduce the deficit, boost spending on defence, and chuck the rest into public health interventions, targeted early years, HS2, trams and cycle lanes.
My original point is essentially in agreement with you - I'm worried that we wouldn't spend it on those kinds of things.
He’s doing it to cause Labour trouble. It’s not a genuinely thought out policy, it’s done so he can claim Labour are once again aping him. I don’t think abolition is all that popular, but he’s not going to be the one who makes the decision.
I would say however that, although this isn’t the moment, there is a risk to him that being too clever by half will end up costing him.
I posted earlier that his intervention might help Labour because they likely want to drop it, but are aware that it's actually quite popular.
What's amazing with Farage's intervention, is that polling suggests it's popular with most voters, but WILDLY popular with Reform voters.
Which suggests most Reform voters remain Tories in hiding.
This could be an example of where the Reform copy:paste of US obsessions could trip him up if taken too far. I think the DOGE for local government is another.
I am supportive of dropping or reforming the cap as a way of addressing child poverty. But the reason Farage is behind it is altogether different and comes from natalist movement in the US - the idea is you promote the reproduction of the “indigenous” population as a fight against the great replacement.
Hence a policy that looks left wing but is actually something else.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
The man should be nominated for next year’s Nobel Prize for arrogance. I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone so utterly convinced he’s a genius while all around him are ignoramuses.
JD is head and shoulders above them all. Including Trump. Including everyone on PB.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
The man should be nominated for next year’s Nobel Prize for arrogance. I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone so utterly convinced he’s a genius while all around him are ignoramuses.
JD is head and shoulders above them all. Including Trump. Including everyone on PB.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
As an aside, "The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea" could be read in one of two ways...
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
It's a pathetic attempt to justify the science funding cuts - which are effectively a blackmail attempt to get universities to kowtow to the administration.
The "voting patterns of university professors" have absolutely nothing to do with the science research that (eg) Harvard conducts.
Vance apparently believes whataboutery is rational argument. Which might be why william is a fan.
Vancesplaining, that’s what he does. He Vancesplained the Ukraine war to the president of Ukraine. He’s now Vancesplaining academic research to universities, and in between he managed to fit in a bit of Vancesplaining of Thomas Aquinus to those pesky clerics.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
The man should be nominated for next year’s Nobel Prize for arrogance. I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone so utterly convinced he’s a genius while all around him are ignoramuses.
Really? I can only envy you for never having had to deal with Amanda Spielman.
Vancesplaining, that’s what he does. He Vancesplained the Ukraine war to the president of Ukraine. He’s now Vancesplaining academic research to universities, and in between he managed to fit in a bit of Vancesplaining of Thomas Aquinus to those pesky clerics.
Vancesplaining, that’s what he does. He Vancesplained the Ukraine war to the president of Ukraine. He’s now Vancesplaining academic research to universities, and in between he managed to fit in a bit of Vancesplaining of Thomas Aquinus to those pesky clerics.
I like him. He reminds me of me
Genuinely extremely smart, and genuinely smarter than almost everyone around him, but also fucking neurotic, given to severe moodswings, and damaged by a weird childhood
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
That's not a crisis: that's science working as it should.
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal link), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
I don't think anyone is denying that. We know roughly why it happens- as OGH Jr explains. We know roughly why it's so hard to fix- nobody gets ahead by writing up negative results, and no publisher can make money by producing a Journal of Failed Ideas (insert gag about the Staggers or Speccie to taste.)
Vance's rhetorical sleight-of-hand is to start by mentioning a real, but global and not partisan problem before staring on a series of whinges which are a lot more partisan and less securely established. Ending with "nasty boffins disagree with me". It's a good persuasive trick, but that's all it is.
Vancesplaining, that’s what he does. He Vancesplained the Ukraine war to the president of Ukraine. He’s now Vancesplaining academic research to universities, and in between he managed to fit in a bit of Vancesplaining of Thomas Aquinus to those pesky clerics.
I like him. He reminds me of me
Genuinely extremely smart, and genuinely smarter than almost everyone around him, but also fucking neurotic, given to severe moodswings, and damaged by a weird childhood
And regular purveyor of barely plausible bullshit.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
That's not a crisis: that's science working as it should.
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal like), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
Other people rush to replicate it, and it fails.
Unless it is the universe, trolling us
"I’m going to endeavor to post whatever thing or things really fascinated me in a given week on Fridays.
This week, it was a Radiolab Short: I listen to this excellent podcast while I do my workouts. In this 16-minute short, a scientist describes a phenomenon called the decline effect: in essence, the phenomenon in science whereby the at-first dramatic results of a scientific study become less and less dramatic, gradually, over time as the experiment is repeated, even under the same rigorous conditions.
The scientist concludes with a radical hypothesis he is extremely reluctant to even make: that the act of observing reality may in itself change it."
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the entire cosmos is a simulation, as I may have mentioned. This means you and everyone else on here does not exist. I know this must be 1. upsetting, and also 2. boring - as I have said this before - but seeing as you do not exist, it does not matter
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
Trump has cut science funding by about three quarters. He's not interested in helping the universities. Vance is lying, as he does about most things.
A Harvard behavioural scientist who earned global renown for her studies on ethical behaviour has been fired after an investigation found she had fabricated data to bolster her research
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
That's not a crisis: that's science working as it should.
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal like), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
Other people rush to replicate it, and it fails.
Unless it is the universe, trolling us
"I’m going to endeavor to post whatever thing or things really fascinated me in a given week on Fridays.
This week, it was a Radiolab Short: I listen to this excellent podcast while I do my workouts. In this 16-minute short, a scientist describes a phenomenon called the decline effect: in essence, the phenomenon in science whereby the at-first dramatic results of a scientific study become less and less dramatic, gradually, over time as the experiment is repeated, even under the same rigorous conditions.
The scientist concludes with a radical hypothesis he is extremely reluctant to even make: that the act of observing reality may in itself change it."
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the entire cosmos is a simulation, as I may have mentioned. This means you and everyone else on here does not exist. I know this must be 1. upsetting, and also 2. boring - as I have said this before - but seeing as you do not exist, it does not matter
Sigh.
This is simple maths.
There's an example of when a drug shows such extraordinary efficacy in early trials that it is rushed to market, and yet as the trials continue, the efficacy drops.
But it is the simplest of statistics to understand why this is the case. It's like the Sports Illustrated "curse". Every result is part causal, part chance. And the one that showed the best early numbers probably had a lot of chance. They didn't really go backwards... they just had less of the chance element.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
That's not a crisis: that's science working as it should.
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal like), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
Other people rush to replicate it, and it fails.
It's easier in the physical sciences- you get a hoohah (the most recent one was room temperature superconductors, the memorable one from my student years was cold fusion), everyone has a play with the available toys in their lab and it's pretty quick to tell if the fuss is justified or not.
Biology is harder, because everything tends to be messier and slower. And social sciences are harder still. But yes, more checks for replication would be a good thing, because a five percent hurdle is going to let a lot of wrong things through. What are we diverting to get that to happen?
A Harvard behavioural scientist who earned global renown for her studies on ethical behaviour has been fired after an investigation found she had fabricated data to bolster her research
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
That's not a crisis: that's science working as it should.
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal like), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
Other people rush to replicate it, and it fails.
Unless it is the universe, trolling us
"I’m going to endeavor to post whatever thing or things really fascinated me in a given week on Fridays.
This week, it was a Radiolab Short: I listen to this excellent podcast while I do my workouts. In this 16-minute short, a scientist describes a phenomenon called the decline effect: in essence, the phenomenon in science whereby the at-first dramatic results of a scientific study become less and less dramatic, gradually, over time as the experiment is repeated, even under the same rigorous conditions.
The scientist concludes with a radical hypothesis he is extremely reluctant to even make: that the act of observing reality may in itself change it."
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the entire cosmos is a simulation, as I may have mentioned. This means you and everyone else on here does not exist. I know this must be 1. upsetting, and also 2. boring - as I have said this before - but seeing as you do not exist, it does not matter
The question of observing reality changing it is increasingly being connected with various issues of consciousness by various scientists.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
I encountered a fake paper a while back. Made up results. Data that were impossible. We made the chemical compound and the data were very different. Published the correct data and science moves on.*
There is a genuine issue in some parts of biology, notably where statistics is crucial to showing effects. It’s also proving an issue with researchers needing papers to advance thei4 careers and playing a bit loose with what they publish. If a claim is big enough it WILL get exposed as others try to replicate or use it.
The issue of negative results is huge too. There really ought to be a journal or repository for ‘experiments we thought would work but didn’t’.
However my old supervisor invented a new kind of named Chemical Rearrangement - the Bachman Rearrangement. Essentially if he had an idea he would get one of his PhDs or post docs to try it. If they didn’t get it to work he’d change the student until it did…
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
As an aside, "The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea" could be read in one of two ways...
U.K. universities are home to a lot of left wing voters. After 2019 a colleague said to me how terrible it was, assuming that like everyone else I didn’t want a Johnson government. That said, I suspect there are quite a lot more Tories at Unis than it seems - a lot just keep their heads down.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
In places, yes, it’s a huge problem. Less so in the physical sciences were we rely less on statistics to prove things.
Yeah, but that’s bollocks. LLMs generate text. That text might seem to indicate all sorts of things, but it’s just generated text. That’s the key point about the Anthropic paper: they can actually map what the LLM is doing to generate the text and it’s just various associations. It has nothing to do with what the LLM says it’s doing, because when the LLM “says” what it’s doing, you’re just getting it to generate text with another prompt. It might say all sorts of things, but it’s just a sequence of words from a next token algorithm.
Yeah, but that’s bollocks. LLMs generate text. That text might seem to indicate all sorts of things, but it’s just generated text. That’s the key point about the Anthropic paper: they can actually map what the LLM is doing to generate the text and it’s just various associations. It has nothing to do with what the LLM says it’s doing, because when the LLM “says” what it’s doing, you’re just getting it to generate text with another prompt. It might say all sorts of things, but it’s just a sequence of words from a next token algorithm.
If I was allowed to commentate on such matters, I could take you to the cleaners and back again, such is the state of this inane drivel
Yeah, but that’s bollocks. LLMs generate text. That text might seem to indicate all sorts of things, but it’s just generated text. That’s the key point about the Anthropic paper: they can actually map what the LLM is doing to generate the text and it’s just various associations. It has nothing to do with what the LLM says it’s doing, because when the LLM “says” what it’s doing, you’re just getting it to generate text with another prompt. It might say all sorts of things, but it’s just a sequence of words from a next token algorithm.
There"s huge exaggeration of AI capabilities currently, because so much quantitative easing money has ended up in the sector.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
That's not a crisis: that's science working as it should.
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal like), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
Other people rush to replicate it, and it fails.
Unless it is the universe, trolling us
"I’m going to endeavor to post whatever thing or things really fascinated me in a given week on Fridays.
This week, it was a Radiolab Short: I listen to this excellent podcast while I do my workouts. In this 16-minute short, a scientist describes a phenomenon called the decline effect: in essence, the phenomenon in science whereby the at-first dramatic results of a scientific study become less and less dramatic, gradually, over time as the experiment is repeated, even under the same rigorous conditions.
The scientist concludes with a radical hypothesis he is extremely reluctant to even make: that the act of observing reality may in itself change it."
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the entire cosmos is a simulation, as I may have mentioned. This means you and everyone else on here does not exist. I know this must be 1. upsetting, and also 2. boring - as I have said this before - but seeing as you do not exist, it does not matter
Sigh.
This is simple maths.
There's an example of when a drug shows such extraordinary efficacy in early trials that it is rushed to market, and yet as the trials continue, the efficacy drops.
But it is the simplest of statistics to understand why this is the case. It's like the Sports Illustrated "curse". Every result is part causal, part chance. And the one that showed the best early numbers probably had a lot of chance. They didn't really go backwards... they just had less of the chance element.
Read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science.
That's a massive simplification of what is a genuine issue - albeit much worse in the softer sciences than the harder ones
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
The replication crisis is the discovery in around 2005 that most(?) studies are not reproducible. A study is reproducible if you perform a similar study on similar people and get similar results. But many do not.
Statistics is coping with this as follows * more exact sample size calculations before the study * exploratory studies done before the actual study * an emphasis on systematic reviews and metastudies instead of *actual* studies (I regret this)
A new problem is that statisticians are moving from classical statistics based on the Central Limit Theorem and statistical tests, to modelling which is pragmatic and not based on theory. So more people are doing stats, but it's technically worse. Weighted self-selected panel polls is an example of this.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
In places, yes, it’s a huge problem. Less so in the physical sciences were we rely less on statistics to prove things.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
I encountered a fake paper a while back. Made up results. Data that were impossible. We made the chemical compound and the data were very different. Published the correct data and science moves on.*
There is a genuine issue in some parts of biology, notably where statistics is crucial to showing effects. It’s also proving an issue with researchers needing papers to advance thei4 careers and playing a bit loose with what they publish. If a claim is big enough it WILL get exposed as others try to replicate or use it.
The issue of negative results is huge too. There really ought to be a journal or repository for ‘experiments we thought would work but didn’t’.
However my old supervisor invented a new kind of named Chemical Rearrangement - the Bachman Rearrangement. Essentially if he had an idea he would get one of his PhDs or post docs to try it. If they didn’t get it to work he’d change the student until it did…
So the assumption was that the negative results were because you ain't seen nothing yet?
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
I encountered a fake paper a while back. Made up results. Data that were impossible. We made the chemical compound and the data were very different. Published the correct data and science moves on.*
There is a genuine issue in some parts of biology, notably where statistics is crucial to showing effects. It’s also proving an issue with researchers needing papers to advance thei4 careers and playing a bit loose with what they publish. If a claim is big enough it WILL get exposed as others try to replicate or use it.
The issue of negative results is huge too. There really ought to be a journal or repository for ‘experiments we thought would work but didn’t’.
However my old supervisor invented a new kind of named Chemical Rearrangement - the Bachman Rearrangement. Essentially if he had an idea he would get one of his PhDs or post docs to try it. If they didn’t get it to work he’d change the student until it did…
So the assumption was that the negative results were because you ain't seen nothing yet?
A story came out back when I was in college about some doctoral candidate who discovered that her PhD advisor was fudging/manufacturing data to create fictitious results to get more grant money. Being an honest sort, she reported the fraud, along with all of the supporting documentation.
What happened next should not surprise you. The professor in question was given (IIRC) a slap on the wrist while the young lady who reported him was not only kicked out of her doctoral program, she was blackballed across academia, preventing her from enrolling in another doctoral program.
There's another major statistical thing that you also need to consider.
If someone previously tested the hypothesis, and got a negative result, then will will rush to reproduce it, because they *know* what the most likely result will be.
Previously, their negative result was worthless.
Now, they get to knock another researcher down, and therefore climb a little in the academic standings.
Those conclusions that are most likely to replicated, are therefore those most likely to fail.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
That's not a crisis: that's science working as it should.
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal like), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
Other people rush to replicate it, and it fails.
Unless it is the universe, trolling us
"I’m going to endeavor to post whatever thing or things really fascinated me in a given week on Fridays.
This week, it was a Radiolab Short: I listen to this excellent podcast while I do my workouts. In this 16-minute short, a scientist describes a phenomenon called the decline effect: in essence, the phenomenon in science whereby the at-first dramatic results of a scientific study become less and less dramatic, gradually, over time as the experiment is repeated, even under the same rigorous conditions.
The scientist concludes with a radical hypothesis he is extremely reluctant to even make: that the act of observing reality may in itself change it."
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the entire cosmos is a simulation, as I may have mentioned. This means you and everyone else on here does not exist. I know this must be 1. upsetting, and also 2. boring - as I have said this before - but seeing as you do not exist, it does not matter
More plausible than the simulation hypothesis is the thought that though reality is real the only access we have to it is observational/sensory, which means that all discussion of independent reality outside of experience is closed to us, and we are left only with the world of appearances, which are shaped by our cognitive apparatus. Or to put it more briefly, Kant, on the more radical interpretation of the first critique, is right.
IMHO either this or an Aristotelian approach are the only options open to us once we have dismissed the impossible but common thought that appearance and reality are somehow the same thing.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
That's not a crisis: that's science working as it should.
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal like), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
Other people rush to replicate it, and it fails.
Unless it is the universe, trolling us
"I’m going to endeavor to post whatever thing or things really fascinated me in a given week on Fridays.
This week, it was a Radiolab Short: I listen to this excellent podcast while I do my workouts. In this 16-minute short, a scientist describes a phenomenon called the decline effect: in essence, the phenomenon in science whereby the at-first dramatic results of a scientific study become less and less dramatic, gradually, over time as the experiment is repeated, even under the same rigorous conditions.
The scientist concludes with a radical hypothesis he is extremely reluctant to even make: that the act of observing reality may in itself change it."
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the entire cosmos is a simulation, as I may have mentioned. This means you and everyone else on here does not exist. I know this must be 1. upsetting, and also 2. boring - as I have said this before - but seeing as you do not exist, it does not matter
The question of observing reality changing it is increasingly being connected with various issues of consciousness by various scientists.
It seems increasingly obvious to me that the "existence of" consciousness is intimately bound up with the existence of the universe, a kind of substrate, perhaps - or a dark underground sea, of sparkles and ripples, upholding Creation itself
A story came out back when I was in college about some doctoral candidate who discovered that her PhD advisor was fudging/manufacturing data to create fictitious results to get more grant money. Being an honest sort, she reported the fraud, along with all of the supporting documentation.
What happened next should not surprise you. The professor in question was given (IIRC) a slap on the wrist while the young lady who reported him was not only kicked out of her doctoral program, she was blackballed across academia, preventing her from enrolling in another doctoral program.
Thank God that JD Vance and Donald Trump aren’t like that. We can be confident that they aren’t vindictively blackballing people who pointed out their dishonesty.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
That's not a crisis: that's science working as it should.
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal like), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
Other people rush to replicate it, and it fails.
Unless it is the universe, trolling us
"I’m going to endeavor to post whatever thing or things really fascinated me in a given week on Fridays.
This week, it was a Radiolab Short: I listen to this excellent podcast while I do my workouts. In this 16-minute short, a scientist describes a phenomenon called the decline effect: in essence, the phenomenon in science whereby the at-first dramatic results of a scientific study become less and less dramatic, gradually, over time as the experiment is repeated, even under the same rigorous conditions.
The scientist concludes with a radical hypothesis he is extremely reluctant to even make: that the act of observing reality may in itself change it."
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the entire cosmos is a simulation, as I may have mentioned. This means you and everyone else on here does not exist. I know this must be 1. upsetting, and also 2. boring - as I have said this before - but seeing as you do not exist, it does not matter
More plausible than the simulation hypothesis is the thought that though reality is real the only access we have to it is observational/sensory, which means that all discussion of independent reality outside of experience is closed to us, and we are left only with the world of appearances, which are shaped by our cognitive apparatus. Or to put it more briefly, Kant, on the more radical interpretation of the first critique, is right.
IMHO either this or an Aristotelian approach are the only options open to us once we have dismissed the impossible but common thought that appearance and reality are somehow the same thing.
Which is why the revelations that come with extremely powerful hallucinogens should not be lightly dismissed. Perhaps they really do open the Doors of Perception, if only by a few precious inches
I know what I saw on ayahuasca, twice, and once on LSD (amongst many trips). And I saw what I Know
Yeah, but that’s bollocks. LLMs generate text. That text might seem to indicate all sorts of things, but it’s just generated text. That’s the key point about the Anthropic paper: they can actually map what the LLM is doing to generate the text and it’s just various associations. It has nothing to do with what the LLM says it’s doing, because when the LLM “says” what it’s doing, you’re just getting it to generate text with another prompt. It might say all sorts of things, but it’s just a sequence of words from a next token algorithm.
There"s huge exaggeration of AI capabilities currently, because so much quantitative easing money has ended up in the sector.
Partly. Also I think because America is the dominant power and Americans have a long history of overhyping technology and being suckered into booms. I'm old enough to remember the pets.com boom before the millenium and to have seen God knows how many cryptocurrencies and second-wave internet startups fail. I've also read of the radio boom in the 1920s that helped fuel that decade's stockmarket boom and the early stage computer company boom in the early 1970s. All ended in crashes of one form or another when the tech, though somewhat useful, didn't live up to its hype in the vast majority of cases.
The desire to get rich quick exists everywhere, but there's something about being American and falling for the hype around second rate technologies. The total lack of historical perspective and general ignorance that is a predominant national characteristic seems to make them particularly vulnerable.
And of course they've just elected a President with decades of experience in launching scams like Trump University and whose first act in office was to launch a shitcoin...
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
That's not a crisis: that's science working as it should.
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal like), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
Other people rush to replicate it, and it fails.
Unless it is the universe, trolling us
"I’m going to endeavor to post whatever thing or things really fascinated me in a given week on Fridays.
This week, it was a Radiolab Short: I listen to this excellent podcast while I do my workouts. In this 16-minute short, a scientist describes a phenomenon called the decline effect: in essence, the phenomenon in science whereby the at-first dramatic results of a scientific study become less and less dramatic, gradually, over time as the experiment is repeated, even under the same rigorous conditions.
The scientist concludes with a radical hypothesis he is extremely reluctant to even make: that the act of observing reality may in itself change it."
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the entire cosmos is a simulation, as I may have mentioned. This means you and everyone else on here does not exist. I know this must be 1. upsetting, and also 2. boring - as I have said this before - but seeing as you do not exist, it does not matter
The question of observing reality changing it is increasingly being connected with various issues of consciousness by various scientists.
It seems increasingly obvious to me that the "existence of" consciousness is intimately bound up with the existence of the universe, a kind of substrate, perhaps - or a dark underground sea, of sparkles and ripples, upholding Creation itself
Obvs most theists (including this one) think something along those lines, but their tracks are well worn. Quite interesting are the non-theists who have argued something of the same. Atheist Thomas Nagel - he of 'What is it like to be a bat' stellar fame writes interestingly on this in Mind and Cosmos, OUP 2012.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
I think the point is that failure to reproduce shows that people are trying to reproduce, and (most likely) are trying to reproduce those things most likely to fail.
If people weren't trying to reproduce results, it would be a much more serious problem.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
That's not a crisis: that's science working as it should.
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal like), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
Other people rush to replicate it, and it fails.
Unless it is the universe, trolling us
"I’m going to endeavor to post whatever thing or things really fascinated me in a given week on Fridays.
This week, it was a Radiolab Short: I listen to this excellent podcast while I do my workouts. In this 16-minute short, a scientist describes a phenomenon called the decline effect: in essence, the phenomenon in science whereby the at-first dramatic results of a scientific study become less and less dramatic, gradually, over time as the experiment is repeated, even under the same rigorous conditions.
The scientist concludes with a radical hypothesis he is extremely reluctant to even make: that the act of observing reality may in itself change it."
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the entire cosmos is a simulation, as I may have mentioned. This means you and everyone else on here does not exist. I know this must be 1. upsetting, and also 2. boring - as I have said this before - but seeing as you do not exist, it does not matter
More plausible than the simulation hypothesis is the thought that though reality is real the only access we have to it is observational/sensory, which means that all discussion of independent reality outside of experience is closed to us, and we are left only with the world of appearances, which are shaped by our cognitive apparatus. Or to put it more briefly, Kant, on the more radical interpretation of the first critique, is right.
IMHO either this or an Aristotelian approach are the only options open to us once we have dismissed the impossible but common thought that appearance and reality are somehow the same thing.
Which is why the revelations that come with extremely powerful hallucinogens should not be lightly dismissed. Perhaps they really do open the Doors of Perception, if only by a few precious inches
I know what I saw on ayahuasca, twice, and once on LSD (amongst many trips). And I saw what I Know
Perhaps St Paul was on the same journey when he wrote the astonishing words of II Corinthians 12.1-5 - the bit where he went to paradise and the third heaven 14 years ago.
When they let an ambulance through how did they fail to stop a car following it through? Yet another police failure
Presumably he was on its bumper and they didn't want to get run over. Drivers routinely ignore road closures for events and no action is taken against them, perhaps the police will treat it more seriously in future (then the CPS/courts can let them off later). It still wouldn't have resulted in any incident if he hadn't tipped over into violent road rage, though the likelihood of a driver who tailgates an emergency vehicle through a roadblock erupting into road rage is clearly high.
I think the "drivers routinely ignore road closures with no action is taken against them" is a critical insight. And when no action is taken, it is just assumed that it is OK to ignore the law, and that then becomes an assumed entitlement, and anyone questioning it gets such a driver very, very angry and then the absolutely focus is on self-justification.
When people in my circles stop questioning such entitlement eg by knocking on the door of a house because the pavement is entirely blocked with a motor, it is usually because in the past they have been heavily abused or threatened with violence.
One of the strangest ones was when a wheelchair using friend came out of a shop in York to find that the pavement BOTH sides had been blocked by cafe tables placed on it. The cafe owners both sides proceeded to give her lectures about why they were entitled to completely block the pavement, rather than think about the impact of their actions.
Eabhal mentioned the woman driving her car past a "road closed" sign into the Plymouth Half Marathon in 2018. The idea that she was putting people in danger did not even occur, because she HAD to get somewhere and was yelling excuses out of the car window. As far as I can see she was just let off completely, with not even a careless driving ticket.
Here's the video of the 2018 Plymouth incident, with her "it was a stupid thing to do, BUT ...." justification. BUT I can ignore the rules, because I'm more important than public safety.
I don't think the Plymouth incident is unusual. In the events I've done there have been times where drivers have ignored the signage, but it usually ends safely when they realise there is a good reason for the closure. We even had people parked halfway across the road during the Edinburgh Marathon a few years ago, despite thousands of posters and leaflets letting people know not to.
"Main character syndrome" is what the kids call it.
(I think JohnLilburne has also experienced it. JosiasJessop does lots of events too,).
You are ignoring the fact most people who get a leaflet through the letter box usually consign it to the bin without reading it because 99% of leaflets through the door are marketing shite
Two counterpoints to that, Pagan, if I may:
1 - Driving into a crowd is something that no careful and competent (the expected standard) driver should *ever* do. I'd suggest it's a basic rule, as to drive into a crowd, especially a running crowd, is a deliberate decision to place human beings at risk of injury. You just stop and wait, or get out and ask someone for help.
It doesn't need a leaflet, or a policeman, or anything - just the most basic road sense.
2 - If you look at the video she drove through the coned off end of the sideroad, and past a sign in the middle of the junction.
I don't think I have used my photo today, so here you go:
I wasn't claiming it was an excuse for driving into people. I was merely commenting that just because you shove a leaflet through someones door about road closures does not mean they know about them
Yes - absolutely agree on that particular point.
We are increasingly bombarded by useless stuff where mail, signs on lampposts or social media. When its 99% irrelevant we learn to just ignore it and not bother reading it. Indeed I often throw unopened mail in the bin because even the stuff in an envelope is 99% junk mail
I'm reminded of the joke about the flood and the believer who says 'God will save me' whenever anyone tries to help him. He turns down the bloke in the canoe, the helicopter and the rnli and then ends up drowning. Arriving at Heaven he confronts God 'I was drowning and believed that you would save me! What happened?' God replies 'Didnt you see the canoe, helicopter and the RNLI?'
Your argument then is I should waste a lot of time reading irrelevant shit just in case sorry they can fuck off. If I read every piece of mail that has come through my door in the last 12 months I would have probably spent 24+ hours of my life doing it.....absolutely none of it was relevant.
Something I need to know, find a better way to communicate
Pagan2 tragically shot by crossbow maniac.
"I was only trying to deliver a leaflet for the SDP"
I have a crossbow but would never deliver a leaflet for the sdp
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
When they let an ambulance through how did they fail to stop a car following it through? Yet another police failure
Presumably he was on its bumper and they didn't want to get run over. Drivers routinely ignore road closures for events and no action is taken against them, perhaps the police will treat it more seriously in future (then the CPS/courts can let them off later). It still wouldn't have resulted in any incident if he hadn't tipped over into violent road rage, though the likelihood of a driver who tailgates an emergency vehicle through a roadblock erupting into road rage is clearly high.
I think the "drivers routinely ignore road closures with no action is taken against them" is a critical insight. And when no action is taken, it is just assumed that it is OK to ignore the law, and that then becomes an assumed entitlement, and anyone questioning it gets such a driver very, very angry and then the absolutely focus is on self-justification.
When people in my circles stop questioning such entitlement eg by knocking on the door of a house because the pavement is entirely blocked with a motor, it is usually because in the past they have been heavily abused or threatened with violence.
One of the strangest ones was when a wheelchair using friend came out of a shop in York to find that the pavement BOTH sides had been blocked by cafe tables placed on it. The cafe owners both sides proceeded to give her lectures about why they were entitled to completely block the pavement, rather than think about the impact of their actions.
Eabhal mentioned the woman driving her car past a "road closed" sign into the Plymouth Half Marathon in 2018. The idea that she was putting people in danger did not even occur, because she HAD to get somewhere and was yelling excuses out of the car window. As far as I can see she was just let off completely, with not even a careless driving ticket.
Here's the video of the 2018 Plymouth incident, with her "it was a stupid thing to do, BUT ...." justification. BUT I can ignore the rules, because I'm more important than public safety.
I don't think the Plymouth incident is unusual. In the events I've done there have been times where drivers have ignored the signage, but it usually ends safely when they realise there is a good reason for the closure. We even had people parked halfway across the road during the Edinburgh Marathon a few years ago, despite thousands of posters and leaflets letting people know not to.
"Main character syndrome" is what the kids call it.
(I think JohnLilburne has also experienced it. JosiasJessop does lots of events too,).
You are ignoring the fact most people who get a leaflet through the letter box usually consign it to the bin without reading it because 99% of leaflets through the door are marketing shite
Two counterpoints to that, Pagan, if I may:
1 - Driving into a crowd is something that no careful and competent (the expected standard) driver should *ever* do. I'd suggest it's a basic rule, as to drive into a crowd, especially a running crowd, is a deliberate decision to place human beings at risk of injury. You just stop and wait, or get out and ask someone for help.
It doesn't need a leaflet, or a policeman, or anything - just the most basic road sense.
2 - If you look at the video she drove through the coned off end of the sideroad, and past a sign in the middle of the junction.
I don't think I have used my photo today, so here you go:
I wasn't claiming it was an excuse for driving into people. I was merely commenting that just because you shove a leaflet through someones door about road closures does not mean they know about them
Yes - absolutely agree on that particular point.
We are increasingly bombarded by useless stuff where mail, signs on lampposts or social media. When its 99% irrelevant we learn to just ignore it and not bother reading it. Indeed I often throw unopened mail in the bin because even the stuff in an envelope is 99% junk mail
I'm reminded of the joke about the flood and the believer who says 'God will save me' whenever anyone tries to help him. He turns down the bloke in the canoe, the helicopter and the rnli and then ends up drowning. Arriving at Heaven he confronts God 'I was drowning and believed that you would save me! What happened?' God replies 'Didnt you see the canoe, helicopter and the RNLI?'
Your argument then is I should waste a lot of time reading irrelevant shit just in case sorry they can fuck off. If I read every piece of mail that has come through my door in the last 12 months I would have probably spent 24+ hours of my life doing it.....absolutely none of it was relevant.
Something I need to know, find a better way to communicate
What would you prefer (a) personal visit from the race organizer or (b) air raid style siren for 5 minutes followed by loud hailer announcement?
What I am getting at is important announcements get delivered this way. The people responsible for delivering these announcements are also the ones that have ok'ed the flooding of these channels with dross degrading the signal to noise ratio to the point where they are if we are lucky like static and if unlucky like tuning in to radio 1 on a bad day
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
I think the point is that failure to reproduce shows that people are trying to reproduce, and (most likely) are trying to reproduce those things most likely to fail.
If people weren't trying to reproduce results, it would be a much more serious problem.
Maybe but @bondegezou telling me it isn't a problem immediately makes me think it's a problem and needs external investigation and to be taken out of the hands of scientists who seem more interested in keeping grant money flowing than science.
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
I have no idea what the "Bluesky party line" is, but he is taking an example of the system working well - i.e. people attempting to replicate results and publishing said attempts - and counting it is a negative.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
But the reproducibility crisis is real
That's not a crisis: that's science working as it should.
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal like), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
Other people rush to replicate it, and it fails.
Unless it is the universe, trolling us
"I’m going to endeavor to post whatever thing or things really fascinated me in a given week on Fridays.
This week, it was a Radiolab Short: I listen to this excellent podcast while I do my workouts. In this 16-minute short, a scientist describes a phenomenon called the decline effect: in essence, the phenomenon in science whereby the at-first dramatic results of a scientific study become less and less dramatic, gradually, over time as the experiment is repeated, even under the same rigorous conditions.
The scientist concludes with a radical hypothesis he is extremely reluctant to even make: that the act of observing reality may in itself change it."
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the entire cosmos is a simulation, as I may have mentioned. This means you and everyone else on here does not exist. I know this must be 1. upsetting, and also 2. boring - as I have said this before - but seeing as you do not exist, it does not matter
Ah so you've found a philosophy that confirms your previously held belief that you're the centre of the universe?
Yeah, but that’s bollocks. LLMs generate text. That text might seem to indicate all sorts of things, but it’s just generated text. That’s the key point about the Anthropic paper: they can actually map what the LLM is doing to generate the text and it’s just various associations. It has nothing to do with what the LLM says it’s doing, because when the LLM “says” what it’s doing, you’re just getting it to generate text with another prompt. It might say all sorts of things, but it’s just a sequence of words from a next token algorithm.
There"s huge exaggeration of AI capabilities currently, because so much quantitative easing money has ended up in the sector.
Partly. Also I think because America is the dominant power and Americans have a long history of overhyping technology and being suckered into booms. I'm old enough to remember the pets.com boom before the millenium and to have seen God knows how many cryptocurrencies and second-wave internet startups fail. I've also read of the radio boom in the 1920s that helped fuel that decade's stockmarket boom and the early stage computer company boom in the early 1970s. All ended in crashes of one form or another when the tech, though somewhat useful, didn't live up to its hype in the vast majority of cases.
The desire to get rich quick exists everywhere, but there's something about being American and falling for the hype around second rate technologies. The total lack of historical perspective and general ignorance that is a predominant national characteristic seems to make them particularly vulnerable.
And of course they've just elected a President with decades of experience in launching scams like Trump University and whose first act in office was to launch a shitcoin...
When I first started working in AI, which was 1999, we deliberately didn’t call it AI because the term had been so overhyped previously and disappointed. We talked about “decision support systems” instead. Well, the seasons turn and “AI” is exciting again.
But that hype cycle doesn’t mean the underlying tech isn’t going to be very important. The .com boom was followed by a bust, but online retail and other online business has changed the world. So the easily excitable and the ones seeking to boost stock prices are getting carried away with generative AI hype, we’re *not* close to conscious AGI etc., but we also shouldn’t get carried away with countering the hype!
A story came out back when I was in college about some doctoral candidate who discovered that her PhD advisor was fudging/manufacturing data to create fictitious results to get more grant money. Being an honest sort, she reported the fraud, along with all of the supporting documentation.
What happened next should not surprise you. The professor in question was given (IIRC) a slap on the wrist while the young lady who reported him was not only kicked out of her doctoral program, she was blackballed across academia, preventing her from enrolling in another doctoral program.
There is a reason the phrase is "revenge is a dish best served cold". Because you want absolutely all your ducks in a row when you serve it and that takes an awful lot of time to prepare...
Although that does remind me that I need to remind someone that we've given their mate a favour but allowing them to quietly fix an error that I'm starting to regret and it would be VERY embarrassing for a lot of people if I mentioned it...
Vancesplaining, that’s what he does. He Vancesplained the Ukraine war to the president of Ukraine. He’s now Vancesplaining academic research to universities, and in between he managed to fit in a bit of Vancesplaining of Thomas Aquinus to those pesky clerics.
I like him. He reminds me of me
Genuinely extremely smart, and genuinely smarter than almost everyone around him, but also fucking neurotic, given to severe moodswings, and damaged by a weird childhood
To compare yourself gleefully to that moron is absurb in the extreme. Why call yourself a total arsehole who is far from as clever as they think they are..
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
Yeah, but that’s bollocks. LLMs generate text. That text might seem to indicate all sorts of things, but it’s just generated text. That’s the key point about the Anthropic paper: they can actually map what the LLM is doing to generate the text and it’s just various associations. It has nothing to do with what the LLM says it’s doing, because when the LLM “says” what it’s doing, you’re just getting it to generate text with another prompt. It might say all sorts of things, but it’s just a sequence of words from a next token algorithm.
There"s huge exaggeration of AI capabilities currently, because so much quantitative easing money has ended up in the sector.
Partly. Also I think because America is the dominant power and Americans have a long history of overhyping technology and being suckered into booms. I'm old enough to remember the pets.com boom before the millenium and to have seen God knows how many cryptocurrencies and second-wave internet startups fail. I've also read of the radio boom in the 1920s that helped fuel that decade's stockmarket boom and the early stage computer company boom in the early 1970s. All ended in crashes of one form or another when the tech, though somewhat useful, didn't live up to its hype in the vast majority of cases.
The desire to get rich quick exists everywhere, but there's something about being American and falling for the hype around second rate technologies. The total lack of historical perspective and general ignorance that is a predominant national characteristic seems to make them particularly vulnerable.
And of course they've just elected a President with decades of experience in launching scams like Trump University and whose first act in office was to launch a shitcoin...
Hey it worked so well they are launching another shitcoin next week.
And it will work because the quid pro quo is that if you buy enough of the shitcoin you may get 10 minutes directly with Trump....
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
To make it worse all the pathetic inquiries haven't even attempted to get at the truth; the UK's "Covid inquiry" was probably the most dismally incurious
We bankrupted our country with debt, damaged generations of humans, fucked up our cities - like many other nations - and all because of a virus that very likely came from a lab that was deliberately fucking with viruses to make them more dangerous. And no one is even going to be properly questioned about this, let alone tried in a courtroom??
Twenty million people died, and our reaction is a shrug. I guess there are some scandals that are SO big it is too awkward to confront them. Better and easier to forget, pretend it definitely came from a pangolin, don't upset China (or the Americans that funded the research), let's instead get really really upset about 200 sub-postmasters
It is, if nothing else, a sad but enormous lesson in human psychology
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
To make it worse all the pathetic inquiries haven't even attempted to get at the truth; the UK's "Covid inquiry" was probably the most dismally incurious
We bankrupted our country with debt, damaged generations of humans, fucked up our cities - like many other nations - and all because of a virus that very likely came from a lab that was deliberately fucking with viruses to make them more dangerous. And no one is even going to be properly questioned about this, let alone tried in a courtroom??
Twenty million people died, and our reaction is a shrug. I guess there are some scandals that are SO big it is too awkward to confront them. Better and easier to forget, pretend it definitely came from a pangolin, don't upset China (or the Americans that funded the research), let's instead get really really upset about 200 sub-postmasters
It is, if nothing else, a sad but enormous lesson in human psychology
The COVID inquiry is laughable, the premise is basically "why didn't we lockdown harder, earlier and for longer" and finding those lone voices who went against the grain and trying to shame them. COVID showed me that we can never trust "fact checkers" and "experts".
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
I'm at a loss as to what you would do instead of lockdowns given that I suspect it went
1) we need to cut down inter people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 2) we really need to cut down inter people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 3) we really really need to cut down people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 4) if you don't stop people living their houses the NHS will be overwhelmed in 2 weeks and the time frame to do so is NOW not tomorrow.
The two things we picked up from Covid were
1) that we were using estimates for aerial distance spreads that came from the 50s and wouldn't have stood scrutiny if anyone had been bothered to look at the "science" behind things.
2) There is a lot of sense in reacting early because at by doing so you can minimise the risk or at the very least you take your profit early (and I can thank Leon for that).
Trump can play the personalities: Trrump the businessman Trump the celebrity Trump the dont give two fucks guy Trump the bloke Trump the charismatic, at least to some
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
I'm at a loss as to what you would do instead of lockdowns given that I suspect it went
1) we need to cut down inter people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 2) we really need to cut down inter people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 3) we really really need to cut down people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 4) if you don't stop people living their houses the NHS will be overwhelmed in 2 weeks and the time frame to do so is NOW not tomorrow.
The two things we picked up from Covid were that we were using estimates for aerial distance spreads that came from the 50s and wouldn't have stood scrutiny if anyone had been bothered to look at the "science" behind things.
There is a lot of sense in reacting early because at least you take your profit early (and I can thank Leon for that).
Then you let the NHS get overwhelmed for a while. It's a health service, it's there to treat sick people not save the world.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
No, it was absolutely the scientists who were refusing to listen to anything that contradicted what they already believed about where the virus originated.
Trump can play the personalities: Trrump the businessman Trump the celebrity Trump the dont give two fucks guy Trump the bloke Trump the charismatic, at least to some
Vance the......
For some reason, I ended '....' with ".. his extra leg".
Maybe that fabled sofa has a story to tell.
Also, I vaguely remembered that Jake The Peg was sung by Benny Hill. And now I remember it was Rolf.
Which is making this post even worse than it started.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
As an illustration of your thesis. Patrick Vallance and Jeremy Farrar are deeply implicated in the cover-up of the lab leak hypothesis - ie the early attempt to get it shut down entirely, call it a racist conspiracy, so as not to offend China or "threaten science". Even if you do not accept the lab leak hypothesis, the attempt to silence the hypothesis is indisputable, it happened, and it was deeply harmful, as it prevented proper investigation in the early months when it might have actually found proof. They enabled China to dodge scrutiny for a year or two
Recall that WHO sent a team to China to investigate the origins of the Wuhan virus, and the only western scientist on the team was.... Peter Daszak, the co-head of the Wuhan labs. He was told to mark his own homework, and - wow -decided it was extremely unlikely that the virus came from his own lab which was making this virus more dangerous
If you put that in a thriller, no one would buy it. Too ridiculous. Yet that is precisely what happened. The entire wolrd was gaslit by these frauds and liars for years. And Vallance is now enjoying a happy life as Lord Vallance, Minister for Science, and meanwhile where is Jeremy Farrar? Ah yes, he's now leader of WHO
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
To make it worse all the pathetic inquiries haven't even attempted to get at the truth; the UK's "Covid inquiry" was probably the most dismally incurious
We bankrupted our country with debt, damaged generations of humans, fucked up our cities - like many other nations - and all because of a virus that very likely came from a lab that was deliberately fucking with viruses to make them more dangerous. And no one is even going to be properly questioned about this, let alone tried in a courtroom??
Twenty million people died, and our reaction is a shrug. I guess there are some scandals that are SO big it is too awkward to confront them. Better and easier to forget, pretend it definitely came from a pangolin, don't upset China (or the Americans that funded the research), let's instead get really really upset about 200 sub-postmasters
It is, if nothing else, a sad but enormous lesson in human psychology
The COVID inquiry is laughable, the premise is basically "why didn't we lockdown harder, earlier and for longer" and finding those lone voices who went against the grain and trying to shame them. COVID showed me that we can never trust "fact checkers" and "experts".
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
I'm at a loss as to what you would do instead of lockdowns given that I suspect it went
1) we need to cut down inter people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 2) we really need to cut down inter people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 3) we really really need to cut down people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 4) if you don't stop people living their houses the NHS will be overwhelmed in 2 weeks and the time frame to do so is NOW not tomorrow.
The two things we picked up from Covid were that we were using estimates for aerial distance spreads that came from the 50s and wouldn't have stood scrutiny if anyone had been bothered to look at the "science" behind things.
There is a lot of sense in reacting early because at least you take your profit early (and I can thank Leon for that).
Then you let the NHS get overwhelmed for a while. It's a health service, it's there to treat sick people not save the world.
Given where this comment thread started - that Vance's argument was a joke and the science's cross checking works fine. It's remarkable that we've quickly got to an example that shows he may be correct - the 1950's theory that aerial spread wasn't possible meant that it was only in 2022 that the UN / Nature accepted that it was an airborne virus https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
I'm at a loss as to what you would do instead of lockdowns given that I suspect it went
1) we need to cut down inter people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 2) we really need to cut down inter people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 3) we really really need to cut down people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something 4) if you don't stop people living their houses the NHS will be overwhelmed in 2 weeks and the time frame to do so is NOW not tomorrow.
The two things we picked up from Covid were that we were using estimates for aerial distance spreads that came from the 50s and wouldn't have stood scrutiny if anyone had been bothered to look at the "science" behind things.
There is a lot of sense in reacting early because at least you take your profit early (and I can thank Leon for that).
Then you let the NHS get overwhelmed for a while. It's a health service, it's there to treat sick people not save the world.
I think the problem wasn't that the NHS would be overwhelmed it was feared it was going to be the black death in Eyam mark 2.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
No, it was absolutely the scientists who were refusing to listen to anything that contradicted what they already believed about where the virus originated.
I know some on here believe that they have won the argument over covid origins, but just shouting loudly on PB is not proof. I am open to both explanations. And take that side out, and I think there is some merit in the idea that lab leak was suppressed by some bad actors, the attutude of some in here to rerunning the pandemic without lockdown and without other measures is bonkers.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
No, it was absolutely the scientists who were refusing to listen to anything that contradicted what they already believed about where the virus originated.
I know some on here believe that they have won the argument over covid origins, but just shouting loudly on PB is not proof. I am open to both explanations. And take that side out, and I think there is some merit in the idea that lab leak was suppressed by some bad actors, the attutude of some in here to rerunning the pandemic without lockdown and without other measures is bonkers.
Who the f*ck could not have foreseen this? They're meant to be smart?
"Trump’s second administration has, predictably, embraced this cynical conception of executive authority, with devastating results for democracy and civil liberties."
Trump has weaponized the court's decision to elevate himself above democratic institutions and target his enemies with unlawful retribution in ways the justices never could have foreseen when they wiped away his criminal prosecutions, Stern wrote.
"The majority may have also failed to foresee the ways that Trump would use the decision to diminish the court’s own power," Stern wrote. "Having freed the president to burst past existing constitutional restraints, the justices must now try to preserve their own authority from executive encroachment."
Trump can play the personalities: Trrump the businessman Trump the celebrity Trump the dont give two fucks guy Trump the bloke Trump the charismatic, at least to some
Vance the......
For some reason, I ended '....' with ".. his extra leg".
Maybe that fabled sofa has a story to tell.
Also, I vaguely remembered that Jake The Peg was sung by Benny Hill. And now I remember it was Rolf.
Which is making this post even worse than it started.
This talk of the Replication Crisis is somewhat overblown and outdated. There are some serious problems, but science has faced the matter and practice has improved. We look for publication bias in systematic reviews. We encourage protocols being published (it’s required for serious RCTs in healthcare). Open access journals are generally happier about publishing negative results than the older publication model. Healthcare RCTs readily get published irrespective of whether they found an effect.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
Nothing to see here. The establishment voice says it's all fine and good. Everyone go about your business as usual and keep giving out taxpayer money in grants.
And, remember, @bondegezou "the scientist" is 100% certain that Covid came from the wet market, that's the overwhelming consensus: no one disputes it any more, and questioning that is actively racist, so let's briskly move on
Indeed. I'm at the point where if he told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check to make sure. We still need a reckoning for the "scientists" who forced us into lockdowns, blackball them and cut their funding sources forever. Make them pay for what they did to the nation.
Wow. You have some issues there. Why are you putting scientists in quotation marks? And never forget - it was politicians who took the decisions on lockdowns and the rest. Do you feel we didn’t need to lockdown at all? That’s one view but I think it was essential in March 2020. Later events I think are less clear cut. But who is it that you think needs blackballing? I’m genuinely curious.
In retrospect I wouldn't have done the first lockdown either. The cost was too high and the lasting effects have been terrible and all so that a few people over 80 got an extra year or two.
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
What would you have done if you didn’t do the first lockdown? Simply let hospitals be overwhelmed? Suggest people just live or die at home?
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more. We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
Yup, people live or die at home. Only take COVID patients under 18, everyone else deals with it at home and assesses their own risk.
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.
Comments
https://bsky.app/profile/damonberes.com/post/3lq5p26upyk2e
https://x.com/jdvance/status/1926369663929249883
There is an extraordinary "reproducibility crisis" in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.
Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.
The voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.
And on top of all of this, many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
Or, they could yell "fascism" at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.
Most people in the media (and even many knowledgeable people on here) think it applies to Child Benefit and are blissfully unaware it's actually about the colossal additional sums (ie in addition to Child Benefit) of Universal Credit handed out to people with children.
In contrast Child Benefit is chicken feed.
Never have I sat through such a load of bathetic sentimentalist crap (which about 10 minutes of outstanding action does not redeem).
@Casino_Royale I've got missile lock on you buddy, and you're out of flares.
JD is head and shoulders above them all. Including Trump. Including everyone on PB.
JD Vance’s Irish ancestry claim hits a genealogical dead end
DUP-commissioned report fails to find a link between JD Vance — a self-declared Scots-Irish — and Ireland.
https://bsky.app/profile/chadloder.bsky.social/post/3lpxkthsc7c2c
Obama has more Irish heritage than Vance...
And doesn't give a shit about the damage the administration is doing to the US science base.
What's amazing with Farage's intervention, is that polling suggests it's popular with most voters, but WILDLY popular with Reform voters.
If we were to increase it to French/Nordic levels, I'd do some combination of reduce the deficit, boost spending on defence, and chuck the rest into public health interventions, targeted early years, HS2, trams and cycle lanes.
My original point is essentially in agreement with you - I'm worried that we wouldn't spend it on those kinds of things.
This could be an example of where the Reform copy:paste of US obsessions could trip him up if taken too far. I think the DOGE for local government is another.
I am supportive of dropping or reforming the cap as a way of addressing child poverty. But the reason Farage is behind it is altogether different and comes from natalist movement in the US - the idea is you promote the reproduction of the “indigenous” population as a fight against the great replacement.
Hence a policy that looks left wing but is actually something else.
The reality is that (in all sciences), people don't publish negative results.
Let's see if [x] causes [y]? If the test comes back negative, you don't publish.
Here's the thing, though. We use 95% confidence intervals, so that 5% of hypotheses are going to pass the test when they shouldn't*. That's why we attempt to reproduce them. So we can weed this out.
Now: if people published all their negative results, then we wouldn't have this problem. Instead of treating the failure of a hypothesis to play out as a failure, we should celebrate it's addition to the sum of human knowledge.
* Yes, I know it's more complicated than that.
Or maybe on reflection not. Dom is up there
The "voting patterns of university professors" have absolutely nothing to do with the science research that (eg) Harvard conducts.
Vance apparently believes whataboutery is rational argument. Which might be why william is a fan.
I'm aware of what the Pope said to him
Genuinely extremely smart, and genuinely smarter than almost everyone around him, but also fucking neurotic, given to severe moodswings, and damaged by a weird childhood
https://xkcd.com/882/
If people published negative results, then we wouldn't have this issue, because people would know that there was no link between [x] and [y]. Instead what happens is that 20 different teams each test it. 19 come back with negative results (because there is no causal link), while the 20th publishes a positive result.
Other people rush to replicate it, and it fails.
Vance's rhetorical sleight-of-hand is to start by mentioning a real, but global and not partisan problem before staring on a series of whinges which are a lot more partisan and less securely established. Ending with "nasty boffins disagree with me". It's a good persuasive trick, but that's all it is.
You might be right there.
Good for him, but it also needs more Israeli politicians to come out.
"I’m going to endeavor to post whatever thing or things really fascinated me in a given week on Fridays.
This week, it was a Radiolab Short: I listen to this excellent podcast while I do my workouts. In this 16-minute short, a scientist describes a phenomenon called the decline effect: in essence, the phenomenon in science whereby the at-first dramatic results of a scientific study become less and less dramatic, gradually, over time as the experiment is repeated, even under the same rigorous conditions.
The scientist concludes with a radical hypothesis he is extremely reluctant to even make: that the act of observing reality may in itself change it."
https://powerinyourhands.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/this-weeks-favorite-thing-cosmic-habituation/
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the entire cosmos is a simulation, as I may have mentioned. This means you and everyone else on here does not exist. I know this must be 1. upsetting, and also 2. boring - as I have said this before - but seeing as you do not exist, it does not matter
@thetimes
A Harvard behavioural scientist who earned global renown for her studies on ethical behaviour has been fired after an investigation found she had fabricated data to bolster her research
https://x.com/thetimes/status/1927470372313608496
This is simple maths.
There's an example of when a drug shows such extraordinary efficacy in early trials that it is rushed to market, and yet as the trials continue, the efficacy drops.
But it is the simplest of statistics to understand why this is the case. It's like the Sports Illustrated "curse". Every result is part causal, part chance. And the one that showed the best early numbers probably had a lot of chance. They didn't really go backwards... they just had less of the chance element.
Read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science.
Biology is harder, because everything tends to be messier and slower. And social sciences are harder still. But yes, more checks for replication would be a good thing, because a five percent hurdle is going to let a lot of wrong things through. What are we diverting to get that to happen?
Which is why we have peer review, and people try and reproduce results.
There is a genuine issue in some parts of biology, notably where statistics is crucial to showing effects. It’s also proving an issue with researchers needing papers to advance thei4 careers and playing a bit loose with what they publish. If a claim is big enough it WILL get exposed as others try to replicate or use it.
The issue of negative results is huge too. There really ought to be a journal or repository for ‘experiments we thought would work but didn’t’.
However my old supervisor invented a new kind of named Chemical Rearrangement - the Bachman Rearrangement. Essentially if he had an idea he would get one of his PhDs or post docs to try it. If they didn’t get it to work he’d change the student until it did…
But I am not, so I can't. Count yourself lucky
Statistics is coping with this as follows
* more exact sample size calculations before the study
* exploratory studies done before the actual study
* an emphasis on systematic reviews and metastudies instead of *actual* studies (I regret this)
A new problem is that statisticians are moving from classical statistics based on the Central Limit Theorem and statistical tests, to modelling which is pragmatic and not based on theory. So more people are doing stats, but it's technically worse. Weighted self-selected panel polls is an example of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Findings_Are_False
A story came out back when I was in college about some doctoral candidate who discovered that her PhD advisor was fudging/manufacturing data to create fictitious results to get more grant money. Being an honest sort, she reported the fraud, along with all of the supporting documentation.
What happened next should not surprise you. The professor in question was given (IIRC) a slap on the wrist while the young lady who reported him was not only kicked out of her doctoral program, she was blackballed across academia, preventing her from enrolling in another doctoral program.
There's another major statistical thing that you also need to consider.
If someone previously tested the hypothesis, and got a negative result, then will will rush to reproduce it, because they *know* what the most likely result will be.
Previously, their negative result was worthless.
Now, they get to knock another researcher down, and therefore climb a little in the academic standings.
Those conclusions that are most likely to replicated, are therefore those most likely to fail.
The Republicans just don’t like science because they don’t want an epistemic challenge to their worldview. They want only one source of truth: it was previously the Bible, but it’s now whatever Donald posts to Truth Social.
IMHO either this or an Aristotelian approach are the only options open to us once we have dismissed the impossible but common thought that appearance and reality are somehow the same thing.
I know what I saw on ayahuasca, twice, and once on LSD (amongst many trips). And I saw what I Know
The desire to get rich quick exists everywhere, but there's something about being American and falling for the hype around second rate technologies. The total lack of historical perspective and general ignorance that is a predominant national characteristic seems to make them particularly vulnerable.
And of course they've just elected a President with decades of experience in launching scams like Trump University and whose first act in office was to launch a shitcoin...
Labour admin posting about us all day every day.
https://x.com/reformparty_uk/status/1927464500719997131?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
If people weren't trying to reproduce results, it would be a much more serious problem.
The people responsible for delivering these announcements are also the ones that have ok'ed the flooding of these channels with dross degrading the signal to noise ratio to the point where they are if we are lucky like static and if unlucky like tuning in to radio 1 on a bad day
But that hype cycle doesn’t mean the underlying tech isn’t going to be very important. The .com boom was followed by a bust, but online retail and other online business has changed the world. So the easily excitable and the ones seeking to boost stock prices are getting carried away with generative AI hype, we’re *not* close to conscious AGI etc., but we also shouldn’t get carried away with countering the hype!
Although that does remind me that I need to remind someone that we've given their mate a favour but allowing them to quietly fix an error that I'm starting to regret and it would be VERY embarrassing for a lot of people if I mentioned it...
Any "scientist" who pushed the "lab leak is racist" narrative including more than a few on here, any who pushed the lockdowns after seeing how awful the first one was, any who pushed for shitty mask mandates, any who pushed for closing schools, any who pushed for that idiotic "substantial meal" rubbish. It was all nonsense in the end and none of the guilty parties who thought it up have paid the price. Indeed, if there was another pandemic we'd rely on the same "scientists" who would plunge us back into endless lockdowns, I mean there were some who thought that we should never have let go of COVID measures and we're advocating for keeping social distancing indoors permanently etc... all in the name of "harm prevention".
Honestly fuck the scientists and "experts" and I say this holding a valid chemistry degree and having worked as a data scientist for the last half decade. We should never have handed over the levers of government to people who didn't get voted in, even for a temporary amount of time. The way the media venerated them was sickening and once they got a taste for it you could see how loath they were to give it up.
And it will work because the quid pro quo is that if you buy enough of the shitcoin you may get 10 minutes directly with Trump....
We bankrupted our country with debt, damaged generations of humans, fucked up our cities - like many other nations - and all because of a virus that very likely came from a lab that was deliberately fucking with viruses to make them more dangerous. And no one is even going to be properly questioned about this, let alone tried in a courtroom??
Twenty million people died, and our reaction is a shrug. I guess there are some scandals that are SO big it is too awkward to confront them. Better and easier to forget, pretend it definitely came from a pangolin, don't upset China (or the Americans that funded the research), let's instead get really really upset about 200 sub-postmasters
It is, if nothing else, a sad but enormous lesson in human psychology
1) we need to cut down inter people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something
2) we really need to cut down inter people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something
3) we really really need to cut down people contacts because it's going to be bad - do something
4) if you don't stop people living their houses the NHS will be overwhelmed in 2 weeks and the time frame to do so is NOW not tomorrow.
The two things we picked up from Covid were
1) that we were using estimates for aerial distance spreads that came from the 50s and wouldn't have stood scrutiny if anyone had been bothered to look at the "science" behind things.
2) There is a lot of sense in reacting early because at by doing so you can minimise the risk or at the very least you take your profit early (and I can thank Leon for that).
Trump can play the personalities:
Trrump the businessman
Trump the celebrity
Trump the dont give two fucks guy
Trump the bloke
Trump the charismatic, at least to some
Vance the......
Maybe that fabled sofa has a story to tell.
Also, I vaguely remembered that Jake The Peg was sung by Benny Hill. And now I remember it was Rolf.
Which is making this post even worse than it started.
Recall that WHO sent a team to China to investigate the origins of the Wuhan virus, and the only western scientist on the team was.... Peter Daszak, the co-head of the Wuhan labs. He was told to mark his own homework, and - wow -decided it was extremely unlikely that the virus came from his own lab which was making this virus more dangerous
If you put that in a thriller, no one would buy it. Too ridiculous. Yet that is precisely what happened. The entire wolrd was gaslit by these frauds and liars for years. And Vallance is now enjoying a happy life as Lord Vallance, Minister for Science, and meanwhile where is Jeremy Farrar? Ah yes, he's now leader of WHO
I think we got a lot of things wrong, but there were no easy choices. I think we failed to change our policies quickly enough when we knew more. We knew that it wasn’t droplet spread pretty early yet advice based on droplets carried on for years (2m social distancing is based on that). We should have used the not 100% accurate but pretty good lateral flow tests hugely more to open things up. We should have let outdoor events go on far more.
We had a government that, I think it’s pretty clear, took a dim view of humanity and thought draconian rules were needed. I think that’s partly because that’s how they are themselves, Johnson certainly. Others have suggested using carrots rather than sticks might have worked.
I get that people now think we did too much, but that is hindsight and mostly not realistic. I too am frustrated with the inquiries, but perhaps we should judge at the end, when the reports come out.
I mean, lol
"Trump’s second administration has, predictably, embraced this cynical conception of executive authority, with devastating results for democracy and civil liberties."
Trump has weaponized the court's decision to elevate himself above democratic institutions and target his enemies with unlawful retribution in ways the justices never could have foreseen when they wiped away his criminal prosecutions, Stern wrote.
"The majority may have also failed to foresee the ways that Trump would use the decision to diminish the court’s own power," Stern wrote. "Having freed the president to burst past existing constitutional restraints, the justices must now try to preserve their own authority from executive encroachment."
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/supreme-court-distraught-as-trump-uses-ruling-to-emasculate-justices-expert/ar-AA1Fz9DP?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=9bbae65cbf8340ebd30f54a74ae96474&ei=6
We can't halt everyone's lives because there isn't enough healthcare provision, it's completely nonsensical. To extend the lives of the very old by a few months or years we locked up the other 99% who wouldn't have died even without hospital intervention.