cgiles

13 ms·

1.
by cgiles 6y ago
Generally, your points are well taken. The only quibble I have on a factual basis is here: > 3. "Censorship" is when a person is not allowed to express their views. That is not what is being proposed here. This is about refusin
2.
by cgiles 6y ago
> The 2016 US Election in particular showed us what happens when a platform takes a "hands off" approach - the platform is absolutely saturated with false, hateful information... And yet, presumably you were able to employ crit
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by cgiles 6y ago
Quarantined subreddits are analogous to downweighting a particular Facebook post in the FB algorithm: both are a form of "soft" moderation stopping short of outright censorship. Banning users who vote for Reddit's arbitrarily
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by cgiles 6y ago
> we certainly have more confidence in the robustness of the physics-based models. That is interesting. I don't know to what extent wind vectors are considered chaotic in the technical sense, but I would have guessed that chaotic sy
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by cgiles 6y ago
> Mere Monte Carlo state exploration is wasteful and doesn't provide much insight. Often we don't have error bars on model outputs to even know if an "improvement" in a metric is significant. The funny thing is, I did
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by cgiles 6y ago
> What's missing from current mathematics to make predictive models for biology? Well, I think that, no joke, there is a Nobel Prize waiting for anyone who knows the answer to that. I think this is the next big paradigm shift needed
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by cgiles 6y ago
I work in molecular biology research, and I think this is a great article that strikes at the heart of many problems in the field. I can't comment on the climate change stuff, although I wish he hadn't included it because it was a
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by cgiles 6y ago
tl;dr: this is not an "age reduction breakthrough", it is both A) a confirmation of what we already knew, which is that parabiosis makes old mice healthier, and B) a finding that virtually proves the mAge clock has nothing useful
9.
by cgiles 6y ago
The question I am not seeing addressed in the many, many comments below is: why is there such a large pool of people willing to believe, and act on, ideas like "5G causes COVID-19 symptoms", "vaccines are harmful", any
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by cgiles 7y ago
It is also the basis of much conspiracy theorizing. The chain of logic is: 1. Group X has an incentive to do Y 2. We observe Y 3. We also observe specific instances of X doing Y 4. Therefore, all Y is caused by X The problem, obviously, com
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by cgiles 7y ago
> The PhD wage situation in the US is simply shameful. It really isn't. I recently finished my PhD, and now I'm a postdoc. My stipend was $30K, but, crucially, I wasn't living in a place like Santa Cruz. It was very easy t
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by cgiles 7y ago
Well, for those of us who live in those flyover states, it does make us feel a little better about our own situations, as well as mightily perplexed about what people in SF, etc, are thinking. Where I live, a mid-sized metro in the centra
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by cgiles 7y ago
You are right, and I altered a comment below to reflect this. I was trying to make a more general point and phrased it poorly. The general point is: the reason drug costs are high because of two things working together: 1) Pharma continuall
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by cgiles 7y ago
> This would be abused like any other slush fund. That's a Fully Generic Argument against any pool of government money for any purpose. The law could be written in such a way that the money is allocated for this specific purpose. &g
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by cgiles 7y ago
To my knowledge -- keeping in mind this is not my area -- there are modest benefits for newer types of insulin. You have to dose less often. The variance in swings of blood glucose is lower -- newer types tend to be more "extended rele
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by cgiles 7y ago
There is a fair amount of that. But I think the bigger problem is dogmatic ideology. Many of those on the right are just ideologically opposed to government spending on anything (that isn't the military). It is often a win to get them
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by cgiles 7y ago
I work in medical research and mostly agree with this, but there are two major problems I see preventing this from becoming a reality: 1) Academic medical research is simply not well tooled, right now, to do the later stages of drug develop
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by cgiles 7y ago
The PDF takes the point of view that it is caused by various forms of cognitive bias. I generally agree with that. The reason that I don't think it's totally ethically neutral is that it is a basic responsibility of scientists to
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by cgiles 7y ago
When you review a paper, no one knows who you are except the editor of the journal. If there are any incentives at all for the reviewer, it is not to be arsed to review at all, since it takes time and you get nothing out of it. There is som
20.
by cgiles 7y ago
> One obvious test: is the per-capita rate of publication increasing? It definitely is, in biology at least. My graduate mentor was really interested in publication metrics (as in, he published studies on them). The main driver is not ne
21.
by cgiles 7y ago
Completely agreed on all counts. By "reform from within", I mainly meant the NIH, NSF, big funders, etc, need to pay more than lip service to this before Congress gets involved. Although there are people who have built careers on
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by cgiles 7y ago
Haha, no. The more elite the institution, the more money you are expected to bring in. It is compensated somewhat by the fact that a big name institution will give you an advantage in getting grants. There is a bit of a difference between w
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by cgiles 7y ago
That is correct. Even when reviewing papers, it is true. As a reviewer, you do not question, for instance, whether the authors did the experiments exactly as stated, or whether they tried to analyze the results 20 different ways until they
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by cgiles 7y ago
> it simply doesn’t matter very much whether any particular paper is reproducible If we are talking about highly abstract types of science, I agree entirely. The problem is that there are strong incentives for groupthink, even where publ
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by cgiles 7y ago
> but also believe that being unable to reproduce a result can often be explained by their lack of sufficient information (or resources) to reproduce said results, rather than always assuming the other person must be lying (or just prett
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by cgiles 7y ago
At my institute, there is only one metric that matters: dollars you bring in through grants. There are a variety of ways to get to the cash: you can do it with a small number of high-impact papers, a larger number of low-impact papers, by f
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by cgiles 7y ago
Biology postdoc here, seconded. But what really gets me is the disconnect between "most scientists agree there is a reproducibility crisis" and "most scientists believe most of the papers they read are basically true and repr
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by cgiles 7y ago
> women are expected to be in control of their emotions / self and men are not > Men are not often held accountable for taking their emotions out on people, be they anxiety, depression or insecurity I think a more accurate framin
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by cgiles 7y ago
Absolutely fascinating. I never thought about it this way. This would also imply that the Fredonian government would be highly incentivized to run at a constant deficit, more so than other governments, because its cost of capital would be l
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by cgiles 7y ago
In my vague understanding, you can consider objects like electrons as either particles or as amplitudes in a field. Although these two (currently known) ways of viewing it lead for the most part to similar intuitions, these paradigms can be

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