xaa

7 ms·

1.
by xaa 9y ago
Yeah...I saw this about an hour ago, and bit my tongue. But it is dismaying that apparently the reverence for science is so high around here that it extends to downvoting criticisms of science as a process and sociological phenomenon to obl
2.
by xaa 9y ago
Ultimately the issue is that we somehow got fixated on the p-value, which (roughly and imprecisely speaking) quantifies the probability that there is any effect, even a small one, rather than using effect size estimates which estimate both
3.
by xaa 9y ago
Because a very common type of hypothesis is along the lines of "gene X is important in disease Y" or "priming people with words will affect psychological outcome Z". The opposite hypothesis is the null hypothesis which i
4.
by xaa 9y ago
Yes, every time I hear people talking about how evil or difficult threads are, I just think back to my frequent use of OpenMP. It is really quite easy to take a single-threaded program and make it multithreaded with OMP -- so long as the jo
5.
by xaa 9y ago
I have to thank you for your "Ph.D. Grind" memoir. There were many lessons in it, but the lesson I took from it, as I recall from reading it several years ago, was basically that you have to discard perfectionism to get anything
6.
by xaa 9y ago
Thanks for your interest. I've actually met him once -- a friend of his I was talking to over beers introduced us -- but at the time, he was seemingly more interested in his pending date with the blonde he had just picked up than talki
7.
by xaa 9y ago
Well the project arose like this. I got interested in aging halfway through the PhD. I started collaborating heavily with aging people at my institution. But there are so many papers and so much data to get informed about the area. So I won
8.
by xaa 9y ago
Oh, God, I'm not sure anyone is totally happy with their dissertation, but I guess I should get over it. I got about 2/3 of what I wanted to done. I'm continuing with the project, though. https://www.dropbox.com&
9.
by xaa 9y ago
Not really. My salary was funded by my PI and he was happy to keep someone at my skill level as long as I wanted (and at a bargain salary to boot). From my department and committee, I started to feel rumblings around mid-year-6 of the &quot
10.
by xaa 9y ago
Wow. I just defended a few weeks ago, at 7 years. And honestly, until about year 5, I felt no rush whatsoever to get out. Not that I was derping around -- I finished with 20+ papers -- but I was enjoying it, and I realized that once I was o
11.
by xaa 9y ago
I get why game theory is an attractive model to explain human behavior. But I always wonder why they invent the game, and try to explain behavior in terms of a particular model, rather than using real behavior to fit model parameters, so yo
12.
by xaa 9y ago
> I think it is fair to label people inclined to sympathy with Nazi ideas as Nazi sympathizers. OK, fair enough, but that's not what you originally said, nor is it what people are doing when they throw that term at me. They're
13.
by xaa 9y ago
Seems like a distinction without a difference. Even if you run a website on your own server, you are still using the ISP's hardware, so they could make the exact same argument. And hosting services are so popular exactly because ISPs h
14.
by xaa 9y ago
> Nothing can, and hopefully never will, stop these groups from running websites That is literally what OP is about.
15.
by xaa 9y ago
I wrote a much longer comment, but long story short: I'm in medical research. Do I think antivaxxers should be able to publish in medical journals? No (unless they performed an experiment that passes peer review, etc). Do I think they
16.
by xaa 9y ago
I would sympathize with them on this issue. This is actually the second time this week I have been called a Nazi sympathizer essentially for believing everyone, including Nazis, should be able to air their views in such a way that intereste
17.
by xaa 9y ago
Hmm, perhaps instead of "rationale", I should have said "philosophy behind" the 1st Amendment. Obviously the 1st Amendment is not directly intended to cover entities other than the government. But almost everything in th
18.
by xaa 9y ago
This viewpoint confuses the legal meaning of the First Amendment, which indeed only applies to the government, with its rationale. The rationale is the theory that having a diversity of viewpoints, including some that are dangerous or repug
19.
by xaa 9y ago
Oh, yeah. Health issues. For me, it got to the point where every morning I would wake up and vomit. It got to be part of my morning routine to just get it over with before heading straight to work. Otherwise it might happen in the car. I th
20.
by xaa 9y ago
I just defended on Wednesday, and had a similar experience, but not quite as extreme. For me, the pressure was internal rather than external -- my committee was (in retrospect) OK with my progress and ready to let me go, but I wasn't.
21.
by xaa 9y ago
Right. I read your footnote, but if indeed the disagreement is based on "misunderstanding", it is a willful misunderstanding. Damore's opponents appear to me to not even have tried to understand his argument. They are not eve
22.
by xaa 9y ago
Take a look at this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... Apparently, and paradoxically, greater eqalitarianism in a society can result in higher amounts of individual choice, which
23.
by xaa 9y ago
I don't think the disagreement in the case of the memo is about facts. Few outlets that reported on this controversy even seem to have read the memo, nor are the criticisms of it I have read based on facts (or on words). They seem to b
24.
by xaa 9y ago
Oh, boy. Yes, it is true, no one knows better than we scientists that science is flawed and bias-prone. You can say science is flawed but the best available source of truth we can have, or you can say science is too fallible to be more priv
25.
by xaa 9y ago
> nobody really reads that many papers That is very true. Nowadays, a good day for me is 3. We're too busy writing papers, writing grants, writing code, answering e-mails, filling out forms, or whatever. But I work at an institute t
26.
by xaa 9y ago
That sounds interesting. This is a really busy period but within the next few weeks I hope to check it out. In general, I love meeting with the non-academic side of this work. I met de Grey and some of his associates at last year's AAA
27.
by xaa 9y ago
I work in aging research. A very nice set of notes you have there. The field is not really thinking in this direction. By "picking" mutations, I suppose you mean gene therapy. As you probably know, NIA does not consider aging a di
28.
by xaa 9y ago
Obviously this article is full of self-modification for fairly whimsical reasons. It's easy to make fun of. But this kind of problem is more serious and discouraging when you think about aging. You know cells in each organ are going to
29.
by xaa 9y ago
I was really into this question a few years ago. I had quite a bit of existential angst about it as well. I read Penrose, etc, but at the end of it could not find any plausible mechanism for humans having free will in the sense of uncaused
30.
by xaa 9y ago
I read this more as a nod to the fact that Stanford is the feeder school for SV. And pretty much all SV churns out these days is webapps. Javascript is just a very mediocre language in virtually every way. There is only one thing it's

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