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There’s one thing they aren’t screaming about: how free will is a myth. It’s a topic that gets shot down a lot.
Actual genuine scientists tend to be the nerd type excited about whatever it is they’re studying. They can’t wait to tell you about the frequency oscillations of some quasar or the courtship rituals of hagfish or whatever.
The journals they have to publish in are shady as a cave though.
That secret being ‘the oil/sugar/etc lobby paid me to create this fake study to mislead you.’
"Agit-prop is a KIND of science . . . " (Lionel Hutz, probably)
It’s a secret rouse so you won’t suspect the stuff that they don’t tell you and get together every few months to co-ordinate keeping under wraps.
You sound fun!
Bet you’ve met a few soldiers and a few too many cops.
science makes me have faith in science.
Science is unironically one of the only things i ever trust because truth prevails, always…
Which, ironically, defeats the entire purpose of science.
Research is based on the so-called scientific method (therefore science) and that is something you can’t proof, just belief in. But it’s the best we have with extraordinary amount of evidence to back it up.
There was this guy who spent his whole life in rural Arizona. All evidence indicated that the world is made of sand.
Never discount errors of perspective.
If you consider something that all scientists do then you might see a vast shared error.
It was evident that the world was bigger than what the guy saw, he was just not checking (lazy or insatiable or whatever) what’s further. There is the difference.
This is why we put walls around our laboratories.
Science research on the one hand is cursed to follow the money.
My own experience leaves me a bit more optimistic, although I do see some cursed bits.
The presence of money in research depends greatly on the field and the ability of the scientists to make their research sound sexy. You can mask a lot of wierd niche basic research topics with sexy applied research talk.
Also, there’s still a lot of science research without much money, being sustained by sheer enthusiasm.
I agree. A great example of why can be found in this excellent article about an extensive “dossier” of fraud allegations against a top Alzheimer’s researcher: (https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion)
Specifically, this snippet:
“Microbiologist and research integrity expert Elisabeth Bik, who also worked on the Zlokovic dossier, contributed other Masliah examples and reviewed and concurred with almost all of the findings.”
Elisabeth Bik is someone who has an incredible eye for fraudulently edited Western Blots images and someone I greatly admire. Calling her a “research integrity expert” is accurate, but what I find neat is that (to my knowledge) she doesn’t have any particular training or funding towards this work. A lot of work she does in this area starts on, or is made public on PubPeer, an online forum. This is all to say that Elisabeth Bik’s expertise and reputation in this area effectively stems from her just being a nerd on the internet.
I find it quite beautiful in a way, because she’s far from the only example of this. I especially find it neat when non-scientists are able to help root out scientific fraud specifically through non-scientist expertise. As a scientist who often finds herself propelled by sheer enthusiasm, sometimes feels overwhelmed by the “Publish or Perish” atmosphere in research, and who worries about the integrity of science when there’s so much trash being published, it’s heartening to see that enthusiasm and commitment to Truth still matters.
At first I read “have you ever met a single scientist?” As in “don’t you know they’re all fuckin?”
Meet single scientists in your area. Click here.
We’re all fucking all right. We are all fucking with the laws of nature. You like it when we stop your atoms moving and shine a laser at you, don’t you, you dirty filthy condensate?
Beam me ‘daddy’?
Here goes:
During my dissertation, I was lookig for information on the emissiom of 172nm scintillation light in mixtures of gaseous Xe and CO2 (95:5% - 98:2%), with results being difficult to come by. I found a collaborator who had tested this at lower CO2 concentrations (0-0.5%), but nothing else, no predictions or generalizable applications. Not knowing the optimal search engine terms or what textbook to look in for rules governing gaseous light emission, I ended up looking in fluorescence chemistry papers (my previous field of study) which had something called the Stern-Volmer relation for different concentrations of quenchant in a fluorescent solution. I figured gas scintillation queching was probably similar to liquid fluorescence quenching, but the standard relation didn’t quite fit below 10% additive.
I dug around more and found a modification of this relation for diffusion-limited quenching of fluorescent solutions (the same limitation imposed in gas mixtures, quenching due to random Brownian collisions) that employed an exponential term, allowing for a smoother curve down to low additive concentrations. This perfectly matched the available data and allowed me to model the predicted behavior. I discussed this with the one member of my committee who was available, an organic chemist (my PI was on vacation, everyone else was sick, and my dissertation defense was in 2 weeks). He said my reasoning and math for using this formula made sense and gave me a thumbs up to include this analysis. When my PI came back from holiday, he asked me why I didn’t use some equation generally used in the field, or even just a generic exponential fit. I was ignorant of his suggestion, but it provided the same general formulation as Stern-Volmer, though Stern-Volmer was more rigorously derived mathematically.
Mixing fields is super cool and can allow a much deeper understanding of the underlying principles, as opposed to limiting yourself to one branch of science. While my PI’s recommendation would have given approximately the same answer, understanding and applying Stern-Volmer allowed me to really dig at the principles at play and generate a more accurate and in-depth model, which I managed to write up and defend at the 11th hour.
Interesting, yet another proof that math is useful!
I understood so little of this lol. But good job.
The assignment was to infodump, so I will take that as a compliment. I was aiming for detailed and hyperspecific.
You achieved it
How did the defense go
I am now Dr. Drail, so it went well! This was back in August, so I am still in recovery mode while I job search.
Congrats and good luck on the hunt
@drail@fedia.io built a wall made up of a 90 mins presentation around himself to defend his dissertation from his committee. The committee members built a wall of 120 mins of questions and internal discussions around that trapping @drail@fedia.io in for even longer. The whole affair was brutal. No one came out unscathed, yet no one can remember what happened except for the extremely troubling moments.
A moment of silence in remembrance…
🧑🎓 🫡🫡🫡
I’ve seen things. Things you’d never understand. All I can say is that the best dissertation defense is a good dissertation offense. So much blood on my hands…
One of my professors likened it to overeducated wolves surrounding a wounded elk.
Obviously the elk is weak. But is it weak enough?
maybe this wording works on a certain kind of voter because of the “fuck you I got mine” attitude, they probably think that if they were the scientist they would reap the benefits for themselves
benefits of what, grant money you can’t get anymore because there’s no more federal funding? Oops.
they wouldn’t know about grants or how underpaid academics are in general, it’s just a projection
thats part of the joke, unfortunately.
This is so true, and I can’t even type that without a severe eyeroll of agreement.
I think that’s why some people wax poetic on Reddit or Lemmy with very little provocation. Finally…a captive audience that might read this info, even if they’re just passing time on the shitter…
Yeah. No one cares if you’re rambling in a comment. Just be interesting enough that someone can pause their doom scrolling to read it.
I personally have about 5 subjects where I can chime in with fun (to me) little facts.
Or essays on the subject…
Quick , tell me a fun fact
I know you’re not talking to me, but let me seize this unique opportunity to tell you that the amazing Dracula orchids with flowers, which look A LOT like monkey faces to us humans, are actually trying to imitate certain type of mushrooms, which attract their pollinators (flies that lay eggs on the mushrooms)!!! The mushroom part of the flower is what seems to be the monkey’s mouth to us.
Please, feel free to search for Dracula orchid pictures to see many more monkey faces.
Thanks, that was rad!
This is why the “secret scientists don’t want you to know” always turns out to be some pseudoscience bs that at best is misinformation and at worst is actively harming people. So, yes, they are things scientists don’t want you to know.
I would argue that we still want them to know about pseudoscience, but also know enough about everything else to understand how the pseudoscience is wrong.
Not a scientist. I have a litany of complex topics that I just can’t really talk to anyone about. I’m a big computer networking nerd, and once upon a time, when I didn’t know what I didn’t know, I was curious what computer networking really entailed… It seemed dead simple, you connect things to a switch, connect that switch to the internet router, not much more.
Then I learned about VLANs, which are cool but it seemed like unnecessary complexity. Then I learned about Routing and L3 switching, and routing protocols and… Holy shit, how deep is this?
Now-a-days, I want to have conversations about the merits of one routing protocol over another in various contexts, and see/build a spine and leaf network infrastructure that’s nearly infinitely scalable.
I want to explore the nuance of IP unnumbered routing. I can’t find anyone who will chat about it on a level that’s close to my understanding, either someone knows way more than I do, or they know way less.
IP unnumbered routing is a way of connecting devices without setting an IP on the interface that is being routed to/from. The other end uses the routing protocol on top of layer 2, and while the two might have a router ID, often in the form of an IP address, the interface that is connecting the two has no IP. It’s basically advanced point to point protocol (PPP) that breaks away from traditional TCP/IP routing in ways that people who have never used anything besides TCP/IP can’t really comprehend. The two “IP addresses” (actually router IDs) in play can have nothing in common. Traditional TCP/IP requires that two IPs share a subnet. In routing, this is typically a /30 for IPv4, and the two IPs are adjacent to eachother, eg, 10.254.123.1 and 10.254.123.2 IP unnumbered can have 10.254.123.2 talking directly with 172.30.88.207, with no layer 3 interfaces in-between.
It’s really fascinating and interesting and I’ve been trying to find a good model or guide to help me learn this better, but I keep ending up at dead ends, and I have nobody to talk to about it.
Sounds like you should look at IS-IS protocol if you haven’t as that’s very close to the ip unnumbered routing you were talking about. Though isis is usually deployed with its on the interface of each device, it doesn’t have to be AFAIK.
I’m not sure that I understand the benefit of “unnumbered” routing. It sounds like there are numbers (well, “identifiers”), just not IP addresses.
It’s hard to know without more context, but you can use things like IPv6 multicast to manage reachability. This will let you set arbitrary sets of endpoints that talk to each other, and you can still us IP-based tools to debug connectivity, measure performance, and so on.
Did my fair share of networking back in the day, but never heard of IP unnumbered. I was curious about the same idea back in the day and it is possible, but I haven’t much seen anyone doing it for realsies. If you have any good longreads/vids on the topic, it’d be much appreciated.
I’ll look at my resources and see what I can dig up. No promises, but the concepts are simple as long as you can separate yourself from the TCP/IP restrictions on two things needing to be in a subnet, and the idea that NAT is something that needs to happen.
Honestly, I’ve seen so many people get hung up on the fact that NAT isn’t universal, or necessary.
Should shoot me a DM, have been studying for my CCNP and do want more networking buddies to potentially socialize with.
I’ve been looking at the CCNP for a while, I don’t need it for the work I do at my day job, so I haven’t prioritized taking the test or anything.
I should do more work on it.
Now-a-days, I want to have conversations about the merits of one routing protocol over another in various contexts, and see/build a spine and leaf network infrastructure that’s nearly infinitely scalable.
bro i just want screensharing that isn’t using the hell that is webrtc.
How hard is it to send video packets over IP, it can’t be that difficult. Half the job is already done, and i can’t imagine building a reliable networking protocol, even if you had to do it from scratch would be particularly hard.
everything is webrtc, it always has been.
See, I only recently came into awareness that web RTC was a thing. I have a lot of learning to do on how it even works as a protocol.
I’m sure it runs on top of IP, so I think web RTC meets your curriculum here. Regardless of that, I think I know what you mean, and if I knew enough about the protocol, I might even agree.
I need to brush up on the new protocols that are getting to be very common. I’m almost entirely up to date on the 802.11 specs, but there’s so much to keep track of… Yikes.
I need some help with networking and eventually getting an organisation website online; if you want to geek out a bit, please send me a dm. :)
Bringing a website online sounds a lot more like development stuff.
Networking is all about how to get data from one place to another that is reasonable, manageable and scalable. Knowing what devices are increasing latency and when you should adjust the settings to route around a high latency (and/or high loss) link to enhance performance and reliability. Visibility into network flows in real time and monitoring for every link and port that’s connected to a device, switch, router, or computer.
Web hosting is system admin and development.
What networking concerns do you have with this website?
yeah uh… you lost me at ‘protocols’
Unfortunately, real scientists have become lumped in with “industry shills paid to science the way industry wants them to science”.
currently questioning my sanity over whether key compound of my thesis did just did a ice-nine or not (it’s a real thing, but not for water)
Wow, that was an interesting read. Thanks for sharing!
it just made three months of my work useless but np
fully channeling energy of this fake tweet rn
i need to howl. that stuff is a catalyst and i need it to stay dissolved, but now it won’t. depending on how badly things will go, it might be impossible for everyone forever to replicate my old results
That sucks. Thanks again!
I’ve read about this before. That super sucks for you, but is a fascinating phenomenon. Good luck trying to chase that rabbit down.
(is there an offtop thread?)
Clearly those aren’t real scientists. Real scientists have secret labs, where they do secret research.
And annoying older sisters who blow their experiments to smithereens…
That’s why they learn random facts about stink bugs to scare everyone away from their secret knowledge
My new favorite conspiracy theory
And remember: the more niche it sounds, the more secret their actual project. When someone tells you they use role and reference grammar to analyze the socio economic implications of the difference in vowel harmony between classical and biblical Hebrew, they basically admit they work for MKUltra. It isn’t debatable in any meaningful way at that point anymore.
Prepare for the cataclysm!
