It’s not about dispelling any ulterior motive. The idea of anti-monopoly enforcement actions is that if the “business ecosystem” is good and healthy, then other companies who don’t own Chrome will be able to compete with whoever owns Chrome, giving the consumer choice that people who like the free market say will reduce consumer exploitation. (If you can’t tell from my tone, I am dubious, at best, of this logic)

If I wanted an autistically over-literal answer, I’d either ask myself (or come to Lemmy)

Stochastic parrots is an excellent phrase.

This is only tangentially related, but I’m reminded of a thing from Plato where he was complaining that communicating through writing was a bad way of doing philosophy. His concerns weren’t just around communicating ideas between people; he was even opposed to writing as an introspective tool to help a person think through their ideas, or make notes to come back to.

"And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”

• Plato, “Phaedrus” ^([citation needed])

It’s interesting because I don’t think he’s necessarily wrong about the skill atrophy angle of it. It’s just a question of to what extent we need those memory skills in the modern era.

Even if you’re competent at arithmetic in school, those skills can definitely atrophy. I say this as someone who’s unreasonably slow at basic arithmetic despite being an ex-mathlete; I got complacent because I’ve been learning and using graduate level maths, so I thought that would keep me from getting rusty. Nope — it turns out that basic arithmetic that you’d use in daily life is a different “muscle” to the kind of maths you use in academic research (which is obvious in hindsight)

I can’t imagine how much I’d be struggling if I didn’t have a good foundation to be starting from

I respect your approach. I bet you’re the kind of parent who apologises to their kids when you make mistakes

It’s frustrating how common IQ based things are still. For example, I’m autistic, and getting any kind of support as an autistic adult has been a nightmare. In my particular area, some of the services I’ve been referred to will immediately bounce my referral because they’re services for people with “Learning Disabilities”, and they often have an IQ limit of 70, i.e. if your IQ is greater than 70, they won’t help you.

My problem here isn’t that there exists specific services for people with Learning disabilities, because I recognise that someone with Down syndrome is going to have pretty different support needs to me. What does ick me out is the way that IQ is used as a boundary condition as if it hasn’t been thoroughly debunked for years now.

I recently read “The Tyranny of Metrics” and whilst I don’t recall of it specifically delves into IQ, it’s definitely the same shape problem: people like to pin things down and quantify them, especially complex variables like intelligence. Then we are so desperate to quantify things that we succumb to Goodhart’s law (whenever a metric is used as a target, it will cease to be a good metric), condemning what was already an imperfect metric to become utterly useless and divorced from the system it was originally attempting to model or measure. When IQ was created, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was. It has been made worse by years of bigots seeking validation, because it turns out that science is far from objective and is fairly easy to commandeer to do the work of bigots (and I say this as a scientist.)

It’s one reason why I like Lemmy so much — conversations around here are so small scale that I can be confident I’m talking to a human.

Unfortunately, learning about things doesn’t always help. I’m still very scared of spiders, despite being big on team learning. Some fears are rational, some are irrational, and these have very different salves.

My late best friend was a metal head and I often joke that I hope he’s gone to hell, because as a queer nerd who loved TTRPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, he’d have a hell of a time there.

I went to a big, old university where there were many old chapels with excellent organs. I went to some services despite being an atheist, just to hear the pretty sounds echoing 'round a pretty room.

this type of ecological engineering

Do you count reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone to be the same type of ecological engineering? I haven’t checked progress on that for a while but the last I heard, it was too early to say whether it was successful. I highlight Yellowstone because of how cautious the effort was (it took years of planning and analysis) and this caution feels like it’s directly descended from the fuck ups of the past

It has one of the best on-screen depictions of a panic attack that I’ve ever seen, which I wasn’t expecting

I agree about regular news, but a niche subset of this are blogs by academics, which straddle the line between academic writing work and news. I’m thinking of stuff like https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/ , a blog with multiple authors, but I am most familiar with Andrew German. They have a blogroll with many other examples.

A specific example of what I mean is that a while back, there was a big hub-bub about the shocking discovery of potentially arsenic based life. Turns out that this revelation was based on shoddy science and a dash of non-academic press picking up the exciting headline. A pretty thorough debunking was done on Rosie Redfield’s blog, where the quality of the scientific analysis is good, but is more opinionated than you’d typically find in a published paper(which can be good in some scenarios). This led to a bizarre situation where later news retrospectives of the hype did actually rely on Redfield’s blog as a reference.

Of course, this is still incredibly niche, and I think this subsection of blogs only end up like this because of the informal peer review networks that you get when a bunch of scientists make blogs, but I find it cool and interesting nonetheless.

I also have a few friends who are practicing Jews (I don’t know if that’s the right phrase), and also atheists. Judaism appears to be more focussed on orthopraxy (doing things correctly) than belief, which was confusing to me at first, as someone who grew up steeped in Christianity

To be fair, AlphaFold is pretty incredible. I remember when it was first revealed (but before they open sourced parts of it) that the scientific community were shocked by how effective it was and assumed that it was going to be technologically way more complex than it ended up being. Systems Biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi captures this quite well in this blog post

I’m a biochemist who has more interest in the computery side of structural biology than many of my peers, so I often have people asking me stuff like “is AlphaFold actually as impressive as they say, or is it just more overhyped AI nonsense?”. My answer is “Yes.”

I think it works best with an adjective that has 3+ syllables. E.g. You incorrigible turnip You reprehensible teapot You abominable spoon You acephalous sandwich

Something about potential wide scale fraud came out recently about a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher. This article covers it quite well: https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion

It’s grim, especially when considering the real human cost that fraud in biomedical research has. Despite this, like you, I am also optimistic. This article outlines some of how the initial concerns about this researcher was raised, and how the analysis of his work was done. A lot of it seems pretty unorthodox. For example, one of the people who contributed to this work was a “non-scientist” forensic image expert, who goes by the username Cheshire on the forum PubPeer (his real name is known and mentioned in the article, but I can’t remember it).

I have a Catholic friend who says she treats her body like a temple — full of red wine and guilt

This is incredible in ways I can’t articulate