imdef @imdef@qoto.org

In the summer 2021, I collected a lot of literature on this and wrote up some thoughts. Much of it applies to the reception of the latest #Cochrane's summary too.
https://intemittdefault.wordpress.com/2021/07/10/evidence-decisions-and-default-reasoning/

(3/n, n=3)

Based on what I have seen during the pandemic, many people poorly equipped to interpret this sort of selective summary because they rely on a type of default thinking:

Pick a hypothesis that wins by default (e.g. a specific physical intervention is harmful/non-beneficial). Then once new studies become available, check if they give a strong and rigorous enough reason to reject the default; if not, keep the default. (Similar to how, in a court of law, the accused is by default innocent until proven beyond reasonable doubt to be guilty.)

This can be contrasted with a more Bayesian way of thinking:

No hypothesis wins by default. Decide on some initial degree of belief in a hypothesis and its negation. Carefully weigh new evidence for an against and incrementally update the degrees of belief. (2/n)

A new #Cochrane Review on physical interventions against respiratory viruses is making the rounds. The review focuses exclusively on #RCTs and finds that in the entire scientific literature, there are 78 studies with a bearing on the various questions asked. (1/n)
https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6

@ndloubere Great to open this discussion, IMO. I was not aware of the censorship and data selling issues - sounds like major problems. I think the most enthusiastic OA supporters imagined the present model to be an intermediate step towards what's now called "platinum OA", but AFAICS there is not much momentum for making platinum the standard.

Every physicist has a copy of Goldstein's book on Analytical mechanics in his/her bookshelf. I don't share the conviction but have to love his cockiness about Bohmian mechanics around the 12 minute mark here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pslh_P24If4

From a workshop on Shape dynamics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU0sDEeWsfE

A written tutorial:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0105

@johncarlosbaez that blog post is a true joy to read and look at.

Idag snögubbe med yngsta barnet.

Stillsam skogstur i söndags. Bra tillfälle att fundera över harmoniska oscillatorer.

@freemo thanks for looking into to it

@freemo wow, that's a quick reply :) IMO, provisionally turning it off would be helpful.

LaTeX formatting often becomes unreadable on #qoto. Often a single character is resized to enormous size compared to the rectangular box a typical toot fits into, and this hides a lot of the containing toot. This happens frequently with posts from mathstodon.xyz. @freemo, if others have this problem too, would it be possible to turn off LaTeX formatting until it's fixed? Seeing the raw, unformatted LaTeX code would be an improvement.

Årets #julklapp: träningscykel med generator