Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
@bedirthan Yeah, it's the precise layout that made me think of a dungeon on graph paper.
Helping a friend at a #storage #unit the other day, I had a revelation: indoor storage units are dungeons, in the #DnD sense. Long straight #corridors, all at right angles, neat units of distance, and #niches full of #treasure to either side.
Which makes me think it would be a lot of fun to run a game in a far-post-apocalyptic-#fantasy setting, preferably without the players knowing at first that's what it is, where they are exploring a #dungeon which turns out to be a buried building. The niches all have cryptic symbols above them they can't decipher, but which appear to be some kind of numbering system. When they pick or break the ancient locks, they find some niches have ancient treasures, while others contain incomprehensible #artifacts, and still others are full of plain junk.
The main danger on the upper levels comes not from #monsters, but from precariously piled heaps that fall down as the doors are opened. The players, of course, will perceive these as #traps.
A dungeon needs *some* monsters. Here they're more numerous on the lower levels, in the form of #undead employees. The players will eventually discover that they venture forth from a chamber on the bottom level, known in the ancient tales as the "Manager's Office." The #Manager itself is the final boss fight.
Upon defeating the Manager and venturing out the door, they find that the lower levels of the building are surrounded by a vast #cavern, with an oddly flat floor and the ruins of a huge sign. The party sage puzzles out the ancient writing: PUBLIC STORAGE.
... I guess outdoor units are ruins, but anyone DMing that game needs to figure out how they've lasted that long. A #curse is a chillingly believable explanation.
September 12, 2024- “Patients With Long-COVID Show Abnormal Lung Perfusion (*aka blood supply, likely the cause of shortness of breath) Despite Nor...
@Mx_EddyNikko @GottaLaff That's a serious kind of power.
@MalthusJohn I'm quoting a Facebook conversation. Happy to provide the link if you want. The first and third quoted paragraphs are mine, the second ("For the history buffs ...") is from someone else. He *pretended* to ask a legitimate question about "what do we do when experts disagree," but was clearly more interested in pushing a narrative than getting an answer.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite But was that result received with mockery, or just disagreement? It's the "they laughed at ..." narrative I'm pushing back against specifically.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite Trust me! (97.3%, ±1.7% CI.)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite Exactly. Relativity tied a bunch of strange results together in an elegant way. The same applies to some of the other examples on my list—e.g. the reason the Alvarez hypothesis gained widespread acceptance relatively quickly is that none of the other proposed mechanisms for the #KPg #extinction (formerly #KT) fit the rather odd data.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite My answer is a qualified yes: the majority of experts are more often closer to correct than anyone else. I'm a statistican, so I'm not going to get any more definitive than that. 🙂
A conversation.
"When experts disagree, usually the best thing to do is listen to what the majority of experts say. There's no *guarantee* that they're right, but they're more likely right than wrong. And if the majority view is overturned, it's almost guaranteed that this will be done by other experts in the field presenting evidence for the minority view, not by random kibitzers."
"For the history buffs in here, while most scientific knowledge is advanced incrementally, the true breakthroughs are usually ridiculed by the reigning experts. That is why appeals to authority are the worst kind of logical fallacy for a scientist."
"That's the pop-history version of scientific progress. The actual #history of #science is very different. Kind of like the difference between 'history buffs' and historians."
===
Yes, there are examples—a few—of genuine breakthroughs that were ridiculed by the scientific establishment of the day. I bet you know what they are, because everyone does. They laughed at #Semmelweis, they laughed at #Wegner, they laughed at Luis and Walter #Alvarez, they laughed at #Marshall and #Warren. These things happened.
But they did *not* laugh at #Galileo: indeed, they took his work with deadly seriousness. (And there really wasn't any such thing as a "scientific establishment" at the time.) They did not laugh at #Newton, or #Watt, or #Darwin, or #Gibbs, or #Pasteur, or #Einstein, or #Curie, or #Heisenberg, or #Fisher, or #Watson and #Crick and poor unacknowledged #Franklin, or #Tharp and #Heezen, or #Ostrom and #Bakker, or #Hansen, or the *vast majority* of scientists whose work has fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe.
At least if by "they" you mean scientists working in relevant fields, who understood the questions at hand ... not, in most cases, scientists from other fields, or those with no scientific experience at all. Nor the religious and political ideologues who muddy the waters by creating fake "controversies" to cast doubt on results they know are true, but cannot accept.
In some cases they *disagreed*, quite vociferously. There were debates that descended into shouting matches, professional disagreements turned into personal feuds, once-eminent researchers become sad cranks, ruined careers and shortened lives. Yes. These things happened too, and that's a tragedy.
But most of the time, most researchers in the same fields as the revolutionaries said, "Oh, that makes sense!" Problems that had seemed insoluble suddenly became simple, or at least it was possible to see how there *might* be an elegant solution. Major discoveries spawned a host of medium-sized ones, each of which in turn spawned endless minor ones—and endless minor papers, academic bread and butter for when you can't get steak and lobster. Everyone wins.
Those ideologues I mentioned above? They really, really want you to believe the narrative of ridicule. You might want to consider why.
@rubinjoni It's been a while since I read the Dune novels, but wasn't the Jihad against AIs themselves? As much as I enjoy Terminator and Battlestar Galactica, like I said I'm not really worried about the machines turning against us. Just humans doing really dumb things with them.
Good look at a bad problem. The author is a friend from grad schol at the #University of #Colorado, where she was a faculty member when I was a grad student. She's since gone on to bigger and better things, and I've gone on to ... well, things.
Anyway. I've never been particularly worried about #Cylons, #Skynet, etc. Humans doing stupid human tricks, and using #AI to do them much faster, OTOH, yeah.
The internet community of anti-science #cranks is an example of #model #collapse happening at human speed. #Antivaxers, #creationists, #climate change #deniers et al. prey on people with legitimate questions about some particular aspect of the broad #consensus. Those people often go down an increasingly loony rabbit hole, and end up propagating the absurdity, sometimes adding their own bizarre spin which their new-found colleagues happily add to the ideology.
If this becomes part of the #academic ecosystem, with AI reviewers approving AI-generated #papers and no human checks on the process, the scholarly corpus will become hopelessly contaminated. I have no idea what to do about that.
So apparently the #RoyalSociety is considering giving #ElonMusk the boot. I am appalled and astonished, not that they're considering kicking him out, but that he was a ever a member in the first place.
"... elected as a fellow of the UK’s national academy of #sciences in 2018 in recognition of his work and impact in the #space and #electric vehicle industries, with some considering him a 'modern #Brunel'."
Isembard Brunel was a genius polymath engineer who built much of the modern world. He also, BTW, lived a reasonably comfortable but not especially wealthy life. His obituary noted archly, "Brunel was the right man for the nation, but unfortunately, he was not the right man for the shareholders."
Musk's odor permeating the halls of the Royal Society proves that eminent scientists are no more immune to fast-talking con artists than anyone else. We non-eminent scientists should take this lesson to heart.
There's been no doubt for some time that we're in the middle of a sixth #mass #extinction. Here are some numbers.
If we're very lucky, we'll stop at the level of the #Devonian extinction, the least severe of the Big Five. More likely we're headed for something on the scale of the #Ordovician or #Triassic. The #Cretaceous is in sight, and the #Permian is not out of reach. From an evolutionary time perspective it will *look* like the Cretaceous, practically as instantaneous as the Big Rock.
I confess, I really like the idea of #corvid #paleontologists digging up the #Anthropocene. Feathers gleaming under badlands dust, exciting cawing as dextrous claws scrape rock away from a flat-faced skull ... But I’m very much not okay with what we’re doing right now to make that happen.
Pop-sci coverage: https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2023/07/19/modern-sixth-mass-extinction-event-will-be-worse-than-first-predicted/
Journal article, open access: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/brv.12974
Seen in the wild: "In the making of #Aliens, James Cameron didn't warn the actors that there was crawl space above the ceiling tiles. He thought the best performance would be captured when real #xenomorphs were let into room, and the actor reactions would be spontaneous and authentic."
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
