Viewing profile — cgiles

Generally, your points are well taken. The only quibble I have on a factual basis is here: > 3. "Censorship" is when a person is not allowed to express their views. That is not wha…

> The 2016 US Election in particular showed us what happens when a platform takes a "hands off" approach - the platform is absolutely saturated with false, hateful information... A…

Quarantined subreddits are analogous to downweighting a particular Facebook post in the FB algorithm: both are a form of "soft" moderation stopping short of outright censorship. Ba…

> we certainly have more confidence in the robustness of the physics-based models. That is interesting. I don't know to what extent wind vectors are considered chaotic in the techn…

> Mere Monte Carlo state exploration is wasteful and doesn't provide much insight. Often we don't have error bars on model outputs to even know if an "improvement" in a metric is s…

> What's missing from current mathematics to make predictive models for biology? Well, I think that, no joke, there is a Nobel Prize waiting for anyone who knows the answer to that…

I work in molecular biology research, and I think this is a great article that strikes at the heart of many problems in the field. I can't comment on the climate change stuff, alth…

tl;dr: this is not an "age reduction breakthrough", it is both A) a confirmation of what we already knew, which is that parabiosis makes old mice healthier, and B) a finding that v…

The question I am not seeing addressed in the many, many comments below is: why is there such a large pool of people willing to believe, and act on, ideas like "5G causes COVID-19 …

It is also the basis of much conspiracy theorizing. The chain of logic is: 1. Group X has an incentive to do Y 2. We observe Y 3. We also observe specific instances of X doing Y 4.…

> The PhD wage situation in the US is simply shameful. It really isn't. I recently finished my PhD, and now I'm a postdoc. My stipend was $30K, but, crucially, I wasn't living in a…

Well, for those of us who live in those flyover states, it does make us feel a little better about our own situations, as well as mightily perplexed about what people in SF, etc, a…

You are right, and I altered a comment below to reflect this. I was trying to make a more general point and phrased it poorly. The general point is: the reason drug costs are high …

> This would be abused like any other slush fund. That's a Fully Generic Argument against any pool of government money for any purpose. The law could be written in such a way that …

To my knowledge -- keeping in mind this is not my area -- there are modest benefits for newer types of insulin. You have to dose less often. The variance in swings of blood glucose…

There is a fair amount of that. But I think the bigger problem is dogmatic ideology. Many of those on the right are just ideologically opposed to government spending on anything (t…

I work in medical research and mostly agree with this, but there are two major problems I see preventing this from becoming a reality: 1) Academic medical research is simply not we…

The PDF takes the point of view that it is caused by various forms of cognitive bias. I generally agree with that. The reason that I don't think it's totally ethically neutral is t…

When you review a paper, no one knows who you are except the editor of the journal. If there are any incentives at all for the reviewer, it is not to be arsed to review at all, sin…

> One obvious test: is the per-capita rate of publication increasing? It definitely is, in biology at least. My graduate mentor was really interested in publication metrics (as in,…

Completely agreed on all counts. By "reform from within", I mainly meant the NIH, NSF, big funders, etc, need to pay more than lip service to this before Congress gets involved. Al…

Haha, no. The more elite the institution, the more money you are expected to bring in. It is compensated somewhat by the fact that a big name institution will give you an advantage…

That is correct. Even when reviewing papers, it is true. As a reviewer, you do not question, for instance, whether the authors did the experiments exactly as stated, or whether the…

> it simply doesn’t matter very much whether any particular paper is reproducible If we are talking about highly abstract types of science, I agree entirely. The problem is that th…