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Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

nature.com

181–190 of 258 posts

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accuracy or precision. Pick one?

>>Accuracy or precision Do they have different meaning to you? They are the same thing unless there is some scientific meaning that makes them different of which I'm not aware. i.e. Theory in Science means a different thing than what it means to a layman person.

I admit I'm only skimming the discussion so I may be missing the point of your question, but a common analogy to the difference:

If you're target shooting, and all of your shots go through the same hole: that's precision.

If that hole is several inches away from the bullseye, it's precise but not accurate.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#182
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy the argument/implication that it's somehow hypocritical to oppose something while actively benefiting from it, as long as one is upfront about that fact. For example, say that we have genuinely useful medical information as a result of Unit 731 experiments and similar crimes (which may or may not be the case; I have no idea). There's no contradiction if one person supports using those existing results to…

> because the personal sacrifice would only be worth it to me if it came attached to a systemic change This is the reason why. You may prefer the world to be a certain way, but you aren't willing to make any sacrifice to make it be a particular way, so it appears that you don't actually care about an opinion that you are espousing. People who don't eat meat have a net effect on a reduced demand for meat, reducing the…

It would be hypocritical if I were to hide that I eat meat and admonish others for doing so, but neither of those are the case. I care, but I also care about the substantial harm being done to humans by the past 50 years of low-fat diet craze, so in my mind, as much I respect vegetarians, it'd be harmful to go around blindly pushing everyone to eat less or no meat.

For me, I see the greatest impact I can personally make as continuing to work to become successful and then investing a ton of money into lab-grown meat.

Anyway, it's something I'd like to help do something about, but it's not my life's focus. If I had a magic "make everyone stop eating meat" button, I'd be tempted to press it and figure out a way to personally adapt, but ultimately I think that would cause more harm than good without a market-ready drop-in replacement that fits the same macros. That's not the same as not caring or being unwilling to make a sacrifice; it's just caring about multiple things to varying degrees and being realistic.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accuracy or precision. Pick one?

>>Accuracy or precision Do they have different meaning to you? They are the same thing unless there is some scientific meaning that makes them different of which I'm not aware. i.e. Theory in Science means a different thing than what it means to a layman person.

Precision is how fine a measurement is (i.e. being able to measure temperature to thousandths of degrees versus tenths), whereas accuracy is a measure of how closely your results much the objective truth. So you may have a very precise thermometer that measures to thousandths of degrees but it may not be accurate because it's calibrated such that it always reads exactly two degrees higher than it should. Meanwhile a thermometer that can only measure to a tenth of a degree is more accurate and less precise than the one just mentioned if the shown figures reflect the true temperature.

In common usage, these words mean the same thing, but scientists often give words specific meanings in order to make their research and ideas less ambiguous.

Definitions are even more important in non-scientific fields such as philosophy or math where meaningful reasoning of abstract structures and ideas would be next to impossible without giving them concrete definitions and stating your assumptions.

Remember that definitions are arbitrary, so to understand an author's argument or idea, you must seek out the author's definitions.

Hopefully that clarifies some of the discussion going on in the comments here.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#184
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw I have been assured that Big Pharma will swap out a set of mice (or whatever the test species is) as a way to find the results they're looking for. This was told to me by someone who does research for Big Pharma. Someone who I have no reason not to trust.

But how can we trust you to tell the truth about this?

My personal motto is:

Don't be evil.

Does that help? ;)

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accuracy or precision. Pick one?

>>Accuracy or precision Do they have different meaning to you? They are the same thing unless there is some scientific meaning that makes them different of which I'm not aware. i.e. Theory in Science means a different thing than what it means to a layman person.

[deleted]

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#187
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose humans tend to underuse, or undertrain, their senses, so we fail to consider the possibility that other animals might be taking advantage of their senses in different ways. In elementary school, I used to listen to the sounds of people’s pencils scratching on the desk, and could accurately determine what they were writing, especially if my head was near the desk and I knew what their handwriting looked like…

I used to hear transistors very clearly. One of the things I knew as a kid from anther room or sometimes even from outside was if someone had their TV on. The noise was so high pitched that I didn't even consider it a noise. I just knew and didn't think much about it. One weird memory is that I remember detecting objects in silent and dark room at home if they were like 10cm from my head. Even with eyes closed. I'm n…

What you heard was probably not transistors but the flyback transformer that TVs use to generate the high voltage needed by cathode ray tubes. They generally operate around 16-18kHz, in the high range of human hearing that young people can hear easily but most people lose that ability as they age.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#188
post #97
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never did manage to trace Feynman's story back to a source, but nevertheless, also something Derek Lowe repeatedly covers for biology/chemistry on "In the Pipeline": a lot of the 'cell lines' or 'reagents' used in lab work turn out to just not be what they're supposed to be, either because they never were or they degraded into something else in storage or something. So to give a recent paper he blogged, there's som…

Do you remember the article(s) in which he talks about that, or any other keywords? I found all of "In the Pipeline", but my Google-fu ends there. Also for the mice getting fatter over time? That's fascinating!

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/08/21/is-...

Well worth reading through the archives, IMO, even if you're not a chemist or biologist (I'm not). Quite aside from the methodological issues and the realities of working in the pharmacorp industry, Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With" series about dangerous chemical compounds is... a blast.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#189
post #100
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember the article(s) in which he talks about that, or any other keywords? I found all of "In the Pipeline", but my Google-fu ends there. Also for the mice getting fatter over time? That's fascinating!

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/10/20/bad... http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/12/15/cel...

Also http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/15/how... or http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2013/01/08/met...

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#190
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>pretending you don't know the word "trap" I'm not pretending to not know the word; it made sense on sight to me as "someone who fools you". Easiest term around. And that is clearly a concept of its own not a synonym for transsexuals , hence my confusion when a poster gets flagged for an affront to them. You have actually been helpful now though, despite thinking you're slamdunking me. Passing is a bad word now too?…

Next you're going explain to me that you're not a "homophobe" because you're not literally "afraid" of homosexuals, you just hate them without fearing them. That's not the way language works, and I've heard all of your arguments before. You have nothing to contribute to the conversation.

All of you: please stop this now.
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