Earlier quoted context omitted.
my kid they would get back up and shove the other kid over. Therein lies the rub. Some sure do, but most 13 year old girls don’t.
My 10 year old daughter would.
Wait until the hormones kick in. Personalities change.
Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
461–470 of 1001 posts
Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Reason article blurs the distinction between SciAm's opinion pieces and its factual (or putatively factual) reporting. How are readers to know the difference?
Sorry, I can't tell whether this is sarcasm or not. If it's a genuine question, the articles are labelled.
Labeled by whom, and following what set of rules or guidelines? Are those rules agreed upon and enforced in some way? What are the consequences for breaking those rules?
Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that nonsense? Isn't it just saying that normal distributions are misleading when multimodal distributions would be more accurate? The indignant tone is unnecessary but it's not wrong to say complex systems cannot be modeled with a simple normal distribution.
It is simply saying the assumption of a normal distribution is incorrect for the population, which without context of what particular data they were observing would be impossible to know if it is in fact nonsense.
So, quite sesnsical indeed but possibly, circumstantially incorrect? It seems like a non-controversial stance to take.
Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
#464People double down as part of human psychology. Some grasp their own biases much better than others. We should try to train people to be more self reflective and less biased politically. It does not correlate with education level so something is clearly broken in higher ed..
Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse. Much of it is pushback against widespread ideological capture, and in particular the authoritarian idea that everyone else has to change and restrict their behavior to accommodate increasingly absurd and harmful requests from an overly demanding identity group.
What is the group demanding that is "over" what you would consider appropriate? How do their demands restrict your behavior? Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever. And I say this as a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition.
I want to live my way outside of superficial constructs like gender. I do not want to be forced to accommodate people who think that gender identity is something relevant.
The current political climate sucks for agender people.
Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. Was the nail small or important?
If a tiny problem can cascade like that, it seems that there’s a systemic logistics issue going on here, the problem wasn’t the nail it was some high-level problem in the overall organization. One nail is small and unimportant but the general problem of getting enough nails is a big important one. And anyway, the messenger also could have been shot, the horse could also have tripped on a rock, the battle could have b…
I think the argument the poster is making is as root cause analysis.
The root cause of the messenger failing was the missing nail. Sure it could have been many other things, but in this case it was the nail. And if it was a pitched battle that was narrowly lost by one message, sure, they could have won or lost because of a dozen other factors, but in this case it was the missing message. There are likely many other important things to worry about, but in the system as it is today, it failed for want of a nail.
Plenty of large engineering outages were because of single keystroke typos. Should these systems be less prone to human error? Of course. Are they? Some of them are, but right now some of them aren't.
The point being made is that small things can be important if other things go wrong. We should fix the other things, but often they are much harder to fix than the small thing. And really, we should care about both, since humans are capable of that.
Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're talking about a horseshoe on a horse which was being used to deliver an important message
There are too many leaps of abstraction, which to me, proves the missing horseshoe nail is irrelevant in the big picture. Too many other things could have transpired positively for the kingdom in a space so expansive. It’s classic scapegoating. “Bro my controller totally didn’t work that time! We would’ve won the match otherwise I promise.”
Tbh it seems entirely plausible to me that a messenger being unable to deliver an important message could have an outsized effect on that outcome of a battle. What if they're letting their side know about a surprise attack?
Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
#468I read Scientific American from time to time. It's not what the Reason author claims it is. It's a popular, non-specialist science magazine that reaches out to the public (mostly through Dentist's office waiting rooms). It's OK for it to have a political point of view. I see this a lot lately. Someone takes issue with something(s) in a magazine or journal and tries to burn them to a crisp because of it. Even on here,…
It's not even what's "published in the magazine" as such, they take issue with opinion pieces saying stuff like "the complicated legacy of E.O. Wilson". It's news to me that disagreeing with part of the work of someone in behavioural psychology (of all things) is "setting aflame the edifice of science", but here we are...
Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
#469To the "everything is political" crowd: The complaint is not that SciAm writes about politics. It's that they write SCIENTIFIC NONSENSE when arguing for political causes. Exhibit A: "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against."
If you read the whole paragraph, it's obvious what the writer intended to convey: that health research often assumes that there is one average, representative person, and everybody else is clustered around that person in a normal distribution. The author asserts that this is wrong, because people are dissimilar in more complex ways, and instead often fall into different clusters, rather than one bell curve. In my opi…
I tend to agree, and go even further. The idea of averages and normal distribution means are grossly over-used in medicine and social discourse. They can sometimes be useful for population level discussions, but rarely personal healthcare or decision making.
Medicine and public policy is plagued by advice and recommendations for the average person, but the average person does not exist. 50% will be above average, and 50% will be below.
Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
#470"In the process, SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event whose fallout we'll be living with for a long time." Which is it - small or important? All that seems like a bit much.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. Was the nail small or important?
That's "systemic" thinking (a la "systemic" racism). Which makes it political. TFA would have us avoid such thinking.