Why is this scientific post?
Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
101–110 of 357 posts
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#102It would be nice if scientists started being just scientists again instead of activists. Hopefully being cloistered on bluesky will bring the old vibes back
What do you mean? Activism is an essential part of science but maybe I’m misunderstanding your use of “activist.”
The job of science is to discover facts and produce new knowledge from those facts. Activism is the marketing of an ideology. They couldn't be more opposite.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scientists are allowed to have opinions outside of their work and share them.
It is 100% allowed, I just don't think it's really helpful or beneficial for them or society Especially when they try to lean on their status as scientists in order to try and have their opinions be more influential. The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter is one of these credibility damaging moments that is hard to undo.
> The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter
That’s… not what they said? They said it was probably relatively safe to attend a protest because it was happening outdoors and Covid spread mostly through accumulated aerosols. It turned out to be good guidance: practically no one gets Covid that way unless a sick person is actively coughing on them.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#104I'm rather reminded of the ads from the early 20th century for "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!" [1] [1] - https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/doctors-smoking/more...
In what sense?
In the same sense that "More scientists hang out with Neo Nazis and White Supremacists than with any other political party."
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scientists are allowed to have opinions outside of their work and share them.
It is 100% allowed, I just don't think it's really helpful or beneficial for them or society Especially when they try to lean on their status as scientists in order to try and have their opinions be more influential. The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter is one of these credibility damaging moments that is hard to undo.
So nobody is allowed to use their notoriety to amplify their posts?
No more athletes, musicians, artists, whatever. Everyone must be anonymous. Or is it strictly scientists who are not allowed to post if their profession is known?
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Opening an account on Mastodon was a pain even for me, a long-time Internet user and a nerd. I'm confronted with a choice of servers, but if I love cheese and golf, do I open my account on the cheese server or the golf server? What will be the disadvantages of choosing one over the other? Instant blocker right in the sign up process that made me actually give up several times. If it was like that for me, imagine how…
How is it a pain when you can just skip the server selection process and use mastodon.social like pretty much everyone else?
I see that now the website shows a simpler choice - join mastodon.social or choose another server. I don't think it was like that when I joined (maybe 2 or 3 years ago), you were just given a list of servers or a search and told to choose.
This is an improvement for average user onboarding - although if almost everyone clicks mastodon.social, you kind of lose the value of decentralization, right?
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Especially when they try to lean on their status as scientists in order to try and have their opinions be more influential. How do they do that?
The “I am an expert, so listen to me drone about some political topic that’s vaguely related to my expertise” has been a thing for years now. And it’s usually some controversial thing that doesn’t have to do with science anyway. In general, it makes scientists look really naive and makes them lose credibility when they talk about actual science.
Jordan Peterson comes to my mind. Although I have no respect for his opinions at all, I still think that, in the end, scientists have their political views and should be allowed to talk about them. What they shouldn't be allowed is to insinuate that these views are anything other than their personal views. Hate speech and political extremism should also not be allowed because these damage the reputation of their university.
Other than that, I don't think it's right to tell them not to use their status to influence politics and society towards what they perceive as making the world better. On the contrary, they might have some duty to do just that.
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#108X still appears above the fold in a special section on Google with custom previews. Eg. searching 'Anthony Albanese Bluesky' for Australia's leader has a link to X, with custom integrated previews, above the Bluesky link of the PM despite the search explicitly stating Bluesky and despite the account posting to Bluesky. It's hard for anyone to move over since the lack of engagement is rigged like this.
Btw if you set your browser default search to anything other than Google searching for people works much better. No customized bumping of X based links over other options when searching for people. Duckduckgo and Bing put the bluesky link as #1 for the above. Seems straightforward to make the switch to me. If you haven't changed your browsers default search engine in the past 5 years now's a good time to do so. Much…
kagi.com is a superior search engine compared with all three, to the point where I pay for a license for everyone in my company to use it.
The kagi assistant is also nice, only responding with AI when you add a question mark to your query, with the option of opening the query in a separate web search RAG w/the LLM of your choice
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#109It would be nice if scientists started being just scientists again instead of activists. Hopefully being cloistered on bluesky will bring the old vibes back
Rose colored glasses. Science from the start has challenged status quo of churches and god kings
You're not interested in science but kowtowing to perceived authority
Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it a pain when you can just skip the server selection process and use mastodon.social like pretty much everyone else?
Doesn't pretty much everyone using the same instance pretty much defeat the point?
We’re talking about the average user. They’re not going to be particularly passionate about federation. The point, to them, is to have a functioning Twitter-like social network.