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Fraud, so much fraud
461–470 of 868 posts
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hacker news is completely flooded with “AI learns just like humans do” and “AI models the human brain” despite neither of these things having any concrete evidence at all. Unfortunately it isn’t just bosses being fooled by this. Scores of people push this crap. I am not saying AI has no value. I am saying that these idiots are idiots.
What evidence for „AI models the human brain“ do you want? Isn’t a neural network pretty clearly a simplified model of the working of the human brain? What is there to prove?
Neural networks are not a model of the working of the human brain. They are based on an extremely simplified approximation of how neurons connect and function (which while conceptually similar is a terrible predictive model for biological neurons) and are connected together in ways that have absolutely zero resemblance to how complex nervous systems look in real animals. The burden of proof here is absolutely on showing how LLMs can model the human brain.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think my favorite Simpsons gag is the episode where Lisa enlists a scientist (voiced by Stephen Jay Gould) to run tests to debunk some angel bones that were found at a construction site. In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests "were inconclusive". In the end, it's revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.…
That's a good one. In my experience, corruption is almost always disguised as neglect and incompetence. Corrupt people meticulously cover their tracks by coming up with excuses to show neglect; some of them only accept bribes that they can explain away as neglect where they have plausible deniability. It doesn't take much brainpower to do well, just malicious intent and knowing the upper limits. IMO, Hanlon's razor "…
I wouldn't attribute malice to Hanlon's razor, but yes, even dogs and small children know how to play dumb and the children just keep getting better at it.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are "heavy handed covid response and censorship" a prime example of that?
Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid vaccine was a bit heavy handed. And saying it was likely made in a lab in China is kind of censored to this day. I think partly because the science community doesn't want to take flack for doing risky stuff and killing millions.
> Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid vaccine was a bit heavy handed.
Nobody did that. They prevented you from working with me
Nobody here or there was forced to get a vaccine. But if you refused it was right to shun you
Freedom is about more than the individual. We as a group should be free from the consequences of individual actions
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the incentive is that he didn't want to run the tests out of laziness (i.e. he lacked an incentive to run them). He ran to Lisa to give his anticlimactic report not to be deceptive, but rather he just happened to be cycling through that part of town and just needed to use the bathroom really badly.
The writers of these episodes were really on another level considering it was a cartoon. Lisa's first word is still a personal favourite of mine, especially now as a father.
What's her first word?
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#466These sorts of articles raise so many thoughts and emotions in me. I was trained as a computational biologist with a little lab work and ran gels from time to time. Personally, I hated gels- they're finicky, messy, ugly, and don't really tell you very much. But molecular biology as a field runs on gels- it's the priimary source of results for almost everything in molbio. I have seen more talks and papers that rested…
What's amazing to me is that journals don't require researchers to submit their raw data. At least, as far as I know. The only option for someone who wants to double check research is to completely replicate a study, which is quite a bit more expensive than double checking the researcher's work.
Journals are incentivized to publish fantastic results. Organizing raw data in a way that the uninitiated can understand presents serious friction in getting results out the door.
The organizations who fund the research are (finally) beginning to require it [0][1], and some journals encourage it, but a massive cultural shift is required and there will be growing pains.
You could also try emailing the corresponding authors. Any good-faith scientist should be happy to share what they have, assuming it's well organized/legible.
[0] https://new.nsf.gov/public-access [1] https://sharing.nih.gov/
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud. Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science", when in reality science is still the best way to push humanity forward and alleviate human suffering, _despite_ all the fraud and misaligned incentives that may influence it.
In defence of the "less bright people" or deplorables as others have called them - they are deeply suspicious of Science(tm) used as a cudgel. They intuit that some parasitic entity or entities has latched on to Science and is co-opting it for it's own gain to achieve it's own purposes which run counter to the interests of the people. The heavy handed Covid response and censorship is a prime example of that. The whol…
I attended the opening talk of a local science festival.
The speaker was a psychology researcher from UK who flew here for that, and the talk was about conspiracy theories. When they introduced her they stated that she wouldn't accept any questions from the audience.
This was received with boos and shouts that it was not real science.
She then proceeded to bundle all the conspiracy theories together. Going from "the government is doing something bad" to "earth is flat".
After that talk I can really believe that the bullshit conspiracy theories are made up and spread artificially so that anyone that comes up with any conspiracy theory can be shushed as a crazy person.
But… in reality conspiracies do exist. One can make a theory and then test if it's true (or get killed/imprisoned by the government while trying).
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#468These sorts of articles raise so many thoughts and emotions in me. I was trained as a computational biologist with a little lab work and ran gels from time to time. Personally, I hated gels- they're finicky, messy, ugly, and don't really tell you very much. But molecular biology as a field runs on gels- it's the priimary source of results for almost everything in molbio. I have seen more talks and papers that rested…
> don't really tell you very much
???
I think this statement is either meaningless or incorrect. At the very least your conclusion is context dependent.
That being said, I ran gels back in the stone ages when you didn't just buy a stack of pre-made gels that slotted into a tank.
I had to clean my glass plates, make the polyacrylamide solution, clamp the plates together with office binder clips and make sure that the rubber gasket was water tight. So many times, the gasket seal was poor and my polyacrylamide leaked all over the bench top.
I hated running them. But when they worked, they were remarkably informative.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think my favorite Simpsons gag is the episode where Lisa enlists a scientist (voiced by Stephen Jay Gould) to run tests to debunk some angel bones that were found at a construction site. In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests "were inconclusive". In the end, it's revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.…
That's a good one. In my experience, corruption is almost always disguised as neglect and incompetence. Corrupt people meticulously cover their tracks by coming up with excuses to show neglect; some of them only accept bribes that they can explain away as neglect where they have plausible deniability. It doesn't take much brainpower to do well, just malicious intent and knowing the upper limits. IMO, Hanlon's razor "…
Ehh... I think neglect and incompetence are super common. I have a sink full of dishes downstairs to prove it. I think corruption, while not rare, is still far rarer. Horses over zebras still (at least in the US).
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud. Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science", when in reality science is still the best way to push humanity forward and alleviate human suffering, _despite_ all the fraud and misaligned incentives that may influence it.
Also science: There are more new cases of cancer in the United States now than there have ever been before.
> There are more new cases of cancer in the United States now than there have ever been before.
Sigh
That is because antibiotics, essentially
The mechanism by which antibiotics cause cancer is they stop you dying from bacterial infection, once a huge (biggest?) killer.
You still have to die of something....