501–510 of 868 posts
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>Every few years you can vote left or right, If you're talking about the US, you can vote center-right (Democratic) or far right (Republican). There is no viable left wing party in the US.
These posts are tiresome. They all boil down to "my view should be the middle". You could just as well claim the Democrats are far left and the republicans center left.
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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
I've been saying this for years and have been punished for that. Even here. I've done Biology and CS for almost 20 years now, I've worked at four of the top ten research institutions in the world. The ratio of honest to bullshit academics is alarmingly low. Most of these people should be in jail. Not only do they commit academic fraud, many of them commit other types of crimes as well. When I was a PhD student, my 4…
"Four of the top ten" research institutions is probably part of the reason for your experiences. I went to an elite private undergrad as a scholarship student and was sexually abused by the son of high powered lawyers, probably awful people themselves, who targeted scholarship students, international students, etc. because we were vulnerable with no recourse. I then went to a highly ranked but not super sexy public s…
Do you think these are also the best for incoming faculty?
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> 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
My employer of 750k people made it very clear, upload proof of vaccination or be fired. That’s a fact.
Why? The misaligned incentives that drive (in my opinion) otherwise-well-meaning human beings to fraud in the biomedical sciences stem from competition for increasingly-scarce resources, and the deeply and fundamentally-broken culture that develops as a result. The only thing that will propel the needed culture shift is for the people who provide the money to see, from the visibility provided by such scandals, just how bad the problem is, and to basically withdraw funding unless and until the changes happen.
Some of those changes include:
1. Reducing competition for funds by reducing the number of research-focused faculty positions (a.k.a. principal investigators, or PIs) across the board. When people's livelihoods depend on the ridiculous 5% odds of winning an important grant competition, they WILL cheat. As it stands, 20 well-funded scientists are probably more productive than 100 modestly-to poorly-funded, most of whom will do nothing meaningful or useful while trying to show "productivity" until the next funding cycle.
2. Reducing competition for funds by providing reasonably-assured research funding, tied to a diversity of indices of productivity, NOT just publications. As an example, a PI should be hired with the understanding that they'll need `x` dollars over the next 10 years to do their work. If those dollars aren't available, the person shouldn't be hired.
3. Reducing the number of PhD- and post-doctoral trainees across the board. These folks are mostly used as cheap labor by people who are well-aware, and don't care, that there will likely be no jobs for them.
4. Turning those PhD and post-doctoral positions into staff scientist positions, for people who want to do the research, but don't want the hassle of lab management. Staff scientist positions already exist, but in the current environment, when a PI can pay a postdoc $40k a year to work 80 - 100 hours a week, versus a staff scientist $80k a year to work 40 hours a week, guess which they pick.
5. Professionalizing the PhD stream. A person with a PhD in the biomedical sciences should be a broadly-capable individual able to be dropped, after graduation, into an assortment of roles, either academic or industrial. Right now, the incentive to produce publications tends to create people who are highly expert in a tiny, niche area, while having variable to nil competencies in anything else. Professionalization increases the range of post-PhD options for these folks, only one of which is academia. As it stands now, there's the tendency to feel that one has nothing if one doesn't have publications -- which increases the tendency towards fraud.
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You're not wrong, but people who oppose "science as a cudgel" tend to support "religion as a cudgel", and don't see a difference between science and religion, except that one is the Yellow team and one is the Purple team, and they have a preferred color.
When the public is told to “trust the science”, it is no longer science and is now religion.
Were the papers peer reviewed? How does something like this happen
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Run like a startup in what respect? It was a massive government-directed military project in wartime that was able to recruit all the top theoretical physicists at the time around a common aim in an urgent technological arms race to build the bomb. It included a vast effort of army engineers to build the facilities to process the fuel and so on. I'm not seeing the parallels with startups.
I just want to echo this! They built a gosh darned city... oh wait, I was wrong, they built three. It was run like an extremely high-value military project, which is exactly what it was. Sure it was more theoretical than other military projects(at the time), but that is the game sometimes. I get the sense that some folks just think "faster then we would do it now" is the same as startup. Which, to put it politely, I…