Yay for being in the UK. (I do have a VPN that I regularly use, but it isn’t enabled right now)

A lot of them went into academia, the poor fuckers. My old university tutor comes to mind as the best of what they can hope for from that path. He did relatively well for himself as a scientist, but I reckon he was a far better scientist than what his level of prestige in that area would suggest.

There’s one paper he published that was met with little fanfare, but then a few years later, someone else published more or less the same research that massively blew up. This wasn’t a case of plagiarism (as far as I can tell), nor a conscious attempt to replicate my tutor’s research. The general research climate at the time is a plausible explanation (perhaps my tutor was ahead of the times by a few years), but this doesn’t feel sufficient to explain it. I think it’s mostly that the author of this new paper is someone who is extremely ambitious in a manner where they seem to place a lot of value on gaining respect and prestige. I’ve spoken to people who worked in that other scientists lab and apparently they can be quite vicious in how they act within their research community (though I am confident that there’s no personal beef between this researcher and my old tutor — they had presented at the same conference, but had had no interactions and seemed to be largely unaware of the other’s existence). Apparently this researcher does good science, but gives the vibe that they care more for climbing up the ranks than for doing good science; they can be quite nasty in how they respond to people whose work disrupts their own theories.

I suspect that it’s a case of priorities. My tutor also does good research, but part of why he left such an impact on me was that he has such earnest care in his teaching roles. He works at a pretty prestigious university, and there are plenty of tutors there who do the bare minimum teaching necessary to get access to perks like fancy formal dinners, and the prestige of being a tutor — tutors who seem to regard their students as inconvenient obstacles to what they really care about. It highlights to me a sad problem in what we tend to value in the sciences, and academia more generally: the people who add the most to the growth of human knowledge are often the people who the history books will not care to remember.

That’s incredible, thank you for sharing

As a society, we need to better value the labour that goes into our collective knowledge bases. Non-English Wikipedia is just one example of this, but it highlights the core of the problem: the system relies on a tremendous amount of skilled labour that cannot easily be done by just a few volunteers.

Paying people to contribute would come with problems of its own (in a hypothetical world where this was permitted by Wikipedia, which I don’t believe it is at present), but it would be easier for people to contribute if the time they wanted to volunteer was competing with their need to keep their head above the water financially. Universal basic income, or something similar, seems like one of the more viable ways to improve this tension.

However, a big component of the problem is around the less concrete side of how society values things. I’m a scientist in an area where we are increasingly reliant on scientific databases, such as the Protein Database (pdb), where experimentally determined protein structures are deposited and annotated, as well as countless databases on different genes and their functions. Active curation of these databases is how we’re able to research a gene in one model organism, and then apply those insights to the equivalent gene in other organisms.

For example, the gene CG9536 is a term for a gene found in Drosophila melanogaster — fruit flies, a common model organism for genetic research, due to the ease of working with them in a lab. Much of the research around this particular gene can be found on flybase, a database for D. melanogaster gene research. Despite being super different to humans, there are many fruitfly genes that have equivalents in humans, and CG9536 is no exception; TMEM115 is what we call it in humans. The TL;DR answer of what this gene does is “we don’t know”, because although we have some knowledge of what it does, the tricky part about this kind of research is figuring out how genes or proteins interact as part of a wider system — even if we knew exactly what it does in a healthy person, for example, it’s much harder to understand what kinds of illnesses arise from a faulty version of a gene, or whether a gene or protein could be a target for developing novel drugs. I don’t know much about TMEM115 specifically, but I know someone who was exploring whether it could be relevant in understanding how certain kinds of brain tumours develop. Biological databases are a core component of how we can big to make sense of the bigger picture.

Whilst the data that fill these databases are produced by experimental research that are attached to published papers, there’s a tremendous amount of work that makes all these resources talk to each other. That flybase link above links to the page on TMEM115, and I can use these resources to synthesise research across so many separate fields that would previously have been separate: the folks who work on flies will have a different research culture than those who work in human gene research, or yeast, or plants etc. TMEM115 is also sometimes called TM115, and it would be a nightmare if a scientist reviewing the literature missed some important existing research that referred to the gene under a slightly different name.

Making these biological databases link up properly requires active curation, a process that the philosopher of Science Sabine Leonelli refers to as “data packaging”, a challenging task that includes asking “who else might find this data useful?” ^[1]. The people doing the experiments that produce the data aren’t necessarily the best people for figuring out how to package and label that data for others to use because inherently, this requires thinking in a way that spans many different research subfields. Crucially though, this infrastructure work gives a scientist far fewer opportunities to publish new papers, which means this essential labour is devalued in our current system of doing science.

It’s rather like how some of the people who are adding poor quality articles to non-English Wikipedia feel like they’re contributing because using automated tools allows them to create more new articles than someone with actual specialist knowledge could. It’s the product of a culture of an ever-hungry “more” that fuels the production of slop, devalues the work of curators and is degrading our knowledge ecosystem. The financial incentives that drive this behaviour play a big role, but I see that as a symptom of a wider problem: society’s desire to easily quantify value causing important work that’s harder to quantify to be systematically devalued (a problem that we also see in how reproductive labour (i.e. the labour involved in managing a family or household) has historically been dismissed).

We need to start recognising how tenuous our existing knowledge is. The OP discusses languages with few native speakers, which likely won’t affect many who read the article, but we’re at risk of losing so much more if we don’t learn to recognise how tenuous our collective knowledge is. The more we learn, the more we need to invest into expanding our systems of knowledge infrastructure, as well as maintaining what we already have.

[1]: I am not going to cite the paper in which Sabine Leonelli coined the phrase “data packaging”, but her 2016 book “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study”. I don’t imagine that many people will read this large comment of mine, but if you’ve made it this far, you might be interested to check out her work. Though it’s not aimed at a general audience, it’s still fairly accessible, if you’re the kind of nerd who is interested in discussing the messy problem of making a database usable by everyone.

If your appetite for learning is larger than your wallet, then I’d suggest that Anna’s Archive or similar is a good shout. Some communities aren’t cool with directly linking to resources like this, so know that you can check the Wikipedia page of shadow library sites to find a reliable link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna’s_Archive

It sounds like you don’t seem to understand how poverty works. Either you have no lived experience of it, or you do, but you’ve internalised the notion that it’s possible to pull oneself out of poverty by the bootstraps — possibly because it’s more comforting to think this than to reckon with how many of us are just a few strokes of bad luck away from poverty.

Often poverty is entrenched precisely because many people don’t have a choice about whether to keep a 1-2 month buffer of resources. Social safety nets exist not just out of compassion, but because a society becomes better when people who are struggling don’t have to worry about how they’re going to feed themselves.

Place the blame where it is due: the maliciously incompetent legislators who see poor people going hungry as a feature, not a bug.

Proud of you.

This isn’t useful to me at the moment, but nonetheless, I really appreciate when people like you take the time to share knowledge in this way.

There is a special place in heaven for the people who do this, just as there’s a special place in hell for people who reply to their own forum post about a complex technical problem.

(Side note: I tried the find the xkcd where he is yelling at his computer after finding a forum post from someone who has the exact same computer problem as he does, but the original poster hasn’t updated it. Alas, I couldn’t. If anyone knows which one I mean, I’d appreciate you pointing me to it, because it’ll drive me mad until I remember how to find it)

A friend once had to go to the hospital due to extreme and chronic constipation, and whilst her… evacuation was less… explosive than this, she describes the relief as being so great that for a few glorious moments, she forgot that she was in the ER with a tube up her ass (and that the tube was only necessary when multiple members of medical staff had failed to move things along manually).

Nurses are such integral parts of a functioning healthcare system, and it annoys me how they are systematically devalued. If we could wave a magic wand and make every nurse into a doctor (with the magic including the extra money it would take to fund this), it would be a downgrade. We often talk about nurses as if they’re just doctors, but worse, when in fact the role that they fulfill is qualitatively different to doctors and requires a different, not lesser, skillset.

That’s fucking hilarious. Tell your husband that at least one randomer on the internet thinks that he’s a catch

A handful of senior engineers or developers. And then we’re even more ducked when they retire or die, because the no-one is hiring junior engineers or developers

🤘🔥🤘

I don’t find the latency with Bluetooth headphones to be a problem if I’m just watching videos, but it’s super jarring if I’m doing something like gaming.

It’s interesting because my current headphones (Steel series Arctic Nova Pro Wireless) can connect via Bluetooth, or wirelessly to a little dock thing that’s plugged into my PC (just a more complex dongle that has few settings on it, and a battery charger). This means that I can easily compare the Bluetooth latency to the dock’s latency, and it’s interesting to see the difference. I haven’t compared wired latency to the dock-wireless, but certainly I haven’t noticed any problems with the dock-wireless

A weird thing about these headphones is that the Bluetooth and the dock-wireless seem to work on different channels, because I can be connected to my phone’s audio by Bluetooth, and to my PC’s audio via the dock. I discovered this randomly after like a year of owning the headphones.

They were quite expensive, but I rather like them, and would recommend them to someone who wants a “jack of all trades” pair of headphones. They were plug and play with Linux, which is a big part of why I got them.

I see your point, but I still think it’s valuable to criticise Christians who act in a deeply unChristian manner. It’s not necessary to jettison Christianity entirely to do this, and indeed, I think that doing so would be losing the forest for the trees.

You’re right that the potential to do great harm is a human trait, rather than specifically a religious one. However, pointing out the hypocrisy of Christian settler colonialism is one of the ways we can assert that it’s not the Christianity that’s the problem (even if it may be used as an excuse)

This is supremely silly. I will never use it, but I’m glad that it exists; you’re delightful

Damn, I didn’t notice they were made out of lambdas. Guess I need to switch to NixOS

I’m also not sure what I mean by “end apartheid”, because I also don’t know whether it’s realistic in the short term. That would still be the most realistic path to deradicalising Palestine.

A reasonable first step towards that long term goal would be to end the ongoing genocide. It’s hard to even speculate about possible futures when each day of needless bloodshed makes future peace more difficult.

Yay, learning!

Excellently put.

Thanks for the video link, that looks like an interesting watch. It’s a phenomenon I’d already intuitively noticed, so I look forward to this video elucidating my thoughts on this matter.