“He blew the doors off of something we already knew was happening.”
Usually when an investigation blows the doors off of something, it’s because although many people were aware of what was happening inside, not enough did. Even if the primary gain is bringing awareness to an issue, investigative journalism like this is still important. After all, the doors were closed for a reason
I think the analogy still applies. There are loads of people who I interact with who say things I don’t want to hear/profound disagree with. The block list includes people with whom it doesn’t feel viable to have a discussion with without things descending into flames.
For a while, I was subscribed as a patron to Elisabeth Bik’s Patroeon. She’s a microbiologist turned “Science Integrity Specialist” which means she investigates and exposes scientific fraud. Despite doing work that’s essential to science, she has struggled to get funding because there’s a weird stigma around what she does; It’s not uncommon to hear scientists speak of people like her negatively, because they perceive anti-fraud work as being harmful to public trust in science (which is obviously absurd, because surely recognising that auditing the integrity of research is necessary for building and maintaining trust in science).
Anyway, I mention this because it’s one of the most dystopian things I’ve directly experienced in recent years. A lot of scientists and other academics I know are struggling financially, even though they’re better funded than she is, so I can imagine that it’s even worse for her. How fucked up is it for scientific researchers to have to rely on patrons like me (especially when people like me are also struggling with rising living costs).
Gay humans exist today, they existed throughout history, and they will continue to exist for as long as humans do.
Do you consider Uhura being a bridge officer to be “pushing a narrative”? Because that was a political statement in much the same way that gay characters in Star Trek are (arguably more so).
It sucks to be a person whose very existence is political in this world that we live in now. Sci-Fi that includes those people is a way of saying "hey, wouldn’t it be nice if people could live their lives without their existence being the battleground for political ideology.
I was talking about this recently with someone (read: ranting as they nodded sympathetically) and I finished up by saying “what’s the point of ‘smart’ tech if the humans who use it are steadily disempowered and ultimately, made less smart?”
I’ve recently been dabbling in HomeAssistant and learning how to set things up properly feels like it’s been making me more smart.
As others have said, Fitgirl is a major player in the games piracy scene. She doesn’t crack the games, but she does repack cracked games (compresses them in clever ways). It’s quite common for people to impersonate her or her site to try to fool people into downloading malware. This seems to be another one of those.
She warns against this quite frequently. From her faq, for example:
"Q: Do you have a Facebook page? A: I didn’t, don’t and won’t have a Facebook page. The same applies to Twitter, Instagram, whatever else. This site is the only official FitGirl Repacks source. If you happen to come here from “Facebook FitGirl Page” – you’ve been fooled by an imposter. "
(Note: this comment is not an endorsement of games piracy, and this community is not the appropriate venue for discussions of that nature. Anyone interested should go to relevant communities like the ones hosted on the db0 Lemmy instance )
I’ve been doing a complete rewatch of Deep Space 9, and it really underscored why I didn’t enjoy Discovery and Picard. My favourite parts of DS9 are the character driven moments, whether they’re big and dramatic, or lightweight and silly. I like that the show has enough space for that. The show has more Plot than previous Star Trek, but that Plot still serves the characters. Discovery is not nearly as bad as Picard on this front, but I still found myself wishing for more opportunity to get to know the characters.
Mass surveillance was definitely okay with them though, as long as they could hide behind flimsy plausible deniability; I remember one of the early 972mag pieces about this that called bullshit on their claim that they have no knowledge that they are supporting mass surveillance — if military/intelligence services come to you and say “hey, we need servers to store terabytes of audio files”, then it’s bloody obvious what the point
Yes.
I feel this. I’ve found that a good response in those circumstances is to say “sorry, can we put a pin in this? I feel like I don’t have the capacity to properly process what you’re telling me right now, so I’d rather we resume this conversation at a later point. Thanks for helping me figure out [bool question] though.”
It’s a useful response if one genuinely is interested to learn, but not at that moment.
Sometimes, (amongst friends who accept how thoroughly weird I am) I will actually say “XOR” when I want to make my intentions clear. It means that when they give the silly OR answer, I can jokingly chastise them for poor listening. The downside is that they relish the opportunity to give OR answers when I am not sufficiently specific in my question. I reap what I sow ¯_(ツ)_/¯
“That said, people can put it in “recipe” format - a set of steps to be blindly followed without understanding - but even there you have some minimal foundational knowlegde required”
Something that’s quite interesting is that apparently one of the core components of how Latin and Greek used to be taught in fancy public schools (especially in like, Isaac Newton’s era) was that students would be made to copy out sections from classical literature (such as the Odyssey). Obviously this would be happening alongside lessons involving basic grammar, but I’ve seen some scholars suggest that this kind of blind repetition was a key component to the language learning, and that it may even be useful for learning languages in a modern context.
I was already interested based on your first comment but this:
“The UBA is a masterpiece, and I’m not being sarcastic.”
has thoroughly piqued my interest. Thank you for being an opinionated nerd on the internet.
This made me smile because it reminded me of building my late best friend’s PC. I had a lot of fun doing it, but I insisted on making him do parts of it so that he would understand the basics of what was going on
This is hilarious. I’m deeply sad that I don’t think my irl friends would appreciate this joke, because I want to share it with everyone.
(I am personally irked by vibe coding because some assholes in my life have been real smug about how much better of a programmer they are than me due to vibe coding. )
I recently used Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) as a static site generator. I found it easy to use. I personally used Gitlab pages, because I didn’t feel confident hosting on my home internet (didn’t want to inadvertently cause issues for my housemates when I’m still learning this stuff).
The nice thing about static sites is that it’s pretty easy to find free or extremely cheap hosting for them.
Anti-vaxxers often do a lot of reading, ime. The stuff they read is often bullshit written by scammers or other people who drank the Kool-aid, but I think the “research” they do is a big part of the anti-vaxx culture. My view is that many who are drawn into conspiracy theories end up there due to a diminished sense of agency, and that the “research” is key to them feeling more in control — it gives them a false sense of understanding in which they can take all their bad feelings about how the world is, and construct a worldview in which they feel more oriented.
It reminds me a lot of the line “antisemitism is the socialism of fools”, though I feel like this is more like “anti-vax is the antiauthoritarianism of fools”. It’s frustrating because in some ways, they’re so close to understanding the ways in which the world is super fucked up, but they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and hide in a fortress of ignorance instead.
I remember way back when I was still intimidated by the command line, I was having issues with a video, and the only info I could find was on using ffmpeg to do some conversions directly. I laugh at the memory of me being nonplussed at trying to launch ffmpeg and expecting a GUI to pop up.
I am glad that I spent some time getting to know ffmpeg directly. There’s been a few times where knowing that it was ffmpeg under the hood helped me.
Seconding that massgrave is legit. I remember that I was nervous when I first installed Windows through this method, but I used it for years, across multiple different devices and never had any problems
Useful context: I am a biochemist with a passing interest in neuroscience (plus some friends who work in neuroscience research).
A brief minor point is that you should consider uploading the preprint as a pdf instead, as .docx can cause formatting errors if people aren’t using the same word processor as you. Personally, I saw some formatting issues related to this (though nothing too serious).
Onto the content of your work, something I think your paper would benefit from is linking to established research throughout. Academia’s insistence on good citations throughout can feel like it’s mostly just gatekeeping, but it’s pretty valuable for demonstrating that you’re aware of the existing research in the area. This is especially important for research in a topic like this tends to attract a lot of cranks (my friends tell me that they fairly frequently get slightly unhinged emails from people who are adamant that they have solved the theory of consciousness). Citations throughout the body of your research makes it clear what points are your own, and what is the established research.
Making it clear what you’re drawing on is especially important for interdisciplinary research like this, because it helps people who know one part of things really well, but don’t know much about the others. For example, although I am familiar with Friston’s paper, I don’t know what has happened in the field since then. I also know some information theory stuff, but not much. Citations are way of implicitly saying “if you’re not clear on where we’re getting this particular thing from, you can go read more here”.
For example, if you have a bit that’s made up of 2 statements:
Then you can make statement 2 go down far easier if that first statement. I use Friston in this example both because I am familiar with the work, but also because I know that that paper was somewhat controversial in some of its assumptions or conclusions. Making it clear what points are new ones you’re making vs. established stuff that’s already been thoroughly discussed in its field can act sort of like a firebreak against criticism, where you can have the best of both worlds of being able to build on top of existing research while also saying “hey, if you have beef with that original take, go take it up with them, not us”. It also makes it easier for someone to know what’s relevant to them: a neuroscientist studying consciousness who doesn’t vibe with Friston’s approach would not have much to gain from your paper, for instance.
It’s also useful to do some amount of summarising the research you’re building on, because this helps to situate your research. What’s neuroscience’s response to Friston’s paper? Has there been much research building upon it? I know there have been criticisms against it, and that can also be a valid angle to cover, especially if your work helps seal up some holes in that original research (or makes the theory more useful such that it’s easier to overlook the few holes). My understanding is that the neuroscientific answer to “what even is consciousness?” is that we still don’t know, and that there are many competing theories and frameworks. You don’t need to cover all of those, but you do need to justify why you’re building upon this particular approach.
In this case specifically, I suspect that the reason for building upon Friston is because part of the appeal of his work is that it allows for this kind of mathsy approach to things. Because of this, I would expect to see at least some discussion of some of the critiques of the free energy principle as applied to neuroscience, namely that:
Linked to the empirical testing, when I read the phrase “yielding testable implications for cognitive neuroscience”, I skipped ahead because I was intrigued to see what testable things you were suggesting, but I was disappointed to not see something more concrete on the neuroscience side. Although you state
that wasn’t much to go on for learning about current methods used to measure these things. Like I say, I’m very much not a neuroscientist, just someone with an interest in the topic, which is why I was interested to see how you proposed to link this to empirical data.
I know you go more into depth on some parts of this in section 8, but I had my concerns there too. For instance, in section 8.1, I am doubtful of whether varying the temporal rate of novelty as you describe would be able to cause metabolic changes that would be detectable using the experimental methods you propose. Aren’t the energy changes we’re talking about super small? I’d also expect that for a simple visual input, there wouldn’t necessarily be much metabolic impact if the brain were able to make use of prior learning involving visual processing.
I hope this feedback is useful, and hopefully not too demoralising. I think your work looks super interesting and the last thing I want to do is gatekeep people from participating in research. I know a few independent researchers, and indeed, it looks like I might end up on that path myself, so God knows I need to believe that doing independent research that’s taken seriously is possible. Unfortunately, to make one’s research acceptable to the academic community requires jumping through a bunch of hoops like following good citation practice. Some of these requirements are a bit bullshit and gatekeepy, but a lot of them are an essential part of how the research community has learned to interface with the impossible deluge of new work they’re expected to keep up to date on. Interdisciplinary research makes it especially difficult to situate one’s work in the wider context of things. I like your idea though, and think it’s worth developing.