3 ms·
That parasite website is so weird. It sounds so negative, like a piece of satire, but then you read the actual text and it sounds like a serious award whose goa
by jtmarmon 9y ago
That parasite website is so weird. It sounds so negative, like a piece of satire, but then you read the actual text and it sounds like a serious award whose goal is to encourage rigor in scientific research.
Whose stupid idea was it to call it the Parasite Award
- tw1010 9y agoMaybe natural scientists are more accustomed to using the strict, cold, definitions of biological concepts without being emotionally influenced by any cultural value judgement attached to them.
- Avshalom 9y agoGood thing we live in a strict cold culture-less world then.
- tw1010 9y agoI think it's too much to ask to expect every little scientific niche, every subculture, to have to adapt their local personalized context-aware terminology to the global culture, just because a random person coming from outside the niche might be confused by their language. It's like demanding that no part of a public speech should be able to shine a poor light on the speaker when a substring of it is taken out of context. It's an unnecessarily harsh constraint.
- jessriedel 9y agoThe name is tongue in cheek. It's taken from a NEJM editorial that attempted to negatively characterize people who just analyze data without doing the grunt work of collecting it as "research parasites". (Obviously the editorial is gesturing at a real problem: that by unbundling data collection and analysis and, as is unfortunately typical, only giving credit to the result of analysis, there could be a dearth of data collection from lack of incentive. But characterizing pure analysis negatively is obviously the wrong response.)