aluren

9 ms·

31.
by aluren 7y ago
Facebook and social media in general is already horrible as is, why would you want to infect academia with it as well? The community does have a lot of issues but a social network and more blog posts are not the solution. The traditional wa
32.
by aluren 7y ago
The language barrier is most likely the cause. For some reason people from some countries like Russia, China, France etc. struggle with English and they'll seek a way to communicate however they can, usually by finding fellow countryme
33.
by aluren 7y ago
Explaining common social phenomena with modern human genomics isn't a thing period. If you'd attempted to introduce some sociobiology talking points in a typical genomics conference you'd be laughed out of the room. (That&#x2
34.
by aluren 7y ago
I've written various things in English (papers, thesis, abstracts, etc.) and I loathed using that language every step along the way. English is such a clunky language for communication, especially in science. -It has loads and loads of
35.
by aluren 7y ago
Again, that's not how our modern understanding of genomics works, and hasn't been since the 1980's. There's much, much more to it than genes+environment. See all the mechanisms I've mentioned in GP. Also, you brough
36.
by aluren 7y ago
That 'something' you mention is called developmental biology and it's yet another level of abstraction removed from the basic cell machinery that operates around DNA. It also has nothing to do with compilers or anything com
37.
by aluren 7y ago
Nature vs. nurture hasn't been a thing since the 2000's when second generation sequencing dramatically expanded the breadth of information we had about species' genomes and (along with other discoveries made at the time) made
38.
by aluren 7y ago
Also the compiler is self-modifying. And the compiler flags as well. And the OS. And the chip architecture sometimes. Like, at what point do we decide that pushing the analogy further is just silly and just drop it altogether?
39.
by aluren 7y ago
True. Most of what I've been taught after high school feels like "you've been lied to, everything you were taught in high school was wrong or grossly oversimplified and now you need to unlearn it all and relearn from scratch.
40.
by aluren 7y ago
>understandings of genes as immutable features of biology that are fixed at conception This 'understanding' has been known to be wrong for 30+ years now. Rearrangements, microchimerism, epigenetics, chromosome organization etc.
41.
by aluren 7y ago
What they mean is that you may take whatever point in space to be your immobile frame of reference and describe all motion with respect to that point. It happens to be convenient to take the center of the Sun as such a point when doing calc
42.
by aluren 8y ago
Racism as we know it has only been a thing since the days of slave trade and colonization, probably as a way to rationalize it. The early day and medieval empires (Roman, Mongol, Inca, etc.) were very much not racist given how they had to
43.
by aluren 8y ago
All Africans are black and all Europeans are white? That's a new one. As for medicine, while the efficacy of drugs can be ethnicity dependent, race is such a weak proxy for it that it often leads to mistakes when doctors operate by h
44.
by aluren 8y ago
"Race" is just how you look to other people and how that ties to your status. Its categorization is very much country dependent - Hispanic people are often not considered white in America, while no one would be making that distinc
45.
by aluren 8y ago
It seems that "genetics" is increasingly becoming the essentialism of the 21st century. Because you now sound silly if you use words like 'soul' or 'energy', people increasingly rely on 'genetics' or
46.
by aluren 8y ago
What if strengthening the democratic process can only be done through the support of a political party? Right now, the Republicans control all branches of the legislative, executive and judiciary, despite Trump having lost the popular vot
47.
by aluren 8y ago
What? No, we should not force people to share the same space as fascists and racists. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. If I were to encounter neo-nazis in real life, I would not engage in a civil discussion, confident that the polic
48.
by aluren 8y ago
What if you don't want to prove them wrong, or indeed engage them at all? Not everyone is owed a debate, a response, or even eyeballs. There's plenty of interesting content out there that people are paid to read, what makes you th
49.
by aluren 8y ago
I was more referring to changes in the API where the input and output suddenly have to be in different formats in the middle of a pipeline, causing a crash. What can also happen is that somehow the old format is still valid and gets proces
50.
by aluren 8y ago
>If a scientist knowingly lets false information be published he is causing a disservice to society, harming progress. Often it's not so much false as empty or useless. Nevertheless, since all people in a community know the values o
51.
by aluren 8y ago
We never claimed to be completely free of bias, or immune to nepotism. We're human. I think you're making it to be a bigger deal than it actually is. Most of these things are just noise. We just ignore it. If someone rises to prom
52.
by aluren 8y ago
They are so unwieldy . JSON formatting means the ipynb format is a huge mess to handle by simple means, so you have to open a browser window to do anything. Loading, editing, formatting, saving is just... ugh. You can't do proper di
53.
by aluren 8y ago
It's not rotten to the core, it's just imperfect, like all human communities are. Nepotism, conflicts of interests, human error, unconscious biases, etc. don't magically disappear just because we're in academia. As I sai
54.
by aluren 8y ago
- Nature is full of bogus, like all journals, if not more. The reason for its high impact factor isn't due to consistently solid papers all around, it's due to a few very high impact, foundational papers and a crowd of minor impa
55.
by aluren 8y ago
It's not at all uncommon that implementations provided with papers do not actually do what the paper says it does. You're often lucky when there is an implementation at all. But most of the time it's just that running the exa
56.
by aluren 8y ago
To be honest I'm surprised it's not higher. Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789308 The bottom line is that there's not much incentive for doing the boring statistical validations (
57.
by aluren 8y ago
Everything you experience is bound to be mind-altering in one way or another. We change constantly, and our past selves from 10 years ago are hardly the same person as our current selves. (In fact, the very notion that there is a 'self
58.
by aluren 8y ago
Maybe the point was lost in discussion but the original post was not about absolute, hard numbers at all - it was about people being accepting of violence. About violence being so ingrained that everyday folks such as what you may bump in
59.
by aluren 8y ago
You missed that one part: >I mean we're still talking about very low absolute levels. So no, I don't see how it logically follows , whatever that means, that people Turkey or Croatia would be more likely to resort to violence
60.
by aluren 8y ago
What does per capita homicide have to do with a culture's being accepting of violence? I mean we're still talking about very low absolute levels. Anecdotally, having been to all three countries, I approximately encountered the sam

More ›