This has been reported on account of the source. I’m not sure it’s worth removing necessarily, and would direct people to look at @spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org comment for another source and an excellent summary.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a way to solve everything. But an authoritative body can build credibility and hold onto it. People should still be skeptical and still review, but that’s a normal part of the scientific process. Knowing what’s more and less credible is a normal process of research, and learning to assess credibility is important too. Peer review doesn’t need to be torn down as a concept, it just needs to be taken with a healthy grain of salt, like all processes. This is part of why I mentioned how some journals are more reputable than others - it’s a reflection of how often their peer review misses important things, not a reflection of how bullet-proof their science is. Everyone makes mistakes, the goal should always be to make less.

Also, to be clear, I’m talking about the post-research and pre-publish step, not the pre-research proposal step - that form of peer review can fuck right off.

Also of great importance which I should have probably highlighted in my initial post - this is really dependent on the field itself. In medicine people put in effort for that kind of review. I’ve peer reviewed quite a few papers and I’ve received really good advice from peer reviewers on some of the papers I’m on. Certainly this can happen in environments where this kind of review isn’t necessary, but the institutions that exist do make it a lot easier. An open source self-hosted model would make it really hard to get an idea of how many eyes were on a particular paper, and would make keeping up with continuing education difficult… of course unless groups of people made their career reviewing everything that emerges and putting together summaries or otherwise helping to sift through the noise.

In certain fields, at least, there are important steps these papers provide such as screening and review that are simply not feasible through as self-hosted. People who understand what the paper is about and can sniff out bullshit - be it cooked numbers, incorrect figures, improper citations, etc. are an important part of the process. Heck, even among academic papers out there, some are much lower ‘quality’ than others in that they are frequently bought off or have poor review processes allowing fluff and bad science to get through.

With all that being said, scihub is a thing and even paid journals are often easily pirated.

Framing it as what ‘sparked complex life’ is what makes it slightly clickbait-y. The circumstances which involved the creation of RNA/DNA is arguably more important when we talk about what ‘sparked complex life’, but it’s really borderline and this is an important discovery and previous gap in knowledge so I think it’s excusable here.

Slightly clickbait-y title, but super cool and important discovery!

I found the following particularly interesting:

They also learned that in pairings that work, both partners adapt to each other — a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked. It wasn’t just the bacteria adapting to a new environment; the host changed too, even in the early stages. “That is a fundamentally important question that people have ignored,” Richards said. “This opens the doors for real advances.”

The Michael Bay method of video game production - overproduced with no substance

At what point does indirectly become directly? I think what’s most important here is intent - this man was clearly knowledgeable enough to know he was causing harm and still chose to do so in order to increase shareholder profit. There is malice here no matter how you slice it.

I’m removing this because Sabine has repeatedly been lambasted by the media for junk science, and because she’s a known transphobe.

It’s a big step up from literally drowning lab rats as an experiment, but we’ve got a long way to go before we get even reasonably ethical with lab animals 😔

To be fair if anyone was gonna not kill them when they’re done, this lab seems like they might be the ones.

very cute!

Yes, but if a review board were to sign off on them and then someone managed to significantly hurt or damage themselves, one could theoretically apply some of the blame to the review board for not doing their job to ensure that a study was safe. The whole idea of having ethics as a part of the review board was born of some of the studies they used to sign off on that were ultimately problematic and resulted in seriously damaging some individuals, such as minorities and kids.

Sorry by experimental what I meant here is something which is not ready to be tested in humans - this scientist was skipping a bunch of the necessary steps to show this is a safe thing to do (in lab grown cells first, for example) to proceed to human experimentation.

Ethically speaking, we should not be experimenting on humans, even with their explicit consent. It’s not allowed by any credible review board (such as the IRB) and in many countries you can be held legally liable for doing experiments on humans.

With that being said, there have been exceptions to this, in that in some countries we allow unproven treatments to be given to terminal patients (patients who are going to die from a condition). We also generally don’t have repercussions for folks who experiment on themselves because they are perhaps the only people capable of truly weighing the pros and cons, of not being mislead by figures of authority (although I do think there is merit of discussing this with regards to being influenced by peers), and they are the only ones for which consent cannot be misconstrued.

This isn’t related to science, feel free to repost in news

oh lol

Guess I’ll have to wait for the book, but that title might be misleading. It sounds like they had discussions about the process, in light of Trump being… well, Trump. Not that Trump ever ordered anything to do with nuclear weapons and Milley preventing said action.

If you wish to discuss the controversy, feel free to make a post or link to an article. I’m personally not interested in hosting a link to these weirdos.

Started and finished 1000xResist over the course of a few days. In general I often find myself turned off by games with aging graphics, not for any good reason but more that I just find less of a pull towards them. I have more trouble being engaged or immersed, unless there’s a really strong art focus. This is one such game that I was worried I wouldn’t get pulled into, and in fact one that sat on a list of “maybe I’ll pick it up” because it was so highly reviewed but I was worried about that facet. It did not take very long for the game to grip me, however, because of it’s excellent storytelling. In fact, the game is almost entirely about storytelling, so there’s not a ton that I can share other than to say that it deals with a lot of difficult themes like intense trauma, bullying, having a tough childhood, extreme ideologies, and the long term effects of violence. It also deals with more societal and human issues like protests, fascism, extreme duress, how self-interested and powerful individuals can cause serious problems and inflict violence, being optimistic or nihilistic in the face of overwhelming odds, and the threat of extinction.

While it isn’t a very long game, consisting of maybe a dozen hours of gameplay, I found myself putting it down for a while after certain chapters in order to process what just happened. The story throws a lot of curveballs and reveals information that can easily change the way you frame entire chapters of the story from earlier, but it never feels like it’s done in a way that inspires whiplash - nothing ever feels like a ‘sudden’ realization and I’m honestly not sure how much of it can be attributed to such a difficult story (if everything is fucked, what’s one more thing?) and how much is because they do a masterful job at slowly unraveling the enigma of the story that very few pieces of information ever really feel out of place. There’s unfortunately only so much I can write without spoiling the story, but I will say that it was one of the best stories I’ve heard or played through and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone who likes a good story or wants to explore the themes I’ve mentioned above. Also, if anyone else out there played through this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the story… what did you think? Do you have any lingering questions left over? Were there parts of the story that irked you or that you found particularly moving?

Thank you for engaging 💜

Just because there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism doesn’t mean that we have zero control over what we consume. It’s perfectly fine to hold a viewpoint of trying to minimize harm where you can and when you’re aware of it. Where you draw your lines doesn’t have to be perfect either (after all, we’re human).