Hey fam, starting with this reply its pretty clear you’re not engaging in good faith - this statement is fundamentally accusatory. It’s unsurprising that other folks viewed this as an attack. Please chill out, treat users with good faith, and do your best to avoid escalating things - you should gut check your own comments and ask yourself “how will others view this? Is this helpful?” and if the answer is no, rewrite your comment or don’t reply.

That’s just cherrypicking. Yes some people will review bomb. Others will make fake positive reviews to counteract people review bombing a game for being too “woke”.

In the end the only thing that even could matter is how people in aggregate work - and that’s easy to account for, you just readjust the distribution to be more spread out to get the “true” score of things.

This video seems more like clickbait than anything. I’m finding it hard to find anything worthwhile to engage with here even from a high level.

This is how you make them listen.

Wish this article did a better job at citing information, would love to know what study provided evidence for sentience and self-awareness. Not that I disagree, I think we vastly underestimate the intelligence and cognitive state of most living creatures, I just want to read about this in more depth.

“embrace of right-wing politics…” my dude he did a literal nazi salute multiple times, stating it this way is minimizing

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