3,106 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2020
    1. Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the idea of natural selection independently of Charles Darwin, was an implacable opponent of the smallpox vaccine during the late 19th Century

      Being an anti-vaxxer makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

      Fixing any disease that could kill an individual before his/her childbearing age is only helping weaknesses (diseases) propagate in the human populous.

    1. Cells, for example, are a central category, but there’s no definite criterion for what counts as a cell. If you attempt to find one, you rapidly bog down in a maze of exceptions. You might start with something like “a self-reproducing living unit carrying a single copy of the organism’s DNA within a membrane.” But red blood cells don’t self-reproduce and have no DNA. Mitochondria are not cells, but they self-reproduce using their own DNA within a membrane. Muscle cells have multiple nuclei, each with a separate complete copy of the DNA. Some algae have life stages in which they have no cell membranes. And so on indefinitely.8

      I'm not an expert in biology or anything, but perhaps the moral there is we should rethink this 'cell' idea? IIRC astronomers continue to talk about 'planets' even though the longer you examine the concept the more incoherent it becomes. (For an extended example, see the infamous Discourse about whether "Pluto is a planet", which led to hilarious goal post stretching where people kept trying to find a definition of 'planet' that exactly fit the traditional celestial objects we classify as planets without having to include any new ones or exclude existing ones)

      There is obviously no rule that says the categorizations we come up with for stuff when a field is young should be expected to have infinite inferential reach as that field of knowledge expands.

    1. Using esoteric equipment and methods to get some tiny bit of reality to behave according to theory is most of what you do in a science lab.

      Not quite. You use esoteric equipment and methods to get the opportunity to make an observation of some tiny bit of reality that would help you narrow down hypothesis space.

  2. Jul 2020
    1. O’Connor, D. B., Aggleton, J. P., Chakrabarti, B., Cooper, C. L., Creswell, C., Dunsmuir, S., Fiske, S. T., Gathercole, S., Gough, B., Ireland, J. L., Jones, M. V., Jowett, A., Kagan, C., Karanika‐Murray, M., Kaye, L. K., Kumari, V., Lewandowsky, S., Lightman, S., Malpass, D., … Armitage, C. J. (n.d.). Research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond: A call to action for psychological science. British Journal of Psychology, n/a(n/a), e12468. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12468

    1. He had put the case (without mentioning names) to an eminent physician; and the eminent physician had smiled, had shaken his head, and had said–nothing. On these grounds, Mr. Bruff entered his protest, and left it there.

      So to say nothing is enough proof that there is no merit to this experiment? Isn't Ezra's thoughts inspired by textbooks/an intention to mimic the scientific process?

      I feel like such ignorance towards science is relevant today *cough*,*cough* people who refuse to wear face masks *cough*,*cough*

  3. Jun 2020
    1. Saltelli, A., Bammer, G., Bruno, I., Charters, E., Di Fiore, M., Didier, E., Nelson Espeland, W., Kay, J., Lo Piano, S., Mayo, D., Pielke Jr, R., Portaluri, T., Porter, T. M., Puy, A., Rafols, I., Ravetz, J. R., Reinert, E., Sarewitz, D., Stark, P. B., … Vineis, P. (2020). Five ways to ensure that models serve society: A manifesto. Nature, 582(7813), 482–484. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01812-9

    1. The brain uses the same area to save coding as it does to save our speech. They found that programming is like talking. The research found out that the brain regions that are most active during coding are those that are also relevant in the processing of natural language.
      • Study shows that programming knowledge is stored in the same area of the brain as speech.
      • Using fMRIs, researchers analysed which parts of the brain are activated during programming.
      • The results essentially show that programming is like talking - the same regions that are active when processing natural language are active during programming.
      • In the study, professional programmers were asked to repeatedly write some code and check other chunks of code for mistakes.