kmmlng

Maybe you can make an argument that, in the absence of any information, your best bet is assuming a Gaussian distributon, but it definitely is not safe to assume so. Your data might not be symmetrically or even unimodally distributed and making these assumption can lead to completely wrong conclusions.

I would rather normalize publishing negative results (including refutations of previously published positive results).

Reproducing every single submission is extremely expensive, but per the Pareto principle, no one is ever going to care about the vast majority of publications. It's the ones that lots of people care about that we want to be accurate. Given the right incentives and possibilities, people will seek out to reproduce those by themselves.

A big problem with Myers-Briggs is also that it expresses everything in terms of binary categories. That makes it easy to communicate your type, but also comes with less precision.

Big Five avoids this, but it's also difficult to communicate your Big Five results concisely.

Interesting, I would have considered the idea of pretending to be someone I'm not for extended periods of time to be far more harmful than any potential disadvantages I might experience in a busieness setting for being an introvert.

I don't think any undue stereotypes around the introversion / extraversion dimension come from Jung, but have simply been attached to the concept by ill-informed society. It's hard to fault Jung for this. Introversion / Extraversion is also part of the Big 5 and has more substantial scientific backing than the foundations laid by Jung.

> A cotton bag will not have a reuse of one. It is more expensive to begin with. It could hold sentimental value.

I agree that on average, a cotton bag will not have a reuse of one. Some cotton bags absolutely will only be used once, however. Sometimes it's even predictable that a cotton bag will only be used once. Ideally, we would get people to use whatever product is best suited for the situation at hand on a quality-environmental impact pareto front. There is no catch all that's going to be the best solution in every situation. We shouldn't give out plastic bags like their going out of style, but I'm also not sure we should eliminate them completely.

> I think that is where we might disagree the most. Quality cannot be measured, it can only be known. I hate that this reads as touchy-feely, but I don't know a better way to put it. Once you accept that quality cannot be measured in numbers, it is liberating. Then it allows you to argue in a different paradigm; How your neighborhood "feels" because there's no plastic bags stuck in roadside shrubbery, the peace of mind knowing that your drinking water doesn't have microplastics in it, ... that's genuinely immeasurable. Yet it is the stuff that makes up quality of life. People can be convinced of those qualities, and their value, _without_ quantifying them.

Yes, I was trying to say that quality is hard to measure by calling it an ill-defined metric. You are still trying to maximise it, even if you cannot measure it. I get that, I'm with you most of the way, but I just don't think you can only look at quality. We could be creating the most high quality neighbourhood at the cost of increasing entropy outside of it. Nothing comes for free.

I'm willing to and I mostly do bring my own bags to the grocery store. Sometimes I forget. Let's say I forget twice a year and opt to buy paper bags in those cases. We have just learned "[...] to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag, a paper bag would have to be used forty-three times [...]". Depending on how often I go grocery shopping a year, I have now already come quite close to nullifying any positive effect of bringing my own bag compared to buying plastic bags every single time. And we haven't even considered the environmental impact of the bags I remember to bring with me most of the time.

You raise an interesting point, but isn't this just moving to another extreme? It seems like both quality and efficiency have their place, we are probably putting too much emphasis on efficiency at the moment, but completely focusing on quality and disregarding efficiency isn't the solution either. It's maximising a single (ill-defined) metric as well, no?

If we stick with the plastic vs cotton bag example, we are considering two factors: some aggregate of environmental impact metrics e and the number of times we use the bag n. If n=1, would you still favor the cotton bag just because it is higher quality? Isn't it also mostly trash in this case? What is trash? I'd argue it's a product that we cannot or do not squeeze any additional utility out of. How about n=10? n=20?

Yes, I would say it's a feature, bot a bug. There was a brief phase when social networks first came about when everyone was fine just putting their entire life on display. Then everyone realized that privacy is kind of nice. You don't want all your stuff out there long-term easily findable and for everyone to see. You don't need absolute privacy either. You have no problem talking about things with your friends in public, even though strangers might eavesdrop. The same holds on discord. Anyone could listen in on your conversations, but it's unlikely enough that it doesn't really matter.

I would argue a common scenario in a German city is the following: You live in an appartment building without a garage and your workplace is closeby, i.e. you do not take your car to work. You use the car to visit family on the weekend, appointments out of town, etc.

You can get by without curbside charging in this scenario, but it sounds like a huge annoyance.

I feel like search still has its place. New information is being generated all the time. I want to be able to access it without having to retrain my LLM. It's also easier to validate that my search results are real. With LLMs, you never know if the answers are hallucinated or real. Where LLMs really shine is in understanding what I actually want. Where search still gives me many irrelevant answers, LLMs just get my question. Combining the two in some way might just get us the best of both worlds.

Ah okay, that's a different thing. Coming from an academic context, a literature review is something you spend months on for me.

> conducting literature reviews

I get where this is coming from, but as someone who recently did an extensive systematic literature review: you benefit from doing the work, not from getting an automatic summary. It's the little details you keep stumbling upon, that make you think "Wait a second!", that are really important. You miss them the first 100 times you come across them, but by the 101st time, you have learned something.

Is there much evolutionary pressure for a longer lifespan? As long as you have offspring and live long enough to raise them, there may not be much pressure to increase lifespan.

I think people underestimate how hard it is to evaluate the validity of ideas. Most people think they are open to new ideas, but actually have a pre-configured bias system that automatically accepts or rejects any incoming ideas. If you are actually willing to entertain new ideas, you have to run with something for a while while you figure out if it makes sense or not. You have to suspend parts of your existing belief system and reexamine assumptions you have made before. You will probably change your conclusion a couple of times in the process.

Dismissing conspiracy theories is the safe thing to do. It also does not require any effort, intelligence or insight on your part. I admire people who are willing to actually engage with ideas like that, even though it does not seem feasible everywhere all the time.

> Skipping breakfast is found to be slightly more beneficial than skipping dinner

Beneficial in what way?

A couple of quotes from the article you linked: "In contrast, higher postprandial insulin concentrations and increased fat oxidation with breakfast skipping suggest the development of metabolic inflexibility in response to prolonged fasting that may in the long term lead to low-grade inflammation and impaired glucose homeostasis"

"Increased fat oxidation, despite higher postprandial insulin concentrations with breakfast skipping, suggests the development of metabolic inflexibility in response to prolonged fasting that may increase metabolic risk over time."

"Altogether, the present results support the association between breakfast skipping and disturbed glucose homeostasis, which is not explained by a positive energy balance."

This isn't exactly my domain of expertise, but it does not sound all that beneficial to me. Of course, something can be beneficial in one way and problematic in another. Further, I would caution against selectively reading a single article.

I'd be very careful with this kind of reasoning. We just do not know the insides of others peoples heads. How can you rule out that there are differences between peoples appetites?

Personally, I eat when I am hungry. My body typically generates hunger signals around the times I routinely eat. At other times I'm usually not hungry. Sometimes, I'll eat just for taste, but that is rare. I've had periods of time where I was trying to gain weight for fitness reasons and it was a real struggle. My natural state is to be skinny and it's quite hard for me to deviate from that. There a plenty of people like me and there are also plenty of people who tend to be overweight unless they actively fight it.

Clearly there are differences. There are extremes and their is a continuum between those extremes. You can exert some amount of willpower to change your position on the continuum, but the closer to the extremes you are, the harder it will be to arrive at a "normal" position.

And this is just inherent feelings of appetite. Some people may additionally be subconsciously eating to fill some kind of emotional hole or trauma. There is a lot going on and I wouldn't want to be too quick to judge.

I'm not in the US, but from what it sounds like, the situation isn't much different where I live.

A surprising amount of overhead goes to employees in accounting who perform some black magic so that everyone on staff is payed by some combination of projects. Whether someone actually works on said projects is irrelevant of course.

I think it's not surprising that conferences have to perform some selection. You need the right amount of participants and talks. If a high rejection rate achieves the right amount, it is hard to argue against it.

But why are publications tied to conference attendance anyways? Sure, there also journals, but submitting to a journal tends to be an especially slow process. If you are in a fast-paced field, submitting to a journal is a dangerous game.

Why can we not just upload our papers to something like arxiv and then give people the option to vote on papers analogous to reddit submissions, so that promising stuff organically rises to the top. That way it would at least be based on the opinions of a sizable number of judges, not just three preselected peers.

Oh no, but what about peer review. What about it? Is it difficult to get past peer review at a top conference? Yes. Is it difficult to get past peer review in general? No. You can publish anything you want already, you will just have to jump through senseless hoops to do it. Why not skip the hoops and just upload it somewhere? We can still have journals and conferences that select high quality material from the uploaded papers and it will be an honour to be featured in one of those. You can still use features at conferences and journals as a bad metric to judge the quality of researchers, but the actual publishing will be decoupled from these institutions.

Academic researchers who make it to a tenure track position and stick with it for the rest of their career spend the majority of their career in tenure or in PhD. Most do not make it this far because there are fewer positions than applicants.

I don't think it is an isolated incident. Once something has become "known" among the public and the medical profession, it seems quite difficult to update it. Another example is the dietary cholesterol issue.

The human body is incredibly complex and we have quite limited tools to study it, so we are bound to arrive at wrong conclusions. That by itself is to be expected, but what does really worry me is this missing knowledge updating mechanism. It can take decades for quite a substantial update on what we thought we knew to trickle down from academia to practicing medical professionals.

At this point, if you have any kind of scientific literacy, it might be a good idea to verify whatever your doctor claims.

Do you know any good places that would be suited to this topic?

I have always found the vast majority of recommendation engines to be completely underwhelming. There is one exception: Spotify. It doesn't seem to work for everybody, but personally, I get insanely good recommendations from Spotify to the point that it has become my main way of discovering new music (and discovering new music is very important to me).

What is the difference? On the surface, it doesn't seem like music recommendation should be a very different problem from movie recommendation.

Unrelated to this: I find the comparison between Netflix and Spotify interesting in general. Why do I get (pretty much) all the music there is on Spotify, but I cannot subscribe to a movie / tv streaming service that lets me access all the content for a flat fee? As a consumer, I would much rather have the choice between three well polished streaming platforms that all offer the same content compared to the current situation where you have a fractured catalogue on platforms of wildly varying technical quality (looking at you, Amazon..).

For example solving specific problems in a data-driven way when there is no data and there never will be any data.

Developing all sorts of platforms that will theoretically benefit the public / researchers / whoever, but in actuality will never be used by anyone and in fact will be shut down as soon as the corresponding project ends.

Those are the two generic examples I can think of, for everything else I'd have to give too much context.

The lack of almost any permanent positions aside from full professorships in the German research landscape is truly ridiculous. What does that get you? A whole bunch of inexperienced PhD students with one professor at the top who cannot possibly find the time to adequately supervise them all / steer the research in useful directions.

A PhD can mean a lot of different things. Personally, I'm employed as a research associate while doing a PhD, which in theory means I should do the PhD as part of my job. In practice, I do not get to do any actual research during the job and the PhD is relegated to weekends.

What I find curious: I get paid to do lots of things which are clearly complete nonsense, but the funding comes with the requirement that these specific nonsensical things must be done. I could do lots of useful things, but I do not get paid for those.

I'm far enough into the process that I've decided to just collect the stupid credential before I move on. Which is funny because I did not get into this for the credentials, but dropping out at this point would just look weird on my CV.

I have a feeling whatever metric you define will just create different problems. The high emphasis on metrics itself is the problem, because quantifying someone's research quality is not at all trivial.

To your other point: I get what you mean, and I don't even disagree, but I could also make the exact opposite point. Papers today often are these big, overly structured manuscripts that actually cointain a multitude of ideas so that it can become hard to see what exactly the point of the paper is. In the past, papers often were much more atomic. They presented one idea with some relevant context. There was no need to prove you had surveyed the entire field just to present an idea. No useless context, more relevance, more focus.

Since you specifically mention Germany: professors are incredibly well paid in Germany and also enjoy high social status. Of course, a lot of them don't do any science, they are the CEO equivalent of an institute.

Salaries for PhDs and PostDocs are a different story of course. They are alright in theory, but often you can only get a part time job, which in reality means a > full time job with a part time salary.

> because money doesn’t buy science, money buys technology; we actually don’t have enough scientists on whom to spend the money.

I can only speak from personal experience and observations in my environment, but to me this statement sound like a dark, cynical joke.

There is plenty of scientists who would love to work on interesting things, are hired as scientists, but once they are hired, no one actually lets them work on scientific problems.

I'm not sure how much architects can do. White gets dirty quite easily and is prone to yellowing from UV light.

With sardines you are of course introducing the mercury issue.

Vitamin D dosage is a surprisingly controversial topic, with many voices claiming the recommended dose is much too low and you are very unlikely to overdose if you are not taking completely unreasonable amounts of it.