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Author Topic: Impending Doom Thread  (Read 7917 times)

wierd

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #45 on: October 25, 2017, 02:14:11 am »

Remember Trekkin, as an "in circulation" academic, who has an institution willing to pay for wide access to publications (I would have to pay any place from 30$ to 200$ per article, depending on the article, and publishing journal, with little more than the abstract to attempt to derive a value judgment from. I cannot afford that), you have more ready access to information than I do.  If you think there is a bad signal to noise ratio in academics, just try the internet at large, where I have to wade through miles of people talking about being probed by aliens, and other dreck. Getting good data, where the majority of discussion is geared toward people who would much rather be reading about Jay-Lo's butt, and what rapper she is making babies with this week, is vastly more difficult than you seem to be implying.

Also remember, that what is apparent (or even obvious) to yourself, may not be to others.  If I may take you down a bit of scientific history, I would remind you about the heated debates about "phlogiston" in the 1700s. There was no direct evidence for this substance, its basis for hypothesis was mostly based on prior mostly disqualified theory, and was hotly debated in the chemistry circles even while very compelling evidence identifying oxygen was being made available. The kind of argument you just made condemns people for arguing (in good faith, as they honestly were either instructed that way, or had seen observations that supported the claim) that phlogiston was real, and going visceral on their asses, rather than politely offering them the 'recent' work of Scheele or Priestly, and asking them to take a look.  I understand that the inside of academia is very cut-throat, and unpleasant, with all kinds of rivalry and bitterness. Not being under any obligation or pressure to be so pedantic and vindictive, with no real skin in that game, I have the luxury of not being ruined for being publicly wrong. I dont believe in being afraid of being wrong, which seems to be what makes you so crazy-- Much like the people who postulated 'phlogiston' were wrong, the willingness to be corrected, and to accept better data in the end is what drives the advancement of mankind. It is important to remember, that no matter how well educated you are, somebody is always BETTER educated, and there are things you quantitatively either DO NOT KNOW, or have learned that ARE DEAD WRONG. Being smarmy, and rude to these people instead of sympathetic and helpful, is not going to win you any brownie points in the greater world of mankind.

I would argue that the reason why small mistakes that can be caught after the fact ruin careers is because of the cut-throat nature of academia, where there are 500 people grappling for 5 person's worth of grant, and a public with a jaundiced eye that is totally blind to this. (Assuming that the process was followed well, research is not pure waste even with such a mistake. Valuable data can still be obtained after correcting for the error.)  People go in wanting to know the truth, and are either expelled for not being bastardly enough, prolific enough, or pedantic enough, and in the end you have a den of vipers doing the work. Academia does not seem to care that it has become a den of vipers, because the vipers are very good at their work-- but remember that being a viper is not explicitly a requirement for being able to follow good process, and thus do good work. It is just a requirement to getting and retaining grants and funding. Again, I dont need grant funding, so I am not compelled to be a viper, or to consort with vipers. I am in this for one things and one thing only, and that is to get to the truth. If I am wrong, and somebody can give me a more truthful bit of information, I will greedily accept it.  However, there is enough horseshit out there that I wont take 'appeal to authority' over qualified argument. I need more than just your angry screaming, I need to see where your position derives from. (EG, does it come from data, or from opinion.)



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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #46 on: October 25, 2017, 02:31:39 am »

I think he's kind of a blowhard, and his position doesn't make any sense. There are better and worse sources, but it's nowhere near reasonable to expect someone to go down to primary sources (let alone raw data) every single time.  I daresay such a position is self defeating and untruthful, and a close cousin of some infamous creationist pundit points.

As for accesing academical data in general, nowadays it's ridiculously simple for many articles, if legally gray.  There have been even journal editorials about it
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone
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wierd

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #47 on: October 25, 2017, 02:35:03 am »

CP--- I mentioned such "Curation" earlier. :P  Specifically lamplit it in fact.  However, these collections are not comprehensive. Important papers cannot be found in them.
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Reelya

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #48 on: October 25, 2017, 02:36:50 am »

People who aren't trained to interpret raw data shouldn't be drawing any conclusions from raw data. It's the kind of dumb shit climate change deniers do: "look at the data!"

You look at a bunch of expert opinion to see how they've interpreted the data and weight your opinion off that. See the sulfuric acid stuff I posted in my previous post. given that many college chemistry departments are saying the same thing then I'd be inclined to go with that, and not Trekkin's opinion that it's bullshit based on that he read one paper or something.

I have a organo-chemist who an expert in onions being cited as support. Is Trekkin an organo-chemist / onion specialist? It's the same as how we discount what irrelevant scientists think about climate change. If they're not in an Earth or Climate related science field their opinion is worth jack shit. "sciency guy" doesn't mean that someone automatically has a reasonable opinion on specialities outside their own field.
« Last Edit: October 25, 2017, 02:48:18 am by Reelya »
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martinuzz

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #49 on: October 25, 2017, 02:39:00 am »

Dutch government has been working on making all scientific publications mandatory open access for a while now, so the 99% of population that can't pay 100s of euros to access snobby science journals and research papers can access them to educate themselves.

http://www.nature.com/news/dutch-lead-european-push-to-flip-journals-to-open-access-1.19111
« Last Edit: October 25, 2017, 02:45:51 am by martinuzz »
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wierd

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #50 on: October 25, 2017, 02:43:11 am »

The solution to that is remedial education on statistics, and information processing.  If you care enough about a subject to be angry and vocal, you care enough about it to want to be correct in your assertions, by and large.  Granted, not everyone wants to improve themselves by gaining skills they lack, or improving on skills they find difficult. We are also talking about a situation where there is a big public refrain of "Math is hard!! Statistics is hard!! I can't do it!!, It has no bearing on every day life!!"

Never mind that the reason they are being angry and vocal about the topic, is because it very much impacts and has bearing on every day life-- and despite the terrible ways in which math is taught these days, math really is not that difficult to grasp. (the basics of it are taught to little kids all the time.)

Re: Onions

I am not an organic chemist, but as far as I know, the substances of interest found in onions are amino acid sulfoxides.  These are most certainly not sulfuric acid. However, the onion also contains several enzymes that break these compounds down into a wide assortment of other sulfur bearing compounds. None of which are sulfuric acid however. Via hydrolysis in a saline solution, such as in one's eyes (from exposure to trace gas concentrations of allicin, one of the sulfur bearing products produced from the previously mentioned enzyme reactions, and the major component of the irritating odor of fresh cut onion), it is possible that very trace amounts of SO4 groups could be produced, but these would be an academically small quantity, with very low production rate. (You would get more SO4 from putting rock sulfur in distilled water and shaking it vigorously.)

This would put the functional truth someplace between Trekkin, ("Onions do not contain sulfuric acid!", which is quite true), and the sources Reelya cites, which state that this acid is detected in human tears after exposure to onion vapors. The devil is in the details.  Arguing past each other is not useful.  The onion itself does not produce this acid, nor are any of the products released from the onion, this acid. This acid may however form in very minute quantities in the tears of those exposed to allicin gas, via a very weak hydrolysis reaction. More than likely, the irritation is from the allicin itself, and not from this minute, basically inconsequential fraction of acid produced.


« Last Edit: October 25, 2017, 03:03:32 am by wierd »
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #51 on: October 25, 2017, 04:30:11 am »

CP--- I mentioned such "Curation" earlier. :P  Specifically lamplit it in fact.  However, these collections are not comprehensive. Important papers cannot be found in them.

I kind of disagree. I've used scihub to find key stuff in the past.
Of course, its possible the stuff I look for is unusually overrepresentated in their database
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Arx

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #52 on: October 25, 2017, 05:47:00 am »

I happen to agree with Trekkin, largely because it's easy to fall into a trap of a sort of religious devotion to intellectualism. That tends to lead one to take an interest in a subject, do research on it, choose a position based on your research, and then kind of fossilize in that position because any time someone disagrees, you feel safe in ignoring them because you're confident in your research - which is of course counter to the whole idea.

I've done it to myself many times.
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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #53 on: October 25, 2017, 04:36:37 pm »

And incidentally, weird, if I have a chip on my shoulder, folks like you blatantly ignoring mathematical reality because you want to sound intellectual helped put it there. You can be wrong about more stuff faster than I can ever hope to correct.
I once again feel the need to chip in that, despite being someone who enjoys shit like reading dry as fuck hep-th or astro shit on arXiv, who enjoys performing experiments and testing his own knowledge, and much prefers an honest state of doubt than one of unwarranted confidence... lay off him for that.

If I looked through my backyard telescope at the general area of the moon where I expected Apollo 15 to be located and saw the Hadley Rille my first thought would be "goddamn is that the rover tracks?" as I have only a functional background in optics and thus wouldn't immediately see why that is impossible like I do now after seeing the math.
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Trekkin

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #54 on: October 25, 2017, 06:22:19 pm »

Who am I to believe here if I'm not a chemist? Some random forumite, or a bunch of college chemistry departments and government advisories? Pretty much all of these sources are being very specific and consistent with how and when the sulfuric acid is being formed. And I haven't come across a single expert jumping up to point out that all these sources are wrong.

Actually, Reelya, the thesis of my whole argument from the beginning of this thread is that you should believe none of them solely on the basis of who they are. Experts can be wrong, although they really shouldn't be, and they can also simplify things for public consumption in ways not reflective of their scientific opinions. What you should do -- the only thing you should ever do if you want an accurate idea of something -- is to look at what's been published and peer-reviewed and how it accords with other observations. If it matters for your argument, you should check it. For why onions don't make you cry via sulfuric acid, we can actually do that fairly completely, and I've tried to do that for you below(EDIT: and then given up, because I found something funnier.). For whether we're doomed as a result of climate change, we can't do that, in part because not all the answers you would want are actually available to you, so any attempt at doing so is eventually going to resolve into arguments from authority that we all agree shouldn't happen, at least in part because it's a much larger and more speculative problem. At some point long before you'd be satisfied, the process of figuring out how well-founded any given position on the problem could be is going to hit a paywall and stop. That is, as I said wayyy upthread, really unfortunate, doubly so because those paywalls are there for more than arbitrary reasons.

I'm not asking you to believe me. I'm asking you to believe that you shouldn't believe me or anyone else without checking, and in this particular case that checking isn't going to be possible to the degree you'd want. Which sucks. What fills in the vacuum doesn't help anyone, which also sucks.

Remember Trekkin, as an "in circulation" academic, who has an institution willing to pay for wide access to publications (I would have to pay any place from 30$ to 200$ per article, depending on the article, and publishing journal, with little more than the abstract to attempt to derive a value judgment from. I cannot afford that), you have more ready access to information than I do.  If you think there is a bad signal to noise ratio in academics, just try the internet at large, where I have to wade through miles of people talking about being probed by aliens, and other dreck. Getting good data, where the majority of discussion is geared toward people who would much rather be reading about Jay-Lo's butt, and what rapper she is making babies with this week, is vastly more difficult than you seem to be implying.

I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's both doable and necessary -- and actually, it's the public signal-to-noise ratio I'm more worried about. And I'm glad you won't take an appeal to authority. That's good, and you shouldn't -- including your own authority, which is even more appealing than someone else's for reasons Arx has mentioned. But bear this in mind: neither your demands nor your lack of fear of being wrong nor your constant ad hominem attacks on academia, the public, journal editors or anyone else have any bearing on how right you are. How well your arguments either accord with or disprove currently accepted theory has bearing on how right you are, and it's doable, if difficult, to improve that. Failing that, just qualify what you're claiming by stating how well you know what you're talking about. Cite your sources, provide the basis for your arguments, that kind of thing. Provide the kind of evidence you demand of others.

Regarding the onion thing: (EDIT: justifying the evaporation rate assumptions was annoying and unnecessary) Well, as you can read here (https://books.google.com/books?id=4msoDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA14-IA12&lpg=PA14-IA12&dq=TRPV1+lachrymatory&source=bl&ots=qA-G2ZQhG9&sig=63g7I52yqDpbk3hkahzAR95aOHo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj327vZ8ozXAhVKJCYKHTeCDecQ6AEILTAB#v=onepage&q=TRPV1%20lachrymatory&f=false), onion LF, which is thiopropanal s-oxide, activates TRPA1 and TRPV, which leads to the commonly known tear response. I'm going to stop there and point you toward the author of that book, one Eric Block, with whom you might be familiar, Reelya.

Eric Block is a research chemist and his areas of expertise are listed as:
Quote
Chemistry of olfaction -- the sense of smell
Allium chemistry (organosulfur and organoselenium chemistry of garlic, onion, and other genus Allium plants)   
    Natural products chemistry including isolation, characterization and total synthesis
    Organosulfur and organoselenium chemistry; bio-organic chemistry
    Organic synthesis
    Organic photochemistry
    Heteroatom and heterocyclic chemistry
    Small ring chemistry
    Chemistry of 1,2-dithiins and other 1,2-dichalcogenins
So I'd assume he knows a thing or two about onion chemistry
Unfortunately the primary literature turns out to be paywalled, but hey, if you want to descend into argument from authority, your authorities are making my argument.

And incidentally, weird, if I have a chip on my shoulder, folks like you blatantly ignoring mathematical reality because you want to sound intellectual helped put it there. You can be wrong about more stuff faster than I can ever hope to correct.
I once again feel the need to chip in that, despite being someone who enjoys shit like reading dry as fuck hep-th or astro shit on arXiv, who enjoys performing experiments and testing his own knowledge, and much prefers an honest state of doubt than one of unwarranted confidence... lay off him for that.

If I looked through my backyard telescope at the general area of the moon where I expected Apollo 15 to be located and saw the Hadley Rille my first thought would be "goddamn is that the rover tracks?" as I have only a functional background in optics and thus wouldn't immediately see why that is impossible like I do now after seeing the math.

And what happens when the guy weird brought around learns its impossible and says "aha! the evidence is false!" and becomes an even more intractable moon landing hoaxer?
« Last Edit: October 25, 2017, 09:05:07 pm by Trekkin »
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Max™

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #55 on: October 25, 2017, 08:38:05 pm »

The most difficult lesson I ever learned: you can not disprove a cozy belief with facts, no matter how uncomfortably hard they may be.

It's a pursuit of knowledge because you have to get up and go after it, while erroneous beliefs will fall in your lap all day long if you aren't careful.
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Jimmy

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #56 on: October 26, 2017, 07:49:21 am »

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dustywayfarer

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #57 on: October 31, 2017, 12:47:18 pm »

Thanks for the link, martinuzz.

Some of the comments in this thread have touched on the idea of paywalled academic content, its history, necessity, and lamentability. Mind if I ask a few questions for curiosity's sake? Feel free to be terse; just like not everyone is willing to publicly display their navel, not everyone is willing to share every last opinion that they might have, and I understand. I'm not sure where I stand on many of these, and the online commentary I've read usually doesn't stray very far from stating observations and drawing a somewhat-related, cliche conclusion. I'm not asking you to come up with wild answers just for the sake of originality. I'm mainly asking because I would enjoy reading an in-depth perspective from an actively-employed academic like Trekkin. Forgive me if some of these have already been answered.

1. If you can freely answer in this venue, do you consider steep paywalls to be ethical (your own ethical standards count in this case)? Why or why not?
2. If you have considered alternatives to a steep paywall for academic content, which do you like best?
3. If you have a favorite alternative, is it also the one you consider the most viable for the long-term proliferation and propagation of widely and practically applied scientific information and understanding? Why or why not?
4. If you have any more time, what do you think about piracy of paywalled content? Is it a force that will eventually make the world a better place? A worse place?
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Trekkin

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #58 on: October 31, 2017, 06:40:24 pm »

Well, here goes:

1. "Ethical" means a lot of things to a lot of people. Mostly it's a licence to inflict your opinions of other people on them at length by considering them axiomatically correct. It's a human sort of problem, the kind people without any solutions to real problems love to whinge about. So, in that spirit, I think it may be best to point out why paywalls are necessary and leave the ethics to people for whom that sort of problem is important.

   Paywalls exist first and foremost out of economic necessity. As long as servers and printing and bandwidth all cost money and curating the peer review process demands specialized expertise, someone has to pay journals to exist so they can pay their employees and running costs. Now, you can say government should do that, because of course "they" should and science should be free to everyone, but do bear in mind that what government funds, politicians try to control. That's how you get things like Lysenkoism: you let politicians think that they can buy their own facts in lieu of real ones, instead of in addition to them. The current drive to maximize impact factor is at least biased towards useful papers rather than convenient ones. So, if not government/"them", we can either ask scientists to pay to get their research out or we can ask industry and academia to pay to read it. The latter two groups have much bigger and more suitably segmented budgets than the former; publication fees still exist, but at least they aren't several thousands of dollars for low-tier journals like open-access can be. In that sense, then, paywalls are, to my mind, the least bad option to keep journals running, because they foist the economically necessary costs on people who are at least biased towards genuinely useful results and able to pay without sacrificing research capacity.

But there's another reason paywalls are useful: they make it harder to promulgate plausible misinformation. People have an inherent drive to make sense of their world, to see patterns and try to place individual observations into a larger context. They're much less driven to validate the results of their curiosity, in part because it's a long, boring process that might not seem as necessary as the million other demands on their time, so people generally stop being curious when they have an answer that makes sense to them. That gap spews forth an endless assortment of homeopaths and crystal healers and fortune tellers and mediums and Biblical literalists and other superficially plausible alternatives to reality, many of which are more readily believed because they're simple and appealing and nice. Open the archives and let the public read whatever they like, and you also invite these people to quote-mine and misinterpret data to suit their ends; further, you economically incentivize them to do so, in order to dazzle with spurious references anyone they can't convince with appealing nonsense. I'm not saying the public is too dumb or too credulous to respond with their own research; I'm saying they literally do not have the time to sort through the resulting deluge of lunacy because they have jobs and demands on their time. There's a level of plausible nonsense you'll believe, same as anyone, and there's a whole lot of people with a financial interest in finding it and selling it to you who will read more literature than you have time for in pursuit of something easier to claim than it is to disprove.

And that brings me to my third and snobbiest point: pick a random member of the public, drop a paper in their lap, and the understanding they reach of its contents will probably be materially wrong. They're written in what is, for all intents and purposes, a dialect, one as different from its root language as American is from British. This is why you get people dismissing evolution as "only a theory" or trying to claim that a p-value < 0.05 is infinitely probative of whatever they want to believe. When you add in the subtle statistics we do and the way we code things, there's a lot of room for even honest error -- and you can see those errors being made everywhere, even when the training to avoid making them is freely available, because it's just not worth it even for self-proclaimed intellectuals to acquire the bare minimum level of understanding required to parse data correctly. I'm not saying that's a bad choice to make. It's not; learning things you can't use is a luxury, and I'd no more expect everyone to understand science than I would expect them all to learn how to responsibly handle radioactive materials or write in cuneiform. It's just not worth it for a lot of people, but it does mean that they're not going to reliably be any better-informed for having scientific papers available, not least because there's a huge amount of text to sort through. We don't spend years in college and graduate school and postdoctoral fellowships and so forth for nothing; we're acquiring a specialized skillset for a specialized task, and assimilating new and complex data in a way that lets us draw useful, falsifiable, relevant conclusions is part of that skillset. It's an easy part to think you have, too, which is part of why people don't believe how much checking we do.

So in other words, yes, I think it's generally in line with what we're supposed to be doing to restrict access to information the public hasn't been trained to use properly, and I also think it's ethical to pay journals out of the deepest (functional) pockets we can find in the process. Paywalls do both; they help keep the information out of the hands of people who are more driven to misuse it than their audiences are to understand it and they keep peer review properly incentivized, albeit in a crude way. None of this means the public is stupid or easily duped. It just means that people do what they're paid to do, and right now that doesn't lead people to do things with free scientific data that are, on balance, in line with our obligation to educate the public.

2. I don't like any of the ones I've seen in isolation. There are fixes, but they're comprehensive ones.

3. N/A. I don't want scientific knowledge proliferated without proper safeguards in place against its misunderstanding and misuse, and the public has little incentive to take advantage of those as it currently stand.

4. Oh, definitely worse. Pirates zero in on whatever papers appeal to them, rip them away from their proper context and plaster them where people have no hope of finding that context. Regardless of how we release data, it must be controlled, and with the background at the very least available. Doing it haphazardly helps no one.

One final point that should probably be made: Your questions suggest you're thinking about this problem in human terms, kind of like how weird has leapt from villain to villain in this thread to explain why he's been unjustly denied something to which he feels entitled. That skips a step. Before we ask what is "ethical", we should ask what is necessary and possible and maximally efficacious, and what must be changed to change those assumptions and the resultant possibility space. People spill mountains of ink telling themselves elaborate stories about how much richer and more popular and better liked they and people like them should be if only the world were just, all the free things they deserve, and what everyone else should be doing to make it so. Ask first what is and what can be, and why. Too often people come at problems like this ethically, become convinced their way is perfect, and spend their time grousing about how evil everyone else is. That's not helpful.

I don't like paywalls as a concept, but I do acknowledge that the conditions that make them beneficial are tied into too many things for it to be worthwhile to cry out against paywalls alone. We can't just switch them off at will. We didn't switch them on at will, but rather at need. It may help, as you form your opinions of this sort of thing, to keep those dependencies in mind.
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wierd

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #59 on: October 31, 2017, 07:31:03 pm »

Nice ad hominem there Trekkin. :P

For a better explanation of my view, i will just give it, so you dont have to confabulate one.

In terms of curation, the costs of that process have dropped from several dollars per article, to less than a few cents per article. This is especially true when the people reviewing the literature are more often than not, NOT PAID for it.  The services the journals provide are typesetting, spell checking, and general document formatting. (In addition, of course, to being prestigious.) Nearly all of those are fully capable of automated processing today. We are not talking about paying people to set up a lithograph template to print the article anymore. Those days are long gone. The actual source of costs for curation are from storage and bandwidth costs. Granted, with the ever present threat of the removal of network neutrality rules, these costs have the potential to skyrocket due to double dipping from the ISPs involved, the current normative costs are pennies per megabyte. Well within the boundaries of being financed within the reach of the lay public. (There really is no justifiable excuse for charging 200$ for an article. There just isn't Trekkin.)

This brings us to the matter of "Is it better to conceal information from the public, or to educate the public?"  Your view is that lay people are unredeemable, and should be prevented from sullying your precious words with their grubby fingers. This flies in the face of how the information age revolutionized academia, by increasing availability of literature. I am quite sure that you will retort something along the lines of those advances being made by allowing academics better access, and not general people, but that flies in contravention of such things that advanced society, like the patent process, which in exchange for the exclusivity granted by a patent, allows anyone (YES, ANYONE) to view the details of your design.  It also stinks mightily of the arguments at the turn of the century against the promotion of public libraries, where academics feared that the lay people would simply destroy the books instead of reading them.  Such arguments also have trappings of religious scholarship from well before the modern era, such as exclusivity to high ranking clergy or priest castes, because "ordinary people could never understand the sacred like we can!" (Just see how well that worked out for the Jewish faith, after the last temple era ended, and their works were lost.) While it might be useful to getting unwanted opinion and discussion out of your immediate sight, it does a terrible service to the proliferation and protection of knowledge as a whole. In terms of historical records, every time this was done, huge amounts of data was lost due to a curation catastrophe.  The mass replication of open access assures that knowledge has a robust basis to avoid such inadvertent deletion/loss.

Basically, from where I am sitting, you feel it is better to risk permanently losing the vast sum of advanced science we have produced in the past century against loss due to catastrophe, than to allow "uneducated people" to talk about it.  That seems.. rather foolish Trekkin.





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