Regular announcements: did you know you can hire me for life coaching and general consulting? You can also buy my novella Her Voice Is A Backwards Record wherever fine ebooks are sold (except Google Books).
Conservatives are more skeptical of aid and USAID, but also play a key role in the coalition sustaining it. Saying conservatives killed foreign aid is post hoc rationalization. In reality is was conspiracy-minded cranks with personal vendettas and weird ideological bents. https://niawag.substack.com/p/conservatives-didnt-kill-foreign
>"USAID is unpopular among conservatives because it spread pro-LGBT messaging. I think pro-aid-reform people should have reached out proactively to conservatives who have these concerns. We could validate the concerns (DEI musicals in Ireland are indeed a dumb thing to spend money on) and provide a framework for criticizing them that doesn’t mean defunding important global health aid."
From my perspective that is just one example of "sub-partisan political activity" that USAID seemed to be funding. Some of what I had heard about, and been outraged about, was related to pushing gun control (apparently in foreign countries but in a way that would be expected to "spill over" to the USA, or in a way that would provide for a slush fund that would support a program in the USA). The other side of this is cases where after USAID was suddenly cut, various domestic political left-ish wing groups suddenly seemed to have funding problems for unclear reasons.
So basically I really want the lifesaving food / water / medicine stuff to come back (maybe with better auditing against slushfundery and patronage networks) but I really want it to be restricted to either not include this ideological stuff or, well, to give my side and equal cut of it.
(this is another thing that faces the issue where the 2A on establishment of religion starts to look awkward when there are many not technically religious ideologies around.)
I have to make the same comment about the Belgium bit-flip thing as when Scott posted it. It looks like this was a bit-flip error. But bit-flip errors are not necessarily, and I think not even primarily, due to cosmic rays! People have learned this association of "bit-flip error => cosmic ray" but it's not true! Whenever there's a report on a bit-flip error people keep reporting it as being caused by a cosmic ray but I do not think that is an accurate way of reporting such things!
It is astonishing to me that people actually worry about malaria net fishing.
Seriously, otherwise intelligent people are saying that we need to worry about letting Africans get ahold of nets. Literal stone age technology! Whatever you think of gun control, net control is obviously insane.
As I scientist, I found the peer review blog post to be pretty bad. He cites data showing that peer review did not seem to have an effect on the long term decline of research productivity due to ideas getting harder to find. Okay, doesn't that also show that the supposed productivity harms of peer review are being overrated here?
As evidence that peer review "doesn't work", he cites examples of bad work getting through, and a study saying that peer review only caught "30% of major flaws". That's not proof it doesn't work, that's proof it works, but only partially. Just because an intervention isn't 100% effective, doesn't mean it's not a good idea! It's like saying "we put up a wall and the invaders still got through! I guess we should tear down the wall". I think a science in which every paper had 30% more major flaws in it could be substantially worse in a significant way.
His "alternative" for peer review is that he wrote a blog post about a bunch of mechanical turk polls he did, and then a bunch of people commented on it. Well, that's all well and good for his article on a very accessible subject with extremely simple methodology, but in my cases I need reassurances that Anders et al used the right computational quantum chemistry method for the calculation of the dielectric function of Aluminum nitride, and I don't exactly trust the blogosphere to be very helpful on this front. Not every potential paper is going to go viral on social media!
The Slopworld 2035 thing keeps reminding me of a thought I keep having: it's "The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand" all over again, except this time the not very bright guys are LLMs.
Usaid shouldn't fund lgbt projects seems like you are infantilising conservatives. If they don't like some program it is legit that.stop funding the musicals or whatever. Saying it is liberals fault for conservatives failure here is part of an overall pattern where the country treats conservatives as ignorant toddlers who of course couldn't have known better
Conservatives are more skeptical of aid and USAID, but also play a key role in the coalition sustaining it. Saying conservatives killed foreign aid is post hoc rationalization. In reality is was conspiracy-minded cranks with personal vendettas and weird ideological bents. https://niawag.substack.com/p/conservatives-didnt-kill-foreign
Regarding:
>"USAID is unpopular among conservatives because it spread pro-LGBT messaging. I think pro-aid-reform people should have reached out proactively to conservatives who have these concerns. We could validate the concerns (DEI musicals in Ireland are indeed a dumb thing to spend money on) and provide a framework for criticizing them that doesn’t mean defunding important global health aid."
From my perspective that is just one example of "sub-partisan political activity" that USAID seemed to be funding. Some of what I had heard about, and been outraged about, was related to pushing gun control (apparently in foreign countries but in a way that would be expected to "spill over" to the USA, or in a way that would provide for a slush fund that would support a program in the USA). The other side of this is cases where after USAID was suddenly cut, various domestic political left-ish wing groups suddenly seemed to have funding problems for unclear reasons.
So basically I really want the lifesaving food / water / medicine stuff to come back (maybe with better auditing against slushfundery and patronage networks) but I really want it to be restricted to either not include this ideological stuff or, well, to give my side and equal cut of it.
(this is another thing that faces the issue where the 2A on establishment of religion starts to look awkward when there are many not technically religious ideologies around.)
> (Featuring a cameo from occasional Thing of Things reader Samuel Cottrell. Hi, Sammy!)
Hi Ozy!!!
I have to make the same comment about the Belgium bit-flip thing as when Scott posted it. It looks like this was a bit-flip error. But bit-flip errors are not necessarily, and I think not even primarily, due to cosmic rays! People have learned this association of "bit-flip error => cosmic ray" but it's not true! Whenever there's a report on a bit-flip error people keep reporting it as being caused by a cosmic ray but I do not think that is an accurate way of reporting such things!
->"a nuclear power plant operator as an earning-to-give career. Many places only require a high-school degree."
Simpsons did it!
It is astonishing to me that people actually worry about malaria net fishing.
Seriously, otherwise intelligent people are saying that we need to worry about letting Africans get ahold of nets. Literal stone age technology! Whatever you think of gun control, net control is obviously insane.
As I scientist, I found the peer review blog post to be pretty bad. He cites data showing that peer review did not seem to have an effect on the long term decline of research productivity due to ideas getting harder to find. Okay, doesn't that also show that the supposed productivity harms of peer review are being overrated here?
As evidence that peer review "doesn't work", he cites examples of bad work getting through, and a study saying that peer review only caught "30% of major flaws". That's not proof it doesn't work, that's proof it works, but only partially. Just because an intervention isn't 100% effective, doesn't mean it's not a good idea! It's like saying "we put up a wall and the invaders still got through! I guess we should tear down the wall". I think a science in which every paper had 30% more major flaws in it could be substantially worse in a significant way.
His "alternative" for peer review is that he wrote a blog post about a bunch of mechanical turk polls he did, and then a bunch of people commented on it. Well, that's all well and good for his article on a very accessible subject with extremely simple methodology, but in my cases I need reassurances that Anders et al used the right computational quantum chemistry method for the calculation of the dielectric function of Aluminum nitride, and I don't exactly trust the blogosphere to be very helpful on this front. Not every potential paper is going to go viral on social media!
Peer review is overrated as a guard against bullshit, and could be improved a lot, but overall it's fine, and the majority of researchers are satisfied with the system: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0189311&type=printable
The first item under American Democracy reminds me of the old Slate Star Codex post 'sacred principles as exhaustible resources'
The Slopworld 2035 thing keeps reminding me of a thought I keep having: it's "The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand" all over again, except this time the not very bright guys are LLMs.
Should I be embarrassed that I didn't realize the Sam Kriss piece in Asterisk magazine was fiction when I first read it?
Usaid shouldn't fund lgbt projects seems like you are infantilising conservatives. If they don't like some program it is legit that.stop funding the musicals or whatever. Saying it is liberals fault for conservatives failure here is part of an overall pattern where the country treats conservatives as ignorant toddlers who of course couldn't have known better
I think your description of the Slopworld essay got cut off in the middle of a sentence.