- Maybe it's time to do a Eurovision style thing for the quality badge. Everyone uploads to Arxiv. Every who's in the field votes on the worthiest papers (not allowed to vote for anyone you actually collaborated with).
Winners get to put a shiny sticker on their papers.
- Who could have guessed that growing up in a Polynesian culture is a better preparation for such a thing than going to an English boarding school..
- Whatever it takes to keep you from leaving your post.
- The value you get from the health care system isn't just from the services they provide when/if you need them.
It's from the system existing and being ready to help you.
We're not talking about widgets, onions, haircuts, or pork bellies here. You can't opt out of the system existing. And you can't opt out of the horrific consequences if the system doesn't exist.
So it's a bit silly to talk about health care like it's something that has a free market.
- My childhood was dominated by the smell of licorice in some places because chocolate was too expensive.
- And then they enroll their patients in the Drug of the Month Club.
- Young people moving out, and those who stay are not inclined to bear children.
- It's true, but it's cold comfort. the amount of reading I can do in a single sitting has declined a lot.
- It's things like having a grating monotone, and having to pause before speaking and willing yourself to adopting the right tone for your state of mind and the effect you want to have on your audience. Every. Time. You. Speak.
It's like being an actor, except the whole world is your stage, and you have to be conscious of your character, lines, and motivation, the entire time you're awake.
- Discord servers are half of a good counterexample, since people try to avoid the extreme end of network effects and want their chat partners pre-screened.
But... it's all on Discord, not IRC or jabber or anything.
- Until now, once you got a grant, you could count on it.
Now? One of your grad students says something a little too on the nose on Bsky, and your lab gets shut down.
- This ends science in the United States.
You can't really enroll graduate students for a 5 year PHD project if their funding can be pulled at a moment's notice like this.
- There are many contexts where doing an experiment with proper controls is literally a crime against humanity.
Which means, yes, that there are many studies where the control isn't quite proper. And that does slow down progress in medical science.
- If you have access to statistics for the general population, you can forego the control group, I would think. But that requires doing the study in a country with a well run health care system and properly regulated medical records so that you can get these stats without privacy issues.
(Glances in Denmark's general direction.. )
- Problem #3 is relatively easy to address: shift from journals to conferences. Organizing fake conferences is a lot harder than setting up paper mill journals.
- Once you get that annuity you wind up embroiled in the fighting to decide who gets tenure next. Your proteges or other people's.
- From 1945 to about 2000, academia in the western world was slowly growing. That made the pool of positions not-quite-zero-sum, and way too many people went into it expecting a much more genial environment.
- > Detectives are "masked thugs to pop out of unmarked vehicles and grab people off the streets".
The moment they make an actual arrest (which is rare, since they prefer to maintain their cover), they identify and are held accountable for how they do it.
Something ICE is not doing.
- Yes, we've had decades of assholes trying to worm exceptions to the 14th Amendment. But read the plain letter of it.
Everything else written about the idea is speculation, from The Coral Island to The CHildren's Island to Lord of the Flies.
But Golding did observe behavior in a boarding school, and while the Tongan boys did also go to boarding school, they also were being raised in Tongan culture, and that culture, including its behavioral norms, was what helped them survive on a desert island.