Andy

I don’t agree with their approach, but I’ll admit that their argument is sound.

Particularly the part about rejecting the opinions of an outsider.

I don’t want to live in Singapore, bit if this is genuinely how Singaporeans wish to run their society I do not consider it my place to meddle. Especially because, as they note in the response, all of us should focus on getting our own houses in order before prescribing to others.

Yeah, it’s wild how clearly we can see that Palestine is the world’s laboratory for surveillance and state violence tech and tactics.

My aggravation at the people who run big tech companies makes me more interested in hacking than ceding tech to them.

I think stepping back from a lot of specific tools is appropriate. I’m trying to de-Google, and I’ve left a lot of platforms. I also appreciate unnetworked things like physical media, and music and e-books on non-networked devices.

But leaving tech overall isn’t appealing to me. I just recently started getting into mesh radio, for instance. It’s dope stuff.

This article doesn’t really seem to validate it’s headline. I was eager to learn more about the methodology and how to better detect corporate content, but I was disappointed that they apparently just made the leap from the claim that 15% of popular subs host a non zero amount of corporate manipulation to the claim that this represents the fraction of total content.

I’m not saying this to dispute how much of the total content is corporate bots. I’m just pointing this out because I actually care about the quality of statistical claims and data science, and I hate to see my ideological allies either misusing data because they’re dumb or because they don’t have a commitment to truth.

I read op’s question about whether money was the primary bottleneck facing scientists.

And that’s actually a reasonable question.

There is, unfortunately, a real efficiency problem in science.

The money spent is generally a great investment: you’re not just funding discovery: you’re also financially supporting millions of jobs that support discovery that include the businesses that sell to scientists and the restaurant staff in small college towns.

However if we look at where the money goes, it’s long been an open secret that a lot of the support costs are taking unjustifiable slices of the pie. Examples include what’s called “overhead expenses”, which are essentially astronomical rents universities charge their science departments. Also, equipment and repair costs are wildly inflated.

I would like more funding of research, but I would also like reforms to limit this kind of exploitative price gouging in science. But to answer the question: yes, science would still produce more social impact faster if given more money.

Gotta pay the gravity tax

Thank fucking God that they’re finally waking up. This is long overdue.