Yeah. Saw two shows there.

Spent last weekend at Sphere. Definitely lives up to the hype.

Would be awesome to see him try to order ice cream from the moderator though.

Or he is. Which is also scary.

I think that Berliner actually was way off in his timeline. NPR almost fully lost me back when Obama did the DACA executive order. Every story NPR did about it was some version of "listen to this sob story about a kid who isn't going to go to Harvard if DACA is struck down by the courts." Certainly those stories were real and heartbreaking in a way, but you never heard them run a story about the wife beaters and tax evaders who came here illegally with their parents as children (and of course I'm not saying those types of people are representative of the population either...just that they never even tried to be balanced). I thought their coverage was a great disservice to the country by not focusing on the legal merits but rather on the human interest. It was so blatantly biased that I see that as the point in my life where the liberal media bubble was popped for me. It (DACA) is probably one of the major starting points for Trump's political career, so it's ironic that Berliner sees their Trump coverage as the beginning of the end. NPR-level liberal bullshit is why he exists as a political player, IMO.

In what sense? It’s up by like 30 something percent since its debut. I’m the first person to admit that I have 0 understanding of internet companies’ valuations.

My supposition is that there isn't a true association, and that a larger sample size would get closer to the true mean. I think this is less a case like you're describing and more a case of distorted findings based on a few outliers driving the average.

Thanks for finally joining! It's slow moving around here, but there are good people with some really interesting and niche expertise.

Actually I don’t think that journalist captures the biggest flaw of all, which is the sample size. 20,000 people sounds kind of big, but it’s actually tiny. The problem is that the average age of the population was 49. Heart attacks among people below old age are relatively rare to begin with, and when you are sorting out people who self-report eating on a time-restricted schedule your numbers are going to be minuscule. “91%” is the relative risk, but I don’t see where they report the absolute risk or the absolute numbers. My guess is that a couple instances could be driving that seemingly large figure. Relative risk is meaningless in almost any context (of data reporting) without also understanding absolute risk.

Nothing brings people out of the woodwork like self-reflection. At this point, I'm not sure it makes a lot of difference. The traffic has slowed to a crawl, so I'm not sure whatever choice you make is going to get a lot of support or pushback. It's basically a half dozen of us reverberating ideas into a large echo-y cave at this point.

“This” is whatever hypothesis you’ve tied your success to.

Some of the issues I’ve discussed above maybe are unique to pharma, where I work. And in no way did I mean to imply that academia isn’t a good career populated with almost all good people. Just that the incentive structure, which can affect good people too, is such that it encourages putting one’s best data forward, say. This is obviously a ton harder in a hugely collaborative gazillion dollar field such as the one you work in…Lot of small time scientists work sort of on an island.

Also, the bigger the claim, the easier it is to poke holes in. The superconductor thing reminds of this thing that happened maybe 10 years ago where a researcher in my field claimed she could make induced stem cells by just bathing them in acid in some specific way. Took like 5 minutes to rip to pieces. Some people really want that paper in Nature.

For real don’t mind me though. I’m just kind of a jaded asshole because of some experiences I’ve had when my (very well connected and basically bulletproof) data didn’t align with the big lab’s big money hypothesis. They’ll skewer you.

I've flipped out on multiple family members, including my own wife, for posting pictures of my kids on whatever site (not for money or "influence", whateverthefuck that is, but just for sharing). I know it's de rigeuer in today's world, but I feel like we don't let kids get tattoos, because tattoos are forever. Well the internet is forever, too, right? It's really shitty to let a kid do that to themselves, let alone to make that choice for them.

I'm always shocked by the laziness that goes into made up data. Like here you have multiples of a number. In bio you often see stretched or inverted images that are portrayed as individual replicates, say. You'd think that if you were going to go to the level of just plain cheating that you'd put your back into it. There are statistical tests, e.g., that can tell you with pretty good precision whether numbers are random, say, or whether a large group of numbers is spaced in a way you'd expect a natural set of data to be spaced (e.g., the frequency of small numbers increases with the size of the number). I doubt it would be that hard to fake a set of data if you reverse engineered it to pass the standard battery of smell-test statistics. But you never see that. Or maybe only the dumb ones get caught?

I'm gonna push back on that idea a little. Firstly, this was an academic scandal, with an eye toward industry. But more to the point, I have worked in academia and private industry both fairly extensively, and I've found that private industry generally does more rigorous science (though often not as exciting). The caveat is that I work in biotech, so I don't know how that relates to physics. I would imagine it's not so different, though, because the incentive structures dictate everyone's behavior (but to be fair, biology experiments are notoriously opaque and hard to reproduce even when the hypothesis is rock solid, so there's a lot more room for obfuscation than in a harder experimental science).

In academia the financial incentives come from grants, which generally result from publications, which generally result from high impact discoveries. So the incentive boils down to "make high impact discovery."

In industry the incentive is to move product, and moving product doesn't happen if the product doesn't work. The product won't work if the science behind it is faulty. So the incentive is to weed out bad science, and only pursue the most reproducible work. This leads to a relative lack of risk taking, but generally more faith that what comes out of it is solid.

I can tell you from years of experience that the attitude in academia is "defend this at all costs" and in industry it's "kill this at all costs". Totally different mentalities. But again this is biotech. I realize fully that not all industries follow this trend, especially, say, venture-backed tech. I would imagine that the academic side of tech is way more upstanding than the industry side, but that's a hunch based on little-to-no first hand knowledge.

So here’s the problem they faced in a nut shell: They absolutely had no basis to countermand the fact finding of the lower courts. I.e., if the lower courts found it was an insurrection and Trump didn’t really even try to say he wasn’t. At least that wasn’t the main thrust of his argument. And they really didn’t want to entertain that bullshit about the president not being an officer. So where do they go? Clearly, Roberts and crew weren’t comfortable with where the libs were, which is “states don’t get to say, but someone does”. I goes they felt they had to invent something, and the something turned out to be section 5. Ok. It’s a stretch that you don’t have to be a legal scholar to see though, but the problem is that they were all just uncomfortable with the facts. They were too afraid to just apply the law, because the consequences were too much to face. So now we have a wack-ass precedent that could stand for 150 years. Insane.

Don’t you have a hot wife and a cool job? Not sure what else you’re waiting for. Democracy? It’s so abstract.

Pretty devastating review of the ruling from David French.

The money quote is: "Through inaction alone, Congress can effectively erase part of the 14th Amendment." I've been following French's and some other writers' interpretation of section 3 in advance of this ruling, and while I've read pieces that have been persuasive in both directions, not a single one imagined this as the outcome. This may be a new low for this court, and they have a lot of hits on that chart.

Very prescient, in retrospect.

Thank you for definitively reminding me why I avoid such debates on the internet. I'll stop now.

Right, but think about the ambassador's words for a minute. Early in the war there was a lot of handwringing about Israeli soldiers shooting up a hospital. The fact is, when you suspect that there's a weapons cache inside a hospital, you try to enter it. When people start shooting at you from inside, then you shoot your way in. The trouble is that Hamas freely admits to using hospitals, schools and mosques as places to shield fighters and materiel. That's the context around what she's saying there. It's shitty, but you still have to leap a giant chasm to get from there to genocide (there's a good reason that Arabs can be doctors, lawyers and cabinet ministers in Israel, but Jews (not Israelis) aren't even allowed to be tourists inside many Muslim countries). From October 7 onward, Hamas could have saved every single Gazan civilian by offering an unconditional surrender. They haven't and they won't. That's on them.

You're arguing against a strawman. Nowhere did I say that the Netanyahu government is correct in their prosecution of the war. I said it's not a genocide, because it's aims aren't genocidal, they're statecraft. Pointing out how bad conditions are there isn't a counterargument.