I kept looking at that too. It's crazy to me that there are only 2 cycles in the graph and one is the big accidental one. It honestly makes me think that either something must be wrong with the data, or it's reflective of some deep principle of math or sexuality (e.g. that people won't fuck around within their close social grouping nearly as readily as they will with people on the outskirts of it).
The authors wrote that they were surprised too and went back to talk to the students and apparently there was an unwritten rule that you don’t date the ex of the new partner of your ex. So if Bob and Alice split up and Alice starts dating Ben, then Bob should not date Ben’s ex Alison.
This is actually very interresting. I always found it hard to understand how some people can have so many sexual partners, and then there are people with very few of sexual partners. I had this theory that there must be some subculture of people who are really into this, date eachother in this group which causes their number to increase abnormally. It was just a silly theory but this sort of supports it?
If you look at this a little closer, you’ll notice that there aren’t actually that many highly connected nodes.
The big structure is mostly composed of single link chains.
Elsewhere it was mentioned that the researchers were also surprised by that, and did followup interviews that revealed that it was against social rules to date your exes partners ex. Basically two couples can’t “swap” partners. I thought it was interesting that you didn’t see that, but you do see a few triangles.
And that’s even more interesting. As someone who was not part of any of the graph in high school / college, how would a big link of chains play out in real time?
Like “The Mary and Tom met at a party. Next week Tom stumbled into Lucy by the lockers…”
Only partially related but i am going to hop on my soapbox to inform everyone that honeybees are an invasive species in the US and others places. While they are not the sole cause of native bee/pollinator die off they are one of the largest factors contributing to it. Save native bees!
I don’t think anyone in that conversation is advocating against “science.” They’re advocating to (or maybe just lamenting the fact that we can’t for political reasons) do more to save real bees (and the environment in general) rather than replace bees with something robotic. And they’re commenting on how starkly this article highlights how much we’re fucking the planet.
Second, building robot bees isn’t really science. It solidly qualifies as engineering, but not science. The reason I bring this up is that while it’s arguable that there’s no science that shouldn’t be pursued (though certainly science ought to be done ethically), there’s definitely engineering that would best be not done at all. We keep engineering new and ingenious ways to extract more oil from mostly-not-oil, but that’s destroying the planet. Elon’s Hyperloop was never a good idea, and it’s fortunate it was never actually built and probably will never be built. A lot of geoengineering proposals that have been put forward are risky on the basis that we don’t understand the ecosystems involved well enough to know what the side effects might be (and that’s likely not something science will be able to solve any time soon.)
Some engineering is beneficial. But some isn’t. And you can imagine Elon or the oil industry or some reckless geoengineering startup railing against detractors calling them “anti-science” just as a PR stunt to sway public opinion in favor of their fucked-up money-making scheme.
Comparing building robot bees to measuring fly genitalia further illustrates how the poster is conflating science and engineering.
The thing about “less strain on bees” seems directly out of someone’s ass. I can’t guess their line of reasoning.
Now, being realistic, we’re so fucked that I doubt we can save the bees. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to make robot bees. But it’s pretty fucked that we have to. Which is all they were saying in that conversation.
We keep engineering new and ingenious ways to extract more oil from mostly-not-oil, but that’s destroying the planet.
Before we were doing that we were destroying the planet by killing whales and burning coal. We haven’t quit burning coal though, but we have managed to cut back on killing whales.
Elon’s Hyperloop was never a good idea, and it’s fortunate it was never actually built and probably will never be built.
I noticed that for the most part, the things they claim it advanced, are advanced regardless and it’s only BECAUSE they reached the level that they are now that this can even be done. It wasn’t the other way around. We aren’t working to make robotic bees and THAT tech is what furthers everything else.
The “less strain on bees due to monoculture crops” thing is doubly silly. Monoculture has a lot of real problems, no need to make any up. Increasing crop diversity reduces the need for fertilizers, poisons, and reduces risk of plant diseases running rampant. Reducing our usage of chemicals for agriculture would help save the actual bees!
That was my biggest gripe of the text, “bees do poorly” translates directly to “it’s unnatural because it’s unbalanced”.
People: we can have progress, and a beautiful world of living companions on this blue spaceship as well. There is no other place like it! I say that as an engineer who enjoys the hell out of his job!
At the same time. This is a clear “why not both?” situation.
Let’s care for bees. Of course. But engineering even for it’s own sake is beneficial.
Some AI problems (or really NN problems) are stupidly difficult. Recognizing individual flower parts from a remotely driven camera on a small copter for one has applicability to about every journal even adjacent to aerospace, control systems, and probably distributed control and consensus. That shit drives science too. Physics informed loss function reduction (for PINNs) are super cutting edge and is at the intersection of science and engineering.
My aero research lab that worked on military systems and airports precipitated a cool as hell line of research into the spread of feline diseases using overlapping principles.
It’s all good stuff. As long as those copters don’t run on ground up bees, I think it’s cool someone is getting 6 or 7 figures for a group to research it.
Well, we don’t tend to do well with a “Why not both?” situation. We tend to select for the bare minimum, egoistic solution. Not having the egoistic solution available could genuinely help us, i.e. force us, to be less stupid about this…
It’s evolved. His understanding of anti-science attacks seems to be of those leveled by the older GOP, the ones that only wanted their businesses to be free to make the max amount of money.
However, that same tool of generalized chaos, confusion and eventually, disgust and hatred from that sustained confusion, are exactly how you increase the chances of a fascist strongman rising to power in a place that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. Because it helps make people afraid.
This is a case where the genie has been let out of the bottle by a bunch of fools, and now its out, and we all might pay dearly. With a lot more than cutting of funding and support, we’re sliding towards mass violence, as seen in previous centuries.
I think, when possible, we need to present our evidence for our positions to the public in ways that are as hard to refute as possible. One way is numerically, particularly with nice visualizations included.
Because honestly, they just don’t believe us. The problem has continued to worsen, and now people have not just opponents, but enemies. The preferred approach for actual, honest-to-god enemies is usually destruction, because emotions start running things. We can still appeal to rationality, but we need things that are as hard to distrust as possible. Using narrative was a great idea 10 years ago, but has been losing effectiveness.
Can we quantify potential benefits for the things we do, in ways someone with only a HS level of education can understand?
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