If this is you playing Devil’s Advocate, then I have to voice my concern that the Devil has retained a lawyer that makes Trump’s attorneys look competent by comparison.
The crime is the clearly weighted d20 he’s going to try to bring to the game on Friday night claiming he only wants to use his own dice for his character.
Except it’s more intense, with older parts of the nervous system getting mis-developed.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I’m confused by what you’re referring to here. If you mean that the parts of the brain that develop in older children and young adults (eg the frontal cortex and prefrontal cortex) get maldeveloped, then I agree with you. If you additionally mean that this has deleterious downstream effects on the limbic system through loss of feedback and control mechanisms, I also agree wholeheartedly. If you mean evolutionarily older parts of the brain or parts that develop earlier in childhood (and there’s overlap there of course), I’m not entirely sure which specific aspects of neuroanatomy you’re referencing.
Could you include additional details if that’s the case?
In any case, the answer to “why shouldn’t one sexually abuse a child” is the same as “why shouldn’t one physically abuse a child,” “why shouldn’t one starve a child,” and “why shouldn’t one force a child to work on large scale heavy machinery in factories for twelve hours per day seven days a week.” It damages the child, it damages the abuser, and it damages society.
This is the correct answer. Overcharging (and self-dealing) is typically used in tax fraud and money laundering.
Of course, no one would actually do that, especially if they were to later do something as public as running for president. The entire justice system, due to its fair and impartial nature, would come crashing down on their head with every resource at its disposal, and the people would riot in the streets if it treated such egregious crimes as less important than passing a bad $20 bill.
I caught Covid in Feb 2020, so I was part of the first wave when they weren’t sure it was a thing yet. I lost my sense of taste and smell for almost a year, to the extent I could stand next to a pan of frying onions or a trash can with rotting garbage and not smell it. It never fully recovered from that - I couldn’t say whether is 50% back or 30%, but it also still goes out sometimes. I’ve had every shot and booster available and have had a few influenza like illnesses since but with different levels of severity.
I’m going to hazard a guess here based on some related studies I’ve seen about the effects of covid and say that there’s likely a genetic component. I probably have a gene variant that makes this outcome more likely. I’m saying that because I’ve seen at least preliminary studies that looked at the severity of covid symptoms and found a genetic correlation.
For the majority of people who do lose their sense of taste and smell, they recover within a few weeks to a couple of months, but I am unaware of studies that show the degree to which they cover sensation. I know from my own experience that “recovery” can mean getting a fraction of your previous sensation back.
Men and women might have had their fingers deliberately chopped off during religious rituals in prehistoric times, according to a new interpretation of palaeolithic cave art....
I left Reddit, deleting all of my content, because I disagreed with the elimination of third party apps and because of Reddit’s response to the community. Full stop. I wasn’t a heavy Twitter user - I tend to enjoy more drawn out discussions and topically focused communities - but I stopped using it entirely because of Elon’s moves, including his rejection of corporate censorship.
I have no problem with a service establishing a ToS that includes trust and safety policies that will remove posts and ban users over hate speech. I have no problem with forced demonetization and deplatforming of hate accounts. I would have no problem if federal and state governments enacted more anti-hate laws to bring us in line with other democracies around the world.
That’s because I do not think that permitting a group of American brown shirts to fly Nazi flags and shout racist slurs at passersby increases freedom. I think it decreases it, because it causes a large part of the population to live in fear. I think hate speech rules by private companies serve the same purpose.
“Thank god you’re here, Mr. President. Your new name is Billy O’Brien and you’re about to take over as the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.”
I am standing by and watching my doorbell cam. I’ll let you know when he shows.
Inspired by a post that popped on lemmy world today about Weird Al it got me thinking. I listed out a bunch of names but the one that I think fits the most would probably be Surfan Stevens. Who do you all think?
An example is that I generally despise Jordan Peterson and most of what he says, but I often quote one thing that Jordan Peterson said (in the linked video) because I think it’s a good summary of why toxic positivity doesn’t work....
I think what people are intuiting is really in two parts. Like another person said, if an observation is true, you can probably find someone who said it better.
The other thing is that crafted personae (think Peterson, Ayn Rand, Shapiro, Rush Limbaugh) will take a position and argue for it on the basis of their other opinions. Each observation is meant to be a facet of an integrated philosophy.
So if they take position A, they will support it by opinions X, Y, and Z. If you accept A, as presented by them, but reject X, Y, and Z, then it’s up to you - if you’re using them as a point of reference, to point out the flaws in their supporting arguments and substitute your own. If you do not, it’s reasonable for a listener to think you also subscribe to their supporting premises.
Let’s say we’re having dinner and you comment that Ayn Rand was right when she said welfare is evil. Rand meant that welfare is evil because it takes the hard-earned wealth from the good and virtuous rich and gives it to the lazy, greedy poor. If you go no further than naming her and stating your agreement, we will probably think you picked her because you agree with her reasoning. You may actually mean that you prefer a universal basic income over welfare, or a completely egalitarian society where everyone from surgeons and ceos to grocery clerks make the same wage. Or you might be advocating for societies like those documented by David Graeber, who describes the indigenous people of the Northeast US where there was no notion of cash or barter but instead something closer to “from each according to their ability to each according to their need.” But because you started by quoting Rand and not Marx, people aren’t going to just jump to that conclusion.
It’s like why math teachers ask you to show your work. If you made a bunch of self-cancelling errors and blundered onto the right answer, you didn’t actually learn the material, so the fact that you wrote down the numerically correct answer doesn’t mean that you understand how to solve that kind of problem, and it will get 0 credit. The same for a philosophy or history professor who wants you to justify your answer and not just write down a one sentence opinion.
EDIT: Let’s cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We’re not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don’t believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I’m sure almost everybody has something...
First, let me start off by saying that I agree with what I believe your actual premise is (or should be) - that articles in science journals should not be behind paywalls. I’m strictly against the practice, I think it’s a massive scam, and so does everyone I know who does research. I have paid to open source every paper I’ve published. Well, not me personally. But thank you taxpayers for funding me to not only do my work but to make sure you have access to it too. I’ll talk about this more at the end.
With that out of the way, I’d like to mention a couple of things. First, the scam is on the part of the academic journals, not the researchers or the journalists writing the articles. It’s not part of some scam to hide the fact that the journalist is making crap up. If the authors were unwilling or unable to pay the fees for open sourcing their papers ($3-5k when I was doing it several years ago), then you’re either going to be in an institution that has a subscription to the journal or you’re going to have to find some way of acquiring it.
Search for the exact title in quotes. Sometimes the Google Scholar engine will return with the default link to the pay walled page, sometimes it’ll have a link to a prepublication server. Arxiv is one of the more popular ones for physics, math, and computer science of all stripes. Step 2 is to go to the institution web page of the first author. Very often, researchers will keep an updated list of their publications with links to the PDFs. If that still doesn’t work, you can write the author and request the paper. We love those emails. We love it when people read our work, especially when they’re so excited that they wrote to request a copy. None of these involve copyright infringement. That prepub that you get is the same paper (usually but you can confirm with the author if that’s a question), but possibly without the masthead and layout from the journal. It’s still cited the same.
So, why are so many journals behind a paywall? Because the publishers want to monetize what today should be a cost free (or minimal) set of transactions. Here’s what happens:
I have an idea for some research. If it’s good and I’m lucky, I get money from the government (or whomever) to do the work, and I use it to pay my expenses (salaries, materials, equipment, whatever). I also get taxed on it by my institution so they can pay the admins and other costs. When submitting a proposal, those are all line items in your budget. If you’re doing expensive research at an expensive institution, it’s pretty trivial to set aside $10-20k for pub fees. If your entire grant was $35k, that’s a lot harder to justify.
You write the paper after doing the work. You don’t get paid to write the paper specifically - it’s part of the research that you are doing. The point here is that, unlike book authors, researchers see zero of any money you’d pay for the article. If you do locate a copyrighted copy, you’re not taking a dime out of my pocket. Again, just thrilled someone’s reading the damn thing.
You pick a journal and send it in. The journal has a contact list of researchers and their fields, and sends out requests for reviewers. They usually require 2 or 3.
The reviewers read the paper making notes on questions they have and recommend revisions before publication. Reviewing is an unpaid service researchers do because we know that’s how it works. The irony is that it challenges the academic notion of the tragedy of the commons. You could be a freeloader and never review, but enough people do it that the system keeps rolling.
You revise, reviewers approve, publisher accepts and schedules date. There can be some back and forth here (this is a legitimate publisher expense, but the level of effort and interaction isn’t like with a book editor).
Your paper comes out.
As you can see, the role of the publisher is very small in the overall amount of effort put into getting an idea from my head into yours. At one point publishers had an argument that the small circulation numbers for things like The Journal of Theoretical Biology justified their $21k/year institutional subscription price.
And I shouldn’t have saved this til the end, but for the one person who skimmed down to see where all of this was going:
Any science article / press release that cites a paper whether or not you have access to it at least is citing something that has undergone peer review. Peer review can only do so much and journal quality has a wide range, but it’s about the best we have. If it’s a big enough deal to actually matter and the media in question has wide enough reach to care, then it will get back to the author who can then clarify.
I absolutely agree with you there. I just commented a short time ago on an article about the effects of primate vocalizations on the human brain. The article not only got the conclusion of the paper wrong, they got the very nature of evolution wrong. I didn’t even have to read the paper - I haven’t gotten to it yet. It’s admittedly the kind of mistake non-biologists make. Journalists should probably avoid drawing conclusions that aren’t specifically in the source material. My point is that, going off of the author’s quotes the pulled and my own knowledge of evolutionary dynamics, I knew it was wrong. However, I am not at all sure that someone without a background in biology would be able to understand the paper well enough to catch the error in the article.
I am all for open access, and I share your frustration. I think you should be able to access any paper you want for free. But I’ll also say that if you don’t have the background in the subject to know what the underlying paper will have said, the chances are pretty good that you’re not going to understand the paper well enough to find the flaws.
I used to talk to a physicist named Lee Smolin who proposed a Darwinian model for universe formation. I can follow the evolutionary part, but when it gets down to the physics of it, I’m lost at sea. So when I read an article about him - I read something about him recently - I mostly have to go on my basic understanding because there’s no way I’d make it through that paper.
And literally the only reason I’m throwing this out there at all is that, unlike a physics paper that’s totally incomprehensible and obviously so, people believe in their own interpretations on social science or public health papers. I see more kinds of cherry-picking abuses and simple misunderstandings there than elsewhere.
Confronted with the likelihood that we cannot achieve climate goals, confront socioeconomic inequality, and ultimately build a better world without significant personal sacrifice: How much are you personally capable and willing to lose? I mean this in the most earnest way possible. Acknowledging the likely possibility of working...
I think there’s a fundamental problem with the question that goes to the heart of the climate crisis and which makes a significant contribution to why I think we will not solve it.
There’s two versions of this question. The first is the one you asked - how much are individuals and families willing to give up in order to make the climate problem go away (whatever that means at this point). The second is “If you knew with 100% accuracy that by you going vegan (or ditching your car or installing solar or composting…), that the climate crisis would definitely be solved, would you do it?
Let’s pretend that I don’t want to go vegan. I eat Big Macs every night. Porterhouse steaks every weekend. I drive an F-350 to the ice cream store down the block. All of that. Let’s say I love those things. If I personally give them up, it will make no difference if we don’t reorganize the entire global economy. You might convince me to vote for politicians who would pass laws to make that happen, but you’d have a harder time selling me on sacrificing something I see as a core benefit for zero gain. It’s the difference between “How much would you give to get a homeless person off the streets and a new start” and “How much would you give a homeless person if you knew they were just going to set the cash on fire” if you see where I’m going with that.
We are humans. We are cooperators. That’s how we got where we are. Unfortunately there’s also other dynamics in play as well. I honestly have no idea how far back we’d need to rewind the tape in order to have a chance at a better outcome. I do think any progress we can make is good. This just feels like a boulder rolling towards your house kind of thing where all you can do is watch.
Venus by Tuesday (lemmy.world)
What do you think is the coolest designed sci-fi gun?
I mean the physical design of the gun, not the projectile or effect.
The giga crystal (sh.itjust.works)
The quackening (lemmy.world)
by pierremortel: www.instagram.com/pierremortel/p/C0zIDvOtMVx/
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Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. (startrek.website)
Is it illegal to charge insane prices for things?
Is there a law preventing me from for example selling a baseball hat for $20,000?
How do I get my sense of taste back after covid?
750 m below ground in the Bavarian Alps... (slrpnk.net)
Many prehistoric handprints show a finger missing. What if this was not accidental? (www.theguardian.com)
Men and women might have had their fingers deliberately chopped off during religious rituals in prehistoric times, according to a new interpretation of palaeolithic cave art....
This is just cruel (startrek.website)
Corporate Censorship Bring You Here?
Pure curiosity:...
FEDiverse (startrek.website)
You guys, the Feds are on the front porch…
Who in your opinion is the modern day equivalent to Mozart? (lemmy.world)
Inspired by a post that popped on lemmy world today about Weird Al it got me thinking. I listed out a bunch of names but the one that I think fits the most would probably be Surfan Stevens. Who do you all think?
Why do people not understand that you can agree with one thing someone said or did while disagreeing with the majority of what they stand for? (www.youtube.com)
An example is that I generally despise Jordan Peterson and most of what he says, but I often quote one thing that Jordan Peterson said (in the linked video) because I think it’s a good summary of why toxic positivity doesn’t work....
What is Something Scientific that you just don't believe in at all?
EDIT: Let’s cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We’re not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don’t believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I’m sure almost everybody has something...
Honestly - How much will you sacrifice for a better world?
Confronted with the likelihood that we cannot achieve climate goals, confront socioeconomic inequality, and ultimately build a better world without significant personal sacrifice: How much are you personally capable and willing to lose? I mean this in the most earnest way possible. Acknowledging the likely possibility of working...
Name "mp3" so pirates get confused (lemmy.world)
A minor oopsie (startrek.website)
Maybe he's born with it. Maybe It's Maybelline (i.chzbgr.com)
well guess what else is yellow ? (lemmy.world)
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