It goes without saying which field has the least crisis in reproducibility.
Theology?
The linked-to post is all well and good. But I don't buy the claim that there's all this shock and dismay that studies in the clinical sciences aren't replicable.
As a friend of mine once said: "Unless I'm literally dying, I'll restrict myself to medical interventions whose patents have expired, so that the first, second, and third cohorts of subjects have all passed thru to lifetime impact studies". In short, "I'll wait for all the early adopters to shake it out, before I use it myself."
Similarly, I've read articles about longitudinal studies of SSRIs (and how ineffective they turned out to be).
Seems to me the real crisis here is the credulity of those in power, who just so happen to be the ones who profit from the pretense that such interventions are effective, when we'll only know 20+ years down the line.
Yeah, and also there are a lot of low-information people, who buy into these pretensions ("my doc says my social anxiety can be treated with a pill") but honestly, isn't the problem here that unlike homeopathy and flat-earth-ism, a belief that Paxil can help, can actually hurt you?
For psychology/cog-neurosci at least, my impression is though there is indeed no strong theory, it does not cause problems in the way the author says: making it "more difficult to guide investigation, leading to wider ranging efforts that may be less likely to replicate." Individual PIs are convinced they have the grand unified theory, and are doing very specific experiments to test it. Somehow nearly every single one of these experiments succeeds.
Sooo much lame theory around, which would be fine, if there was just a way to kill some of them off, but it's essentially impossible. The standard of statistical practice is so poor that in many cases you have a very good chance of pulling a significant result out of pure Gaussian noise. Under these circumstances, I don't even know how much good more replication would do. You could do, say, 8 Gaussian noise experiments, get a result out of 5 and publish them, tell no one of the other 3, and make a career out of the nice, robust effect you discovered.
5: A belief in homeopathy can hurt you - see all the patients who have rejected conventional cancer treatment with a fairly good probability of success for some quackery. Even if they come back to conventional treatment at the end, they have often given up their first, best chance of knocking the thing out.
Yes, this was a good article.
In my field it was just standard for reviewers of your article to say "If you also do these other experiments, and get exactly this result, we'll publish the paper". And sometimes the even stupider "In Figure 2A and Figure 2D there is an outlier, please repeat the experiments until there are no outliers". No chance of data falsification with these incentives!
Can we just publish, please, and let the readers decide what they think? What is the point of all this?
Looking at it from the outside now, it is just preposterous that we still don't use preprint servers in biomedical fields. "Go here to see our paper, and in 18 months you can finally see the slightly different version of it that makes the reviewers happy". Everyone would like to do that but still doesn't realize it's an option.
I've never seen anything like that from reviewers in dozens of papers in biomedical fields.
That said, we really only did a control experiment once.
I mean, when they say "This needs to be backed up in another model", or "This needs to be made robust by doing it in another cell line", or "The sample size needs to be increased", that's what they're saying. Get the following data, and your paper will be published.
There's really no way to get around it except to make it a one-step accept/reject process. Or to have the authors, instead of doing new experiments, say in the revised version of the paper "It would be good if someone else did these other experiments, please do them someone and replicate our work".
I don't even see the "replication crisis" as so much of a problem - one lab doesn't replicate what another lab did, that happens all the time. The problem is because we expect one paper, from one lab, to contain in itself so much replication that we are shocked when another lab fails to agree. We should be encouraging different labs to try things and either fail or succeed. Not to have every paper assumed to be accurate in every way because it got through the peer review process.
6: You guys can get away with filing away inconvenient studies, but we really can't. You've just spent several hundred thousand to a few million of somebody's money, plus large amounts of time to the exclusion of other work. The PI can't afford not to publish for resume-related reasons even if the grant (and hence hope of getting any other money) doesn't require it.
(Drug companies would of course love to stuff things in a whole and don't worry about millions here and there, but the FDA doesn't listen to anything they say if the analysis plan wasn't submitted to them prior.)
The cost has a great deal to do with "our expectations of how often findings should replicate". When each degree of freedom is tens of thousands of dollars, you don't get a great deal of replication not because people working in the field have high expectations for the value of each individual study but because nobody will pay $5 million for a replication unless somebody very obviously fucked it up.
(There's lots and lots of re-analysis, but not true replication with new data.)
14, I think you're in the field where you design a study ahead of time, and then perform the study, and then publish the study. I was in the more experimental field where you do a bunch of experiments and then decide which 10 to 100 of them go in the paper or not. This allows for endless opportunity to say "These 30 experiments are good, but these 4 detract from your case, so take them out, and add 4 other experiments which would nail down the mechanism".
13,14: Oh, we can't get away with it either, also for the reasons you mentioned. Everything we do has got to produce a paper or we're dead. Someone just p-hacking Gaussian noise, however, could easily afford to fail...
"P. Hacker and the Bonferroni Corrections" would be a good name for band.
15. Yes, but we aren't epidemiology or astronomy or particle physics either.
We sit near epidemiologists, but we are not them.
Actually, my former student is now an epidemiologist as well the person who does the still too advanced for me. But not me.
How do you tell what an epidemiologist is?
There's a sign that says "Epidemiology" but there's also a sign saying "Don't Flush Paper Towels, They Will Clog the Toilet" and the toilet will totally flush up to 2 paper towels at a time.
Also, I'm doing very much clinical research.
Unless they order thicker towels or change the sign to "Don't Flush Three or More Paper Towels...," I don't do epidemiology.
What I found bizarre about that graph is that epidemiology also has a replication crisis. My wife took an epidemiology course last year which began with the professor saying "Epidemiology is not as bad as its reputation." For a bacterial or viral disease, like the beloved cholera example, epidemiology works well, but the epidemiology of diabetes runs into the exact problems you would expect.
That's because people tell lies about donuts.
The obverse of the quality of the evidence in any given field is the least-publishable-unit, the pressure to publish and claim success with a feeble basis, rather than to acknowledge methodological limitations in reporting.
AT the risk of casually slandering an entire field, the quality of papers on the effects of nutrition on human health is not great, partly because there's an intense desire (at least among Americans and Europeans) for reading about results. There are successes, but epidemiology is not a useful tool here for the most part. Reading about the biochemistry of metabolism is usually pretty cool.
25: When you come to think of it, bacterial or viral epidemiology is nothing *but* replication crises.
Said the vicar to the xerox machine.
I'm having a lot of trouble understanding what "basic theory" means in the linked post, or how the graphed items are distinguishable along that axis. "Other fields, like medicine, lack even the most rudimentary theories that can be used to make basic predictions" seems wildly wrong, but it is very possible I am just missing something. What is that something?
They mean how closely does the field approximate math.
When you use 'xerox' like you use aspirin, it gives us a headache.
If I just substitute "rocks" every time it says "basic theory" it reads better. "I think it's fair to say that different fields of study fall on a spectrum in terms of how much rocks they can rely on."
30: Mostly they mean for basic theory that changing an independent variable X will make an inpact on dependent variable Y. So yes, math, but also how many variables can we observe and measure. A good example in nutrition is how much of a given food it takes to achieve a given level of a vitamin. It varies! So, you do a study that measures what happens if everybody eats 2 lbs of spinach a day, but it turns out every participant ends up with different levels of the nutrient in question when blood samples are taken, and some continue to eat a pound of kale in addition to their spinach ration. It's really hard to get at the effect of spinach, and if you did, what might it be about the spinach that caused the effect? It's also harder in people because IRBs don't let you cut people up and take tissue samples at the end of the study unless you are running a very special kind of study.
It's also tough to prove a mechanism by which your variable is acting. You need a pretty big effect/clear signal/process that can be measured.
Oh, and time scales make it hard, too. Immediate effects are way easier in terms of theories. Cascades are hard.
Not to mention that epidemiology is notorious for studies that ask "hmm, I wonder if there's any correlation between hand size and orange skin" without any plausible theory of how one would affect the other.
They don't actually do that. It's just that "plausible" is harder to determine when you are dealing with people and not wasting time on a bench.
Racist or no, the Minions are super popular here.
37 I see that's what it's getting at, but I'm still not sure how "muons are massless" counts as basic theory but "dead bodies don't have heartbeats" doesn't. Is it because there are more conceivable exceptions to the latter? I don't even think that's right though, I think the exceptions just get described so they don't sound like exceptions. It sounds like I'm being dense (unlike muons, dinos, etc.); I *know* particle physics and medicine are different, but I have a hunch that the difference isn't what the post described. Something about reactivity/reflexiveness/the thing perceiving itself that I'm having trouble formulating.
(None of this should be construed as me sticking up for the rigor or truth-telling capacities of eg social science/economics broadly.)
Dead bodies do have heartbeats by commonly used definitions. It's just not real common.
That is, the definition is commonly to many different jurisdictions but the circumstances in which it is used are not that common compared to Dead 1.0.
Which probably gets at the difference you mention in 43 in that nobody in physics ever seemed require a bunch of lawyers to agree to and codify their definitions.
46 it's pretty easy to crack quantum physicists in depositions, fwiw.
||
My brother the classicist who went into a cocoon and came out a wealthy developer which is especially offensive since he's YOUNGER is trying to convince me to do Project Euler for fun/to show myself my brain can do things like those things. Should I? Or should I just try to learn 10th grade math or teach myself Hebrew? All while the kids are here obviously, when they're gone I hypothesize about cow dragons in comments.
|>
Weren't you supposed to learn Hebrew for Bat Mitzvahing?
I've been planning to learn some programming this fall, though maybe not starting this minute, and that looks like it could be fun but also I think is not what I'm looking for. I wasn't really into cow dragons either, but I have other ways to fill my time.
I think the programming I've encountered has disappointing because it's less "derive cool patterns so you can analyze bunch of data efficiently" and more "perform simple functions very fast so you can analyze a bunch of data very efficiently." This seems relevant to basic theories or whatever.
I kind of refuse to learn useful things on principle so that may solve it for me.
Project Euler things can be diverting. Why not?
Really the one study vs. many studies explains most of the differences. We didn't decide there was a muon because someone did one experiment.
I think the programming I've encountered has disappointing because it's less "derive cool patterns so you can analyze bunch of data efficiently" and more "perform simple functions very fast so you can analyze a bunch of data very efficiently."
I often say that, while I enjoy my job, most people would find it incredibly tedious.
Perhaps I'm just dealing with a particularly boring programming job, but in my experience not only does very little of what I do involve cool patterns but, like writing, all good programming is re-writing (debugging).
That said, when it works it's awfully satisfying.
50 to be clear by "encountered" I mean "heard my brother scold his colleagues about during swear-filled phone calls he gets up from the dinner table to make."
Don't TELL my brother I'm doing it you guys tho I have a reputation to maintain in my family as the chaos-trailing underachiever.
Programming that they pay you for tends not to be that engaging. Like my old man says, that's why they call it compensation.
43: Muons are massless vs dead bodies have no heartbeat isn't quite a fair comparison. The hypothesis is muons are massless, the testing can be experimental, and I don't think particle physicists try to answer questions about why a particle has certain characteristics. Massless muons should behave in predictable, reproducible ways, and we have enough expertise in physics that we can measure phenomena that support or help disprove the theory. With enough experiments, you can call it established and move on.
I'd maybe analogize to "smoking gives you cancer," but since you started with heartbeat, I'll try to stick with that. Like Moby is getting at, you need definitions of alive and dead. This one is easier than most medical things, because there's basically one variable, and it's easily measured without cutting a person open, but you can maybe see how medical science gets complicated pretty quickly -- what about people having bypass surgery? Alive or dead? What about an irregular heartbeat? What about people who have pacemakers? Is heartbeat the only variable that determines death, or are there others? Can stopped hearts restart by themselves (hard to study)? Is the muscle pumping the critical factor that leads to death? What happens first when someone dies? Is that universal? What causes a heart to stop beating? These all sound kind of stupid, since medical science at least understands a lot more than alive/dead dichotomy, but there are so many intermediate possibilities, variability system-to-system and unexpected outcomes than there are with particles. I think medical science definitely has theories and you can do hypothesis-driven medical research, but theories need to be more complex than "people need oxygen, but not too much or too little." Is there a hope for a Unifying Theory of Human Health? Or a Theory of Cancer? Not that particle physics doesn't have stochastic solutions sometimes, but medicine nearly always does.
What happens first when someone dies?
They crap their pants.
Also, "smoking gives you cancer" is a good example of very successful epidemiological research that occurred well before anybody had much of a theory.
My problem may just be that I'm working with a layperson's understanding of the word theory, but I'm not seeing why the heartbeat/masslessness comparison is unfair; not honed to precision maybe, but they're both what I'd call basic theories--rather settled understandings about a quality of an entity that you can use to make other predictions about those entities and that can help test/measure/refine more unsettled hypotheses. I mean all the problems you mention with the relationship between heartbeat and deadness sound a lot like zany subatomic ambiguities and--and conversely there kind of IS hope for a Theory of Cancer. There are all sorts of reasons clinical research BECOMES fuzzier I'm just not convinced it's uniquely different from, say, "what is going on inside the sun," in terms of abundance of basic theory.
I'd guess what I'd be curious to see is how much of the replication crisis extended into, I dunno, let's say slug research. In particular I'd be curious about the differences in replicability between experiments that implicated something about Us As People and experiments that didn't. Eg let's say looking at sea slugs to predict the effects eating a bunch of sugar on how fast they died v research on sea slugs to, I dunno, learn what endocrine (???) processes made them more or less sticky so we could harvest them for glue. I would bet you a thousand sea slugs that the first would a replicability mess and the second would be fine.
Maybe we should just get sea slugs to research us, we'd have a workable Theory of Human Health in like a week.
All this said I know nothing about any of this (ok I know some about sea slug neurons but that's a one-off) and ydnew I'm sure you're right on a level I can't even access, I'm just curious why I can't access it.
I don't know how you'd feed a bunch of sugar to a sea slug, but I'm picturing a tube like they use for the geese when making foie gras.
Whether or not a large organism is alive seems pretty complicated to me-- all the cells can be alive, but the organism is not. Basic biology does have some theoretical unerpinnings-- metabolism and evolution, but there are lots of situations where the way to apply those is not clear, or is more like craft than science. Also the lvel of instrumentation differs-- biologists study complex systems with crude detectors. Also, there is a theory of cancer, it just doesn't reach far enough to indicate treatment for many kinds of neoplasias.
Physics is the similar, but physicists concentrate on areas where their theories work (thin plates, small deformations) rather than where they fail (jello bouncing until it tears).
63 is right. I think by "theory" they mean based on a model. In biological systems there are millions of variables and things cannot be isolated like they can in physics. Just read the blogs about pharmaceuticals and realize how it is still impossible to use models to reliably predict what drug will inhibit what without also inhibiting 50 other things.
My impression of the physics experiment is that they say "We think the mass of a gluon at 5 Kelvin should be this number of grams. Let's make sure we're right." The biological approach would be "Let's see what the mass of a gluon at 5 Kelvin is, then try to figure out why." Most people at a biomedical institute on a given day are more observational than hypothesis-based. Then when you get an actual hypothesis you start being tempted to commit fraud, because you've done a few experiments that add up to a model, and you need to do a couple more to confirm it, and you pray they all fit in with the rest or else your model makes no sense.
With epidemiology, not only are you doing observational studies instead of hypothesis-driven studies, but you can barely even measure anything because you can't control ANY of the variables.
I suspect part of the problem here is in how we define "disciplines" and "research" and how we compare them.
Project Euler is a lot of fun. I don't think I'd say it's a great way to learn programming, but it is a fun way to explore a new language if you already get programming. You should be comfortable with math: it's mostly about exploring the boundary between tractable and intractable solutions--how much do you want to throw numerical horsepower at something, versus if you math it up a lot can you make it into something that will finish computing in less than a minute (or, in some of the simple problems, possibly even get a closed-form answer)?
And it won't teach you about any of the other stuff you need to know about being a developer, like how to structure big programs. Project Euler code can be super gross, although the problems do have some similarities (e.g. dealing with primes) so you can start developing little libraries for your own use.
I think the programming I've encountered has disappointing because it's less "derive cool patterns so you can analyze bunch of data efficiently" and more "perform simple functions very fast so you can analyze a bunch of data very efficiently."
Actually, if that's how you're looking at it maybe the boundary between math and computing--as practiced, not as theory--might be right up your alley.
Massless muons and massive gluons? What is this craziness?
Among the many reasons that particle physics is different from other fields is that every electron is identical to every other electron, unlike viruses or stars or human bodies or unhappy families or most other things people have studied.
Sea slugs are pretty much interchangeable, though.
I'LL TAKE A REPLICATION CRISIS OVER A REPLICANT CRISIS EVERY DAY
More basic sciences definitely benefit from simplification. We know that the basic laws of physics hold for chemistry, but the system is too complex to calculate them out. We know that the basic laws of chemistry apply to biology, but the system is too complex to calculate them out.
Replication crises happen when replication is sparse, either because the results aren't important enough to replicate or because the field is too fragmented to do so. Like many human endeavors, direct competition is a good way to eventually discover the truth, though not without its perverse incentives and distortions.
Among the many reasons that particle physics is different from other fields is that every electron is identical to every other electron
This is pretty much just a methodological assumption though, right? Aside from being really, really useful if you want to use math, and some strange historical roots, it's basically only supported by the fact that we've been assuming it without too much trouble, and the fact that no one is going to put two electrons down in front of someone who asserts that and say "what is wrong with you that these look like they're the same?". Electrons could be different from each other in all kinds of weird ways as long as those don't make differences that can be seen really far away and through statistical noise reliably enough that people can't just shrug them off. And that doesn't mean causally irrelevant ways either given, e.g., the existence of things like the unified neutral theory in ecology which is disturbingly predictive for something that depends on such transparently false starting points ("plants are all basically the same").
71: But it's not just a matter of looking at any particular pair of electrons. Various macroscopic quantities that you calculate with statistical mechanics depend on whether particles are distinguishable or indistinguishable. If you try to calculate the thermodynamic properties of indistinguishable particles by treating them as distinguishable, you get the wrong answer.
71: Nope, as AcademicLurker says, it's not an assumption, it's a well-tested fact about nature. Statistical mechanics, the Pauli exclusion principle, the structure of atoms--all sorts of things very importantly depend on the fact that every electron is identical. (Similarly: every photon, every up quark, etc.) Measured experimental outcomes would be radically different if it weren't true.
There are very few assumptions in particle physics: quantum mechanics plus relativity plus the charges of the various particles uniquely determine the interactions that can appear in the complete theory. Once you measure 20-odd numbers that tell you how strong those interactions you are, you predict all of the millions of different measurements that have been done to test the theory. That's how strong "strong basic theory" is.
Sorry about going along with the massless muon thing! I was waiting for horror, but just went along.
I'm sort of fascinated by the folks who are saying there's a theory of cancer. I was meaning a theory that presents a common (or at least closely related) origin and potential common pathway to cure. "Something goes wrong and cells fail to die" or "Cells replicate uncontrollably" isn't really sufficient. Or that unifies solid tumors more closely with things like leukemia. Or highly aggressive forms with less aggressive. I think the trend in that area is towards fragmentation (even ignoring the buzz of personalized medicine), which is a good and helpful one in terms of understanding why there is so much variation.
I think part of what is confusing MHPH is that (at least my intuition) for the word "identical" is actually much *weaker* than what physicists mean when they say that two particles are "identical." It's not *merely* that all electrons have exactly the same properties as each other (same mass, same charge, etc.), but that you cannot distinguish different electrons even in principle! If you start with two electrons (call them Alice and Bob, though giving them separate names is exactly what you can't do) you can make them interact in a way where at the end you will not be able to say, even in principle, which of the two electrons at the end is Alice and which was Bob.
Even if you had two particles that had all of the same properties, you could still run experiments to figure out whether they were "identical" or not. (E.g. if you had Alice particles and Bob particles that each individually behaved exactly like electrons, you could build a Helium molecule that would have chemistry more like a Hydrogen molecule, because it would have an unfilled Alice shell and an unfilled Bob shell.)
If we merely meant that all electrons have exactly the same properties, then you'd be right to say that's something we only know approximately and we're making an assumption to say that they match up exactly. But that's not the situation! The particles are actually identical in a much stronger sense which we can test directly, and in order to be identical in this stronger sense they also need to have exactly the same properties as each other.
60.2: I bet both would be OK for reproducibility, actually. So, I breed a colony of sea slugs in a lab and confirm that they have basically homogenous genetics. I put 10 slugs each in 20 containers containing the same salt water and nutrients (purchased from the same supplier, recording lot numbers), but I add a bunch of sugar to half the containers (or spike it into my Purina Sea Slug Chow.). Then, I check on them every day. When one dies, I pull it out, cut it up, and look at gross pathology and perform any chemical analysis I want. That study ought to be highly reproducible, provided anyone reproducing it uses my exact conditions. I could probably generate hypotheses for a mechanism by which sugar effects sea slug mortality.
But, those studies don't tell me something that I can generalize very well. Sea slugs with different genetics might give a different outcome. So, maybe I should try it again with heterogeneous populations. But now, I need to recruit Moby Hick to tell me how many slugs I should use and maybe how diverse they should be to have confidence that I learned something not specific to my specially bred slugs. I'd also probably need to consult with someone who is expert in sea slug genetic diversity to make sure my sample was representative. And I'd really need to check doses of sugar. The first study, I'd just use a lot, because I wanted to jnow whether there was any effect. Dose response would be important if I wanted to generalize or develop asolid hypothesis.
Now, my experiment is starting to look like epidemiology, except that I still control the environment. Maybe my lab environment isn't really representing the slug's natural habitat, where nutrients aren't fixed. But how do I then get the extra sugar group of slugs? I'd need either to fund an immense slug habitat or to find a way to give sugar at fixed doses to wild slug populations without poisoning everything else. I might need a chemical engineer to design an aqueous sugar-distribution system.
I ban myself for the extended, painful analogy.
My massless muons are not a horror, they're a very good joke.
75 can I have an example of theory from a non-clinical discipline that meets the theory-criteria not met by "something goes wrong and cells fail to die"? (It's hard to make typed questions read as genuine curiosity rather than challenges, but this is the former.)
I'm just saying, I'm immobilized by a back sprain so I have like at least 72 more interminable hours to figure out a theory of whatever we need a theory of. I can probably do it, I just need to be clear on what a theory is.
80: Apparently we need a theory of theories.
80: Much sympathy. I had to leave work early yesterday because of a fucked up back. Perhaps it's catching. I suggest working on a grand unified theory of cock jokes.
78: Woah, I can't believe I forgot about that. That's such a great story.
The idea that we know as an experimental fact that electrons are identical is one of those things that sounds like gibberish without math, but is clear with it. (It's peculiar to quantum mechanics, though, one of the many ways in which quantum mechanics is unintuitive.) I guess this is a point for heebie.
What besides particle physics is in the bottom right quadrant?
Some model organism research is really awesome in terms of identicalness and reproducibility. Like every planarian has the same list of neurons and we know exactly what knocking ouch each individual one will do to its behavior. We also know the exact sequence of splits in the development of every single cell in their body. Etc.
Oh no, Stabby! Sorry to hear you're immobilized. When I hurt my back, I got steroid and muscle relaxant shots as well as pills and it made a huge difference. Then I went and sprained my ankle as soon as I was able to walk upright, but I don't think I can blame the drugs for that. In the future I'll probably seek help again when I have sciatica instead of just getting through on my own like I have before this time.
79: There are lots! Here are a few: astronomy/astrophysics - theory of relativity which tells you how bodies should behave (which you can test via prediction and observation of different types of systems). Molecular biology - DNA encodes proteins (simplifying a lot) using sets of three bases for one amino acid (so you should be able to figure out the code, input designed DNA and see whether you get the predicted amino acid sequence), microbiology - b-lactam antibiotics work by inhibiting penicillin-binding protein, which is normally responsible for a step in bacterial cell wall synthesis (which you can test via mutation studies and by looking at cell walls through a microscope). Chemistry has theories about predicting products from a given set of conditions (which you can test experimentally). There are also physics-type theories about collisions and molecular motion. There was a recent kerfuffle about a prof who famously proposed that although all different antibiotics have different immediate mechanisms for killing bacteria, they all cause cell death by causing oxidative damage (recently disproven by some very nice experiments). That's like what I mean by a theory of cancer.
There must be a ton of branches of chemistry in the bottom right too, but I can't think of examples off the top of my head.
Sorry to hear you've done your back. It's a bugger. Take it easy and don't try to do too much too soon.
Got it, 88 is super helpful. Per 64 it more or less clicks for me if I substitute "model" for theory.
And thank you all for sympathy! At this point I'm on an upward swing (i.e. not literally crawling to get to the fridge) so it seems like getting to anywhere where anyone could inject me with anything is more trouble than it's worth; I'm just insanely bored.
also to the extent this is the math thread, if anyone recommends a particular translation of Euclid's Elements, pseud aside, my ancient Greek is not up to that (or any) task
I read 'Clinical' as 'Classical' -- was looking forward to the controlled experiments.
Like every planarian has the same list of neurons and we know exactly what knocking ouch each individual one will do to its behavior. We also know the exact sequence of splits in the development of every single cell in their body. Etc.
Is there a planarian like that? I'm not sure but you might be thinking of C. elegans which is a nematode.
Even with them, I bet the experiments are more like "Let's see what happens if we give them a diet with no sucrose, and put them at 21 degrees Celsius" than any sort of confident prediction.
92 tradition of just trying a lot of different levers and fulcrums
This is the opposite of a crisis, but since there was a link to the massless muon dating comments, could I ask for some Tinder advice? I've tried using it, found that I'm not actually coordinated enough to swipe properly and that I'm too cheap to pay to undo my wrong swipes. I had two dates with people I wasn't particularly interested in, which was fine. Then I deactivated my account or made my card invisible or whatever stupid thing they say. But twice since then I've gotten messages that there are new matches even though no one should be able to see me. And that leaves a little notification on the icon on my phone that there's one thing there, which I find annoying enough that I opened the app even though I know it's a trick to make me open the app. Should I just delete it to make it stop annoying me? Why is it telling me no one can see me but letting people match with me? (I have no recollection of swiping favorably when seeing this woman's profile, though she doesn't seem awful or anything.)
Stabz, if you haven't gotten a better answer before then, I'm having dinner with my parents tonight and will ask my dad about Euclid translations since he's all into history of math stuff now and make it clear that no really it's for a friend and I don't have a secret yearning to translate Euclid either with him or alone. (Actually either might be fun, but still nope.)
Standing offer, I'll translate Euclid with anyone's dad.
and re tinder there's no downside to deleting the app; your matches and whatever stay unless you actually delete your account, not to imply there IS a downside to deleting your account just if there WERE it would not be implicated here
Yes, "model" is actually a better description. In chemistry there is a model for predicting the shapes of molecules called VSEPR. It's a wildly successful model and its predictions are nearly 100% correct. Strangely, though, one of its key assumptions is blatantly, demonstrably wrong. It's one that sounds good on paper, and leads to correct predictions, but it's wrong.
98: Good point! Got rid of it and okcupid so that I can't just browse for lack of anything better to do.
I've changed a lot since the linked comments and actually feel quite positive (for me, anyway) about myself and the non-broken parts of my body but still think it's probably better for me not to put any effort into trying to date right now.
85: Linguistic theory about "dog balls".
It's a wildly successful model and its predictions are nearly 100% correct. Strangely, though, one of its key assumptions is blatantly, demonstrably wrong.
Nobody tell Milton Friedman.
91: From the perspective of someone just in it for the math: I have the Dover edition, it's fine.
My dad recommends the Dover edition, by Heath, cheap and with a lot of notes. Apparently there hasn't been a good modern translation.
Aren't all English translations by definition modern?
I don't think Alfred the Great translated Euclid specifically, but the translations he did do were both English and not-modern.
Well, yes. But this one is late 19th century and translation norms have changed a bit even if the underlying text hasn't.
I didn't say ye olde Englishe Translations were moderne,Teofiloe.
93: Yes, I meant C. Elegans. My bad. I'm not sure how I got mixed up.
Here's the kind of thing I was referring to, though I don't see the specific thing about disabling each individual neuron and seeing what changed that I read about elsewhere on that particular site.
107 he did not, though I think Boethius did it into Latin and he did other Boethius? And a collective decision that he did in fact translate it sounds like something that might have happened in early 19th century England. Ugh I have such a crush on him.
111 was me DUH, and thank you dalriata and Thorn's dad.
Ugh I have such a crush on him.
You have a crush on Alfred the Great? Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
I thought Alfred only translated that one super scholasticky one.
Ugh autocorrect erased the diphthong I would NEVER.
115 he did consolations for sure. Otherwise I just don't know how solid the various attributions to him are.
ugh why is this iPad trying to erase me from the discourse
All of the proofs in Euclid have holes in them, though nobody noticed until the 19th century.
114: Fair enough. Nothing wrong with a crush on a dead English monarch, so long as it's not Henry VIII.
I used to have a bit of a crush on Sir Thomas More (or Saint Thomas More, as I first heard of him). And then I read about his role in the persecution of the Lutheran heretics, and my crush could not survive the grisly details of his stubborn orthodoxy.
113: You must have missed the recent thread where this came up. There were memes and everything.
122: What?! Memes and everything? This sounds like my kind of thread, and I totally missed it.
Finding it took longer than I expected, but it's this thread.
The link much appreciated, Teo, and thanks a million.
You're welcome.
Anyway, since it did actually come up in that thread, I just finished The Inheritance of Rome. I'll probably have a blog post soon reviewing it, but in short, it's excellent and well worth reading. I had suggested earlier that it might be a good reading group book, but now that I think about it more I'm not so sure. It's really primarily a synthesis of other work and an attempt to bring that work to the attention of a wider audience to spark interest in a period that is very poorly known among the general public. Which is fine, and a worthy goal, but makes it the kind of book that's hard to discuss for a general audience. It's really very interesting, but I'm having a hard time thinking of things I would say about it to a group that had also read it.
I read it back when someone--Tigre? ajay? Someone else?--brought it up a year ago and it was a great experience. It's a big info dump of a fairly broad swath of spacetime, but it was helpful in presenting it both as tied to its predecessors and non-static. I didn't appreciate how much the Franks innovated.
Yeah, it does feel like a huge infodump to some extent. Lots of the info is really fascinating, though. And agreed on the Franks.
Oh this sounds like something to read, always looking for a good spin on the Franks.
Yes, definitely read it if you haven't yet.
I once had a crush on David Hume, even though I was, and still remain, a practicing Roman Catholic. My dad objected to my affinity to these intellectual Scotsmen ("bunch o' bloody Orangemen"), though he had no real problem with anyone who was English and Anglican. It was the Scots Presbyterians who really brought his blood to a boil; he had no real quarrel with the English, nor with the Anglicans. He hated the Orange Order Lodge with a true passion, though.
Bought. My daughter has a Frankish name which I quite like but she's been starting to ask about the Franks and all I can think of is Salic code/terrible murders so if I can say "they made a good bridge" or something it would be good.
One major takeaway from the books for me is that the Franks had some amazing names. Otherwise they were indeed kind of notable for terrible murders, especially the Merovingians, but the Carolingians added a noble effort to enforce public morality and encourage scholarship, while not exactly cutting back much on the murders.
Book, singular. There's just the one.
The only reason I would ever have more kids would be to have SEVERAL daughters named after Merovingian abbess-assassins there's no diminishing marginal return there.
You could always start your own abbey and rename other people's kids, I suppose.
I'm just going to assume Clytie named her daughter Plectrude, after the queen and widow of Pippin II.
Who ultimately lost out in a power struggle with Charles Martel, but you can't win them all.
One major takeaway from the books for me is that the Franks had some amazing names.
Truth. My dad's joke name for girls is Clothilde. If I ever have a male dog I want to name him Dagobert.
"But when I grew up, I put away Childeric's things."
Pippin II was so much more successful than his predecessor.
Not to mention his predecessor's brother.
We all know about Charlemagne's inept brother who died of a nosebleed right??? His name
was
Carloman.
There's an excellent concept album about him, from the last year I paid attention to music.
143: Didn't know that - but it did remind me of the case of Nicolae Ceausescu's brother, who was a high official in the Ministry of the Interior, and was also named Nicolae. Who among us has not drunkenly given their newborn son a name with a naggingly familiar ring to it?
I think I am in love with A.E. Housman,
Which puts me in a worse-than-usual-fix.
No woman ever stood a chance with Housman,
And he's been dead since 1936.
The place was stiff with Carlomans (or possibly Carlomen).
I wholly endorse the recommendation of the Wickham book. It is excellent, if you're interested in the period (It may have been me who recommended it before). You need no other basic book on early mediaeval Europe. But, as has been said, it is only for the fairly committed dillentante.
Nthing Wickham, read on the recommendations here. Though on reflection I remember distressingly little.
||
Completely off topic, but there was a thread a few weeks ago about how/whether people envisage, among other things, mathematical operations. This is an unexpected (to me) light on the subject.
|>
150: Right. Spatial reasoning != visual reasoning. It's a hard thing to remember if you do all of your spatial reasoning visually.
120: Thomas More is now venerated as a martyr in the Calendar of Saints of the Church of England. He'd be rolling in his grave if he'd been allowed one.
152. Serve the sadistic bastard right!
150 is interesting, but there's some super dumb lines in there:
This may mean we have a deep understanding of how to handle numbers that is entirely independent of visual experience. This suggests we are all born with a natural understanding of numbers - an idea many researchers find difficult to accept.
Or - and this is radical - the blind people may have had other forms of stimulus throughout their life besides being born with all math already in their head.
In people with sight, the visual cortex is responsible for processing visual information and is not involved in maths. But this brain area, which is not needed for vision by people who have never had sight, seems to have been assigned a new function in these blind people.
Clearly what is revealed is that blind people are recruiting an otherwise useless part of their brain in a superhuman feat of flexibility, and not that scientists have an incomplete understanding of the visual cortex. It couldn't be called the visual cortex if there was other stuff going on, now could it.
150: So it's almost as if our minds can generate the structure of space prior to any exposure to visual data, and that this has some relationship to mathematics. Someone should write something about that and give it a snappy name - 'the pure form of intuition' or something.
My cousin talked about how if he had a son, he was going to be named "Kevin," but he had only daughters. Since he didn't need "Kevin," I've been using it when I need a snappy name for something.
He's close to 60 now, so you don't need to worry much about him taking it back.
My wife habitually calls my teenage daughter the equivalent of "Max" - "Ok Max, let's hit the road". Max is generally unamused.
148 "The fairly committed dilettante" is either a Trollope novel or a Busby Berkley movie that will be inspired by me when we have time travel.
150's neat. Though it would make sense that spatial reasoning was less contingent on "seeing stuff" than on "living in a body."
Now thinking of how boyf and I have names that read about as exotically as idk, Annie and Will, and we have kids whose names might as well be Radegund and Diarmaid, guess we're assholes.
"I'm going to bed with The Fairly Committed Dilettante"
"You're what?!"
"Don't worry, darling. It's just some Trollope."
It was the Scots Presbyterians who really brought his blood to a boil; he had no real quarrel with the English, nor with the Anglicans
A bit nonplussed by this at first, until I recalled that we weren't Presbyterians either—in Canada.
My highland ancestors were Presbyterians in Canada, until Union in 1925, an amalgamation of most Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists to form the United Church of Canada. There were still separate Presbyterians in my childhood, whom I would expect to be Orange as you say.
In the U.S., we joined the United Presbyterian Church USA, which is a mainline Protestant denomination. There are other kinds of Presbyterians in this country, all also more Orange.
My father's mother's family were very proud of their Irishness, and they were Anglicans: we would call them Episcopalians. Supporters of independence, proud of the literary renaissance and of the Protestant participation in both. This position is unusual and dissonant in the US, where Irish identity tends to be rather sectarian.
Canada: always different enough for the similarities to be misleading.
160.2: bodies with skeletons seem like a good start on a haptic sense of Euclidean geometry. I long for Egan to write a species for which Lagrangian fluid mechanics is more natural than Eulerian.
A memorable episode in Carl Sandburg's The Prairie Years, the kind of chestnut which I imagine is very seldom read anymore concerns the middle-aged Lincoln's diligent efforts to master Euclid, in the office or on the circuit, sharing rooms with other lawyers as they traveled with the court calendar.
166 (with its famous figure learning geometry in middle age) reminds me of this much-quoted bit from Aubrey's life of Hobbes. Makes me smile whenever I see it:
He was (vide his life) 40 yeares old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library in . . . , Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the 47 El. libri I. He read the proposition. 'By G--,' sayd he*, 'this is impossible!' So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with geometry.
*He would now and then sweare, by way of emphasis.
My distant Canadian relative who was significant enough for me to know anything about him was as Orange (and Francophobe) as all hell. But I guess he was Anglican (Church of Ireland); at least his uncle from whom I descend was, graduating from Trinity and becoming a curate in Wicklow before coming to England. So Anglicanism doesn't/didn't seem to inoculate you against Oragery all that well.
It's not like William of Orange was a Presbyterian or something.
I imagine he was raised in the NHK, which is or was organisationally presbyterian, although completely unconnected to Knox's crew.
Thanks for your post! Through your pen I found the problem up interesting! I believe there are many other people who are interested in them just like me! Thanks your shared!... I hope you will continue to have similar posts to share with everyone! I believe a lot of people will be surprised to read this article!
slither io