maegul (he/they)

A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

  • 127 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2023

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  • Not to claim equivalence or anything, but smartphone and the internet (ironic saying so here I know).

    I’m a xennial … old enough to remember living without all this and the middle time where computers were either games or just useful tools.

    For me, and I’m pretty sure many others, I’m pretty convinced it’s better that way.

    I’d really like to get away from these things, at least just to relearn older habits.


  • Thank you!

    I’ve only watched the first minute or two, but I think I get the idea. Clickbaity generalisations etc … yea that makes sense and are obviously shitty (I guess I just expect that more from YouTubers who are otherwise reasonable people).

    The whole “most research is BS” claim isinteresting though. I’ll be interested to see how the video addresses it. If we’re talking about >50%, and that it’s substantially imperfect in its constitution due to systemic issues, I dunno, I’d be interested in an actual investigation TBH.

    Thanks again though!



  • as people are losing more and more faith in academic research and science

    Counter argument: it’s happening with or without her and it’d be better to rationally highlight the issues rather than allow the uneducated to hijack the issue.

    IME, the biggest deflator of faith in science etc for laypeople are their friends who left academia telling their own stories aligned with Sabine’s general point.

    Broadly, I’d wager the erosion of faith in research is a much bigger picture and getting to the bottom of the causes is more important than getting precious about maintaining the status quo.


  • Sabine is the poster child for science populism. She got chewed out by academia for having mediocre research ideas and now she loves to claim that there’s a conspiracy to take funding from her favorite fringe fields and give it to the establishment.

    Gotta say you’ve got me sceptical.

    I don’t follow her closely and am no mega fan or anything. But it’s not like it’s uncommon for good people to get pushed out of academia for shitty reasons.

    Plus, I don’t think you need to conjure conspiracy theories before you start arguing that there are dominant dogmas, cultures, practices and even some sort of “establishment”. I’d wonder how many fields of science don’t have some internally recognised “establishment” and “counter-establishment” ideas.

    And I’m not sure I see the “poster child … populism” claim? Sure, she’s probably popular, but for my money she does a decent job of YouTube science. Not sure she’s a household name or all over tv or anything.

    Got any more substantive links/sources about her being mediocre or conspiratorial?


  • Yes this basically.

    I don’t follow Sabine closely, but I’d presume she’d at least in principal be capable of appreciating the value of even random exploration and serendipity.

    But what this is about is an elitism bubble that rewards playing along rather than embracing the serendipity facilitating sorts of diversity and counter culture and iconoclasm in research approaches.

    A great summary I’ve heard on this, from a very elite researcher, is that you can’t tell where good research is going to come from. If forced to chose between a lab of Nobel prize winners and one of new comers, you’d may as well split the funding evenly. It seems to me that the productionisation of research and academia has gone too far and is the problem.



  • Yep. And it’s a point well made.

    To me it all comes down to the consequences of 1) wanting the work to not just be easier but literally not involve thinking, and 2) how little attention people are paying to where these tools come from: just training on the whole Internet, not some intelligent analytical task specific tooling.

    Big and obvious consequences fall out of these I think, and I’m a little frightened how little people think and talk about this.






  • EDIT: I’m agreeing with you here. My tone was probably confusingly aggressive. I just meant to add the idea that managers wouldn’t even know if WFH was good or bad let alone know whether you should keep your full pay.

    How about we decide on what doing the job actually is, in a way that can reasonably be measured, and then see if we can do it better from home or the office?!

    I’ve always felt that the elephant in the room on this is that remote work highlights the incompetence of management. And so instead of embracing the notion that remote work can work well provided the work force is well orchestrated, they’ve embraced fear mongering around uncontrolled labour.







  • I’ve read plenty of books digitally. And it’s fine and convenient. But there’s something fundamentally missing. Each time I’ve finished a digital book I’ve had the urge to buy a physical copy. To have it on my shelf as a constant reminder … something I can go back to with the ease of moving into a neighbouring room.

    It’s the big elephant in the room with modern tech IMO … it’s big obvious failure … that it’s all stuck in little screens. Look at the desktop computer … replacing a whole desk with … a single screen (sure things have gotten bigger now, but still, desks and whiteboards and pin boards can be quite large too).

    I’m in a new office and there isn’t a single piece of useful information on the walls. No whiteboards or posters or pinboards or anything. So much is hidden in the computer where mostly no one sees it but where we are all supposed to consult and update it like a shitty ritual that no one believes in. And don’t get me wrong, I’m “pro-computer” as a knowledge work tool. It’s just we’ve bought into lies and the dumb promise that having all of the Google or Microsoft things will just make us productive provided “we learn to use it properly” (where not enough ever do, and things change regularly enough that there probably isn’t a point anyway).