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The upvote and downvote buttons are a couple millimeters apart on mobile and there's no feedback (that I've noticed, anyway) regarding which one you've pressed. There's probably a lot of accidental voting.

After you hit one of them, an 'undown' or 'unvote' button appears in front of the 'root' / 'parent' button

Oh it says "undown", that's good to know, I often worry I might have downvoted somebody by mistake. (Never done it deliberately.)

The vote button you press disappears, as well. I think this depends on some kind of local storage; it's often slightly out of sync.

Well, the authors' byline says they're from Northeastern University, Shenyang 110169, China and Faculty of Management and Economics, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China. I've heard that Chinese universities sometimes have explicit publication quotas or offer cash bonuses for publications. Having never worked at a university in China, I cannot personally verify that though.

MDPI also spams anyone it thinks might be willing to submit a paper or serve as an editor, and does not seem to care much about the quality of the submissions it receives.


The concept of indirect fitness must be more complicated than explained here. The article explains it as a worker bee sharing 75% of her genes with her sisters, but only 50% with a child, so there is selection pressure for workers to be sterile and self-sacrificing. But few genes actually differ between individuals, so the percentages are much higher. E.g., I share ~ 99% of my genes with each one of you reading this. Assuming honey bees' genetic variation is not much more extreme than human variation, we're talking about 99.5% vs. 99.75% sharing, which sounds more like an explanation of why altruism would be preferred in general rather than uniquely affecting bees.

The article does eventually circle around to acknowledge this, but it's easy to miss and very underdeveloped compared to the discussion of kin selection: "So why do bees die when they sting you? Perhaps because they're disposable parts of a larger super-organism which has evolved by multi-level selection."


It doesn't matter how much bees have in common. The idea is that in bees, altruistic traits, that is those that produce more sisters by helping the queen have a 75% chance of being passed, because sisters share 75% of a worker bee genes. Most of the genes are the same, of course, bees won't become dogs or anything like that, but a few of them differ, and these are the one that matter.

Could worker bees be fertile and have a selfish traits that let them have more children, they would only have a 50% chance of passing these, because children share 50% of genes.

So: 75% of altruistic genes pass vs 50% of selfish genes. Altruistic genes win. Humans can't pass 75% of their genome this way, so that altruistic genes have no intrinsic advantage over selfish genes.


Right, "sharing" here must mean DNA that was cloned from the same ancestral DNA strand, not merely that it shares the same informational content. I got lost in the analogies that frame things in terms of what's "better" for the organism and lost sight of this.

The most important thing from the perspective of replication of a DNA strand is the number of copies of DNA passed to the next generation, and future generations, right? Which would be 0.75 * (mean marginal increase in next-generation sisters) + 0.5 * (mean # offspring). The probability that these next-generation individuals actually get to reproduce in turn would also factor in somewhere.

What's also interesting is that if we take the point of view of the queen (through whom the altruistic genes must pass), the queen's reproductive strategy is relatively few children + hordes of sterile helpers + killing her own sisters. So are we talking about a fitness advantage of altruistic traits (maximizing # sisters), or a fitness advantage from selfish traits [maximizing P(fertile child survival) I guess, since # children is small] that produce hordes of sterile helpers?

Edit: Circling back to the organism perspective, in the sense of "I would gladly give up my life for two brothers or eight cousins.", how many bees is it worth giving up one's own life for in that specific sense? We do have a common ancestor after all and thus a non-zero R-factor.


Hmm, I understand this difference in genes differently.

You and I probably share 99% of effective genes, but still the difference in genes is much greater because there we are comparing the entire DNA. There is a lot of non-affecting DNA. And that is what they analyze when comparing DNA of two individuals in forensics.


Based on the information I found, the % difference between two randoms humans in terms of base pairs (including non-coding DNA) is even less than the difference in terms of genes, so the distinction does not materially alter the discussion. Also the article framed its explanation in terms of genes, not base pair sequence.

"Between any two humans, the amount of genetic variation—biochemical individuality—is about .1 percent." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK20363/

https://book.bionumbers.org/how-genetically-similar-are-two-...

Forensic comparisons are mostly about comparing the number of short tandem repeats at handful of loci, a very small part of the the whole genome.

If you have any information that indicates the DNA similarity between people is less than 98–99% I would love to hear it. I have not personally analyzed the sequences from the 1000 genome project to check, and am relying on summaries written by other people.


I see, thank you for the explanation!


Shifting the topic from research misconduct to good laboratory practices, I don't really understand how someone would forget to take pictures of their gels often enough that they would feel it necessary to fake data. (I think you're recounting something you saw someone else do, so this isn't criticizing you.) The only reason to run the experiment to collect data. If there's no data in hand, why would they think the experiment was done? Also, they should be working from a written protocol or a short-form checklist so each item can be ticked off as it is completed. And they should record where they put their data and other research materials in their lab notebook, and copy any work (data or otherwise) to a file server or other redundant storage, before leaving for the day. So much has to go wrong to get to research misconduct and fraud from the starting point of a little forgetfulness.

I mean, I've seen people deliberately choose to discard their data and keep no notes, even when I offered to give them a flash drive with their data on it, so I understand that this sort of thing happens. It's still senseless.


Recipes like these aren't useless, but yes, they really need to be prefixed with whether they expect to start from a clean work tree and empty staging area. Or describe what they'll do to uncommitted changes, both staged & unstaged. Otherwise they pose a substantial risk of making the problem worse.


> Or, better yet, the gay satanic-panic currently gripping half the country, and the insane culture war being waged around it. You can't actually believe that all those people who have strong opinions about it have been somehow personally wronged by homosexuals.

Or the satanic panic over Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. One of the cops ("school resource officers") in the middle school I went to still believed in that nonsense and it was the early 2000s by that point.


If anyone is curious, the following seems to work:

0. Install the Tree Style Tab extension (or whatever vertical tabs extension you prefer).

1. Enable userChrome.css: set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets=true in about:config.

2. Set browser.tabs.inTitlebar=0 in about:config so the title bar buttons (and, on some OS's, the title bar itself) remain visible.

3. Create =chrome/userChrome.css= in your Firefox profile folder and write the following to it:

  @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");

  /* hides the native tabs */
  #TabsToolbar {
      visibility: collapse;
  }


> Is it considered unethical to do medical experiments on yourself without any oversight like you would find in a typical human subject trial?

Note there are different contexts at play here. When someone says "ethics" in a scientific context, it may encompass scientific integrity, avoidance of questionable research practices, reproducibility, etc., as well as medical and moral ethics. The speaker may not even be fully aware of these distinctions, since the subject is often taught with a rule-based perspective.

Experimentation on oneself is often _scientifically_ unethical (i.e., when done with the intent to make a scientific discovery) because:

1. The result is often too contaminated by experimental integrity issues to have scientific value. As another comment in this thread notes: "sample size of 1, confirmation bias, amped-up placebo effect, lack of oversight, conflict of interest when the patient is the investigator". Lack of oversight means no one is checking the validity of your work, it's not a permission thing. Every issue that is blamed for the so-called reproducibility crisis is worse.

2. Due to publication pressure, abandoning the cultural prohibition against self-experimentation amounts to pressuring everyone to self-experiment to grow their CV by a few quick N = 1 studies, or do something risky when their career flags. Obviously, oversight to ensure that self-experimentation proceeds only in cases of terminal disease mitigates this concern.

In practice, journal editors currently provide oversight addressing point #2, which is why work like what we're discussing here still gets published. See also Karen Wetterhahn's valuable documentation of her (accidental) dimethylmercury poisoning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn).

Experimentation on oneself in an attempt to cure your own illness by any means at your disposal, provided you do not harm others, is not _morally_ unethical IMO. It just rarely has a scientific role.


According to the original account, the pencil/pen thing wasn't about an audit trail, and both the IRB and hospital admin were equally silly.

> IRREGULARITY #3: Signatures are traditionally in pen. But we said our patients would sign in pencil. Why?

> Well, because psychiatric patients aren’t allowed to have pens in case they stab themselves with them. I don’t get why stabbing yourself with a pencil is any less of a problem, but the rules are the rules. We asked the hospital administration for a one-time exemption, to let our patients have pens just long enough to sign the consent form. Hospital administration said absolutely not, and they didn’t care if this sabotaged our entire study, it was pencil or nothing.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/


The usual approach is to provide grants for something else that the municipality wants/needs, but make them conditional on the municipality acting in the desired manner.


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