The US Constitution guaranties US citizens rights not the general population of the Earth. Our government has no way to enforce or protect rights from entities outside of the US (other than force). If as you say it is just a "giant printing press" then ownership is irrelevant - change it and print away. If on the other hand the Chinese government has a vested interest in influencing what 136 million Americas consume as information - it will probably stay under a Chinese Government sphere of influence by order of the Party.
They will call Washington's bluff because the Chinese Government will tell them to do so. It will not be out of a sense of protecting free speech or desire for the public good - quite the opposite. People seem to forget how Jack Ma virtually disappeared when he bucked the party's orders. Almost half of their users are from of the US. Surely a decentralized version of TikTok can be made to replace them.
> It will not be out of a sense of protecting free speech or desire for the public good
Arguing out of principle for 'free speech' is often used to defend literal Nazis even. Why couldn't they use it? Especially when corporations are people there.
I agree - It is simply my opinion that regardless of the stated public stance the underlying reasons for whatever decision they make will be dictated by the Chinese Government.
There is a scene from "Cool Hand Luke" where the Warden instructs Luke "You gonna get your mind right." I think Jack Ma got his mind right. Navalny never quite got his mind right.
Picked a friend at SFO and headed back into the City to see a concert at SFJazz. Google routed us directly the "problem area" where I was delighted to observer a man jacking off into the side of a building on a public side walk. Welcome to SF.
Was called up to jury duty. Got dismissed. Walked back to muni through the "problem area". Passed 2 individuals receiving Narcan from EMTs on market as they convulsed on the sidewalk. Was met by 2 individuals cooking something in a spoon as I descended into the Muni station.
I do not go down that way often. Those are 2 of the last 4 trips in the past year. Sadly FoxNews is correct in some respects. I do not know exactly why this is occurring but I still love this city and intend to contribute to making it a great place to live. It still is in many respects.
> Soon after the CSH paper was published, Jorge Hirsch, a condensed-matter theorist at the University of California, San Diego, began pressing Dias to release the raw magnetic-susceptibility data, which were not included in the paper. More than a year later, Dias and Salamat finally made the raw data public.
Explain to me why Nature would publish a paper without having access to/requiring the data. Could it be Nature wanted to be the first to publish such a ground breaking discovery? Dishonest people are simply a fact of life. The entire point - supposedly - of peer review is to insure that scientist do not make unsubstantiated claims. Job well done Nature. Job well done.
Nature very specifically wants to be the venue where the most important and impactful discoveries are first reported, and they tolerate a very high false positive rate to achieve it. Quick, light peer review is part of that process.
We always joked that if you read it in Nature, it was certain to be wrong, but realistically, it meant that the topic was likely an important one with a small number of competitive groups who could all evaluate each other's papers and will loudly complain about every inconsistency or irreproducible detail.
Peer review is not designed to detect fraud. It is meant to improve the quality of work, by giving a publication a fresh set of eyes who might identify gaps in the original research.
Maybe it should be. "Peer reviewed" is taken as a sign of reliability in many contexts, including public policy. If it isn't actually such a sign, then either it needs to change so it is, or we need to stop taking it as a sign of something it isn't.
I am not sure you appreciate the scope of distrusting submissions. Does this mean the reviewer has to clean-slate replicate everything? What if the author spent three years breeding a particular mouse model? Purified 8pg of an antibody extracted from flea tears? Spent six months of HPC time to simulate molecular dynamics? Some science is hard and incredibly difficult and expensive to do.
Even just reevaluating a submitted dataset is no guarantee. Someone committing an elaborate fraud could have faked the raw datasets as well.
> I am not sure you appreciate the scope of distrusting submissions.
What you're saying is, the first option I gave, to fix the peer review process so it is a good indicator of the reliability of research, is not feasible.
If that's the case, that just means we have to pick the second option: stop treating peer reviewed research as if it is reliable.
> If that's the case, that just means we have to pick the second option: stop treating peer reviewed research as if it is reliable.
It is the case, and that second option is exactly what we do. One article is nice, but replication is key before some new finding is accepted. That is exactly what happened with LK-99, for example, which is interesting because it was very public.
That's actually exactly correct. Peer review is supposed to characterize the research in terms of quality, not validate it. Otherwise, those peers who validate it would practically be co-authors.
It's a system built upon honesty. A dishonest person is obviously going to take advantage of it. Really blatant things are caught in peer review, but sneaky fraud will definitely slip through.
> Peer review is supposed to characterize the research in terms of quality
Fraudulent research would obviously not be of the desired quality, wouldn't it?
> It's a system built upon honesty.
But if the purpose is to characterize the research in terms of quality, this can't be right. Since fraud is known to happen, and there are known to be incentives for fraud, any process that claims to judge the quality of research would have to have some way of checking for fraud.
I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by "quality" in this context. It's not quality as in something like meat, it's quality as in "a quality education". Does it go above and beyond vs. do the bare minimum to address the scientific question proposed by the authors.
Something can appear to be of very high quality and yet still be completely fraudulent. This occurs in countless fields; art, counterfeit money, deepfakes, etc.
Scientists are attempting to address fraudulent research in other ways, but peer review is not the best means for it and it should not be thought of in that way.
BTW: I am not criticizing the actual reviewer of the paper. Data availability should be a policy of the journal and required for publication. How can you improve quality without access to the data? In this instance requiring data would have likely prevented the paper from even reaching peer review and wasting a busy individuals time.
Requiring (raw) data is relatively new, and is only in a few fields. For most of the history of peer review data was not required. In fact, none of the PIs I worked in during grad school would ever agree to releasing the raw data. I'm pretty sure they're still not in most of physics.
IMO, it's reasonable to require it, but understand that this is a relatively new requirement and not part of peer review culture.
Science isn't a religion, nor is it a paper, thesis, or journal. It's a method for understanding the world around us through rigorous application of testing and retesting.
Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted. It's people that can't be trusted.
We call people in the field of Science, Scientists. Perhaps we should stop labeling fallible and untrustworthy humans as such. Science is trustworthy. Humans are not.
> Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted. It's people that can't be trusted.
This is an important point and I think people should make it more often.
A human scientist who is committing fraud is misrepresenting facts about the world. And the way you would accurately describe those facts is with science. It's not that science is in the wrong here, it's that the human is lying about what the science says.
You want to be able to say "objectively, this guy lied about his research." But if you want to say that, then you need to be able to accurately describe both the world and the research so you can compute the diff between them. So if you throw out the science with the human scientist, then you've thrown out any objective means by which you were going to say the human scientist did anything wrong in the first place.
I strongly agree that there is a difference between science and "science".
>Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted.
I still wouldn't go so far. Science doesn't provide a pure understanding of the world it produces at best a model based on observations and axioms. These both can be wrong without politics,money, or personal bias. Our senses are fallible and sometimes you measured the wrong thing with the wrong tool. You shouldn't trust science, you scrutinize it and use what you find works until it doesn't (and then publish that).
> Nobody should wonder why people do not trust science
Taking an iterative approach where you make a prediction, test the prediction, and adjust course in response to the test (AKA science) is literally the only possible thing that can work to discover true things about the world. So if someone distrusts science they're basically giving up on a belief in objective reality.
But I agree it's not surprising that people don't trust science, any more than it's surprising that people believe in astrology, lizard people, or ESP. Human minds don't have a special science sensor that lights up when they read true things. It's pretty much garbage in garbage out.
Don't miss the story here, which is that the study failed to replicate and the fraud was detected. In many human endeavors there are frauds that have persisted for centuries.
> That on its own is scandalous
Yeah it is, I agree. Providing data should be mandatory to the reviewers. It should IMO also be provided publicly if feasible (at least upon request if it's financially burdensome to host) if the work is publicly funded.
That was one particular dataset being requested. There are near infinite ways to characterize a material, and even the best lab is only going to have the time, resources, and expertise to collect and present some of them.
I am not in the field, so I cannot comment on the specific relevance of the request, but in my area, there are absolutely some mandatory data inclusions which should block a paper from being published. Presumably this was not on that list.
There are numerous ways to embargo data and make it available to reviewers before publication and to the public after publication. [1] This isn't a new idea. They simply did not do it.
Nature is a "premier journal" known for publishing cutting edge research. Any data - in this case a bunch of numbers - used to support the conclusion should be made available. I am sure there are disciplines where the evidence would be difficult to provide directly - fossils, physical items etc. Maybe this PI did the experiment himself - thought he won a Noble - only to find he could not in fact reproduce the results after publication - oops. IMO Nature did not do its job. Just pointing that out.
I would like it noted that I had Jorge Hirsch as a professor many years ago, and his grading was extremely harsh - you needed to be flawless at showing your work, not just getting the right answer. I remember getting a 14% on one of his tests, the worst score I ever got on any test in my life. It turned out to be a B+ after the curve was applied.
Hence, it doesn't surprise me at all to see that he was the one to call out Dias. Some things never change!
May I suggest the book "Mind of the Raven" by Bernd Heinrich. Excellently written and extremely interesting. He has spent a life time studying animal behavior in particular Corvidae.
"Bernd Heinrich is a biologist and author of numerous books on the natural world. He lives in Richmond, VT, and in a cabin in the forests of western Maine."
There are 192 medical schools in the US. For a mere $192 Billion dollars one time payment we could train all doctors each year in perpetuity. The US just forgave $138 Billion in student loans.
Not that anyone is offering $192B but I also suspect existing doctors and the AMA might actively oppose this. Debt-free MDs would probably create downward pressure on salaries.
And those $138 billion in loans were not "forgiven". That would be the loan companies, or the universities saying "don't pay us" or "don't pay us back".
What happened is AHIC said "let raise everybody's taxes. We'll print more money and 'inflate it'. Nobody will notice."
I'm a fan of affordable education. This is just vote-buying. If I'm re-elected, free ice cream for all.
