As a breast cancer survivor I will say that OBVIOUSLY I am happy to be alive. However, there needs to be more focus on quality of life in breast cancer treatment and research. I was diagnosed at 29, and I will live the rest of my life with a compromised immune system, non-functional chest muscles, lymphatic issues, and persistent anemia and fatigue. Mostly likely I was over treated due to my age and aggressiveness of the cancer. Again, I am thankful to be alive and I am grateful for the amazing doctors, nurses, and hospital staff. But with people being diagnosed younger and living decades post-treatment there needs to be research into quality of life that can help guide treatment decisions.
I guess that study is quite flawed when thinking about morality as a highly subjective value. Things that were highly moral 100 years ago are now seen as barbaric and a person alive 100 years ago would certainly not agree to many moral standards today. Religion comes into play as a conserving agent for morality of generations past, it still changes its interpretation of moral directives over time (at least true for christianity) but this change is far slower than the actual change in society.
So yes, from an individual standpoint, morals are possibly declining if you believe that the morals you grew up with are correct and you do not accept new concepts of morality produced by generational differences and societal change, even more so if you're religious. Therefore the feeling of moral decline is not something you can counter by saying "you're imagining it" because all moral is a, to some extent, abstract (read imagined) concept.
The study is more concrete than what you describe. Specifically they looked at questions like
“Do you think that over the last few decades our society has become less honest and ethical in its behavior, more honest and ethical, or has there been no change in the extent to which people behave honestly and ethically?”
So specific virtues are mentioned in the questionaires they evaluated, which counters the argument of changing morals over time. So your argument only holds if the morals in the time frame of the study (post WW2 USA) had shifted so dramatically that things like honesty had received a radically different valuation (which I don't think has happened).
I don't think their take is nuanced enough. They're talking in black and white terms, like either there is moral decline or there's not. What seems to be happening is that people who lack morals are often drawn to positions of power over others. This is leading to an imbalance of declining morals in our leadership. It's not all of us, but when they have control over the situation they're going to have a disproportionate impact.
It's the "peer-reviewed" part that should be raising eyebrows, not the AI-generated part. How the gibberish images were generated is secondary to the fact that the peer reviewers just waved the obvious nonsense through without even the most cursory inspection.
Peers are People and if you have papers published you know it can mean very little. People can and will accept or deny papers on their own biases. If you send an article to be reviewed at a journal that is about X and the study suggests X isn’t that helpful for a specific situation. They could absolutely reject it from a smaller journal. You will get reviewers who will reject your paper for contradicting their paper, even if you have the evidence to back it up.
In another article, it said that one of the reviewers did being up the nonsense images, but he was just completely ignored. Which is an equally big problem.
I read another article which quoted one of the peers as saying they mentioned the image but it wasn’t what they were reviewing, apparently the content was fairly standard and I haven’t seen anyone imply the research itself was invalid
I’ve heard some of my more senior colleagues call frontiers a scam even before this regarding editorial practices there.
It’s actually furstratingly common for some reviewer comments to be completely ignored, so it’s possible someone raised a flag and no one did anything about it.
Frontiers has something like a 90%+ publish rate, which for any “per reviewed” journal is ridiculously high. They have also been in previous scandals where a large portion of their editorial staff were sacked (no pun intended).
They sent me an email once inviting me to be a guest editor. I thought it would be a cool experience and a neat thing to have on the CV.
I mentioned it to my advisor at the time and they told me that frontiers does that pretty often and that these special issues don’t amount to anything.
Frontiers isn’t alone of course. MDPI is notorious for shitty editorial practices too.
The biggest problem with Frontiers for me is that there are some handy survey articles that are cited like 500 times. It seems that Interdisciplinary surveys are hard to publish in a traditional journal, and as a result 500 articles cited this handy overview article for readers who would need an overview.
The article I checked was in a reasonable quality, and it's a shame I can't cite it just because it's in Frontiers.
Some of the reviewers have explained it as the software they use doesn’t even load up the images. So unless the picture is a cited figure, it might not get reviewed directly.
I can kindof understand how something like this could happen. It’s like doing code reviews at work. Even if the logical bug is obvious once the code is running, it might still be very difficult to spot when simply reviewing the changed code.
We have definitely found some funny business that made it past two reviewers and the original worker, and nobody’s even using machine models to shortcut it! (even things far more visible than logical bugs)
Still, that only offers an explanation. It’s still an unacceptable thing.
Yea, “should be”, but as said, if it’s not literally directly relevant even while being in the paper, it might get skipped. Lazy? Sure. Still understandable.
A more apt coding analogy might be code reviewing unit tests. Why dig in to the unit tests if they’re passing and it seems to work already? Lazy? Yes. Though it happens far more than most non-anonymous devs would care to admit!
*The world 3 months ago:*AI is growing exponentially and might take over the world soon. It can do everything you can, but better, and some even seem almost centient.
*The world today:*Turns out the large language model made to fool us tried to fool us by ‘unexpectedly’ exhibiting behavior it was made for.
Whether or not we have free will and whether this whole existence is pre-calculated, I'm going to go all meta-Pascal's wager on it and suggest that we try to act like we do have free will and try not to think about it.
Maybe I was always going to come to that conclusion. Doesn't matter.
Maybe this makes about as much sense as Wile E. Coyote staying in the air until he actually realises he has run off a cliff. Doesn't matter.
Be the Road-Runner able to run into a painting of a tunnel as if it is real and remain as happy as possible about it.
Yep. On the grand scale it doesn't matter if this comment was pre-determined or if I genuinely made the free choice to write it. What matters is that, to me, the illusion of free will is complete. There is nothing other than my belief that I am free to affect my own existence.
As Rush once said, even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
Assuming his hypothesis is true I find this rediculous from the article:
"The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over," Sapolsky said. "We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there."
How is it made more so. We have no free will over how we reward or punish people. If the world is screwed up and his hypothesis correct then its exactly as screwed up as its supposed to be and our lack of decision neither make it worse or better. It just is.
That is a very good point. It seems like his argument is that, since we have no free will, we should stop trying to do anything to control others' actions... which in itself is suggesting to control others' actions. Furthermore regardless of whether we have free will or not, however you want to define it- punishing bad behavior discourages it and provides better outcomes for the world at large. It's like he's saying people just blindly act according to some non-free-will principle without taking in any environmental input, which just seems ridiculous. And implying that specifically applies only to bad behavior, which just seems like he's being smugly pessimistic as a gotcha. "Ha ha, the world is bad, if you disagree with me you're just a hopeless optimist" sort of thing.
This is missing the biggest piece: phylogenetic analysis. They aligned a selected group of mutations and then eyeballed the alignments and then speculated.
The study is very clearly talking about non-diabetic patients, too..
These are almost certainly people who want the weight loss primarily for aesthetic reasons rather than health ones, and may face these terrible health complications as a result. Makes it even worse, I think.
You're almost certainly better off somewhat "fat" than skinny by way of a drug like this. Especially given that "fat" is an entirely subjective measure and the "objective" measures like BMI overweight/obese are not based on points of any kind of phase change in health outcomes but are just somewhat arbitrary statistical variations. Dramatic interventions like these should be reserved for people that have dramatic need, at least until we have such an intervention safe enough and with few enough side-effects for over-the-counter sale.
Yes, I understood that. Sorry I wasn't clear. I have experienced gastroparesis a couple of times, and I'm saying that it is worse than a chronic illness in my experience (I also have a couple of chronic illnesses). It's extremely unpleasant. Sure can lose weight since you can't eat anything, though.
I don’t think this Lemmy thing is gonna make it tbh. Too many small communities all hoping to be the main hub for types of content, not enough moderation for the amount of fucking around that can happen, not to mention the constant armies of poorly informed morons trying to misinformation the general public.
The Cambrian had a bunch of strange creatures like this. There was the Opabinia, which had five eyes and a mouth on an arm. And there was the Anomalocaris, which is kinda similar to the new one they discovered (at least from the perspective of a non-scientist just looking at the artists' renditions), but with only two eyes and an order of magnitude bigger.
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