The major journals have absolutely no accountability. In any other market, if the product doesn't work or harms someone the company goes out of business or the maker is sued. Not so in journals. So, why do we accept it? Because there's no other way for the layman to determine what makes a good professor, because by definition, they are smarter than us (or at least they're supposed to be), and so we (the general public) are not able to tell if they are good at what they do or not.
So - the answer we have is peer review, which is just the foxes guarding the hen house. There's no other solution that's been proposed that makes any sense in a self reinforcing market manner. Having some post-docs suddenly become concerned about this and hire a bunch of undergraduates to start using to comb excel with spreadsheets will be useful until everyone loses interest. The price of a can of Coca-Cola isn't useful until people lose interest - it's market priced by millions of customers at every minute of every day.
Until there's a solution to this problem that makes sense this will keep happening over and over again.
Case in point - youtube. They changed their demonitization algo in response to complaints and now they have complaints from other users that the algo is producing false positives. For example, the "Great War" history podcast had 100s of youtube videos demonitized because they talk about storm troopers and Nazis, which of course isn't great if you are a Nazi, but maybe ok if you're a history podcast.
The issue is that each video generates on an individual level so little money for youtube that it just doesn't pay to have an individual go through each and every video on their platform and make a value judgement on worth. I mean anyone can upload a video for free and each watch of a video is maybe at maximum a few cents from an advertiser in profit to youtube.
Facebook and all other content aggregation web forums face the same conundrum. And the problem doesn't get better if we invent new algos or people more efficiently (somehow). On the one hand you now have an algo that determines what can be said or not said en masse and is making the decisions in an increasingly black box (as the heuristics will be by necessity rather complicated), on the other you have the very poor filtering videos or at the very least fallible human judgement still at the wheel on what gets to be said and not said.
Who watches the watchers? At the moment we have a handful of powerful media conglomerates that effectively control through monopsony almost all the social media on the internet. What, we've got Alibaba, Facebook, youtube, reddit, and instagram - that covers at a rough guess like 60-70% of social media traffic? But these are companies that are only successful at scale - you go on a social media platform because all your friends are on it (a la the myspace model) and you are given a "free" user experience because aggregating millions of people allows for a few cents in ad revenue per user to subsidize the servers at scale.
This problem is probably baked into the cake of this particular pattern and isn't fixable. Boy is it going to be wild when we finally crack how to make deep fake videos!
Except, in the first case the underlying casual issue to Republicans separating children from their parents is their hatred and racism of asylum seeking immigrants. In the second case, the underlying issue to people who don't believe in abortion are often religious groups that have a history of persecuting anyone different than them, including the mistreatment of women and children.
Trying to state there are radicals "on both sides" just isn't true in degree or kind. We don't have radicalized left wing socialists shooting up schools. We just don't.
At a guess, are you a foreign student? Most post graduate degrees are being gotten by foreigners, because that’s how the economics works as the education ponzi scheme collapses.
The sweet spot, in terms of ROI, is to get a bachelors degree and go immediately into industry. The student shows they are competent enough to succeed on their own at a school environment where they have a nonzero probability of failure. For foreigners they stay in school for as long as possible so their green card can process. It’s not worth the risk of working for a company where they can be fired immediately and sent home, and it’s likewise not worth the cost of an h1b to companies for an undergrad. Since we graduate more phds every year than academia can absorb into teaching positions the green card process is effectively subsidizing postgrad programs, where the product is Indians and Chinese (primarily) who are desperate to get a high paying job in industry. Look up the numbers if you’d like.
At a societal level this is disastrous as it means that we have many foreign born who disproportionately hold the highest paying positions in society. Prosperity gospel and American exceptionalism aside this just leads to mass discontent and nationalism. It’s hard to argue they are wrong - why should a native born American allow a foreigner to take the highest paid jobs if given a choice? This leads (among other ways the country ignores and marginalizes poor native born citizens) to the election of people like Donald Trump.
This is not to say foreigners are bad - they often come from hard places where life isn’t easy. The real villains in this story are the aristocrats of the education empire. “More money for me and fuck everyone else,” seems like a common refrain these days.
I don't recall ever having someone ask me not to post something. Is there an inbox or something or is it all reply based? I get "flagged" sometimes, but that just means someone pushed the "flag" button right? I thought posts were just deleted when they reached -1.
EDIT: Now this post and the grandparent post have had their points reduced. So, now I'm super confused - if this post had been detached from the main thread, who is downvoting it? Do the mods have abilities to see (and vote) on threads removed from users with lower access rights? Sorry for all the questions, but I'm not sure I understand how the comment system works really.
EDIT EDIT: OK now I understand how detached works, thanks.
This guy always strikes me as a weird nut bar. Is someone willing to tl;dr for me? I'm interested, but a bit too tired at the moment to wade through a sea of cray-cray.
The chan boards are some of the last bastions of actual free expression.
Here, if you post something that someone doesn't like, your comment is downvoted into oblivion.
Case in point, I posted "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" and within 2 seconds it reached 0 votes. If you post anything anti-capitalist on this board (I'm pro-socialist) then there are paid trolls who will literally down vote you until your comments and submissions disappear. Hackernews is owned by propagandists literally by design - it has a moderation system that is created to be gamed. Post enough popular click bait content and you get the points necessary to down vote others. I'm sure that there are entire offices purpose built and operated around policing Hackernews for political purposes.
The /pol/ board on 8ch is a disgusting cesspool. Yes, and? Cloudflare is a de-facto monopoly (monopsony?) and they have the ability to control information. Whoever controls the free flow of information controls the world. What happens when a fascist decides to control Cloudflare? What do you do then? And if you think that is unlikely, well Rupert Murdoch exists.
This should be unlawful by regulation. A free press and free speech means that people should have the right to express opinions that you disagree with. And monopolies prevent that.
Meh...they'll rename it "Happy Pancakes", do it again until they get caught and then fire some hapless nitwit middle manager that they wanted to get rid of anyway.
Yay, capitalism. Where no one's to blame and everything's always on fire.
"Being bored is good? I'll show you how bored I am! I'm the most bored. Here's an anecdote about how I was the most bored before being the most bored was known to be good. Therefore I really am bored and therefore good. LIKE ME LIKE ME LIKE ME"
In other news Putin signed into law more internet censorship bills this week. For all of the people claiming they desire more censorship, who gets to decide? You? The democratically elected Congress/Legislature/President (ruhroh)? If you want to fix this problem, the focus should be on helping those in society who have fallen through the cracks and would desire to harm others in the first place. Which requires real work and effort put into job placement programs and social safety net legislation. Instead what we'll probably do is start banning websites because most people are stupid and reactionary while real work takes effort. Sigh.
"The 2.5% rate of annual loss (of insect biomass) over the last 25-30 years is “shocking”, Sánchez-Bayo told the Guardian: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”
So, in 100 years all insects will die. All of them. And therefore us, long beforehand.
So this "reduction of poverty" through capitalist economic expansion has been achieved by the use of pesticides for cheap food, plastic, global warming etc. How can anyone claim that reduction of poverty is a good thing when it comes at the cost of the survival of the entire world ecosystem?
So - the answer we have is peer review, which is just the foxes guarding the hen house. There's no other solution that's been proposed that makes any sense in a self reinforcing market manner. Having some post-docs suddenly become concerned about this and hire a bunch of undergraduates to start using to comb excel with spreadsheets will be useful until everyone loses interest. The price of a can of Coca-Cola isn't useful until people lose interest - it's market priced by millions of customers at every minute of every day.
Until there's a solution to this problem that makes sense this will keep happening over and over again.