I'm not commenting to be contentious or antagonistic. Problems with reproducibility have been rampant in numerous fields for the past 15 years, for a variety of reasons. That's part of what makes the problem so difficult to address and remediate.
This was a particularly important retraction, as the original paper was about how social science research done right could be highly reproducible. When I poked around the article history on Pubmed a bit, I found the following:
>Clarification 17 October 2024: This article has been amended to clarify Berna Devezer’s field of study and to emphasize that not all of the authors of the original study signed the response to the retraction.
>Clarification 23 October 2024: This article has been changed to emphasize the range of issues flagged in a preprint about the retracted paper and the source of the statement that 86% of replication efforts were successful.
The first caveat on 17 Oct 2024 doesn't seem significant. The second one might be (difficult to tell with minimal info!) but I don't have access to the full content. (I can only read the original paper in Nature and the "non clarified" retraction notice.) Might you know anything about the 2nd clarification?
Decent post and good points: I've observed similarly about myself over time... even an interval of as little as six months. I write something and leave it in draft, or deliberately postpone doing or saying something to make sure I still feel the same way, after letting time pass. (This isn't with things I need to do, nor procrastinating.) I like it as an alternative to being impulsive.
How is the post an example of mindfulness? I'm not sure I know what mindfulness is.
I would think this would be sufficient which the USDA already does.
>... the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, which conducts research on crop yields, invasive species, plant genetics and other agricultural issues. The USDA instructed employees to stop agency researchers from collaborating on or publishing papers with scientists from “countries of concern,” including China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela.
There have been incidents in academia of researchers accepting funds from the US government for projects and also accepting money from foreign governments but not disclosing it. Or even lying about it when asked. I think the USDA situation is different.
I know, right? Look at this, what Liv Ullman said. https://deadline.com/2026/01/norwegian-star-liv-ullmann-comm... I don’t understand what Liz Ullmann means here. The Nobel people said the prize can’t be revoked, shared, or transferred so it is just the gold medal that María Corina Machado gave to Trump. It is a very nice medal to have! But it isn’t anything to get upset about if she chooses to give her medal to someone. Norway isn’t going to invade the USA to get it back.
>“I’m Norwegian, we give a Nobel Prize to somebody who deserved it and suddenly that Nobel Prize is going to somebody else. It’s so strange, so strange and that’s why I’m happy specifically now that we have laws that say that if you misuse the Nobel Prize we take it away from you. Somebody in power in the United States may be disappointed. He will lose it… I am happy.”
The landing page has a Q&A. This is the relevant part of the response to the question, "Why aren't all GEO satellite links encrypted?"
>Encryption imposes additional overhead to an already limited bandwidth, decryption hardware may exceed the power budget of remote, off-grid receivers, and satellite terminal vendors can charge additional license fees for enabling link-layer encryption. In addition, encryption makes it harder to troubleshoot network issues and can degrade the reliability of emergency services.
So, the only suggestion that there would be greater heat/energy if they did encryption by default is the part about decryption (receiver) hardware having limited power budgets in some cases. There's more than what I copy-and-pasted above, but the overall message is that lots of organizations haven't wanted to pay the direct costs of enabling encryption... although they should.
At first I thought, same-old same-old, but I changed my mind halfway through. I like how the author, Elke, identifies the underlying similarities between e/acc and the AGI doomers. (By AGI doomers, I'm referring to many Less Wrong folks, NOT earnest people who worry about whether AI will cause 20% unemployment or if it is hype and they're being played).
I think pmarca may have had a change of heart about being on the e/acc side, but he certainly is associated with funding lots of AI startups, so that may be more relevant.
Also, after the SBF_FTX fiasco and association with effective altruism, I'm not sure if EA should be so strongly linked to the doomers as Elke does. This and my vague recall of what Andreessen says on Twitter are minor points. Elke wrote an insightful, clever post about AGI (and even AI without attaining AGI) as a form of eschatology.
P.S. My next stop will be to look for the 1999 book she mentioned for an earlier view of tech eschatology.
The example, "Misapplication of LLMs can negatively impact productivity" was a real shocker to me. I guess I'm still too naive, but I never imagined anyone would try to do that. No surprise it didn't work out, and sad that he seems to be ready to give up on coding entirely now.
Even for non-believers in such things as alien bases, this is a good post. I say that because of the extent to which many public, i.e. free, Google services seem to have degraded.
In this case, we don't know if it is due to imposed secrecy by blurring, or due to Google Earth degrading in quality overall. Observations of the decaying quality of Google Search are quite common now.
(The video could have explained it better by focusing more on then and now images, but hey, I know that my Youtube explainer videos leave even more to be desired than this one. The message was conveyed effectively and that's what counts).
I found a good post with photos of Google Earth, pre-blurring from L.A. Almanac https://www.laalmanac.com/mysterious/my722.php It says that the spot has been referred to as Sycamore Knoll. I'd heard that name before but never knew what it was.
This was a particularly important retraction, as the original paper was about how social science research done right could be highly reproducible. When I poked around the article history on Pubmed a bit, I found the following:
>Clarification 17 October 2024: This article has been amended to clarify Berna Devezer’s field of study and to emphasize that not all of the authors of the original study signed the response to the retraction.
>Clarification 23 October 2024: This article has been changed to emphasize the range of issues flagged in a preprint about the retracted paper and the source of the statement that 86% of replication efforts were successful.
The first caveat on 17 Oct 2024 doesn't seem significant. The second one might be (difficult to tell with minimal info!) but I don't have access to the full content. (I can only read the original paper in Nature and the "non clarified" retraction notice.) Might you know anything about the 2nd clarification?