I just defended on Wednesday, and had a similar experience, but not quite as extreme. For me, the pressure was internal rather than external -- my committee was (in retrospect) OK with my progress and ready to let me go, but I wasn't. I felt my dissertation wasn't "ready", I didn't want to have my name on something that wasn't "good enough".
But even though the circumstances were different, it led me to the same place eventually. After months of the same kind of lifestyle, I decided I just didn't care anymore, was ready to go be a farmer or something if they failed me, and would just submit what I had. Obviously it worked out fine (so far). But it will be some time before I recover from that level of stress. I developed fairly severe alcoholism that I am just now starting to step down from. As happens with burnout, my efficiency was terrible during this period, which made everything worse.
I hear this kind of experience is pretty common for a dissertation -- everyone goes through some twisted version of the stages of grief before submission.
Apparently, and paradoxically, greater eqalitarianism in a society can result in higher amounts of individual choice, which can actually exacerbate inherent differences between groups (if you believe they exist).
I don't think the disagreement in the case of the memo is about facts. Few outlets that reported on this controversy even seem to have read the memo, nor are the criticisms of it I have read based on facts (or on words).
They seem to be based on the idea that the writer has drawn the wrong conclusion. The facts or lack thereof seem to be irrelevant: if he had cited the same papers but made the opposite argument, he would have been fine.
The idea of scientists being some kind of arbiters of truth makes me very uncomfortable. The process of science is really messy. People want to publish surprising and extraordinary findings (which often turn out to be false, and the more extraordinary, the more likely this is). We have to publish or perish. And many other problems.
Over the long term, science finds truth. In the short term, it is quite unreliable. Scientists are tired of having their work used to support agendas, when in reality we only observe, and usually the observations don't even support the agendas they're being used for.
At this point, I think more and more scientists would prefer that science just be left out of politics. Politics appears to be a lost cause, far beyond any ability for facts or reason to be useful, and we have always done our best to leave politics out of science. To the left and right, I would just plead: leave us out of your petty squabbles and let us get on with advancing humanity's future. But I must admit there are some publicity-seeking members of this profession who undercut this hope.
To more directly respond to your post, there is an awful lot of confusion between what science says, and the value judgments derived from a combination of scientific observations and some ideology. I do not think the public, left or right, is generally capable of disentangling facts from their interpretations of the consequences of those facts.
>I don't think the disagreement in the case of the memo is about facts.
Neither do I, see footnote 2. However, the article this thread is responding to was talking about factual decisions, so I stuck with that assumption.
>At this point, I think more and more scientists would prefer that science just be left out of politics.
By all means, leave politics out of science [0], but we need science to inform are politics. Otherwise, we just get more of the raw ideology that is the very reason you don't like politics.
Science should not be left to just the scientists. They do the hard work of collecting data and running experiments. But mostly, they end up answering very specific questions with varying degrees of confidence. Once they have those answers, they guess at broader implications. These are informed guesses, based on their knowledge of other highly specific results and thinking that others have done. However, this latter part of science is far more accessible than most people realize. So, instead of actually engaging with the science, they simply appeal to the scientists. This is made even worse because they are attempting to understand the conclusion without the argument, and so will tend to misunderstand. Further, since the general public almost never engages with the actual science, politicians and activists have near free reign to misrepresent the results.
[0] Mostly, the question of what to study should be a political one, but politics is so corrupting that I see no problem giving scientists a lot of insulation from it.
Right. I read your footnote, but if indeed the disagreement is based on "misunderstanding", it is a willful misunderstanding. Damore's opponents appear to me to not even have tried to understand his argument. They are not even attempting to engage the argument and failing; they're just not trying. The conclusion is heretical, therefore the reasoning must be wrong...somewhere. I say this as one who doesn't know and doesn't care about this argument, I just worry very much about the free speech implications.
> but we need science to inform are politics. Otherwise, we just get more of the raw ideology that is the very reason you don't like politics.
Well, I do like politics, in the sense that I think it is a fascinating window into the most irrational sides of human behavior. But politics is far more powerful as a cultural force than science is. Politics appeals to the most tribal instincts in humans.
Yes, it would be wonderful for science to inform politics. To have a president and Congress who would look at the facts and make decisions based on those facts, which neither a Democratic or Republican administration would really do. So the best we can hope for is for politics not to infect science while we wait for science to make these silly arguments irrelevant, if indeed it does.
For example, I will note that the Obama administration, despite all its lip service to climate change, never did realize the simple fact that modern civilization requires energy, and it will consume the cheapest form of that energy available, and therefore green energy will only win if and when it becomes cheaper than fossil fuels. When researchers make green energy cheaper, I predict Republicans will, as if by magic, lose all their skepticism and reservations about climate change, and the left will abandon their unrealistic talk about emissions caps, and it will all become a non-issue.
Oh, boy. Yes, it is true, no one knows better than we scientists that science is flawed and bias-prone.
You can say science is flawed but the best available source of truth we can have, or you can say science is too fallible to be more privileged than any other source of knowledge/belief. What you cannot do is have it both ways, to pretend science is infallible when you agree with it, and biased or problematic when you don't. This seems to be what many on the left are trying to do.
There is absolutely an institutionalist argument to be made against how science is practiced by fallible and biased humans. However, I've never heard of any method I'd trust more.
Science seems to be the only fair process for adjudicating when factual claims are at odds. I'd hate to rely on rhetoric, as that certainly isn't less subject to human fallibility.
At the same time, we need to be thoughtful about what are scientific questions and which are normative/ value questions.
Science could help us figure out whether ground up humans make good plant fertilizer. Humans need to make a value judgement on whether or not to fertilize plants with ground up humans.
Believing in the scientific method, recognizing the institutional ways that we can systematically fall short of its lofty platonic ideal, and understanding the limitations of science to tell us the "right" social policy is what I want.
Obviously this article is full of self-modification for fairly whimsical reasons. It's easy to make fun of.
But this kind of problem is more serious and discouraging when you think about aging. You know cells in each organ are going to mutate, get protein aggregation, fibrosis, and so on. Instead of trying to figure out something to do about each of those things individually at the molecular level, it might seem simpler to just replace organs periodically. Every 20 years, just get a new heart, etc.
Nontrivial and risky, of course, but perhaps less so than the even less-developed alternatives. But as TFA points out, surgery is hard on the body, and the body likes to reject transplants, be they biological or mechanical. Integrating vasculature is hard, integrating nerves is REALLY hard.
So in short, I think even if these particular applications are frivolous, hopefully people who are doing this will help push forward knowledge on the general question of "how do you add/replace/integrate body parts safely and robustly". They are truly pioneers, in all senses of the term -- they're pushing forward the frontier at great personal risk.
In the mean time, there's also some work that can be done on the the anti-aging front by picking very simple mutations that cause delayed aging phenotypes (skip to "longevity" section): http://diyhpl.us/wiki/genetic-modifications/
I work in aging research. A very nice set of notes you have there. The field is not really thinking in this direction. By "picking" mutations, I suppose you mean gene therapy.
As you probably know, NIA does not consider aging a disease, just a risk factor for other diseases. So we cannot possibly test anything remotely risky in humans for the treatment of aging, and that certainly includes both transplants and gene therapy. We have to backdoor our way in via stuff like Alzheimer's, dementia, sarcopenia, etc, and it seems unlikely that most gene therapy interventions that target aging per se would have enough efficacy on that kind of disease to justify the risk. They are too advanced already.
Even so, this is the kind of thing I think about while driving to work, frustrated at the slow pace that occurs while working within the system :)
I am inclined to agree that the problems with transplantation, both biological and mechanical, are mostly solvable though. I think the kinks will have to be worked out in other fields where prosthetics, surgery, and gene therapy have a better perceived risk/reward ratio than aging.
Well dude, I have some funding for crazy gene therapy projects, so let me know if you want to work on things that matter. But it's all somewhat outside of academia, so it doesn't really appeal to everyone.
Some very high-level background on where this is coming from: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/hplusroadmap/ (we hang out mostly on IRC and would love to hear your project ideas).
That sounds interesting. This is a really busy period but within the next few weeks I hope to check it out.
In general, I love meeting with the non-academic side of this work. I met de Grey and some of his associates at last year's AAA meeting. The relationship is complicated, as you know.
I see the value in both types of research -- people working outside the system don't have to worry about IRBs, paper-writing, etc, and can take risks we can't. OTOH, there are a lot of very smart people on the inside who are working on "things that matter". For example, Jim Kirkland and senolytics. They have access to expertise, funding, samples, and personnel that the non-academic community cannot realistically match. Although the entrance of Calico et al is a new quantity and it will be interesting to see how that turns out.
As a very short summary of my focus, I came into the field, read a lot of papers, and came to the conclusion "no one knows what causes aging". So my focus is on bioinformatics systems to process a lot of data and help me figure out what direction should be most fruitful to focus on. I work with wet-lab people but don't do it myself.
I hope the new generation of academic aging researchers will reach out more to the non-academic side more, though. I plan to do so.
After a conference once, Aubrey sat down with me at whatever bar we were at, and he told me that one of the dirty little secrets about the field of aging research is that nobody really reads that many papers.
I laughed it off, I thought he was pulling a fast one on me. At the time I was intentionally reading about 10 papers/day ( http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/longevity/ not all of them on longevity, of course). I told him my personal target, and he basically said nope, other people are reading at most a few papers per month.
I don't really think the academic system is working :-). Biology is crazy complex, there's just no way for anyone to get enough context if they are just grazing around.
That is very true. Nowadays, a good day for me is 3. We're too busy writing papers, writing grants, writing code, answering e-mails, filling out forms, or whatever. But I work at an institute that does a lot besides aging. I don't get the impression this is specific to the aging field.
But on the other hand, the truth is that most papers do not have very much relevant information in them. There are millions of papers published per year. Aging is so interdisciplinary it would be foolish to think that if you just read J. Gerontology (now "GeroScience" lol, that was done to suck up to Felippe Sierra), Aging Cell, and a few others, you'll be caught up.
That's why I went to the data. Even IF a human could read them all, most of the interesting data nowadays is high-throughput and is analyzed in the most shallow way within the text. The real beef is deposited in GEO or SRA.
I am inclined to think that biology works in a way that is not very comprehensible to the human mind. For example, when humans design a system, it's modular, and you try to minimize the number of interdependencies between modules.
In biology, it seems almost everything affects everything else, to the point that if someone publishes a paper saying "X upregulates Y", I find it almost irrelevant; they have, assuming everything was done correctly, characterized one edge in a very highly connected network. Probably the "X upregulates Y" is contextual as well.
I don't know the solution to all this. I just wanted to do this as a career, and as a graduate student we very clearly learned that there are certain lines we need to color within if we wanted to be paid to do research.
This mention triggered 30 visits to the blog post in the last 1.5 days. Next time I make a blog.kitmatic.com progress post, I'll mention it here also. Busy working on the 3D carved electronics safety enclosure. Using FreeCAD 3D is tough lately because the devs have made tons of change without new docs for it, but it means culture shock's design is OSHWA certified reusable in new designs.
Just wondering, if you "have some funding for crazy gene therapy projets", what does that mean? Where does "outside funding" usually come from? I imagine Larry Ellison flying you over in his private jet and saying "kanzure, I want to live longer, here's some cash please make it happen". Is it like that?
.... Eliezer leaned back in his chair. "Mr. Musk, what can I do for you?". The two engaged in a blissful staredown as their eyes locked. After several overbearing teary-eyed moments, Elon replied with a simple request. "World peace." And thus began a long, unproductive partnership between Big Yud and Peter Thiel-- I mean, Elon Musk -- a partnership focused not on the practical realities of actually building relevant transhumanist technology, but rather a venture focused on theories of world peace-- er, I mean, friendliness-- and writing fanfic instead of executing on important engineering/lab skills to achieve technological goals.
More seriously... Some projects don't really require that much funding to happen. Often you can use specialized knowledge to forego otherwise hugely expensive efforts. It mostly starts with skill and knowledge, not money. As an example, trying out random CRISPR-Cas9 projects can actually be really cheap, less than $5k/project if the projects are structured just right. The trick is to pick projects that happen to be within budget and interesting enough to everyone involved. And if there needs to be a larger budget, sometimes the project is interesting enough to attract outsider funding.
Where were you planning on getting all these organs, though? There's a shortage now, even though transplantation is an unpleasant last resort; unless xenotransplantation is sorted out or we go full Niven (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gift_From_Earth), it doesn't seem interesting as a routine procedure, even if rejection isn't an issue.
I was really into this question a few years ago. I had quite a bit of existential angst about it as well.
I read Penrose, etc, but at the end of it could not find any plausible mechanism for humans having free will in the sense of uncaused causation. But I use a modified version of Daniel Dennett's take on it: we CAN choose, we just can't choose what we choose.
Another way of looking at it is to have two different "modes" for thinking of free will: in everyone's daily lives, they use the "traditional" view (how else could we have such things as moral praise or blame?), but when you look at the human brain as a physical system, you use the deterministic/pseudodeterministic view.
I read this more as a nod to the fact that Stanford is the feeder school for SV. And pretty much all SV churns out these days is webapps.
Javascript is just a very mediocre language in virtually every way. There is only one thing it's good at, webapps, and it's only good at that by virtue of the fact that it's the only game in town for complicated front-end stuff.
The only thing that could be said in Javascript's favor as a teaching language is that it has basically no standard library, so teaching the entirety of the language can be done quickly.
I went to a completely unranked school, not even a CS major. But took Programming I anyway. It was for freshmen, and was in C++.
IMO, for an intro language, you need either something close to the metal, so that students can work their way up the abstraction chain, or something very high-level with flexible constructs if it's desired to teach things from the algorithmic level.
I also think that any dynamically typed language is a bad choice for a first language. We're all used to holding the types in our heads, but beginning programmers don't even know what they are, and it's a really core construct.
Disagree, I think it is the exact opposite. I say that as someone who did their CS education in the early 90s when that was the case. We used C for everything unless the class material implied something else. We got into the down and dirty details quite fast.
IMO that's the wrong way to do it. Using myself as an example it took me far longer to learn things like data structures than it should have. Why? Because I still hadn't wrapped my head around pointers. The fact that the two are coupled is an implementation detail IMO. It turned out that I never had a problem understanding the structures, I had trouble writing code which didn't segfault.
I'd prefer to see CS education start with the more theoretical constructs and then start diving towards the metal as the basic concepts are known. In other words, treat it more like computer science and less like computer engineering.
I keep hearing that people have (or had) trouble understanding pointers. As someone who has never had that problem or met such a person, I am struggling to understand why...
It's not so much as trouble with pointers as trouble with visualizing algorithms and data structures. Try implementing some moderately complex one in C. It reads like a monster. A dynamic language like Python would have a simpler implementation but at the cost of performance (Why do beginners need performance).
In retrospect I don't understand either. It's such a simple concept. But it really befuddled me for a while.
My suspicion is that since everything involved pointers in C, even things like string manipulation, it was just an extra layer of confusion in a sea of new to me stuff.
It’s possible to use pointers successfully without understanding them fully - (having a sense of) incomplete knowledge can frustrate the learning process. Spending time dropping down to assembler to learn a few variations of MOV or looking at compiler output would make pointers achingly clear.
> IMO that's the wrong way to do it. Using myself as an example it took me far longer to learn things like data structures than it should have. Why? Because I still hadn't wrapped my head around pointers.
How do you expect to understand anything about data structures if you fail to wrap your head around one of the most basic data structure mechanism around: referencing a memory address?
In fact, how exactly do you expect to implement a data structure if you fail to understand the very basics of accessing and managing memory?
I don't see how that's a problem caused by a particular pick of programming language. In fact, that seems to be a major failure to understands the very fundamentals of CS.
Because a memory reference isn't necessary to be completely understood to understand the concept? It's just a low level implantation detail. I can draw a structure on a whiteboard and indicate that element a points to b. That doesn't need to imply a "pointer". I'm. It saying avoid the topic altogether in saying one doesn't need to understand memory management to do structures
If anything learning things this way would likely make learning about memory references easier?
If you have 1M bad programmers 1% will make terrible libraries. In 10-20 years at least a few of those you'll be forced to port to some other shitty library made by that 1%. I'm doing this right now...
I agree. When I first started out I learned java on my own. But when I first started taking college level CS classes it was all C++. And to be honest I prefer it.
Biologist here. Biologists don't try to predict whether a drug will have side effects before giving it to humans. They simply give it to mice. If we do have some strong reason to suspect it might be harmful to humans, we might do a primate trial, but usually not as those are expensive.
People do make statements like "Drug X has target Y, so its side effects should be limited to A, B, and C", but no one takes those claims seriously. It's too hard to predict what a drug will do, and in fact drugs are frequently used in practice without any knowledge of mechanism of action.
The point is that biology is fundamentally empirical here, because in complex systems it seems that rationalism/theory is not that useful.
> Economics is hard because you can't do repeated trials.
Yes. The problem is that they pretend they can predict results of interventions when they demonstrably cannot. Economists are simply used to justify policy decisions made on some other basis.
Yeah, I've been out of the Windows game for some years now, but my wife has a few (desktop and laptop), occasionally comes to me and says "it's slow. fix it." And indeed it is slow, even on moderate browser use -- things just hang. Specs are more than adequate.
I have to say (after halfheartedly looking into it a few times): "Um, sorry honey, I have no idea. Guess it's a Windows thing." She nods, and goes back to patiently waiting minutes for the browser to stop hanging! Seems that people using Windows just accept this kind of thing as a given, to the point they don't even notice it. (I've installed Linux for her a few times, but of course, it's too different, doesn't run Photoshop, etc...)
But even though the circumstances were different, it led me to the same place eventually. After months of the same kind of lifestyle, I decided I just didn't care anymore, was ready to go be a farmer or something if they failed me, and would just submit what I had. Obviously it worked out fine (so far). But it will be some time before I recover from that level of stress. I developed fairly severe alcoholism that I am just now starting to step down from. As happens with burnout, my efficiency was terrible during this period, which made everything worse.
I hear this kind of experience is pretty common for a dissertation -- everyone goes through some twisted version of the stages of grief before submission.