I think the best part is how the journal told him he was focusing too much on climate change over other factors in peer review, he spends most of it trying to defend only accounting for climate change, then after publication comes out and goes on a media tour about how he was forced, forced i say to only include climate change by the journal, seemingly forgetting that the journals peer review comments are published alongside the paper.
This is in the same vein as that idiot that started the anti-vaxxer movement by writing a bogus study about vaccines causing autism. Tbf, his bullshit should've been uncovered while reviewing the study...
I think this is worse, arguably. Don't get me wrong, Wakefield wasn't good. But this is actually worse.
Wakefield wanted to call into question a thing which, at the time, was a relatively small thing: the MMR vaccine. There was no political platform of vaccines back then, it was the fallout from his con years after that created that platform. He wanted to do that so he could sell his own snake oil cure-all for autism. He frankly didn't care about vaccines, he simply knew people were hesitant about shots and overly concerned about normalcy.
So Wakefield really was just a greedy sonuvabitch ready to capitalize on the tremendous effort parents of autistic children are ready to commit for their kids. Bad, but just selfish greed. Not trying to accelerate an already existential crisis for political maga points.
This though, climate change, is already the political platform. This is very clearly an attack on the very institutions of academia themselves. This is trying to discredit the act of collecting data and replicating experiments as real science. And there's frankly a lot to say about that topic today (p<0.05 apocalypse) but this isn't saying any of that. It's simply saying "here's a reason not to trust climate science at all". That's the argument. That's way more dangerous than anti-vax arguments. Thank God this instance was as ineffective as it was.
Silver lining, it took almost ten years for Wakefield to get caught and detracted. This didn't take long to catch at all because the guy who did it was smug about his shitty goal, in typical right winger fashion: he went and published an opinion piece on his own paper, to the surprise of even his co-author.
I live in Texas and there are so many small towns that seemed to have forgotten trees exist outside of the trees planted in a private yard. I have only lived in Dallas as far as bigger cities go, but the trees are mostly located in the richer/older neighborhoods. Trees planted next to the curb and cared for by the city are almost non-existent.
So I got in an argument with a friend who thinks govt is useless. This is exactly the kind of source I’ve been looking for. Where do you keep up with official announcements like this?
I have a particular interest in the heat-island effect so this kind of stuff is always on my radar. This one specifically however I stumbled upon by chance.
As for your friend, I don’t know if it is only a change once I got older, but you will almost never be able to change your friend’s mind. I’ve had conversations along those lines with libertarians many times and there is a distinct lack of logic when discussing government. It’s not worth your time. I may be a bit exhausted by politics after the last eight years.
This is important for managing heat on a human level in cities. So I'm not saying this is stupid.
But don't get this twisted: This is useless for addressing the climate change problem. It's not even a bandaid on a stab wound, this is equivalent to offering someone bleeding out a glass of warm water and fanning them with a brochure about new plastic doodads. A trillion trees planted tomorrow wouldn't even be a pebble on the pavement to that SUV flying down the fiery freeway.
Indeed 10-20 years ago the 'fake cheese' that was available had no lasting appeal. However, a taco shop near me has a vegan cheese from Mexico. And DANG!, it's super tasty and the texture is right. And the shops prices are very reasonable.
Like I said, Lucky you. I don’t have a taco shop nearby, nor anywhere that sells Mexican cheese. The Mexican place here in Ware only has the generic stuff they ise in gast food places that tastes of coconut and plastic.
Good ones (Tyne Chease) are usually mail order. The deli near me occasionally has some blue from somewhere at £8.50 for a small piece.
I’ve settled for Violife and Morrisons dairy free block.
Anything that improves the quality, price and availability is good news though.
Sapolsky, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, is extremely aware that this is an out-there position. Most neuroscientists believe humans have at least some degree of free will…
Theirs is very much a minority viewpoint. Sapolsky is “a wonderful explainer of complex phenomena,” said Peter U. Tse, a Dartmouth neuroscientist and author of the 2013 book “The Neural Basis of Free Will.” “However, a person can be both brilliant and utterly wrong.”
While our lives are largely dictated by situation and environment, this doesn’t equate to a complete lack of free will. We are constantly making decisions based on reacting to information we receive.
Even if we don’t actually have free will, it’s not really a useful argument to make. It just feels like an excuse to dismiss the problems of humanity and ignore opportunities to learn and change.
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.
phys.org
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