More interesting to frame it the other way around really - why would some organisms reproduce using this dangerous, complex, uncertain process called sex
@a Did you read the article? The evidence cited there seems more compelling to me than the suspicious-but-circumstantial evidence that supports a lab leak; cases statistically clustered around the part of the wet market that sold the suspect animals, and genetic similarity to a bat strain of covid.
Still, it's possible, I just no longer believe it's probable. This quote from the article sums it up:
“Have we disproven the lab leak theory? No, we have not,” Andersen said. “But I think what’s really important here is there are possible scenarios and there are plausible scenarios and it’s really important to understand that possible does not mean equally likely.” ...
“Both of these two studies really provide compelling evidence for the natural origin hypothesis,” said Aliota, who wasn’t involved in either study. Since sampling an animal that was at the market is impossible, “this is maybe as close to a smoking gun as you could get.”
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
We're in that interim period where people don't understand the technology at all but still think it's capable of anything, so even people who absolutely should know better are going to be misusing it.
@HeartyBeast this is a fascinating article. It’s mind blowing to think that the fundamental component making up most of the physical universe is just a chaotic probability field of chaotically moving quarks and antiquarks.
can people with prosthetics feel stuff? are we at that point technologically? if so, how precisely? with my fleshy fingers I can tell the difference between glass and less smooth surfaces, or even a hair ir some dust, but I doubt prosthetics would be at such s point
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