Fragen und Antworten zur Staatsräson

13.07.2025 admin

Warum steht der Begriff „Staatsräson“ nicht ausdrücklich im Grundgesetz, wenn er doch angeblich das oberste Interesse oder Prinzip beschreibt, nach dem ein Staat handelt, um sein Bestehen, seine Ordnung und seine Sicherheit zu wahren?

– Ursprünglich wurde der Begriff in der Frühneuzeit geprägt, etwa durch Niccolò Machiavelli und später Giovanni Botero oder Richelieu.
– Er diente zur Legitimation staatlicher Machtpolitik, oft losgelöst von ethischen oder rechtlichen Maßstäben.
– In der Moderne ist er normativ begrenzt – d. h. im demokratischen Rechtsstaat muss Staatsräson mit Recht, Moral und Verfassung vereinbar sein.

Also ist Staatsräson das, was ein Staat für unbedingt notwendig hält, um sich selbst zu schützen und zu erhalten. Müsste in das nicht doch in das Grundgesetz?

Das Grundgesetz ist eine rechtsstaatliche Verfassung – kein Machtinstrument. Das Grundgesetz von 1949 wurde bewusst als Gegenentwurf zur NS-Diktatur geschaffen. Es soll:
– Macht begrenzen, nicht rechtfertigen,
– die Grundrechte des Einzelnen schützen, und
– Recht und Moral über staatliche Interessen stellen.
Ein Begriff wie „Staatsräson“, der traditionell die Zwecke des Staates über Recht und Moral stellt, passt nicht zu einer rechtsstaatlichen, demokratischen Verfassung wie dem Grundgesetz.

Continue reading Fragen und Antworten zur Staatsräson →

Software

Attention is all you need

12.07.2025 admin

Here is the link to the famous landmark paper in the recent history https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

Before this paper, most sequence modeling (e.g., for language) used recurrent neural networks (RNNs) or convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These had significant limitations, such as a difficulty with long-range dependencies and slow training due to sequential processing. The Transformer replaced recurrence with self-attention, enabling parallelization and faster training, while better capturing dependencies in data. So the transformer architecture became the foundation for nearly all state-of-the-art NLP models. This enabled training models with billions of parameters, which is key to achieving high performance in AI tasks.

Joke

Give me a positive review please

9.07.2025 admin

It’s making the rounds now – Andrew Gelman has already a long post – how authors of scientific papers are trying prompt injections for lazy reviewers that let a LLM write their review.

Noteworthy

No Words Needed: The Numbers Tell the Story

8.07.2025 admin

https://danielroelfs.com/posts/the-money-in-scientific-publishing/

Joke, Philosophy

LLM crazyness

7.07.2025 admin

We do not need to discuss all dystopic X posts about LLMs.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936333964693885089

Whenever Nature Mag, however, publishes nonsense like “A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition” this may deserve a comment…
Fortunately Science’s Cathleen O’Grady already commented

“I think there’s going to be a big portion of the scientific community that will view this paper very skeptically and be very harsh on it” says Blake Richards, a computational neuroscientist at McGill University … Jeffrey Bowers, a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol, thinks the model is “absurd”. He and his colleagues tested Centaur … and found decidedly un-humanlike behavior.”

The claim is absurd as training set of 160 psych studies was way to small to cover even a minor aspect of human behavior.

And well, a large fraction of the 160 published study findings are probably wrong as may be assumed from another replications study in psych field

Ninety-seven percent of original studies had significant results … Thirty-six percent of replications had significant results.

Philosophy

Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic

6.07.2025 admin

All interpretations made by a scientist are hypotheses, and all hypotheses are tentative. They must forever be tested and they must be revised if found to be unsatisfactory. Hence, a change of mind in a scientist, and particularly in a great scientist, is not only not a sign of weakness but rather evidence for continuing attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again.

CC-BY-NC

Video

Light my fire

4.07.2025 admin

The ghosts of Paris at Pere Lachaise

Software

LLM word checker

4.07.2025 admin

The recent Science Advance paper by Kobak et al. studied

vocabulary changes in more than 15 million biomedical abstracts from 2010 to 2024 indexed by PubMed and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. This excess word analysis suggests that at least 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs.

Although they say that the analysis was performed on the corpus level and cannot identify individual texts that may have been processed by a LLM, we can of course check the proportion of LLM words in a text.

Unfortunately their online list contains stop words that I am eliminating here. But then we can run the following script!

# based on https://github.com/berenslab/llm-excess-vocab/tree/main

import csv
import re
import os
from collections import Counter
from striprtf.striprtf import rtf_to_text
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
import nltk
import chardet

# Ensure stopwords are available
nltk.download('stopwords')

# Paths
rtfd_folder_path = '/Users/x/Desktop/mss_image.rtfd' # RTFD is a directory
rtf_file_path = os.path.join(rtfd_folder_path, 'TXT.rtf') # or 'index.rtf'
csv_file_path = '/Users/x/Desktop/excess_words.csv'

# Read and decode the RTF file
with open(rtf_file_path, 'rb') as f:
raw_data = f.read()

# Try decoding automatically
encoding = chardet.detect(raw_data)['encoding']
rtf_content = raw_data.decode(encoding)
plain_text = rtf_to_text(rtf_content)

# Normalize and tokenize text
words_in_text = re.findall(r'\b\w+\b', plain_text.lower())

# Remove stopwords
stop_words = set(stopwords.words('english'))
filtered_words = [word for word in words_in_text if word not in stop_words]

# Load excess words from CSV
with open(csv_file_path, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as csv_file:
reader = csv.reader(csv_file)
excess_words = {row[0].strip().lower() for row in reader if row}

# Count excess words in filtered text
excess_word_counts = Counter(word for word in filtered_words if word in excess_words)

# Calculate proportion
total_words = len(filtered_words)
total_excess = sum(excess_word_counts.values())
proportion = total_excess / total_words if total_words &gt; 0 else 0

# Output
print("\nExcess Words Found (Sorted by Frequency):")
for word, count in excess_word_counts.most_common():
print(f"{word}: {count}")

print(f"\nTotal words (without stopwords): {total_words}")
print(f"Total excess words: {total_excess}")
print(f"Proportion of excess words: {proportion:.4f}")

7 Aug 2025

The long ’em dash’ — U+2014 instead of the standard minus – seems to be a characteristic sign of chatGPT 4 even when asked not use it.

Philosophy

The Südhof Nomenclature

3.07.2025 admin

Blurred as I have no image rightsSource: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/medizin-nobelpreistraeger-thomas-suedhof-wie-boese-ist-wissenschaft-110567521.html

The video can be found at the Lindau Mediathek.

Here is my annotated list of excuses numbered as SUEDHOF1, SUEDHOF2, …,. SUEDHOF15 in chronological order.

Is this really “an unprecedented quality initiative” as F.A.Z. Joachim Müller-Jung wrote?

IMHO this looks more like a larmoyant defense but form your own opinion now. Continue reading The Südhof Nomenclature →

Philosophy

Peer review is science roulette

1.07.2025 admin

One of the best essays that I have read about current science.

Ricky Lanusse. How Peer Review Became Science’s Most Dangerous Illusion. https://medium.com/the-quantastic-journal/how-peer-review-became-sciences-most-dangerous-illusion-54cf13da517c

Peer review is far from a firewall. In most cases, it’s just a paper trail that may have even encouraged bad research. The system we’ve trusted to verify scientific truth is fundamentally unreliable — a lie detector that’s been lying to us all along.
Let’s be bold for a minute: If peer review worked, scientists would act like it mattered. They don’t. When a paper gets rejected, most researchers don’t tear it apart, revise it, rethink it. They just repackage and resubmit — often word-for-word — to another journal. Same lottery ticket in a different draw mindset. Peer review is science roulette.
Once the papers are in, the reviews disappear. Some journals publish them. Most shred them. No one knows what the reviewer said. No one cares. If peer review were actually a quality check, we’d treat those comments like gospel. That’s what I value about RealClimate [PubPeer, my addition]: it provides insights we don’t get to see in formal reviews. Their blog posts and discussions — none of which have been published behind paywalls in journals — often carry more weight than peer-reviewed science.

Noteworthy, Philosophy

Enigma of Organismal Death

27.06.2025 admin

I asked ChatGPT-4 for more references around the 2024 paper “Unraveling the Enigma of Organismal Death: Insights, Implications, and Unexplored Frontieres” as Tukdam continues to be a hot topic. Here is the updated reading list

1. Organismal Superposition & the Brain‑Death Paradox
Piotr Grzegorz Nowak (2024) argues that defining death as the “termination of the organism” leads to an organismal superposition problem. He suggests that under certain physiological conditions—like brain death—the patient can be argued to be both alive and dead, much like Schrödinger’s cat, creating ethical confusion especially around organ harvesting. https://philpapers.org/rec/NOWOSP

2. Life After Organismal “Death”
Melissa Moschella (2017, revisiting Brain‑Death debates) highlights that even after “organismal death,” significant biological activity persists—cells, tissues, and networks (immune, stress responses) can remain active days postmortem. https://philpapers.org/rec/MOSCOD-2

3. Metaphysical & Ontological Critiques
The Humanum Review and similar critiques challenge the metaphysical basis of the paper’s unity‑based definition of death. They stress that considering a person’s “unity” as automatically tied to brain-function is metaphysically dubious. They also quote John Paul II, arguing death is fundamentally a metaphysical event that science can only confirm empirically. https://philpapers.org/rec/MOSCOD-2

4. Biological Categorization Limits
Additional criticism comes from theoretical biology circles, pointing out that living vs. dead is an inherently fuzzy, non-binary distinction. Any attempt to define death (like in the paper) confronts conceptual limits due to the complexity of life forms and continuous transitions. https://humanumreview.com/articles/revising-the-concept-of-death-again

5. Continuation of Scientific Research
Frontiers in Microbiology (2023) supports the broader approach but emphasizes that transcriptomic and microbiome dynamics postmortem should be more deeply explored, suggesting the paper’s overview was incomplete without enough data-driven follow-up https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6880069/

Video

Gödelsätze

26.06.2025 admin

Beispiel eines Gödelsatzes „Diese Aussage ist nicht beweisbar“

Wenn der Satz beweisbar wäre, dann wäre die Aussage falsch , also Widerspruch! Wenn der Satz nicht beweisbar ist, dann ist die Aussage wahr, aber nicht beweisbar.

Software

How to sync only Desktop to iCloud

22.06.2025 admin

After giving up Nextcloud – which is now overkill for me with 30.000 files of basic setup – I am syncing now using iCloud. As I am working only on the desktop, it would make sense to sync the desktop in regular intervals but unfortunately this can be done only together with the Documents folder (something I don’t want). SE has also no good solution, so here is mine

# make another Desktop in iCloud folder
mkdir -p ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/iCloudDesktop

# sync local Desktop
rsync -av --delete ~/Desktop/ ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/iCloudDesktop/

# and run it every hour or so
# launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/launched.com.desktop.rsync.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <dict>
      <key>Crashed</key>
      <true/>
    </dict>

    <key>Label</key>
    <string>launched.com.desktop.rsync</string>

    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/usr/bin/rsync</string>
      <string>-av</string>
      <string>--delete</string>
      <string>/Users/xxx/Desktop/</string>
      <string>/Users/xxx/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/iCloudDesktop/</string>
    </array>

    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>

    <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
    <array>
      <dict>
        <key>Minute</key>
        <integer>0</integer>
      </dict>
    </array>

    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/tmp/rsync.out</string>

    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/tmp/rsync.err</string>
  </dict>
</plist>

Noteworthy

Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner und Fritz Straßmann

16.06.2025 admin

Hier zur Erinnerung ein Video mit Otto Hahn (1879-1968), Lise Meitner (1878-1968) und Fritz Straßmann (1902-1980) im Gespräch, eine historische Aufnahme aus dem Januar 1960.

Nur Otto Hahn bekam einen Nobelpreis, obwohl unstrittig alle an der Entdeckung der Kernspaltung beteiligt waren.

https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/ndr_retro/Gespraech-mit-Otto-Hahn-Lise-Meitner-und-Fritz-Strassmann-,ausersterhand130.html

Es fällt auf, wie zuvorkommend in der Diskussion immer auch die Leistung von anderen anerkannt wird, die eigentlich demütige Grundeinstellung aller, in der nicht die Selbstdarstellung sondern der Erkenntnisgewinn die treibende Kraft war.

Noteworthy, Software

Are we really thinking at 10 bits/s?

16.06.2025 admin

There is a funny paper at arXiv, that is now published in Neurology. It claims to have found a

neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ~10^9 bits/s. The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained and touches on fundamental aspects of brain function: What neural substrate sets this speed limit on the pace of our existence? Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? Why can we only think about one thing at a time?

If there are really two brains, an “outer” brain with fast high-dimensional sensory and motor signals and an “inner” brain that does are the processing? My inner brain says this is a huge speculation.