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Philosophy

Muss man wirklich jedem Unsinn widersprechen?

Nicht wenn man einer neuen Studie in Sci Rep glauben kann

Three experiments, one preregistered with a sample representative of the United States population, examined the impact of (a) directly correcting prior misinformation offered in support of restricting Genetically Modified (GM) foods (i.e., the correction strategy) and (b) discussing information in support of GM foods (i.e., the bypassing strategy), compared to a misinformation-only control condition. Findings consistently revealed that bolstering beliefs with opposite implications is just as effective at reducing opposition to GM foods as is correcting misinformation about GM foods.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 09.11.2025
Joke

Researchers ranked

True ranking is ranking by peers not artifically ranking by any computer method

According to Landau’s classification, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein belonged to a super league, with Newton receiving the highest rank of 0, followed by Einstein’s 0.5. The first ordinary league, a rank of 1, consists of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger. Landau originally graded himself a modest 2.5, which he elevated to 2 after discovering superfluidity, for which he was awarded the physics Nobel Prize in 1962. The classification continues all the way to the rank of 5 for mundane physicists, like us. In his 1988 talk My Life with Landau: Homage of a 4 1/2 to a 2, David Mermin, who with Neil Ashcroft co-authored the legendary textbook Solid State Physics, rated himself a “struggling 4.5”.

I am “struggling 5.5” only.

 

29.7.2023

Just received an email from Jon Gilham

just wanted to reach out and let you know that you link to OpenAI’s Text Classifier Tool which has been discontinued.

If you’re interested in learning more about why they discontinued, we wrote a blog post about it here: https://originality.ai/blog/openai-text-classifier-review

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 09.11.2025
Noteworthy

At what age do scientists tend to produce great ideas?

It took me some time to relocate the paper that was discussing this topic. I first thought of  PNAS back in 2011 but the plot that I was looking for is in  a Scientometrics 2019 article.

Take home message: It may be the your first or your last paper in your career that will have the biggest impact  while the overall probably is highest at age 44.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-019-03065-4

Another paper (with different source data) moves the curve to the left but unfortunately methods are not clearly described.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2389203

For example, in contrast to Einstein, 93% of Nobel Prize-winning scientific breakthroughs have come from individuals beyond age 26, and even geniuses who emerge early may bloom more fully at more advanced ages. Einstein’s theory of general relativity, perhaps his greatest contribution, came largely in his early to mid-thirties. Copernicus completed his revolutionary theory of planetary motion around age 60. Mozart’s most famous operas came in his thirties, and Steve Jobs produced by far his most commercially successful innovations in his late forties and early fifties.

And here is a third paper, that shows that the interval widens at 65 while the mean performance remains stable.

doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2006653117

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 09.11.2025
Philosophy

Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht

Mit dem Heidegger Zitat eröffnet Paul Hoyningen-Huene den Aufsatz “Irrationalität in der Wissenschaftsentwicklung“.

Tatsächlich wurde die Wissenschaft, insbesondere die Naturwissenschaft, die meiste Zeit ihrer Existenz als rational verstanden, sowohl in ihrem eigenen Selbstbild als auch im Fremdbild, etwa durch die Philosophie oder das allgemeine Bewusstsein.  …  so wurden bestimmte wissenschaftliche Entwicklungen als steril oder scholastisch angeprangert, Wissenschaft wurde als gefährlich oder einseitig angesehen …. Kuhn behauptet … neben der Wichtigkeit von Paradigmen allem Anschein nach auch die Irrationalität der Wissenschaftsentwicklung. Bei den entscheidenden Weichenstellungen der Wissenschaftsentwicklung, nämlich der Auswahl und Akzeptanz einer Theorie aus einer Gruppe von konkurrierenden Theorien durch die jeweilige wissenschaftliche Gemeinschaft, würden durchaus nicht rationale Gründe den Ausschlag geben. … Ähnliche Diagnosen von Irrationalität in der Wissenschaftsentwicklung waren auch von dem bekannten (und z.T. berüchtigten) Philosophen Paul Feyerabend zu hören, der in seinem Buch Against Method von 1975 für die Wissenschaften gar den Slogan ausgab: „Anything goes“. Ein Dutzend Jahre später schien Feyerabend die Vernunft sogar ganz und gar verabschieden zu wollen, indem er 1987 ein Buch mit dem Titel Farewell to Reason publizierte.

Der initialen Bestandsaufnahme von Hoyningen-Huene kann ich aus eigener Erfahrung durchaus zustimmen, denn die Auswahl aus den konkurrierenden Ursprungstheorien in meinem Bereich folgte nicht rationalen Gründen sondern mehr der Medienpräsenz einiger zentraler Figuren, dem “gesunden Menschenverstand” einiger Kommission und Kongresspräsidien, dem allgemeinen politischen Trend und wohl auch handfesten wirtschaftlichen Interessen.

Aber warum um Himmels willen Feyerabend berüchtigt und nicht auch als berühmt zu bezeichnen? Es scheint der running gag bei Hoyningen-Huene zu sein

Für den Aufklärer Feyerabend ist dieser Verstoß unmittelbar auch antihumanitär, denn „Fortschritt ist immer dadurch erreicht worden, dass man wohlverschanzte und wohlbegründete Lebensformen an unpopulären und grundlosen Werten gemessen hat. So hat sich der Mensch schrittweise von Furcht und von der Tyrannei ungeprüfter Systeme befreit“.

Nun ja, im Vorwort einer Einführung in die Philosophie Feyerabends seines Doktoranden Eric Oberheim wird Hoyningen-Huene schliesslich auch zitiert mit “If you join any one philosophical school, you loose ten IQ points”.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 09.11.2025
Allergy

Y

1905 entdeckte Nettie Stevens das Y Chromosom und die geschlechtsgebundene Vererbung. Wenn das 2023 in Frage gestellt wird, kann man nur auf das lange TAZ Interview aus dem letzten Jahr mit Alexander Korte weiterleiten

Die neurobiologische Forschung ist definitiv den Beleg schuldig, dass Geschlechtsidentität genetisch bedingt sein könnte. Auch aus der Sicht der Entwicklungspsychologie ist es abwegig, davon auszugehen, dass Identität etwas ist, mit dem man zur Welt kommt. Aus meiner Sicht ist Identität stets das Resultat einer individuellen Bindungs- und Beziehungs- und auch Körpergeschichte.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 09.11.2025
Software

Call for an AI moratorium: Pause Giant AI Experiments

More than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers … have urged artificial intelligence labs to pause development of the most advanced systems, warning in an open letter that A.I. tools present “profound risks to society and humanity.”
A.I. developers are “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict or reliably control,” according to the letter, which the nonprofit Future of Life Institute released on Wednesday.

I signed the letter also (although some other people may have signed for other reasons).

 

May 5, 2023

30,000 signatures by today while the White House now also

pushed Silicon Valley chief executives to limit the risks of artificial intelligence, telling them they have a “moral” obligation to keep products safe, in the administration’s most visible effort yet to regulate AI.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 09.11.2025
Allergy, Genetics

Any proof for hygiene hypothesis by lockdown babies?

It is an interesting question – does social distancing influence later allergy ? Lawler et al. in November 2021

http://www.doi.org/10.1111/pai.13591

report the impact of COVID‐19 lockdown in 365 Irish babies at 6 months of age enrolled in the CORAL study. These were a subset of 3773 infants born in two participating major maternity hospitals in Dublin between March and May 2020. Unfortunately only 10% of children participated, so families were self-selected.  Allergic rhinitis was common in both mothers (36%) and fathers (30%) which is higher than reported by Allergy Ireland (26%) and explained by the authors that parental allergy is “higher than the general population, which may have contributed to parental desire to enrol in this study.”

A follow-up in March 2022 in 344 children consecutively shows higher food allergy (4.7% vs 3.5%, NS) when compared to an earlier cohort (BASELINE 2008). Atopic dermatitis increased of 15.5% in the BASELINE study to 25.3% in CORAL (no P reported) which is not unexpected given the interest of parents in an allergy study.

Maybe a short questionnaire at 2026 school entry would be informative than the current study? Nevertheless the authors needed now to analyze their stool samples sitting in the shelves. This is the content of  the March 2023 preprint that has just been published. There may be an association of some bacteria with atopic dermatitis but in the end it is a useless result as the strongest risk factors for atopic dermatitis – parental history and/or FLG mutations – are missing from the presented models

At the end we can safely assume that the 2020 lockdown did not have any influence on allergy prevalence in Ireland.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 09.11.2025
Philosophy

Deviation from preregistration

I know tons of papers that deviate from their initial plan, but I am not aware of so many papers where this can be unequivocally found by comparing pre-registration and publication.

It has been mentioned recently and there seems also a formal analysis in the literature

We observed deviations from the plan in all studies, and, more importantly,  in all but one study, at least one of these deviations was not fully disclosed.

Further research required,

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 09.11.2025