Category Archives: Philosophy

Querdenken

Es gibt bisher wenig gute Erklärungen der Querdenken Bewegung.

Warum verfallen Menschen auf bestimmte  Meinungen? Und was unterscheidet sie zum Beispiel von den wahnhaften Störungen in der Psychiatrie oder aber auch von Fehlschlüssen in der Wissenschaft? Irgendwie scheint sich doch alles auf einem Kontinuum zu bewegen?

Bei dem Versuch einer Antwort folge ich dabei mehr oder weniger dem Psychiater Manfred Lütz, der auch nicht viel auf unsere psychiatrischen Diagnosen gibt, da sie nur Hilfskonstruktionen sind die nur einem Zweck dienen, nämlich Menschen medizinisch zu helfen (S.32ff)

Manfred Lütz. Irre! – Wir behandeln die Falschen: Unser Problem sind die Normalen. Goldmann 2019.

Unbestrittenes Kennzeichen des Wahns ist jedenfalls die Unfähigkeit, die Perspektive zu wechseln.  Mit dieser Definition gelingen nun auch die Unterscheidungen: So sind Psychotiker und Querdenker beide unfähig, die Perspektive zu wechseln, während das den meisten Wissenschaftlern aber möglich sein sollte.

Psychotiker leiden unter dieser Unfähigkeit (zumindest im symptomfreien Intervall) während Querdenker darüber in ihrer Gemeinschaftserfahrung Bestätigung erfahren. Die “self enforcing loops” bei der Psychose sind wohl hirnorganisch  bedingt, während sie bei Querdenker eher sekundär und erlebnisreaktiv sind. Die Ideenwelt der Psychose ist kreativ, während Querdenker kaum zu neuen oder innovative Ideen in der Lage sind.

Dennoch: Querdenken sollte  nicht pathologisiert werden – Labels helfen nicht, sie verstärken nur eher den Zusammenhalt der Gruppe. Mit Wegfall von Youtube und Telegram würde die Bewegung wohl in sich zusammen fallen. Da dies nicht passierte, sucht sie sich neue Ziele etwa Russland.

Im selbst gewählten Asyl ist es dann aber mit dem Gemeinschaftserlebnis vorbei, so auch bei den zwei prominentesten Ärzteaccounts diese Woche zu sehen.

Bodo Schiffmann https://twitter.com/Tzerberus1/status/1589185591127977984
Carola Javid Kistel https://twitter.com/Alemanniel/status/1589318971769196551

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025

Academic freedom

Peer review kann auch Wissenschaft verhindern, wie wir gestern an dem Cosmos Artikel oder vor ein paar Tagen bei eLife gesehen haben.

Und es ist ein riesiges Problem, wie ich gerade in einem weiteren Essay bei Sandra Kostner gefunden habe “Disziplinieren statt argumentieren. Zur Verhängung und Umsetzung intellektueller Lockdowns” in ApuZ 71. Jahrgang, 46/2021, 15. November 2021.

Continue reading Academic freedom

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025

Peer review in peril

Cosmos has an interesting article

The list of retractions and editorial issues of concern, even from the most-respected peer-reviewed journals, swells daily, exposing the underlying problem of expecting peer review to act as the gatekeeper for scientific rectitude and rigour. This is a job for which it is woefully inadequate.
Academic peer review became an integral part of the scientific publishing process in the early 1970s and quickly became synonymous with trustworthiness – both of the journal and of the science itself…“One of the biggest issues in peer review is the lack of incentive to do a good job,” says medical researcher Dr Hannah Wardill, from the University of Adelaide. “There is no oversight and no training. People are just so thinly spread. None of these factors facilitate a robust and thorough peer-review system.”

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025

Too many complaints about eLife

Following the recent announcement of eLife to overcome a accept/reject decision

We have found that these public preprint reviews and assessments are far more effective than binary accept or reject decisions ever could be at conveying the thinking of our reviewers and editors, and capturing the nuanced, multidimensional, and often ambiguous nature of peer review.

there are now many complaints

Destroying eLife’s reputation for selectivity does not serve science. Changes that pretend scientists do not care about publishing in highly selective journals will end eLife’s crucial role in science publishing, says long-time supporter Paul Bieniasz

While the announcement could have come in a more polite way – creating a second tier of an eLife archive – I believe this is a good decision.The rejection attitude  is basically driven that “your inferior paper would harm my journal impact” while it just goes to another journal. Publication is seldom stopped so it produces workload at other journals and for other reviewers in particular when the initial reviews are not public.

The eLife decision therefore breaks a vicious circle.

 

27.11.2024

Unfortunately, eLife is now starting again to reject papers. From an email that I received this month

In this case the editorial team felt that the manuscript should be reviewed by a more specialized community. Where results are principally useful within a specialised community, then it is likely that this audience can evaluate the paper themselves, so the public reviews and assessments carry less value. We also think that in these cases more specialised journals are likely to be able to find more suitable technical reviewers than eLife.
We wish you good luck in getting your work reviewed and published by another journal.

eLife is also been delisted now, maybe it wasn’t a good idea to fire Michael Eisen.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025

Surveillance Publisher

Capitalized value? Personalized PDFs? DFG warning? User tracking? Forced marriage? It is incredible how scientific publishers are expanding their business. Here is a new paper

This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior. … The products’ purpose, moreover, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades. A final concern is that scholars will internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors.  

Sure, this already happens as some committees look only at lists of impact factor and grant sums. In the near future, they will switch to Elsevier`s “human ressources” management system Interfolio to compare candidates.

Founded in 1999, Interfolio supports over 400 higher education institutions, research funders and academic organizations in 25 countries, and over 1.7 million academic professionals and scholars. Theo Pillay, General Manager of Research Institutional Products, Elsevier, said: “Interfolio has a proven track record in supporting the academic community, thanks to its deep understanding of faculty needs, institutional workflows, research assessment and academic careers, combined with its agile technology and experienced leadership.

Back to the original article

the publishing giants have long profited off of academics and our university employers—by packaging scholars’ unpaid writing-and-editing labor only to sell it back to us as usuriously priced subscriptions or article processing charges (APCs). That’s a lucrative business that Elsevier and the others won’t give up. But they’re layering another business on top of their legacy publishing operations, in the Clarivate mold. The data trove that publishers are sitting on is, if anything, far richer than the citation graph alone.

Data is the new oil, indeed.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025

Ist Sci-Hub legal?

Nein, ist es nicht – so das Amtsgericht München vom 31.1.2022 mit  Az:21 O 14450/17 das aber auch sagt:

Im Übrigen wird die Klage abgewiesen.

Sci-Hub ist auch nach dem jüngsten BGH Entscheid vom 13.10.2022 Az:I ZR 111/21 nicht legal, allerdings wird auch hier der Kläger abgewiesen:

Welche Anstrengungen zur Inanspruchnahme des Betreibers der Internetseite und des Host-Providers zumutbar sind, ist eine Frage des Einzelfalls.

Ist die Benutzung von Science-Hub unmoralisch? Nutzer in Afrika oder Südamerika werden diese Frage anders beantworten, als Nutzer in Europa oder Nordamerika. Continue reading Ist Sci-Hub legal?

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025

Virchow’s experiences with epidemics radicalized him

Ed Yong speaks from the bottom of my heart in his Atlantic essay “What Even Counts as Science Writing Anymore?

Virchow’s experiences with epidemics radicalized him, pushing the man who would become known as the “father of pathology” to advocate for social and political reforms. COVID-19 has done the same for many scientists. Many of the issues it brought up were miserably familiar to climate scientists, who drolly welcomed newly traumatized epidemiologists into their ranks. In the light of the pandemic, old debates about whether science (and science writing) is political now seem small and antiquated. Science is undoubtedly political,

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025

Pitbull reviewer

Virginia Walbot “Are we training pit bulls to review our manuscripts?”

Who hasn’t reacted with shock to a devastatingly negative review of a manuscript representing years of work by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows on a difficult, unsolved question? … dismissing the years of labor and stating that the manuscript can only be reconsidered with substantially more data providing definitive proof of each claim. … Your manuscript is declined, with encouragement to resubmit when new data are added.
I confess. I’m partly responsible for training the pit-bull reviewer, and I bet you are too.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025

How to push the impact of 2,299 scientists with 8,000 citations each?

Answer: Be co-author of an autophagy guideline

this is another episode of guidelines paper. More participants listed here – Affiliations listed stopped at 2299 – this means that there are 2299 authors in the manuscript. Unbelievable – how did they manage to get a consensus on what is written. May the first author explain, how the authorship on this guidelines is decided?

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025

Face à Gaïa

 

Bruno Latour (* 22. Juni 1947 in Beaune; † 9. Oktober 2022 in Paris)

Jonas Salk in the foreword of “Laboratory Life – the Construction of Scientific Facts” 1986:

Scientists often have an aversion to what nonscientists say about science. Scientific criticism by nonscientists is not practiced in the same way as literary criticism by those who are not novelists or poets …  A love-hate relationship exists toward scientists in some segments of society. This is evident in accounts that deal with facets ranging from tremendously high expectations of scientific studies to their cost and their dangers—all of which ignore the content and process of scientific work itself …  For myself, it was interesting to have Bruno Latour in our institute, which allowed him to carry out the first investigation of this kind of which I am aware…

“Laboratory Life” focuses on the question how the objects of scientific study are socially constructed within the laboratory where they enter a “cycle of credibility” by accumulating recognition, honors, funding and prestige. But is there any truth or is this just a scientific culture remains an open question.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025

Das gemeinsame wissenschaftliche Ethos

Lesenswert!

https://www.bpb.de/system/files/dokument_pdf/APuZ_2021-46_online_0.pdf
[Es ist … ] unbestreitbar, dass ein gemeinsames wissenschaftliches Ethos und eine geteilte akademische Kultur die Grundlage für die Möglichkeit und den Bestand von epistemischen Freiräumen bilden. Diese Freiräume, auf die Wissenschaft angewiesen ist und die durch die Rechtsordnung allein nicht garantiert werden können, sind Räume der Gründe. Hier sind die rationalen Gütekriterien hoch, die Vorwegnahme der Gegenposition zur eigenen und deren ernsthafte Reflexion der wissenschaftliche Idealfall. Der Rede folgen gemeinhin Kritik und Gegenrede; eine sachbezogene Beharrlichkeit (statt Ablenkung, Themenwechsel, bullshitting) ist der diskursive Standard. Daher ist die „große Gereiztheit“, die Teile der aktuellen Debatte um Wissenschaftsfreiheit charakterisiert, der Wissenschaft wesensfremd, ebenso wie antagonistische Selbstverortungen (links vs. rechts, wokevs. boomer, Freunde vs. Feinde der Wissenschaft).

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025