Category Archives: Philosophy

Philosophy, Software

Big Data Paradox: quality beats quantity

/www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04198-4 (via @emollick)

Surveys are a crucial tool for understanding public opinion and behaviour, and their accuracy depends on maintaining statistical representativeness of their target populations by minimizing biases from all sources. Increasing data size shrinks confidence intervals but magnifies the effect of survey bias: an instance of the Big Data Paradox … We show how a survey of 250,000 respondents can produce an estimate of the population mean that is no more accurate than an estimate from a simple random sample of size 10

It basically confirms my earlier observation in asthma genetics

this result was possible with just 415 individuals instead of 500,000 individuals nowadays

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025
Philosophy, Software

It is only Monday but already depressing

Comment on the Palm paper by u/Flaky_Suit_8665 via @hardmaru

67 authors, 83 pages, 5408 parameters in a model, the internals of which no one can say they comprehend with a straight face, 6144 TPUs in a commercial lab that no one has access to, on a rig that no one can afford, trained on a volume of data that a human couldn’t process in a lifetime, 1 page on ethics with the same ideas that have been rehashed over and over elsewhere with no attempt at a solution – bias, racism, malicious use, etc. – for purposes that who asked for?

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025
Philosophy

I would also like to apply for the Elsevier bug bounty program

a new proposal by Ivan Oransky

Retractions must be supported as an essential part of healthy science. Sleuths should be compensated and given access to tools to improve the hunt for errors and fraud — not face ridicule, harassment and legal action. Publishers could create a cash pool to pay them, similar to the ‘bug bounties’ that reward hackers who detect flaws in computer security systems. At the same time, institutions should appropriately assess researchers who honestly aim to correct the record. Retractions should not be career killers — those correcting honest errors should be celebrated.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025
Philosophy, Software

(replication crisis)^2

We always laughed at the papers  in the “Journal of Irreproducible Results”

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-best-of-the-journal-of-irreproducible-results/473440/item/276126/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3NnCm72l-QIVpHNvBB1nIwSWEAQYAiABEgK6__D_BwE#idiq=276126&edition=1874246

 

then we had the replication crisis and nobody laughed anymore.

 

And today? It seems that irreproducible research is set to reach a new height. Elizabeth Gibney discusses an arXiv paper by Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan basically saying that

reviewers do not have the time to scrutinize these models, so academia currently lacks mechanisms to root out irreproducible papers, he says. Kapoor and his co-author Arvind Narayanan created guidelines for scientists to avoid such pitfalls, including an explicit checklist to submit with each paper … The failures are not the fault of any individual researcher, he adds. Instead, a combination of hype around AI and inadequate checks and balances is to blame.

Algorithms being stuck on shortcuts that don’t always hold has been discussed here earlier . Also data leakage (good old confounding) due to proxy variables seems to be also a common issue.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025
Philosophy

Hausberufung

Wikipedia zu Hausberufung / internal appointment

Unter einer Hausberufung versteht man die Berufung eines Hochschulbediensteten zum Professor an derselben Hochschule bzw. Universität, an der er bislang fest beschäftigt ist. In der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (DDR) war die Hausberufung eine übliche Vorgehensweise.In der Bundesrepublik Deutschland besteht hingegen landläufig ein sogenanntes Hausberufungsverbot … Ziel der Beschränkungen ist es, eine ungebührliche „wissenschaftliche Ämterpatronage“, Nepotismus oder unlautere Bevorzugung aufgrund persönlicher Beziehungen bei der Besetzung akademischer Stellen zu verhindern.

Viele oder wenig Hausberufungen machen also den Unterschied zwischen einem demokratischen und einem diktatorischen System aus.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025
Philosophy

Information has (capitalized) value

information has (capitalized) value

libraries have seen the impact of increased corporate domination, budget shortfalls, and the corporatization of higher education. We are gouged by publishers like Elsevier who offer package subscriptions with exponentially increasing costs … Many corporate library vendors have consolidated to further ensure market power and control, a process which has often rewarded the largest companies…. While companies like Elsevier make record profits, library workers of all types face increasingly precarious work arrangements and they serve students who are anxious about affording skyrocketing tuition as well as outrageous textbook prices.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025
Philosophy

Desynchronizing peer review and publication

researchprofessionalnews

The Plan S open-access initiative has announced its support for newly emerging ways of producing research papers, in which peer review takes place independently from publication in journals or on platforms.

plan S is widely known for their last major announcement

on September 12, 2018, UBS confirmed a sell rating for shares in Elsevier (RELX). Elsevier stock lost 13% between August 28 and September 19, 2018 alone

so hopefully the stock market will respond again by selling out Elsevier.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025
Allergy, Philosophy

Allergy research – waste of time?

A waste of time – has been said about other fields but applies to allergy research also when reading the review request of “Allergy” today. I have to keep the content confidential but not the comment of  AI expert Jeremy Howard

It’s a problem in science in general. Scientists need to be published which means they need to work on things that their peers are extremely familiar with and can recognize an advance in that area. So, that means that they all need to work on the same thing. The thing they work on… there’s nothing to encourage them to work on things that are practically useful so you get just a whole lot of research which is minor advances and stuff that’s been very highly studied and has no significant practical impact.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025
Philosophy

Tyrannei der Intimität (Sennett)

der Freitag:

In seinem 1977 erschienenen Buch „Verfall und Ende des öffentlichen Lebens. Die Tyrannei der Intimität“ betrachtet Richard Sennett, ein US-amerikanisch-britischer Soziologe, den kollektiven Rückzug aus dem Öffentlichen … Für unsere heutige Zeit konstatiert er die damit zusammenhängende Tyrannei der Intimität..

Das betrifft auch akademische Leben: Bei Corona waren die meisten bei mir im Wohnzimmer und ich in ihrem. Aber ob das der Beziehung zuträglich ist?

Die menschliche Erfahrung beschränkt sich immer mehr auf zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen der nächsten Umgebung, sodass den unmittelbaren Lebensumstände eine überragende Bedeutung zukommt. Gesellschaftliche Fragestellungen nach Herrschaft und architektonischer Gestaltung öffentlicher Räume, die über den eigenen Lebenshorizont hinausweisen, verlieren hingegen an Gewicht.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025