This is not about the extraordinary cyclist Peter Sagan but about the astronomer Carl Sagan who postulated in his 1979 book “Broca’s brain” that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”
A major part of the book is devoted to debunking “paradoxers” who either live at the edge of science or are outright charlatans.
„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
We do not need to discuss all dystopic X posts about LLMs.
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.
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.
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
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.
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/
Science’s Holden Thorp nailed it again
Scientists take it for granted that the consensus they refer to is not the result of opinion polls of their colleagues or a negotiated agreement reached at a research conclave. Rather, it is a phrase that describes a process in which evidence from independent lines of inquiry leads collectively toward the same conclusion. This process transcends the individual scientists who carry out the research.
Unfortunately parallel lines only intersect at infinity.
Only this morning did I realize that the book of Götz Aly has also been published in English with a preview at Google books
“Nazi Census” documents the origins of the census in modern Germany, along with the parallel development of machines that helped first collect data on Germans. Or read IBM and the Holocaust which has more details on IBM’s conscious co-planning and co-organizing of the Holocaust for the Nazis.
Why should you read that? Not because of Nazis but because authoritarians thrive on data. Here are todays news
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US plans to merge all government data. A large-scale effort, led by Elon Musk’s team, aims to link federal databases — raising serious concerns among privacy and security experts.
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U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services begin screening immigrants’ social media accounts as grounds to deny visa and green-card applications.
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Here is an article from the Dean of the UC Berkeley Law School Erwin Chemerinsky and the emeritus Harvard constitutional law professor Lawrence Tribe about the consequences: “We should all be very, very afraid”.
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Peter Liptons Hauptwerk “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE) ist leider nie auf Deutsch erschienen. Ich habe den Text daher von Gemini zusammenfassen lassen, überarbeitet und werde ihn auch in den nächster Wochen noch weiter ergänzen. Lipton ist einer meiner Lieblingsphilosophen. Er hat das Buch 1991 in erster und dann 2004 in zweiter Auflage veröffentlicht. Es ist ein Meilenstein in der modernen Wissenschaftstheorie und bietet eine detaillierte Analyse einer spezifischen Form des wissenschaftlichen aber auch alltäglichen Schließens: wie funktioniert am besten der Schluss auf die beste Erklärung? Continue reading Wann ist eine Erklärung eine gute Erklärung?
Auch wenn wir uns in Wahl der Forschungsfrage, in der Wahl dere Methode und in der Interpretation der Ergebnisse um Objektivität und Distanz bemühen, ist Wissenschaft immer politisch.
Natürlich kritisieren Wissenschaftler/innen unzulässige politische Einflussnahmen (zuletzt in Deutschland in der Fördermittelaffäre). Und natürlich haben auch Universitäten unterschiedliche politische Ansichten, gerade live zu sehen wo die eine Universität Widerstand zeigt, und die andere einknickt.
Stuart Ritchie hat dazu einen exzellenten Essay verfasst “Wissenschaft ist politisch – und das ist übel” in dem er zunächst auflistet, was es bisher zu dem Thema gibt,
– Science Has Always Been Inseparable From Politics (Scientific American)
– News Flash: Science Has Always Been Political (American Scientist)
– Science Is Political (Chemistry World)
-Yes, Science Is Political (Scienti;c American)
Aber dann geht er zur Frage über, was bedeutet das eigentlich, daß die politische Agenda immer mehr die wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse beeinflusst?
Forschung wird von der Politik gerne in eine Richtung gelenkt, die politische Ziele unterstützt, anstatt neutral und faktenbasiert zu bleiben. Die öffentliche und akademische Debatten werden eingeschränkt, dabei werden kritische Stimmen oder abweichende wissenschaftliche Ansichten unterdrückt oder sogar delegitimiert, wenn sie nicht dem vorherrschenden politischen Narrativ entsprechen.
Wenn Finanzierung und Karriere aber von politischer Anpassung ab hängen, dann sind– Forschende zunehmend darauf angewiesen, ihre Arbeiten an politische Erwartungen anzupassen, um Fördergelder und akademische Positionen zu sichern. Die Gefahr dabei: Es wird nicht ohne langfristige Folgen bleiben. Sobald Wissenschaft als politisches Werkzeug wahrgenommen wird, verliert sie die Glaubwürdigkeit und damit das Vertrauen der Gesellschaft und ihre Fähigkeit, objektive Erkenntnisse abzuliefern.
Zitat Wikipedia
Unter Neopatrimonialismus wird ein, besonders häufig in Afrika anzutreffender, Herrschaftstyp bezeichnet, der (in Anlehnung an Max Webers Herrschaftstypologie) als eine Mischform aus klassisch patrimonialer und legal-rationaler Herrschaft angesehen werden kann. Als Regimetyp ist er zwischen Autokratie und Demokratie anzusiedeln. Kennzeichnende Bestandteile des Neopatrimonialismus sind Klientelismus und politische Patronage.
Besonders häufig in Afrika anzutreffen? Den Wikipedia Artikel müsste mal überarbeitet werden, der Atlantic hat jedenfalls noch mehr Vorschläge
here is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack. Two professors published a book that deserves wide attention. In “Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future”, Stephen E. Hanson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a political scientist at UC Irvine, resurface a mostly forgotten term whose lineage dates back to Max Weber, the German sociologist best known for his seminal book “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”
Die These wäre zu überprüfen [1][2]. Es könnten stimmen…
I consult the almighty chatGPT frequently for additional information as this saves me hours of wading through my own database, Pubmed, Scholar and Goggle Hits.
But I have my own opinion, I never cut & paste as this is always running at risk (1) to plagiarize unknowingly and (2) to produce nonsense.
Miryam Naddaf has an article about this
In a survey of nearly 5,000 researchers, some 19% said they had already tried using LLMs to ‘increase the speed and ease’ of their review. But the survey, by publisher Wiley, headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, didn’t interrogate the balance between using LLMs to touch up prose, and relying on the AI to generate the review.
And well, maybe I am already sticking to the NEJM that said
Although human expert review should continue to be the foundation of the scientific process, LLM feedback could benefit researchers
It is not the weaponization or the destructive vendetta of some investigators. The biggest problem is also not about the technical skills. It is something completely different —the intentional misuse of the internal scientific discussion (does something like this still exist?) by an political agenda. As devybee puts it forward in a book review about the swamp of science fraud
Szabo is impressed by the efforts of “data sleuths”, who perform post-publication peer review and report problems on the PubPeer website, but he regards this as unsustainable: and cleaning up the literature should not be a task for volunteers. …Szabo’s recommendations for change focus on funders, who have the power to deny funding to those who fail to take steps to ensure that their results are reliable. …This is a particularly difficult time to be conveying such a message. The only people who might be overjoyed to hear that a high proportion of published research is unreliable are politicians who are antagonistic to science and would like an excuse to defund it.