Category Archives: Philosophy

Philosophy

Peer review is science roulette

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.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 23.11.2025
Noteworthy, Philosophy

Enigma of Organismal Death

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/

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 23.11.2025
Philosophy

How to consensus

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.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 23.11.2025
Philosophy

Authoritarians thrive on data

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

-1-
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.

-2-
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services begin screening immigrants’ social media accounts as grounds to deny visa and green-card applications.

-3-
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”.

-4-

https://newrepublic.com/post/194245/rfk-jr-disease-registry-track-autistic-people

-5-

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/25/politics/doge-building-master-database-immigration/index.html

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 23.11.2025
Philosophy

Wann ist eine Erklärung eine gute Erklärung?

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? →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 23.11.2025
Noteworthy, Philosophy

Ist Wissenschaft politisch?

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.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 23.11.2025
Philosophy

Neopatrimonialismus oder moderne Patronageherrschaft

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…

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 23.11.2025
Philosophy, Software

Is it a crime to use AI for peer review?

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

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 23.11.2025
Philosophy

The biggest problem of scientific integrity investigations

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.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 23.11.2025
Philosophy, Software

Similarity between false memory (of humans) and hallucination( of LLMs)

The common theme seems the low certainty about facts – a historical event that is wrongly memorized by a human or the Large Language Model that wrongly extrapolates from otherwise secure knowledge. But is there even more?

Yann Le Cun is being quoted at IEEE Spectrum

“Large language models have no idea of the underlying reality that language describes,” he said, adding that most human knowledge is nonlinguistic. “Those systems generate text that sounds fine, grammatically, semantically, but they don’t really have some sort of objective other than just satisfying statistical consistency with the prompt.”
Humans operate on a lot of knowledge that is never written down, such as customs, beliefs, or practices within a community that are acquired through observation or experience. And a skilled craftsperson may have tacit knowledge of their craft that is never written down.

I think “hallucination” is way too much an anthropomorphic concept – some LLM output is basically statistical nonsense (although I wouldn’t go as far as  Michael Townsen Hicks…). Reasons for these kind of errors are manifold -reference divergence may be already in the data used for learning – data created by bots, conspiracy followers or even fraud science. The error may also originate from encoding or decoding routines.

I couldn’t find any further analogy with wrong human memory recall except the possibility that also human memory is influenced by  probability as well. Otgar 2022 cites Calado 2020

The issue of whether repeated events can be implanted in memory has recently been addressed by Calado and colleagues (2020). In their experiment, they falsely told adult participants that they lost their cuddling toy several times while control participants were told that they only lost it once. Strikingly, they found that repeated false events were as easily inserted in memory as suggesting that the event happened once. So, this study not only showed that repeated events can be implanted, it raised doubts about the idea that repeated events might be harder to implant than single events

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 23.11.2025
Philosophy

Das Gegenteil von “gut” ist “gut gemeint”

https://podcastaddict.com/jung-naiv/episode/185576104

Podcast zur Wissenschaftsfreiheit mit Kritik an der Antisemitismus-Resolution des Bundestages – hörenswert!

Weitere Quellen

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScyErqrcDRrzrZ1EPuk6iX9x10g8JrwishN2rlnAhRyYZQwPg/viewform

https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2024-07/bundestag-resolution-antisemitismus-schutz-juedisches-leben-verfassungsschutz/komplettansicht

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/umstrittene-antisemitismus-resolution-im-bundestag-unis-fuhlen-sich-bevormundet-schulen-zeigen-sich-offener-13102345.html

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/neue-resolution-fur-die-hochschulen-hochschulrektoren-kritisieren-vorgaben-zum-umgang-mit-antisemitismus-12738023.html

 

 

 

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 23.11.2025
Philosophy

Fake degrees from fake universities

Unfortunately there are so many lies, there is so much fraud in science. And science is a big business according to a new report

According to Hesselbäck, in Sweden it’s not illegal for a job applicant to submit qualifications from a fake university, although it is a crime to forge an academic transcript or degree from a legitimate university. The relevant laws vary by country.

Occasionally I had doubts on MD/PhD or professoral titles shown on badges while it is particular annoying if legal and illegal titles are even mixing…

In Norway, he adds, it is a criminal offence to submit credentials from a fake university, but the burden of proof has to be strong. At the federal level, the United States does not explicitly prohibit the issuing, holding or advertising of bogus degrees, although some states have laws banning them. In practice, individual holders of phoney medical degrees have surrendered their licences or been removed from their positions.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 23.11.2025