Category Archives: Philosophy

Joke, Philosophy

Comparatively trivial

Nature has a short report about historical peer reviews including a link to the Referee Report of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin about the 1954 Watson & Crick complementary paper (not the 1953 Watson & Crick double helix paper).

https://makingscience.royalsociety.org/items/rr_79_230/referees-report-by-dorothy-mary-crowfoot-hodgkin-on-a-paper-the-complementary-structure-of-deoxyribonucleic-acid-by-francis-harry-compton-crick-and-james-dewey-watson?page=1

And here is Fig 5 and Fig 6 of the paper under review. So did Watson & Crick follow her advice?

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.1954.0101

I don’t think so.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 05.11.2025
Genetics, Philosophy

Risks you should be aware of as study participant

I wrote about this about this basically 15 years ago

Confidentiality has been seen in the past as a fundamental ethical principle in health care and breaching confidentiality is usually a reason for disciplinary action. It has been assigned such a great value because it directly originates from the patient’s autonomy to control his or her own life […] Two types of re-identification are possible: the “Netflix” type and the “profiling” type.

There is a new Cell paper that builds a “profiling” attack using even single-cell gene expression data only

we demonstrate that individuals in single-cell gene expression datasets are vulnerable to linking attacks, where attackers can infer their sensitive phenotypic information using publicly available tissue or cell-type-specific expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) information.

So this should be included in informed consent forms also.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 05.11.2025
Philosophy, Software

AI hallucination

News article and  paper showing

bigger AI chatbots more inclined to spew nonsense — and people don’t always realize.

and some solutions

various emerging techniques should help to create chatbots that bullshit less, or that can, at least, be prodded to disclose when they are not confident in their answers. But some hallucinatory behaviours might get worse before they get better.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 05.11.2025
Philosophy, Software

Remarkable : I don’t want to be part of this scene anymore

From the creator of wordfreq

Generative AI has polluted the data
I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans.
The open Web (via OSCAR) was one of wordfreq’s data sources. Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Including this slop in the data skews the word frequencies.

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 05.11.2025
Philosophy, Theology

Das Hauptproblem der Erwählung

Tilman Moser (1938-2024) schreibt in “Gottesvergiftung” seine (An-)klage gegen Gott in der langen Tradition der Psalmen, des  Klageliedes, von Hiob bis zur Anklage Jesu am Kreuz

Mit der psychischen Grundfigur der Erwählung, des auserwählten Volkes, hast du dir ja schon ganz zu Anfang einen kleinen Teil der Menschheit eingefangen, einen Brückenkopf aus dem Nichts gebildet.
Weißt du, wie listig du mit den narzißtischen Bedürfnissen deiner Anhänger umgehst, wie fein dosiert du die Grade der Erwählung und der Gottesnähe verteilen kannst, wie virtuos du die Angebote von Geborgenheit, Führung, Glanz und Einzigartigkeit mischst – von den Strafangeboten einmal abgesehen -, so daß sich jeder nach seinen ureigensten, geheimsten niemals öffentlich eingestandenen Bedürfnissen bedienen kann?
Du bist raffiniert und wirst dadurch mächtig, daß du die Angebote an alle anderen im Dunkeln läßt und im Grunde dich jeder so ganz im stillen verehrt und verzehrt.

Das grundlegende Problem ist nicht, ob ein Volk, ein Stamm oder eine Gruppe von Gott erwählt wurde, sondern ob es sich als erwählt versteht. Damit wird der Glaube an die Überwertigkeit zur Realität, ganz ohne Erwählung, was auch als Thomas Theorem bekannt ist

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences / Wenn die Menschen Situationen als wirklich definieren, sind diese in ihren Konsequenzen wirklich (W. I. Thomas und D. S. Thomas)

So erfüllen sich ganz von selbst alle Prophezeiungen. Und die Konsequenz? Einfach nur furchtbar was die täglichen Nachrichten seit dem  7. Oktober bringen, eine Gewaltspirale zwischen zwei Völkern die kein Ende nimmt.  Denn nicht nur die Juden Jes 42,1-4

Siehe, das ist mein Knecht, den ich halte, und mein Auserwählter, an dem meine Seele Wohlgefallen hat. Ich habe ihm meinen Geist gegeben; er wird das Recht unter die Heiden bringen.

sondern auch die Palästinenser fühlen sich auserwählt Sure 3,34

Allah hat Adam, Noah, die Familie Abrahams und die Familie Amrans vor allen anderen Menschen auserwählt.

Das mag alles etwas verkürzt sein, aber warum nicht wenn es den Kern trifft. Religion als Opium fürs Volk? Nein, nicht Opium sondern Crystal Meth.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 05.11.2025
Philosophy

Science was based on mutual trust in the past

Science was based on mutual trust a few decades years ago but with the development into a large money making and career system we cannot believe any more in published results. This affects basically all disciplines not only those that notoriously known for bad quality.

It affects now even thousands of papers that report wrong  microscope manufactures as possible sign of misconduct as reported now by Retractionwatch.

One in four papers on research involving scanning electron microscopy (SEM) misidentifies the specific instrument that was used, raising suspicions of misconduct, according to a new study.  The work, published August 27 as a preprint on the Open Science Framework , examined SEM images in more than 1 million studies published by 50 materials science and engineering journals since 2010.

So I see only one possibility: Mutual trust needs to be replaced with more vigorous control of the the research community and not just two dozen sleuths and journalists. Research integrity should become an own recognized scientific discipline with full-term departments, funding, teaching and established methods & software tools.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 05.11.2025
Philosophy, Theology

Wo immer Ethik gepredigt wird, liegt die Moral im Argen

Rechtzeitig zur Olympiade kommt eine ARD Dokumentation zu Doping, der kriminellen Abkürzung zu Ruhm und Ehre.
Irgendwie erinnert die SZ Filmbesprechung daran, wie aktuell Betrug in der Wissenschaft gehandhabt wird:

Ausführlich zu Wort kommt im Film der spanische Blutpanscher Eufemiano Fuentes, ein verurteilter Superdoper, dessen Dienste das Vaterland bereits in den Achtzigerjahren diskret anwarb. Sportärzte verstehen was von Muskeln und Gelenken, Gynäkologen wie Fuentes was von Blut und Hormonen…Anfragen der Rechercheure zu Fuentes’ Aussagen ließen alle Betroffenen unbeantwortet. Gewagt sei aber die Prognose: Bei den Spielen, die in keinem Halbsatz ohne Floskeln zu Fairness, Ethik und Erziehung auskommen, wird die Causa totgeschwiegen.

Wo immer Ethik gepredigt wird, liegt die Moral im Argen.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 05.11.2025
Noteworthy, Philosophy

The long shadow on Eysenck

Twitter integration has been suspended by WordPress after renaming to X … but here is an announcement as screenshot

https://x.com/mendel_random/status/1812825107020083622?s=12

Program at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/open-research-summer-school-tickets-910343470827

Unforgotten the testimony of Eysenck’s peer Grossarth-Maticek in Heidelberg

Science relies on controversy. Disagreement is part of research, solid consensus is overturned, celebrated researchers enter shady territory. Most of the time, this proceeds more or less smoothly, without all too much of an outcry. Most of the time…

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 05.11.2025
Philosophy, Software

How to ruin yourself

Found at futirism.com

Google researchers have come out with a new paper that warns that generative AI is ruining vast swaths of the internet with fake content — which is painfully ironic because Google has been hard at work pushing the same technology to its enormous user base.
The study, a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper spotted by 404 Media, found that the great majority of generative AI users are harnessing the tech to “blur the lines between authenticity and deception” by posting fake or doctored AI content, such as images or videos, on the internet. The researchers also pored over previously published research on generative AI and around 200 news articles reporting on generative AI misuse.

The authors painfully collected 200 observed incidents of misuse reported between January 2023 and March 2024 and find

– Manipulation of human likeness and falsification of evidence underlie the most prevalent tactics in real-world cases of misuse…
– The majority of reported cases of misuse do not consist of technologically sophisticated uses … requiring minimal technical expertise.
– The increased sophistication, availability and accessibility of GenAI tools seemingly introduces new and lower-level forms of misuse that are neither overtly malicious nor explicitly violate these tools’ terms of services, but still have concerning ethical ramifications.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 05.11.2025