Category Archives: Philosophy

Philosophy

The self evident?

The Wikipedia summarizes the  “Leviathan and the air pump” book by Schaffer & Shapin

Their aim is to use a historical account of the debate over the validity of Boyle’s air pump experiments, and by extension his experimental method, to discover the origins of the credibility that we give experimentally produced facts today. The authors wish to avoid ‘The self-evident’ method,  which (they explain) is when historians project the values of their current culture onto the time period that they are studying (in this case valuing the benefits of empiricism). They wish to take a “stranger’s” viewpoint when examining the debate between Hobbes and Boyle because, in the 1660s, both methods of knowledge production were well respected in the academic community.

 

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Allergy, Philosophy, Software

The problem is getting exponentially worse

Last Word on Nothing writing about ChatGPT

What initiated my change of mind was playing around with some AI tools. After trying out chatGPT and Google’s AI tool, I’ve now come to the conclusion that these things are dangerous. We are living in a time when we’re bombarded with an abundance of misinformation and disinformation, and it looks like AI is about to make the problem exponentially worse by polluting our information environment with garbage. It will become increasingly difficult to determine what is true.

Is “derivate work” now  equal to reality? Here is Geoff Hinton

“Godfather of AI” Geoff Hinton, in recent public talks, explains that one of the greatest risks is not that chatbots will become super-intelligent, but that they will generate text that is super-persuasive without being intelligent, in the manner of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson. In a world where evidence and logic are not respected in public debate, Hinton imagines that systems operating without evidence or logic could become our overlords by becoming superhumanly persuasive, imitating and supplanting the worst kinds of political leader.

At least in medicine there is an initiative underway where the lead author can be contacted at the address below.

In my field, the  first AI consultation results look more than dangerous with one harmful response out of 20 questions.

A total of 20 questions covering various aspects of allergic rhinitis were asked. Among the answers, eight received a score of 5 (no inaccuracies), five received a score of 4 (minor non-harmful inaccuracies), six received a score of 3 (potentially misinterpretable inaccuracies) and one answer had a score of 2 (minor potentially harmful inaccuracies).

Within a few years, AI-generated content will be the microplastic of our online ecosystem (@mutinyc)

 

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Noteworthy, Philosophy

When the empire strikes back

TheFrancesca Gino case is now well known [1, 2]. But this is something never seen before , a mass self-auditing effort to prove the honesty of the co-authors

More than 140 collaborators of Francesca Gino, the Harvard Business School professor who has been accused of data fabrication, have been scrambling to verify the research that they’ve published with her. On Monday, they started making their findings public.

The mass self-auditing effort, called the Many Co-Authors Project, has already initiated the retraction of at least one paper that Gino collected data for, according to one of her collaborators.

https://manycoauthors.org/gino/papers Nov 7, 2023

 

15 Nov 2024

At  the end it is about sleeping tonight

https://x.com/jpsimmon/status/1833976010192421244

 

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Philosophy

Industrialized cheating

From a guest post at Retraction Watch by Adya Misra

Just in the last few months, we put out 37 from Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and 21 from Concurrent Engineering. And there are more to come.  While we don’t celebrate this type of action, the news is not all bad. The high numbers of retractions at times reflect a problem of industrialized cheating, but also, as in our case, a belief that rigorous scholarship – robustly reviewed by researchers who are experts in their fields – can and should improve the world.

 

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Philosophy

The information landscape is pitted with lies, tall tales, myths, pseudoscience, half-truths, and plain old inaccuracies

Joanna Thompson summarizes it at (Undark)

It’s worth noting that misinformation — by any definition — has been around for a long time. Ever since the first humans developed language, we’ve been navigating an information landscape pitted with lies, tall tales, myths, pseudoscience, half-truths, and plain old inaccuracies. Medieval European bestiaries, for instance, described creatures like bears and weasels alongside unicorns and manticores. Anti-vaccine groups have been around for over 200 years, well before the internet. And in the age of yellow journalism around the turn of the 20th century, many reporters made up stories out of whole cloth.
“I don’t like this whole talk of ‘we’re living in a post-truth world,’ as if we ever lived in a truth world,” said Catarina Dutilh Novaes

 

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Allergy, Philosophy

Der Grenznutzen von Wissenschaft

Kann man:frau unbegrenzt Wissen schaffen?

Die Wirtschaftswissenschaften beschreiben den Grenznutzen wo der Zuwachs nur noch durch den Einsatz enorm hohe Aufwands erzielt werden kann – wenn trotz des hohen ökonomischen Aufwandes der Nutzenzuwachs gering ist oder sogar gegen Null geht.

Der Grenznutzen liesse sich im Prinzip auch von der DFG bestimmen, von Universitäten und Forschungsorganisationen wenn sie nur Interesse daran hätten.

Haben Sie aber nicht.

 

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Philosophy

What is pseudoscience?

A recent Nature commentary defines pseudoscience as everything that cannot be empirically tested. Wikipedia is more comprehensive

Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method

with a long footnote pointing towards Oxford English Dictionary 1989

A pretended or spurious science; a collection of related beliefs about the world mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method or as having the status that scientific truths now have.

Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science 1988 gives probably the best definition

[w]hat is objectionable about these beliefs is that they masquerade as genuinely scientific ones…  claims presented so that they appear [to be] scientific even though they lack supporting evidence and plausibility” … In contrast, science is “a set of methods designed to describe and interpret observed and inferred phenomena, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation”.

Here is my own definition of the scientific method in the ethics lecture 2021 (which is close to the initial statement).

 

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Philosophy, Software

No way to recognize AI generated text

Whatever I wrote before different methods to detect AI written text (using AI Text Classifer, GPTZero, Originality.AI…) seems now to be too optimistic. OpenAI even reports that AI detectors do not work at all

While some (including OpenAI) have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated content.
Additionally, ChatGPT has no “knowledge” of what content could be AI-generated. It will sometimes make up responses to questions like “did you write this [essay]?” or “could this have been written by AI?” These responses are random and have no basis in fact.
…
When we at OpenAI tried to train an AI-generated content detector, we found that it labeled human-written text like Shakespeare and the Declaration of Independence as AI-generated.
…
Even if these tools could accurately identify AI-generated content (which they cannot yet), students can make small edits to evade detection.

BUT – according to a recent Copyleaks study, use of AI runs at high risk of plagiarizing earlier text that has been used to train the AI model. So it will be dangerous for everybody who is trying to cheat.

https://copyleaks.com/blog/copyleaks-ai-plagiarism-analysis-report

 

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Philosophy

Science is great but scientists are still people

Time to read again the famous Kornberg article

In parlous times, some truths need to be remembered and repeated. When science is under attack from many quarters, we need to be reminded of the distinctions between the extraordinary power of science and the fallibility of those who practice it. We are aware of prodigious feats in the arts, law, and religion that endure for ages. Yet none of these disciplines offer individuals, as science does, the opportunity to contribute to a progressive understanding of nature. In persuading the public to support scientists in their attempts to achieve a more rational and effective understand-ing of ourselves and of the world about us, we must be clear in distinguishing the uniqueness of science as a practice from the human qualities of its practitioners.

 

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Philosophy

FOGD

Die DFG hat etwas Neues (FAZ)

„FOGD“, also „Forschungsorientierte Gleichstellungs- und Diversitätsstandards“. Man ist auf den regenbogenbunten Zug der Diversity aufgesprungen. Wir zitieren, in Bezug auf FOGD, von den Internetseiten der DFG: „In den Blick zu nehmen sind […] Diversitätsdimensionen, wie Geschlecht und geschlechtliche Identität, sexuelle Orientierung, Alter, ethnische Herkunft und Nationalität, soziale Herkunft (beispielsweise unter folgenden Aspekten: ökonomische Situation, Herkunft aus nicht-akademischer Familie, Migrationsgeschichte), Religion und Weltanschauung, Behinderung oder chronische/langwierige Erkrankung. Auch das Zusammenkommen mehrerer Unterschiedsdimensionen in einer Person (Intersektionalität und seine Bedeutung) sollte berücksichtigt werden.“

Nun sind also nach Saad , Jäger und Florin, auch Pfeilschifter und Wicht an dem Thema angelangt

Das Diversitätsmanagement schlägt um in eine neue Totalität, nämlich den hobbesschen bellum omnium contra omnes, den Kampf um das jeweils schlagkräftigste (Opfer-)Narrativ und um die Macht über die Konstruktion der dazugehörigen Sachverhalte

wobei die Inhalte sekundär sind.

 

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Genetics, Philosophy

I never read the introduction of an article

I never read the introduction of an article, seldom the discussion section, but I always scan the methods and sometimes (if the methods warrant it) also the tables and figures. It seems that I am not alone here.

The survey indicated that individuals at different career stages valued different sections of scientific papers, and skill in reading the results section develops slowly over the course of an academic career.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0189753

So why do we still write papers with an introduction that is longer than 1 sentence?

 

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Philosophy

Way too many meta-analyses

It is no secret – there are way too many meta-analyses while  original research is missing [blog, paper, paper, paper, paper,  journal, journal). Books are about the method are also abundant. Sure, armchair research can be done without getting dirty.

Narrative reviews are much less appreciated nowadays although most of the current “systematic reviews” are basically useless as they are frequently written by “new kids on the block” and not by experienced scientists.

If the  current pace continues, we will soon have more reviews than original studies… As another author put it forward it is a “bloated mushroom of evidence”.

 

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Philosophy, Software

AI threadening academia

cheating is increasing

In March this year, three academics from Plymouth Marjon University published an academic paper entitled ‘Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT’ in the journal Innovations in Education and Teaching International. It was peer-reviewed by four other academics who cleared it for publication. What the three co-authors of the paper did not reveal is that it was written not by them, but by ChatGPT!

a Zoom conference recently found

having a human in the loop is really important

Well, universities may loose credit

But a new report by Moody’s Investor Service says that ChatGPT and other AI tools, such as Google’s Bard, have the potential to compromise academic integrity at global colleges and universities. The report – from one of the largest credit ratings agencies in the world – also says they pose a credit risk.
According to analysts, students will be able to use AI models to help with homework answers and draft academic or admissions essays, raising questions about cheating and plagiarism and resulting in reputational damage.

What could we do?

There is an increasing risk of people using advanced artificial intelligence, particularly the generative adversarial network (GAN), for scientific image manipulation for the purpose of publications. We demonstrated this possibility by using GAN to fabricate several different types of biomedical images and discuss possible ways for the detection and prevention of such scientific misconducts in research communities.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 06.11.2025