"May" is doing a lot of work here. This is a low-level regulatory element of a systemic protein. It's a neat result - this kind of biochemical investigation is hard and worthwhile - but it's miles from any kind of therapeutic AFAICT
And if these smart academically inclined people can’t reason about the merits of the system beyond whether it has worked for them, then they are as I accused them … unintelligent or childish.
Nah, it's really hard to notice things that are against your incentives to notice. And if all of the people around you are prospering in the same system, extra hard. The myth of meritocracy is extremely compelling, possibly to an even greater extent in academia than elsewhere.
success in academia is its own reward with prestige that should not be underestimated.
No doubt. And listen, I'm on the tenure track job market at this very moment, having said that last year was definitely going to be my last attempt. There's some kind of cultish nature, all the more inextricable in that I can see it, and it doesn't stop me.
I guess my point is that it's obvious to most of us that that success is extremely rare, and getting rarer. The thing that keeps me in it is the sense that I can do more good pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake than work that is easier and more remunerative but less fulfilling. Call that stupid or childish? Maybe 🤷.
I do these things. I also refuse to review for-profit journals and paper mills, post all of my code in open source repositories, and advocate for these practices whenever I get the chance. When I had a popular science blog over 10 years ago, writing about this stuff a bunch.
But as long as hiring committees are scanning CVs for the number of Nature/Science/Cell journals, and granting agencies aren't insisting on different practices, this shit will continue.
I can understand why it seems the way. But the people doing academic research by and large could make a lot more money working less hard at some company, but choose instead to try to advance human knowledge.
The incentives are just terrible. When I was a PhD student, I railed against this system, but when it came time to publish, I was overruled by my PI. And I know now that he was right - success is built off publication, and the best journals have this shitty model.
I used to think that when I became boss, I wouldn't participate in the bullshit, but if any of my trainees want a career in academia, that stance would be screwing them over. The rules need to come from the top, but the people at the top, almost by definition, are the ones that have prospered with the current system.
I've also got a gazelle, nearly 5 years old - no complaints! I occasionally need to use it on battery and it's pretty power hungry, but if you turn off Nvidia graphics for those times, it's quite a bit better.
Those are 2 different animals btw, not one like you’re making out.
This makes it worse, not better. If it were one, it might be chalked up to a fluke.
What is the difference between “gruesome” and “horrific”? Is “horrific” allowed?
No, certainly not.
Again though - this is testing. This is the entire point of it.
No. Animal suffering is absolutely not the point. Humane treatment of animals does not mean that they will never suffer - they will. I'm not against using animals in experiments, indeed I've done so myself. Humane treatment means that you put in the effort and bear the cost of minimizing suffering to the extent possible.
Like I said - would you rather they just jumped straight to human trials and this happened to people?
This is not the trade off. There is a wide spectrum of behavior between "never test on animals" and "treat animals purely as tools."
You said a bunch of things you like about cinnamon, and nothing that you don't. Is there something motivating you to switch?
Animal testing need not be gruesome - and indeed must not be according to most and
approvals.
Typically, minimizing animal suffering and humane procedures for determining when and how to euthanize animals is typically a big part of getting sign off for this kind of thing.
The man has a way with words and is righteous about giving credit where due.
There are a lot of things that would be "pretty cool" as long as we don't worry about the suffering they inflict. I mean, in a sense, factory farms are pretty cool in their level of technical sophistication and efficiency of converting grain and energy into meat. The accomplishments of breeding to generate chickens with breasts so large they can't stand up or procreate without intervention, and grow so fast their skeletons can't keep up with their weight are amazing. The density of animals we can grow while keeping loses to disease acceptably low with antibiotics is also remarkable.
And yet, all of these things that are "pretty cool" are also horrendous on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. Raising an intelligent animal like a pig just to harvest its heart for a human might be an ethical trade-off you're comfortable with - and given our treatment of animals for food I've no doubt that it's one society at large is fine with. If my own parent needed a heart transplant, I would likely have a hard time saying no if this were available. But from a Rawlsian perspective, thinking in advance, I don't think this is something we should be doing.
You know, it would also be pretty cool to have some kind of animal that could perform human-level tasks and ideally could understand human language. Maybe we could distinguish them from people based on some superficial physical characteristic like skin color 🤔
Well that's an excessively low bar.
I'm not certain, but I'm wondering if OP means that new programs don't automatically get a "desktop" app or whatever. I'm often annoyed when I have to manually create the file that lets me access software from the launch menu