I will refer you to my ER physician friends, who have stories of people attempting to use adhesives of all varieties in the most absurd ways. People will apparently attempt to put anything, anywhere.
Last night some neighbors set off some illegal fireworks a few blocks from our house. My husband was out on a walk when the paramedics arrived because one of them had burned off half his face and another his arm.
Amen to childhood leukemia rates improving being awe-inspiring. I had a friend I rode the bus with around 2001 who was diagnosed with leukemia and didn't make it. They let us know over the PA system at school. I suspect these days she would have survived.
It's misleading because a single murder in this case is not statistically significant, but phrasing it using probabilistic terminology (i.e. percentages) obscures that fact and implies that you have enough data for the probabilistic language to be relevant.
Choosing to use percentages when there is a countable or small amount of data is typically misleading, even though it is "technically" true. In fact, a misleading statement is almost always something that is technically a fact.
It would be good (especially with the replication crisis), but historically to earn a PhD, especially at a top-tier institution, the criteria is conducting original research that produces new knowledge or unique insights.
Replicating existing results doesn't meet that criteria so unknowingly repeating someone's work is an existential crisis for PhD students. It can mean that you worked for 4-6 years on something that the committee then can't/won't grant a doctorate for and effectively forcing you to start over.
Theoretically, your advisor is supposed to help prevent this as well by guiding you in good directions, but not all advisors are created equal.
The problem is that what the “hallowed institutions” are trying to do is extremely ridiculous: turn the kind of work that scientific geniuses did into something that can be replicated by following a formula.
It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”
> The problem is that what the “hallowed institutions” are trying to do is extremely ridiculous: turn the kind of work that scientific geniuses did into something that can be replicated by following a formula.
> It’s as if a committee of middle managers got together and said, “how can we replicate and scale the work of people like Einstein?”
Or are they trying to require enough rigor and discipline so that out of 100,000 people who want to be the next Einstein, the process washes out the 99,000 who aren't willing or able to do more than throw out half-baked 'creative' ideas and expect the world to pick them up and run with them.
There's only finite attention and money for funding research, so you gotta do SOMETHING to filter out the larpers who want to take it and faff around.
I think at this point the system has eaten its own tail a bit, but there's good reason to require some level of "show me" before getting given the money to run your own research.
This is an excellent point! People often forget that something uncommon out of a much larger pool is still larger than anything that comes from a smaller pool (base rate neglect).
> For example, given a choice of the two categories, people might categorize a woman as a politician rather than a banker if they heard that she enjoyed social activism at school—even if they knew that she was drawn from a population consisting of 90% bankers and 10% politicians (APA).
The general population is much larger than the population of child prodigies.
I think this was meant in jest, but Florida is not that wide on the peninsula. You can drive from Clearwater to Cocoa Beach (the entire width from west to east) in about 2.5-3 hours. So if you live in the middle like near Orlando or Gainesville, you just...drive an hour to go surfing.
The funny part of this is, you just described not only travel, but all of life prior to about 2003ish (at least in the United States). This is when, in my social circles, we transitioned to most people having cell phone access and the ability to "let people know if you would be late." Still a long time before smart phones became ubiquitous.
So this was "just life" in the 90s and beforehand. The upside you describe was also sometimes the downside. E.g. my mother was traveling for work when one of my brothers was injured in a way that required a trip to the ER for stitches (he's fine). My dad was getting us all (4 kids under 7) into the car as she called from her hotel and he basically had to answer and say that we were on the way to the hospital, and she just had to wait for an update once we got home many hours later.
And yet, I would still agree that "Life felt slower, but somehow more real?" and that we haven't yet found the right equilibrium for always being connected in a way humans were never able to be before. I'm glad experiences like this are still possible.
