https://t.co/Vk1Ot8hK0l
Yearly cursed/nightmarish science articles thread. Will include articles from past years for completeness since old threads have been lost.
https://t.co/Vk1Ot8hK0l
https://t.co/8N3wWkRtSl
https://t.co/80CwxRsINP
The humanzee is both scientifically possible and morally defensible.
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https://t.co/5JQuThCDob
https://t.co/Gj8fT33JSU
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https://t.co/3xRJBJZg9t
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https://t.co/Tbta3PBNag
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More from Science
Hugh Everett's birthday! Pioneer of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Let us celebrate by thinking about ontological extravagance. I will do so by way of analogy, because I have found that everyone loves analogies and nobody ever willfully misconstrues them.
We look at the night sky and see photons arriving to us, emitted by distant stars. Let's contrast two different theories about how stars emit photons.
One theory says, we know how stars shine, and our equations predict that they emit photons roughly uniformly in all directions. Call this the "Many-Photons Interpretation" (MPI).
But! Others object. That is *so many photons*. Most of which we don't observe, and can't observe, since they're moving away at the speed of light. It's too ontologically extravagant to posit a huge number of unobservable things!
So they suggest a "Photon Collapse Interpretation." According to this theory, the photons emitted toward us actually exist. But photons that would be emitted in directions we will never observe simply collapse into utter non-existence.
The physicist Hugh Everett III was born #OTD in 1930. His \u201crelative state\u201d formulation of quantum mechanics, which we now call the \u201cMany Worlds Interpretation,\u201d was published in 1957. pic.twitter.com/ZqMsZcPJDG
— Robert McNees, the bastegod (@mcnees) November 11, 2020
We look at the night sky and see photons arriving to us, emitted by distant stars. Let's contrast two different theories about how stars emit photons.
One theory says, we know how stars shine, and our equations predict that they emit photons roughly uniformly in all directions. Call this the "Many-Photons Interpretation" (MPI).
But! Others object. That is *so many photons*. Most of which we don't observe, and can't observe, since they're moving away at the speed of light. It's too ontologically extravagant to posit a huge number of unobservable things!
So they suggest a "Photon Collapse Interpretation." According to this theory, the photons emitted toward us actually exist. But photons that would be emitted in directions we will never observe simply collapse into utter non-existence.
@mugecevik is an excellent scientist and a responsible professional. She likely read the paper more carefully than most. She grasped some of its strengths and weaknesses that are not apparent from a cursory glance. Below, I will mention a few points some may have missed.
1/
The paper does NOT evaluate the effect of school closures. Instead it conflates all ‘educational settings' into a single category, which includes universities.
2/
The paper primarily evaluates data from March and April 2020. The article is not particularly clear about this limitation, but the information can be found in the hefty supplementary material.
3/
The authors applied four different regression methods (some fancier than others) to the same data. The outcomes of the different regression models are correlated (enough to reach statistical significance), but they vary a lot. (heat map on the right below).
4/
The effect of individual interventions is extremely difficult to disentangle as the authors stress themselves. There is a very large number of interventions considered and the model was run on 49 countries and 26 US States (and not >200 countries).
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1/
I've recently come across a disinformation around evidence relating to school closures and community transmission that's been platformed prominently. This arises from flawed understanding of the data that underlies this evidence, and the methodologies used in these studies. pic.twitter.com/VM7cVKghgj
— Deepti Gurdasani (@dgurdasani1) February 1, 2021
The paper does NOT evaluate the effect of school closures. Instead it conflates all ‘educational settings' into a single category, which includes universities.
2/
The paper primarily evaluates data from March and April 2020. The article is not particularly clear about this limitation, but the information can be found in the hefty supplementary material.
3/
The authors applied four different regression methods (some fancier than others) to the same data. The outcomes of the different regression models are correlated (enough to reach statistical significance), but they vary a lot. (heat map on the right below).
4/
The effect of individual interventions is extremely difficult to disentangle as the authors stress themselves. There is a very large number of interventions considered and the model was run on 49 countries and 26 US States (and not >200 countries).
5/
