camelite (u/camelite)

camelite commented on Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

mike_hearn · 2 years ago

There's the Cochrane Collaboration. They don't tick off every item on your list but it's fairly close to what you're asking for. It's mentioned in the article as they do a lot of meta-studies. Unfortunately they only started trying to spot fraudulent RCTs in 2021. Also in recent times some people don't like them, because they did a big review of mask studies and found there was no reliable evidence that masks worked against COVID.

Cochrane (formerly known as the Cochrane Collaboration) is a British international charitable organisation formed to organise medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving health professionals, patients and policy makers.[4][5] It includes 53 review groups that are based at research institutions worldwide. Cochrane has approximately 30,000 volunteer experts from around the world.[6]

The group conducts systematic reviews of health-care interventions and diagnostic tests and publishes them in the Cochrane Library.[7][4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochrane_(organisation)

camelite · 2 years ago

"Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that 'masks don't work', which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation."

https://www.cochrane.org/news/statement-physical-interventio...

camelite commented on Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong features.apmreports.org/s... · Posted by u/Khaine

mandmandam · 3 years ago

Is "synthetic phonics" not a rather narrow subset of "phonics-centric reading"?

In any case, the issue in the linked article seems to be a classic case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

Which is to say, phonics is very important, and a great tool in a balanced approach to learning to read for fun and profit... However, it's not so great to focus on phonics as a lonely and narrow target in a national reading programme, or to justify Departmental failures.

camelite · 3 years ago

The unstated goal of the phonics test with the nonsense words is to make it impossible for teachers to cheat by having students rote-learn a bunch of high-frequency words. They can only pass by actually learning the grapheme-phoneme correspondances. It's a good thing.

camelite commented on Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong features.apmreports.org/s... · Posted by u/Khaine

oxfordmale · 3 years ago

Phonics-centric reading is the next big scandal waiting to happen.

Teaching reading in England may have been less successful since adapting the synthetic phonics approach rather than more.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...

The number of downvotes shows that it may still take a few years for people to understand that phonics is not the be all end all solution that it is currently made out to be.

camelite · 3 years ago

https://www.pedagogynongrata.com/a-response-to

camelite commented on Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform isdotnetopen.com/... · Posted by u/exyi

someotherperson · 4 years ago

Opinions like this have always been weird to me. Not wrong, but weird.

Any contribution that M$ (remember when people would sub the S for a dollar sign?) makes to open source or open standards is to support their own bottom line and we shouldn't expect anything else. The directors have a legal responsibility to the company and to boost the share price, not for the betterment of humanity. To this effect, companies will contribute to open standards when it's better for the share price, and will seek to screw open standards when it's better for the share price.

Public companies are inherently evil by default -- this is because the only goal of a public company is to strengthen the share price. I've said it before and I'll say it again: always assume bad faith when you're dealing with a company.

From this, it doesn't matter what people thought of Microsoft before, or what they think of them now. Microsoft like all companies has a single goal. If we can pressure these companies to coast in a certain direction then great. But we shouldn't ever believe that companies can 'turn over a new leaf' when they legally cannot. FAANG is the same. Ford is the same. Starbucks is the same.

Every company is exactly the same, but the larger they grow, the more visible and impactful these actions become. Microsoft has been in the spotlight for decades because it has been a juggernaut for decades. But it's hardly unique in what it does. Our real concerns should be why regulators were quick to put the smack down on Microsoft but have since turned into paper tigers and are allowing unhinged monopolization from FAANG in 2022.

camelite · 4 years ago

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

"There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” ... this belief is utterly false."

camelite commented on Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations journals.plos.org/plosone... · Posted by u/behnamoh

uoaei · 4 years ago

The inequity resulting from the material consequences of appearing in, being raised in, and interacting with society as white and male is a well-established statistical fact.

camelite · 4 years ago

There are important differences between material and statistical facts you would be better off not glossing over.

And more centrally, whiteness (in particular) and maleness are still not facts. You're in voodoo territory if you center them as such.

camelite commented on Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations journals.plos.org/plosone... · Posted by u/behnamoh

uoaei · 4 years ago

> is to elevat[e] the white voice too

Elevate?? We are not assigning authority to the white voice, we are assigning hegemony. It is a material fact that whiteness and maleness are the centers of Western philosophy, and everything else is measured based on deviance from that perceived center. There are by now centuries of literature on the matter.

> if they happen to not fit into the agenda of the DEI group

What you call "agenda" I call "bandwidth". Think about it: a fledgling DEI group, small to start, must tackle a lot of metastasized workplace issues. But they're not going to get anything done by spreading their forces too thin. So they focus first on what will make the most material effect with the least effort: call it "productivity". Ageism does fall down the list of priorities, for the simple matter that older people tend to have a larger net worth and so are more insulated from material consequences writ large. It is those who are poorest who need insulation from poverty first, who get help first: this is called "triage". The rising tide starts at the lowest point, right? Without directly asking for everyone's net worth, which is extremely illegal as I'm sure you know, we must resort to proxy measures.

Would you join an engineering team who was constantly switching contexts instead of focusing in on particular features during particular sprints? No, that would be counterproductive. Afford your colleagues the same consideration, even if their goal is not a webapp but compassion in the workplace.

camelite · 4 years ago

Whiteness and maleness are not and cannot be material facts and it is a category error to insist otherwise, nevermind elevating them as the axiomatic center of your worldview.

camelite commented on Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations journals.plos.org/plosone... · Posted by u/behnamoh

uoaei · 4 years ago

Viewpoint diversity is very, very important. But for a large contingent of the workforce, their viewpoints are already represented in the numerous implicit and ideological supports that our society has developed, without them even needing to be present: this is called "hegemony".

If you do not acknowledge this is the case, then DEI efforts can seem very unfair. But one should be careful not to allow emotions and sensitivities to creep in, to do the ideological work for you. Your status is not threatened by people of different backgrounds coming together and critiquing the processes and pathologies that dominate today (and that white men typically grow up in, and so are already comfortable navigating to the point they assume that it is the natural way of things). It will make everything better for everyone if we take the time to put effort into including (injecting) the diversity of viewpoints that you find so valuable, and that is precisely the aim of DEI.

camelite · 4 years ago

But the dei perspective is the one that is hegemonic at this point. Something off a paradox for those possessed of it, displayed in such absurdities as believing that viewpoint diversity is the (precise) aim of dei.

camelite commented on Spotify deletes 70 Joe Rogan episodes jremissing.com/... · Posted by u/Acrobatic_Road

JumpCrisscross · 4 years ago

> When the government asks Spotify to censor Rogan

Political appointees making public statements isn’t the government asking anyone to do anything.

camelite · 4 years ago

What if the political appointee publicly states they would like Spotify to censor Joe Rogan? Perhaps 'the government' is simply too ineffably abstract an entity to attach to any individual actor commonly regarded as comprising it.

camelite commented on California moves to recommend delaying algebra to 9th grade statewide sfstandard.com/controvers... · Posted by u/moultano

csa · 4 years ago

> but even very young children can learn these concepts if you would just spend some time teaching it to them.

Many decades of cognitive science disagree with you.

See Piaget for one of the earlier researchers on this topic. Even though his original ideas have been refuted or refined, the basic premises of his ideas are still prominent among the large group of modern researchers that some people dub neo-Piagetians.

camelite · 4 years ago

Why would we "see" Piaget if his work, as you correctly note, his theories have been refuted? Educationalists, who have never personally and successfully taught anythingmarried simply wrong theories of learning, are a good 50% of the problem.

camelite commented on A Policy of Activism in the Workplace Is Anti-Fellowship antivalue.blogspot.com/20... · Posted by u/spyckie2

ali0sha · 5 years ago

This is a strawman, unmoored from evidence or reality.

Here's my read, based on your supporting the blog post and your two comments:

You've constructed this fantasy as a defence mechanism. You use the classification of those with earnest beliefs that you find threatening as worse at 'actual code' and obsessed with 'work groups', and on that basis you reject those beliefs without having to introspect.

As collaboration, design, and people skills become more valued as ways to produce better software alongside sheer lines-of-code output, you fear that the power you derive from skills is being diluted.

As the corporate world realises that people who aren't men or who aren't white might matter, need to be taken into account, and might have something to contribute, you fear that maybe some of what you got you didn't deserve quite as much as you thought, and the fear of being seen as privileged makes you want to cling onto your existing power all the more.

This is an opportunity for growth. You can choose whether to create resentful posts on HN, writing off anyone who cares as a leech, or you can engage with those underlying feelings and become a better human, and better at your job.

camelite · 5 years ago

This is extraordinarily vicious, and yet entirely par for the course, a good example of the basically pro forma denunciation OP is arguing should be verboten in the work place.