meow1032 (u/meow1032)

meow1032 commented on Uber and Lyft competitors ready if service is suspended in California cnbc.com/2020/08/19/uber-... · Posted by u/lxm

marcell · 5 years ago

I’m sure the institution that brought us the Los Angeles public school system and the thriving Los Angeles public transit system will surely succeed in building an Uber competitor.

meow1032 · 5 years ago

I have a feeling that the lack of faith that Americans have in their government ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. I work closely with a lot of government employees, and it really seems like 95% of the work is about avoiding "boondoggles" -- i.e. highly visible failures. This is because boondoggles can be used as political tools, and ultimately, politicians are more concerned about getting reelected than getting anything done. The upshot of this, is that they would rather risk low visibility failures way more than high visibility failures. As an example, about 10 years ago, they were looking to install wifi in one of the buildings that I work in so they bought a bunch of routers. One of the higher ups wanted to assure that this wouldn't cause any security issues so they ordered audit after audit after audit. Eventually they just stopped trying and the building still doesn't have wifi, and they wasted all the money on those routers and audits. The problem is that they don't even have any sensitive data or data to be secured on that network. It's like this for everything. I think a better system would be to tolerate some very visible failures vs basically guaranteed non-visible failures.

meow1032 commented on Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates theverge.com/2020/8/6/213... · Posted by u/virde

Balgair · 5 years ago

In grad school I had a friend that was doing olfactory (smell) research on rats with tetrode drives (wires in their brain). He was looking at the neuronal response to smells that they gave the rats and had a few signals to match up. There was the signal from the arduino running the scent gates, the amps that reported the weak neuronal currents, the nose lasers that gated the ardunio, etc. He was having a hard time getting through all the data in his MatLab code and I offered to help for some beer.

After the 11th nested 'if' statement, I upped the request to a case of beer. I'm not certain he ever got the code working.

To the larger point, scientists are not programmers. They got into their programs to do research. What keeps them going is not the joy of programming, but the thrill of discovery. Programming is nothing but a means to an end. One they will do the bare minimum to get working. Asking hyper stressed out grad students to also become expert coders isn't reasonable.

And yes, that means that the code is suspect at best. If you load the code on to another computer, make sure you can defenestrate that computer with ease, do not use your home device.

meow1032 · 5 years ago

> To the larger point, scientists are not programmers. They got into their programs to do research.

I would say most research, to an ever growing degree, is so heavily dependent on software that it's tough to make that claim anymore. It makes no sense to me. It's like saying Zillow doesn't need software engineers because they are in the Real Estate business, not the software business.

meow1032 commented on Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates theverge.com/2020/8/6/213... · Posted by u/virde

epistasis · 5 years ago

It's not usually computational biologists who are using Excel.

What if you want to share data with a wetlab biologist who want to explore their favorite list of genes on their own?

meow1032 · 5 years ago

There are lots of great computational biologists, but being a computational biologist doesn't necessitate being good with computers. Plenty of PI's rely pretty much exclusively on grad students and post-docs to run all their analyses.

Not that I'm saying using excel is bad either. I use excel plenty to look at data. But scientists need to know how to use the tools that they have.

meow1032 commented on Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates theverge.com/2020/8/6/213... · Posted by u/virde

gameswithgo · 5 years ago

it would be nice if everyone was expert at everything, but they cant be. it would be nice if they hired experts but money doesn’t grow on trees. we often insist on a degree of excellence we refuse to pay for

meow1032 · 5 years ago

It's not about being an expert at everything or hiring more people. These aren't particularly hard problems, it's not difficult to find biologists who are incredibly adept at using python, R or C. It's about thinking about how science gets funded and how it gets implemented. I've written here before about the difference between "grant work" and "grunt work", and how too computer touching tends to get looked down upon at a certain level.

If you're deciding who gets a large-scale computational biology grant, and you're choosing between a senior researcher with 5000 publications with a broad scope, and a more junior researcher with 500 publications and a more compuationally focused scope, most committees choose the senior researcher. However, the senior researcher might not know anything about computers, or they may have been trained in the 70's or 80's where the problems of computing were fundamentally different.

So you get someone leading a multi-million dollar project who fundamentally knows nothing about the methods of that project. They don't know how to scope things, how to get past roadblocks, who to hire, etc.

meow1032 commented on Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates theverge.com/2020/8/6/213... · Posted by u/virde

jordigh · 5 years ago

To people asking, "why do they use Excel?" that's like asking "why must we be subjected to gravity?"

The whole world's data ultimately comes from or ends up in an Excel spreadsheet. Sure, we might use other intermediate data storage methods, but in the end it's going to go into some scientist's or some politician's computer, and by golly it's gonna be in Excel. Trying to rally against Excel is like trying to rally against fundamental forces of nature.

This is just an example of that fundamental force winning.

meow1032 · 5 years ago

I don't disagree completely with this, but just want to point out that it's kind of a bad smell to have computational biologists who are - as someone in the article puts it - computationally illiterate. I have met lots of these types over the years, and usually their methods are kind of a gong show. If you can't properly sanitize your data inputs on your column headers, why should I trust that you've treated the rest of your data properly?

meow1032 commented on You Want to See My Data? I Thought We Were Friends nautil.us/blog/you-want-t... · Posted by u/dnetesn

jpeloquin · 5 years ago

Requiring replication work for a PhD seems like a great idea. PhD programs already use a mandatory exercise—the qualifying exam—to check a student's competence, with ambiguous effectiveness. Turning the qualifying exam into a replication study seems like a win: it tests the student's ability to do their actual job rather than pass an abstract test, and produces output that is useful both to the student and the community. The qualifying exam committee (usually ~ 4 PIs from different labs) can do quality control on the replication.

> All it will do is devalue the value of replication studies because only PHD students do replication studies. It's also not in their best interest especially if they dispute findings of established researchers.

Most studies are done by students regardless, so it seems unlikely that replication studies would be devalued merely because they're done by students. Although disputing the findings of established researchers can be risky, they would be publishing jointly with their PI (or, with the above implementation, multiple PIs), not alone with no support. Few students want to stay in academia, so it usually doesn't matter to them if a professor at some other institution gets offended. Most importantly, if everyone is doing replication studies, there will be so many disputations flying around that any particular person is less likely to be singled out for retaliation.

meow1032 · 5 years ago

It sounds like what you're suggesting would be functionally equivalent to PI-led replications, which I would agree is a good idea. There are still some practical problems though.

1. Studies can be much more expensive than most people think. In my field, a moderately sized study can easily cost $100,000+ if you're only accounting for up front cost (e.g. use of equipment, compensating participants). Someone would have to foot the costs of this.

2. Studies can be incredibly labor-intensive. PI's can get away with running studies that require thousands of man-hours because they have a captive market of PHD students, Post-docs, and research assistants all willing to work for low wages or for free. PHD students usually don't have the same amount of man-power.

3. For obvious reasons, studies that require high cost, high man-power work tend to get replicated naturally less. In other words, the least practical studies to replicate happen to also be the most necessary to replicate.

A couple of things I would dispute:

> it seems unlikely that replication studies would be devalued merely because they're done by students

I think academics value work in a particularly skewed way. There is "grant work" and there is "grunt work". Grant work is anything that actively contributes to getting grants for one's institution. Grunt work is everything else. PHD's can do grunt work, but that doesn't mean it will be valued on the job market. For example, software development is actively sought after in (biology) grad students, because it's a very useful skill. However, I've also seen it count against applications as professors because it shows they spent too much time on "grunt work". Software development skills don't win grants.

> Few students want to stay in academia

In some fields there aren't any options except to stay in academia or academia adjacent fields.

meow1032 commented on You Want to See My Data? I Thought We Were Friends nautil.us/blog/you-want-t... · Posted by u/dnetesn

joppy · 5 years ago

It seems to me, still, that a lot of these problems you bring up can be addressed by universities changing their hiring policies. Which makes sense: academics ultimately rely on universities for their income, and so it is the hiring policies which are setting the perverse incentives. And I don’t think changing hiring policies would be an incremental change, it would be a huge change (and not likely to be made by any university any time soon, since students rank universities on similar metrics to how universities hire staff — a prestigious university will lose prestige even if it changes its hiring policies for the better).

meow1032 · 5 years ago

> academics ultimately rely on universities for their income

Sort of, a huge portion of income is from grants, particularly after the first few years from being hired. More importantly, a huge portion of the University income is from grants. When a researcher recieves a grant, there is an "overhead" percentage that goes to the University. Universities hire, in part, to maximize those overheads, which means getting the researchers with the best chance at getting big grants.

Changing the hiring process may affect how PHD students act, but once they're "in the system", they are subject to all the same problematic incentives.

meow1032 commented on You Want to See My Data? I Thought We Were Friends nautil.us/blog/you-want-t... · Posted by u/dnetesn

Sebb767 · 5 years ago

I generally agree, but their solution (fund boring research, publish only in journals with high standard) is in direct contrast to what they stated earlier. It's basically saying yes, we have bad incentives, but we could ignore them. That's not going to happen; shiny new research will attract people and funding. Especially more than "boring" what we found before was indeed a finding-research.

Now, I don't have a good solution either, unfortunately. What might work is that we require replication work for a PhD or have a certain percentage of a journal dedicated to verification. That, combined with some meta-studies to reward people with citations for replication, might work without fully swimming against the current.

It's a hard problem, really.

meow1032 · 5 years ago

> What might work is that we require replication work for a PhD

I don't think this will work. All it will do is devalue the value of replication studies because only PHD students do replication studies. It's also not in their best interest especially if they dispute findings of established researchers.

Also, we have to get away from the idea that the scientist's job is to think and write, and literally all of the other work can be shuffled off onto low wage (or no wage), low status workers. This is one of the biggest reasons that science is going through such a crisis. If you want enough papers to consistently get grants you probably need at least 4/5 PHD students every few years. This causes a massive glut in the job market. It also dissociates scientists from their work. I've met esteemed computational biologists who could barely work a computer. All of their code was written, run, and analyzed by graduate students or post docs. They were competent enough at statistics, but that level of abstraction from the actual work is troubling.

meow1032 commented on You Want to See My Data? I Thought We Were Friends nautil.us/blog/you-want-t... · Posted by u/dnetesn

joppy · 5 years ago

I think the suggestion that "universities could change their hiring policies" is a very good recommendation. There are a lot of problems in academia (bad research, lack of diversity, pressure to publish) that could be reduced if universities changed their hiring policy to something further away from the metric of (number of papers published since receiving PhD) / (time since receiving PhD). Of course no university hires explicitly on that metric, but many of the metrics they use are not far from that, mixing in quality of journals and norms for the field, etc.

Each of the suggested actions, taken together, would seem to have a very positive improvement on the status quo. Would you care to explain why the suggested actions would be "somewhere between ridiculous and useless?"

meow1032 · 5 years ago

Not OP here, but my issue with the recommendations are that they've pretty accurately listed a whole bunch of mostly structural problems with academia, but all of the suggestions boil down to "we all just need to try harder". You can say something like: "journals need to demand higher standards" but what incentive do they actually have to do so? Then you can counter with "scientists could vote with their feet", but what incentives do they have to do that?? You're asking people to consider seriously damaging their career for some nebulous quality metric.

Frankly, having worked in academia long enough to see at least a couple shifts in culture, the only thing I can see that comes out of this is a couple more things get added on to the ever growing checklist of publishing a paper/submitting a grant application.

I think we need to get away from the sort of thinking where large structural problems can be solved by tiny incremental improvements. If you really want to solve the problem, one or more of [Granting Agencies|Journals|Universities] has to be completely torn down and built back up.

meow1032 commented on The Age of Mass Surveillance Will Not Last Forever wired.com/story/the-age-o... · Posted by u/nicolas_

loteck · 5 years ago

One silver lining of living in these United States is that you can be assured that complex technology picked up by cities and counties (and often even states) will be implemented carelessly and wielded by only the hammiest fists.

The political winds shift and blow away any short term cover the operators ever enjoyed.

The ACLU's CCOPS efforts were launched in 2016 [0] and have since resulted in multiple cities across the country wresting oversight of local surveillance technology into the hands of deliberative bodies.

I joined a local effort to put this oversight model in place in my city, and we're on track to receive unanimous approval from my (large) city council this year. It takes work to do it. You will have to get hands on if you want to participate in this change.

ACLU NorCal has put together a nice guide on how to build the movement in your city if one has not already begun. [1]

[0] https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/surveillance-...

[1] https://www.aclunc.org/publications/fighting-local-surveilla...

meow1032 · 5 years ago

> One silver lining of living in these United States is that you can be assured that complex technology picked up by cities and counties (and often even states) will be implemented carelessly and wielded by only the hammiest fists.

This is absolutely not assuring. All this means is that the wrong people are going to be surveilled, arrested, and punished.