Sure - I've known for a long time that most pop music is written by a few folks in Sweden, and is just a collection of hooks without actual meaning, and lots of autotune and fake emoting.
I don't like most of that stuff either but I don't think what you say about hooks is fair. One could make the same criticism of Mozart also. Mozart was a tunesmith and mostly wrote totally abstract music with no meaning. That doesn't stop him being widely considered a genius.
But sometimes a catchy tune is good and you're not somehow less good because lots of other people like it too.
This is definitely true and I also agree that one shouldn't be snobbish about popular culture. That said, it's also true that you can have your cake and eat it: there's plenty of good music that also has good tunes.
Heh. Pop music is by the most varried of ALL genres. Other genres limit themselves to certain structures, where pop music just needs to be popular, and can take crossovers from any other genre if it is widely accessible enough.
I don't think "pop music" is a genre, I think it encompasses multiple genres. So on the one hand, by virtue of being a catch-all term, pop is varied. On the other hand, mainstream popular music must now grab the listener as quickly as possible on the first listen. To achieve this new songs must have a lot of familiar content and they must be simple. This pushes mainstream popular music towards less variety and less depth. Thus I don't think pop music is the most varied of all genres: it's mostly recycled candy. If you want the three course meal you need to look elsewhere.
Central to this is the assumption that "psychological" means "made up". It doesn't have to the be that way. Consider classical conditioning of Pavlov's dogs: bell ringing predicts food and eventually bell ringing on its own causes salivation of dog. Is that psychological or physical? Is this just a semantic difference? The conditioning is underpinned by a real pathway in the brain that's been created and/or strengthened: so that's a physical thing. But ultimately you only know this has happened by watching the behavior of the animal: which is closer to "psychological". They're both two sides of the same coin.
What if chronic fatigue syndrome is somehow like that? What if somehow these patients have a condition where any exertion triggers a strong and abnormal fatigue response and this leads to a vicious circle wherein they get more tired with progressively less activity. That would explain why the condition is so resistant to treatment and why it has no obvious measurable hallmarks other than fatigue.
It's a really really old saying. So yes luck bestows merit but the important part isn't that. True Merit is needed to take advantage of Luck. Nearly every experimental graduate student will tell you it takes 2 weeks of work to get a PhD but it takes 5 years to find be prepared to recognize the 2 weeks.
Working in a research lab, I feel that ratio is pretty far off. It's a lot more than 2 weeks. If stuff goes badly, maybe you have to chuck out 3/4 of your experimental work. If stuff goes well, all your experimental work goes into your thesis.
This type of thing never works, it just makes the people who already believe in this hunker down because now they believe it's an even bigger conspiracy. If you want to get people to stop believing in this, just make a pro-vaccine movie. Only you don't fill in full of scientists, reason and logic. Go film some of the anti-vaxxers whose children got sick with perfectly preventable diseases. Make sure to really capture the suffering of those poor children and the misery of the dumb-fuck parents. Go to the corners of the earth where polio still exists to show them the horrors of that. I think that will get their attention.
It probably won't get their attention: they are blind to reason. They will just think the film is propaganda and either not watch it or do so but use twisted logic to disregard it. People believe the Earth is flat, so believing vaccines are bad for you is a far easier delusion to maintain. The only thing that might change their minds is if their kids die or are debilitated by the diseases they are failing to vaccinate them against. Their current belief system has little of any obvious repercussions on themselves, so it's easy to continue the self deception.
We should replicate studies and confirm analysis independently before we get too excited about any results..
That's true, but the hitch is there will be financial interests working and braying about whatever study gives them better profit opportunities.
That doesn't stop the individual from looking at Cochran reviews and so forth to get a more balanced picture and making up their own minds. I do this whenever the media bring up a new study making some claim or other.
Despite giving it a few weeks however, I just couldn't warm up to it. No one big thing, just a lot of little things that made the experience feel like it was still an unpolished pre-release.
So it's still not quite as good as KDE 3, then? The good news is that it seems to be getting there. Probably around 3 or 4 years to go at this rate of progress.
That the greens have predicted. I never thought you could do worse than economists and still be called a science. Maybe they should change their name to climate studies and be moved in with the gender studies people.
This is a dangerous and foolish attitude to take. The threats facing humanity raised by the "greens" -- your chosen term not mine -- are real, quantifiable, and ongoing and will not go away because a particular milestone has not been reached when predicted. There are crystal clear and very worrying trends across a range of domains such as climate, deforestation, availability of fresh water, insect populations, desertification, and pollution. Brushing them aside because the "apocalypse" hasn't happened yet is beyond silly.
I agree that the small sample size is no proof of any malign intent, however, the tiny sample size with no explanation of why the sample size is so small, the use of graphics instead of presenting the raw data
On reflection, I take back the raw data statement (which was made WRT to lack of data points overlaid onto error bars -- a common thing in the field). There ought to be more detailed analyses of what individual bees do.
I agree that the small sample size is no proof of any malign intent, however, the tiny sample size with no explanation of why the sample size is so small, the use of graphics instead of presenting the raw data and the fact that they never appear to have considered memory being sufficient to explain the results without any claims that "bees can add/subtract" are all worrying signs that the study is worthless.
Based on what I see in the field in general, I wouldn't say n=14 is "tiny". I would say it's "OK could be better" but of course that depends on SD and effect size too. As for the lack of raw data points, that's inexcusable (i.e. there is no reason not to do it) but unfortunately very common indeed in this field. I've found from experience that you can't write off a paper just because they miss out the raw data points: you'd throw out 90% of the field and it wouldn't make sense. FWIW, authors are obliged to send a reader raw data upon request. I've not really read the paper, but based on the figures it seems they lack controls of the sort you mention. That's the problem. The rest I can live with.
You may get drift in behavioral scores over time, batches of insects that produce suspect results, etc.
Yes, that's exactly the problem here. These guys got a batch of bees that happened to score 65% and cherry picked that as proof that the bees can do arithmetic.
If they did that, it's gross data manipulation. You don't know that they did that and there is no evidence that they did.
This isn't like they are studying the remaining living WWII veterans or Japanese anorexics. They should be able to find some extra BEES to run the tests on. Presumably they have access to a hive, at a minimum.
I agree a larger n would be nice (say, n=30 at least) and I *think* it's likely not too hard to obtain in this case. I would caution, however, that sometimes it's a lot harder than it looks to obtain these data. It could be that n=14 is hard to do.
I used to work in insect neuroscience and I collaborated with people who did experiments of the general sort described in the paper. The issue was of course not finding insects -- we had lots of insects -- the problem we had was that running the experiments was very time consuming and could often fail for unclear reasons. You may get drift in behavioral scores over time, batches of insects that produce suspect results, etc. All sorts of really weird stuff happens with animal behavior and so to get solid results you believe in might require throwing out most of your data (e.g. because variance was weirdly high on some days). After all is said and done your sample size isn't always what you hope for. I've seen really good people work for years and still end up with sample size of less than 10 animals.
Memorization of the correct and incorrect answers is all that is needed for the described (too small of a sample size to be considered an) "experiment".
How far/. has fallen...
It is true that memorisation could explain this. You point about the sample size is trickier, though. Firstly there is no magic number that constitutes a large (vs small) sample size. What is suitable depends on the size of the effect, the variance, and the degree to which you want to generalise the results to a wider population. This is often balanced against what is possible. In biology a lot of experiments have a small sample size because of the cost or difficulty in gathering the data. For instance, I just reviewed a paper where the authors have gathered data from just a single subject. However, they gather a vast amount and do a very thorough job. Their work still stands as it is (it's in a sense a methods paper) and given that they aren't targetting a big name journal or over-selling their results I'm going to let the n=1 slide.
In the particular case of this paper, what I find most annoying isn't the n=14 but that their graphs hide the underlying data by displaying them as just bars with a 95% confidence interval for the mean. I would also agree, however, that I don't see why in this case they couldn't have produced a larger sample size. That's not the main issue, IMHO, however.
Surely if I ever felt the urge to read The Guardian I would make the effort but in all fairness it is not on top of my everyday agenda, one reason being the above article.
Secondly, science has been experimenting with different doses of LSD in solicited and unsolicited experiments ever since it was discovered 50 years ago, plenty has been written about it. Lets move on.
And yet we still don't know how it works. We don't know if micro-dosing is real or placebo. We have some evidence that psychedelics can be used to treat diseases like alcoholism but there is still not sufficient evidence for governments to accept that these substances have a medical use. Ditto with their use for PTSD, etc. So, no, I would say more research is needed.
Way to tell anyone who has ever done LSD what they already know.
It's a drug, it fucks with your brain. How profound is it that effects your sense of time perception? Not at all.
They say in their first sentence that the effects on time perception are known. I admit I don't know what the hell they mean by their second sentence but, for me, the point of this work is that the effects are still present when micro-dosing. As far as I know, micro-dosing has not so far been studied in blind controlled studies. This one is double-blind.
In general there are a lot of shitty studies in this field, but we need the field to grow and produce better papers as it's one of the few avenues for driving a reassessment of psychedelics.
Go to your local astronomy club some time and look through an Halpha scope. You can literally see things like this. People who know what they're doing are taking images like this in their back yard.
There is a lot of music out there, unfortunately, most of it is just plain bad. I honestly don't want to listen to a bunch of crap to maybe hear one decent song.
This is Sturgeon's law, indeed most things in given field of endeavour aren't good. Nonetheless, precisely because there is so much music, in absolute terms a vast quantity of really good music exists right now. Streaming platforms massively reduce the personal cost of exploring new genres or new acts: you don't worry about buying the wrong album, etc. Personally, I've found a massive change in my listening habits since I switched to streaming: I've discovered several genres new to me, developed new interests related to music, and literally learned things about myself I wouldn't have learned otherwise. Data indicate that broadening of musical tastes is a general trend amongst listeners of streaming platforms.
You can make a station based on a song in Spotify. I never do it, but the the option is there. It also makes a station based on your recent listening that you can optionally use.
The popular singles may be getting shorter, and streaming may be becoming more common, but where's the proven connection? Perhaps shorter songs are simply more "attractive" to the demographic with a reduced attention span, and artists and their record companies are aiming for that market?
You can't formally prove it without either an experiment or an admission by the people producing the stuff. However, the shift reported in the article is large and is likely to have a solid reason behind it. Saying that shorter songs are more attractive sounds like a bit of a fluffy explanation: they listen to whatever they're fed. I would suggest by Occam's Razor that the large reported shift is best explained by the music industry seeking to cash in as much as possible, since this is consistent with previous known behavior.
I do this too and it's remarkably how rarely I get sold out. It's so rare, in fact, that now out of laziness I end up just giving my "shopping@johnsmith.com" to all on-line vendors because it's easier than starting a new address each time. What's not so rare is that a vendor starts to spam me after first e-mail contact. They always stop when asked, though.
Graphics are better. Security is worse. Understanding is worse. RAM is cheaper but software just wastes more of it to compensate. Same goes for CPU speed; CPUs are much faster but software is just slower to compensate.
It's of course true that software becomes more bloated but the reason likely is that it's not worth the time to optimise it since resources are more than ample to run it at adequate speed in its bloated state. Further, despite this bloat, there is still a huge net gain for the end user. So resources more than compensate for bloat. I analyse data and it's incredibly obvious how much more I can do per unit time on a modern desktop machine compared to 10 years ago. Graphics quality in games tells a similar story. The main thing I'm hoping will improve now are IO speeds: as datasets get larger I find I'm spending most of my time on IO.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure - I've known for a long time that most pop music is written by a few folks in Sweden, and is just a collection of hooks without actual meaning, and lots of autotune and fake emoting.
I don't like most of that stuff either but I don't think what you say about hooks is fair. One could make the same criticism of Mozart also. Mozart was a tunesmith and mostly wrote totally abstract music with no meaning. That doesn't stop him being widely considered a genius.
But sometimes a catchy tune is good and you're not somehow less good because lots of other people like it too.
This is definitely true and I also agree that one shouldn't be snobbish about popular culture. That said, it's also true that you can have your cake and eat it: there's plenty of good music that also has good tunes.
Heh. Pop music is by the most varried of ALL genres. Other genres limit themselves to certain structures, where pop music just needs to be popular, and can take crossovers from any other genre if it is widely accessible enough.
I don't think "pop music" is a genre, I think it encompasses multiple genres. So on the one hand, by virtue of being a catch-all term, pop is varied. On the other hand, mainstream popular music must now grab the listener as quickly as possible on the first listen. To achieve this new songs must have a lot of familiar content and they must be simple. This pushes mainstream popular music towards less variety and less depth. Thus I don't think pop music is the most varied of all genres: it's mostly recycled candy. If you want the three course meal you need to look elsewhere.
What if chronic fatigue syndrome is somehow like that? What if somehow these patients have a condition where any exertion triggers a strong and abnormal fatigue response and this leads to a vicious circle wherein they get more tired with progressively less activity. That would explain why the condition is so resistant to treatment and why it has no obvious measurable hallmarks other than fatigue.
It's a really really old saying. So yes luck bestows merit but the important part isn't that. True Merit is needed to take advantage of Luck. Nearly every experimental graduate student will tell you it takes 2 weeks of work to get a PhD but it takes 5 years to find be prepared to recognize the 2 weeks.
Working in a research lab, I feel that ratio is pretty far off. It's a lot more than 2 weeks. If stuff goes badly, maybe you have to chuck out 3/4 of your experimental work. If stuff goes well, all your experimental work goes into your thesis.
Go to the flat earth society forum and engage with them in honest discussion as this pompous twat did. You'll be surprised what they believe.
This type of thing never works, it just makes the people who already believe in this hunker down because now they believe it's an even bigger conspiracy. If you want to get people to stop believing in this, just make a pro-vaccine movie. Only you don't fill in full of scientists, reason and logic. Go film some of the anti-vaxxers whose children got sick with perfectly preventable diseases. Make sure to really capture the suffering of those poor children and the misery of the dumb-fuck parents. Go to the corners of the earth where polio still exists to show them the horrors of that. I think that will get their attention.
It probably won't get their attention: they are blind to reason. They will just think the film is propaganda and either not watch it or do so but use twisted logic to disregard it. People believe the Earth is flat, so believing vaccines are bad for you is a far easier delusion to maintain. The only thing that might change their minds is if their kids die or are debilitated by the diseases they are failing to vaccinate them against. Their current belief system has little of any obvious repercussions on themselves, so it's easy to continue the self deception.
We should replicate studies and confirm analysis independently before we get too excited about any results..
That's true, but the hitch is there will be financial interests working and braying about whatever study gives them better profit opportunities.
That doesn't stop the individual from looking at Cochran reviews and so forth to get a more balanced picture and making up their own minds. I do this whenever the media bring up a new study making some claim or other.
Despite giving it a few weeks however, I just couldn't warm up to it. No one big thing, just a lot of little things that made the experience feel like it was still an unpolished pre-release.
So it's still not quite as good as KDE 3, then? The good news is that it seems to be getting there. Probably around 3 or 4 years to go at this rate of progress.
That the greens have predicted. I never thought you could do worse than economists and still be called a science. Maybe they should change their name to climate studies and be moved in with the gender studies people.
This is a dangerous and foolish attitude to take. The threats facing humanity raised by the "greens" -- your chosen term not mine -- are real, quantifiable, and ongoing and will not go away because a particular milestone has not been reached when predicted. There are crystal clear and very worrying trends across a range of domains such as climate, deforestation, availability of fresh water, insect populations, desertification, and pollution. Brushing them aside because the "apocalypse" hasn't happened yet is beyond silly.
I agree that the small sample size is no proof of any malign intent, however, the tiny sample size with no explanation of why the sample size is so small, the use of graphics instead of presenting the raw data
On reflection, I take back the raw data statement (which was made WRT to lack of data points overlaid onto error bars -- a common thing in the field). There ought to be more detailed analyses of what individual bees do.
I agree that the small sample size is no proof of any malign intent, however, the tiny sample size with no explanation of why the sample size is so small, the use of graphics instead of presenting the raw data and the fact that they never appear to have considered memory being sufficient to explain the results without any claims that "bees can add/subtract" are all worrying signs that the study is worthless.
Based on what I see in the field in general, I wouldn't say n=14 is "tiny". I would say it's "OK could be better" but of course that depends on SD and effect size too. As for the lack of raw data points, that's inexcusable (i.e. there is no reason not to do it) but unfortunately very common indeed in this field. I've found from experience that you can't write off a paper just because they miss out the raw data points: you'd throw out 90% of the field and it wouldn't make sense. FWIW, authors are obliged to send a reader raw data upon request. I've not really read the paper, but based on the figures it seems they lack controls of the sort you mention. That's the problem. The rest I can live with.
You may get drift in behavioral scores over time, batches of insects that produce suspect results, etc.
Yes, that's exactly the problem here. These guys got a batch of bees that happened to score 65% and cherry picked that as proof that the bees can do arithmetic.
If they did that, it's gross data manipulation. You don't know that they did that and there is no evidence that they did.
This isn't like they are studying the remaining living WWII veterans or Japanese anorexics. They should be able to find some extra BEES to run the tests on. Presumably they have access to a hive, at a minimum.
I agree a larger n would be nice (say, n=30 at least) and I *think* it's likely not too hard to obtain in this case. I would caution, however, that sometimes it's a lot harder than it looks to obtain these data. It could be that n=14 is hard to do.
I used to work in insect neuroscience and I collaborated with people who did experiments of the general sort described in the paper. The issue was of course not finding insects -- we had lots of insects -- the problem we had was that running the experiments was very time consuming and could often fail for unclear reasons. You may get drift in behavioral scores over time, batches of insects that produce suspect results, etc. All sorts of really weird stuff happens with animal behavior and so to get solid results you believe in might require throwing out most of your data (e.g. because variance was weirdly high on some days). After all is said and done your sample size isn't always what you hope for. I've seen really good people work for years and still end up with sample size of less than 10 animals.
Memorization of the correct and incorrect answers is all that is needed for the described (too small of a sample size to be considered an) "experiment".
How far /. has fallen...
It is true that memorisation could explain this. You point about the sample size is trickier, though. Firstly there is no magic number that constitutes a large (vs small) sample size. What is suitable depends on the size of the effect, the variance, and the degree to which you want to generalise the results to a wider population. This is often balanced against what is possible. In biology a lot of experiments have a small sample size because of the cost or difficulty in gathering the data. For instance, I just reviewed a paper where the authors have gathered data from just a single subject. However, they gather a vast amount and do a very thorough job. Their work still stands as it is (it's in a sense a methods paper) and given that they aren't targetting a big name journal or over-selling their results I'm going to let the n=1 slide.
In the particular case of this paper, what I find most annoying isn't the n=14 but that their graphs hide the underlying data by displaying them as just bars with a 95% confidence interval for the mean. I would also agree, however, that I don't see why in this case they couldn't have produced a larger sample size. That's not the main issue, IMHO, however.
Micro-dosing was proven to have a testable effect in a double-blind experiment with controls. There was a post about this two days ago.
I saw that, but that study wasn't really exploring the microdosing claims we've been seeing recently: things like increased creativity and so on.
Surely if I ever felt the urge to read The Guardian I would make the effort but in all fairness it is not on top of my everyday agenda, one reason being the above article. Secondly, science has been experimenting with different doses of LSD in solicited and unsolicited experiments ever since it was discovered 50 years ago, plenty has been written about it. Lets move on.
And yet we still don't know how it works. We don't know if micro-dosing is real or placebo. We have some evidence that psychedelics can be used to treat diseases like alcoholism but there is still not sufficient evidence for governments to accept that these substances have a medical use. Ditto with their use for PTSD, etc. So, no, I would say more research is needed.
Way to tell anyone who has ever done LSD what they already know.
It's a drug, it fucks with your brain. How profound is it that effects your sense of time perception? Not at all.
They say in their first sentence that the effects on time perception are known. I admit I don't know what the hell they mean by their second sentence but, for me, the point of this work is that the effects are still present when micro-dosing. As far as I know, micro-dosing has not so far been studied in blind controlled studies. This one is double-blind.
In general there are a lot of shitty studies in this field, but we need the field to grow and produce better papers as it's one of the few avenues for driving a reassessment of psychedelics.
Go to your local astronomy club some time and look through an Halpha scope. You can literally see things like this. People who know what they're doing are taking images like this in their back yard.
There is a lot of music out there, unfortunately, most of it is just plain bad. I honestly don't want to listen to a bunch of crap to maybe hear one decent song.
This is Sturgeon's law, indeed most things in given field of endeavour aren't good. Nonetheless, precisely because there is so much music, in absolute terms a vast quantity of really good music exists right now. Streaming platforms massively reduce the personal cost of exploring new genres or new acts: you don't worry about buying the wrong album, etc. Personally, I've found a massive change in my listening habits since I switched to streaming: I've discovered several genres new to me, developed new interests related to music, and literally learned things about myself I wouldn't have learned otherwise. Data indicate that broadening of musical tastes is a general trend amongst listeners of streaming platforms.
You can make a station based on a song in Spotify. I never do it, but the the option is there. It also makes a station based on your recent listening that you can optionally use.
The popular singles may be getting shorter, and streaming may be becoming more common, but where's the proven connection? Perhaps shorter songs are simply more "attractive" to the demographic with a reduced attention span, and artists and their record companies are aiming for that market?
You can't formally prove it without either an experiment or an admission by the people producing the stuff. However, the shift reported in the article is large and is likely to have a solid reason behind it. Saying that shorter songs are more attractive sounds like a bit of a fluffy explanation: they listen to whatever they're fed. I would suggest by Occam's Razor that the large reported shift is best explained by the music industry seeking to cash in as much as possible, since this is consistent with previous known behavior.
I do this too and it's remarkably how rarely I get sold out. It's so rare, in fact, that now out of laziness I end up just giving my "shopping@johnsmith.com" to all on-line vendors because it's easier than starting a new address each time. What's not so rare is that a vendor starts to spam me after first e-mail contact. They always stop when asked, though.
This is Elon Musk trolling for attention as usual. Of course he's not going to build a flying Tesla, why is this even on Slashdot?
Graphics are better. Security is worse. Understanding is worse. RAM is cheaper but software just wastes more of it to compensate. Same goes for CPU speed; CPUs are much faster but software is just slower to compensate.
It's of course true that software becomes more bloated but the reason likely is that it's not worth the time to optimise it since resources are more than ample to run it at adequate speed in its bloated state. Further, despite this bloat, there is still a huge net gain for the end user. So resources more than compensate for bloat. I analyse data and it's incredibly obvious how much more I can do per unit time on a modern desktop machine compared to 10 years ago. Graphics quality in games tells a similar story. The main thing I'm hoping will improve now are IO speeds: as datasets get larger I find I'm spending most of my time on IO.