Write in Gallifreyan

Oh, this is fun. Here is “Doctor Zen” in Gallifreyan writing from Doctor Who.

I have to be careful, or I’ll spend hours translating things into this script.

 External links

Gallifreyan translator

What is misinformation for?

A new article on how many people in the US are increasingly hostile to reality has much to contemplate, but I wanted to briefly muse on this:

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information.

I see the point, and agree with it to some extent, but I think this underestimates the persuasive power of misinformation.

It neglects the “rabbit hole” effect that misinformation has had on fostering conspiracy theories and radicalization. It neglects the slow corrosion that has been happening in political discourse. It’s not just that political parties (particularly in the US) are polarized, but that some have gone ever more extreme.

I can see a connection between Caulfield’s “misinformation helps maintain beliefs” and persuasion. People’s beliefs are informed by different points of view. Without countervailing points of view, those existing beliefs can become more certain and more readily drift to ever more extreme versions of that belief.

Misinformation is often better described as straight-up propaganda, though. But we seem to have lost that word through fear of calling lies, lies.

External links

I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is

“Equal contribution” statements don’t mean much: Nobel prize edition

This is not a post about the Nobel prizes. It is a post about authorship.

The Nobel Prize for chemistry was given two people for protein folding. I told students in my introductory biology classes for years that whoever could solve that problem should book a ticket to Stockholm, because it would get a Nobel, and I’m pleased to see I was right on that count.

On Bluesky, Michael Hoffman pointed out that the key paper about AlphaFold has an equal contribution statement:

(T)he AlphaFold paper has 19 authors who “contributed equally” but only two of them (Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper - ZF) get part of the Nobel Prize 🤔 

So why those two people out of all the 19 who made, allegedly, equal contributions? The paper has a “Contributions” statement:

J.J. and D.H. led the research.

I don’t think there has ever been a clearer demonstration that “equal contribution” statements don’t mean much of anything except to maybe the people involved. And their relatives.

Also worth noting that in the 19 equal contributions were, I believe, two women. (Guess based on given names, which is not ideal, I know. Still.)

More generally, authorship is a terrible way of assigning credit. I have, and will continue to, argue that the CRediT system of identifying specific contributions should be adopted just across the board.

References

Jumper J, Evans R, Pritzel A, Green T, Figurnov M, Ronneberger O, Tunyasuvunakool K, Bates R, Žídek A, Potapenko A, Bridgland A, Meyer C, Kohl SAA, Ballard AJ, Cowie A, Romera-Paredes B, Nikolov S, Jain R, Adler J, Back T, Petersen S, Reiman D, Clancy E, Zielinski M, Steinegger M, Pacholska M, Berghammer T, Bodenstein S, Silver D, Vinyals O, Senior AW, Kavukcuoglu K, Kohli P,  Hassabis D. 2021. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature 596: 583–589. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2

Losing your academic email cuts you off from the scientific community

I haven’t had a job in a university for a while, and I’m realizing how much I cannot do and how many opportunities I am missing because I don’t have a university email address.

One of the biggest issues is Google Scholar.

Google Scholar still has my last institutional email from last year. I could leave my email blank, but I don’t want to, because “Unverified profiles can’t appear in search results.” That is bad for me professionally – I want people to be able to find my papers in Google Scholar search. It’s also, it must be said, bad for research more generally. I wonder how many people realize that profile search are filtered by institutional emails.

if journal editors find my Google Scholar profile, they will only see my old email. If they send a request to that email for me to review a manuscript, they won’t get a response. Given how many editors complain about how they “just can’t find people willing to peer review some articles,” I wonder how many potential reviewers are lost because they change email addresses?

Other examples:

Pubpeer won’t accept a Gmail address in their signup.

ResearchGate warns you about deleting an institutional email but allows you to do it.