Teaching Science Fraud

One of my neuroscience professors once said: It's a damn shame they don't let us experiment on animals in classrooms any more. If you want to do serious science, you need to learn the ropes first. Students need space to mess up. I wish we could still stick electrodes into animal brains as part of a training course, but these days you can only kill a monkey if it advances science! How are new generations going to learn? You can't just throw them in the deep end!

Disclaimers: 1. No discussions about animal welfare on this post, please. 2. My professors were actually decent people, and their own research practices were, by all accounts, above board.

I went to a school for gifted children. When I was 14, one of my classmates invented data for a term paper. He said he would do empirical research, but when he was done collecting his samples for a longitudinal study, he didn't have enough, and the data he had didn't paint a clear enough picture. He wanted to confirm a certain conclusion. He wanted to get a good grade. So he made some data up. He asked us how best to do this. I don't think this was ever published, but it probably was presented at a poster session of the science fair. That year, I did pure maths, and presented my results at a science fair.

The next year, my friend did applied physics. He submitted their work to the national science fair, and shook the president's hand. The president didn't care for pure maths. My classmate went on to be a respected physicist. He didn't squander his gift the way I did.

In grad school, we did this robotics reinforcement learning project. We gathered a lot of data. It didn't pan out. The problem was that we tried off-policy learning, based on a training robot controller that wouldn't break the robot. The reinforcement learning produced a linear approximation of the training controller. The data was useless, and our approach was useless. The correct way to do this would have been 100x as much robot training time with on-policy learning. Our professor really wanted us to publish something. I told him the experiment didn't yield anything. Our professor told us to publish negative results. I explained that we just approximated the training controller, so it's not an interesting negative result. He really wanted us to publish something. We put in all this experiment time with this cool robot!

Over and over, I saw students fudge, cherry-pick, and p-hack their experimental results. Surveys, priming, multiple choice, response times, likert scales, benchmarks. Who cares, it's only undergraduate, it's only for this project, it's only for a poster session.

In high school, our physics teacher always told us to report what we actually saw, not what we expected to see based on the textbook. But that's what happened. When we did experiments, we knew what result we were supposed to get, and we tried our best to observe the right result. Over and over he was a lone voice against all the other teachers. The day we graduated, this physics teacher confessed to us that one time, in 10th grade, he rigged one of the experiments so he could show us an effect that was orders of magnitude weaker than anything he could produce in the classroom. It really weighed heavy on his conscience that the violated his own principles.

Apart from physics class, there was this expectation, throughout my schooling and training, that I have to get the results of an experiment right to get a good grade, that I have to describe the right results. My classmates picked up on this. In maths/software engineering/computer science, it was less of a concern. But in any empirical research, and that includes computer simulations, we had to get the results right.

It didn't really matter. It was just homework. It was just coursework. It was just about learning the experimental methods.

i promised an exclusive report about the day the worlds longest grill came to this tiny town and here it is. every moment of my life and yours as well has led up to this so please watch

Post of all time

when i was a child i liked combat sports; i took martial arts classes (i forget which form) and i competed in fencing. i had to stop when i went to highschool because we didn't have time for it anymore. after leaving highschool i met a girl who did boxing and i planned to go and sign up at her gym to learn it with her, but i became too ill and it never happened. still, it had reignited my interest in combat sports and i would talk about it with people. i told one guy that i liked the look of Muay Thai; he expressed a common view, which was that martial arts like this sucked, because they were impractical in a real fight. he liked Krav Maga because it was real.

[long-ish post about fighting]

"This event ends the moment you write us a check, and it better not bounce, or you're a dead motherfucker" -- Big Bill Hell

There was a time when you'd see little old ladies paying for the groceries with a hand-written personal check, holding up the line, causing an immediately-forgiven slight sense of annoyance with those behind her. Buddy. Those days are over. They've been over. What, did you think you were going to just pop a couple extra zeroes on the end of your paycheck there? Maybe scan your paycheck, open it in photoshop, make a template, print em out all nice? You think you're the first to think of that, dipshit?

It takes the law a long time to catch up with the state of the art. You're reading this on the internet, which means you never use checks. The law has caught up. Your ass will be going to prison immediately and you will see zero return.

You can't even kite checks anymore, and hell, nobody under 40 will even know what that means, due to the blazing fast, two day settlement on all ACH transactions. Let me paint you a picture.

You get paid on Friday, but it is Monday, and bills are due on Tuesday. And you're broke: $0 in the bank. Goose egg. Pop open your checkbook, go to a store, "buy" some things, write a check for the amount. The cashier takes it!

Now take those things you "bought", across town, to another store location, and return them for cold hard cash. Sweet. Bills paid. Friday rolls around, and you just make it to the bank to deposit your paycheck before it closes. After the weekend, the checks you wrote finally post, and they don't bounce! You've kited a check. You've surreptitiously taken a zero-interest loan. And we know your broke ass. The interest rate on that short-term payday loan should have been straight up usurious. We're talking 29%. That makes predatory fuckers like us horny for sex. We're so mad. Now you are going to Federal Prison. For a good minute. Fuckface.

COST: $0.10 (With banks offering free checking accounts + Bic pen)

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor sleet, if you fuck with the mail, we'll rip your nuts off" -- Ronald Mail (Inventor of Mail)

Many people have this misnomer that the most powerful people in politics are democratically elected. The president, of the United States, of America, is a stupid cartoon hotdog. All of them, I don't care. Way less clout than you'd think. Brilliantly, it is the people that the hotdog president appoints who are actually doing anything significant. The director of the CIA. The fucking chairman of the Federal Reserve. Probably the, like, most senior, uh, general of the military, and shit too. I don't know, we don't "do" army here at Bloomberg. You probably don't even know their names! I don't! These are the ones you should be seeing in your sleep.

There's another position like that. Appointed directly by the hotdog. The Postmaster General. That's a real title. He's the CEO of the mail, and buddy, what he may lack in political power relative to the director of the CEO, he makes up in raw sexual energy. Total Tom Selleck energy. Like an airline pilot. We're talking Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I'm tentpoling in my black business slacks just writing this, and all my Bloomberg newsroom bros are peering over my shoulder and also tent-poling. We're not gay though, and especially me, I'm probably the least gay, but sometimes I just lay awake for hours at night what that mustache would feel like pressed against my lips, the unbelievable and utter, total sense of security I'd feel burying my head into his hard chest.

You get it. He's your dad. And if you fuck with the mail, you've fucked with the tools in your dad's garage. And dad's been drinking. You're in for it, bucko, you are in trouble. Do you think the United States Postal Service actually makes any money? Hell no. It costs like five bucks to mail a box basically anywhere I can think of and they give you the boxes for free. You can just walk in the post office and take them. I do that, and then just throw them away, I don't know why, some kind of compulsion. Being able to move shit around like this, quickly, cheaply -- Jesus H, I've got a huge amount of money in my bank account, probably tens of trillions of dollars (due to financial knowledge gained from reading Bloomberg articles) and I could probably mail every single person ever something and still come out in the black.

No way pal. They've thought of that already. The Postmaster General is going to know every time, and he's going to grab you by the shirt collar, wearing his cool as fuck hat, and you're going to get your pants pulled down, and your bare ass spanke...I need to go use the restroom real quick.

We rely on the mail system to get important shit done. It's not something to be taken lightly, and it isn't. Trust me. This is why, like almost every other person who receives mail in this year 2023, I just fucking put a wastebasket under my mail slot. I don't even shred that shit anymore. I just burn it. Takes less time.

COST: $0.63 (Postal stamp)

"Can call all you want, but there's no one home // And you're not gonna reach my telephone // Out in the club, and I'm sipping that bubb // And you're not gonna reach my telephone" -- Lady Gaga

I read something wild that the children of today do not know what a dial tone is, because of how fucked up and stupid they are. Isn't that super fucked up?

While it's not really our style, allow me to fill you in on some ancient, arcane knowledge about the telephone. You can turn it on, and then you can punch in numbers. Any numbers. Random ones, or maybe not random ones. If the ten numbers you punch in are the same as the numbers in someone else's telephone number, their phone will ring, and then you are talking to them. This is called "Phreaking".

Here's the kicker: You can tell that jackass anything you want. "Oh, Hi, Yes, I am Reginald Sumpter calling from Avalon Consulting LLC, we are just following up on the invoice we sent you. Please remit to ###### routing ###### account."

BOOM! Your name isn't Reginald whatever and that company doesn't exist, but you just received a deposit. It's fucking beautiful. What have you done wrong? It isn't your responsibility to handle who your business' clients/etc are, it's their's. If they want to just pay you money for no real reason, well, that's kind of on them, isn't it? I haven't stuck a pistol in your face and demanded everything in the register.

Well, it's too clever. It's too slick. This is the United States of America. It's one thing to commit a felony like armed robbery, it's another thing to piss off someone in charge of the accounting division who uses a special bathroom you need a key to get into.

You can do it on the computer too, I use a PC Computer at work and send email, so you can see how it'd work there. You can make a document that is indifferentiable from a real invoice and, straight up, 1/3 of the time they will pay that shit. Lmfao.

It's called wire fraud because, uhh, duhhhh, there's wires. What do you think that thing is strung between the telephone receiver and the dialer? And computers? Give me a break. There's so many wires with those.

COST: $0.25 (Coin for payphone)

"People calculate too much and think too little." -- Charlie Munger

It is insane how dumb the common man can be when it comes to our world of expertise. I hear this same sentiment, like, ALL THE TIME:

"Durr hurr I will buy an insurance policy for my car or house or whatever so that in case something happens to it I will get money". And then that same person proceeds to drive safely or not burn their house down. Dumbest crap imaginable.

Let me break it down for you. Insurance is a two player competitive game. There is a winner and there is a loser. Go take out an expensive insurance policy on your American sports car. Buy a neck brace, a football helmet, and pack that bitch with throw pillows. Then get in the left lane of a major highway at like noonish, let it rip and then SLAM on your brakes. Hit from behind! Your fault! Congratulations. You have won insurance. How this gets past people is beyond me.

You can only do this once or twice before the insurance companies catch on. Then they don't want to fuck with you. It is also..I don't know man...something feels off about taking a car or a house, which like, some guy had to build and just destroying it, but that is only a weird emotional thing, since you're making money, more than whatever the destroyed thing is worth, so in reality you've built that house plus some extra. You've contributed.

COST: $106.00 (Average monthly car insurance payment)

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SUBSCRIBE TO MY WHATEVER FOR PART TWO, COMING SOON. i'll post it later today probably. whatever time frame will juice the numbers. have a sneaky peaky

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im in the least technologically advanced country in the world i need to get an app for using SMS instead of just checking it for authentication

I heard someone really refer to MMS and not mean the found footage erotic horror movie series Ragini MMS for the first time in my life.

Bruh the messaging situation in this country is dismal and it's like 80% Apple's fault for building a very good texting app and refusing to allow it to be ported, trapping like 50% of Americans with imessage and the rest in too fragmented an ecosystem for anything that isn't a fucking unencrypted best effort system to take off

The problem with people is they infer ought from is; they think “I exist, therefore my existence is necessary and my death is bad”.

But every time you leave it to people to realize this they fail, so I guess you have to evangelize.

Holy Death watch over me and grant your favor

in your name I dare, in your cause I serve

may in victory I bring glory

or find comfort in your breast

@kontextmaschine is in a pretty bad way, I think. I'd only got to wondering but:

rip

I have to talk about Chester Arthur. His story makes me go crazy. A mediocre president from the 1880s who's completely forgotten today has one of the best redemption stories I've ever heard and I need to make people understand just how cool his story is.

So, like, he starts out as this idealist, okay? He's the son of an abolitionist minister and becomes famous as a New York lawyer who defends the North's version of Rosa Parks whose story desegregates New York City's trolley system.

Then he starts getting pulled into politics and becomes one of the grimiest pieces of the political machine. He wants money, power, prestige, and he gets it. He becomes the right-hand man of Roscoe Conkling, the most feared political boss in the nation, a guy who will throw his weight around and do the most ruthless things imaginable to keep his friends in power and destroy his enemies.

Because Arthur's this guy's top lackey, he gets to be Controller of the Port of New York--the best-paying political appointment in the country, because that port brings in, like, 70% of the federal government's funds in tariffs. He gets a huge salary plus a percentage of all the fines they levy on lawbreakers, and because he's not afraid to make up infractions to fine people over, he is absolutely raking in the dough. Making the rough equivalent of $1.3 million a year--absolutely insane amounts of money for a government position. He's spending ridiculous sums on clothes, buying huge amounts of alcohol and cigars to share with people as part of his job recruiting supporters to the party, going out nearly every night to wine and dine people as part of his work in the political machine. He's living the high life. Even when President Hayes pulls him from his position on suspicions of fraud, he's still living a great life of wealth, power, and prestige.

Then in 1880, his beloved wife dies. While he's out of town working for a political campaign. And he can't get back in time to say goodbye before she dies. Because he's a guy who has big emotions, it absolutely tears him up inside, especially because Nell resented how much his political work kept him away from home. He has huge regrets, but he just moves in with Roscoe Conkling and keeps working for the political machine.

And then he gets a chance to be vice president. The Republican Party has nominated James Garfield, a dark horse candidate who wants to reform the spoils system that has given Conking his power and gave Arthur his position as Port Controller. Conkling is pissed, and he controls New York, and since the party's not going to win the election without New York, they think that appointing Conkling's top lackey as vice-president will pacify him.

They're wrong--Conkling orders Arthur to refuse--but Arthur thinks this sounds like a great opportunity. The only political position he's ever held is Port Controller--a job he wasn't elected to and that he was pulled from in disgrace. Vice President is way more than he could ever have hoped for. It's a position with a lot of political pull and zero actual responsibilities. He'll get to spend four years living in up in Washington high society. It's the perfect job! Of course he accepts, and Conkling comes around when he figures out that he can use this to his advantage.

When Garfield becomes president, Arthur does everything he can to undermine him. He uses every dirty political trick he can think of to block everything that Garfield wants to do. He refuses to let the Senate elect a president pro tempore so he can stay there and influence every bill that comes through. He all but openly boasts of buying votes in the election. He's so much Conkling's lackey that he may as well be the henchman of a cartoon supervillain. On Conkling's orders, he drags one of Garfield's Cabinet members out of bed in the middle of the night--while the guy is ill--to drag him to Conkling's house so he can be forced to resign. He's just absolutely a thorn in the president's side, a henchman doing everything he can to maintain the corrupt spoils system.

Then in July 1881, when Arthur's in New York helping Conkling's campaign, the president gets shot. By a guy who shouts, "Now Arthur will be president!" just after he fires the gun. Arthur has just spent the past four months fighting the president tooth and nail. Everyone thinks he's behind the assassination. There are lynch mobs looking to take out him and Conkling. The papers are tearing him apart.

Arthur is absolutely distraught. He rushes to Washington to speak with the president and assure him of his innocence, but the doctors won't let him in the room. He gets choked up when talking to the First Lady. Reporters find him weeping in his house in Washington. Once again, death has torn his world apart and he's not getting a chance to make amends.

Arthur goes to New York while the president is getting medical treatment, and he refuses to come to Washington and take charge because he doesn't dare to give the impression that he's looking to take over. No one wants Arthur to be president and he doesn't want to be president, and the possibility that this corrupt political lackey is about to ascend to the highest office in the land is absolutely terrifying to everyone.

Then in August, when it's becoming clear that the president is unlikely to recover, he gets a letter. From a 31-year-old invalid from New York named Julia Sand. A woman from a very politically-minded family who has been following Arthur's career for years. And she writes him this astounding letter that takes him to task for his corrupt, conniving ways, and the obsession with worldly power and prestige that has brought him wealth and fame at the cost of his own soul--and she tells him that he can do better. In the midst of a nationwide press that's tearing him apart, this one woman writes to tell him that she believes he has the capacity to be a good president and a good man if he changes his ways.

And then he does. After Garfield dies, people come to Arthur's house and find servants who tell them that Arthur is in his room weeping like a child (I told you he had big emotions), but he takes the oath of office and ascends to the presidency. And he becomes a completely different man. His first speech as president mentions that one of his top priorities is reforming the spoils system so that people will be appointed based on merit rather than getting appointed as political favors with each change in the administration. Even though this system made him president. When Conkling comes to Arthur's office telling him to appoint his people to important government positions, Arthur calls his demands outrageous, throws him out, and keeps Garfield's appointees in the positions. "He's not Chet Arthur anymore," one of his former political friends laments. "He's the president."

He loses all his former political friends. He's never trusted by the other side. Yet he sticks to his guns and continues to support spoils system reform. He prosecutes a postal service corruption case that everyone thought he would drop. He's the one who signs into law the first civil service reform bill, even though presidents have been trying to do this for more than ten years, and he's the person who's gained all his power through the spoils system. He immediately takes action to enforce this bill when he could have just dropped it. He becomes a champion of this issue even though it's the last thing anyone would have expected of him.

He oversees naval reform. He oversees a renovation of the White House. He still prefers the social duties of the presidency, but he's respectable in a way that no one expected. Possibly because Julia Sand keeps sending him letters of encouragement and advice over the next two years. But also because he's dying.

Not long after ascending to the presidency, he learns he's suffering from a terminal kidney disease. And he tells no one. He keeps going about his daily life, fulfilling his duties as president, and keeps his health problems hidden. Once again, death is upending his life, and this time it's his own death. He's lived a life he's ashamed of, and he doesn't have much time left to change. He enters the presidency as an example of the absolute worst of the political system, and leaves it as a respectable man.

He makes a token effort to seek re-election, but because of his health problems, he doesn't mind at all when someone else gets the nomination. He dies a couple of years after leaving office. The day before his death, he orders most of his papers burned, because he's ashamed of his old life--but among the things that are saved are the letters from Julia Sand, the woman who encouraged him to change his ways.

This is an astounding story full of so many twists and turns and dramatic moments. A man who falls from idealism into the worst kind of corruption and then claws his way back up to decency because of a series of devastating personal losses and unexpected opportunities to do more than he could have ever hoped to do. I just go crazy thinking about it and I need you all to understand just how amazing this story is.

jesus christ.

if you want horror, open up inspect -> network inspector and record tumblr as you write a post. it starts out normal, if a bit excessively latter-day web2.0-y.

then try to add tags. fucking keysmash it. look at the network tab.

logging into a computer in your pocket. logging into a computer on top of your head. logging into a computer inside the computer you're typing into. logging into a computer on the other side of the world, a computer on the other side of the room, a computer on the other side of your keyboard. never logging into a computer again. obsoleting the notion of a computer in favor of the distributed computer. if only someone would develop it an OS.

One thing that I keep seeing whenever I make posts that are critical of macs is folks in the notes going "they make great computers for the money if you just buy used/refurbs - everyone knows not to buy new" and A) no they don't know that, most people go looking for a new computer unless they have already exhausted the new options in their budget and B) no they don't make great computers for the money, and being used doesn't do anything to make them easier to work on or repair or upgrade.

Here's a breakdown of the anti-consumer, anti-repair features recently introduced in macbooks. If you don't want to watch the video, here's how it's summed up:

Apple doesn't make great computers for the money because they are doing everything possible to make sure that you don't actually own your computer, you just lease the hardware from apple and they determine how long it is allowed to function.

The lid angle sensor discussed in this video replaces a much simpler sensor that has been used in laptops for twenty years AND calibrating the sensor after a repair requires access to proprietary apple software that isn't accessible to either users or third party repair shops. There's no reason for this software not to be included as a diagnostic tool on your computer except that Apple doesn't want users working on apple computers. If your screen breaks, or if the fragile cable that is part of the sensor wears down, your only option to fix this computer is to pay apple.

How long does apple plan to support this hardware? What if you pay $3k for a computer today and it breaks in 7 years - will they still calibrate the replacement screen for you or will they tell you it's time for new hardware EVEN THOUGH YOU COULD HAVE ATTAINED FUNCTIONAL HARDWARE THAT WILL WORK IF APPLE'S SOFTWARE TELLS IT TO?

Look at this article talking about "how long" apple supports various types of hardware. It coos over the fact that a 2013 MacBook Air could be getting updates to this day. That's the longest example in this article, and that's *hardware* support, not the life cycle of the operating system. That is dogshit. That is straight-up dogshit.

Apple computers are DRM locked in a way that windows machines only wish they could pull off, and the apple-only chips are a part of that. They want an entirely walled garden so they can entirely control your interactions with the computer that they own and you're just renting.

Even if they made the best hardware in the world that would last a thousand years and gave you flowers on your birthday it wouldn't matter because modern apple computers don't ever actually belong to apple customers, at the end of the day they belong to apple, and that's on purpose.

This is hardware as a service. This is John Deere. This is subscription access to the things you buy, and if it isn't exactly that right at this moment, that is where things have been heading ever since they realized it was possible to exert a control that granular over their users.

With all sympathy to people who are forced to use them, Fuck Apple I Hope That They Fall Into The Ocean And Are Hidden Away From The Honest Light Of The Sun For Their Crimes.

Libraries are like sleeping barracks for books. The shelves are nicely organized bunk beds, and if you speak too loud you might wake them up.

Soda was an effervescent corn-based drink that was popular during the height of the American Empire. Regionally known as pop or coke in some provinces, it was prepared by extracting corn sugars into a thick syrup to be mixed with water

physicists love to do this maddening thing where theyre like "semi-rigorous" like they make all sorts of approximation arguments or whatever but they arent formal in their approximation arguments so what exactly is and isnt allowed is extremely vague. this is why i dropped from a major to a minor, i hate this so much

this is why i dont like identifying calculus with real analysis. Like real analysis is a formalization of calculus and there's multiple ways to do it. There's this whole practice of math that isnt formalized as a system of rules, and then there's mathematicians who come up with competing formalizations of it. I guess this is just my complaining about "delta function isnt really a function" thing which objectively is a minor terminological quibble that i should let go of but its annoying for mathematicians to formalize what ppl like me do and then tell us we're calling it the wrong thing cause their first choice of how to formalize "function" didnt encompass everything we call a function and they had to extend it later

it's not just physics btw it's statistics too. It's like everyone but mathematicians rly. Well idk about computer scientists. Theoretical computer science seems like a branch of math to me sometimes.

i remember my stats prof saying, if you want to know whether you derived the right probability distribution, simulate, make a histogram, and plot the distribution you derived over it (and did this on the projector screen). Someone asked him when a result holds and he said "under suitable regularity conditions", basically as a joke, and moved on with the lecture.

TCS feels really handwavy in undergrad but gets pretty well established throughout grad school.

Every other part of CS is basically empirical and rigor is whatever. You test stuff and see what happens, then come up with tests to see if you can make those results make sense. Sometimes you get to prove some bound on something but tbh it's easier just to implement the thing and see if it works.

broke: many worker ants are reproductively viable; the neat division of ants into reproducing queens and nonreproducing workers is a human social construct.

woke: many worker ants are reproductively viable, but the eggs and young of these gamergates are frequently eaten by other workers, and sometimes they are punished for reproducing; the neat division of ants into reproducing queens and nonreproducing workers is socially constructed by ants

Going back in time and telling Kantorovich that one day everyone in economics and capital allocation will know his name but neglecting to tell him that all of these people work at American hedge funds so as not to ruin the mood

@mourning-again-in-america optimal transport!