there are helicopters twice a day overhead. i assume the noise sends a message. every time, a single neuron is diverted into ensuring the blades of fascism recede into the distance. twice now, i have envisioned an alternative, which quickly requires active thought aversion.
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we are cancer researchers, and we give thanks to our patients. we tell them: i do not expect to cure cancer in my lifetime. we show them: i will fail at my single goal.
leukemia induces fear in my head that won't go away. it's not fear: i see it in their blood vessels when i wake up, not mine. i can't solve it yet.
matrices are different when you know what each cell means. every chapter and verse of every protocol. they winced but they were so brave for row 7, days 3-13. someone trusted you when they asked if this data really helps and you said "yes"
i've learned a strange and unsettling truth: biologists are being deskilled out of statistical application and data collection. biology journals don't want new methods. bioinformatics journals are peer reviewed by people who think they're smarter than cancer researchers and get scared if you ask them about a number they published. what the hell kind of scientist fears their own numbers?
(i wonder if university admins like having fuckboy credit stealers in charge/tenured/etc because they can be manipulated. doubly so for data fabricators. literally a win-win for admin: data fabrication lets you do hot science at speeds no real scientist can match (without my help). if they ever rock the boat, leak their lies, wash your hands, repeat with new hire)
cc @inquiline i had never considered the self-reinforcing potential of the two-party system of uni admin vs fuckboy. maybe this is obvious and well-known? but it took me until just now to overcome my assumption that "people who lie are liabilities" (i admit i perhaps retain a Romantic idealization of academia)
i think there are structural incentives i can speculate on:
- R1 universities have lots of government funding. that's because taxpayers want to cure cancer. god i bet i could get some taxpayers real mad about this
- a 3-minute video walking through the software they are required to use to get published would result in lawsuits, if the government did that sort of thing.
- "lawsuits?" government grants have a famously lengthy (but standard) set of requirements, which used to be "do not violate the civil rights act" but also relate to concerns regarding fraud. particularly if the t-SNE fabricator machine were ever used in grant applications, progress reports, and other summaries, eventually if it becomes knowingly false someone (uni admin ideally, but they'll probably bounce it back)
- ok so software that so obviously and evidently does not work by design is not necessarily illegal but this shit is why i hate software corps. the expensive software, that cannot be reproduced, that is >30x slower, that actively functions by impeding the process of science, that is required by anonymous reviewers
i am slowly convincing myself that:
- anonymous reviewers are on the take
- uni admins are on the take
unfortunately "lying about numbers for money" is generally not considered harmful unless people directly die from it i think. also, both of these seem obvious now (anonymous reviewers are obviously not all the same person, that would be adjective). i bet a real uni admin would sneer at me for being surprised at that
you can't own the data, you can't parameterize their charts, they literally only support obsolete and discredited tools like t-SNE which literally just falsifies data (i shit you not. dimensionality reduction is fake but this one also adds noise cause it looks sciencey. first time i ever found a citation loop for a quantitative claim relied upon everywhere to do science. it would not be the last time)
if you didn't publish in wet lab biology in 2018 maybe the LLM assault on science is confusing to you but i did a paper in one of the hottest labs in the world with plenty of pub experience and they spent two years after i left getting it published because the paper is obviously groundbreaking in three distinct ways. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30413431/
people whose actual job is publishing papers said it mystified them. that itself is a data point indicating that falsification and corpo deskilling is not just artificial but recent and accelerating.
this was all before twitter inc too lmao
because academic journals hear [read in kpop singer voice]:
hacker and doctor team up to take on cell differentiation and wrote their own analysis stack
and think [very evil hot queer villain voice]:
that sucks, nobody wants to hear that the expensive software that sucks is also wrong. you boy, throw some more copies of nature into the undergraduate dogfighting pit. add some sauce
[she's queer coded bc she will be joining our team later after we convince her that we are the one lab that doesn't lie. she will propose that we simply lie instead but we then explain that people will die and she gets all pouty but in the final battle she explains how we showed her how to hope and love. and she's also a hotshot biologist and we build mech suits together. platonically]
i don't ever again want to read a paper taking biopsies from unnamed dead people to chuck into the "literally data fabrication, this used to be illegal" machine. i'm removing a variable sized portion of your flesh for each dimension it reduces and pulling out a hair each time it adds noise to look more sciencey
@hipsterelectron jesus fuck what??
@davidgerard also "t-SNE fabricates data and is relied upon near-exclusively for single-cell protein analysis, both before expert input (gating) and very frequently for published figures" was both:
- true for many years
- mostly still true
- specifically profited corps, who know damn well what they're doing and didn't offer any alternatives
- uni admin hits ctrl-f for t-SNE, sends one-line email "Yes!", immediately gets blackout drunk
- fact-shaped data
- unlike proprietary LLMs, is math (can be disproven): like proprietary LLMs, is statistics (slur)
