A friend of a friend worked at a petrochemical plant of some sort. They took the job reluctantly, because they had been struggling to find work for the kind of engineer that they were without it being somewhere deeply unethical. They reportedly ended up covertly feeding intel to climate action protesters and direct action groups.

Apparently it helped somewhat, but it was still pretty stressful

Do you have a link? Because if you tell me you found it but don’t tell me where, then that may put you at risk of being in the same ring of hell as people who comment “nvm, solved it” to their tech forum posts.

A lot of them went into academia, the poor fuckers. My old university tutor comes to mind as the best of what they can hope for from that path. He did relatively well for himself as a scientist, but I reckon he was a far better scientist than what his level of prestige in that area would suggest.

There’s one paper he published that was met with little fanfare, but then a few years later, someone else published more or less the same research that massively blew up. This wasn’t a case of plagiarism (as far as I can tell), nor a conscious attempt to replicate my tutor’s research. The general research climate at the time is a plausible explanation (perhaps my tutor was ahead of the times by a few years), but this doesn’t feel sufficient to explain it. I think it’s mostly that the author of this new paper is someone who is extremely ambitious in a manner where they seem to place a lot of value on gaining respect and prestige. I’ve spoken to people who worked in that other scientists lab and apparently they can be quite vicious in how they act within their research community (though I am confident that there’s no personal beef between this researcher and my old tutor — they had presented at the same conference, but had had no interactions and seemed to be largely unaware of the other’s existence). Apparently this researcher does good science, but gives the vibe that they care more for climbing up the ranks than for doing good science; they can be quite nasty in how they respond to people whose work disrupts their own theories.

I suspect that it’s a case of priorities. My tutor also does good research, but part of why he left such an impact on me was that he has such earnest care in his teaching roles. He works at a pretty prestigious university, and there are plenty of tutors there who do the bare minimum teaching necessary to get access to perks like fancy formal dinners, and the prestige of being a tutor — tutors who seem to regard their students as inconvenient obstacles to what they really care about. It highlights to me a sad problem in what we tend to value in the sciences, and academia more generally: the people who add the most to the growth of human knowledge are often the people who the history books will not care to remember.

As a society, we need to better value the labour that goes into our collective knowledge bases. Non-English Wikipedia is just one example of this, but it highlights the core of the problem: the system relies on a tremendous amount of skilled labour that cannot easily be done by just a few volunteers.

Paying people to contribute would come with problems of its own (in a hypothetical world where this was permitted by Wikipedia, which I don’t believe it is at present), but it would be easier for people to contribute if the time they wanted to volunteer was competing with their need to keep their head above the water financially. Universal basic income, or something similar, seems like one of the more viable ways to improve this tension.

However, a big component of the problem is around the less concrete side of how society values things. I’m a scientist in an area where we are increasingly reliant on scientific databases, such as the Protein Database (pdb), where experimentally determined protein structures are deposited and annotated, as well as countless databases on different genes and their functions. Active curation of these databases is how we’re able to research a gene in one model organism, and then apply those insights to the equivalent gene in other organisms.

For example, the gene CG9536 is a term for a gene found in Drosophila melanogaster — fruit flies, a common model organism for genetic research, due to the ease of working with them in a lab. Much of the research around this particular gene can be found on flybase, a database for D. melanogaster gene research. Despite being super different to humans, there are many fruitfly genes that have equivalents in humans, and CG9536 is no exception; TMEM115 is what we call it in humans. The TL;DR answer of what this gene does is “we don’t know”, because although we have some knowledge of what it does, the tricky part about this kind of research is figuring out how genes or proteins interact as part of a wider system — even if we knew exactly what it does in a healthy person, for example, it’s much harder to understand what kinds of illnesses arise from a faulty version of a gene, or whether a gene or protein could be a target for developing novel drugs. I don’t know much about TMEM115 specifically, but I know someone who was exploring whether it could be relevant in understanding how certain kinds of brain tumours develop. Biological databases are a core component of how we can big to make sense of the bigger picture.

Whilst the data that fill these databases are produced by experimental research that are attached to published papers, there’s a tremendous amount of work that makes all these resources talk to each other. That flybase link above links to the page on TMEM115, and I can use these resources to synthesise research across so many separate fields that would previously have been separate: the folks who work on flies will have a different research culture than those who work in human gene research, or yeast, or plants etc. TMEM115 is also sometimes called TM115, and it would be a nightmare if a scientist reviewing the literature missed some important existing research that referred to the gene under a slightly different name.

Making these biological databases link up properly requires active curation, a process that the philosopher of Science Sabine Leonelli refers to as “data packaging”, a challenging task that includes asking “who else might find this data useful?” ^[1]. The people doing the experiments that produce the data aren’t necessarily the best people for figuring out how to package and label that data for others to use because inherently, this requires thinking in a way that spans many different research subfields. Crucially though, this infrastructure work gives a scientist far fewer opportunities to publish new papers, which means this essential labour is devalued in our current system of doing science.

It’s rather like how some of the people who are adding poor quality articles to non-English Wikipedia feel like they’re contributing because using automated tools allows them to create more new articles than someone with actual specialist knowledge could. It’s the product of a culture of an ever-hungry “more” that fuels the production of slop, devalues the work of curators and is degrading our knowledge ecosystem. The financial incentives that drive this behaviour play a big role, but I see that as a symptom of a wider problem: society’s desire to easily quantify value causing important work that’s harder to quantify to be systematically devalued (a problem that we also see in how reproductive labour (i.e. the labour involved in managing a family or household) has historically been dismissed).

We need to start recognising how tenuous our existing knowledge is. The OP discusses languages with few native speakers, which likely won’t affect many who read the article, but we’re at risk of losing so much more if we don’t learn to recognise how tenuous our collective knowledge is. The more we learn, the more we need to invest into expanding our systems of knowledge infrastructure, as well as maintaining what we already have.

[1]: I am not going to cite the paper in which Sabine Leonelli coined the phrase “data packaging”, but her 2016 book “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study”. I don’t imagine that many people will read this large comment of mine, but if you’ve made it this far, you might be interested to check out her work. Though it’s not aimed at a general audience, it’s still fairly accessible, if you’re the kind of nerd who is interested in discussing the messy problem of making a database usable by everyone.

If your appetite for learning is larger than your wallet, then I’d suggest that Anna’s Archive or similar is a good shout. Some communities aren’t cool with directly linking to resources like this, so know that you can check the Wikipedia page of shadow library sites to find a reliable link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna’s_Archive

This isn’t useful to me at the moment, but nonetheless, I really appreciate when people like you take the time to share knowledge in this way.

There is a special place in heaven for the people who do this, just as there’s a special place in hell for people who reply to their own forum post about a complex technical problem.

(Side note: I tried the find the xkcd where he is yelling at his computer after finding a forum post from someone who has the exact same computer problem as he does, but the original poster hasn’t updated it. Alas, I couldn’t. If anyone knows which one I mean, I’d appreciate you pointing me to it, because it’ll drive me mad until I remember how to find it)

Exactly. DevOps engineers are already super skilled at using automation where appropriate, but knowing how and when to do that is still an extremely human task

A handful of senior engineers or developers. And then we’re even more ducked when they retire or die, because the no-one is hiring junior engineers or developers

This is supremely silly. I will never use it, but I’m glad that it exists; you’re delightful

I’m also not sure what I mean by “end apartheid”, because I also don’t know whether it’s realistic in the short term. That would still be the most realistic path to deradicalising Palestine.

A reasonable first step towards that long term goal would be to end the ongoing genocide. It’s hard to even speculate about possible futures when each day of needless bloodshed makes future peace more difficult.

“Historically patriarchal” — there are contemporary Japanese politicians who argue that the job of women is literally just to be baby making machines. I struggle to imagine how a “hardliner conservative” female politician could fit into that without being extremely hypocritical.

Edit: Yup, as I expected (source: Associated Press)

“Takaichi has been seen as opposed to all the reforms that advocate for better representation and the position of women in society. The soon-to-be Japanese PM has supported the LDP’s view that women should serve as good mothers and wives. She opposes same-sex marriage, male-only imperial succession reforms, and legal changes allowing married couples to keep separate surnames.”

Edit 2: Though I suppose that’s very on brand, given that she apparently idolises Margaret Thatcher

What do you mean by “ideological reasons”? You’re using the phrase as if it’s a bad thing, but I struggle to imagine how anyone could exist in a political role such as FTC chair and not bring their ideology into their work.

Okay, I’ll bite. Let’s say that Palestinians also need to be deradicalized. Surely the first step should be to stop the ongoing genocide and apartheid?

Biochemistry — specifically protein structure. It’s so cool.

My favourite protein is Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). It was first extracted from a jellyfish, and it’s super useful in research. The middle bit is the bit responsible for the coloured glow, and the rest of it (the barrel type structure) is basically just to stop the emitted energy from being immediately absorbed by the solvent.

If anyone wants me to nerd out more about proteins, hit me up.

“too dumb to understand code requirements in every industry and profession.”

Or selfish. Unfortunately Hanlon’s razor can only cut so deep.

I find it cool that Dolly Parton’s stage persona is so thick a mask of glamour that when she’s not “in character”, she can go out and get to live like a normal person, who no-one recognises her. I don’t know if this was by design, but it sure seems to be a smart choice

I agree that baby steps are important. So many of the less techy people I know have become so accustomed to being annoyed at tech that they just suppress it, thinking that there is no alternative. I’ve been told a few times that my freely incandescent rage at technology is validating because “if even [I] are frustrated at things, then it’s not just a problem of [them] being bad at tech”.

Step one is acknowledging the problem

Is it? I didn’t get that sense. What causes you to think it’s written by chatGPT? (I ask because whilst I’m often good at discerning AI content, there are plenty of times that I don’t notice it until someone points out things that they notice that I didn’t initially)

Sometimes, I feel like writers know that it’s capitalism, but they don’t want to actually call the problem what it is, for fear of scaring off people who would react badly to it. I think there’s probably a place for this kind of oblique rhetoric, but I agree with you that progress is unlikely if we continue pussyfooting around the problem

Quelle surprise

I find it odd that you seem to be more comfortable to think of the impact this will have on paragliders dropping bombs on people than on the innocent people bombed in this attack. I get that being a paraglider must be scary because it inevitably comes with the risk of being shot, but this is a story about civilian deaths due to a bombing, not paraglider deaths due to gunfire.