Ask Lemmy

You’re not wrong. According to the current scientific understanding of the universe, that’s exactly what it is. They just gave it a badass name.

Yeh, that's how the scientific method works.
Observations don't support a model, or a model doesn't support observations.
Think of a reason why.
Test that hypothesis.
Repeat until you think it's correct. Hopefully other people agree with you.

People are also working on modifying General Relativity and Newtonian Dynamics to try and fix the model, while other people are working on observing dark matter directly (instead of it's effects) to further prove the existing models.
https://youtu.be/3o8kaCUm2V8

We are in the "testing hypothesis" stage. And have been for 50ish years

All of physics is a "math model". One we attempt to falsify. And when a scientist does prove some part of the model wrong, the community leaps up in celebration and gets to working on the fix or the next.

Dark matter started as exactly a catchall designed to make the model work properly. We started with a very good model, but when observing extreme phenomenon (in this case the orbits of stars of entire galaxies), the model didn't fit. So either there was something we couldn't see to explain the difference ("dark" matter), or else the model was wrong and needed modification.

There's also multiple competing theories for what that dark matter is, exactly. Everything from countless tiny primordial black holes to bizarre, lightyear-sized standing waves in a quantum field. But the best-fitting theories that make the most sense and contradict the fewest observations & models seem to prefer there be some kind of actual particle that interacts just fine with gravity, but very poorly or not at all with electromagnetism. And since we rely on electromagnetism for nearly all of our particle physics experiments that makes whatever this particle is VERY elusive.

Worth observing that once, a huge amount of energy produced by stars was an example of a dark energy. Until we figured out how to detect neutrinos. Then it wasn't dark anymore.

In short, you're exactly right. It's a catch-all to make the math model work properly. And that's not actually a problem.

This is like the second or third post I have seen in the past week talking about “belief” in science. Science isn’t about belief, it’s about understanding. Maybe this post should be, “What facts are you questioning because you don’t understand the underlying data?”

Chill science should be questioned otherwise it's not science

The reason for this is that we tend to sleep deeper now than our ancestors. Because of this, we are more prone to roll onto a baby, and not wake up.

It can still be done, you just have to avoid things like alcohol, that stop you waking. You also need to make sure your sleeping position is safe. Explaining this to exhausted parents is unreliable, however. Hence the advice Americans seem to be given.

Fyi, if people want a halfway point, you can get cosleeping cribs. They attach to the side of the bed. Your baby can be close to you, while also eliminating the risk of suffocating them.

You can read the dawn of everything book which is a very interesting take at a lot of those assumptions which are indeed false. This book goes deep into the ideological bias scientists have when interpreting evidence.

The hunter-gatherer gender division is actually proven wrong now.

Also, hunting mammoths was a very rare activity. I would expect it to be some kind of desperate activity in fact. People weren't more crazy than we are, they would rather live than to be trampled by a mammoth.

It's definitely NOT science that animals don't have feelings. Maybe 50 years ago.

Now, there's a concerted effort to discern thoughts and emotions in animals.

First, let me start off by saying that I agree with what I believe your actual premise is (or should be) - that articles in science journals should not be behind paywalls. I’m strictly against the practice, I think it’s a massive scam, and so does everyone I know who does research. I have paid to open source every paper I’ve published. Well, not me personally. But thank you taxpayers for funding me to not only do my work but to make sure you have access to it too. I’ll talk about this more at the end.

With that out of the way, I’d like to mention a couple of things. First, the scam is on the part of the academic journals, not the researchers or the journalists writing the articles. It’s not part of some scam to hide the fact that the journalist is making crap up. If the authors were unwilling or unable to pay the fees for open sourcing their papers ($3-5k when I was doing it several years ago), then you’re either going to be in an institution that has a subscription to the journal or you’re going to have to find some way of acquiring it.

Search for the exact title in quotes. Sometimes the Google Scholar engine will return with the default link to the pay walled page, sometimes it’ll have a link to a prepublication server. Arxiv is one of the more popular ones for physics, math, and computer science of all stripes. Step 2 is to go to the institution web page of the first author. Very often, researchers will keep an updated list of their publications with links to the PDFs. If that still doesn’t work, you can write the author and request the paper. We love those emails. We love it when people read our work, especially when they’re so excited that they wrote to request a copy. None of these involve copyright infringement. That prepub that you get is the same paper (usually but you can confirm with the author if that’s a question), but possibly without the masthead and layout from the journal. It’s still cited the same.

So, why are so many journals behind a paywall? Because the publishers want to monetize what today should be a cost free (or minimal) set of transactions. Here’s what happens:

1. I have an idea for some research. If it’s good and I’m lucky, I get money from the government (or whomever) to do the work, and I use it to pay my expenses (salaries, materials, equipment, whatever). I also get taxed on it by my institution so they can pay the admins and other costs. When submitting a proposal, those are all line items in your budget. If you’re doing expensive research at an expensive institution, it’s pretty trivial to set aside $10-20k for pub fees. If your entire grant was $35k, that’s a lot harder to justify.
2. You write the paper after doing the work. You don’t get paid to write the paper specifically - it’s part of the research that you are doing. The point here is that, unlike book authors, researchers see zero of any money you’d pay for the article. If you do locate a copyrighted copy, you’re not taking a dime out of my pocket. Again, just thrilled someone’s reading the damn thing.
3. You pick a journal and send it in. The journal has a contact list of researchers and their fields, and sends out requests for reviewers. They usually require 2 or 3.
4. The reviewers read the paper making notes on questions they have and recommend revisions before publication. Reviewing is an unpaid service researchers do because we know that’s how it works. The irony is that it challenges the academic notion of the tragedy of the commons. You could be a freeloader and never review, but enough people do it that the system keeps rolling.
5. You revise, reviewers approve, publisher accepts and schedules date. There can be some back and forth here (this is a legitimate publisher expense, but the level of effort and interaction isn’t like with a book editor).
6. Your paper comes out.

As you can see, the role of the publisher is very small in the overall amount of effort put into getting an idea from my head into yours. At one point publishers had an argument that the small circulation numbers for things like The Journal of Theoretical Biology justified their $21k/year institutional subscription price.

And I shouldn’t have saved this til the end, but for the one person who skimmed down to see where all of this was going:

Any science article / press release that cites a paper whether or not you have access to it at least is citing something that has undergone peer review. Peer review can only do so much and journal quality has a wide range, but it’s about the best we have. If it’s a big enough deal to actually matter and the media in question has wide enough reach to care, then it will get back to the author who can then clarify.

To add onto that, whenever a newspaper says "based on the findings of researchers at [Random University]" but they don't list the citation anywhere at all. That is just evil, but somehow industry standard.

You know I felt this way for years. I felt that way through psychopharmacology in pharmacy school, and I felt that way during our psychiatry and behavior lectures in medical school. I felt like psychiatry was minimizing behavior to these boxes was far too reductionist. Then I spent a month in an inpatient psychiatry facility as a third year medical student.

While I completely agree that each individual is unique and people are more than their diagnosis, you'd be absolutely shocked by just how similar patients' overall stories, maladaptive coping mechanisms, and behaviors are within the same psychiatric illness. I can spot mania from a doorway, and it takes less than five minutes to have a high suspicion for borderline personality disorder. These classifications aren't some arbitrary grouping of symptoms: they're an attempt to create standard criteria for a relatively well preserved set of phenotypic behaviors. The hard part is understanding pathology vs culturally appropriate behavior in cultures you don't belong, and differentiating within illness spectra (Bipolar I vs II; schizophrenia vs bipolar disorder with psychotic features vs schizoaffective)

4 years where? To become a real psychologist (not a therapist) in most places you need a PhD or a PsyD. In total, you probably do at least 8 years of schooling.

Not to mention that that "book full of labels" is constantly reviewed and was made based on consensus from psychiatrists, which are medical doctors with a lot more than 4 years of schooling.

Hey it's ok to be wrong on this one.

It's not true. Your observations may be affected by confirmation, bias, or other things.

https://www.dukehealth.org/blog/myth-or-fact-more-women-go-labor-during-full-moon

However, barometric pressure can apparently induce labor