I think a key distinction is that the religious rhetoric is often precisely that — rhetoric. Specifically, it’s rhetoric aimed at an international audience, because conflating Judaism with the Israeli state is essential to how Israel frames itself and its genocide. It allows them to denounce all criticism of zionism as antisemitism, even if those critiques are coming from Jewish antizionists. Meanwhile, Israel’s actions have been helping drive an increase in actual antisemitism, which is also useful for Israel, because it helps them to justify the existence of Israel as necessary for Jewish safety.

That might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s important if we want to understand what’s happening. Many of the most vehement pro-genocide voices in Israel are secular Jews, as is a decent proportion of Jews in Israel. Judaism is more than just a religion, but an ethnoreligious group, and that distinction is important because Israel cares more about the “ethno-” part of that than the religious part (because like I say, there are many people who identify as secular Jews).

It’s somewhat analogous to how Trump performs a particular kind of conservative Christian rhetoric that’s more about white nationalism than any Christian ideals. The religious component is important to acknowledge, because many prominent MAGAs aren’t doing it performatively in the way that Trump and some others do, but rather their Christian faith is tightly intertwined with their white nationalism. However, to see this purely as a religious issue would lose crucial nuance of the issue.

The Swiss literally collaborated with the literal Nazis.

Oftentimes, they are successful. There are certainly times when a wealthy person who tries this ends up failing in their attempt, but it doesn’t stand out much because there’s a certain level of rich-people-assholey that’s almost expected, where people will disapprove, but in an unsurprised way.

Streisand’s case was absurd to the highest degree, which was why it blew up. The photo wasn’t even of her house, but an aerial shot of the coast which also captured many other houses. Her house was just incidentally in the image, and even if you zoom in close enough to try see details of the house, the resolution is so low that I can’t fathom anyone genuinely believing it was an invasion of privacy.

What’s more, the purpose of the aerial photos was to document coastal erosion as research for policy making. Especially back in the early 2000s, I’d bet that the majority of photographers sued under invasion of privacy laws were paparazzi, and this is completely different circumstances. People found Streisand’s response offensive because she was obstructing a project that was for the public good. It’s likely that there were other people whose homes were included in photographs from this project who wouldn’t be keen on that prospect, but sucked it up because it’s not like they were actively trying to photograph people’s houses, and coastal erosion is a pretty big deal for people living on the coast.

Though I imagine most people would be unaware their homes were even captured. I remember that the photo in question had only been downloaded 6 times — two of those times were her attorneys.

Though actually I just learned that her beef was actually far more reasonable than I’d realised — unlike other homes that were labelled anonymously, with latitude and longitude coordinates, hers was labelled as belonging to her. Given the awfulness of paparazzi and stalkers, I actually think wanting her name off of it was reasonable. Since then, she’s made it clear that this was all she wanted, and one of the legal documents I just skimmed aligns with that. I can’t imagine why the photographer wouldn’t have just acquiesced to that request before it got all the way to court (by which point, he’d accrued $177k in legal fees). I wonder if perhaps the initial cease and desist sent to the photographer framed it more like a request to remove the photo entirely.

She writes and talks about Trump because she feels that the insight that she has on the fucked up dynamic of the Trump family is useful in understanding the mindset of one of the most powerful men in the world. People care about what she says, and thus give her a platform, because they agree that her analysis is useful and interesting.

In terms of her agenda, if I were her, saddled with the curse of that name and the toxic family that comes with it, I would feel it my duty to do everything I could to criticise Trump, especially given that her name means that her words would carry weight even if her perspective wasn’t especially interesting (I do find her work interesting — she doesn’t just coast off of the name, but also draws on her experience as someone with a PhD in psychology). Hell, even outside of that hypothetical, I already do consider it my duty to oppose Trump however I can; it’s just that that amounts to very little given that I’m a Brit with no political power). Trump is such a repugnant human that surely we don’t need to grasp for some nefarious underlying agenda to explain why she’d criticise him.

I’m glad that you have a spouse who makes you feel seen, and gives you the compassion you deserve.

Oooh, very cool. Thanks for the link, I’ll check it out

I am filled with rage whenever I hear stuff talking about the ceasefire as if it still exists. At least articles like this call it like it is. My view is that a ceasefire can only be broken once, and then there would need to be a new ceasefire arranged. Israel broke the ceasefire not long after it was put in place, so it’s utterly absurd we’re still talking about the ceasefire as if it still exists.

I don’t have any specific examples, but the standard of code is really bad in science. I don’t mean this in an overly judgemental way — I am not surprised that scientists who have minimal code specific education end up with the kind of “eh, close enough” stuff that you see in personal projects. It is unfortunate how it leads to code being even less intelligible on average, which makes collaboration harder, even if the code is released open source.

I see a lot of teams basically reinventing the wheel. For example, 3D protein structures in the Protein Database (pdb) don’t have hydrogens on them. This is partly because that’ll depend a heckton on the pH of the environment that the protein is. Aspartic acid, for example, is an amino acid where its variable side chain (different for each amino acid) is CH2COOH in acidic conditions, but CH2COO- in basic conditions. Because it’s so relative to both the protein and the protein’s environment, you tend to get research groups just bashing together some simple code to add hydrogens back on depending on what they’re studying. This can lead to silly mistakes and shabby code in general though.

I can’t be too mad about it though. After all, wanting to learn how to be better at this stuff and to understand what was best practice caused me to go out and learn this stuff properly (or attempt to). Amongst programmers, I’m still more biochemist than programmer, but amongst my fellow scientists, I’m more programmer than biochemist. It’s a weird, liminal existence, but I sort of dig it.

Not all memory foams are equal. I’ve found that quality makes a huge difference. Unfortunately, the good stuff can get pretty pricey. It sounds like you’re talking about memory foam insoles, and I know that a lot of those tend to be the rubbish kind

“Any attempt to quantitative measure intelligence is pro eugenics.”

Oh definitely, I’m with you on that, 100%. Regardless, it’s not productive to just accuse people of being eugenicists when it’s infinitely more likely that they weren’t aware of how problematic it is to frame intelligence in the way they did.

I’m firmly of the belief that far more important than any seemingly innate intelligence is the support and opportunities for learning that we have access to. It sounds like this is in line with what you think also. That in mind, I hope you can see why your initial comment wasn’t helpful towards anyone learning.

IQ is borne out of an ideology in which there is a class of special people, who should do all the thinking, and everyone else, who should just be mindless drones. Rejecting that ideology means reckoning with the fact that our thinking and reasoning capacities depend massively on our circumstances — and our ability to grow is limited by not knowing what we don’t know. For me, recognising that we’re all equal in all the ways that count means that I feel a duty to facilitate people having access to opportunities to learn and grow. I’m not saying that you should feel obligated to explain complex topics to people who you don’t know will even be receptive, but I am saying that the least you could do is avoid lowering the quality of the discourse.

I initially took the time to reply to you because although your comment was hostile and unnecessary, I have enough background knowledge on the topic to guess that you’re someone who is well-informed and principled. Indeed, it sounds like your views here are quite similar to my own. You could’ve written a comment that might’ve usefully challenged the person you replied to, and it’s a shame we didn’t get to see that.

That’s overly harsh and a not very good faith comment to make. I agree that mentions of IQ is often a red flag due to its association with the eugenics movement, and even if we try to extricate it from that, it’s not even a particularly effective measure of intelligence. However, the regrettable fact is that IQ has become so embedded within pop culture that it’s not reasonable to assume a random commenter is a eugenicist for referencing it.

If you wanted to highlight these pernicious aspects of IQ, and how using it in common parlance like this perpetuates eugenicist ideas (even if we don’t mean to), then I’d be jazzed to see that kind of perspective. Alas, your comment as it is now isn’t really adding to the conversation.

Yeah, I think you’re right. Trump is a dumbass in almost all respects, but he is pretty good at reading and playing to a crowd.

If I punched you, that would be assault.

If I hit you with a hammer, that would be assault with a weapon.

If I stood beside you with a hammer and did not harm you at all, then I have not committed any crime.

No-one is going to be charged with crimes they didn’t commit because of this. Classifying them as a weapon is only relevant for cases in which they were actively used to commit sexual assault, much the same way that a hammer only counts as a weapon if I assault you with it.

Though I understand why you came away with the impression you did — I am often exasperated at weird drug laws that are overly prohibitive and often unscientific in how they criminalise relatively low risk drugs, which meant that I also initially had the same reading of this news as you did. Fortunately, it seems that this is not an example of one of those silly drug laws, but an actually sensible measure.

Exactly. Money buys breathing space, and that’s essential for actually building things to be happy about in one’s life

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Man, this is fucked up.

"If they don’t want to ride with all women, that’s not the kind of ride I want to be on anyway,”

Yes! This is the solidarity that we love to see.

Being in community with trans folk (and especially trans women) has infinitely improved my ability to be comfortable in and even enjoy my own gender, as well as making me a better feminist.

Assholes on the right like to ask “what is a woman?”, but the truth is that I don’t know. I know that I am a woman, but I am just one data point and I don’t feel equipped to answer such a general question. It’s only through being open to other women’s lived experiences that I can usefully build my idea of what it means to be a woman.

None of us are free until all of us are free.

Useful context: I am a biochemist with a passing interest in neuroscience (plus some friends who work in neuroscience research).

A brief minor point is that you should consider uploading the preprint as a pdf instead, as .docx can cause formatting errors if people aren’t using the same word processor as you. Personally, I saw some formatting issues related to this (though nothing too serious).

Onto the content of your work, something I think your paper would benefit from is linking to established research throughout. Academia’s insistence on good citations throughout can feel like it’s mostly just gatekeeping, but it’s pretty valuable for demonstrating that you’re aware of the existing research in the area. This is especially important for research in a topic like this tends to attract a lot of cranks (my friends tell me that they fairly frequently get slightly unhinged emails from people who are adamant that they have solved the theory of consciousness). Citations throughout the body of your research makes it clear what points are your own, and what is the established research.

Making it clear what you’re drawing on is especially important for interdisciplinary research like this, because it helps people who know one part of things really well, but don’t know much about the others. For example, although I am familiar with Friston’s paper, I don’t know what has happened in the field since then. I also know some information theory stuff, but not much. Citations are way of implicitly saying “if you’re not clear on where we’re getting this particular thing from, you can go read more here”.

For example, if you have a bit that’s made up of 2 statements:

• (1): Something that’s either explicitly stated in Friston’s paper, or is a straightforwardly clear consequence of something explicitly stated
• (2): Something that your analysis is adding to Friston’s as a novel insight or angle

Then you can make statement 2 go down far easier if that first statement. I use Friston in this example both because I am familiar with the work, but also because I know that that paper was somewhat controversial in some of its assumptions or conclusions. Making it clear what points are new ones you’re making vs. established stuff that’s already been thoroughly discussed in its field can act sort of like a firebreak against criticism, where you can have the best of both worlds of being able to build on top of existing research while also saying “hey, if you have beef with that original take, go take it up with them, not us”. It also makes it easier for someone to know what’s relevant to them: a neuroscientist studying consciousness who doesn’t vibe with Friston’s approach would not have much to gain from your paper, for instance.

It’s also useful to do some amount of summarising the research you’re building on, because this helps to situate your research. What’s neuroscience’s response to Friston’s paper? Has there been much research building upon it? I know there have been criticisms against it, and that can also be a valid angle to cover, especially if your work helps seal up some holes in that original research (or makes the theory more useful such that it’s easier to overlook the few holes). My understanding is that the neuroscientific answer to “what even is consciousness?” is that we still don’t know, and that there are many competing theories and frameworks. You don’t need to cover all of those, but you do need to justify why you’re building upon this particular approach.

In this case specifically, I suspect that the reason for building upon Friston is because part of the appeal of his work is that it allows for this kind of mathsy approach to things. Because of this, I would expect to see at least some discussion of some of the critiques of the free energy principle as applied to neuroscience, namely that:

• The “Bayesian brain” has been argued as being an oversimplification
• Some argue that the application of physical principles to biological systems in this manner is unjustified (this is linked to the oversimplification charge)
• Maths based models like this are hard to empirically test.

Linked to the empirical testing, when I read the phrase “yielding testable implications for cognitive neuroscience”, I skipped ahead because I was intrigued to see what testable things you were suggesting, but I was disappointed to not see something more concrete on the neuroscience side. Although you state

“The values of dI/dT can be empirically correlated with neuro-metabolic and cognitive markers — for example, the rate of neural integration, changes in neural network entropy, or the energetic cost of predictive error.”

that wasn’t much to go on for learning about current methods used to measure these things. Like I say, I’m very much not a neuroscientist, just someone with an interest in the topic, which is why I was interested to see how you proposed to link this to empirical data.

I know you go more into depth on some parts of this in section 8, but I had my concerns there too. For instance, in section 8.1, I am doubtful of whether varying the temporal rate of novelty as you describe would be able to cause metabolic changes that would be detectable using the experimental methods you propose. Aren’t the energy changes we’re talking about super small? I’d also expect that for a simple visual input, there wouldn’t necessarily be much metabolic impact if the brain were able to make use of prior learning involving visual processing.

I hope this feedback is useful, and hopefully not too demoralising. I think your work looks super interesting and the last thing I want to do is gatekeep people from participating in research. I know a few independent researchers, and indeed, it looks like I might end up on that path myself, so God knows I need to believe that doing independent research that’s taken seriously is possible. Unfortunately, to make one’s research acceptable to the academic community requires jumping through a bunch of hoops like following good citation practice. Some of these requirements are a bit bullshit and gatekeepy, but a lot of them are an essential part of how the research community has learned to interface with the impossible deluge of new work they’re expected to keep up to date on. Interdisciplinary research makes it especially difficult to situate one’s work in the wider context of things. I like your idea though, and think it’s worth developing.

And apparently the evidence for this is that she competed in beauty pageants? I swear, I’ll never understand these people

I hate that I know the words hebephile and ephebophile. I only know them because of people who do weird mental gymnastics to justify their creepy behaviour. “Um actually, he’s an ephebophile, not a pedophile” is a huge red flag whenever I see it