opaque

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Fable is probably a close as Kafka got to a children's book.

"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into."

"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

This is the critical question and the answer is no, as far as I'm aware. Like many such suggestions it's "A great tool for telling you things you already know" as my professor used to say. Physics should be judged on its predictive power.

This article is a general critique of the reward system in academia, bolted on the lab leak hypothesis for clickbait. "The Science Game" is a thing and often discussed on HN, but I don't see any causative link here.

> All to say: scientists create dangerous synthetic viruses to achieve “high-impact” scientific output.

Does gain of function research yield more high impact papers than more benign types of virology research? The article seems to suggest so, but provides no citations indicating that. Were the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology publishing their research to general acclaim up until now? Given how little we know about it, doesn't seem so. Are these scientists driven by the same invectives as western university research academics? They're probably state employees on stable contracts for a start, not the PhD students and itinerant PostDocs of the university system, who are the main players of the Science Game.

I don't know the answers to these questions, but the article would be more persuasive if it did.

Interesting article, but some of the arguments are pretty weak.

>“Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.”

>"Capitalism led to the creation of monopolies ..., to food lines, and to war"

The author seems to think these two statements are a damming contradiction, which proves

> "When it came to recognizing unpalatable truths, it seems that Orwell had as much difficulty as the next man."

However, both Capitalism and Communism can be flawed (and are), there is no contradiction here. The ability to critique both is probably why Orwell's work endures.

> It seems to me that if we all weren't constantly dividing ourselves by an increasing number of characteristics that are not socioeconomic class, then we would have an enormous group of people working towards the problems that result from socioeconomic differences.

That's why some on the left believe that the elites (of both the NYT and Fox news persuasion) welcome and encourage identity politics. Marxists would say class is the important divisor and the rest is a distraction.

> She says she didn't publish this model for glory, but she also named it after herself.

She didn't name it after herself, the users did:

> collegues ... began using it and addressed it as "Tai's formula"

As is typically the way with eponymous scientific works, people citing the work add the author's name e.g. Maxwell's equations or Higgs' boson. The author doesn't typically declare "I have discovered X, which I shall call ${self.name}"

This argument is called "Bertlmann's Socks"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Bertlmann#Bertlmann%E...

The other replies explain why it's wrong, but here's a link to Bell's refutation for good measure

http://cds.cern.ch/record/142461/files/198009299.pdf

So, what's the real story? Is it all just trolling?

Take curcumin papers with a pinch of salt. It's a pan assay interference compound (PAIN), prone to misleading results. Pubmed is full of thousands of papers claiming it solves all manner of medical problems, leading it to be dubbed an 'improbable natural panacea'.

See this article, by the same author as it happens.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/01/12/cu...

> Would this describe the world of physics prior to Einstein and Quantum Mechanics? I'm not a physicist, but my impressions is that it absolutely was "something extraordinary that invalidates most of our current understanding."

I am (or was) a physicist. Even scientific revolutions like Relativity and Quantum mechanics don't invalidate 'most' of our prior understanding. Newtonian mechanics continues to be a very accurate model on the length scales that were testable at time it was conceived (apples and trees). The Relativity and Quantum Mechanics revolutions explained why classical mechanics breaks down at the scale of planets and atoms respectively. All that is invalidated is the idea that the current model is universal, but that would be naive thing to believe at any time. Scientific progress does not mean the prior results are wrong, it's an additive process, if done correctly.

"Port Out, Starboard Home" by Michael Quinion is a nice book about 'folk etymologies' that covers these and many more. He gives the real origin where it's known.

Every time I learn something new, a little of the old gets pushed out of my brain. Remember that time I took that wine making course and forgot how to drive?

- Homer Simpson