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turboaspie

Re:Hacked on Saturday April 06, 2024 @09:26AM (#39952298)
If I received an email from a legitimate representative of the Tim Ferris show I'd be more likely to suspect a scam than if I received a typical phishing email.
Re:What comes up when you flush on Thursday December 08, 2022 @11:10AM (#33909488)
Ultimately the hygiene benefits of closing the lid when flushing are negligible in most situations. These studies always show evocative images of aerosol spreading from toilets when flushing, which understandably elicits a disgust response in certain individuals, but they fail to show that e.g. homes where the lid always stays up have higher rates of disease, or that the pathogen exposure from flushing has any real impact on health.

Also given that the majority of people flush without closing the lid (I suspected this but just confirmed with a quick search) it's a bit weird referring to them as "these people" whose type you can tell. I don't think this habit is constrained to those who publicly joke about it.

Not defending Elsevier's practices, but people who get their information about the pandemic etc. from Joe Rogan are probably not going to read (or even understand) a research paper from an academic/medical journal. The problem with misinformation isn't lack of access - there are plenty of accessible, high quality articles that are written for the layperson - the problem is that people are reading (either through choice or The Algorithm) misleading and sensationalised tabloid clickbait.
>Zotero can do anything EndNote can do, is Open Source, and with that won't drive your PI up the wall with yet another expense.

My university offers EndNote (plus Web of Science and the Clarivate stack) for free for students and many of them don't use it - they'd rather manually manage the bibliography in their Word documents. The university even ran tutorials to show them how to set it up, add citations, and export the references, thinking maybe the students didn't understand the value of bibliography management software. Nope, even with the tutorials there was almost no uptake.

It turns out the problem was EndNote all along. I tried it myself - one of the worst user experiences imaginable, and I could totally understand why even doing references by hand is preferable. Eventually I told some of my own students that I use Zotero and to give it a go even though we're not supposed to endorse other software. Two weeks later most of them were using it.

So I'm actually quite confused at the fact that Zotero is offered as a free alternative to EndNote, unless the EndNote that I've used is some weird dated inferior version...

Re:Philosophers and Other Conjurers on Tuesday December 28, 2021 @08:49AM (#29713717)
Not sure where to start with this bizarre criticism of philosophy...

You're somehow conflating learning the history of your own field to being self-obsessed. Almost all of social science and humanities education starts with a history introduction - the origin of ideas, the development of the field, etc. Is literature self-obsessed too, because they read Homer? Your analogy with phlogiston completely fails, and not just for that, but because revisiting ancient philosophical ideas is not the same as reconsidering outdated scientific theories. Your source of misunderstanding is captured in your criticism that philosophers are incapable of

>abandoning philosophies long disproved

If you think philosophy can be proved or disproved, then you don't get it. Philosophy produces arguments, and some of those may be stronger than others, but there is very little in philosophy with unanimous agreement. I think _your_ ignorance, ironically, is what makes you believe that certain ideas are ignorant. For example, here you say that philosophers

>can't teach you about Descartes' epistemology without also getting into his ignorant dualism

I say this as a non-dualist - the debate on the philosophy of mind is far from "proved" or "disproved", and moreover your suggestion that Descartes' dualism should somehow be removed from the curriculum is ridiculous. The point is that philosophy students have the opportunity to debate and think about this stuff, rather than just accepting it as dogma. So even if we were to reject an idea entirely we'd still teach it to new students. (Not to mention that separating Descartes' epistemology from his metaphysics would be a terrible pedagogical idea.)

But what's even more bizarre about your comment is that all of this is pretty much irrelevant because in actual philosophy education and literature today the kind of ancient ideas you're attacking are never the core stuff. They might be used as intro or historical material but you're exaggerating the extent to which they take up the curriculum. The whole thing is a strawman to be honest from someone who I doubt has ever studied philosophy in a university.