At the same time they are OK with Hooters.

(Let alone they root for child labor, child marriage, domestic violence, corporal punishment, sexual harassment and rape of women by prominent figures, and covering up for tens of dozens of republican sex offenders against minors and women. But this is where they draw the line: “sex ed is PorNoGraPhy librarians should be LoCKkKeD uPp”.)

Redefine it and then …criminalize it, right? Otherwise how is a librarian a “sex offender”?

A librarian of all people!

Certainly. I try to do the same, in fact I craft my comments so that they are immediately useful to others. Nonetheless, this might be not enough. Trolls are there for a reason, and you have to accept that our comment-section skirmishes do not add up to much, especially when you consider state-sponsored trolling and mega-corporate push of the far right agenda, across all media outlets, including social media.

Perhaps peppering responses with links is counterproductive. Why not follow a more consistent strategy? Such an approach would for example summarize the opposition’s view in good faith, give a name to the fallacies in it, and respond not only by providing a link, but a short synopsis of what the link is and how it refutes those fallacies. This approach helps not only rebut the opponent, who may be unwilling to listen to reason, but everyone following the conversation in real time or in the future. For this reason it is also great to use archived versions of links, whenever you can.

organised system of reproduction

Yes, that would be great. People put so much stock in peer review because there is the myth that every statement undergoes under a rigorous process of verification in multiple laboratories. The reality is, as you said, there is a culture of active discouragement of reproduction and the pushing of novel results.

Not to mention that to foster reproductions, researchers should be trained into a culture of replication and collective metanalyses. As it is now, reproductions are less than an afterthought for the vast majority of researchers, and virtually none knows how to handle multiple replicatory studies instead of p-hacking.

As an innocuous example of sharing data with pure bash and Arise, these people here have preserved the Trigedasleng dictionary, the fictional language from the science-fiction/young adult show The 100, after another fan site was taken down. They use a github repo as data backend, and Arise as a static-site generator for github pages. All their data are stored in lots of version controlled JSON files instead of a database. According to the authors, this democratizes the process of forking and adding data to the repository.

I think Arise is sth I had seen and at the time motivated these thoughts. It is a bash based static site generator, that, according to its docs, it is build with the philosophy of minimal language requirements as well as other dependencies.

I would argue that a solution like this is better than heavily nested JSON files, or a cascade of Ordered Dicts in Python, or even a db.sqlite that would require the user parse or query the data somehow. In fact, a user could retrieve the static site from their own distro package manager and run it in bash with minimal dependencies.

I haven’t tested this solution yet, but it looks very promising as to what I originally had in mind.

Possibly the domain is visible with a traffic monitoring tool. Everything else is between you and the bank via HTTPS. Having said that, whatever is not over https is visible to whoever sits on the same network as yourself.

In AI-generated sound you can see it in the waveform, it has less random noise altogether and it seems like a huge, well, wave. I wonder if sth similar is true for images.

This trick should come in handy pal

12ft.io/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/sam-altman-mythmaking/680152/

Perhaps we could benefit from sth like MetaCritic for science.

As far as I know the peer reviewers are in most cases now selected by the editor, they self-select to respond, are not paid for their work, and the process for alarmingly many journals is not even blind. I always thought that this makes the process vulnerable to network effects in the field, since people are obliged to a certain etiquette when commenting on established figures in their own field. So yes, I get where you are coming from, but similar to the scientific method, peer review is also great to describe in theory, in practice it would require much more precise protocols, like Web protocols I might say. I really don’t want to be a pessimist about science in the current political climate, but if we want these great ideals (Scientific method, Peer Reviewed evidence) we will have to abandon the existing situation as soon as possible.

This is not just about the pressure put on academics to publish, but it is a whole systemic rot, that is not even remotely living up to the “peer reviewed evidence” myth.

The whole idea of an intermediary authority for scientific publishing is a scam, and it corrupts people who want/need to be in the pyramid. The whole thing is ill-conceived, needs to be abolished, and a new thing should be put in its place. At some point someone said, “I can ditch all this and just publish research on my blog, then people will criticize and build upon that”. No publisher, no paywall, no problem. If we follow this example, all of these issues can disappear overnight. But the vast majority of professionals value their career more than anything else, including our tantamount tenets of what science communication should look like.

You might object that “intermediary authorities” and “peer review” are essential to prevent disinformation and conspiracy theories. Well, we are past this point aren’t we? Did this system prevent conspiracy theories and disinformation, hoaxes, and fraudsters this far? No, so how exactly will it prevent all of these terrible things in the future? If anything, building arguments in the open without paywalls might deter at least some of the conspiracy theorists that brandish paywalls as further evidence of cover-ups and secrecy, and ditching the horrible jargon and high-brow style might actually help the common sense of scientific arguments just shine, and combat the rising anti-intellectualism of right-wing conspiracy theorists.

Like, if you explain Elsevier’s etc business model to any lay person (Pay me money so that I let you publish to my super-selective journal and feed your vanity) they have the most funny reactions, because to anyone who is not conditioned to this absurdity, it just sounds like a pyramid scheme.

I mean, even the struggle to self-censor crap beliefs is pathetic. Most guys don’t even censor themselves or outright announce that they self-censor. Like refraining from spewing transphobia and misogyny in front of women is like refraining from farting on a date. Most women are not even that pedantic with these things. The fact that this poses a mental toil on you as if you cannot tell a radicalized incel from an average dickhead is really alarming. I hope you find peace.

Right enough, the old standard is toxic and must go. You can wear a dress, cry in public, take it up yours. You still will be a manly man.

there are legal reasons to worry

"You could go to jail for saying the wrong thing! And how you are supposed to know what is considered offensive this month? Who knew you will have to subscribe to a feminist newsletter to be a man? " Did someone get addicted to old privileged sex roles, and now they feel they will be persecuted for hating women’s bodily autonomy?

That is why I say it is suspicious, and given recent UK history they just might say that students protesting TERFs are extremists and round them up.

This might also be virtue signalling so that other groups are persecuted. Several things it can be, except the one they claim it is, because if it was, the general consensus is that modern extremists target all those groups of people.

Their choice shows that they don’t care that much for those other groups. Effectively, it can be understood as a pink washing move for throwing all the other classes under the bus. I hope I am wrong.

so easy to get label as misogynistic where do we call it extremism

Um, incels have long been in the spotlight as possibly violent extremists. TBF research says that a minority of them become mass shooters, but their ideology is as clearly misogynist as it gets.

over and over that 50% of the population sees them as a threat

It is so easy to pick up some minimal etiquette, which most guys use to feint decency and lead normal lives, despite being more or less misogynist on the inside. If you can hardly stick to that ridiculously low bar, then in good faith, you might need to talk to a professional?

If you spew Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson nonsense at your first encounter with a woman, then yes you are perceived as a possible threat and women are smart enough to show one the door.

It is pretty unclear what you are trying to say. If you are suggesting that this regulation (good or bad in itself) bears a relation to the mental turmoil suffered by young men, you should back it up with some evidence. This is some remote innuendo.

In reality, mental health organizations like APA recognize that young men are under lot of pressure, which leads to addiction, violence, self-harm, steroid abuse, depression, and even suicide. There are special guidelines for counseling young men, and there is active research about the root cause.

A rigid traditional understanding of masculinity is shown to be the main culprit.

Do you have anything to back up your claim that regulating misogyny somehow has an effect on young men’s and boys mental well being? So far it is shown that the likes of Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson cause greater harm than this ill-conceived law.

Mixed feelings about this. First things first, misogyny and online harassment in the wider “internet” is rampant, and yes I believe someone has to do sth about it. I am not sure a super-surveillance nation state expanding its definition of extremism is what I wished for though. What if it was Russia? On top of that: This coming from the highly transphobic UK rubs me the wrong way. I am not sure they will not label transgender rights activism as extremism as well, given how many outlets in the UK entertain Rowling’s delusion that it is a misogynistic movement, no less while UK TERFs’ litigation is piling up, accusing trans people of harassing them. I am not buying it, yet.

Depends on the jurisdiction. In many countries directly insulting someone in his face is a misdemeanor or similar level violation.