No idea why systematic needed to be rendered in scare quotes here, but for context, Cochrane is a highly-presitigous and cautious journal whose reviews essentially settle outstanding questions in the field.

Naomi Oreskes is a historian with some background in geology. You can see her conributions to Scientific American here. Her contributions cover the gamut of things like bullying, child labor laws, gun violence, et al.

Stating a summation of evidence you don't like is not a mistake.

Masking is not one of those things. You can mask some people and not other people and measure the difference, and you can do with a randomly selected sudy and control groups. An RCT is basically always better when it is possible to do and the only way to establish causality. If your opening argument is "who really cares about RCT evidence anyway" it's already pretty obvious what your feeling is about any well-established evidence that undermines your stance in general.

The pandemic raged over the entire world for years and there are countless instances of varying country, state, city, and school policies, how is the key evidence indisputably proving her position two datapoints occurring over a month-and-a-half in Kansas?

The truth the referenced study was a badly reported study which measured the masked countries from after they had just recovered from a COVID spike. Even then the result was only a 6% relative reduction in COVID. Not only that the group of masked counties had a consistently higher amount of covid throughout the entire study.

The fact that some methodologies can be flawed is exactly why you would prefer a careful systematic review of studies over citing a single study that confirms your priors.

Also note the journal that is published in, MMWR, is not peer-reviewed in the sense of other journals - research there is selected according to policy preferences. There are some problems with that.

So according to Naomi Oreskes actual rigor is when you reject large and careful metanalyses of all available data by experts in the field and statistical analysis and instead is to pick one study out of 80 that confirms her biases by cooking endpoints?

She is a complete embarrassment and if SA had any integrity they would retract this article and fire her. As well as their present editor Laura Lee Helmuth who is largely responsible for driving SA's quality into the ground and prioritizing politicization over science.

Does Vox not understand what a systematic review is? They looked at the available evidence. Cochrane had no control over what the available evidence was.

And the title of the review is "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses". Yes, there are other types of physical intervention than masking, and other types of respiratory viruses than CoVID-19. How is the fact they looked at more evidence a critique of the analysis? How you can be so incompetent that your 'rebuttal' can't even comprehend the title of the paper?

You are entirely free to dislike any policies in red states. But any policy that doesn't fit your political preferences isn't therefore dystopian - that is just a histrionic abuse of language.

Texas and Florida, in contrast to California gained 450k and 400k citizens in 2022, respectively. Clearly people very much want to live there and, even if they didn't like the policies you mentioned, their cost-benefit-analysis is that, taken as a whole, TX and FL have much more enticement than CA. That doesn't immediately tell us which aspects they are preferring, but is a numerical fact.

For that matter California, by-and-large, clearly is not "dystopian" either. I say by-and-large because it's quite difficult to ignore the crisis that is developing in San Francisco (and perhaps LA). Five years ago the United Nations condemned conditions in San Francisco as cruel and inhuman and the situation has only gotten worse in terms of homelessness, crime, drug use, housing prices, etc.

Do also want to point out your ridiculous slander here.. The article you cite takes a parting shot to complain about a proposed AP curriculum being blocked. Well, guess what we find in Ex 2.8.A.4 of that curriculum?

The exact same teaching that you portray as "teaching that slaves benefited from slavery."

So why wasn't the governor a hero for blocking this pro-slavery curriculum? A: obviously, pointing out slaves' resourcefulness isn't a pro-slavery observation, and is appropriate in either curriculum, some just selectively infer to racism whenever they think they can extract political advantage from it.

The only people who could possibly be discouraged by such a fee are on the low end of the economic spectrum. The rich lawyer visiting a club in his bugatti will bear the cost while hardly thinking about it. The mobility-impaired grandma struggling to pay her grocery bills will have to settle for a phone call instead of getting to see her grandkids' smiles. The people writing this regressive policy will taut a "great success" as the traffic decreases, before hopping in their own personal vehicles to catch a private jet to the next international climate conference.

Real solutions look to make average peoples' lives better (or at least not worse). Cheap electric cars, more efficient catalytic converters, closer grocery stores. Power plants that use clean - and preferably cheaper - energy. *Not* making it more expensive to have human interaction.

And this is... a huge success! They've increased purchasing power and mobility while offsetting a significant portion of the negative externality involved in doing so. This almost certainly increases economic output and reduces poverty overall, leading to more tax revenue, which can absolutely be invested in green technologies, as well as social services.

When bureaucrats decide to look at a single metric as if the entire world revolves around that number, they wind up implementing terrible policies, pretty much regardless of what that metric is.

This smells odorously of bureaucrats simply trying to blame others for their bad policy decisions.

"Hitler didn't lose the battle of Stalingrad he just overrelied on beleaguered troops." You see it was really the soldiers' fault. They just didn't rise to the challenge of his brilliant strategy. And how could he have known they were misrepresenting themselves as being dependable and ready for victory?

The bureaucrats were totally uninvolved for years but now they are going to come in and make all the right decisions to fix the situation.

All tech did was what they always do which is build things according to market demand. The politicians closed down the schools. That created a market for remote learning and tech built things to fulfill that need. No one in tech was saying "we have a way to prevent the predicted learning loss from missing years of in-class instruction." And if they were, it's the policymakers' job to evaluate the impact of their own policies, not just hopefully latch on with complete trust and credulity to the first person who claims the massive disruption won't be a problem.

I'm all for providing students more realistic explanatory models, and do generally have to go beyond textbook descriptions to make that happen.

But the point of such a model is to connect it to their intuition. If you don't care about intuition then just give them the Schrodinger equation and call it a day.

To the end of something a student could realistically sketch or imagine, a completely space-filling model is just ridiculous and would only serve to obscure important details about the real structural complexity. If the wavefunction is highly regionally localized then the best intuitive picture is to have that region filled and other regions not.

Despite striking at this one simplification, the author makes plenty of his own unrepresentative simplifications, such as imagining molecules exist as isolated systems. Certainly not how we ever encounter them as chemical substances. And how would you ever truly look at a molecule by itself without having anything else interacting with it? Identifying how the mathematically descriptive wavefunction is weighted throughout as space as being equivalent to the physical presence of the thing itself is also another unobserved philosophical postulate which is hardly inherent to all interpretations of quantum mechanics.

The reality is that a modern scientist has to juggle multiple okay-ish mental pictures of atoms to reason about them usefully, switching according to their applicability to the questions being asked. There is no good 1:1 mental representation of everything we glean from a quantum or even classical understanding of atomic behavior. A model that focuses on the nuclear wavefunction can be great for considering things like radioactive decay. A Bohr-like picture is pretty decent for thinking about charge and bonding. Hydrogen electron wavefunctions become necessary once you want to talk about spectroscopy. When introducing such models, a short exposition on their limitations and departures from reality is always warranted, and generally the best hedge you can offer.

The top rated female chess player is ranked 89th. The reigning female world champion is ranked 404th by rating. 37 out of the 1600 world grandmasters are women. (or so it was of the end of 2020).

That is just observational fact. I don't personally think that fact says anything about women's intelligence (there can be lots of factors that affect opportunity and rankings), but if you do, then that makes you the one with the sexist claim about them.

Now, given that material fact, if there is to be any chance for women to place e.g. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, compete fairly against one another, and to even have a world champion, it is just plainly necessary that they have their own league. Not a judgment, not a imposition of any kind of moral value, not a claim about intelligence or physical ability or really anything other than simply acknowledging the empirically true and presently existing distribution of competitive ranking. If you took *any* mixed group of A/B with a similar competitive distribution for *any* kind of ranked competition, you'd similarly have to form a separate league for B, assuming you wanted members of B to be able to win spots and matches as often as often as members of A.

And given the very large number of males in proportion to females, it doesn't much of a percentage willing to compete as females to dominate their category. It evidently may take only 1/400 doing so to deny them an opportunity at holding the championship. If you wish to go on with your inference of rankings to intelligence, then the only way that would not be true is if you also maintained that males who transitioned thereby became less intelligent - which I don't think you want to do.

In fact literally zero human being in the history of humanity have ever changed their sex. It's not something humans are capable of doing.

But a large number have insisted they be treated as the opposite sex and that is indeed literally something anybody can do.

How are people disconfirming their results then? It can't simultaneously be that they never provided the information necessary to investigate their claims and that a bunch of labs have investigated and found their claims incorrect.

They provided resistivity, heat capacity, and XRD data in their preprint. The latter is how labs are verifying if they have made a similar sample. They provided video of levitation.

To say they "never did anything" to show their claims was true is preoposterous. A dozen national labs didn't jump on investigating something that could be dismissed out-of-hand.

The leading explanation for disputing their results is that they had a multiphase sample with (a) iron contamination leading to a magnetic torque that looks like diamagnetism (b) Cu2S which can undergo a very low-resistance phase transition around their critical temperature. If that is correct, there was nothing fake or incorrect about their results, they simply saw two unusual features of their sample, both of which are hallmarks of a superconductor, and theorized accordingly.

But it is not a requirement for them to give up in defending their conclusions as soon as anyone criticizes them or comes up with an alternate theory. It is also ridiculous to expect them to be outputting additional results including mass manufacturing of something they took years to produce. Or to suddenly have their lab overrun with people "testing their equipment." Is anyone even aware of a mobile materials research testing team that is prepared to be on site to validate an entire lab on short notice? Do they normally show up within a week or two of putting up a preprint?

I think there is too much Hollywood expectation here. Scientific work, especially in small labs, is not paced to satisfy the internet news-entertainment cycle. It can take a week or more just to write a paper. That most of their time these past couple weeks has been spent dealing with the verbal criticism and trying to move their publication is not just believable, it's by far the most expected answer. It's also hardly their fault if the internet wants to turn their work into the topic-of-the-week and then be disappointed. Getting some decent evidence for their result, publishing, and later being proven wrong is fine. Most papers that get published would not stand up to this kind of scrutiny. And most academics would want to publish sooner with good evidence rather than later with perfect evidence and risk losing priority. Unless there is actual indication of fraud or misconduct it isn't right to turn it into some kind of moral judgment against them.

Yes. Biden recently appointed Steve Dettelbach as the Director of the ATF. The ATF is part of the Department of Justice, headed by the Attorney General Merrick Garland, whom Biden also appointed. Merrick Garland serves as a member of Biden's Cabinet and effectively with the purpose of implementing the president's policies.

In this official Whitehouse news release, the Biden administration describes how they pursuing this issue

This post is, ironically, classic misinformation if not straight conspiracy nonsense. Zero facts or evidence provided, extraordinary claims made in sensational language, but vague enough that you'd have to ask what they actually meant. Point is merely to gesticulate at the bad people and suggest they are indeed very bad so the enlightened in group can all nod sadly.

Meanwhile, in actual data land, Florida and Texas are middle of the pack for state life expectancy (19th and 25th respectively), just a year or two off from California and New York, and with greater life expectancy than any of their neighboring states: https://wisevoter.com/state-ra...

Obviously not "dystopias" where "people die in droves." But even though that claim is completely false, it's voted "+5 Insightful" because it feels good to think that people so horribly wrong in their politics must be justly suffering for their turpitude.

Not that this even is by any means the most egregious spreading of misinformation on Slashdot, it is just funny to have it be one of the first things to see on this discussion in particular.

Here is a video of sample on top of a fixed magnet:

https://twitter.com/AiBreakfast/status/1684020175215927296

It's not repelled by the magnet, it's not attracted to magnet, it's locked in position, a property of superconducting materials.

The publication may still be pre-print but this is one of those wonderful cases where you can pretty much just use your eyes - it doesn't come down to someone with an advanced degree making sure the math was done right. I guess you could still speculate that it is all an elaborate hoax including the demo but that's also pretty unlikely given the credentials of the people involved and how long they have been working on this.

Someone pointed out that the submitted two papers one with six authors and one with only three - the maximum for splitting the Nobel prize - so they may be feeling pretty good about this.

China was specifically active in spreading propaganda against US vaccines.

Why do you magically get to set the cutoff for responsibility there? I could just as well say "once you get stabbed, regardless of who stabbed you, it is your responsibility to staunch the bleeding and seek medical assistance." It's a rhetorical sleight-of-hand which shifts responsibility away from the culprit by pretending their actions were inevitable while the victim was the only one with any agency. I could use your own trick to absolve the US 'collective' of any culpability - "Regardless of the political climate in the US, it is your job to manage your own health care and make wise choices to manage risk of contracting an infectious disease."

But, as mentioned, the CCP was active in spreading misinformation which hampered response efforts - (1) undermining confidence in Western vaccines (2) denying and suppressing evidence of human-to-human in the beginning (while they rounded up PPE for themselves) (3) falsely touting success of their own internal policies and vaccines leading other countries to believe that could successfully control COVID by adopting them.

So yes China bears culpability for impeding global efforts to manage the pandemic even if we adopt your standard of only measuring once the virus has already crossed into other nations' border.

By that logic they were 'merely working on the Democrats' precedent'. Here is the history -

Morality and standards of good governance are things that exist outside the little microcosm of R's and D's trying to prove who is worse. It is just plainly objectively obvious that the governor should not be able to change the substantive meaning of legislation especially by "vetoing" specific characters. It's also extremely childish like changes an 'F' to an 'A' on your report card - but in this case then demanding to actually be paraded in to an Ivy League college.

All the governors listed above should be ashamed to stoop to using this to circumvent the democratic process, and popular objection to the present governor perpetuating the phenomenon should be welcomed and promoted by anyone who cares about maintaining a just system of government.

False, and difficult to believe you would characterize it that way if you had actually read the ruling. You claim any request to remove information is coercive according to the judge. In reality, he specifically raised and spent considerable amount of time on the question of what would make a request by the government coercive

"To determine whether Plaintiffs are substantially likely to succeed on the merits of their
First Amendment free speech claim, Plaintiffs must prove that the Federal Defendants either
exercised coercive power or exercised such significant encouragement that the private parties’
choice must be deemed to be that of the government."

and included numerous examples where they appeared to cross the threshold.

The judge provided a 155 page memorandum

citing vast multitude of associated evidence and explaining the legal basis and reasoning. I assume you dismiss it all sarcastically as "because reasons" and bring up red herrings of Roe V Wade, Alito, Trump, Student Loans etc. because... that is the absolute best you have to offer in terms of counterargument. Just ignore or misrepresent any immediate facts and gesticulate wild implications in retort.

Does this sound like the administration was just passively letting companies know they might want to take a look at something?

"Humphrey sent a copy of the email to Rob Flaherty (“Flaherty”), former Deputy
Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy, on the email and asked if “we can keep
an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre.” The email read, “Hey folks-Wanted to flag the
below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP.... On February 6, 2021, Flaherty requested Twitter to remove a parody account
linked to Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter and President Biden’s granddaughter. The
request stated, “Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately,” and
“Please remove this account immediately... On May 5, 2021, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki (“Psaki”) publicly
began pushing Facebook and other social-media platforms to censor COVID-19 misinformation.
At a White House Press Conference, Psaki publicly reminded Facebook and other social-media
platforms of the threat of “legal consequences” if they do not censor misinformation more
aggressively.... The next day, Flaherty followed up with another email to Facebook and chastised Facebook
for not catching various COVID-19 misinformation. Flaherty demanded more information about
Facebook’s efforts to demote borderline content.... Things apparently became tense between the White House and Facebook after that,
culminating in Flaherty’s July 15, 2021 email to Facebook, in which Flaherty stated: “Are you
guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”"

We are talking about the people who can investigate you, raid your office (who's to say who gets shot if that doesn't go well), send you to jail for life, decide to quash your business deals or pass unfavorable policy, etc. Where's "the evidence they were threatened with something"? Idk, where's the evidence that the guy who walked into a gas station and asked for a $100 from the register while tapping his holstered side arm was threatening the cashier? Just a polite request. Never mind if they definitely could do something about it and are getting increasingly angry with you for not complying, per above.