There's an interesting new idea where you can get some journals to pre-approve publication of your study by first submitting your plan... so you outline exactly how you are going to perform the experiment and analyze it. Then the journal pre-approves it, you perform the experiment/study, and they'll guarantee to publish your results (if you follow your plan) no matter the outcome. The idea is to fix the problem where journals only want to publish surprising results because they're more exciting, but the problem is that surprising results are also more likely to be wrong, and also to get cited.

The scientific community generally knows they have a serious problem, and they want to fix it, but in my opinion they're moving pretty slow. I don't know if they understand how much trust they're losing every time a story like this comes out. Ultimately it's good that these studies are being retracted, but the slow and painful way it's happening is just crushing trust in science as an institution. I'd like to see the scientific community take a stronger and faster approach to solving these problems.

To be fair, throughout history when countries didn't get along (which was most of the time) they solved it by throwing young men into meat grinders to achieve their aims. The idea after WWII was to stop using armed conflict to settle disputes and do it with monetary coercion. This was a much better deal for young military-age men the world over. The fact that Russia gave a big F U to the western world and its monetary policy, and started throwing young men into a meat grinder again, is a disheartening development. The fact that the US is now run by a guy who idolizes Putin and wants to use those same tactics, and throw away the international monetary system... that's a really scary development.

I think this is the point of cryptocurrencies. They want to be free of government interference. Sanctions are a form of government interference. It's working as intended.

Gotta be honest, every time someone collapses and is in distress, there are always a bunch of people who pull out their phones and start recording. As a first responder, it's just so gross that someone would think to start recording instead of pitching in or calling 911. Seriously, you may need to bare their chest to apply an AED or do compressions. It's quite embarrassing for the casualty for a lot of reasons. Give people some privacy. They're fellow human beings. We need to stop pretending like it's perfectly OK to film strangers in public. Legal? Sure. Should you be doing it? 9 times out of 10, no.

I think that's very fair, but I don't think you can rule out the effect of social conformity.

If you believe one side or the other is factually correct and the other is factually incorrect, then you drank someone's kool-aid and you should spit it out. Both "sides" use demonstrably false logic and reasoning in their arguments, but that doesn't mean those arguments aren't effective in convincing people to follow them. The fact is that the vast majority of people live their life on vibes and feeling, and not based on logic and reason. That's kind of the point of this article, after all. Logic and reason isn't as effective as appealing to someone's emotions.

Remember that a person who moves from a liberal city to a conservative town will invariably become more conservative in their opinions, and the opposite is also true. Most of what people say outwardly is not an expression of their actual beliefs, but what they believe will get them the most positive rewards from the people around them.

True. I love how the vendors are selling this as a privacy feature, when in reality it's a CYA feature. They're clearly going to be hit by massive class action lawsuits over this, and they just seem oblivious to it. I guess if there's money to be made now, don't worry about the future. Hire some lawyers.

Everyone who supports AI medical transcriptions says, "of course you still need to proof-read it," but we know there are a lot of physicians and psychologists not proof-reading the transcriptions because stuff like this is getting through. Do doctors not take ethics seriously? They're worried about lawsuits, but not worried about using an unproven technology that's notorious for confabulating?

You are correct, and this is part of a broader crisis of falling trust in institutions across the western world. We need science to be able to happen within an open scientific community that the rest of us can see into, but the media has an addiction to reporting on the findings that are weird outliers. But those weird outliers are the most likely to be incorrect, which feeds a cycle of mistrust. I would like to see science come up with a grading system of scientific certainty... where, say, the quantum mechanics model, which agrees extremely well with experimental results to as many digits as we can measure, is graded as a 9 out of 10 certainty, and the results in the squishier social sciences are down in the 2 or 3 range, and then climate science is only going to fall in the 4 out of 10 range at best. New surprising results should come in at a 0 or 1 initially. This would hopefully help the media better understand what they're reporting on.

Isn't "assigning blame prematurely" the precise reason we handed everyone a megaphone by giving them a phone in their pocket with access to social media? I was wondering what everybody was thinking, and now I get to hear them scream it into the void.

This is only one study among many which show over and over that smartphone use is bad for mental health in general, and particularly bad for tweens. I'm not sure why you're so intent on ignoring the mounting evidence, but you do you.

Except that the study says they controlled for that. So within those individual demographics, some 12 year olds had smartphones and some didn't, and the ones that did have them had worse outcomes. You're trying pretty hard to not accept the results.

Mods: To whoever went and downvoted both of my posts... none of the moderation options include "I agree with this" or "I don't agree with this" or "I don't like the implication of this" and that's for a good reason. When you're moderating, you should simply be filtering out *low quality* posts. There was nothing about my posts that was low quality. The posts stated an idea in a well reasoned way. If you disagree, you can post yourself and point out where you think the reasoning went wrong, or where you think the axioms I used were wrong, but moderating a post down just because you disagree is a misuse of the moderation function.

No, I would say... we were inadvertently cooling the North Atlantic with ship emissions, and when we stopped (due to more stringent international emissions standards) then we saw a jump in water temperatures in the ocean. So we're already geo-engineering. Some of it adds together, and some of it reduces the effect of other geo-engineering effects. If we're doing it anyway, and there's zero chance we're "just going to stop" then we need to get better at it.