When Isaacman was originally nominated, the whole space community was like, "oh, that's an interesting pick." Yes, he's a rich guy and pays for private missions via SpaceX, but his credentials are pretty solid, and he really is a believer in the ideals of space exploration. He also sees the value in public/private partnerships. Nobody thinks NASA is doing anything close to what SpaceX is accomplishing. Trump reportedly yanked the original nomination because someone told him that Isaacman had some history of donations to democrats, and he didn't like that. Which is why Isaacman has since make some donations to MAGA stuff as well. I assume that was part of the deal. But really, take a look at this guy before you dismiss him out of hand. This isn't a JFK Jr. type of pick.

>Unless you have at least a masters in the related subject, ideally a PhD

I disagree. You can spend a few years studying the nomenclature, norms, methods and underlying science and be entirely capable of reading and understanding a paper in context for a field that is not the one you started in.

Sometimes it's what you bring to the party that helps. I bring some knowledge on statistical inference and experimental methods, which arises from my day job. My interest was understanding my own health. It took about a decade of reading papers and textbooks to get up to speed. It has freed me from listening to health advise in media and not knowing how to tell if it's sound. I can go to the sources and see them in context.

If you want a difficult statistical environment, try education - That was my wife's PhD topic. My domain has no shortage of data. I can make all the data I need from silicon. The difficulty is in understanding it and what to do about it.

You could read my most recent paper ( https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdl.acm.org%2Fdoi%2F10.1007... ) and understand it with only a solid grasp of school level algebra and a spot of probability. I wouldn't expect anyone not involved in my field to care one bit about this algorithm, but I like it. It's neat.

Her comments on the nature of the threat from Russia and China are well put and stand up to analysis. That she was stating these things in public suggests that she wants the politicians to stop dithering and she is correct about that.

Her comments on tech seen naive. The tech world won't take her seriously and with good reason.

Yes. There is clearly more than one "cause", but the proximate cause is chemicals tricking the immune system into attacking specific cells.

What the MAHA people don't do is read papers. I do.

E.G. Here's a train of thought:

1) A long time ago, in the UK, a study showed a significant correlation between Parkinson's and exposure to insecticides.

2) More recently, a study showed lectins from wheat forming a ring around the vagus nerve and traveling up it to the Parkinson's site in the brain where biosimilarity between the lectins and tissues in the brain set up the autoimmune reaction that is part of Parkinson's. This wasn't a dodgy correlation study, they took photographs.

3) 99+% of the insecticides modern human's encounter are the "natural" insecticides in plants.

Conclusion : I'm suspicious of wheat and not for the usual reasons.

A long time ago I helped my wife with writing R scripts for her PhD. Why? MANOVER. Your average stats library will do ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) but not MANOVER (Multivariate Analysis of Variance). R did the MANOVER. It could also read in the CSV and had plenty of distribution models to apply.

Of course, I read up and wrote my own MANOVER implementation in python so I don't have to touch that horrible R language ever again. There's a little bit of R in my RNG book, but that's because it's in a section reviewing the distribution support in languages and so R is there because that's what it does well.

I just don't think many people want to watch an awards show where there's a bunch of angry people trying to push a political agenda. I mean, I support their right to free speech, and I've always felt like the games industry abused developers, but you're in the business of entertainment, and hearing people complain about their industry (an industry that I support with multiple game purchases per year) isn't what I'd call entertainment. At most I'd watch it to hear what the big games are, and maybe to see someone get some recognition for their hard work on a particularly well made title.

When I'm in charge, that's the font they'll be required to use.

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.