Another reason is nowadays with all the variety of dietary restrictions in vogue, it’s much harder for a host to prepare a meal everyone can share. Potlucks or a bland collection of help-yourself dishes (which often are nothing more than an odd collection of appetizers) is standard fare.
I’m fortunate to have friends in their 60s and 70s where I can still enjoy the traditional dinner experience.
I wouldn't call diagnosing people for actual medical issues we learned about since the 70s an en vogue thing. Other than those, it's pretty much just vegan / non-vegan.
This rant reminds me why Linux has limited penetration. Its user base is made up of opinionated users who view compromise along the way to something larger as a moral failure.
There are multiple hyper-warming scenarios that have been postulated over the years. Look up the clathrate gun, ocean circulation collapse, arctic albedo flip.. some are now considered unlikely.
I don't know if any would be a Venus scenario, probably not. But we don't really need that much warming to kill ourselves off. Average global temps in the Eucene were up to double what they are today, that would do the job :)
And while not all the way to Venus, Earth's history has multiple mass extinction catastrophes that have happened. Some have been due to things like asteroids, or volcanism but also just chemical imbalance. An ice age is small beans compared to those...
Your post sounds like it is made by a disgruntled misanthrope. I lead teams of biologists and data scientists and both are part of a vast team, each of us playing our bit part, myself included. If your desire is to be the center of attention, you are in the wrong field.
My post may come off disgruntled (point taken). But my point is to completely dispel any romantic notion for someone who is young and want to make the switch into life science research, if they learn all of these ugly things and still want to do it - then they made the right decision and I've done my job. Kindness imho is not being polite and then taking advantage of people's passion/enthusiasm later (nobody so far has disputed the -EV nature of the field itself just my tone) - it is doing right by people from the jump, not serving the institution or my interest in it. And I'm not sayin you're wrong either or that you are not dedicated (by default I presume everybody is in the research), just sharing my perspective, hope you have a good one.
As long as we acknowledge that is your perspective, and in my opinion based on 30+ years of experience, is one that is typical. Most people on the data side, enjoy their work and are well paid, perhaps not near FAANG standards, but they do enjoy their work and life.
I have no doubt you had a bad experience. There are a LOT of egotistical professors and grad studentss who don’t value others. Have you given industry a fair go yet though? You may find a job there more to your liking. The people are generally less arrogant than those in academia, and we view ourselves, rightfully so, as cogs in a big machine.
Did you see the announcement from Moderna today? That was the result of decades of us grunts chipping away the problem.
I can’t overemphasize how happy I am that people are taking the surveillance threat that Flock represents seriously. Ordinarily, the “I haven’t done anything wrong so I have nothing to worry about” fallacy tends to dominate the discussion.
From the self-stated bios, this group consists solely of CS guys. No biologist, physicist, linguist, chemist, biophysicist to be found. Based on this observation alone I call nonsense. These is AI bullshittery. These guys aren’t close enough to the problems to understand the challenges.
Source: PhD Computational biophysicist turned experimentalist. I work with genuine scientists across a range of disciplines from neurodegeneration, cancer, to fibrosis. Getting in the lab and generating data is absolutely key, among other things.
“Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today. By automating the loops of discovery, the world will be able to make much more rapid advances across countless fields of science.”
The key point is these jackasses explicitly state, “ a handful of people” can replace “massive teams of scientists and engineers”.
These guys don’t even understand the nature of the challenge and neither do you apparently. If they did, they would realize that it indeed does require “massive teams of engineers and scientists” to solve our most pressing problems.
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