It is farcical. And then remember what a bunch of clowns the NSDAP's leaders were; the ranting Hitler, the esoteric nonsense of Himmler and Hess, Goering's makeup and fake uniforms, and then contrast that with their actions and impact on history. A clown-show widely mocked during their time, but look at the catastrophic impact they had: just because they're clowns doesn't mean they're not dangerous.
As a kid I had always heard that Hitler was some kind of evil genius. It wasn't until my 20s that I started actually reading about this stuff and NOPE, he was actually a fucking idiot.
It's really strange how close Papa New Guinea is to Australia (by territory, not people to people) and how little contact there is between the two countries, and how little interest there is. Australians couldn't tell you a thing about PNG, its people, or its politics (except those few who've gone to PNG for mining jobs). Compare with New Zealand - NZ is further away by continental distance, but closer to the main cities of Australia. Completely different relationship.
Are you aware of the Australian indigeneous ethnic group called the Torres Strait Islanders? They are considered ethnically distinct from Aboriginal peoples in the rest of Australia. There are about 100,000 of them. They reside on the islands between the north tip of Australia and the south coast of Papua New Guinea. Thus, I would qualify your post by saying: The vast majority of Australians have little contact with PNG, but the Torres Strait Islanders have had contact with PNG peoples for thousands of years.
Not that strange, actually, once you understand the geography and ethnography. First of all (although not that significant), straight line distance between the population centres of AU and PNG is further than that of AU and NZ: Sydney to Port Moresby ~4 hours by direct flight, Sydney to Auckland ~3 hours. More significantly, the whole ~1000km length of Cape York Peninsula is one hell of a barrier: virtually uninhabited, no sealed roads most of the way, and extremely inhospitable (cyclones and mass flooding for several months every year, killer crocodiles / jellyfish everywhere, prevalence of dengue fever / malaria).
The Torres Strait Islanders are genetically and culturally part of the peoples of New Guinea, which is why here in Australia we refer to "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples", why the TSIs have their own flag that's different to the Aboriginal flag, etc. We non-indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand share the same predominantly British ancestry, a very similar (and intertwined) colonial / post-colonial history, etc.
It’s of interest certainly but why would it be strange that Australia, a member of the Commonwealth and New Zealand, also a member of the Commonwealth have closer ties? The US has closer ties with the UK than it does Cuba, for example.
The closest land to PNG in Australia is nearly uninhabited. Northern Queensland may as well be on the Moon. Cape York Peninsula has a population of only 18,000 people! Northern Alaska has significantly more, as a point of comparison.
I always like to bring up how many decades of research, how many hundreds of years of entire PhD-theses, how many sleepless nights were used up to generate all the protein structure data that made up the corpus of Protein Data Bank - that was then hovered up by the AlphaFold team, and guess who got the Nobel Prize...
Individual crystal structures, while heroic, probably don't qualify for the Nobel Prize (the only counterexample that I can think of is the crystal structure of the ribosome, which finally demonstrated that the active site was RNA, not protein).
And don't forget that AlphaFold worked because of sequence data (similarly laboriously collected by a large number of people).
A big part of the problem is that we award prizes to the small number of people who do something first, or who were in charge- the LIGO NP should have been awarded to the entire consortium, not Kip Thorne and a couple other people under this logic.
Just like all non-AI related nobel prizes before them.
Every laureate stands on the shoulder of giants which is their field as a generations-spanning body of researchers. They did the last step and get recognized. The good ones acknowledge that in their acceptance speeches.
Did you see that Andrew Gelman and others just published Bayesian Workflows? https://avehtari.github.io/Bayesian-Workflow/
It sounds similar to what you're after, away from describing the logic of models and the maths, instead it's about (quote from intro) 'There are all sorts of tacit knowledge in applied statistics that do not make it into published
papers and textbooks. The present book is intended to put some of these ideas out in the open'
As an ex-academic (not mathematician), this really resonates. Every generation of researchers has to outperform the researcher generation before them - there are fully tenured profs out there who, with their track record, wouldn't get a postdoc nowadays. It's just a ratchet where every generation has to be more outstanding than the previous one, so yeah, you suddenly need 'triple the conferences'. Eventually that ratcheting reflects on your self-worth and you start calling yourself mediocre, even though you vastly outperform the previous generation. It's an extremely unfair game designed by careless people.
Throw AI into the mix and your self-worth crashes. Just today I saw a Claude Science set of results that made my own work of the past 2 months completely superfluous, and I sit here and wonder what's the point.
All research and progress boils down to Brownian Loop Soup.
Someone/something having a result showing a connection does not mean they have explored "the way" to do it.
Not even the most elegant mathematically perfect solution is guaranteed to be the best way to crack a problem, or provide a definite answer.
Meandering paths through whatever we set our minds to do and serendipity is the way of human beings for the past few hundred millennia.
Sure! I was building a workflow that assesses human gene model accuracy. Which part is supported by what evidence? Important for drug development; if we want to change $THING it better exist in the first place.
I came up with a set of rules, collated external databases, and then slowly (Claude-code assisted) built a Nextflow pipeline that gives me an automated report, which I then manually expand by 'human' assessment of the evidence.
Claude Science prompted with 'assess this gene' came up pretty much with the same rules, built a report, and did the manual assessment of evidence pitfalls for about 10% of a Claude Max subscription's tokens in about 15 minutes. Some details differ from my report - a different tool here or there - but overall, what we needed out of these reports is in the Claude Science report.
Consider that if this was ran from your machine - it would have all of your memories and might be relying on the past 2 months. I'd be curious what would happen if it was run independently.
(I am assuming they didn't train on your prompts, which is always a worry)
You may be thinking of one of the poems of Christian Morgenstern? He used many tricks of formatting for jokes, famous example that fits with yours is The Funnels
The German is more crass: Hurenkind and Schusterjunge, translates to 'child of a whore' and 'shoemaker boy'. The child of a whore does not know where it comes from (who is their father), the short final line - the shoemaker boy is so poor, he does not know where he will end up (the short first line)
Australia too - however, to get a renewal all you need is an online connection and a credit card, the renewal (at least for me!) goes through automatically. (Notwithstanding that Australia just increased the PR-renewal cost from ~400-500 to ~1400-1500 AUD)
I've spent SO MUCH TIME in my life trying to get laboratory machinery, usually only ten of them in the world, to spit out their data nicely. They have UIs but usually god-awful, and all data is hidden away somewhere (they're written by biologists, for biologists). I wish I could go void some warranties....
Security/compliance have the external hammer: if they fail, your org will have to pay fines and someone may end up being criminally liable (depends on country).
The ethics department; if they fail, there may be some negative journalism, but who which AI company has positive journalism these days? There's no external hammer for ethics.
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