Spyke

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Peer review

I recently read an interesting article proposing to get rid of the current peer review system: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review

The argument was roughly this: for the unfathomable (unpaid) hours spent on peer review, it's not very effective. Too much bad research still gets published and too much good research gets rejected. Science would also not be a weak-link problem but a strong-link problem, i.e., scientific progress would not depend on the quality of our worst research but of that of our best research (which would push through anyway in time). Pretty interesting read, even though I find it difficult to imagine how we would transition to such a system.

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Professional Scientists of Lemmy: What is your field of study's, most complex unanswered question?

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As a software engineering researcher, I strongly agree. SE research has studied code comprehension for more than 40 years, but for that amount of time, we know surprisingly little about what makes really high-quality code. We are decent in saying what makes very bad code, though, but beyond extreme cases, it's hard to come to fairly general statements.

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"it's making me uncomfortable"

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I guess the issue is that, assuming a turnout of 60% for simplicity, the undeserving third category you mention only makes up roughly 30% of eligible voters. Which means 70% of eligible voters are deserving of what's coming to them (according to you). I acknowledge that throwing the whole country into the same bucket is not a fair and helpful simplification, but it's becoming increasingly harder to resist the urge.

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What's a piece of Media that is so underrated you must mention it?

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I also greatly enjoyed this one and think it's a really well-made show with great actors. It was also one of the few shows I could watch with my wife with us both really liking it (we have unfortunately very different taste regarding TV shows). We often laughed at very different moments that the other one didn't find super funny but that didn't matter at all. Definitely recommend!

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What are you most basic principles for life?

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I think you might be approaching this in the wrong way. There is no objective right or wrong when it comes to ethics. Life and humans are simply too complex to create simple, objective rules that would be interpreted in exactly the same way by a decent number of humans for a reasonably complex situation. And you don't even have to include ethical dilemmas for that, like deciding whether to shoot down a plane hijacked by terrorists or interrogating a kidnapper via torture.

Nonetheless, many homogeneous groups get to a decent degree of ethical alignment, and asking people for their ethical rules or guidelines is an interesting question to get inspiration and to find out how others try to navigate the complexity of the world. Just don't expect these rules to be objective.

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