Ideas Worth Sharing, Ideas Worth Hoarding

How do we avoid falling into the trap of thinking that if nothing is perfectly true, then anything can be true?

Have you ever been emotionally hijacked, only to later realize that you've made decisions that don't align with your long term goals? Haven't we all? Was it a look or a word that set you off?

Scientists, academics, and journalists are people. They have hometowns, political leanings, personal beliefs, and career ambitions. These factors can, and do, influence their work in subtle ways. Using the fundamentals of mathematics to reconfigure words gets us closer to truth.

Suppose you had a simple representation of one scientist's; self-knowledge, knowledge of another scientist's private life, and the performance reviews of everyone employed by the university department that employs both of these scientists.

Now, suppose that you took a simple representation of those two scientist's lived experience of the university department and strapped a user interface to it.

Is the end product worthy of the title "consciousness"? What does human consciousness have to do with Truth? Suppose you added everyone's search history to the data set. Can you see how LLMs are positioned in this paradigm?

Things wrong with science;

• Confirmation Bias: The most common and innocent bias. It's the human tendency to favor information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. A researcher who believes a treatment will work may be more likely to notice positive outcomes and unintentionally downplay negative ones.

• Publication Bias: The scientific community itself has a bias. Journals are far more likely to publish positive or surprising results than studies that find... well, nothing. This "file drawer problem" means that for every study that shows "X causes Y," there might be ten unpublished studies that found no link at all.

• Funding Bias: Who pays for the study? Research is expensive. If a study on a new drug is funded by the company that wants to sell it, there's an inherent pressure (conscious or not) for a positive outcome.

Acknowledging this doesn't mean all research is a lie. It means that science is a human process, and like any human process, it’s imperfect.

Are scientists intelligent?