Sadly so, students often associate their self-worth with research and academic achievement, so if things go south, for whatever reason, they are in crisis.
>Sadly so, students often associate their self-worth with research and academic achievement, so if things go south, for whatever reason, they are in crisis.
A lot of people also are doing research they think will benefit the world, so it's not just about failing in a personal quest -- you feel you are letting down all of humanity if you do not achieve your goals.
I agree there are some red flags here to me. One is the priority claim "As far as we know, no one seems to have done this kind of stimulation before - even in animals." The other is the definitive conclusion based on weak experimental design and documentation, "Can ultrasound make you smell things that aren’t there? Turns out, yes!"
These are big scientific claims, but the work is clearly too premature to make those conclusions, and it lacks the connection to prior work and peer review needed for making priority claims. It's really great hacker-tinkering work though, and it could turn into solid science if they take more care with it.
If this effect is real and truly novel, my cynical expectation is that someone already established in focused ultrasound will read this, apply a more rigorous approach, and get the recognition that they are hoping for through more establish channels.
I wonder where they got their equipment and research space. A charitable explanation is that they purchased it out of their own pockets, but otherwise, they really should acknowledge their support if it's from a university, federal grant, foundation award, etc. In my opinion as someone with domain experience, they don't show any novel solutions to accomplish this, it's mostly just that they have the time and resources to experiment try out, so it's especially important to acknowledge who enabled it.
An experiment is essentially a way to question ones own beliefs by probing how well they align with reality. There are some theoretical scientists, who don't experiment, but I think they also benefit from counterfactual reasoning to do their work.
Questioning is great, but to generate scientific knowledge, we need a few more steps, roughly speaking:
1. Ask a question
2. Form a hypothesis
3. Experiment to test it
4. Analyze results
5. Draw conclusions
6. Repeat
The MAHA folks essentially disregard this as a valid process for gathering knowledge. They occasionally talk about experiments and studies, but they are selectively chosen to support their conclusions in a posthoc way, ignoring both evidence to the contrary and basic methodological issues. When people describe them as "anti-science," I believe this is the kind of thing they have in mind.
I think there’s an argument that the pandemic era caused a lot of resentment in tech executives. They didn’t like employees having better negotiating power, resenting the pay increases and also things like support for BLM or trans rights, and stuff like RTO factored into that showing people who’s the boss. There was also a successful outreach attempt which went under the radar until Semafor published this:
It's especially hard given that big tech companies and their leaders are working closely with government and explicitly supporting certain political missions, there are few truly apolitical corners of tech now.
This has been my reasoning for years and it has been great for that. If I have to leave in the middle of the workday for errand or appointment it’s with me in the Logitech folio case and I have connected computing power in my hands in a form factor that is roughly the size of a moleskine.
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