Ancestors

Written by dynomight on 2024-12-19 at 19:59

interesting argument—if a rule is broken often enough, maybe it's unreasonable to expect people to follow it (even if you think it's a good rule)

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Written by Brian Marick on 2024-12-20 at 00:14

@dynomight Conversing with my wife, an (emeritus) professor of veterinary internal medicine (food animal variant), you should be curious about fields that select for niceness. (She came up in vet med when it was harder to get into vet school than med school, and it was said that nice people went into vet med and the rest went into "single-species medicine." She might be slightly biased.) (And academia's incentive structure has changed a lot in the last 30+ years.)

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Written by Brian Marick on 2024-12-20 at 00:19

@dynomight It's interesting. She worked in a field where cost-benefit analysis reigned supreme on the clinic floor (farmers knew and cared about the replacement cost of a patient), yet she and others didn't seem to apply such concepts to their academic work. There were certain duties that came with the job, cost not considered.

I may over-romanticize.

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Written by Brian Marick on 2024-12-20 at 00:22

@dynomight When it came to academic queries, she was always touched by those that came from poor countries where they couldn't afford journals and such. Maybe you should pretend to be in the Third World.

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Toot

Written by dynomight on 2024-12-20 at 11:40

@marick Thinking about different fields is funny. My impression is that someone in pure math is far more likely to respond than (say) someone in public health.

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Descendants

Written by dynomight on 2024-12-20 at 12:45

@marick Not sure exactly why... I think the culture in pure math is more than questions are just about the ideas, with fewer possible "ulterior motives" for asking about something?

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Written by Brian Marick on 2024-12-20 at 15:00

@dynomight To test my theory about niceness: have you made many requests of philosophy professors? My understanding is the field is known for hostility.

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Written by dynomight on 2024-12-20 at 16:09

@marick I haven't! Philosophy rarely intersects with data or experiments or whatever so I guess I rarely have cause to ask specific questions? I feel bad just bothering someone and saying "I don't understand"...

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Written by dynomight on 2024-12-20 at 16:10

@marick I will say that my requests of economists have been... consistent with your theory.

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Written by Brian Marick on 2024-12-20 at 23:53

@dynomight I can't remember the two economists (both their names began with R) who made big and policy-affecting claims about something macroeconomic, but it was some "can I have your data?" request that revealed they'd made a spreadsheet error that undermined their claim.

It would be somehow fitting if the lesson economists drew was "not giving out your data increases your utility more than being careful about your data wrangling."

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