Next he's going to weigh in on the "birds are not dinosaurs" idea, or abiogenic petroleum. Sorry, Hanson, your PhD in (checks notes) social science does not give you any insight into Mars rocks.
Abiogenic petroleum? That is bullshit, it is actually a waste product created by [Agartha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agartha) which they pump upwards to get rid of it.
E: while there are certainly still people who believe Agartha is a thing, i have no clue if this is their story for oil, im just making shit up here.
Ooh, that's a new one for me, I'll have to check out Agartha. I was introduced to abiogenic petroleum by a post in r/conspiracy, if I remember correctly 😂
Oddly enough I learned of Agartha by plaing dominions 3 where it is a nation. Somebody pointed out it was based on some weird esotheric conspiracy theories and that was quite a trip to learn more about.
Same here, though I didn't start until Dominions 5.
The D&D monstrous manual is another one that occasionally spits out things from conspiracy theories (like the Derro)
Dom5 is the one I dont have, never got as deep into dom4 as I did in dom3 (I still have my 'gemgens flamewar' medals) so I didnt want to spend the money on it.
And yes, dnd is a bit weird like that, people have also pointed out the the name for the liches soul vessel (sorry forgot the correct one) is a bit offensive to Jewish people, as it is the name of an important spiritual artifact. Not a conspiracy, but still a bit meh, and should prob have been fixed ages ago.
It's a bit different, phylactery is greek, meaning "protection, amulet", it's a word used in some cases to translate the hebrew word Tefillin (the jewish boxes containing bits of torah) but it's a pretty generic word and has other uses (it's used for christian reliquaries, the boxes that contain saint's bones, for instance)
The Derro, OTOH comes from the Shaver Mysteries (with some specific bits changed)
My favorite thing the fake Journal of Cosmology ever did was getting pissed at a blogger pointing out how stupid one of their papers was and linking from their homepage to a page with the blogger's face photoshopped onto morbidly obsese women.
Robin is getting very annoyed at the push back from, you know, actual
scientists(and tries to move the goal posts):
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1390647242613219329
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1390645837945057281
He is so committed to not admitting he could be wrong, it is impressive. I'd assume he is this invested because it is part of his ideology. As shown in the whole 'high status' vs 'low status' bullshit he is pushing here. (E: out of nowhere even btw, people are just talking about different science papers, and he is making it into a weird low status/high status thing).
Haha yeah he is clearly using "status" here to mean "people with recognized expertise on the subject" - not necessarily a wrong way to use it, but once you frame it that way it's tough to get upset that they're given more credence than he is.
Hanson saying that the debunkers are hung up on "status" is a nifty way to evade the problem that the publisher is a scam outfit. Like, dude, it's not about the authors lacking Professor Points, it's the fact that the "journal" is a vanity press in a rented lab coat.
Initial appraisal fee, editorial attention fee, 2d3 peer review fees, paper, ink, and electron costs, and then you've got to pay the locker exit fee for yourself and your peers reviewer.
Ok, so even the weirdos of GME have joined the “true science is done
by dilettanti with high IQ, not by those idiotic ideologized academics
who only spent a life studying it and don’t even have an opinion on
whether Bulgaria is fragile or antifragile”. Which is
Good news, because it means they finally feel a foreign body in
academia. Like, it took fifteen years or so for them to realize, but the
neoliberal era in which each serious university hoped to send a Chicago
Boys-like group at the IMF is over. Now that kind of libertarians are
not the weird but quirky friend of the most popular kid anymore, they
are the embarrassing, awkward and cock-blocking friend of a guy who has
already a lot of drama on his own. And they are starting to understand
it. They have stopped the delusion/fraud (never been able to tell which
was) of posing as the “We are the real authoritative academics who do
actual research not like those pesky neo-keynesians who enjoy media
status but nobody actually takes seriously. Trust me dude, at the
real economics conferences Saez serves drinks and Bowles plays
jazz (wink wink), while everybody debates if federal budget should be
slashed by 90% or 95%”. Now that is blatant even to them that such a
position is untenable, they are withdrawing to the last trench of fading
ideas, the anti-academia, “brave heterodox” bullshit
Bad news, because… Well, in that trench there are quite a lot of
distasteful people (as aficionados of this sub probably know better than
me), and it’s never good if they get reinforcements
everyone will see once they accept the spores, like you, robin, you
can feel them growing and befriending your rational mind, suggesting
that you spend more time outdoors and in high places
Mushrooms don't care what you believe in, [mushrooms are ~~badass~~ antifragile like that](https://preview.redd.it/u421ao8utoi41.jpg?width=720&auto=webp&s=27f0c01fc1abbc518738e73b7ece6b72069bb489)
You’ve got a thin atmosphere where the repeated freezing and
sublimation of carbon dioxide is a major factor, and you want to claim
that mushrooms are thriving to the point that they spring up overnight
in the tracks of Mars rovers? OK, pull the other one, guy.
There are legitimate journals that run on the model of charging authors instead of readers, or making that an option authors can choose. What fields that is economically feasible in, and how the fee levels are chosen, is a whole thing we could get into (e.g., when *Nature* announced the option last year, people said the price was way out of line). But Hanson is disingenuously replying to someone pointing out that this particular journal is a straight-up paper mill. As anybody could tell by [looking up the publisher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_Publishing).
Huh, TIL! It's been a while since I was in academia, but the fields I was in, it was always understood that if you were paying for publication it was a cashgrab.
That said, yeah, the real response there from Hanson should have been to point to evidence that this was a legit article and journal, rather than flail around and attack the critique rather than respond to it.
I mean, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about with exobiology, and that paper is bonkers, but authors paying to publish is unfortunately quite common even with prestigious journals. PNAS, and in my field, the journal Geology, etc. Usually this comes out of funding sources like grants and not out of the author's pocket. Still sucks, though, it's money that could have been used on research. Of course the predatory or vanity journals make you pay, but so do some of the legit journals.
In my last grant, we had a line item for article processing charges that we ended up not having to spend because we got waivers, and we had a line item for travel expenses that we couldn't spend because COVID.
Ha! Yeah, I recently submitted an NSF grant with funding just for publication costs. The whole system seems destined to collapse with stuff like sci-hub making it all free.
There's also an encouraging mini-trend of nonprofit journals. Depending on the size of the niche they cover, operating costs can be really low (basically website hosting in some cases), particularly when the community is one where "acceptance in a journal" is just a stamp of quality for a paper that would be available on the [arXiv](https://arxiv.org) anyway. *[Discrete Analysis](https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/)* is a math journal that's run that way for several years now. In my own field, there's *[Quantum](https://quantum-journal.org/)*, which has a higher throughput and thus higher operating costs (they need an admin staff of three people working part-time or thereabouts). They have to set a "default" publication fee because funding agencies don't have the legal means to support them otherwise, but you can basically click an "I don't wanna pay that" button.
The paper is from a well-known crank, Rhawn Joseph, and his pals from the Journal of Cosmology, Joseph’s crank pseudojournal promoting panspermia:
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/10/06/prince-of-panspermia-has-a-paper-retracted-and-sues-springer-nature/
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/01/30/funny-looking-rock-found-on-mars/
Hanson is not merely unable to tell experts from cranks, he’s siding with the crank over the experts who are right there.
Robin is getting very annoyed at the push back from, you know, actual scientists(and tries to move the goal posts): https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1390647242613219329
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1390645837945057281
Peer review may be in crisis, at least we still have sneer review
Ok, so even the weirdos of GME have joined the “true science is done by dilettanti with high IQ, not by those idiotic ideologized academics who only spent a life studying it and don’t even have an opinion on whether Bulgaria is fragile or antifragile”. Which is
i believe in the marshrooms robin
they’re there and powerful and ever growing
everyone will see once they accept the spores, like you, robin, you can feel them growing and befriending your rational mind, suggesting that you spend more time outdoors and in high places
the mushrooms know bayes too, robin
(PZ Myers)
Isn’t this guy a college professor? He can’t possibly believe this, can he?
This almost sounds like ironic criticism. Why mention “academic” paper? It reminds me of “Any man who must say I am the king is no true king.”
Edit: someone else asked the question that was in my mind:
Isn’t this the logical endpoint of economics deciding to encompass more and more fields?
Someone needs to check his priors
Huh, getting pushback from Amara, someone I know. She generally knows what she is talking about.