• 8 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Everyone likes to believe they’re thinking independently.

    Can you elaborate on that claim?

    I exercise some critical analysis, but for the most part I just have trust in human ambition. For example: the reason I believe human CO2 emissions are driving climate change is not because I’ve looked at the evidence and evaluated it for myself.

    The reason I believe that human CO2 emissions are driving climate change is: that seems to be the consensus of people that have worked hard to impartially develop expertise and gather data to understand climate science.

    There are two important systems at play

    1: Scientific research, which harnesses human ambition by rewarding impartial research and discoveries which overturn old assumptions/paradigms.

    2: Journalism, which harnesses human ambition by rewarding impartial reporting on various fields of human interest. (Reporting is why it seems to be the consensus of the scientific community)

    The impartiality of these systems is (has always been) under assault by capitalism (which also derives its power by harnessing human ambition) and so one must, to an increasing degree, evaluate the appropriate level of personal mental effort to allocate to identifying biases in the reporting.


















  • I’m a different person weighing in here:

    When you said:

    The T3SS is one of the most complex bacterial molecular machines, incorporating one to over a hundred copies of more than 15 different proteins into a multi-MDa transmembrane complex (Table 1). The system, especially the flagellum, has, therefore often been quoted as an example for “irreducible complexity,” based on the argument that the evolution of such a complex system with no beneficial intermediates would be exceedingly unlikely. However, it is now clear that, far from having evolved as independent entities, many secretion systems share components between each other and with other cellular machineries (Egelman, 2010; Pallen and Gophna, 2007).

    I ofc am just a layman reading this, I agree it seems better understood that how I interpreted what he was saying, but it also doesn’t seem nearly as well understood as you’re saying.

    IMO it’s a problem with the article. The article says that T3SS is cited as an example as something that’s “irreducibly complex”. I suppose that it’s true that it is cited as that. But the second part of the paragraph explains why it isn’t true that it’s “irreducibly complex”. The paragraph isn’t explicit enough because the paragraph has probably evolved to be something that’s true and equally dissatisfying to both sides.