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Cake day: June 24th, 2024

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  • Don Piano@feddit.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyzTaste the flavor
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    3 months ago

    It’s a pain perceiver where capsaicin activates it.

    Our senses run on chemicals, and that means sometimes chemicals activate these senses. Capsaicin is similar to a different chemical that our bodies use as signal, and binds to the receptor instead.

    You could imagine it like a vending machine that’s supposed to dispense soda if you put Euro coins in, but it’ll equally dispense soda if you put other flat pieces of metal in it.




  • Don Piano@feddit.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyzpsycho killer
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    8 months ago

    When I studied with a researcher on this, I learned it even stronger than “not all”: Most perpetrators of child sexual abuse are specifically not pedophiles. By focusing on pedophilia (and there focusing on expressing anger rather than effective preventative measures, which feature support rather than trying to feel morally superior), resources are not only overallocated in one place but underallocated in another, thus making the problem worse


  • I recommend finding a different statistics teacher, preferably one who isn’t a comic and one who knows what the difference between a standard deviation, a standard error, and a 95% interval is. Those should not be too hard to find, it’s relatively basic stuff, but many people actually kinda struggle with the concepts (made harder by various factors, don’t get me started on the misuse of bar charts).


  • Keep learning, and it’ll stay easier than if you didn’t. See if you can find changes for the structure of what you’re learning so you don’t get too ossified about that, either. Like, have a decade where you focus more on sciences, one more for arts, one more for languages, one more for understanding people who are very different from you… Maybe a decade is too big a chunk, but you get the idea.


  • Maybe, yeah, but I kinda get annoyed at this kinda dismissiveness - it’s a type of vague anti-science or something like that. Like… Sure, overfitting is a potential issue, but the answer to that isn’t to never fit any curve when data is noisy, it is (among other things) to build solid theories and good tests thereof. A lot of interesting stuff, especially behavioral things, is noisy and you can’t expect to always have relationships that are simple enough to see.

    You’re probably right. But also, I was annoyed, not trying to convince. Maybe not the best place to post from. :)


  • Don Piano@feddit.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyzCan't argue that.
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    8 months ago

    That’s stupid, though. If you can explain 11% of the variance of some noisy phenomenon like cognitive and behavioral flexibility, that’s noteworthy. They tested both linear and quadratic terms, and the quadratic one worked better in terms of prediction, and is also an expression of a meaningful theoretical model, rather than just throwing higher polynomials at it for the fun of it. Quadratic here also would coincide with some homogenizing mechanism at the two ends of the age distribution.