"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
This is the critical question and the answer is no, as far as I'm aware. Like many such suggestions it's "A great tool for telling you things you already know" as my professor used to say. Physics should be judged on its predictive power.
This article is a general critique of the reward system in academia, bolted on the lab leak hypothesis for clickbait. "The Science Game" is a thing and often discussed on HN, but I don't see any causative link here.
> All to say: scientists create dangerous synthetic viruses to achieve “high-impact” scientific output.
Does gain of function research yield more high impact papers than more benign types of virology research? The article seems to suggest so, but provides no citations indicating that. Were the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology publishing their research to general acclaim up until now? Given how little we know about it, doesn't seem so. Are these scientists driven by the same invectives as western university research academics? They're probably state employees on stable contracts for a start, not the PhD students and itinerant PostDocs of the university system, who are the main players of the Science Game.
I don't know the answers to these questions, but the article would be more persuasive if it did.
I'm skeptical of the article's point, but I think it does try to answer this question of yours:
> Does gain of function research yield more high impact papers than more benign types of virology research? The article seems to suggest so, but provides no citations indicating that.
The article's argument is that gain-of-function research moves the researcher from the set of existing viruses to the set of all the viruses we can create - a far, far larger set, and hence one that allows more publications. Or, to put it another way, after you've run out of viruses to find, and things to publish about them, creating more gives you many more papers to write.
There may be something to that argument, but I still agree with your general point that the article needs more evidence.
> Does gain of function research yield more high impact papers than more benign types of virology research?
The article puts "high-impact" in quotes. The thesis as I understood it is not that gain-of-function research is higher impact, but that it's _a_ fertile knob capable of stamping out adequate papers. The externalities here should put it out of bounds of the Science Game. The author is basically saying, go find other knobs to play your games.
Skimming the "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence" grant [0] cited in the posted article suggests a potentially useful role for gain of function research, although I'm not sure if that method was actually used.
The intended work was to (1) look for unknown viruses in bats and sequence the virus' genomes, (2) screen people who live and work nearby to see which viruses cross over to people, and (3) test the infectiousness of these viruses in cell culture and animal studies in a laboratory setting. The point of #3 would be to systematically compare the properties of viral strains with slight genetic variation to reveal which parts of the genome are responsible for which outcomes (symptoms, which species can be infected, etc.). Information from the lab comparisons would be used to help interpret which naturally occurring viruses observed in the screening work are potentially dangerous. Work like this _could_ help prevent a pandemic. (It would be bitterly ironic if it instead caused a pandemic.)
Synthetic variation of the viral genome ("gain of function", but also loss of function) allows direct experimentation to be done in the lab (#3). Direct experimentation is very useful because it allows systematic comparison to establish cause & effect; which genes do what, and how they interact. If a large supply of naturally occurring variants are already available though this can also be achieved, with less certainty, by correlation. But if humanity is going to be proactive about studying viruses, I don't see much reason to avoid gain of function research. Collecting and studying wild viruses means that dangerous new strains will be present in labs regardless, so either way stringent safety controls, monitoring, and containment plans are absolutely necessary.
> Direct experimentation is very useful because it allows systematic comparison to establish cause & effect
Only if "experimentation" includes "infecting humans with various strains and seeing what happens". Is that what you're advocating?
> Collecting and studying wild viruses means that dangerous new strains will be present in labs regardless
Dangerous new strains that happened to evolve naturally is one thing.
Dangerous new strains that are purposely being created by experimenters for the express purpose of finding ones that are more infective is another.
> so either way stringent safety controls, monitoring, and containment plans are absolutely necessary.
This would appear to be an argument for not doing this type of research in the Wuhan lab, which evidently did not have sufficient controls in place. Moreover, I see no indication that any assessment of such controls at the lab, and confirmation that they were sufficient, was a prerequisite for funding this research. That seems insane.
Agree with this critique completely. Erik should have picked a much better context in neuroscience to make his points, not in virology. The trademark addition to the science game is offensive. Don’t think Wittgenstein added TMs to his new terms or phrases much.
The actual impact of gain-of-function research papers isn't actually what is being critiqued here. That's putting the cart before the horse. What is being criticized is that the authors of such papers are pushing their research efforts into this area because they see it as their highest expected value avenue for generating the "impact" they need to secure funding, tenure, etc.
But if the gain-of-function research really is high-impact in the sense that is valuable to society, isn't it a good thing that incentives push scientists to work in this area? It would be an example of careerism "impact" lining up with actual impact; i.e., the system working as intended.
> if the gain-of-function research really is high-impact in the sense that is valuable to society
So far its net impact seems to be extremely negative (one pandemic, zero help with any treatments or preventive measures). So by your own argument, we should stop it immediately, right?
I'm not sure whether on the balance gain of function research is a good idea or not. The point of my comment was just that discussing the impact is highly relevant, and isn't "putting the cart before the horse". But I guess I should expand on it.
Regarding whether gain of function research is a good idea: Creating synthetic variants (to see if there is gain or loss in function) is very helpful in that it allows well-controlled experiments, which is necessary to establish causation. As I said elsewhere, I don't think the risk is appreciably different whether the lab's collection of dangerous viruses is all-natural or not. That is, if we ban gain of function research we should probably stop studying the unmodified variants also. There have been near-misses with accidental releases of SARS-CoV-1 and Guanarito [0]; no gain of function required. And the 1977 release of H1N1 came from vaccine development.
Regarding describing the net impact of gain of function research as one pandemic, zero help:
I don't know what would be different if gain of function research had been banned. The underlying methods have been used since at least 1999 on, among other things, MERS and SARS-2003 [0], so they have contributed to the general knowledge base that permitted extremely rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine. This was a significant help, not zero help. On a technical and scientific level we were very well prepared for COVID-19. Its biology was well-understood almost immediately. Our failures were on the social and organizational levels.
Was gain of function research genuinely necessary to achieve that level of preparedness? To answer that one of us would have to sift through the body of work on COVID-19 vaccine development and trialed treatments to see if the people involved used information from mutagenesis or infectious clone technology experiments (the work that is being referred to as "gain of function"). I haven't done that, so I can't give a definitive reply on that point.
There is also the matter of side effects from a ban. Creating synthetic variants within the scope of naturally occurring traits seems acceptable given the benefits. But there's no guarantee what a given edit will do in advance. If you ban all genetic engineering that could lead to gain of function then that will severely hamper research, including development of vaccines and antivirals.
So overall I guess I favor a restriction on deliberately increasing pathogenicity, virulence, and transmissibility beyond levels that occur in similar natural viruses, but allowing the possibility that this could still happen unintentionally. I also think synthetic variants should be destroyed as soon as their purpose is complete, and facilities where these viruses are studied should have a test/trace/isolate plan in continuous operation.
Edit: We also have to keep in mind that COVID-19 wasn't necessarily leaked from a lab, and even it was, it may be a naturally occurring variant. Which would make much of this speculation pointless.
> allowing the possibility that this could still happen unintentionally
Btw, this is also a key point: if we are going to do research that could unintentionally result in the release of a deadly pathogen, we need to agree as a society in advance on what countermeasures we will put in place if that happens. Leaders of society should not be having to "wing it" about these things after the release has occurred. For example, if the only way to stop a pandemic once the release reaches a certain stage is to stop all international travel, then everyone needs to agree in advance that if there is a release, and it reaches that stage (which in the case of COVID-19 would have been roughly mid-January 2020, when it was clear that infected people were making it from China to other countries), all international travel gets stopped until the outbreak is contained, no exceptions. (Imagine if that had been done in January 2020--we might have had no pandemic at all, and a lot less economic disruption overall to boot, since China, if you believe their numbers, had their outbreak under control by February 2020.) And if that gives a lot of people second thoughts about whether such research should be allowed at all, if that kind of drastic consequence has to be planned for, good.
> Creating synthetic variants (to see if there is gain or loss in function) is very helpful in that it allows well-controlled experiments
Only if, as I responded to another post of yours elsewhere in this discussion, the experiments consist of infecting humans with different strains and seeing what happens to them. And even then there are a huge number of possible confounders.
> There have been near-misses with accidental releases of SARS-CoV-1 and Guanarito [0]; no gain of function required
Indeed. The fact that this problem has been around for a while doesn't make it any less of a problem. Plus, those releases had a much smaller impact because those previous viruses were not as well adapted to human infection when they first appeared--a feature that SARS-CoV-2 does not share (see further comments below).
> I don't know what would be different if gain of function research had been banned
If the lab escape theory is correct, we would not have had this pandemic because the lab would not have done the research in the first place. Seems like a pretty major negative consequence to me.
> On a technical and scientific level we were very well prepared for COVID-19. Its biology was well-understood almost immediately. Our failures were on the social and organizational levels.
The decision to do gain of function research in the first place, particularly in a lab in China where US officials could not hope to have any useful oversight of safety procedures, was also a social and organizational failure. (So was our failure to get a vaccine widely distributed even though, as you note, we understood the biology of the virus very quickly.) Doesn't make the pandemic any less devastating.
> they have contributed to the general knowledge base that permitted extremely rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine
I don't know what knowledge base you're talking about. DNA sequencing technology, and generating mRNA from a given DNA sequence, which is how Pfizer and Moderna were able to produce a COVID-19 vaccine in a matter of hours, were around before any of the research you refer to was done, and that research added nothing new.
If you mean knowledge about the spike protein being important, that was known before any gain of function research was done, so I don't see how that research helps. Simple research into "how does this type of virus infect a human cell" would have been enough.
> I guess I favor a restriction on deliberately increasing pathogenicity, virulence, and transmissibility beyond levels that occur in similar natural viruses, but allowing the possibility that this could still happen unintentionally. I also think synthetic variants should be destroyed as soon as their purpose is complete, and facilities where these viruses are studied should have a test/trace/isolate plan in continuous operation.
While these are nice ideas, the problem is that they would have to be implemented with the same grossly failed institutions that got us into this mess.
To me this is similar to an argument I agree with against allowing capital punishment in our society: while I agree in principle that there can be cases where capital punishment is justified, the institutions in our society have shown that they are incapable of exercising the kind of discipline required to make sure that, when a person is sentenced to death, we know to a moral certainty that they are guilty of a crime that merits that punishment. Similarly, while in principle it might be the case that we could gain benefits from dangerous research with viruses, the institutions in our society have shown that they are incapable of exercising the kind of discipline required to do that safely.
> COVID-19 wasn't necessarily leaked from a lab, and even it was, it may be a naturally occurring variant
The fact that even the earliest samples obtained, in late 2019, were already highly infective to humans, is a huge indicator to me that this virus was not only leaked from a lab, but leaked from a lab that was doing gain of function research, not a naturally occurring variant. As I noted above, previous accidentally released viruses, which were believed to be naturally occurring variants, did not have this property, and, as we can see by comparing the respective outbreaks that followed, it makes a huge difference in the impact.
I think you may be approaching the discussion more from the standpoint of where to assign blame specifically regarding COVID-19, and I'm more interested in the benefits from infectious clone technology and infection experiments in general, which covers the last 50 years [0], not just the work in 2R01AI110964 that is currently under criticism. So I yield on all Wuhan-related points.
One thing that really confuses me though is why you say human testing is a requirement, when almost all work is done in cell & animal models. Usually human tests are restricted to treatments, and only those that have already gone through cell and animal testing to ensure as much safety as possible. I just want to emphasize this point because the thought of doing infectious clone testing on people is awful and the Common Rule is meant to prevent this kind of abuse [1].
Regarding "previous accidentally released viruses, which were believed to be naturally occurring variants, did not have this [highly infectious to humans] property." The ones that are notable enough to make it into reports kind of do. The 1977 H1N1 leak affected "20-70% of those under 20 years of age in school or military camp outbreaks in the first year" [2]. There were also several leaks of the 2002 SARS virus that could easily have gone the same way COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) did. China was the source of several of these leaks, so feel free to use this as evidence for a lax safety culture.
> I think you may be approaching the discussion more from the standpoint of where to assign blame specifically regarding COVID-19
No, I'm approaching it from the standpoint of how to not have a pandemic like this happen again.
> I'm more interested in the benefits from infectious clone technology and infection experiments in general
What are the benefits? What benefits have we gained specifically from this research, that we wouldn't have gained without it?
> why you say human testing is a requirement, when almost all work is done in cell & animal models
Because we can't reliably predict what a virus will do to humans unless humans have been infected with it. Cell and animal models are nice, but they aren't the same as actual human patients.
> Usually human tests are restricted to treatments
Exactly. And that's for good reasons. And my point is that testing treatments isn't the same as testing the viruses themselves. The Wuhan lab wasn't testing treatments, they were testing viruses. So how treatments are tested, and how confident we feel that they are safe based on cell and animal testing, is irrelevant to work with viruses themselves.
> and only those that have already gone through cell and animal testing to ensure as much safety as possible.
And even then we find effects in humans that we didn't expect. And that's for treatments, where we have more control over the variables than we do with viruses themselves.
> The ones that are notable enough to make it into reports kind of do.
"Kind of" isn't the same thing. I'm not talking about how infective they got in the first year. I'm talking about the way SARS-CoV-2 was in the very first human patients we have records of, back in late 2019. The strains isolated from that time were already highly infective. Initial strains of previous viruses were not; they increased in infectivity as they spread in humans and evolved to adapt. That's what we expect to happen for a virus that naturally jumps to humans from some other source. But when we see a virus that is already highly infective in the first human cases we know of, that's an indication that it did not naturally jump to humans, but was specifically engineered in a lab to be more infective to humans.
> There were also several leaks of the 2002 SARS virus that could easily have gone the same way COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) did.
Interesting article, but some of the arguments are pretty weak.
>“Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.”
>"Capitalism led to the creation of monopolies ..., to food lines, and to war"
The author seems to think these two statements are a damming contradiction, which proves
> "When it came to recognizing unpalatable truths, it seems that Orwell had as much difficulty as the next man."
However, both Capitalism and Communism can be flawed (and are), there is no contradiction here. The ability to critique both is probably why Orwell's work endures.
I completely agree. His review [0] of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom [1] illustrates his capacity for nuance combined with his willingness to face those unpalatable truths.
As a sample, he was a socialist who also wrote this:
It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.
The article also quotes this line, the next paragraph for context:
> Professor Hayek is also probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.
I'm not sure why more democracy doesn't solve both issues, while retaining the benefits of both, which seems to be where most modern nations are broadly headed, in fits and starts.
Most of the world has settled on capitalism because it solves a specific class of coordination problems really well, and targeted intervention can stave off the externalities enough to make the system bearable.
Slumps and unemployment aren't, like, an avoidable curse, but they're pretty damn hard to avoid, and so far no system has had real success.
But you're wrong. If you look at economic records going back to the middle ages, you can see the effect of Keynesian economics, central banks, social safety nets, social security systems, etc. Have had on reducing slumps and unemployment. We've gotten very, very good at it. In the 1600's, there were great depression-style crashes every 5 years or so. Despite massive wars, pandemics, geopolitics, and automation, economic slumps and unemployment have been incredibly moderate the past 90 years or so, and they have gotten milder as a function of time over that timeframe.
I didn't downvote you but .. it can easily be argued that the reduced slumps is because of the liberalisation of trade and reduced central control of money. e.g. floating currencies.
It has also been plausibly argued that the great depression was lengthened (and possibly deepened) by things like the New Deal.
In my view it’s because democracy is somewhat orthogonal to capitalism or collectivism, and masses are easily controlled anyway (they can live with the illusion of being in control). A democracy loses something central to the concept when a restricted group has a very concentrated power (be it political, as in the case of pure collectivism, or economic, as with pure capitalism). In my opinion there can’t be true democracy when there are strong imbalances in a society, even when there are regular democratic elections.
"A democracy loses something central to the concept when a restricted group has a very concentrated power (be it political, as in the case of pure collectivism, or economic, as with pure capitalism)."
Yes, it's concentrations of power which are the real enemy.
Unfortunately, no matter how many dictatorships, oligarchies, monarchies, theocracies and kleptocracies the world suffers through, we never seem to learn that lesson.
Orwell wrote that review at pretty much the same time as the Bretton Woods system of international monetary exchange was implemented, which the largest single piece of the Keynesian economic foundations for 25 years of economic growth with a high level of stability and a low level of inequality in the US-centric world.
There were good reasons why Bretton Woods failed in 1970, but the subsequent ascendance of Hayekian neoliberalism doesn't look so good 40 years on.
Hayek himself used the term "neo-liberal" to describe the "movement" of liberalism to which he belonged [0]. The historian Quinn Slobodian [1] advocates using the term "neoliberal" for the intellectual history surrounding the Mont Pelerin Society. In this context, it is sensible to distinguish between a Hayekian strand and, say, Wilhelm Röpke's version of neoliberalism.
Those two statements are only in contradiction if you believe there are only two choices for how to organize a society: A Red one and a White one — and both built on hierarchical power. Orwell clearly didn't believe that. As he wrote:
"Had I gone to Spain with no political affiliation at all I should probably have joined the International Column and should no doubt by this time have had a bullet in the back for being "politically unreliable", or at least have been in jail. If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists."
– George Orwell, "Letter to Jack Common [October? 1937]", in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcournt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 289.
I read the article and had the same feeling. The details are interesting but the arguments seem weak, particularly his argument about how self-contradictory Orwell was.
> "It is often the contradictions in an individual’s character that give it distinction; in the case of Orwell, these were more marked and more numerous than in most, but it is not clear whether he was even aware of them."
I gave up right there, this was so grossly condescending to its subject. Orwell was not aware of his own contradictions? Has the author ever actually read any Orwell?
I think they also got confused with the differences between communism, socialism, social democracy, and democracy. Granted we often conflate these terms but there are differences, especially in authority and where that power lies or who it belongs to. Orwell strikes me as a person who was afraid of authority and how power corrupts, or how quickly it can corrupt. Seems like a good reason to criticize communism. Seems like also a good reason to be afraid of the status quo. But you can also be critical of authority and think some is necessary. I think many for a long time have sought to find the balance of authority and democracy. I don't think anyone has found the solution, if one exists.
I think it has to deal with how people think of optimization problems. Many people think there are global solutions. What we've learned over the last 200 years is that most problems are non-convex, lie in high dimensions, have long and coupled causal chains, are long-tailed, not-gaussian, non-zero summed (many positive, many negative), and are probabilistic in nature, but we assume the opposite of all these things (mostly due to approximations).
Needless to say, things are complicated. It's why we created specialization in the first place, but at the same time we expect people to be experts in many subjects (generalists). Because of this thinking many people will assume someone is being contradictory when they can criticize different things. The nature of reality is complex. No matter how you side on complicated issues there are reasons to critique different sides (Israel/Palestine, China/US, Communism/Socialism/Capitalism/xism, and so on). Simplifying things just causes us to argue over things we have no qualifications to argue over, but we'll do it with self-righteous indignation instead of as a way to learn or update our views. This is strange because arguing, debate, criticism, and self reflection are so important to democracies. It is far more important to critique your own philosophies (the ones you are fighting for) than those you oppose, since those are the things you have control over the direction of.
Sometimes it isn't about contradictions, sometimes (most of the times) we're just dumb and over simplifying.
Increasingly I think arguments are in public and recorded for posterity, making the social cost of a mistake (or being poorly informed, etc) much higher. Given that, I think we're seeing many arguments that are more about group belonging and performance rather than a genuine effort to learn via debate and dialog.
Throw in some radical oversimplifications and that's a pretty strong recipe for polarization. One that's actively cultivated and amplified due to media profit incentives. Unfortunately it's a vicious cycle that seems to make us dumber and oversimplify even more.
The problem with a lot of conservative journos is their inability to make the distinction between left-wing political thoughts, tending to lump everything under "socialism". This renders them unable to understand why Orwell was a left-wing anti-communist and in particular anti Stalin.
This is like dealing with the kind of writer who thinks that java and javascript are the same thing.
Similarly part of what makes Orwell both interesting and entertaining to read is him skewering some of the excesses of the left of his time, without fundamentally being hostile to egalitarianism. It's criticism because he wants a better left, not a non-existent one.
I don't think he was. He was anti-Stalinist, stemming from anti-totalitarianism, but I don't he was generally hostile to communism.
> without fundamentally being hostile to egalitarianism
Which puts it much less forcefully that you could. Orwell was a socialist. He fought with the Marxist POUM in the Spanish Civil War. He was fundamentally pro-egalitarianism and dedicated his life in a big way to egalitarianism as realised by Socialism.
> It seems to me that if we all weren't constantly dividing ourselves by an increasing number of characteristics that are not socioeconomic class, then we would have an enormous group of people working towards the problems that result from socioeconomic differences.
That's why some on the left believe that the elites (of both the NYT and Fox news persuasion) welcome and encourage identity politics. Marxists would say class is the important divisor and the rest is a distraction.
> She says she didn't publish this model for glory, but she also named it after herself.
She didn't name it after herself, the users did:
> collegues ... began using it and addressed it as "Tai's formula"
As is typically the way with eponymous scientific works, people citing the work add the author's name e.g. Maxwell's equations or Higgs' boson. The author doesn't typically declare "I have discovered X, which I shall call ${self.name}"
I have published multiple photonics papers and contributed to many and nobody has ever had the need to provide a citation for maxwell's equations. I would consider it reference padding if you do. Point is people could still have used the term without her publishing it. Also, am I supposed to take her word for it, at least she could have cited somewhere which tried to use it and give her credit. This seems like if anyone uses trapezoidal method she would take credit because nobody had a citation so everyone was just using "Tai's model".
> people citing the work add the author's name e.g. Maxwell's equations or Higgs' boson.
I don't think this rule applies here, because the paper introducing "Tai's rule" calls it "Tai's rule" rather than others citing it. As if Higgs called it Higgs' boson in his paper.
There's huge difference in significance though. Maxwell's equations have their distinctive name because he did discover a missing piece in a system (set) of equations that had been known before as separate phenomena and yet weren't used as a whole. The missing piece he discovered on paper, with a pure logical reasoning alone, that would bring consistency to the set of the equations, was later identified and confirmed as electromagnetic fields in reality.
It’s a generic phrase used quite widely by folks as a reference to societal unrest or societal breakdown, usually in the context of “preparing for” or “being ready for” such an event. The attempt to twist it to fit a certain narrative based on how a ridiculously small minority of people act is obnoxious and paints a whole lot of good people in a bad light.
That depends on how you define "trolling". It's an internet meme taking out of context and in bad faith.
The real story is that a lot of people are fed up with government overreach, abuse, and infringements of our constitutional liberties, and with the culture that supports it all. And also Hawaiian shirts are an aesthetic. That's all there is to it.
Basically? It's a bunch of people fed up with the high arbitrary BS that characterize American attempts at firearm regulation. At least that was how it started.
When you start getting ridiculousness like coat hangers and shoelaces labelled as machine guns, having to play "Mother May I?" with a federal agency to not lose your right to vote, having the exercise of your Constitutional rights locked behind a tax stamp (in the same manner as a poll tax) and increasingly being on the butt of every moral-panic induced attempt at having your Constitutionally established right undermined through weasel wording by the Supreme Court and an abject refusal by the same court to hear any cases that would make inroads on restoring those rights...
Well... Ya start to notice patterns. Like how the same thing happens with the first, the fourth, the fifth, the tenth...
Long story short it was a fantasy scenario concocted as a response to a hypothetical erosion of civil rights/breakdown in the overall political situation of the United States that would qualify as an instance of "Shit Hitting the Fan" (SHTF) that would justify the seemingly irrational stockpiling of weapons and ammunition.
It's been targeted, because it's a convenient boogeyman, it's nebulous, and it's being taken seriously by a bunch of people who don't understand the lost art of not taking everything you read on the Internet too seriously.
Plus, it's fun to say, and the Hawaiian shirts+tacticool are peak aesthetic.
Boogaloo itself comes from an older meme, <something> 2:Electric Boogaloo being an obligatory stand-in for a senseless sequel. Which fits for how the media is trying to portray the goal of people who know what the term means.
In the firearm community, there is generally a vein of dedication that liberty from draconian firearm regulation shouldn't come from the barrel of a gun, but by popular acceptance that the tool itself isn't evil, even if there are people who do evil things with it, and if the community could just do a better job at reaching out and explaining how firearms work, and the ridiculousness of the current vein of firearm regulations, the world (as experienced by firearms enthusiasts) would be a much better place.
Generally, the people in the community are avid theorycrafters, lovers of all things military, history buffs, engineers, degenerate hunters, etc.
Do you maybe have some unsavory elements taking things way too seriously? Probably. The irrationality of those hypothetical bad apples is only matched by those that think this is newsworthy.
Then again, as one of those who has actually picked through the net in search of hard to find nuggets of oral-ish history, I may be somewhat desensitized to the sense of controversy and alarm anything related to it inspires in people. Persistence in the face of obscenity and atrocity are generally used as a form of litmus test to determine whether or not someone is genuinely looking into the more unpleasant depths of reality for that nugget of understanding they're looking for.
Don't ask what it is I'm looking for that keeps me digging. I probably lost track of it years ago, and know now only that I must dig.
Take curcumin papers with a pinch of salt. It's a pan assay interference compound (PAIN), prone to misleading results. Pubmed is full of thousands of papers claiming it solves all manner of medical problems, leading it to be dubbed an 'improbable natural panacea'.
See this article, by the same author as it happens.
> Would this describe the world of physics prior to Einstein and Quantum Mechanics? I'm not a physicist, but my impressions is that it absolutely was "something extraordinary that invalidates most of our current understanding."
I am (or was) a physicist. Even scientific revolutions like Relativity and Quantum mechanics don't invalidate 'most' of our prior understanding. Newtonian mechanics continues to be a very accurate model on the length scales that were testable at time it was conceived (apples and trees). The Relativity and Quantum Mechanics revolutions explained why classical mechanics breaks down at the scale of planets and atoms respectively. All that is invalidated is the idea that the current model is universal, but that would be naive thing to believe at any time. Scientific progress does not mean the prior results are wrong, it's an additive process, if done correctly.
Thanks for the input. I was just quoting the parent’s phrasing of ‘invalidates’. I’d agree that science is absolutely an additive process. However with regards to the mind, we may be in the position of physicists circa 1880. I suppose we simply can’t know.
"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.