David Bertioli

Scientist & Professor. Plants, agriculture & more. Exasperated with ideologies. Philosophy matters. Personal perspective from UK, Brazil & USA.

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

Nullius in verba

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

Discussion on International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources with:

Last year's chair, Alwin Köpse
Director of CGIAR Genebanks, Vania Azevedo
CEO of Bejo Zaden, John-Pieter Schipper
Uni of Georgia's Soraya Leal-Bertioli and myself

At Sowing the Future, the World Seed Conference in Lisbon
Discussion starts 6 minutes into video, link in reply

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

Discussion starts 6 mins
https://t.co/tlobyBfmZM

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

Discussion on International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources with:

Last year's chair, Alwin Köpse
Director of CGIAR Genebanks, Vania Azevedo
CEO of Bejo Zaden, John-Pieter Schipper
Uni of Georgia's Soraya Leal-Bertioli and myself

At Sowing the Future, the World Seed Conference in Lisbon
Discussion starts 6 minutes into video, link in reply

[Paata Ivanisvili @PI010101]

A remarkable moment in mathematics publishing: almost the entire editorial board of the Journal of Approximation Theory has resigned simultaneously, declaring that “the journal, as we knew it, has ceased to exist.”

[Dr. Jonathan N. Stea @jonathanstea]

That time a 9-year-old skeptic named Emily Rosa debunked energy healing (a pseudoscientific alternative medicine treatment) and published in a top medical journal.

https://t.co/mzH6TTa6Vw

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

https://t.co/h2DQiYAg1B

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

A 10 min video on the great José FM Valls
His work in collecting & characterising the wild species of peanut is extraordinary. It shows him in his environment, in the field, talking to people, explaining about the plants — Fantastic!
Worth watching even if you don't speak Portuguese
(link in reply)

[Mushtaq Bilal, PhD @MushtaqBilalPhD]

The growing inaccessibility of science that you can understand by paying €27.99

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

https://t.co/ScYCNqcvU8

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

Peter H. Raven has passed away, aged 89, leaving a legacy that is larger than life. He lived his vocation right to the end. His last publication is a beautiful study on spiny shrub pea from the Californian chaparral
(link in reply)

[Undiscovered History @HistoryUnd]

Tom Brown, a retired engineer, dedicated 25 years to preserving approximately 1,200 apple varieties from extinction.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔A researcher invented a fake eye condition called bixonimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within weeks.
The fake papers thanked Starfleet Academy, cited funding from the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's Gemini told users it was caused by blue light. Perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90,000 people.

ChatGPT advised users whether their symptoms matched. The fake research was then cited in a peer-reviewed journal that only retracted it after Nature contacted the publisher.

My Take
The researcher made the papers as obviously fake as possible on purpose. The AI systems didn't catch it. Neither did the human researchers who cited it in real journals, which means people are feeding AI-generated references into their work without reading what they're actually citing.

I've covered the FDA using AI for drug review, the NYC hospital CEO ready to replace radiologists, and ChatGPT Health launching this year. All of that is happening in the same environment where a condition funded by a Simpsons character and endorsed by the crew of the Enterprise was being presented as emerging medical consensus. The people making these deployment decisions seem to believe the pipeline from research to AI to patient is more supervised than it actually is. This experiment suggests it isn't supervised much at all.

Hedgie🤗
https://t.co/8Kg8FOrgHW

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

A welcome decision from the IOC
Women athletes can compete fairly once more

The debacle leaves the reputation of intellectual classes badly damaged. Their cultural weight was used as an illiberal cudgel, which is obviously anti-intellectual
https://t.co/YWejpoc2a4

[Mark Shearman MBE @AthleticsImages]

After today's excellent decision by the IOC.,if the Rio 2016 women's 800m. was held today, the 3 medallists in my photo. Wambui, Niyonsaba & Semenya would be barred and the medals would go to Canada's Melissa Bishop, Poland's Joanna Jozwik & GB's Lynsey Sharp @AthleticsWeekly

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

"I will therefore confess that there are several sentences in the present volume which some unusually stupid children of ten might find a little puzzling."

From the forward of Bertrand Russell's "Unpopular Essays"
Treat yourself! Download it for free here:
https://t.co/2D8wopgi43

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

"innovation-led productivity growth has been the single most important factor limiting agricultural emissions globally"

"farm policies which reduce UK food production can displace environmental damage to more biodiverse regions overseas"

Great commentary by Charlie Dewhirst
https://t.co/1ntuYpw3Fa

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

Is Green Misanthropy a Uniquely Western Affliction? "Post-industrial Westerners like to imagine that indigenous peoples possessed a preternatural wisdom to live in harmony with nature, a belief reflected in Hollywood movies like Avatar and Pocahontas. However, this is mostly projection on our part. It is modern people who romanticise nature, precisely because they no longer have to endure its daily hardships." @mboudry https://t.co/nYxND4bOa2

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

@michaelshermer Keep up the good work, Michael!
I agree with the above, with 1 exception

Even young adults don't know their futures and cannot properly consent. If a woman asks to be sterilised in her 20s, before having children, standard medical practice is to deny - too many regret it.

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

@camjenglish @TheLancet @ScienceMagazine @Nature I think they may pretend it never happened, a bit like how institutions who fueled the Satanic Panic simply moved on as if nothing had happened

[David Bertioli @BotanyBert]

A welcome legal outcome. Responsibility for the tragic outcomes affecting thousands of adolescents and young adults lies in good part with @TheLancet, @ScienceMagazine, @Nature, and the academic and medical establishments that turned gender ideology into dogma.

[Benjamin Ryan @benryanwriter]

BREAKING: 1st Detransitioner to Take a Medical-Malpractice Lawsuit to Trial Wins $2 Million Judgement

Fox Varian sued her Westchester, NY, area psychologist and plastic surgeon for the gender-transition mastectomy she got at 16.

I was the only reporter to attend the entire 3-week, historic trial. Subscribe to my Substack to receive an alert about the feature article I have coming out next week in a major publication out about the trial: https://t.co/dQRHZHqWHn. I cover pediatric gender medicine as a specialty on my Substack.

Sorry to just give just a teaser for now about the case! But I wanted to get the word out about the verdict promptly, the slower pace of feature-article publishing notwithstanding.

The entire case file was put under seal when the trial started (although I obtained all those documents before they was sealed), and all the transcripts from the trial are also under seal. The riveting trial was sparsely attended and there was only one other reporter at the trial; and he only attended for part of it and, as I observed, took few notes. So my own hundreds of pages of notes from the trial will likely remain the only way for the public to learn about the all finer details of what transpired, possibly ever (or until an appeal, should that happen).

In addition to my article coming out in the media outlet soon, I intend to write a lot about what I observed and learned on my Substack over the coming weeks. Stay tuned…