Ivar A. Åsland Lima

Nysgjerrig, anti-autoritær, sosiolog og filosof. Trebarnsfar.

[Ivar A. Åsland Lima @iaalima]

@PawlowskiMario Putins mindset.

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

"Professors at leading US universities were asked to evaluate applications for a tenure-track STEM position. The applications were identical for all participants...The study revealed a 2:1 preference for the female applicants." https://t.co/CqS3r2MbRl

[Daria Kryukova @daria_sev]

Di solito cerco di non ascoltare Putin. È troppo difficile reprimere la tentazione di lanciare qualcosa contro lo schermo.

Ma questa volta ho superato la repulsione e ho ascoltato qualche minuto del suo intervento al Forum Economico Internazionale di San Pietroburgo. E sono rimasta sinceramente colpita.

Mi ha davvero colpito quanto sia cambiato il suo modo di parlare negli ultimi anni.
Sinceramente, sono rimasta impressionata: si mangia le parole, parla in modo impastato e a tratti sembra persino parlare con la zeppola.
Parla letteralmente come un uomo vecchio. Che, del resto, è quello che è.

Può anche continuare a riempirsi il viso di filler, botox e qualsiasi altra meraviglia della cosmetologia moderna per nascondere rughe e pelle cadente. Ma l'età non si nasconde così facilmente.

Le persone anziane vengono tradite dalla voce, dal modo di parlare, dai movimenti più lenti, dalle pause, da mille dettagli che nessuna iniezione può correggere.

E la cosa che mi colpisce sempre è un'altra.

A un certo punto viene spontaneo pensare: ma perché non andare semplicemente in pensione? Stare con i figli, con i nipoti, godersi il resto della vita.

Poi però ti ricordi che non può.

O meglio: che ha costruito un sistema in cui tutti capiscono perfettamente che dal potere non si esce davvero. Almeno non volontariamente.

E allora viene da chiedersi: perché per alcuni il desiderio di mantenere il potere finisce per essere più forte di tutto il resto?

Più forte della tranquillità, della famiglia, della libertà personale, persino dell'istinto di vivere gli ultimi anni della propria vita in pace.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.

In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:

- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors

This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

We're saving science from ideological capture!

I am thrilled to announce a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review” in the journal Theory and Society.

The journal's editor-in-chief, Kevin McCaffree, and I have been working on this for a while, and it was finally approved by @SpringerNature.

The idea is simple: publication should be the beginning of academic scrutiny, not the end of it.

A Peer Review article can critique a paper from any scholarly journal. It can address problems with methods, evidence, logic, definitions, theory, or interpretation. But it has to focus on the claims and arguments, not personal attacks.

Submissions are capped at 2,500 words and go through a straightforward merit review instead of endless gatekeeping and ideological screening. We ask just one basic question: Is this critique coherent, serious, reasonable, or even popular enough to deserve scholarly attention?

If yes, it gets published.

And the authors of the original paper get a built-in right of reply, so readers can see the critique and the response in a legitimate academic venue.

That’s how science is supposed to work!

Science becomes self-correcting only when real people build the mechanisms that allow correction to happen.

That’s what we’ve done.

Now it’s time for academics to use it.
🔗https://t.co/gqkDE79CO4

[Anders Åslund @anders_aslund]

In his war on Iran, Trump committed every mistake in the book:
1. Trump achieved far less than Obama in 2015 at a horrendous cost.
2. Trump did not understand that the Iranians could seize control of the Hormus Strait & bomb the Gulf states.
3. He did not realize that the global economy could be severely disturbed by blockage of the Gulf.
4. The US had not acquired defense against Iranian Shahed drones, which Ukraine had developed to perfection.
5. The US wasted many very expensive missiles on cheap targets.
6. The US & Israel thought they could accomplish regime change by killing many Iranian leaders, not understanding the nature of the regime.
7. Trump alienated all allies by being rude & obnoxious.
The only good thing that can be said about this foolish US war is that Trump accepted defeat after three months, but now the US stands alone & appears a symbol of incompetence & folly.

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

The moment of one of today’s Russian strikes on Kyiv.

I can see that fewer and fewer people are reading news from Ukraine. I understand that on a Sunday morning, people don’t want to read about war. They want to sleep a little longer, drink good coffee, and sit in the sun. I understand that. The algorithms on X limit content about war, destruction, and suffering. You have to make an effort to even see this information.

All of this is understandable on a human level. But unfortunately, if you remove Putin and the war from your information feed, they do not disappear from reality.

Putin is a sadist and a maniac. He is a threat to all of humanity.

There needs to be active resistance. News from Ukraine needs to be shared. People need to keep their focus.

Despite a sleepless night, I’m still here. And I’m grateful to everyone who continues to stand with us.

One day, we’ll drink morning coffee together in a beautiful, peaceful Kyiv.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

Larry Bushart spent 37 days in jail for posting a meme on Facebook.

I’ve been doing this work for 25 years, and I can honestly say this is the worst First Amendment case I’ve ever seen.

Not because Larry threatened anyone. He didn’t. Not because he committed violence. He didn’t. Not because this was a close call. It wasn’t.

He posted a political meme — the kind of thing millions of Americans do every day — and local officials decided to treat it like a crime.

And because they had badges, prosecutors, jail cells, and the terrifying machinery of the state behind them, they got away with it for 37 days.

Larry is a retired police officer and National Guard veteran. The meme he shared quoted Donald Trump’s “we have to get over it” comment after a 2024 Iowa school shooting. Whatever you think of Trump, the meme was plainly political commentary. Perry County officials knew what it referred to. They knew it wasn’t a threat against a Tennessee school.

They arrested him anyway.

In the middle of the night.

They set his bond at $2 million.

He lost his job. He missed family milestones. He sat in jail for more than a month before the charges finally collapsed — because, of course, there was no crime here.

Today, @theFIREorg secured a measure of justice: Perry County agreed to pay Larry Bushart $835,000 for violating his constitutional rights.

This case should scare the hell out of people across the political spectrum.

Because if the government can jail you for a meme by pretending not to understand obvious political commentary, your rights are only as secure as the good faith of the most authoritarian official in your town.

That is exactly why we have the First Amendment. Not for speech everyone likes. Not for opinions that flatter the powerful. Not for the bland, safe, committee-approved stuff.

It exists for moments when fear, outrage, politics, and authority all line up and say: “Surely this is the exception.”

No. It isn’t.

I’m incredibly proud of @theFIREorg’s legal team. And I’m even prouder of Larry Bushart for refusing to let the government get away with treating his constitutional rights like a suggestion.

But despite the correct verdict, I'll probably always get angry every time I think of this case.

Let’s make this the last time anyone in America is arrested — let alone thrown in jail — for a meme.

Celebrate your independence. Defend your First Amendment.

https://t.co/7ADQTxeHsL

[Brad Lemley @BradCLemley]

Here is a huge positive to modern life that gets no press.

I have an old 2009 Toyota, and the AUX port crapped out about a year ago. Went to YouTube. Young, enthusiastic guy explains how to fix it.

It is not obvious - involves taking the dashboard apart in a counter-intuitive way, but once you see it, it's a 15 minute fix.

There are actually dozens of videos showing how to do this, and they collectively have well over 200k views.

Had this happened in 1995, I would have just lived with it. But the combo of the replacement AUX jack available from Amazon and the video of the simple (but not obvious) fix, I fixed it.

I HAVE DONE THIS DOZENS OF TIMES. Replaced the control panel of my dishwasher. Replaced the ice maker in the fridge. Fixed a wonky sanding head on my drill press. Mastered a bandsaw technique that I use for my sculpture. On and on and on...

I think it is likely no exaggeration to say billions of fixes and skill upgrades have been performed worldwide that would not have been performed if it were not for the instruction freely given peer-to-peer on YouTube.

Take a moment to be happy about this. The busted item keeps performing, rather than going to the landfill. The person learning and doing the fix gains a sense of mastery and saves money. It's an unmixed blessing.

Stop doomscrolling. Think of what is busted in your house, find the YouTube video on how to fix it, and fix it.

[Anders Åslund @anders_aslund]

Putin persuaded Trump to compel Ukraine to accept a 3-day ceasefire for Russia's victory day.
Trump claimed 1000 POW from each side would be exchanged.
Zelensky accepted.
Russia responded with 1,400 drones and ballistic missiles against civilians in 30 hours afterwards.
No POW exchange so far.
No protest from the US or Trump.
Once again Trump shows that he supports Putin.

[Pekka Toveri @PToveri]

1/4
We saw again, that you can´t trust Russia. Putin got his cease-fire for the pathetic Victory Day parade by pleading to Trump. The three day truce was obviously used to prepare for new massive attack to kill more Ukrainian civilians. The strike was biggest ever.

[Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel]

Prestige bias is a major problem in academia: success in academia leads to numerous unfair advantages (eg., professors at prestigious universities have an easier time getting their papers published).

But prestige bias is bigger in fields that are less scientific (eg., art, history, politics, and philosophy). In these fields, the claims of academics are hard to test so people rely more on prestige as a heuristic about the truth of their claims.

In contrast, fields where claims are more testable exhibit lower concentrations of prestige markers (eg., math, physics, computer science, and medicine). This makes it easier for unknown or early career researchers to break through and have success.

A new analysis finds that a 10% increase in the testability of claims in a field is associated with a 9% decrease in citation concentration. Evaluators rely less on prestige for quality assurance when the work is testable.

My field is psychology is in the middle (close to biology). In the last decade, the credibility revolution has dramatically changed the field. As people published replication attempts, several the leading figures in the field lost significant prestige when their claims did not hold up to empirical scrutiny.

This is actually the sign of a healthy scientific field: Prestige should not trump empirical evidence.

https://t.co/p4Xy4jv7PF

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

David Reich on how much ancient DNA evidence has overturned so much consensus thinking how ancient cultures spread.

"It wasn't peaceful, it wasn't friendly, it wasn't nice.

Some of our archaeologist co-authors were just really distressed."

[Anna Stokke @rastokke]

Not ALL education research is terrible (e.g. a lot of ed psych researchers set up good studies w/ statistical analyses). But a lot of education research is terrible and can often be spotted as such just by exercising critical thinking skills.
If the education claim being made is counterintuitive, and supposedly backed by research, that research is likely is bad.
I've been reading shoddy education research for absurd claims in math education for ~15 years. Here are a few of the things that are supposedly backed by education "research" that I've looked into and found the research to be terribly flawed or non-existent:
❌standard algorithms are harmful
❌timed tests cause math anxiety
❌taking math makes a teacher worse at teaching math
❌learning math in groups on whiteboards (BTC) improves math learning
❌procedural skill harms understanding
❌inquiry is the best way to teach math

The field has a problem. I'm glad reporters are writing about it, but the policymakers (e.g., in schools of education, school districts, government level) need to do something about it because it will keep happening and districts and schools will keep buying products based on fake research claims.

[Filip Rygg @filiprygg]

At inflasjon spiser opp realverdien av gjeld, betyr ikke at folk har bedre råd. Det er en balanseffekt på papiret, ikke nødvendigvis bedre privatøkonomi i praksis. Folk må fortsatt betale renter, mat, drivstoff og husleie med faktiske kroner.

https://t.co/cySPx3Y83I

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

An unscrupulous writer without any interesting ideas, by contrast, will ask a different set of questions: How can I appear more profound than I am? How can I keep my text open to multiple interpretations, so I can't be pinned down? What string of abstractions and grammmatical constructions will make my prose the most impenetrable? Is this image obscure enough? Could I make the same simple point using longer and fancier words?

Nothing is easier than being difficult. It takes far more effort to explain a complex idea in lucid, readable prose than to dress up a simple idea in needless verbiage.

[Ivar A. Åsland Lima @iaalima]

@ScottGoetz_ How do you know this? According to medical science long covid is a real disease that occurs in some individuals after a sars-cov2 infection. It has been confirmed in a great number of good scientific studies with a control group.

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

“When it comes to porn and romance novels, both sexes are typically mystified by the recreational pursuits of the other. As Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons observed, ‘To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.’”

https://t.co/uqPVmREj3M

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

As always, a good and productive meeting with Prime Minister of Norway @jonasgahrstore.

We discussed in detail our cooperation in the production and use of drones. Our experience is already being used in the Middle East and the Gulf. We are improving defense against “shahed” drones, and we believe this should also be done in Europe. Today, for this purpose, we initiated a Drone Deal with Norway and signed a Joint Declaration on Enhanced Defense and Security Cooperation. Now our teams will work out the details.

We also focused on our joint production projects and cooperation priorities for this year, and not only in defense. We continue to work together with partners to strengthen our countries.

I personally thank Jonas, Norway, and all Norwegians for their military and energy support for Ukraine, for strengthening our air defense, and for their readiness to continue support for the PURL initiative. We feel your support and are sincerely grateful for it.

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

Ideology is like bad breath: you never smell your own (free from Terry Eagleton)

"Many criteria that influence scientific decision-making, including novelty, interest, “fit”, and even quality are often ambiguous and subjective, which enables scholars to exaggerate flaws or make unreasonable demands to justify rejection of unpalatable findings."

"When scholars misattribute their rejection of disfavored conclusions to quality concerns that they do not consistently apply, bias and censorship are masquerading as scientific rejection."

https://t.co/5U0IT8NB7S