Sexual Assault Survivors Support

Last edited Mon Mar 4, 2024, 09:22 PM - Edit history (2)

Sometimes I am not even that sure (except with a tangible real world male creep which only happens now and then..or some aggressive and pushy greasebag) that stuff is toxic etc.

Sometimes I wonder if miscommunication can make much ado out of nothing. Ie where there really is no problem.

Which would make sense since I dislike communication (as you can probably tell from these tedious rants which I dislike rereading or manicuring). I prefer to hit post and go offline.


I get frustrated if I am in incomprehensible stuff..and I always find people a bit fatiguing.

I take my scientific research seriously. (That is my real work and real life which I would have preferred to keep entirely offline normally. I was only ever online to anonymously trash politicians and billionaires. I never even tweeted. I don??t like any type of internet parade/spectacle …yeeeesh).

However, for all that I take my work seriously, I was not a very good scientist. My basic education was not that great and then I switched fields. I am not excusing myself. I am just saying that I worked in some really good labs. And I always knew I was the weak link, but I was trying. It is frustrating..you are always going to have some sad sacks who attempt science as well.

It is all hideous..I mean good god…you are a sad sack to begin with and you publish work and then you are not sure it is of good quality..it is not even as if it was publish or perish in my labs. That was not the labs I worked in, but my mentors did not micromanage people..it is so we find their own feet. But I didn’t. A type of decent pi sacrifices the peace of mind that comes from going over everything a trainee does not out of sloppiness, but due to the understanding that it fosters independence and implies trust in your trainees to give them some leeway.

It is my failure that I was not up to par, but I have tried really hard to fix that and I would like to just quietly submit my work and move on. I have been working on a follow up paper to my work since 2009.

But then I lost my shit in a place and was sent to mental health -it is not anyone’s fault. Everyone was decent enough. The shrink and therapist they had me see were decent and more importantly not at all moronic. And the counsellor was a straight up decent and cool person. But the whole experience was awful-there is nothing as lame and moronic as those places. You read these just idiotic scripts on mental health and it is such a cliche..You keep wondering what second rate made-for-tv movie your life has descended into? I mean that is a stereotype-real life should never resemble (second rate) fiction ;-/.

But sometimes people lose their shit…I have always had a regrettably short temper and though I tried to conceal it, in the abstract I am a bit of misanthrope. It is not personal or malicious at all. It is just that I had identified the few things in human society that are minimally pointless and hideous like the non profit natural sciences. (They are hard and there is a lot of competition but they are objectively, unambiguously worthwhile). And then I lost the plot..And I really lost faith in everything after the mental health shit. It was so inane. Up until that point, science/medicine etc-these are the grounding, non bullshit, stabilising things in life as opposed tp politics, social media or just about any of the bs that fuels large swathes of human life. It is like David Graeber’s bullshit job world -jobs that even people who do them think are bullshit.

But well..I am not mentally ill and never was. It is not something that one can prove, but it is also pretty hard to insist using (what looks to my layman eyes anyway like) a dusty and dated DSM that someone is actually insane without violating all sorts of professional standards. I don’t see how you can just look at text and data (emails, web use etc and conclude that this pattern or that is indicative of mental illness rather than eccentricity for instance..). Human life requires a lot of context, common sense and cultural understanding. Shrug..I was annoyed for years about potentially being considered mentally ill on top of everything else -can’t I just be kind of incompetent 🙄? I definitely don’t want to be humanised etc so the options are incompetent fuck up or mentally unwell. I”d take incompetent fuck up-it has been fairly true to date and therefore has some connection to reality.

I think that stuff about the stigma of mental health has become a chestnut and overshot - surely they should be careful in ascribing depression, addiction, delusion etc. to people who may actually be perfectly normally outside a system that is dead bent on ascribing pathologies to human behavior rather than attributing things to more straightforward causes. A lot of people drink excessively at some point in their lives and many move on from that without AA or any intervention. Most people have private flaws - before this awful big data drivel became a thing it would have remained private dysfunction they get over. I get exasperated over the common sense free drivel around such things. It is such blatant bs. As if med students themselves don’t party hard while practicing harm reduction. But once you are looked at through the lens of pathology everything looks like a disease…

And there are so many of these sleazy data mining firms-that awful MIT media lab itself spun off some-Cogito, Humanyze..Which also peddle these health apps etc.

And once people think you have a mental health issue it is all bullshit from there on. And then creeps etc sometimes pile on. No one can ever really “prove” they are sane. And creeps think that a mentally ill person is basically easier prey (ie they are stupid enough to buy bs at any rate). That is a conclusion I have come to from my own “observations” about our species..

And anyway all this happened to me at a time when these data sciences and big data (and now I guess ai) were also coming into their own. Which means that now it is always “oh great-so now am I basically making more crap data that makes me seem like a paranoid schizophrenic because I cannot sometimes be bothered to spell out what I mean?”

I wouldn’t mind if it was solid good science. But no one who cares about their own work is going to be happy about being in something that could be shoddy when they are already aware that they were themselves a subpar scientist (who is trying to fix that even if it is taking forever)..

I don’t know at this point if I will ever be a good scientist..but at least I know I will complete this paper.

I really wonder about people like these:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/8/9/23825966/francesca-gino-honesty-research-scientific-fraud-defamation-harvard-university

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie

Anyway statistical significance with P values is only the beginning if you are actually trying to come up with a detailed model for something you are working on..and they would be very easy to manipulate. If someone’s work is that shallow I don’t know where it goes..what I usually find is that as you become at least somewhat better at science you keep noticing your own errors more and more. So if you just manipulate P values etc, I don’t understand what foundation there is to even build on. Do you just then keep fabricating more and more? The reason that science is considered self correcting is because you will yourself find the errors in your work if you start off with a bad assumption. At least the science I have seen that is good science starts off with a simple model and builds more and more sophisticated understanding of a problem on top of that. I don’t get how just publishing a bunch of drivel and mangling the P values will..how would you even keep anything straight? This is not really about image and people. If your stuff is riddled with errors in many sciences you will eventually fail under the weight of the errors.

I am not that sold on the idea that scientific misconduct is that easy even if people were sleazy enough to want to fake stuff. This stuff in those articles is probably easy to fake because it is such drivel to begin with..

This stuff that makes a lot of money, sells those moronic pop best sellers, goes into TeD tech talks (not real respectable social or psychological science, but the stuff in those stories), the basic work itself seems so bullshitty that who even cares about an added layer of data fraud. It is all such bs. I think actual behavioural scientists would probably agree.

I also think that claiming that all science is riddled with fraud etc gives you a low bar to then go and surveill and harass all sorts of crappy small time scientists like me. So when you see so much concern about honesty etc from people who work in data and surveillance-I can see why it is in their interest to represent all other people as dishonest and in need of policing. I don’t see too many people taking on very well-heeled large giant companies..not that I care about this Gino or Ariely and Data Colada. At the very least they all deserve each other. (Edit: actually after reading that Vox article again Gino sounds like a nightmare..invoking title 9 and starting lawsuits because her work was challenged and apparently credibly. I have never heard of Data Colada but they sound like the sympathetic party in this case. As a sadsack who is pretty far from ever being in position to call out anyone else and usually expects to be called out rather, I am not overfond of vigilante policing-I suppose I prefer self policing being encouraged over other policing, but these guys seem like the more sympathetic party here. That is not cool to intimidate them with lawsuits etc for calling out bad work.)

Again I am not ever saying that calling out bad science is wrong. I am just not a fan of heavy policing and surveillance of employees etc. That is just demoralising. I get that it doesn’t go with the whole self righteous spiel of ..I don’t know..it is all such bs.

I don’t know I can answer questions around my own work and that is all. In my case I was using an assay that I felt I didn’t understand that well and I finally have a better model for it. You don’t need to use P values and shady methodologies if you have a decent enough model, back it up and submit it which I now can. I came up with an analysis method now that I like much better than my initial analysis and I can conceivably submit it soon. I have just been trying to make sure that this time around I have a deep enough understanding of all the concepts in the paper.


Some of us are just trying to make sure that our science is good..I don’t get what satisfaction there is in putting a whole bunch of stuff riddled with holes out there. That is not how people think about their work in my experience. But then anytime anything involves people it invariably gets super annoying :-/.

That is not weighing in on the human versus bot drivel so much as about size. I can’t stand t large chaotic things filled with all sorts of shit going off..I prefer to take my own chaos away and bring some order to at least my chaos before I have to deal with a whole bunch of stuff I don’t get.

But well I always think that if someone ever has any reason to call me out, I should be careful not to call them a creep because that is a cop out. Creeps are a separate issue and one’s issues are a separate thing.

It is not that local to me or in US, I have had that much trouble with people. I don’t mind addressing anything I should. But yeah..I do find society as a whole too damn hideous to. Good God the one thing about the sciences in general is that they are so hard and dull that that alone means you get rid of most human interest right there and then you can have some peace and quiet. I am not saying I do anything amazing with peace and quiet often..I may just watch Netflix but I do like to meet as few people as possible irl and deal with people minimally. Usually not something people admit to if they want to live in society. Because we all want some transactions in society but well I do like to keep them to a minimum. Just colleagues and friends. Hideous…