Cafe and Tavern on the math.se

PseudoLooped

04:58

A recent thing with a Twitter account that impersonated a Insulin Manufacturer (by copying their name and using their same twitter photo, and buying the Twitter checkmark) made a tweet saying insulin was now free and caused the real company to lose a lot with their stocks investors.com/news/technology/…

News companies have been trying to reach out to Twitter to talk about it, but there's literally no one left in the Twitter communications department lol. Everyone was fired

one hell of a way to go out as a company I guess

Prithu Biswas

07:04

Has there been any scientific research on the possible harmful effects of MSG?

leslie townes

16:12

prithu: i don't know. i think there is research that a lot of the supposed 'side effects' commonly associated in the US with MSG (such as headaches) are a myth, or at least no more common than people having similar reactions to overly salted food or other ingredients (and yet nobody talks about 'side effects' of salt)

Prithu Biswas

17:06

@leslietownes I am seeing a video from a news channel covering the harmful effects of tasting salt.

Here is what I found in the description of the video (Translated from Bengali to English).

> The use of tasting salt or taste salt has increased in restaurants and homes to make food tastier. Experts say that the chemical called monosodium glutamate is harmful to the nervous system. Doctors say that if you are used to tasting salt-containing food for a long time, you may develop serious diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. They recommend limiting the use of testing salts to avoid long-term effects on the human body, including neurological complications.

But there are no links to any references for the claims above in the description.

I haven't watched the entire video yet. So maybe the references are in there? Let us see...

leslie townes

wow, OK. i've never heard anything like that. the english language wikipedia page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate has some discussion of MSG in the safety context. it sounds like there isn't a lot of evidence that MSG is harmful.

i have a background vague understanding that nobody really knows where alzheimers and parkinsons come from. i feel that if good evidence existed as to things that cause those specific conditions, it would be widely known. like, people would be winning nobel prizes for it.

Prithu Biswas

17:46

@leslietownes Well, it seems like if I want to find out the truth, then I have to start reading research papers, journals and check out the other papers in their citations. Like a never ending rabbit hole.

Even though it will be a very boring and time consuming journey, at the end there is truth, and the truth will set me free.

leslie townes

yeah, although with medical stuff often the data just doesn't point to a strong conclusion. often the best you can get "there is, to date, no evidence that X causes Y, although if it had a really strong role in causing Y, someone probably would have found some evidence of that by now."

Goku

20:02

@leslietownes an old childhood friend of mine, she goes to med school, recently said the EXACT same thing when we were hanging out yesterday. That if X had a strong role in causing Y there'd already be strong evidence for it by now. She seems to also infer that this is a pretty popular mindset in the medical academic community

leslie townes

i think it's generally true. a lot of very medically meaningful data exists at a level where it's indistinguishable from noise in your average medical study.

so you have to choose between reporting the noise as if it might be significant (which feels dishonest) or just saying, well, if it's super clear that X, we maybe ought to have seen it but didn't

Goku

@leslietownes so glad the mathematics/physics/engineering academic communities dont have such mindsets right?....right??

amWhy

@leslietownes What can we expect from religions' beliefs that woman are inferior to woman, and otherwise, responsible for being seductress, and introducing original sin? So surprise whatsoever, for me.

Goku

@amWhy about that "first sin" I find it mildly amusing that I, a man, am the one who has the "Adam's apple" in my throat as opposed to women

amWhy

@Goku But they do, in reality, and in systematic way adopt, the conviction that men are more rational, and women too emotional.

leslie townes

20:14

goku: well, math/physics/engineering are sometimes significantly simpler, as arenas for running controlled trials or numerically simulating different realities.

Goku

@amWhy they should see my reaction when I get headshot out of no where in Battlefield

@leslietownes agreed. Its easier to build fail-proof test cases in these fields and rule out outliers more easily too

leslie townes

yes. you can test things and design systems to much tighter tolerances.

medicine can maybe do 'smoking is bad for you' after decades of empirical study. it probably can't do 'does MSG contribute to alzheimers' or if it can, it can only do so far less confidently.

which doesn't stop the media reporting every week on the food to avoid if you don't want to get cancer.

or some researchers from announcing studies to that effect.

Goku

@leslietownes ironically it did take decades of empirical study and data to come to the "smoking is bad" conclusion

leslie townes

one of the big confounding things with MSG is that a lot of people eat it without knowing it. you probably do know if you're smoking.

Goku

@leslietownes I've seen some of that nastiness seep into the engineering/physics space as well. Such as 5G supposedly causing brain cancer

leslie townes

20:19

haha yes. if there is an audience for clicks, someone will cater to that audience.

Goku

Seriously, this is such as easy myth to debunk. It requires a very basic understanding of how 5G works and how radiation affects your body

Yes, flying at over 80,000 feat without a space suit will bombard your body with enough radiation to cause cancer. But that is NOT 5G

leslie townes

well, i would say the same thing - but it makes sense that i would, because i'm a scorpio and i'm naturally skeptical.

:D

amWhy

Nor have differences between effects of tobacco on women, or of alcohol, or in Blacks, the risk and norms for kidney disease, and in psychology/sociology in which typical experiments utilized male undergrads or soldiers. While that is changing, the majority of "text book" studies remain centered on white men.

Goku

@leslietownes I'm as aquarium that must be why I crashed my car :)

leslie townes

@amWhy this. and if you dig down, it's usually like, 100 white men. 50 white men. or 50+50+50 men but in the same region 50 years ago.

just, nothing where you could expect to get accuracy at the 'decimal points' level about much of anything.

Goku

20:24

@amWhy I reckon that this is only to main consistency between prior studies but who knows.

leslie townes

a lot of it is simply people measuring what was easiest to measure, and reporting it as if it is representative.

amWhy

Then there were Jews in Nazi's Europe, and black prisoners in the US, seen as "expendable" testing life threatening experimental treatments.

leslie townes

i have a friend who did a phd in biology, she has confidence levels reported to three decimal places in the experimental work in her thesis. i think there were 15 people in her final design. she knew the apparent precision was crap, there was one conclusion in her work maybe worth further investigation... but her advisor made her report correlations about all sorts of things. and i think people cite the work for that.

Goku

@amWhy are you referring to the syphillis tuskgee experiment

amWhy

@Goku Yes, but it might have been black soldiers.

Goku

20:27

@leslietownes holy flying saucers.... I'm glad this doesn't happen here at least not as often

leslie townes

a lot of social psychology has been reevaluated after people realized mid 20th century male college students in invented scenarios were not representative of how people behave in non constructed situations.

Goku

@amWhy oh in that case there's countless such examples you can look at within and outside the united states. We'd be here all day if we tried to list half of them

amWhy

Ernst-Robert Grawitz

Ernst-Robert Grawitz (8 June 1899 – 24 April 1945) was a German physician and an SS functionary (Reichsarzt, "arzt" meaning "physician") during the Nazi era. == Biography == Grawitz was born in Charlottenburg, in the western part of Berlin, Germany. As Reichsarzt SS und Polizei (Reich Physician SS and Police), Grawitz was also head of the German Red Cross. Grawitz funded Nazi programs to "eradicate the perverted world of the homosexual" and research into a so-called "cure" for homosexuality. This involved experimentation on inmates in Nazi concentration camps. He was in charge of "enthusiastic...

Goku

@leslietownes certainly won't behave the same today heh

leslie townes

goku my wife works in social science and a lot of folks don't internally place any value on decimal points in quantitative analyses, but include it because they feel that 'someone else must know what this means.'

amWhy

20:29

@Goku Absolutely; but such biases underlie ongoing systemic mindsets.

Goku

@leslietownes I haven't read some so disheartening in a long time lol

leslie townes

all of this stuff is inherently self perpetuating, because if you try to go against it it's just going to make it harder to publish papers or not bother people in your job.

Goku

@leslietownes reminds me of sokal hoax lol

leslie townes

do you want to be the 'difficult' researcher or will you just throw the stuff in that your committee wants.

amWhy

@leslietownes qualitative research needs to complement quantitative research, in a society wide belief that being quantitative analysis is more "objective."

Goku

20:32

@leslietownes many of my software engineer friends face that same problem within the industry. You can either be the "bad" engineer that wants to write clean and optimized code or listen to your manager who has zero technical knowledge and spit out some barely functional code and call it a day

leslie townes

yes and in my wife's case at least, someone, most likely a white man with a phd in economics, will reject your paper if you don't include it.

goku yeah, we all have to strike a balance between doing the best we can do, and adjusting to whatever the norms are in a given workplace (which can involve shading the truth or just letting some big shot get their way). the stakes are lower when the only consequences are internal to an organization.

amWhy

@Goku I'm here too, @goku. Ask that I go away if you want exclusive one-to-one interaction with leslie." Better, Perhaps create a "room for Goku and leslie." But here, it strikes me as rude.

Goku

@amWhy lol believe it or not I'm currently multi-tasking here. Speaking to Leslie, keeping track of a video game, and eating at the same time

amWhy

@Goku Don't use this chat for that, please. If you're that unfocused, this is not the room for you.

Goku

@amWhy I understand you're not happy with being ignored but its just not possible for me to talk to two people simultaneously. Well maybe some people can do that but I can only have a meaningful dialogue with one person at a time

amWhy

20:37

I enjoy your input, but be present and interactive when you're here.

leslie townes

amwhy's link is a great example of someone who put conformity to whatever the superiors wanted ahead of whatever he might have learned during his medical education. when the stakes are not human lives, it's maybe less clear that those choices are being made. but they are.

Goku

Trust me I would pause the video game too but it isn't a single player unfortunately

amWhy

@Goku I gave you the option to take the initiative to create such a chatroom.

leslie townes

e.g. "it's just data for this paper..."

amWhy

@Goku Then please leave.

Goku

20:39

@amWhy don't worry, I already lost (badly) and (rage)quit the game lol

amWhy

@leslietownes How true! But it is troubling. Just as was the Stanford Prison study, and Milgram's study.

Goku

@leslietownes about your statement of your wife working in social science where decimal places/significant figures are considered, well, insignificant. Have you heard about the Sokal hoax? I find it amusing and semi-relevant to that statement

amWhy

[Stanford Prison Study](%3A%2F%2Fwww.prisonexp.org%2F&usg=AOvVaw1bheNx6esV6zEHvJgBSXp8)

leslie townes

goku yes but i would put that example in a different category. as far as i know, nobody was posting regression coefficients in 'social text.' that was more generic mumbo jumbo, a huge problem in academia, but maybe a different problem than 'this more real/accurate because it has numbers in it.'

amWhy

Milgram Obedience Study.

leslie townes

20:44

amwhy so it's looking like the democrats will control the senate, regardless of the runoff in georgia. outlets seem reluctant to say for sure.

so maybe the worst chaos is postponed at least another two years. :D

Goku

@leslietownes true, which why I think it is only semi-relevant but pretty intriguing and amusing nonetheless. Especially the part where mathematical terminology such as "non-linear" are used (by Sokal and others) in a way it was never meant to be

amWhy

Sorry, @leslie and @Goku at my failed effort to link to the Stanford Prison experiment

Goku

@amWhy I almost forgot to ask. You raised the issue of ignoring you a little while ago. How exactly do you suggest I, well, stop doing that?

Because it was unintentionally hopefully you do know that

amWhy

@Goku Sure. No problem. :-)

Goku

Well that didn't answer my question but I'm glad you do know that at least

leslie townes

20:47

@Goku i think of some of this crypto stuff in the news as springing from the same well.

roughly, "here's blizzard of words so give me some money."

Goku

@leslietownes I knew someone was going to bring this up, and I agree. Its scary and dangerous just how easily it is to fool and manipulate so many people today

amWhy

@Goku I'm answering with respect to your last sentence. But I've given you suggestions. @Jakobian Welcome!

Take a breath, e.g., to acknowledge other in the room, whose identicon is not yet faded.

I'm taking a short break here.

Goku

@amWhy out of curiosity, is that actually considered some sort of rule-break? I don't remember every single rule here off the top of my head so forgive me if I am coming off a bit ignorant

leslie townes

it's more of a norms zone than a rules zone, but it's a smaller world than e.g. the main math chat, which almost always has multiple conversations going at once.

the norm is, we're all seated at the same table.

anyway it's nice to see people back and chatting. we were bumping this place for inactivity every couple of days for a while there. :)

Jakobian

21:21

@amWhy Hi, I'm not much of a chatter when it's not about math though

Goku

21:56

@leslietownes Seated at the same table. Funny thing is that's not the norm for me. I almost never like to be at a table with people, even my own family. Not because they're bad but because, well, I just don't

That's why I have meals all alone

leslie townes

same, i eat a lot of my meals at my desk.

we try to do dinner together every night, but everything else is catch as catch can.

Goku

@leslietownes To be fair I'd still much rather chat here than where I used to before, places like comic vine, where every second or third post is something like "Superman/Goku beats this fictional character"

amWhy

@Jakobian No problem!

Goku

@amWhy you're under no obligation to answer this but, did you vote?

amWhy

@Goku No, not a rule-break. But room owners are owners for a reason.

@Goku Vote for what? I did not flag you, if that's what you mean. Please be more specific.

Goku

22:08

@amWhy oh no lol I was talking about the elections (assuming you're from the US)

amWhy

@Goku Yes, I would not have missed voting. Thanks for clarifying :-)

Goku

@amWhy oh... Now I'm a little scared to see how you'd react if I told you that I did not, and haven't been doing it for the 2.5 years now that I've been eligible to vote for, not once

amWhy

@Goku Some people don't vote, and many have their own reasons. I'd sometimes like to know, why, or why not, but I won't judge :-)

Goku

Thank you although one of those reasons, for me, is being lazy heh

@amWhy my 'reasons' are, well, pretty unreasonable. Such as being lazy, not being able to take politics seriously (at all) and a host of other similar 'reasons' that'll make anyone facepalm (rightfully so)

amWhy

@Goku In such a case, I'd maybe respond: Not having voted (due to solely the "too lazy to" reason, inclines me to respond. "Very well; then you'll be too lazy to respond, and I will give no merit to any future complaint."

But the choice is yours. In the US, no one can be compelled to vote.

Goku

22:21

@amWhy I wish there was a "feature" where you could hand over your voting power to someone else voluntarily knowing (and accepting) that they can use that "extra" vote however they like.... Yes I play too many video games

amWhy

Even the idea of "not being able to take politics seriously" suggests, the response "Then it is best you not vote, unless and until you take elections seriously. Since you don't... that's precisely the reason you've lost the right to complain.

@Goku I give you a lot of credit for being self-aware. A lot of those who do vote, are driven by biased, but they're not aware they are. So kudos to you! Sincerely!

Goku

@amWhy My self-awareness likely stems from the fact that I often like to make fun of myself, and that does require some form of self-awareness. I can't even take myself seriously at times

@amWhy I probably won't complain. I mean, I don't exactly like the current political situation and its consequences in real life but I almost never complain

amWhy

23:22

@PseudoLooped refrain from disparaging "old folk". To you that could apply to a twenty-five year-old. Racism, agism, sexism, etc., is not welcome in this chatroom.

→ 1 message moved to Trash

PseudoLooped

Yeah, i can see now in retrospect on how it would be disparaging, and i’m genuinely sorry for the ageism

amWhy

@PseudoLooped Thanks for your response.

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$Mathematics$ Cafe and Tavern on the math.se