Are more “controls” what is necessary here? The problem wasn’t plastic contamination, it was the presence of stearates. Distinguishing between stearates and microplastics sounds like a classification problem, not a control problem.
There is practically universal recognition among microplastics researchers that contamination is possible and that strong quality controls are needed, and to be transparent and reproducible, they have a habit of documenting their methodology. Many papers and discussions suggest avoiding all plastics as part of the methodology, e.g. “Do’s and don’ts of microplastic research: a comprehensive guide” https://www.oaepublish.com/articles/wecn.2023.61
Another thing to consider is that papers generally compare against baseline/control samples, and overestimating microplastics in baseline samples may lead to a lower ratio of reported microplastics in the test samples, not higher.
Many papers in this field are missing obvious controls, but you’re correct that controls alone are insufficient to solve this problem.
When you are taking measurements at the detection limit of any molecule that is widespread in the environment, you are going to have a difficult time of distinguishing signal from background. This requires sampling and replication and rigorous application of statistical inference.
> Another thing to consider is that papers generally compare against baseline/control samples,
Right, that’s what a control is.
> and overestimating microplastics in baseline samples may lead to a lower ratio of reported microplastics in the test samples, not higher.
There’s no such thing as “overestimating in baseline samples”, unless you’re just doing a different measurement entirely.
What you’re trying to say is that if there’s a chemical everywhere, the prevalence makes it harder to claim that small measurement differences in the “treatment” arm are significant. This is a feature, not a bug.
You’re still bringing up different issues than this article we are commenting on.
> There’s no such thing as “overestimating in baseline samples”
What do you mean? Contamination and mis-measurement of control samples is a thing that actually happens all the time, and invalidates experiments when discovered.
> What you’re trying to say is that if there’s a chemical everywhere, the prevalence makes it harder to claim that small measurement differences in the “treatment” arm are significant.
No. What I was trying to say is that if the control is either mis-measured, for example by accidentally counting stearates as microplastics, or contaminated, then the summary outcome may underestimate or understate the prevalence of microplastics in the test sample, even though the measurement over-estimated it.
> What do you mean? Contamination and mis-measurement of control samples is a thing that actually happens all the time, and invalidates experiments when discovered.
The entire point of a control is to test for that sort of contamination (or more generally, for malfunctions in the experimental workflow). In the case of a negative control, specifically, you're looking for an "positive" where one should not exist. If an experiment is set up such that you can obtain differential contamination in the controls but not the experimental arms, as you've described, then the entire experiment is invalid.
> What I was trying to say is that if the control is either mis-measured, for example by accidentally counting stearates as microplastics, or contaminated, then the summary outcome may underestimate or understate the prevalence of microplastics in the test sample, even though the measurement over-estimated it.
The control cannot be "mis-measured", any more or less than the other arms can be "mis-measured". You treat them identically, otherwise the control is not a control. Neither example you've given are exceptions: if the assay mistakes chemical B for chemical A, then it will also do so for the non-controls. If the experimental process contaminates the controls, it will also contaminate the non-controls.
What you're missing is that there's no absolute "correct" measurement -- yes, the control may itself be contaminated with something you don't even know about, thus "understating" the absolute measurement of whatever thing you're looking for, but the absolute measurement was never the goal. You're looking for between-group differences, nothing more.
Just to make it clearer, if I were going to run an extremely naïve experiment of this sort (i.e. detection of trace chemical contamination C via super-sensitive assay A) with any hope of validity, I'd want to do multiple replications of a dilution series, each with independent negative and positive controls. I'd then use something like ANOVA to look for significant deviations across the group means. This is like the "science 101" version of the experimental design. Any failure of any control means the experiment goes in the trash. Any "significant" result that doesn't follow the expected dilution series patterns, again, goes in the trash.
(This is, of course, after doing everything you can to mitigate for baseline levels of the contaminant in the lab environment, which is a process that itself probably requires multiple failed iterations of the experiment I just described.)
Most of the plastic contamination papers I have read are far, far from even that naïve baseline.
> The entire point of a control is to test for that sort of contamination
No, the point of a control is to give you a reference point that shares all the systemic biases and unknown unknowns, not to detect those biases. If you follow the same procedure on a known null and on your experiment and observe an effect, assuming you really did exactly the same thing except the studied intervention, you can subtract out the bias.
This one example of technical jargon diverging from colloquial or intuitive use, and it is the type of thing people who haven't had statistics or scientific process education often struggle with because they keep applying their colloquial intuitions.
You talk like you understand this on the rest of the comment so I'm confused by this framing, and the person you are replying to points out (in my reading ) that contamination of the control 1) does happen in practice (in the sense that there was an accidental intervention) and 2) if the gloves contaminated both the measurements and control the same way then the control is exactly serving it's purposes
You’re repeating several of my points in your own words, supporting them and not arguing with them, even though your language and emphasis suggests you think you are arguing.
> then the entire experiment is invalid
Isn’t that what I said? You even quoted me saying it. But I didn’t say anything about only control being contaminated or mis-measured, I think you’re assuming something I didn’t say. Validity is, of course, compromised if the control is compromised, regardless of what happens to the test samples.
> The control cannot be “mis-measured” […] yes, the control may itself be contaminated […]
So which is it? Isn’t the article we’re commenting on talking about the possibility of mis-measuring? Are you suggesting this article cannot possibly be an issue when measuring control samples? Why not?
Controls absolutely can be mis-measured or contaminated or both. It has been known to happen. It’s bad when this happens because it means the experiment has to be re-done.
> If the experimental process contaminates the controls, it will also contaminate the non-controls
Yes! This is exactly what I was implying, and is exactly how you might end up underestimating the relative presence of whatever you’re looking for in the test, if your classification procedure overestimates it.
> You’re looking for between-group differences
Yes! and this is why if, for example, you didn’t notice your control had stearates and you counted them as microplastics accidentally, and then reported that your test sample had 2x more microplastics than your control, you might have missed the fact that your test actually had 10x more microplastics, or that your control actually had none when you thought incorrectly that it had some.
This, of course, is not the only possible outcome, not the only way that the results might be distorted. But this is one possible outcome that the Michigan paper at hand is warning against, no?
> Most of the papers I have read are far, far from even that naïve baseline.
Short of it, or exceeding it? Based on earlier comments, I assume you mean they’re not meeting your standards. I don’t know what you’ve read, and my brief googling did not seem to support your claims here so far. Can you provide some references? It would be especially helpful if you showed recent/modern SOTA papers, work that is considered accurate, and is highly referenced.
I agree completely. My point is that documenting methodology is standard practice, as is strict quality control, in the microplastics literature. I don’t know what controls are missing according to GP, and we don’t yet have references here to back up that claim. By and large I think researchers are aware of the difficulties measuring this stuff, and doing everything they can to ensure valid science.
$200/mo is a lot, sure, but the shocking part of that comparison is your rent. I didn’t know $400/mo apartments still existed. For most people in the US and EU, $200 would be closer to 15%-20% of rent I think? My cell phone bill for my family is almost $200/mo.
Last year, at first, $200 seemed crazy. Now that I’m getting addicted to coding agents, not so much. Some companies are paying API rates for AI for employees, and it’s a lot more than $200/mo. It seems like funny money, and I’m not sure it’ll last.
As you've probably guessed, I don't live in the US, so the price are drastically different. I live in the EU. And for my case, I love in really small flat for some years, so the rent couldn't go up a lot.
> most people in the US and EU, $200 would be closer to 15%-20% of rent I think?
> the average rent is north of $1000/mo.
I really don't know where you get your number from, $1000/mo average is really wild to me. With this amount, you can rent a flat for a whole family in the heart of the city. Nobody of my more well-of friends have a rent this high.
Or maybe you have some capital city in mind like Paris or London?
> I really don’t know where you get your number from
I googled it. According to Google, London’s average rent is around €2,700, around 3x higher than the average. I assume the number of people living there and paying that much balances against the number of people like you living in smaller towns and rural areas who are paying lower rents.
But yes, rents have become very high everywhere. I live in a medium sized city in the US not anywhere near a coast, and most kids attending the local university are paying over $1000/mo for a 1-bedroom place. The primary way to get cheaper rent is to have flat-mates, try to get 3 or 4 people into a place that rents for, say, $2500/mo.
I was paying $2k/mo in San Francisco 25 years ago for a place that was maybe 90m^2, and since then rents have gone way up. Google says the average now is just under $4k/mo. In some nicer neighborhoods, some people pay $8k/mo for a single bedroom. This big-city rent in SF, LA, NY, Chicago, Miami, etc. balances against the small towns in the US where you can find a room for $500/mo, which is why the average is above $1k.
It is my belief that rent price scales with the leftover income people have after they've paid for other necessities. Ie if you're from a poorer country/area then things like milk and gasoline will cost a similar amount (maybe 2x difference), but rent will cost a lot less. As people in a country get richer they start paying a larger and larger share of their income as rent of various forms.
Even the US has places with cheap rent/housing. The downside is that there's no (well-paying) work nearby.
It’s true that average rent prices are regional and poorer areas have lower rents, but that doesn’t tend to make much difference in urban areas and large cities where the majority of people live now. Why do you feel that rent scales with disposable income? Economists generally say the opposite based on housing being a core necesessity; that people pay rent in proportion to their income, and only what’s left over the the disposable amount. That’s why we have the 30% rule, for example.
You’re technically correct, btw, rental housing is a market and is subject to market forces, meaning what people are willing to pay. I’m just not so sure about framing rent as being lower priority than other necessities. And rent prices have been increasing faster than other necessities, and faster than income, so that might be a confounding factor in your argument.
Still, my initial reaction above is due to the fact that in the US and in Europe in most large cities, the average rent is north of $1000/mo.
>Why do you feel that rent scales with disposable income?
Because I'm from a country where 30 years ago average income was $220/month. Today it's $2475/month.
A large portion of people live in the same houses and apartments now as people did back then. The housing hasn't changed, but today renting a 70 sqm apartment costs you $800/month - the same apartment that people in 1996 lived in with their $220 monthly wage.
The reason why I think that housing is "lower priority" when setting a price is because the sale/rent price for housing is more divorced from the "manufacturing cost" compared to other goods. This happens for a number of reasons:
1. Housing scales with money. Most people live well beyond the "minimum required" for housing. You could survive living in a tiny room with a shared bathroom, but most of us want more than that. Compare this to food - rich and poor people will drink a similar amount of milk. You can't really spend 100x on milk and actually get appreciable benefits from doing so. You can with housing. (Same goes for most other goods. A $3 million car is not 100x better than a $30k car, it's not even 10x better.)
2. Housing is non-fungible. You can't have two houses in the same location. Food, furniture, and electronics are fungible.
3. Housing doesn't depreciate with use compared to other goods. You drink milk and it's gone. You drive your car and it degrades. Your house degrades simply by existing - your use of it will degrade it a little, but living in it also means you do maintenance, like cleaning, that will help keep its value.
4. Because of the above, housing is an asset that people invest in. This is a bit circular, but it also means a lot of people don't want to see housing become cheaper.
>And rent prices have been increasing faster than other necessities, and faster than income, so that might be a confounding factor in your argument.
Because the cost to produce other necessities hasn't increased as quickly as incomes have increased. We have better technology and better economies-of-scale that has made the cost of other goods cheaper. Now people have more money left over to pay for rent, so they do.
Yes rent (like everything) does scale with inflation. All the absolute numbers you’re using make reasoning about this more difficult than necessary. It’s better to use percent of income, in order to get a sense for whether today’s rent is more or less expensive for the renter. That said, you gave an example from 1996 of a $220/mo avg. income and $220/mo rent, which doesn’t add up. Google tells me that as a percent of income, rent has increased over the last 30 years. You might be right; that might be in part enabled by the cost of some goods going down. But the price of food hasn’t gone down. Higher rents also might be in part changes in spending habits, so you’d need to show those haven’t changed.
I used the wrong word, btw. The word I meant to use was ‘discretionary’ income. I think that’s what you’re suggesting, that rent is discretionary? ‘Disposable’ income is what’s left after taxes, but ‘discretionary’ income is defined as being what’s left after paying for things like rent, transportation, food, and utilities (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discretionaryincome.asp)
It’s true the amount one spends on rent is a bit elastic, and that is also true for most consumer goods. The problem with your argument is that rent is not optional, like most consumer goods are. There are very few things that one cannot go without paying for at all, and rent is one of those.
If I understand correctly, what you’re suggesting is the reverse of how most people including economists think of rent. This discussion does depend heavily on what “other goods” you’re actually talking about. Can you provide more concrete examples, and show that they really are getting less expensive over time? Is your hypothesis supported by Eurostat’s HICP or the World Bank’s data on inflation and consumer prices?
What do you mean about vendor lock-in? I haven’t yet seen any meaningful barriers to switching between different companies’ coding agents. Are you talking about AI market lock-in and not vendor-specific lock-in?
> these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup
This is true, and while AI spend continues to rise, I’m starting to think once the dust settles and the true costs emerge and stable profits are achieved, that it may be expensive enough that it’s a limiting force.
The book is fantastic, I’d recommend reading it one way or another. ;) Speaking personally, I lose some motivation to read a book after seeing the movie. But book-based movies of course rarely if ever live up to the book. I read first, so I can’t speak to the other way around, but I think I was looking forward to the movie a lot more than I would have if I hadn’t read the book. I also suspect I was more forgiving of the movie than if I’d seen it cold.
Those handful of 1-star reviews seem the same as the 1-star reviews on all movies, including all of the good movies you probably liked: “boring”, “overhyped”, “doesn’t live up to the book”, etc.. Are they manipulated? Go ahead and name a movie you like without looking at the reviews first, if you dare, and then let’s check the reviews.
I liked the movie and loved the book. Did you read the book? You seeing to be ignoring opinions from real people in this thread. What if the good reviews are as genuine as the bad ones? All I can conclude from bad reviews is that some people have different taste than me, and occasionally some people are in a bad mood when they watch something and it spoils the experience.
What is an example of actual SciFi? What do you mean about there not being any?
My problem with the movie is not that it is humorous or accessible. Scifi does not have to be solemn like 2001 or mythic like Dune. The probleme is that reduces a huge premise to a childish emotional register...
The premise is an interstellar mission, species level extinction risk, first contact, scientific problem solving. The film frames this through cute banter, soft sentiment, and quips that shrinks the movie scale.
So it treats a genuinely huge science fiction premise in a disney type emotional level. The humor feels adolescent and tonally deflates the stakes. Instead of using first contact, isolation, and extinction level danger to create awe or intellectual depth, it turns them into a cute, reassuring buddy experience.
Bust fit Deadpool level jokes, with the first Alien humanity ever encountered? Really?
Plus the direction is bad, the pace is bad and Ryan Gosling I am sorry is no great actor who can talk to a rock for 2 hours and carry on a movie....Also it is not just a bad movie it is also bad Scifi, because it wastes the genre central strength meaning using speculative ideas to confront us with something bigger, stranger or more unsettling than ourselves.
You had everything....extinction of the stars of the universe, first contact, humanity in danger, a regular human trust into the most important project... but instead we ignore the scientific challenges, and logical problem solving who are by the way are a major part of the book.
And this is what I mean by Good Scifi vs Bad Scifi...
They even managed to squeeze some kind of half baked love relationship almost unrelated to the core plot for Ryan Gosling, that is so badly delivered and is so ambiguous... you almost wonder who is partner was, and what any of that had to do with the movie delivery...
They managed to turn an alien into a lovable emotional device. No wonder kids love it...
The bust joke is natural for me when 2 total different species encounter at a more friendly interaction level (after their first interactions).
The humor in this is no way Deadpool level. I'm saying this as a hater of Deadpool because of its depraved jokes. And I just feel lighthearted with the humor in this movie.
This fits exactly your example of seeing the worst reviews and seeing that the review is unreasonable and exaggerated.
> The premise is an interstellar mission, species level extinction risk, first contact, scientific problem solving. The film frames this through cute banter, soft sentiment, and quips that shrinks the movie scale.
God forbid showing the humane side of both tragedies and big stakes missions in an aesthetically pleasing and humorous way.
> So it treats a genuinely huge science fiction premise in a disney type emotional level. The humor feels adolescent and tonally deflates the stakes. Instead of using first contact, isolation, and extinction level danger to create awe or intellectual depth, it turns them into a cute, reassuring buddy experience.
I'd say that's exactly what makes the movie charming for the "masses" and it's OK if you are not into that, but don't make it sound like it is an absolutely terrible movie just because it does not comply to your definition of a good scifi movie.
Is your problem with the movie or the book? It sounds like you didn’t read the book…? It is a buddy story and the author Andy Weir has stated he wanted the story to be different from the typical scary first encounter and send a positive hopeful message.
Again, name any movie you like and go look at the 1-star reviews. You will see the very same rants you’re making here. You can trash any SciFi movie this way because it’s fiction.
So when you said “no actual SciFi” you just meant you thought it was bad sci-fi? The book spends a lot more time on the scientific challenges, so if that’s what you want, maybe you should read it before commenting on this story any further. I can see why they chose to skip that stuff for the movie.
You’re entitled to your opinion. I, and others here and online, disagree with it, and we’re not being paid by Amazon. I don’t know why you keep saying Disney and Deadpool over and over again, especially since those two are very different and this film is very different from either, but some people actually like the film, and it appears to be more people like than dislike. Is that why you’re coming on so strong, because you expected pushback?
That’s not a compelling argument. Sometimes bad reviews can be useful when there are a lot of them, but you’re taking them out of context and ignoring the mountain of good reviews, and furthermore making unsupportable claims about why there are good reviews. Some 1-star reviews are also people who were in a bad mood, or had a rare/unique experience. Occasionally bad reviews are competitors and occasionally trolls who like saying mean things. In this case, the 1-star reviews on IMDB (the site you pointed to) are less than 1% of the reviews, and 6-star and above are 97% of all reviews.
You named Dune and 2001. Let’s look at IMDB’s 1-star reviews for them:
Do the same for products that you like and paid for. I’m certain that an honest application of that test will demonstrate that you’re cherry-picking, made up your mind here for some reason and are unswayed by facts.
If I have 100 reviews saying 10/10, loved the movie, thumbs up!.... I learn nothing. Indian audiences for example always give extreme positive reviews to movies.
If I have a detailed bad review, that tells me why its a bad movie, its not about support for my opinion, its about understanding if the reviewer traveled the same road, to get to the same conclusion.
Since you have multiple times refused to answer the question of whether your have read the book, I'm going to assume you have not. I found the movie to be a pretty close adaptation to the written material, so your strong feelings seem entirely misplaced (and I guess you don't like Ryan Gosling, fine).
That said, my family - both kids and adults, with entirely different interests and preferences - enjoyed the hell out of it. That, to me, makes for a good movie, whatever your definition of "objectivity" is. Listen, it's OK not to like something popular, but consider that the downvotes and responses you're getting are not astroturfing, but simply you swimming against the current. Sincerely, - real human.
> There's a plethora of people who convert to religion at an older age, and that seems far more far fetched than Santa.
Being in a religion doesn’t imply belief in deities; it only implies people want social connection. This is clearly visible in global religion statistics; there are countries where the majority of people identify as belonging to a religion, and at the same time only a small minority state they believe in a “God”. Norway is a decent example that I bumped into just yesterday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Norway
Me too, but I don’t like referring to Dunning-Kruger ever for multiple reasons. There are perfectly good labels like cockiness, arrogance, ignorance, presumptuousness, and wrongheaded. ;)
There are many issues with DK, and the paper’s widely misunderstood. For one, the primary figure demonstrates a positive correlation between confidence and competence, so according to DK’s own paper, high confidence is not an indicator of incompetence, contrary to popular belief. The paper also measured things in a very funny way (by having participants rank themselves against other people of unknown skill), and it measured only very simple things (like basic grammar, and ability to get a joke), and it only polled Cornell undergrads (no truly incompetent people), and there were a tiny number of participants receiving extra credit (might exclude the As and Fs in the class). Many smart people have come to the conclusion that DK is a statistical artifact of the way they did their experiment, not a real cognitive bias. Some smart people have pointed out that DK is probably popular because it’s really tempting to believe - we like the idea of arrogant people getting justice. The paper also primes the reader, telling them what to believe even though the title isn’t truly supported by the data. It’s an interesting read that I think would not pass today’s publication criteria.
I looked up persuade and convince in the thesaurus and dictionary, based on the title, and then came to say the same thing. But then I got a little curious about the source of the title’s claim, and looked up Chaim Perelman. He really did try to make a distinction between convince and persuade in his influential book from sixty years ago, so the body of the blog post is accurate in a sense - this is a concept that came from an historically important philosopher. Perelman was dissecting argumentation and cataloguing the techniques for strong and persuasive arguments. The problem with this blog post is taking Perelman’s argument out of context and stating Perelman’s rhetorical distinction as though it’s a fact and then arguing logically for it. That leaves out all the ethos and pathos that Perelman was trying to convey is necessary for a good argument, and it also misses slightly on the logos as well.
Interesting. The post would have benefitted a lot from talking about this background instead of just name-dropping Perelman once and by last name only(!!).
That's the sort of sloppiness you get when you have a conversation with an AI, ask the AI to make a blog post based on the conversation, and then copy-paste that straight into your Substack without reading to see if a fresh reader would understand what you are talking about.
If the author insists on posting more unedited AI text, asking a fresh AI session to critique the post from scratch would probably catch this kind of mistake and lead to a much better result.
New multifamily construction in the US that has to undergo design review is arguably fairly custom in that each site will have different requirements. I think it's fair to say that commoditization is a spectrum?
The structure of most residential construction in the US is standardized. Foundation (or slab), wood framing, etc. There are different levels of quality, but codes and standards mean that standardization is the norm.
There is practically universal recognition among microplastics researchers that contamination is possible and that strong quality controls are needed, and to be transparent and reproducible, they have a habit of documenting their methodology. Many papers and discussions suggest avoiding all plastics as part of the methodology, e.g. “Do’s and don’ts of microplastic research: a comprehensive guide” https://www.oaepublish.com/articles/wecn.2023.61
Another thing to consider is that papers generally compare against baseline/control samples, and overestimating microplastics in baseline samples may lead to a lower ratio of reported microplastics in the test samples, not higher.
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