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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • There’s a few YouTube channels that I think do a good job of being level-headed when it comes to analysing self-defense and giving decent advice around it. Hard2Hurt, Armchair Violence (a more general channel that recently did a video on unarmed knife defense), and Active Self Protection are three that come to mind right off the bat. All three say the same thing: • avoid sketchy locations if you can • pay attention to the people around you, especially in what are called “transition areas” like when you walk out of a store • deescalate conflict as much as possible (without giving in to demands) • leave as soon as you’re able • only fight when your hand is forced

    As far as I’m aware, they all also advocate for carrying pepper spray and participating in folkstyle wrestling to use as your defensive base for things that don’t require lethal force. The problem is, you don’t have the only say on whether a situation will become a threat to your health and safety or not. Sometimes you’re just unlucky and a guy flips out on you for something petty and now you’ve got a guy pushing and shoving yelling about how he’s gonna fuck you up and you can see a pocket knife clipped in his pocket.

    Most firearm uses are at very close range. If you practice your draw—and you absolutely fucking should—you should be able to draw and fire multiple rounds with a person busy punching or stabbing you. (Through what usually happens is the victim manages to get a window of separation and uses that to draw their weapon.) After a few shots your attacker will have had enough time to react to what you’re doing, but most people react to being shot in the gut by falling over. It’s mostly a psychological thing, but surprisingly effective. Once they do that, turn and run. All you’re trying to do is get them to stop hurting you so you can get away safely.


  • A genuine, actual answer is that when you’re being attacked, it is incredibly rare for a police officer to be standing there, ready to intervene. In life-or-death situations the police really only exist to take a report from whoever is left standing, and potentially make an arrest. There’s plenty of people out there who don’t have the strength to defend themselves in hand-to-hand combat, and even if they did, next to nobody has the skills necessary to reliably defend against a knife attack using their bare hands. That’s just plain how knife attacks work.

    You can counter this with statistics that show that access to guns increases injuries and deaths, because they absolutely do, but pro-gun folks put the individual before the group on this issue. The individual, in their mind, should have the right to quick deadly force in order to facilitate defense of their own life, and other’s failure to handle that responsibility is not their problem and/or the price of that right.

    There are always tradeoffs, in any policy you set for society. If you go the other direction there will be people who are victimized who would otherwise have been able to defend themselves. Which scenario is worse? How many victims of one type are worth victims of the other?














  • Liz@midwest.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzPeer review
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    1 month ago

    I think you’re placing a lot more weight on the authority of a single scientific paper than any actual scientist ever would. If you have one paper, you have one paper. If you have a series of papers all put out by the same lab… maybe there’s something there, maybe not. If other groups start publishing similar papers, okay this is sometime serious.

    In some of the messier sciences, like medicine, people will publish meta-studies, where they combine results from similar, but independently published, papers and see what they can come up with using the combined data. People will also publish literature reviews, where they essentially try to summarize the state of the science in their particular little niche. To trust a single study in medicine is to hitch your horse to a wicket.

    The peer review process doesn’t stop wrong papers from getting published, just obviously wrong or bad ones. I’m not entirely sure what you could even do to stop wrong papers from making into journals, since often times the problem isn’t in the published experimental design or analysis. Plus, there’s some papers that used to be right, but have become wrong as things change.

    they’re apparently lower effort than a good reddit comment

    They’re not, people are being flippant. People frequently complain about having to do peer reviews specifically because it’s unpaid labor. Regardless, if the paper is so wrong it would warrant a community note on Twitter, the paper would be strongly rejected. The standard for acceptance is way higher than that. Remember that it gets reviewed by fellow experts in the field. They will easily spot small errors.

    Is it the best possible system? Heck if I know. It works. Moving to a different system would require everyone to recalibrate their understanding of what good science looks like. We know how to identify it under the current publication model, it would take a fair bit of time to adjust to the new one.

    Edit: Oh yes, re: letters. It can take a year or more between publications. Letters might be slow, but it’s not terribly important. It takes time to do science, you don’t need to clap back in an instant.


  • Liz@midwest.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzPeer review
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    1 month ago

    A peer review really is just someone checking for glaring errors. If a paper gets published and someone had some real beef with it, best they can do is some of their own research to prove how shitty the other team was. After that, there are some journals that will publish letters where people comment on previous articles. But generally, most articles just get mildly ignored. It’s only after a pattern of corroborating evidence piles up that people will start to say that the results of a particular early study were significant.

    Mind you, the details about how this consensus process works varies from field to field. Particle physics has a different culture than hydrology. But, in general, one paper is not enough to hang your hat on.