To some extent, I don’t.

Which is to say that in and around my field (biochemistry), I’m pretty good at sort of “vibe checking”. In practice, this is just a subconscious version of checking that a paper is published in a legit journal, and having a sense for what kind of topics, and language is common. This isn’t useful advice though, because I acquired this skill gradually over many years.

I find it tricky in fields where I am out of element, because I am the kind of person who likes to vet information. Your question about how to identify work as peer reviewed seems simple, but is deceptively complex. The trick is in the word “peer” — who counts as a peer is where the nuance comes in. Going to reputable journals can help, but even prestigious journals aren’t exempt from publishing bullshit (and there are so many junk journals that keeping up even within one field can be hard). There are multiple levels of “peer”, and each is context dependent. For example, the bullshit detector that I’ve developed as a biochemist is most accurate and efficient within my own field, somewhat useful within science more generally, slightly useful in completely unrelated academic fields. I find the trick is in situating myself relative to the thing I’m evaluating, so I can gauge how effective my bullshit detector will be. That’s probably more about reflecting on what I know (and think I know) than it is about the piece of material I’m evaluating.

In most scenarios though, I’m not within a field where my background gives me much help, so that’s where I get lazy and have to rely on things like people’s credentials. One litmus test is to check whether the person actually has a background in what they’re talking about, e.g. if a physicist is chatting shit about biology, or a bioinformatician criticising anthropology, consider what they’re saying with extra caution. That doesn’t mean discount anyone who isn’t staying in their lane, just that it might be worthwhile looking into the topic further (and seeing who else is saying what they are, and what experts from the field are saying too).

As I get deeper into my academic career, I’ve found I’m increasingly checking a person’s credentials to get a vibe check. Like, if they’re at a university, what department are they under? Because a biochemist who is under a physics department is going to have a different angle than one from the medical research side, for example. Seeing where they have worked helps a lot.

But honestly a big part of it is that I have built up loose networks of trust. For example, I’m no statistician, but someone I respect irl referenced a blog of Andrew Gelman’s, which I now consider myself s fan of (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/). Then from that blog, I ended up becoming a fan of this blog, which tends to be about sociology. Trusting these places doesn’t mean I take them at face value for anything they say, but having that baseline of trust there acts as a sort of first pass filter in areas I’m less familiar with, a place to start if I want to learn about a perspective that I know the rough origin of.

In the context of news, I might start to see a news outlet as trustworthy if I read something good of theirs, like this piece on 3M by ProPublica, which makes me trust other stuff they publish more.

Ultimately though, all of these are just heuristics — imperfect shortcuts for a world that’s too complex for straightforward rules. I’m acutely aware of how little spare brain space I have to check most things, so I have to get lazy and rely on shortcuts like this. In some areas, I’m lucky to have friends I can ask for their opinion, but for most things, I have to accept that I can’t fact check things thoroughly enough to feel comfortable, which means having to try holding a lot of information at arms length and not taking it as fact. That too, takes effort.

However, I got a hell of a lot smarter when I allowed myself to be more uncertain about things, which means sometimes saying “I don’t know what to make of that”, or “I think [thing] might be the case, but I don’t remember where I heard that, so I’m unsure”, or just straight up “I don’t know”. Be wary of simple and neat answers, and get used to sitting with uncertainty (especially in modern science research).

I learned this when playing Valheim

That’s her right arm, not left. Are we onto something here? Is the true gender divide that men want a badass left arm and women want a badass right arm?

Edit: I just checked and Noble-2 (from Halo: Reach) has their right arm as the badass prosthetic too.

I wish I could say something helpful, but I’m tired too, and I know there’s nothing that can really be said to help. So I won’t try to help, and I’ll just stop for a moment and we can be tired and scared together.

“Or, you could keep whining about how these people have no empathy for you.”

When OP speaks of allies not being allies, it’s comments like yours that I think of. You use “we” like we’re on the same side here, but (ironically given you say this of OP) you have missed their entire point.

We’re not going to survive (let alone make progress) if we tear each other down like this. This isn’t me saying “they go low, we go high” nonsense, because you’re quite right that relying Trump voters to show empathy doesn’t look like a good strategy. I don’t see that OP was actually saying anything of the sort though. This is about how we (people opposing Trump and co.) treat each other. It would be easier for us to become practiced and educated if we could rely on the people who are meant to be allies.

I want to believe that you’re a decent person who wrote an assholish comment. It happens to the best of us. I hope that you’ll reread OP’s comment and your own and see how unproductive this approach is for everyone. But maybe I’m wasting my time here, in much the same way that expecting empathy from Trump voters is probably unwise. That’s up to you, I guess

I really like how you used spoilers here for rhetorical effect. It gives your comment a rhythm to it you don’t often see in writing.

It’s not about dispelling any ulterior motive. The idea of anti-monopoly enforcement actions is that if the “business ecosystem” is good and healthy, then other companies who don’t own Chrome will be able to compete with whoever owns Chrome, giving the consumer choice that people who like the free market say will reduce consumer exploitation. (If you can’t tell from my tone, I am dubious, at best, of this logic)

Didn’t they sell off a bunch of the land that was going to be used for that? I remember being very upset at how spiteful of a gesture it felt

I read somewhere that someone’s attitude to furries is a great litmus test for how tolerant that person actually is (assuming that person isn’t a furry, of course). I’ve always found myself mildly confused by furries (and I used to be somewhat weirded out because I mainly knew of furries because a friend bought a house from drawing furry porn). Hearing the litmus test thing helped me to chill out a bunch and recognise that seeing lots of furries in and adjacent to my community was a sign of a healthy social ecosystem, so to speak

I hope the job treats you well, and you have enough time and energy for chasing your silly passions

A friend of mine lived with an electrolysis tech for a while, and she got basically all her legs done for free over the course of multiple years. I experienced it a few times — I imagine the pain is similar to how a tattoo would hurt.

For me, the cost was by far, the most expensive part. Sucks to be ginger

I don’t find it nearly as bad as facial hair stubble (based on experiences with partners). You are right though in that the niceness of shaved legs disappears pretty quickly. I tend to only indulge when I change my bedsheets because shaved legs against fresh sheets is amazing

I’m not actually doubtful of this, given that all it’s really saying is "We’re not going full enshittification… Yet "

I too have been playing Satisfactory. I’ve been playing it with friends, which is nice because we’re progressing way faster than I would alone, plus I can let someone else worry about oil ratios. The train network, however, is a bit of a mess (in a way that’s at least 60% charming and only 40% annoying)

“But students seem unlikely to let the incident go without further action to help girls feel safe at school. Last week, more than half the school walked out, MSN reported, forcing classes to be canceled”

Nice. Based students. That kind of collective action is great and takes a lot of organising (I say that as someone who tried to organise activist stuff when I was at school. If you don’t have enough people who genuinely care about the case, you can’t hit critical mass for an action like this. Mad respect for these kids.)

Edit: formatting

It’s definitely good, but I do wonder (and worry) whether increased usage of rail contributes at all to the increasingly abysmal passenger rail services; when you look at the data, it’s horrific how overloaded the train lines are due to chronic under-investment.

That being said, even if this scheme was impacting passenger rail, it’s probably still good overall, especially if it leads to more investment in infrastructure (i.e. passenger rail being drastically involved in the future); I have plenty of beef with Starmer’s Labour, but I also recognise that the trains getting as bad as they are now didn’t happen overnight, so will take time to improve. (Which reminds me: I should read more about the recent budget)

I love the hat Makes me want to wear it and sit cross legged on the floor somewhere

I used to do leathercraft commissions. My best customers were LARPers ordering armour, scroll cases etc., and kinksters buying fancy collars, cuffs and harnesses. Sometimes these were the same people

Nah. Some humans saw that and thought “if we can con enough people into working 40 hours weeks, I can buy a holiday home here”

starting to write and then cancel my post.

I get what you mean, I do a lot of that myself. Although it’s unfortunate that I often find it easier to hit send when replying to internet strangers than I do when messaging my friends. I suspect it’s because online feels far lower stakes, even though my friends would be far more charitable to a poorly articulated idea than the internet would.

If it helps, I don’t think you should feel bad about cancelling unwritten messages. Maybe sometimes you don’t actually know enough to have an opinion on a topic, so refraining is the wise thing. Maybe other times, you have Thoughts, but they’re still sort of fermenting in your head and they’re not quite ready yet. Or maybe you’ve distilled your Thoughts down so that you know what message you want to convey, but you don’t think that this particular conversation is the right time or place for them (possibly due to realising you’re in conversation with someone who isn’t arguing in good faith and continuing would be unproductive). These (and more) are all valid and good reasons to not actually submit a post or comment you start writing.

The advice that I try to give myself is that we’re under enough pressure as it is without helping more on unnecessarily. Sometimes that pressure is because we have something that we desperately want to say, but it’s hard to articulate it in a way that doesn’t feel like we’re dishonouring the meaning of what we intend. That pressure is hard to counter because it’s coming from the weight of the thing we want to say, but I ease it by reasoning that the important ideas will find their own way out of our heads and into the world, if given time, and that they will still be important.

I figure that there’s an infinite array of conversations on the internet that could’ve happened but didn’t. It’d be a shame if we let the conversations that never ended up happening distract us from other conversations that we’re actually having. Which is all to say that it’s okay if you start replying to this comment and cancel it. Maybe in the next life thread, eh?