'Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups.'
pnas.org/doi/full/10.10…

'The interesting thing is that humans have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that 2,400 Gt of carbon might make a difference to climate, but very readily get behind the idea of a few hygroscopic flares making 18 months worth of rain fall in a day.'theconversation.com/dont-blame-dub…

'The paradox is that a focus on the end of the world is oddly convenient. A hypothetical apocalypse is ... “a clean risk”. It is all-or-nothing, absolving innovators from having to engage with the messy inequities that are produced by their technologies.'
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

“Prestige rules everything around us in academia”
science.org/content/articl…

'people see more of their biases (e.g., age, gender, race) in the decisions of algorithms than in their own decisions ... Participants were also more likely to perceive algorithms ... to have been influenced by irrelevant biasing attributes (e.g., race).'
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

'The academic community is attempting, in good faith, to move away from narrow assessment metrics such as publications in high-impact journals. But institutes are struggling to create workable narrative assessments, & researchers struggling to write them.'
nature.com/articles/d4158…

'Soto [a plaintiff] counters that universities have a mission that goes beyond doing big-dollar research ... “Universities are not businesses and running them as such is detrimental to the creativity and insight that only academia can produce.”'
science.org/content/articl…

'[R]educing glacier melt rates only slows down the process. It doesn’t stop the sea level from rising ... [R]eversing the sea-level contribution would ... require nearly two centuries of increased snowfall to build up the mass of ice that has been lost.'
theconversation.com/why-artificial…

'We find evidence of global value divergence ... Over time, however, geographic proximity has emerged as an increasingly strong correlate of value similarity, indicating that values have diverged globally but converged regionally.'
nature.com/articles/s4146…

'consensus decision-making has led to slower, more incremental progress ... it raises questions about the efficacy of consensus driven decision-making, and whether a “last resort” voting rule should be adopted for the climate change regime.' Carbon Brief
carbonbrief.org/guest-post-the…

.David Keith: “The experiment became this proxy for a kind of debate about whether solar geoengineering research should move forward ... that’s ... the ultimate reason why [we] decided to pull the plug. There’s no way ... it made sense to move forward.”
technologyreview.com/2024/04/04/109…

'Throughout its history, the Gates foundation’s emphasis on ‘accelerating’ innovations and ‘scaling up’ technologies ... obscures real-world uncertainties and complexities, and ignores the costs of lost opportunities.'
nature.com/articles/d4158…

'The geologists’ rejection of the Anthropocene is understandable in their need for scientific evidence. It may seem to be a missed opportunity, but it does not really matter because how we live in ... the world does not depend on a signal in the geology.'
theconversation.com/the-anthropoce…

'A scientific definition of the Anthropocene is already widely available in the form of the Anthropocene Event ... as “a complex, transformative, and ongoing event analogous to the Great Oxidation Event and others in the geological record.”'
theconversation.com/the-anthropoce…

'Can AI serve the deeply human function of making others feel heard? ... We found that AI-generated messages made recipients feel more heard than human-generated messages ... [but], recipients felt less heard when they realized that a message came from AI'
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

'2 things can be independently true about social media. 1st, that there is no evidence that using these platforms is ... driving an epidemic of mental illness. 2nd, that considerable reforms ... are required, given how much time young people spend on them.'nature.com/articles/d4158…

'A judgment about whether a scientist is likely to have an accent or be fluent in English, for instance, could influence a journalist’s decision to contact them about their work. “... yes, that is inherent racism ... but ... it’s absolutely at play here.”'
science.org/content/articl…