Discussions

A.M. Kudryavtsev, cor­re­spond­ing mem­ber of the RAS, direc­tor of the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics of the RAS, made a bla­tant­ly fun­da­men­tal­ist pre­sen­ta­tion at a the­o­log­i­cal con­fer­ence. He claimed that muta­tions are caused by sins, that human lifes­pans are short­en­ing because bib­li­cal char­ac­ters lived for hun­dreds of years, and that Russia is forced to war because peo­ple in neigh­bor­ing coun­tries have mul­ti­plied too much. «At first I thought it was a fake,» write with­out col­lu­sion in response to the obscu­ran­tism Acad. Alexei Khokhlov and bioin­for­mati­cian Alexander Panchin. There is also a response from the head of the RAS Commission against Pseudoscience, Acad. Eugene Alexandrov.

Responding to Mikhail Sokolov’s points, Viktor Vakhshtayn con­tin­ues his dis­cus­sion of the obsta­cles that arise in trans­fer­ring the results of soci­o­log­i­cal research obtained in one soci­ety to another.

Mikhail Sokolov has post­ed detailed remarks fol­low­ing an inter­view with Victor Vakhshtayn pub­lished by T-invari­ant. Spoiler alert: «Russian social sci­en­tists … do not need to aban­don Russian mate­r­i­al in the past by eras­ing it along with the part of their lives ded­i­cat­ed to col­lect­ing it. If you under­stand how the men­tal maps of the social sci­ences are arranged, … you can, hope­ful­ly, avoid such sacrifices.»

Prof. Andrei Rostovtsev list­ed the coun­tries whose cit­i­zens, accord­ing to Dissernet, active­ly use the oppor­tu­ni­ty to receive aca­d­e­m­ic degrees in Russia for fal­si­fied dis­ser­ta­tions. China is in first place, fol­lowed by most Third World coun­tries, and there are even some European coun­tries on the list. And for instance, Tajikistan suc­cess­ful­ly sells Russian-lan­guage forg­eries to Iranians. 

The Nature web-site reports about an open let­ter of Ukrainian sci­en­tists with an appeal to the world sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty to boy­cott Russian sci­ence. The Russian sci­en­tif­ic dias­po­ra is dis­cussing the top­ic in the RASA group.

How should we per­ceive the new gen­er­a­tion of AI sys­tems, what to expect of them, and how will they change us? Scott Aaronson, an AI secu­ri­ty spe­cial­ist, talked about this in an inter­view to Sergei Nemalevich, a sci­ence jour­nal­ist of Radio Liberty. It’s a good start­ing point for those who have not yet real­ized how seri­ous things are. 

According to the new Cochrane meta-analy­sis, the effec­tive­ness of masks against the spread of res­pi­ra­to­ry infec­tions has not yet been proven. However, they assess the reli­a­bil­i­ty of this con­clu­sion is low because the avail­able research is incon­clu­sive. Science jour­nal­ist Ira Yakutenko explained in detail why this is the case. We can argue there until the prop­er research arrives.

Machine trans­la­tion The oth­er day it turned out, accord­ing to the Club of Academicians “July 1”, that in December 2022 the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences decid­ed «to trans­fer the func­tions of the RAS Commission on Combating Pseudoscience and the RAS Commission on Counteraction to Falsification of Scientific Research to the Expert Council of the RAS». The lead­ers of the com­mis­sions were not even informed about this. In 2018, the RAS Commission on Combating Pseudoscience was split into two, severe­ly lim­it­ing the right to pub­lic state­ments (only with the approval of the Presidium of the RAS). Now