Also unfortunately, biomedical scientists are not known for their tendency to collaborate to face a mutual enemy (the mild pushback against the Elsevier/Springer Nature publishing cartel has come less from scientists and more from university systems whose libraries have to foot most of the bills). From their perspective, it's "What am I gonna do? Raise my own antibodies? Start blowing my own glassware?" So they grimace and bear it.

For reference, here's how their workflow for research antibodies goes (and it's been like this for decades):

1. Produce an antibody the research world needs. Do no QA, that's expensive and unnecessary.

2. Claim with usually no evidence (and apparently by forging evidence) that the antibody works in certain applications.

3. Let researchers buy the antibody and do your QA for you. Even if the antibody doesn't work, only a tiny percentage of buyers will go to the effort of getting a refund.

4. Profit. Keep selling the antibody even when the rare scientist with time on their hands demonstrates beyond doubt that your antibody clearly doesn't work.

5. When sales start drying up because enough people are catching up to the scam, discontinue the antibody. Give no explanation.

6. Repeat from 1.

Not the person you responded to, but functional democracies require either an already-established functioning government, which can be efficiently perpetuated and controlled by elected leaders (think the United Kingdom); or a non-functioning government which can be effectively reformed and then perpetuated by elected leaders (think Taiwan). In both cases, functional democracies also require an electorate who can be brought to work towards a nation's major development goals.

There are countries for which none of these criteria can be reasonably met in the context of a democracy. One reason is if the electoral processes are so corrupt that no one competent is actually elected or, if they are accidentally competent, are too busy working towards their own and their cronies' ends to be effective leaders. The second is if there is underlying social strife which prevents people from working collaboratively towards nation building.

India fails in both counts: the corruption at all levels of government is nothing short of legendary, and the country as a whole is comprised of very diverse peoples who, historically, have had little reason to work together. Many African countries, rather tragically, are in the same boat: during the colonial era, "countries" were almost randomly assembled out of groups of people who historically had almost nothing in common. When the colonial powers left, they typically left nothing behind -- no knowledgeable and experienced administrators, no established universal education, and little or no social infrastructure. The people were then left to reinvent government from scratch, and the "country" more often than not was actually five separate nations of people who hated each other.

In sum, democracy is sort of an advanced form of government which, when introduced, really does need a somewhat coherent nation to already exist (in more cases) for it to work well. An autocratic or authoritarian government is usually the on-ramp, so long as it's reasonably functional and stable for long enough. Wherever democracy has persistently failed to take off, it's invariably a place in which the underlying foundation didn't exist to begin with.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213103

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

1: The company's website, humanlongevity dot com, seems to have been compromised, and as "captcha" will try to have you install a Trojan. So here's the Wikipedia page instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Longevity

2: https://fortune.com/2017/02/21/craig-venter-human-longevity/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47904876

Points: 514

# Comments: 87

What you are offering is NOT a free tool -- it is a demo, for a tool for which you are charging $12/month. No reasonable person would interpret a grand total of 3 exports as enough to justify calling this a "free" tool.

This is to say nothing of your violation of AGPL on the use of MuPDF, which has been pointed out here and elsewhere.

But of course, you're free to Show HN a paid product; just kindly don't insult our collective intelligences in the process.

Also significantly: "vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause."

> At the heart of the problem is the tendency for AI language models to confabulate, which means they may confidently generate a false output that is stated as being factual.

"Confabulate" is precisely the correct term; I don't know how we ended up settling on "hallucinate".

What's this about?

Certain aspects of human nature, as they apply to the corporate world, can be acknowledged and understood, even if they're not excuses when they lead to the downfall of a prominent organization. When you give someone a big title, a dump truck full of cash, and a mandate to innovate, human nature dictates that most people will internalize the idea that "because I was given all this, I must be competent", even if they very obviously are not. Typically the outcome is a "bold plan forward" which is notable for lacking any actual clear solution to the company's main problems. In one example I know of, the CEO decided to pivot from an unrelated field towards launching a cryptocurrency, and cooked up a cartoonishly-dangerous marketing scheme to support the idea. One person ended up dying as a result, and the company then purged every mention of crypto from its website. (And yes, the company collapsed soon afterwards.)

While it's easy to blame the CEO with their oversized salary, the blame for such disasters doesn't just lie with them. After all, arguably the most important roles of the board are to hire a good CEO, ensure the CEO is actually performing as they should, and fire them if they're not. When politics, cronyism, or again, simple incompetence, lead the board to also fail at its job, you end up with the long, slow decline into obscurity we've seen so often in the tech world.

But Mozilla had a good run.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019022

Points: 3

# Comments: 0