if you lived in a society that valued, i dunno, tracking and hunting down giraffes in small groups, would you have the same struggles? what if just participating in society required ~20 hours of athletic activity a week? i'm not entirely convinced you would have this problem, based on the anthropology i've read.

the signal of a maladaptive culture is not 'i feel like the people around me have a moral failing'. It is 'i, and many others, feel like we've all got basically the same moral failing.'

personally, this has been a very helpful reframing. If I simply can't bring myself to do something, that means not that I am bad and my willpower is bad, it just means that something is materially wrong and I should consider addressing it by doing things that my body will let me do.

if you think CRISPR or P1 transduction were discovered outside academia, you are wrong. and this isn't even discussing stuff with no immediate clinical applications that is nonetheless important (jumbo phages, asgard archaea are hot rn)

Personally I need 10-20 hours of real sport a week to function really well, which seems to put me in some very high percentiles on HN. I need so much sport that I barely have time to do anything besides work and exercise, which means I don't do many non-athletic hobbies anymore.

And even in more computer-adjacent fields, this is still ridiculously reductive. Geoff Hinton is an academic through-and-through, and he changed the world even for computer scientists. What about someone like Don Knuth? I mean, even google's pagerank started as an academic project.

Engineering firms do great research too, but this is not the only way.

Major bummer that others have had differing experiences from me, here.

I've run the exact lab you're describing, and I think we gave full credit for anything between 5m/s^2 and 20 m/s^2 provided there was some acknowledgement that this was at odds with what was expected. We very often would check in halfway through class and either tell the kids what they were doing wrong, or even tell them to write something 'this is at odds with literally all known science and I think I don't trust this'. For this particular lab, I've never seen errors as large as the ones you've described, so your lab was likely very poorly set up.

In other cases, I've made extra time (and allow students to come in) in case their numbers were so weird as to be problematic; just depends on the lab. Any teacher worth their salt will do this. It's a shame the teachers you had were terrible and incentivized bad stuff.

If being in a lab has taught me anything, it's that doing good science is often morally difficult. Sticking by your guns is hard.

But you are right in some sense: there are definitely incentives to... misreport. The best we can do as teachers is to reduce those as much as possible and reward kids/students for being honest.

I'm not sure that invalidates my broader point in any case, but good to know!

I've been a lot more attentive to this kind of stuff lately due to some chronic health stuff that came up in the family. I think there's probably some framework in modern medicine that makes it less prone to adopting these kinds of methods. Maybe it's just historical baggage, who knows...

Do you have a citation on the fact that 'most' pathogenic strains have a plasmid making them so? Some guys in our lab have been playing around with plasmid copy number lately (in a largely 'basic science' kind of way) -- this could give some nice context for that work.