Does XKCD's Cartoon Show How Scientific Publishing Is a Joke? (theatlantic.com) 133
"An XKCD comic — and its many remixes — perfectly captures the absurdity of academic research," writes the Atlantic (in an article shared by Slashdot reader shanen).
It argues that the cartoon "captured the attention of scientists — and inspired many to create versions specific to their own disciplines. Together, these became a global, interdisciplinary conversation about the nature of modern research practices." It depicts a taxonomy of the 12 "Types of Scientific Paper," presented in a grid. "The immune system is at it again," one paper's title reads. "My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it," declares another. The gag reveals how research literature, when stripped of its jargon, is just as susceptible to repetition, triviality, pandering, and pettiness as other forms of communication. The cartoon's childlike simplicity, though, seemed to offer cover for scientists to critique and celebrate their work at the same time...
You couldn't keep the biologists away from the fun ("New microscope!! Yours is now obsolete"), and — in their usual fashion — the science journalists soon followed ("Readers love animals"). A doctoral student cobbled together a website to help users generate their own versions. We reached Peak Meme with the creation of a meta-meme outlining a taxonomy of academic-paper memes. At that point, the writer and internet activist Cory Doctorow lauded the collective project of producing these jokes as "an act of wry, insightful auto-ethnography — self-criticism wrapped in humor that tells a story."
Put another way: The joke was on target. "The meme hits the right nerve," says Vinay Prasad, an associate epidemiology professor and a prominent critic of medical research. "Many papers serve no purpose, advance no agenda, may not be correct, make no sense, and are poorly read. But they are required for promotion." The scholarly literature in many fields is riddled with extraneous work; indeed, I've always been intrigued by the idea that this sorry outcome was more or less inevitable, given the incentives at play. Take a bunch of clever, ambitious people and tell them to get as many papers published as possible while still technically passing muster through peer review ... and what do you think is going to happen? Of course the system gets gamed: The results from one experiment get sliced up into a dozen papers, statistics are massaged to produce more interesting results, and conclusions become exaggerated. The most prolific authors have found a way to publish more than one scientific paper a week. Those who can't keep up might hire a paper mill to do (or fake) the work on their behalf.
The article argues the Covid-19 pandemic induced medical journals to forego papers about large-scale clinical trials while "rapidly accepting reports that described just a handful of patients. More than a few CVs were beefed up along the way."
But pandemic publishing has only served to exacerbate some well-established bad habits, Michael Johansen, a family-medicine physician and researcher who has criticized many studies as being of minimal value, told me. "COVID publications appear to be representative of the literature at large: a few really important papers and a whole bunch of stuff that isn't or shouldn't be read."
Unfortunately, the Atlantic adds, "none of the scientists I talked with could think of a realistic solution."
It argues that the cartoon "captured the attention of scientists — and inspired many to create versions specific to their own disciplines. Together, these became a global, interdisciplinary conversation about the nature of modern research practices." It depicts a taxonomy of the 12 "Types of Scientific Paper," presented in a grid. "The immune system is at it again," one paper's title reads. "My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it," declares another. The gag reveals how research literature, when stripped of its jargon, is just as susceptible to repetition, triviality, pandering, and pettiness as other forms of communication. The cartoon's childlike simplicity, though, seemed to offer cover for scientists to critique and celebrate their work at the same time...
You couldn't keep the biologists away from the fun ("New microscope!! Yours is now obsolete"), and — in their usual fashion — the science journalists soon followed ("Readers love animals"). A doctoral student cobbled together a website to help users generate their own versions. We reached Peak Meme with the creation of a meta-meme outlining a taxonomy of academic-paper memes. At that point, the writer and internet activist Cory Doctorow lauded the collective project of producing these jokes as "an act of wry, insightful auto-ethnography — self-criticism wrapped in humor that tells a story."
Put another way: The joke was on target. "The meme hits the right nerve," says Vinay Prasad, an associate epidemiology professor and a prominent critic of medical research. "Many papers serve no purpose, advance no agenda, may not be correct, make no sense, and are poorly read. But they are required for promotion." The scholarly literature in many fields is riddled with extraneous work; indeed, I've always been intrigued by the idea that this sorry outcome was more or less inevitable, given the incentives at play. Take a bunch of clever, ambitious people and tell them to get as many papers published as possible while still technically passing muster through peer review ... and what do you think is going to happen? Of course the system gets gamed: The results from one experiment get sliced up into a dozen papers, statistics are massaged to produce more interesting results, and conclusions become exaggerated. The most prolific authors have found a way to publish more than one scientific paper a week. Those who can't keep up might hire a paper mill to do (or fake) the work on their behalf.
The article argues the Covid-19 pandemic induced medical journals to forego papers about large-scale clinical trials while "rapidly accepting reports that described just a handful of patients. More than a few CVs were beefed up along the way."
But pandemic publishing has only served to exacerbate some well-established bad habits, Michael Johansen, a family-medicine physician and researcher who has criticized many studies as being of minimal value, told me. "COVID publications appear to be representative of the literature at large: a few really important papers and a whole bunch of stuff that isn't or shouldn't be read."
Unfortunately, the Atlantic adds, "none of the scientists I talked with could think of a realistic solution."
Lol (Score:2)
In a word (Score:1)
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Not 100% of it.
A lot of papers are written just because somebody's tenure depends on them writing X number of papers per year... but not all of them.
Re: In a word (Score:2)
Precisely.
"Some X are A." != "All X are A.".
It is the same type of "logic" as "All Jews ...". (...to use a hyperbole that should end this thread. :)
Left as a challenge for the reader (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm... Must be a slow news day, but I confess to submitting this idea a few days ago, and I still think it's funny. Some of the derivative versions were closer to hilarious, but they lose difficulty points for being derived. However my own extension wasn't included by the editor, so I'll add it on now as a challenge for the reader:
One of the links from The Atlantic will take you to the generator. [The link just says "website", which pretty much lacks meaning in this general context.] It can be used to somewhat easily create a version for the kinds of stories that then get linked to from Slashdot. Unfortunately, I lack the kind of imagination to do the deed, except that I think one of the stories on the last line should feature Cowboy Neal. However my idea would be feeble clickbait: "25 Things You Need to Know about Cowboy Neal" or something along those lines.
But I've already established my lack of a sense of humor, though I think the better Slashdot discussions in days of yore started with an imaginative joke.
types of Slashdot stories (Score:2)
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I went ahead and made one mostly mining the current stories for ideas:
https://drive.google.com/file/... [google.com]
But I'm sure better can be done. But the tool is quite easy to work with.
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Google: No results found for "scientific paper about scientific papers"
Well, that's definitive then.
Now I am going to write a "scientific paper about scientific papers, and why there are not scientific papers about scientific papers"
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I just did some scientific research about "scientific paper about scientific papers" Google: No results found for "scientific paper about scientific papers" Well, that's definitive then. Now I am going to write a "scientific paper about scientific papers, and why there are not scientific papers about scientific papers"
It's called a meta-study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
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You forgot the dupes.
Re: types of Slashdot stories (Score:4, Funny)
You forgot the dupes.
I didn't.
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In my example I included an opposite. Does that count as a kind of dupe?
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I could do the same for "Management Theories" and the endless detritus that seems to flow from that. The current flavor is "Leadership". In monolithic bureaucracies. Yeah.
Kinda miss the honesty of "do what I say or I will fire you".
Apparently "don't be dick" hasn't made its way to the collective zeitgeist of managers. I'm sure it will have at least a thousand books published proclaiming how revolutionary it is.
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Well, just on the quoted parts you have the kernels for four entries. However you'll need to flesh them out for longer entries. Most of my work in creating the example was adjusting the wording so that the new titles properly filled in the available spaces. His program is basically taking the XKCD cartoon and laying new captions over it.
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It's funny, but it does not have some grand meaning behind it. It's become fodder for the modern anti-science and anti-academic attitudes.
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I rather doubt that the anti-science crowd reads XKCD. The Atlantic story certainly portrayed it as scientists willing to laugh at their own pretensions. (Ditto the anti-academic crowd, though I think it's almost the same people.)
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The thing is, the anti-science crowd is strong on Slashdot. Any scientist is automatically more stupid than a slashdotter if they have a finding that does not match what the slashdotter was taught in grammar school. An attitude that all experts are automatically wrong, based upon a reading of only the article's headline, or the dumb overly simplified paragraph written by the slashdot editor. Won't bother reading the papers before declaring them wrong. Slashdot is not about scientists for the most part, i
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Basically concurrence, but I think that's one of the negative changes in Slashdot over the years.
Humans Game System to Score Higher! (Score:2)
News at 11!
I mean, I guess we could let AI's do all the research, but I really don't think they're going to be any better. As long as "# of publications" is a performance metric, folks are going to find ways to easily maximize their publications.
Maybe I should write that up and submit it to a journal. I'll just "borrow" all the illustrations.
Re:Humans Game System to Score Higher! (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as "# of publications" is a performance metric, folks are going to find ways to easily maximize their publications.
That's like tracking the percentage of Agile sprints where the team makes their commitment as a performance metric. It leads to intentional under-commitment to preserve bonuses.
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I mean, I guess we could let AI's do all the research
No, because the problem is not with the research but how the presentation of it is being gamed to satisfy the publish-or-perish model. Where an AI could come in handy is inhaling all the publications in a field and reducing them to a series of useful summaries to inform researchers in that discipline. Think of it as being a super-editor.
Such an AI should be as doable as today's plethora of natural language translators.
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> I guess we could let AI's do all the research, but I really don't think they're going to be any better.
AI has solved protein folding problem, which humans have tried to solve for years. Mind you that the AI still needs a lot of human work to do that level of research.
> As long as "# of publications" is a performance metric,
This is actually a good metric. Study has shown that the best publication comes on average during the time when person publishes the most of the papers. In other words, the more y
Re:Humans Game System to Score Higher! (Score:4, Insightful)
AI has solved protein folding problem, which humans have tried to solve for years.
No, humans solved the protein folding problem, using technology as usual.
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This is actually a good metric. Study has shown that the best publication comes on average during the time when person publishes the most of the papers. In other words, the more you publish, the more likely you are getting something right. ...
You're assuming some sort of independence of events here that I do not think is the case. You're also measuring under the current system where people have to publish lots of papers.
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Humans Game System to Score Higher
Many scientists, especially the good ones hate gaming the system. They hate losing their job and entire career slightly more though.
Many of the worse ones seem to relish the game.
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The scientists I know all do it as a labour of love. Social status among peers in THE most important thing. Getting paid is a bonus. They play the game because they have to. For example, in the USA & Canada, around 75% of faculty don't have tenure & so are living from short-term contract to short-term contract. They'd love to publish fewer papers of higher quality but they're afraid of not getting the next short-term contract. At the moment, there's an exodus of researchers from academia (some of wh
Some real value but some gaming (Score:4, Interesting)
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Simple solution. Unlimited funding.
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Seriously considering the market communism (essentially the Bell Labs model) for research.
It's become glaringly obvious the limitations of market based research, and even public-private partnerships seem little more than another way to drain the taxpayers dry.
Which would even be tolerable if you weren't paying through the nose for the product at the end.(hey pharmaceutical companies).
I could foresee government going back into basic research.
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Considering what is best for humanity, statistically best research funding strategy is to divide it into as many people as possible. Downside of that is that large research projects become impossible.
Fusion research is a good example. It has not been possible without large funding. But even with small funding, a lot of alternative energy technologies have been developed. I would prefer that have both large funding for this kind of super projects and small funding to many projects.
If I had the money, I would
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As I was saying before some would-never-be-billionaire snowflake with a tiny penis-like attachment decided to once again attempt to mod down the stuff that stings his particular nerve...
Was it the idea of ninja-drones conflicting with the idea of protective iki-like-camouflage [wikipedia.org] as one slums among the commons?
We will never know...
Ah well, anyway...
Eliminating any and all inheritance tax and family member murder charges or fines for inheritance values of over $8.008.500. Call it Kill and Keep law.
If the annual
Re:Some real value but some gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
Funding agencies make most, if not all, of their funding decisions via peer review. Any decisions that aren't made that way are made over the usual golf and blow jobs. They don't count papers.
Universities want to evaluate their staff. It's they who've fallen into the widespread trap that metrics == good. So now they've got metrics.
The scientists the Atlantic talked to who can't think of a solution aren't thinking very hard. Just stop using paper count to mean anything. Yeah, you'll have to work a little harder to evaluate your staff's performance. You might have to get external reviewers in. It's hard to do that every quarter. That's a bonus. Do it every five years instead. Then you encourage actual productive work on projects with a reasonable timeframe.
Re:Some real value but some gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
Andy published a paper in a new area of study, showing how A leads to B.
Beth publishes a paper, replicating Andy's work, confirming that A leads to B, and further shows that A can also lead to C.
It is at the point of Beth's paper being published that Andy should get any credit.
Now, some might say that this is problematic because not all science can be replicated by any old tom, dick, and harry. Some science is expensive.
My response is so fucking what. The people doing expensive science no longer need credit at every step, and its a team of people at that point.
Also, sometimes nobody cares to replicate because what was discovered is useless if true. My response is again so fucking what. Thems the breaks. How much credit should you get for discovering the quite unremarkable melting point of an amalgam that never existed until you made some? Hey maybe someone will replicate one day. Until then fuck off with taking credit.
Re:Some real value but some gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
It is at the point of Beth's paper being published that Andy should get any credit.
That's how it already works - researchers' impact factor is calculated from how often their papers are cited & quality of the journals they're published in.
There's 2 problems with this: #1 Researchers can still game the system by publishing claims that are guaranteed to incite indignant outrage among their peers thereby guaranteeing a flurry or rebuttal papers which in turn generates a large number of citations. #2 Rating papers by who publishes them gives even more power to the parasitic academic publishing industry, e.g. Elsevier, which is currently bleeding academia dry & making it more difficult for researchers to do their work.
All solutions that simply exchange one set of metrics for another is missing the fundamental point that metrics alone are a very poor solution, as was expressed by Charles Goodhart (1975):
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
Otherwise known as: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Reference: Goodhart, Charles. ‘Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience’. In Inflation, Depression, and Economic Policy in the West, edited by Anthony S Courakis, 111–46. Rowman & Littlefield, 1981. https://link.springer.com/chap... [springer.com].
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That's how it already works - researchers' impact factor is calculated from how often their papers are cited & quality of the journals they're published in.
You say thats how it works, then describe how it actually works. Right now they get credit for citations. Citations are not replication. Citations can in fact be the exact opposite of replication, but more often than not a citation means that this new study refines a value from that older study, which is frequently not done by any replication of any kind but instead comes from a different angle entirely.
You show that A leads to B.
Someone else shows that Z leads to A.
br You dont get any credit. You get
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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So far I'm apparently the only person who generated a new one?
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Maybe, but I just created one [twitter.com] as well on programming languages
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See? That's how to write comedy. The #3, #4, #7, and #11 were especially funny. But I noticed two typos, too.
Alas, I never have a givable mod point. Maybe it's related to my "Contradictor" achievement? (I noticed this submission was my 2^5 achievement in that category.)
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thanks, I'm sure there are some typos. I did not spend a lot of time on it
Thanks Captain Obvious (Score:2)
Too close to the bone.
Satire doesn't mean it's broken (Score:3)
It's a good comic but you can do the same thing with TV shows, movies, new products, etc, etc. Things, in general, are prone to patterns and categorization.
The fact he needed 12 categories actually demonstrates an impressive level of diversity.
Science is work (Score:2)
Re: Science is work (Score:2)
Academic science rewards splashiness. Therefore there is also an abundance of scientists spinning their mundane work as ground-breaking, life-altering, and indispensable.
Good work obviously gets done, but most information is noise, not signal, regardless of whose mouth it comes from.
The "science cheerleader" types (mostly in media, but also academic Twitter) who assert that any science is all those things simply by virtue of being science, don't help good thinking, or good science, which frequently requires
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Academic science rewards splashiness. Therefore there is also an abundance of scientists spinning their mundane work as ground-breaking, life-altering, and indispensable.
No, that's lazy administration that rewards that. Science rewards reproducibility and usefulness. The problem is that science is one of the biggest victims of name-dropping right now (besides various religious figures). A lot gets said and done in the name of science when there is no scientific reason or research to believe some of those things (energy and environmental policy are examples). Also, science and statistics are hard and some scientists (and even some entire fields) really don't do the relev
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Every one rewards splashiness. It gets more attention.
"Publish or perish" is the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Types of Slashdot Comments (Score:3)
# "One, Two, ???, Profit!"
# "Well duh, this is clearly obvious"
# "This might be obvious for you, but some other people..."
# "Repost!"
# "You're thinking about it from the wrong view point"
# "<Technical details>"
# "If we can do this, then imagine if we..."
# First post - everyone tries to be on top
## 75 Replies
Populism fodder (Score:1)
Its sad to see (Score:1)
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I'm old school (Score:2)
I prefer "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline".
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I think that is what is leaking from my turboencabulator.
Yes, yes, "ALL" of science... clearly... --.-- (Score:2)
PROTIP: Randall Munroe isn't particularly smart or an expert in most of what he crudely draws about. He's just a one-eyed among the blind.
Yes, your headline and its ridiculous generalization for the sake of an uneducated ideology-motivated anti-science agenda backs up me calling you blind very well.
PROTIP2: Don't take it seriously, it's a cartoon! You're cargo culting science, one step away from being a flat-earther. So you should not be talking.
comic is right, but publishing in a joke. (Score:2)
As a former scientist working on quantum computing:
Half of the type of papers was involved in the evolution of superconducting QC, and now they work. They probably would not work I there had not been a lot of people going down every road, looking at old papers, looking at materials which were unknown ho they would behave, attempts to transfer theoretical ideas.
And yes the "the task I had to do anyway was so hard that I wrote a paper about it" is the type of paper which made QC possible.
The 1980's calling. This is old news. (Score:3)
Long ago, I did a final year project in electronics, which involved background research into relevant papers on switched-capacitor filters. The amount of dross was amazing, even then. Eventually, I found that the derivative dross papers all cited one or two papers of actual interest. A typical dross paper would pick up on some formulae in the original work, twiddle the algebra a bit, and derive some load of rubbish results that had little connection to reality. It was not wrong, as such, but just fundamentally useless.
A few years later, the same phenomenon came up, when my father did a bit of consultancy after he had retired as a scientific civil servant. He had been given some papers by his customer (our neighbour), and wanted my opinion. There was one paper worth studying. The rest were just derivative and not at all informative. He was relieved when I told him that. He thought he was going senile, because that sort of rubbish would never have been published in his day.
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Oblig? (Score:2)
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Don't even need to publish rubbish, social media (Score:2)
Take Prof. Sun's work. He got his university to post on their website ( https://news.northeastern.edu/... [northeastern.edu] ) and then he touted it on linkedin. When asked for details he said 'no, waiting for IP'. So, here it is 10 months later and still no product. But i will bet real money he got more funding. The way science is funded is broken. It has been for awhile.
Technology Transfer (Score:2)
Unfortunately, yes (Score:2)
Because
1. Back 50 years ago, 70% of instructors in universities and colleges were tenure, or
tenure track. Now it's under 30%, and everyone else has no guarantee they'll
have a job in the fall.
2. Colleges and universities DO NOT CARE, in general, about the quality of the
Re:Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:2, Insightful)
My favorite brush with academic peer reviewed publications was when the referee comments (from the same reviewer) on my revised draft recommended I revert back the changes I made to my initial draft because while the original was missing a certain X and was too short to make my point, the incorporation of that very X into the manuscript made it too long and didn't advance the point made well enough in the original version.
I stopped after the comments to the second revision recommended going back to the firs
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I think your "publications" consist of updating the weekly specials on the sign at Denny's.
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I think your "publications" consist of updating the weekly specials on the sign at Denny's.
I think that's unlikely. The weekly specials sign at Denny's is actually useful to someone and isn't overflowing with ego.
Re:Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:5, Insightful)
far left politics front and center up top.
Randall Munroe used to have *it*.
He was always "far left" relative to someone like you. And he was always political, if by "political" you mean "suggests we don't normalize punching down for humour".
Rightwing people do have a tendency to find causing suffering on others funny and even as economic policy. Literally every complaint about "PC culture" in comedy is about not being "allowed" to punch down. Here's a hint - you're allowed to punch down, but you can't force people to find that funny because you can't force people to be psychopaths. It is literally just the free market at work.
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You are the reason the majority of the modern Internet is an insufferable bunch of whiny bitches these days.
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You are the reason the majority of the modern Internet is an insufferable bunch of whiny bitches these days.
By far the most common whiny bitch comment on comedy videos is "you can't say this kind of joke now". We're talking about material from, like, 2018. The whiny bitches are you guys: the rightwing snowflakes. I see more of you cunts whinging about poltical correctness and SJWs than people being politically correct or real SJWs.
Keep crying about how liberals are ruining everything.
Jokes don't make anybody suffer, you incredible cry baby.
Says the person who never had racist "jokes" hurled at them apropos of nothing. It's easy to call others crybabies when your pan
Re: Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:4)
Xkcd's humor and presentation was almost completely apolitical until around the time you-know-who was duly elected in a free and fair election.
This is a prime example. He was political and "left" before Trump's election, but you didn't notice until your hero got elected and poked fun at the political positions you held. You could plainly see his politics in every interview or talk he did.
For sure, he's always been concerned about things like climate change, which is a political position because the right wing made it so. He's made feminist comics before Trump.
Re: Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:5, Informative)
We're talking about a fucking stick figure comic that went for years making math jokes.
Here's one from the early days and it's explicitly political:
https://xkcd.com/154/ [xkcd.com]
Look, you are as your username suggests a RightWingNutJob, which means inventing your own reality par for the course. I get that. So this is for anyone else casually reading, since we both know you are incapable of changing your opinion.
Re: Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:5, Insightful)
which means inventing your own reality
"Right wing", "conservative", whatever you want to call it, is always based on an alternate reality known as "the past". "The past" was always better, and strangely never has the things one hates. It's like they lack a sense of awareness that their perception of things, especially the past, is heavily clouded by what they want things to be, rather than what things are.
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You think that if you agree with something it's not political, and if you disagree then it is political.
You're not a creationist, so you disagree with creationism so you consider the cartoon "not political". Except it is political. It is literally talking about the US senate, the embodiment of politics in your country.
I would ask why you think I assumed you were a creationist (I made no such assumption). But I understand why you think that. It's because you don't consider the cartoon political because you a
Re: Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:2)
I don't think y'all really want to start playing the game where we ascribe to the other guy every single whacked out conspiracy theory believed by anyone who voted for him.
If we were to play that game, we would need to hold Biden and Obama personally accountable for not just the Defund The Police bullshit they were or are actively humoring but also the black nationalist/melanin scholar trash they don't touch with a ten foot pole but which at least a few of their supporters believe, or the Ibram Kendi/Robin
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It's a math one, just like the ones you love, and oh look it's feminist too. What an SJW virtual signaller far-lefty that Randall Munroe guy is!
Re: Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:2)
I chuckled at that one back when I read it the first time. See the bit above about personal growth.
Re:Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:5, Insightful)
I stopped reading xkcd years ago.
Unfunny aged Seinfeldesque snark with far left politics front and center up top.
Randall Munroe used to have *it*. Then he either aged out of it, sold out of it, or just plain got lazy. Now he's apparently using a 150-something year old publication to try to drum up views.
Nope.
Maybe get back to that real job you used to have 15 or 20 years ago that provided fodder for good satire. Kept you connected to something that wasn't yourself. Otherwise you're doing the intellectual equivalent of giving yourself a blow job while thinking it's a real (and totally not inflatable) woman doing it.
Alternately, Randam Munroe and XKCD are more or less the same as always. But you're no longer willing to accept humourous insights from people with different politics than you. So you now pretend people you disagree with are immature as simultaneously you crack jokes about real jobs, blow jobs, and inflatable women.
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I wondered if I had missed something, so I clicked through the most recent 30 xkcd comics.
What I saw was the classic weirdness, and I was explicitly looking to see if there was political content.
Re:Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:4, Insightful)
I haven't seen any "far-left" politics unless believing in vaccines is "far-left" these days.
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I haven't seen any "far-left" politics unless believing in vaccines is "far-left" these days.
Unless that was satire, I think you just proved his point.
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Science, being something that works because it's based on evidence and relying on experts in different fields, is a political position these days.
Re: Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:1)
"There is something annoying about a dude that uses his platform to belch forth his political views."
So, you don't watch the news then? Or documentaries? Or even comedy shows? Because these all contain people using platforms to use their, you know, freedom of speech.
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I don't want a preacher telling me what to think and believe unless I go to church.
Sharing an opinion is telling people how to think, apparently. Randall has an opinion, and he shares it via a comic. If you can equate that to a church, then there is something seriously wrong with you. There is something seriously wrong with people when they can take something like a comic and feel they are being told what to think.
It's like those people with the psychological condition that, when they hear some people laughing, they inexplicably can't help but think they're the ones being laughed at. G
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I'm not so sure about that. I'm in the same boat, and I have similar views to this Munroe guy. There is something annoying about a dude that uses his platform to belch forth his political views. Political demagoguery should not be inserted into everything, it should stay in the political section. I don't want politics when I watch sports, I don't want politics when I read comics, I don't want politics when I masturbate - it doesn't matter whether it's from "us" or from "them", I don't want a preacher telling me what to think and believe unless I go to church.
I agree that politics (even politics that you agree with) can be annoying when pushed in another venue.
But I don't see that in XKCD.
He does advocate for a scientific worldview, and sometimes makes fun of unscientific thinking, but not in a political way. If you read pro-scientific thinking as political demagoguery I think that says more about the politics you're exposed to than XKCD.
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Ah yes, you believe that science now means "far left politics".
Re: Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:1)
No, but I think BLM is a far left marxist organization and there he is parroting their slogan on the top of his page.
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Maybe someone should have told Ashli Babbit to just comply with the police.
Re: Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:2)
That, or to refrain from trying to break down a door with a gun pointed at her head on the other side.
Play stupid games...
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Re: Clicked to take a look, remembered why (Score:2)
Tell me Picard, how many genders do you see?
Wah-wah! Muh genders are bein canceled! WAAAH! (Score:2)
Tell me Picard, how many genders do you see?
That's a rather telling response to being faced with reality of lunatics trying for an insurrection at the behest of dumb carnival barker (involving an attempted lynching of their own number two) while touting Jewish Space Lazorz as the reason for forest fires.
Should we consider this your coming out?
Are you too planning on running for a governor once you get rid of that itch?
Re: Wah-wah! Muh genders are bein canceled! WAAAH! (Score:2)
Jewish space lasers? Sounds more like a caricature of a conspiracy theory than an actual conspiracy theory with more than two adherents.
On a related note, did you perhaps confuse the South Park "bag of Jew gold" scene with an actual belief system?
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Sorry to hear about your head injury and I hope you recover.
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I don't recall the last XKCD comic which argued for something like the workers owning the means of production. Care to refresh my memory?
I'd also accept an XKCD comic that rejected the institution of the state and advocates a system of mutual aid instead.
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I was once reviewing a professor's application. I was a student rep so nobody cared what I thought, but being young and naive I actually looked up a few of his papers. There were the usual ones in his field, and some very interesting ones relating to psychic waves and whether or not your bed is oriented with the cardinal directions.
Naturally the hiring committee just used the total count.
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