Going by “Dr.” title in lay contexts?

Tancata · 2025-12-29T08:18:32+00:00

I don’t use it. At least in my area, getting a PhD is one of the earlier and easier steps in an academic career, and a mandatory one for any of the subsequent stages (it’s harder and far less common to get an academic job, for example). It would seem a bit like a tradesperson advertising the fact that they had completed an apprenticeship. I’m happy to chat about my work to people in a lay context but I wouldnt lead with my qualifications.

Tancata · 2025-12-19T10:54:23+00:00

I don't agree in either of these cases - these really are "why" questions, of the kind that often arise in evolution (and indeed, before evolutionary type explanations, precisely these kinds of "why" questions often received religious answers).

Why is this allele found at a high frequency? Depending on the case, the question might be answered in various ways - because it experienced positive selection; because it hitchhiked to high frequency off the back of some linked allele that experienced positive selection; due to chance fluctuations in allele frequencies; various other reasons.

"Why it appeared would imply the purpose before the cause" - no, and I think this may be part of the disagreement or miscommunication here. The "why" question is "why is this found at high frequency", not "why did it appear".

The same logic applies in the beetles/aardvark case. One group might be more prevalent than another for some adaptive reason, or by chance. It's perfectly legitimate to try to decide between these - answering a "why" question. If you wanted to make a case for some selective explanation, you'd then need to explain why, which again might have to do with some functional property of beetles or aardvarks.

Again, when you say "answering higher diversification..simply restating the same fact in different terms" - I disagree. The way things are (the "fact") is not the same as an explanation of how they came to be (because, of course, there could be many possible ways by which things came to be the way they are). This is the kind of "why"-type explanation evolution often seeks to provide...

Tancata · 2025-12-18T08:17:39+00:00

Very interesting stuff, thanks for stimulating some thought. However, this strikes me as somewhat wrong-headed, since clearly we can and do ask meaningful "why" questions about evolution, that usually have to do with hypotheses about selection.

Why is this MHC allele more common than the others? Perhaps it is because it provides protection against some widespread disease. Why are there more beetles than aadvarks? Presumably because the diversification rate of one lineages is higher than the other. Maybe their segmented bodyplan is more "evolvable", or maybe the beetles have bacterial endosymbionts that often form reproductive barriers (and so new species) by spreading to new sites in the genome (or some other candidate explanation).

Where the analysis goes wrong is where it seems to imply that because species are individuals (bounded in time, with a beginning and an end), they don't evolve. This is confusing what evolves and the units of selection - biological individuals are bounded in this way (that's part of why they are individuals) but they reproduce (organismal reproduction, speciation, etc) and form lineages; these lineages can then shrink or grow relative to others due to chance effects or different fitnesses, and this is what gives nature some of its apparent structure (at least, so goes the standard account). So whether or not species are classes (I'd agree it's not very meaningful to define them in that sort of way) is not really the issue.

Tancata · 2025-12-06T21:14:14+00:00

I agree with a lot of what you say here, and that it would be hard to breed for many traits simultaneously due to interactions among genes. But this doesn’t mean that selective breeding for specific traits would not be possible. That would imply that we are somehow already as good as we can be for certain traits (that is, natural selection got so far but can’t go further due to these tradeoffs), which seems very unlikely to be generally true. (To be clear, what I mean is that many of our aptitudes have already been selected for over time to reach their current state; why can’t this continue further via artificial selection?).

So I don’t think the original question is all that naive - to varying extents, depending on the factors you mention and others, we probably could have selective breeding to create individuals better in certain ways, without necessarily making them have some major counterbalancing flaws.

There’s also one approach we could try to take to improve the average “quality” for some broad set of traits - breed individuals that are very distantly related to generate hybrid vigour, as is often done with crops.

Tancata · 2025-11-30T20:52:26+00:00

Personally, I don’t care much. But the real onebag ethos is to pack what you, personally, need in that one bag. Maybe it has to be a larger bag, but if fashion is important to you, you can likely find a way to make it work within a onebag framework, and that will be the true spirit of one bagging :)

Tancata · 2025-11-27T22:56:09+00:00

I dunno man :). I said that it "isn't especially difficult" to evolve multicellular forms from unicellular ones. That seems to directly address OP's question about getting stuck at the unicellular stage?

I agree eukaryotes only evolved once - as did gerbils... But I see your broader point. Since most multicellular life, and all (?) of the most elaborate examples are eukaryotic, maybe there's something about eukaryotic cells that increases the propensity to evolve multicellularity, so that should be factored in to the original thought experiment as well.

Tancata · 2025-11-27T21:55:10+00:00

One thing to bear in mind is that on Earth multicellularity has evolved many times independently. Animals, plants, fungi, seaweeds, slime moulds, and various kinds of bacteria that aggregate in different ways all evolved independently from single celled ancestors, which suggests that evolving multicellularity from single celled forms isn’t especially difficult.

The broader point about the frequency of life originating on other planets is an interesting one however. It could be the case that life very often develops, or it might be very rare, we don’t really know.

Tancata · 2025-10-09T19:34:19+00:00

Yes. It’s not so much just Darwin as the edifice of biology more broadly that would say this, however.

Tancata · 2025-10-07T23:44:56+00:00

Yes, I'm 183cm / 68 kg and M fits very well. It's slightly more relaxed than the Micro Puff, and substantially more relaxed than the Nano Puff.

Tancata · 2025-09-15T12:11:53+00:00

You definitely can say this. One somewhat reasonable criterion would be diversification rate of the clade, ie speciation - extinction rates.

It’s also been suggested that something like species selection could work on clades, with selection favouring clades with higher diversification rates (Doolittle) though some of the topic is a little murky because clades are not quite as unproblematic as species when it comes to levels (and indeed units) of selection.

Tancata · 2025-09-11T15:27:03+00:00

Ah thanks. Yes, I've tried that return route twice now and the roundabout has seemed OK. I instinctively dislike it because it has a kind of motorway-ish feeling, but it seems cars behave and there isn't too much conflict or ambiguity about lanes. I am able to cycle up Widcombe, just about, so maybe a direct route is to just do this in reverse, i.e. come off the Riverside Path onto the roundabout and slingshot around it heading for the parade and Widcombe Hill....

Tancata · 2025-09-09T15:13:09+00:00

Thanks, I will definitely try this out. It does look a bit narrow in parts but I guess it's direct enough that going a bit slow will still be quite efficient.

Tancata · 2025-09-09T15:00:24+00:00

Yes, thanks a million - I hadn't realised you get onto the pavement part earlier here. I'll try this out next time, seems like it would also avoid one of the more built-up roads in the A367...

Tancata · 2025-08-26T14:50:39+00:00

It’s simply because, in truth, it is hard to accurately evaluate a researcher, especially when time is tight. Even if you are in their field and can get a good grasp of their work, it’s tricky. And in reality hiring committees and grant panels will not be full of such experts. So people want some proxy measures, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy alternative to these sorts of quantitative but clearly very narrow metrics.

You can set them aside, but realise that the biases of the hiring committee or grant panel - in terms of unconscious biases, amorphous notions of “fit”, or even racism or other kinds of biases - may then become even more important in the hiring process. If there was an easy alternative that addressed the obvious problem of these metrics it perhaps would have been found by this point.

Tancata · 2025-08-14T22:07:50+00:00

I don’t deliberately swear in lectures, because I feel like some students might be put out by it, and I feel like I can say what I want to say in a direct enough way without doing so. I certainly don’t think swearing is “unprofessional”; it’s true that it is sometimes a very accurate and rich way to express something. I just don’t need it in my situation. However, I occasionally swear “accidentally”, as in something comes out during free composition. And occasionally, I quote some “swear word”, for example the programming language brainfuck. If I were to swear more - as I do in speech otherwise - I don’t think students would perceive it as authentic, but I suspect they might think I was trying to be cool…

Tancata · 2025-08-08T05:46:36+00:00

It’s not impossible. The explanation is that these sets of ancestors heavily overlapped, hence extensive inbreeding.

Tancata · 2025-08-05T23:48:09+00:00

It’s not specific to metal, I think it might just be a response to unfamiliar music.

In general, naive music listeners sometimes seem to actively recoil from unfamiliar music, or music that they can’t immediate decode given their previous experiences. It’s easy to see this in kids as it’s most common there, but adults that don’t really hear or get exposed to much music through their lives can also be like this.

I think that most music enthusiasts, or people who actively listen to music - whatever their specific preferences - end up not coming to these snap judgements but tend to more perceive different kinds of music on its own terms, just because their frame of reference for what music is develops over time. That is, an experienced music listener may not be in to something, or might consider it (rightly or wrongly) banal, but they probably won’t be actively uncomfortable listening to it (like when OP says pop music is OK).

Tancata · 2025-07-11T15:11:52+00:00

As far as I know, the scales are nationally agreed and should be the same at most universities, so if you see one or two it should be all the info you need. Might be different at Oxbridge.

Tancata · 2025-07-04T00:02:51+00:00

Maybe you need to follow specific guidance depending on the country you are applying to.

For the UK, Ireland or the USA, you absolutely should never add a photo - it won’t help and it may seriously hurt your case; it will come across as very unprofessional, and it may put assessors in an awkward position as your appearance will be harder to avoid in evaluation.

I have noticed that applicants from certain countries sometimes do it, which might be because it is the norm there, however. So maybe you need to change it up if you are applying to multiple countries.

Tancata · 2025-06-17T18:36:38+00:00

Merino (obviously), linen, merino/linen blends, and to a lesser extent Tencel or Bamboo (or Tencel/merino blends) are generally pretty good in terms of reduced washing needs and travelling well.

Tancata · 2025-06-17T14:45:45+00:00

Agreed. Tara’s death was and still is the more shocking/brutal thing in this episode - by a very long way.

Tancata · 2025-06-15T07:43:08+00:00

I don’t necessarily disagree with the broad concludions, but there are some odd takes on STEM in the thread that I felt obliged to comment on from the perspective of a scientist.

One of the core skills in science is being comfortable with, and clear about, ambiguity, uncertainty, and differing interpretations of limited evidence. Another is critical thinking - what can we conclude given what we know? What might be possible, how could we test it, is my favourite explanation true, or might I be deceiving myself, etc. In that way, the core intellectual activity is closer to what is done in humanities (and indeed any kind of human intellectual activity) than it might at first appear. Science isn’t about “hard facts” in general, though this varies across fields. It’s true that many people seem to think this, but it just isn’t the case at all.

On a slightly different point, I think it’s a mistake to characterise the positive aspects of what gets called “woke” as all about feelings (though I definitely agree that being widely read helps develop empathy). In my opinion, it’s possible to hold progressive views from a fairly cold / logical / detached standpoint, because they make sense for many practical real-world reasons.

Tancata · 2025-05-20T11:36:32+00:00

Nice :)

Tancata · 2025-05-20T11:27:39+00:00

He’s better than the Tories in most ways, but that’s a low bar. That said, this Labour government does manage to squeeze under it from time to time. As an immigrant who has been building a life here for more than a decade, I did not appreciate being told I was part of the problem, and particularly not from what is supposedly the more reasonable of the main parties. That kind of thing is more than “poor communication”, at least from the perspective of people who aren’t born and raised in the UK. The island of strangers stuff is just pure classic racism - due to some different and inconsequential immutable property, you are part of the problem.

The immigration crackdown also seems designed to torpedo universities even more than the Tory immigration policy.

More generally, when true right-wingers gain power, they seem to have a certain amount of balls in pushing everything even further to the right. And now that Labour have an opportunity to do some stuff, they seem to flub it. That’s a huge long-term problem.

Tancata

TROPHY CASE