Childless man here, I work mostly remotely.

I don’t miss any sense of community.

You can’t just open up with that and not share some leptopoma perlucidum facts.

In a university there was a lab. And in this lab there lived a postdoc. One day in the third month of their the postdoc heard a rap on their door. It was the professor! They said the postdoc would soon be approached by 12 undergrads, and…

<300 pages of worldbuilding later>

“You must take the samples! And throw them into the synchrotron! I am too old and burnt out to do it!” pleaded the old postdoc to the phd student.

<500 pages of more worldbuilding>

“I did the testing, but the results are not meant for me. I must now travel to the West, into the Private Sector.” said the PhD at their graduation party.

Maybe if the academic world behaved like that, I wouldn’t have burned out and fucked off to the IT sector a decade ago.

Kind of adjacent to this, years ago around said burnout I kept floating this idea around my head where I was thinking if there was some way out of this tradition of creating these giant monolithic papers every time -even if your effective research result could be distilled down to a paragraph with some numbers and preliminary handwaving- where you need to pad the whole thing out with a big-ass literature review to keep the citation circlejerk going.

So why not just have “papers” consist of effectively a few paragraphs? The citation tree of how you got there is still relevant, but you can put all of that stuff in what’s effectively metadata and not clutter up the whole thing with it.

Have an idea for a lab experiment? Publish the methodology as-is, and link it to whatever other tidbits of knowledge make it relevant. Did the experiment and got results? Publish the data, and link to the experiment. Got some new theory out of the results? Publish the theory and link to the experiment results in the metadata. And so on.

Maybe this would have weird side effects of its own, but I can’t help but imagine this would make the whole process so much less painful, and allow also for better organizing of the knowledge produced.

I didn’t ask “Can you imagine something better?”, but “Do you think they would be replaced by something better?”

Edit: And that’s ignoring the fact that the EU hasn’t even existed for centuries to do any of that colonialism or other stuff which you think merits its dismantling.

You think they would be replaced by something better, if they were somehow dismantled now?

Instructions unclear, now the universe consists of nothing but an oven preheated to 375F

True; some mold is actually medicine. Therefore you only have 1/4 chance of dying.

You have the causation wrong here.

Autistic people go into astronomy, and then find more exoplanets. Therefore autism causes exoplanets!

My feelings on this:

___

Unfortunately Earth is mostly below the horizon for this one. :(

And if you ask a cosmologist what the universe is made of, they go “Well, there’s a lot of dark matter, and even more dark energy. And then there’s a tiny bit of some matter or something idk lol.”

For bonus points shoot it into deep space. Maybe some alien civilization will run into it trillions of years from now.

but

"🙂".reverse() == "🙃"

3rd person view, especially when driving

Followed by the VR hit: Portal: Companion Cube