The Grievance Studies Affair; One Funeral at a Time: A Reply to Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian

In 2018, Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian published four “hoax” articles within a number of disciplines that rely on critical theory (e.g., gender studies, feminism). When revealing the project, the authors argued that they wanted to expose these fields as being primarily motivated by ideology and social justice rather than knowledge generation. Their method tested the hypothesis that editors and reviewers will support papers that advocate “ludicrous” ideas including “fat bodybuilding.” In the pages of this journal, I presented a critique of their procedure, and the authors have provided a commentary on my article. After discussing the issue of whether their project was a hoax or not, I will argue that the crux of the matter is whether the papers were ludicrous/absurd. I will show how the authors made a fundamental error in their method; they failed to assess whether their ideas were indeed ludicrous/absurd.

“This Charter applies…”: The Supreme Court of Canada’s Fundamental Error in the Trinity Western University decisions

I. IntroductionThere has been an ongoing battle between Trinity Western University and the Federation of Law Societies of Canada — the national organization of the law societies that govern the legal profession in Canada — over whether Canada’s law societies will recognize JDs from the law faculty that Trinity Western wishes to establish. At the heart of this controversy is the fact that Trinity Western University, as an avowedly Christian, and some might say conservative, university, requires all of its faculty, staff, and students to sign a Community Covenant. Among other things, this Community Covenant prohibits “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.”1 A student’s failure to comply with the Covenant could result in disciplinary measures, including suspension and possibly expulsion.2 Several law societies, including the Law Society of British Columbia and the (as it was then known) Law Society of Upper Canada, denied accreditation to Trinity Western’s proposed law faculty because of this Community Covenant...

John Paul II on Humanae Vitae and the Priority of Ethics over Technology

We examine how John Paul II’s lifelong work on the issues surrounding family and human life as expressed in Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae (1968) are an exemplification of his principles for cultural renewal as stated in Redemptor Hominis (1979). The triad of principles, the primacy of persons over things, the priority of ethics over technology, and the superiority of spirit over matter provide a set of interlocking principles for discerning the true progress of modern culture. Contrary to the dominant view that artificial contraception represents an opportunity for great progress for women and for society, we argue that the ambivalent character of modern technology as established by Yves René Simon and Clive Staples Lewis points to a large downside of artificial contraception, namely, a real opportunity for the degradation of the marriage bond and the full flourishing of the human person. The substitution of technology as a way to regulate birth for personal choice and habit or virtue inverts the principle of ethics over technology and opens the door for the manipulation of women as predicted by Pope Paul VI which is a clear failure to place the primacy of the person over things. The fundamental error lies in the materialistic philosophy of life which refuses to acknowledge the superiority of spirit over matter. The battle over the issues at the heart of Humane Vitae constitutes a battle over the ultimate meaning of human existence as theistic or anti-theistic, Gospel or anti-Gospel, and thus it will always stand as a “sign of contradiction.”

Error bounds for wireless localization in NLOS environments

An efficient and accurate method to evaluate the fundamental error bounds for wireless sen-sor localization is proposed. While there already exist efficient tools like Cram`er-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and position error bound (PEB) to estimate error limits, in their standard formulation they all need an accurate knowledge of the statistic of the ranging error. This requirement, under Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) environments, is impossible to be met a priori. Therefore, it is shown that collecting a small number of samples from each link and applying them to a non-parametric estimator, like the Gaussian kernel (GK), could lead to a quite accurate reconstruction of the error distribution. A proposed Edgeworth Expansion method is employed to reconstruct the error statistic in a much more efficient way with respect to the GK. It is shown that with this method, it is possible to get fundamental error bounds almost as accurate as the theoretical case, i.e. when a priori knowledge of the error distribution is available. Therein, a technique to determine fundamental error limits – CRLB and PEB – onsite without knowledge of the statistics of the ranging errors is proposed.

Dialectical Infinity and the Third Mathematical Crisis —On the Fundamental Error of Actual Infinity

This paper discusses the problem of finity and infinity based on the philosophical perspectives of opposing idealism and receiving dialectical materialism. Based on Hegel’s dialectical infinity view, this paper makes a comprehensive criticism of the thought of actual infinity. After Hegel’s dialectical infinite thought scientifically explained the limit concept in calculus, the Second Mathematical Crisis caused by the contradiction of infinitesimal quantity was solved thoroughly. However, the mathematics world has not learned the experience and lessons in history, has always adhered to the idealist thought and methodology of actual infinity, this thought finally brought the third crisis to mathematics. At the end of this paper, based on the infinite view of dialectical materialism, the author analyzes the Principle of Comprehension and the Maximum Ordinal Paradox, and points out that the essence of the Principle of Comprehension is a kind of actual infinity thought. Only by limiting the Principle of Comprehension to a potential infinity can we solve the Third Mathematical Crisis completely.

The Manichean division in children’s experience: Developmental psychology in an anti-Black world

Recent research in developmental psychology situates human development in ecological systems. While culturally sensitive variants of ecological systems theory take important strides in identifying how racialization structures the world in which youth develop, limits remain for critical researchers interested in humanity transformation projects. A fundamental error is being made when modern/colonial capitalist Man remains the unquestioned representative of the human. Accordingly, we discuss the case of anti-Blackness in the ecology of Black youth’s development and its origins with the natural slave, arguing that the child–adult trajectory is distorted for Black youth. We argue that anti-Blackness is inextricably tied to capitalism’s historical development and that developmental psychologists concerned with humanization can adopt a decolonial attitude in service of that goal. For developmental psychologists concerned with humanity transformation, we propose a step back from the dominant approach in developmental psychology to better afford an actional stance.

The GHSZ Argument: A Gedankenexperiment Requiring More Denken

I reassess the gedankenexperiment of Greenberger, Horne, Shimony, and Zeilinger after twenty-five years, finding their influential claim to the discovery of an inconsistency inherent in high dimensional formulations of local realism to arise from a fundamental error of logic. They manage this by presuming contradictory premises: that a specific linear combination of four angles involved in their proposed parallel experiments on two pairs of electrons equals both π and 0 at the same time. Ignoring this while presuming the contradictory implications of these two conditions, they introduce the contradiction themselves. The notation they use in their “derivation” is not sufficiently ornate to represent the entanglement in the double electron spin pair problem they design, confounding their error. The situation they propose actually motivates only an understanding of the full array of symmetries involved in their problem. In tandem with the error now recognised in the supposed defiance of Bell’s inequality by quantum probabilities, my reassessment of their work should motivate a reevaluation of the current consensus outlook regarding the principle of local realism and the proposition of hidden variables.

Flawed methods in “COVID-19: Attacks the 1-Beta Chain of Hemoglobin and Captures the Porphyrin to Inhibit Human Heme Metabolism”

<div>This is a critical commentary on an earlier submission by Liu and Li. The preprint from Liu & Li (<a href="https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.11938173.v7">https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.11938173.v7</a>) puts forward hypotheses about a proposed role for proteins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus associated with Covid-19, in directly attacking haemoglobin in patients’ blood. Arguments for the hypotheses are based on computational methods: bioinformatics calculations searching for evidence that viral proteins share functional domains related to haem binding with human proteins, molecular modeling of viral proteins, and computational docking of these protein models with models of haem, porphyrin and haemoglobin. No experimental evidence is provided to support any of the conclusions. When interpreted according to accepted standards, these computational results do not hold up and do not provide support for the hypotheses. The interpretation of the search for shared functional domains suffers from a fundamental error in how the significance of the results is judged; when interpreted correctly, there is no evidence for these shared functional domains. Molecular modeling is carried out with tools that are easy to use but not best-in-class, and no allowance is made for uncertainty in the resulting atomic coordinates. Finally, the docking results are invalidated by a catastrophic error in their interpretation: the authors choose the docking trials that have the highest energies, whereas the most stable complexes are actually the ones that have the lowest energies and are therefore least strained. An addendum addresses flaws in a new version 8 from Liu & Li (<a href="https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.11938173.v8">https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.11938173.v8</a>), which retracts most of their results from earlier versions but nonetheless continues to put forward the same conclusions on the basis of poorly-controlled docking calculations.</div>

Flawed methods in “COVID-19: Attacks the 1-Beta Chain of Hemoglobin and Captures the Porphyrin to Inhibit Human Heme Metabolism”

<div>This is a critical commentary on an earlier submission by Liu and Li. The preprint from Liu & Li (<a href="https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.11938173.v7">https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.11938173.v7</a>) puts forward hypotheses about a proposed role for proteins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus associated with Covid-19, in directly attacking haemoglobin in patients’ blood. Arguments for the hypotheses are based on computational methods: bioinformatics calculations searching for evidence that viral proteins share functional domains related to haem binding with human proteins, molecular modeling of viral proteins, and computational docking of these protein models with models of haem, porphyrin and haemoglobin. No experimental evidence is provided to support any of the conclusions. When interpreted according to accepted standards, these computational results do not hold up and do not provide support for the hypotheses. The interpretation of the search for shared functional domains suffers from a fundamental error in how the significance of the results is judged; when interpreted correctly, there is no evidence for these shared functional domains. Molecular modeling is carried out with tools that are easy to use but not best-in-class, and no allowance is made for uncertainty in the resulting atomic coordinates. Finally, the docking results are invalidated by a catastrophic error in their interpretation: the authors choose the docking trials that have the highest energies, whereas the most stable complexes are actually the ones that have the lowest energies and are therefore least strained. An addendum addresses flaws in a new version 8 from Liu & Li (<a href="https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.11938173.v8">https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.11938173.v8</a>), which retracts most of their results from earlier versions but nonetheless continues to put forward the same conclusions on the basis of poorly-controlled docking calculations.</div>

Flawed methods in “COVID-19: Attacks the 1-Beta Chain of Hemoglobin and Captures the Porphyrin to Inhibit Human Heme Metabolism”

<div>This is a critical commentary on an earlier submission by Liu and Li: https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.11938173 The preprint from Liu & Li (https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.11938173) puts forward hypotheses about a proposed role for proteins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus associated with Covid-19, in directly attacking haemoglobin in patients’ blood. Arguments for the hypotheses are based on computational methods: bioinformatics calculations searching for evidence that viral proteins share functional domains related to haem binding with human proteins, molecular modeling of viral proteins, and computational docking of these protein models with models of haem, porphyrin and haemoglobin. No experimental evidence is provided to support any of the conclusions. When interpreted according to accepted standards, these computational results do not hold up and do not provide support for the hypotheses. The interpretation of the search for shared functional domains suffers from a fundamental error in how the significance of the results is judged; when interpreted correctly, there is no evidence for these shared functional domains. Molecular modeling is carried out with tools that are easy to use but not best-in-class, and no allowance is made for uncertainty in the resulting atomic coordinates. Finally, the docking results are invalidated by a catastrophic error in their interpretation: the authors choose the docking trials that have the highest energies, whereas the most stable complexes are actually the ones that have the lowest energies and are therefore least strained.</div>