.

”In August 2018 Science Magazine reported that Singer bullied many of her emplo-yees. [19] Difficulties were brought up by team members during a meeting with the scientific advisory board in February 2017 as a part of the institute official evaluation. An internal investigation later confirmed the accusations raised by her former emplo-yees of bullying behavior,mistreatment of pregnant employees and also of significant failures in leadership. The press release of the Max Planck Society acknowledged that partial anonymity of the accusations was not lifted which “made it more difficult for the director to respond to the allegations” and that they did not find evidence for scientific misconduct. In order to avoid a further escalation of the situation, Singer resigned from her director position in agreement with the Max Planck Society. [20] She is now Professor and scientific Head of the Social Neuroscience Lab of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. [21][22]”

Tiedeväärinkäytöksillä (misconduct) saksalaiset yleensä tarkoittavat vain todella härskejä ja muutenkin rikollisia toimia,jättiläiskavalluksia ja valtiopetoksia, jotka myös päättävät tutkijan uran siihen paikkaan vähintäänkin koko EU:ssa.Muu menee virhei-den ja osaamattomuuden piikkiin edellyttäen, että huijari ottaa hatkat kuviosta sovin-nolla.Linja on suurin piirtein kuin NL:ssa Lysenkon kanssa.Myös Ursula von der Ley-en on ollut sekä tutkittavana että myös vastuussa sellaisista tutkimuksista poliittisesti .

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/she-s-world-s-top-empathy-researcher-colleagues-say-she-bullied-and-intimidated-them

Tania Singer, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences

In The ReSource Project, Tania Singer sought to demonstrate that meditation can make people more kind and caring. Moritz Hager/WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) She’s the world’s top empathy researcher. But colleagues say she bullied and intimidated them

By Kai Kupferschmidt Aug. 8, 2018 , 4:10 PM

Tania Singer, a celebrated neuroscientist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, is known as one of the world’s foremost experts on empathy.In her research,she has sought to demonstrate that meditation can make people more kind and caring. The title of a profile of Singer written by this reporter in 2013 summed up her public image: Concentrating on Kindness.

But inside her lab, it was a very different story, eight former and current colleagues say in interviews with Science. The researchers, all but one of whom insisted on re-maining anonymous because they feared for their careers, describe a group gripped by fear of their boss. “Whenever anyone had a meeting with her there was at least an even chance they would come out in tears,” one colleague says.

Singer, one of the most high-profile female researchers in the Max Planck Society (MPG),sometimes made harsh comments to women who became pregnant, multiple lab members told Science. “People were terrified. They were really, really afraid of telling her about their pregnancies,” one former colleague says. “For her, having a baby was basically you being irresponsible and letting down the team,” says another, who became a mother while working in Singer’s department.

Singer, who declined to answer questions for this story, is on a 1-year sabbatical, but her colleagues say they are speaking out now because MPG plans to eventually allow her to return to her lab.

Singer has acknowledged making mistakes in the past. “Problems associated to my exhaustion due to having to carry and be responsible for [a] huge and complex stu-dy,” were partly to blame, she wrote in a 12 February 2017 email to representatives of the department who had complained about working conditions to the institute’s scientific advisory board.In a 7 August letter to Science,Singer’s lawyer denied alle-gations of bullying, however. The letter said Singer had “apologized deeply” during a 2017 mediation process and had taken responsibility for the problems, for instance by asking for the sabbatical and the appointment of a temporary replacement. It also suggested that the allegations against Singer came from a “subgroup with its own strong interests and group dynamics.”

In a statement also issued on 7 August,MPG acknowledged it had learned of the al- legations against Singer last year and said the society’s vice president, Bill Hansson, had investigated them,but that details are confidential.MPG says that “to calm the si- tuation down,” it agreed to Singer’s sabbatical, which took effect in January. In a plan presented to the researchers on 25 July,MPG said it would separate Singer from her current colleagues and allow her to set up a new,smaller research group in Berlin for 2 to 3 years while the postdocs and Ph.D.students in Leipzig finish their projects and move on. (The Leipzig group, which once numbered more than 20 scientists, has dwindled to just five.) She would then return to her lab.

“It appears the Max Planck Society decided it would rather sacrifice another genera-tion of students than risk a scandal,” says one former colleague. Asked how MPG would ensure that future students are treated better, a spokesperson says details of the plan are still being discussed.

" People were terrified. They were really, really afraid of telling her about their pregnancies. "
A former scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences

Singer, the daughter of celebrated neuroscientist Wolf Singer, helped found a new field called social neuroscience; she rose to prominence with her work on empathy, including a landmark study published in Science in 2004 that showed watching a loved one experience pain activates the same brain areas as feeling physical pain directly. In 2013,she started a hugely ambitious study,The ReSource Project,in which 160 participants were trained for 9 months to demonstrate the power of meditation.

The study highlighted some of Singer’s strengths, colleagues say. “She’s creative, she can be charming, she knows how to make contacts and get resources. It’s a gift and it was necessary to make a project like this happen,” one colleague says.“Her superpower is vision", another adds. “That original team of people that she put toge-ther was totally incredible". Several people in her lab recall an impassioned speech Singer gave after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, in which she argued that only a study like ReSource could prevent such acts in the future.

But colleagues say working with Singer was always difficult.She wanted to be in con- trol of even the most minute research details but was often not available to discuss them. In-person meetings could quickly turn into a nightmare, one colleague says: “She gets extremely emotional and when that turns dark it is terrifying.” Another co-worker describes what happened after he told Singer some people in her group were unhappy:

“She was very hurt by this and started crying and screaming",he says.“It escalated to the extent that she left the room and went door to door in the institute in our depart-ment, crying,yelling to the people in the room ‘Are you happy here?’ When she came back, she said: ‘I just asked and everyone said they’re happy so it’s obviously you that’s the problem.’” (A colleague who says he was present corroborates the story.)

Almost every current or former lab member brought up Singer’s treatment of preg-nant women; the issue was also on a list of grievances, shared with Science, that lab members say they drew up after a meeting with the scientific advisory board in February 2017 to record what was said. “Pregnancy and parental leave are received badly and denied/turned into accusations,” the notes say.

Bethany Kok, a former lab member who agreed to speak on the record because she is no longer working in neuro- science, says Singer reacted kindly when she first told her she was pregnant with twins. But the next day,Kok says, “She started screaming at me how she wasn’t running a charity, how I was a slacker and that I was going to work twice as hard for the time I would be gone.” A few weeks later, Kok says, she miscarried one of the twins and missed a lab meeting for an urgent medical appoint-ment. “I got an email from Tania telling me that she wasn’t paying me to go to the doctor, that clearly I wasn’t using good judgment, and I was no longer allowed to go to the doctor during work hours.” (Kok says she no longer has access to the email.)

Singer’s lawyer says Singer never discriminated against pregnant women or any other group, and that events described by others “either did not happen or they happened very differently than described.”

Scientific discussions could also get overheated, lab members say. “It was very diffi-cult to tell her if the data did not support her hypothesis,” says one researcher who worked with Singer. Singer’s lawyer stresses that no rules of scientific conduct were violated and that the institute’s scientific advisory board had rated the work of Singer’s department as “excellent.”

One problem surely is that I have clearly underestimated the challenges associated with our ReSource study.

Contemporaneous notes from the researchers who took part in the 2017 meeting with the scientific advisory board - held after years of informal discussions and talks with an ombudsman that had led nowhere - include numerous other complaints, including “emotional abuse, threats, devaluation of work, and personal abilities.”

“Working with Tania is becoming increasingly difficult,” the lab members wrote after the meeting. “We represent the entire department. We would like some change but are unsure of how to approach the issue due to fear of retaliation.”

“One problem surely is that I have clearly underestimated the challenges associated with our ReSource study",Singer wrote in the email she sent lab members afterward. She noted that “the conflict between the project’s need for long-term continuity and loyalty on the one hand and the researchers’ own divergent needs to move on with their own careers and lives.”

Six meetings with a mediator in the first half of 2017 did little to improve the situation, several people who attended the sessions say. Afterward, Hansson launched his in-vestigation, but in December 2017, scientists at the institute were informed that MPG President Martin Stratmann had taken the matter into his own hands. On 20 Decem-ber, Singer wrote to the group that she would be on a sabbatical for all of 2018, with former MPG Director Wolfgang Prinz taking over some of her duties.

The separation plan presented 2 weeks ago, which would take effect in January 2019, has two goals, according to official minutes from the 25 July meeting, obtained by Science: “1. Unencumbered continuation of everyone’s work. 2.An opportunity for Tania Singer to have an unencumbered new start.” Singer “has learned the lesson that groups that are too big carry the risk of losing contact with co-workers,” her law-yer writes. “A good work environment and dealing with each other respectfully are important to her.”

Several researchers say they are disappointed in MPG. “I had hoped that they take problems at their institutes seriously and act not only on the behalf of their directors but equally their employees. However, every decision was always dragged out, communication was nontransparent and top-down, and then finally a solution was presented to the employees that is really mostly a solution for Tania,” one says.

Several other scandals have recently rocked the prestigious MPG,which has an €1.8 billion annual budget and runs 84 independent institutes. Nikos Logothetis, a resear-cher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen,Germany was indicted in February after accusations from animal welfare activists; the U.S. Society for Neuroscience and the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies sharply criticized MPG last week for not defending him and his colleagues adequately. Also this year, allegations of bullying and sexual harassment at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching,Germany, emerged. Guinevere Kauffmann, the director accused of bullying, received coaching and daily monitoring and now leads a drasti-cally reduced group.In an interview with German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Stratmann said the incident had shown that the society’s procedures for dealing with complaints did not work well. “I have to concede that,and for this reason we will improve it.”

Many say the years spent in Singer’s lab have left them disillusioned about science. “If the Max Planck Society has as its objective to create scientists, then this Ph.D. experience is not the way to do it,” says one.

Posted in: People & EventsS cientific Community

doi:10.1126/science.aav0199

Kai Kupferschmidt

Kai is a contributing correspondent for Science magazine based in Berlin, Germany. He is writing a book about the color blue, to be published this

***

Esko Valtaoja jauhaa edelleen tätä samaa vanhaa paskaa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ThenT4wQeA

Aikamatkustus, mustat aukot ja madonreiät (Esko Valtaoja) | Puheenaihe 343

Mitä aika on ja miksi aika kuluu vain yhteen suuntaan? Onko aikamatkustus mahdol-lista mustien aukkojen ja madonreikien avulla? Miten valonnopeus liittyy aikamatkus-tukseen ja miksi avaruusmatkalle lähtevät ihmiset voisivat matkustaa tulevaisuuteen ? Miksi suhteellisuusteoria ja kvanttifysiikka ovat epäyhteensopivia? Mitä fysiikka kertoo todellisuuden rakenteesta ja mitkä teoriat ovat toistaiseksi scifiä? Studiossa avaruustähtitieteen emeritusprofessori Esko Valtaoja. Jakso on nauhoitettu 10.1.2023.
⌚ AIKALEIMAT
0:00 Varoitus 2:39 Aika 6:17 Suhteellisuusteoria 12:07 Kellot 15:59 Aika ja liike 19:25 Kiihtyvä liike 22:05 "Aika on illuusio" 26:12 Neliulotteinen aika-avaruus 28:56 Vapaa tahto 30:35 Ulottuvuudet 34:56 Kaiken teoria 38:08 Inertiaalikoordinaatisto 42:58 Mustat aukot 45:54 Schwarzschildin metriikka 49:24 Aika ja paikka 51:41 Äärettömyys 53:41 Matematiikka 55:47 Madonreiät 57:15 Havainnot 59:38 Kvanttifysiikka 1:01:55 Hawkingin säteily 1:05:31 Madonreikä aikakoneena 1:07:28 Valkoinen aukko 1:09:52 Aikakone 1:12:30 Tietoisuus 1:16:14 Mikä on mahdollista? 1:20:29 Aikamatkustus ja fysiikka 1:23:22 Monimaailmatulkinta 1:27:12 Ajan suunta 1:28:49 Ihmisen käsityskyky 1:30:21 Lomittuminen 1:36:29 Teoriat 1:40:22

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Valtaojan tiedot muilta tieteealoilta ovat PYHÄKOULUTASOA:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-a-flawed-experiment-proved-that-free-will-doesnt-exist/

" How a Flawed Experiment “Proved” That Free Will Doesn’t Exist

It did no such thing — but the result has become conventional wisdom nevertheless

By Steve Taylor on December 6, 2019

Credit: Getty Images

In the second half of the 19th century,scientific discoveries, in particular, Darwin’s theory of evolution, meant that Christian beliefs were no longer feasible as a way of explaining the world. The authority of the Bible as an explanatory text was fatally da-maged. The new findings of science could be utilized to provide an alternative con-ceptual system to make sense of the world - a system that insisted that nothing exis-ted apart from basic particles of matter,and that all phenomena could be explained in terms of the organization and the interaction of these particles.

One of the most fervent of late 19th century materialists, T.H. Huxley, described human beings as “conscious automata” with no free will.As he explained in 1874, “Volitions do not enter into the chain of causation…. The feeling that we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause."

This was a very early formulation of an idea that has become commonplace amongst modern scientists and philosophers who hold similar materialist views: that free will is an illusion. According to Daniel Wegner, for instance, “The experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one’s thought as the cause of the act.” In other words, our sense of making choices or decisions is just an awareness of what the brain has already decided for us. When we become aware of the brain’s actions, we think about them and falsely conclude that our intentions have caused them. You could compare it to a king who believes he is making all his own decisions, but is constantly being manipulated by his advisors and officials, who whisper in his ear and plant ideas in his head. 

Many people believe that evidence for a lack of free will was found when, in the 1980s,scientist Benjamin Libet conducted experiments that seemed to show that the brain “registers” the decision to make movements before a person consciously deci-des to move.In Libet’s experiments, participants were asked to perform a simple task such as pressing a button or flexing their wrist. Sitting in front of a timer, they were asked to note the moment at which they were consciously aware of the decision to move, while EEG electrodes attached to their head monitored their brain activity.

Libet showed consistently that there was unconscious brain activity associated with the action - a change in EEG signals that Libet called “readiness potential” - for an average of half a second before the participants were aware of the decision to move. This experiment appears to offer evidence of Wegner’s view that decisions are first made by the brain,and there is a delay before we become conscious of them, at which point we attribute our own conscious intention to the act.         

However, if we look more closely, Libet’s experiment is full of problematic issues. For example, it relies on the participants’ own recording of when they feel the intention to move. One issue here is that there may be a delay between the impulse to act and their recording of it - after all, this means shifting their attention from their own inten-tion to the clock. In addition,it is debatable whether people are able to accurately re-cord the moment of their decision to move.Our subjective aware-ness of decisions is very unreliable.If you try the experiment yourself - and you can do it right now,just by holding out your own arm, and deciding at some point to flex your wrist - you’ll be-come aware that it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision. 

An even more serious issue with the experiment is that it is by no means clear that the electrical activity of the “readiness potential” is related to the decision to move, and to the actual movement. Some researchers have suggested that the readiness potential could just relate to the act of paying attention to the wrist or a button, rather the decision to move. Others have suggested that it only reflects the expectation of some kind of movement,rather being related to a specific moment.In a modified ver-sion of Libet’s experiment (in which participants were asked to press one of two but-tons in response to images on a computer screen), participants showed “readiness potential” even before the images came up on the screen, suggesting that it was not related to deciding which button to press. 

Still others have suggested that the area of the brain where the "readiness potential" occurs - the supplementary motor area,or SMA - is usually associated with imagining movements rather than actually performing them. The experience of willing is usually associated with other areas of the brain (the parietal areas). 

And finally,in another modified version of Libet’s experiment,participants showed readiness potential even when they made a decision not to move, which again casts doubt on the assumption that the readiness potential is actually registering the brain’s “decision” to move. 

A further, more subtle,issue has been suggested by psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist. Libet's experiment seems to assume that the act of volition consists of clear-cut decisions, made by a conscious, rational mind. But McGilchrist points out that decisions are often made in a more fuzzy,ambiguous way. They can be made on a partly intuitive, impulsive level, without clear conscious awareness. But this doesn't necessarily mean that you haven't made the decision.

As McGilchrist puts it, Libet’s apparent findings are only problematic "if one imagines that,for me to decide something,I have to have willed it with the conscious part of my mind. Perhaps my unconscious is every bit as much 'me'". Why shouldn't your will be associated with deeper, less conscious areas of your mind (which are still you)? You might sense this if, while trying Libet’s experiment, you find your wrist just seeming to move of its own accord. You feel that you have somehow made the decision, even if not wholly consciously. 

Because of issues such as these - and others that I don’t have space to mention - it seems strange that such a flawed experiment has become so influential, and has been (mis)used so frequently as evidence against the idea of free will.You might ask: why are so many intellectuals so intent on proving that they have no free will? (As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead pointed out ironically,“Scientists animated by the purpose of proving themselves purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.”)

This is probably because the nonexistence of free will seems a logical extension of some of the primary assumptions of the materialist paradigm - such as the idea that our sense of self is an illusion, and that consciousness and mental activity are redu-cible to neurological activity. However, as I suggest in my book Spiritual Science, it is entirely possible that these assumptions are false. The mind may be more than just a shadow of the brain, and free will may not be an illusion but an invaluable human attribute, which can be cultivated and whose development makes our lives more meaningful and purposeful.