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deborah @awful.systems

Rationalism meets iNaturalist: ficus all

forum.inaturalist.org Optimal recruitment

recently on youtube i uncovered a “new” ficus species in the himalayas… ficus timlada. this isn’t a straightforward new species case like someone posting pics of a butterfly that experts had never seen before. in the ficus case, basically the taxonomic system failed because it’s fundamentally fla...

Optimal recruitment

This is worth delurking for.

A ficus-lover on the forums for iNaturalist (where people crowdsource identifications of nature pics) is clearly brain-poisoned by LW or their ilk, and perforce doesn't understand why the bug-loving iNat crew don't agree that

inaturalist should be a market, so that our preferences, as revealed through our donations, directly influence the supply of observations and ids.

Personally, I have spent enough time on iNat that I can identify a Rat when I see one.

I can't capture the glory of this in a few pull quotations; you'll have to go there to see the batshit.

(h/t hawkpartys @ tumblr)

14 comments

  • Hi Deborah what's up wait so what the fuck, am I getting this right: this person found a new ficus, potentially, and is in contact with a ficus expert who'll get back to them in a few weeks. The person can't accept this insignificant delay because???? (is there a lot of pressing demand for advances in ficus taxonomy?) so they write this bizarre screed about ... about huh ... how the invisible hand of the market should drive ficus research? You know, like bees, or Batman? For some reason? Because having to wait a few weeks is the same as being left to drown?

    Someone's on a lot of adderall.

    • hi hi and also yesterday I read their complete contributions to the iNat forums and apparently they turned up a few weeks ago out of nowhere and started demanding iNat change their entire UI in order to uprank ficus. Also to make it easier to downvote incorrectly identified ficus. Also change the forum policy to allow them to link to specific bad identications of ficus so they can mock bad ficus-identifiers.

      But even though a few weeks is being left to drown:

      “d” asked me to send him pics and i was like “nope”. when he finally sees the tree in person it’s going to blow his scholarly socks off. he’s gonna really regret not seeing it sooner. and i’d be surprised if he didn’t write an article about it

      I mean, don't get me wrong, I love me a single-minded gardener, but even when I am obsessively uploading pictures of the lifecycle of the swallowtail caterpillar eating my parsley, I'm not trying to turn a citizen science site into Polymarket.

  • an expert by the name of D [name withheld for privacy]

    One paragraph later...

    and send it to hodel

    One google later...

    Donald Hodel, environmental horticulture advisor

    facepalm

14 comments