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Will Macnair

@willmacnair

Senior Scientist working on single cell neuroscience @ Roche.
Formerly postdoc with @markrobinsonca @ UZH.
Big fan of allowing yourself space to be wrong.
Joined April 2019
389 Following 482 Followers 747 Posts

Latest posts 5

Will Macnair @willmacnair
I agree with this. I also think that there should be more acceptance of “resource” papers. eg if someone has made a massive multimodal resource with an interesting and useful experimental design (this bit is essential!) then that should be enough for a fancy journal.
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Will Macnair @willmacnair
When people developed ML for images, they had feedback along the way: “still too many fingers” etc.

People are now doing the same for single cell data, w/o this feedback loop…😬

Can someone convince me that sc foundation models are not just expensive batch effect generators??
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Will Macnair @willmacnair
Interesting data!

Interpretation 1: Financial security gives freedom to fully pursue interests, and if there was more equality we would see many top scientists from all backgrounds

Interpretation 2: Ambition at a psychopathic level is heritable 😜
Paul Novosad Verified account @paulnovosad Oct 9, 2024
What kind of childhood makes a top scientist? Is it enough to have all the right traits (brilliance, grit, etc) or do you need the right family too?

And why should we care? A 🧵 on our paper on the Nobel Laureates.

A teaser: the income distribution of the laureates' fathers.1/N
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Will Macnair @willmacnair
💯 For me, Nobels mislead non-scientists on how scientific progress is really made.

Sure, there are smart people who accelerate progress a bit, but most progress is incremental and comes from *thousands* of scientists working and disagreeing and building with each other.
Will Macnair @willmacnair
Excellent article on the human impacts of scientific fraud.

For this and other reasons, I think academic science has a huge accountability problem.

Freedom is absolutely necessary to allow discovery of new things, but there needs to be waaaay more checking of the findings.
Calli McMurray @callimcflurry Oct 4, 2024
Science is built on trust. What happens when someone destroys it?

My first feature for @_TheTransmitter investigates the emotional and existential fallout for one lab in the aftermath of a misconduct case.
thetransmitter.org/science-and-so…
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