I know it may sound silly, but The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meant a lot to me. It taught me not to take life too seriously and to just embrace its weirdness.
"While LIGO has gained a (not entirely undeserved) reputation for excessive secrecy, Shoemaker says the collaboration has spent a great deal of time interacting with Jackson and his group over the last two years to improve their understanding of LIGO's methods, including extended visits to the Niels Bohr Institute and inviting Jackson et al. to discuss the issue in depth in teleconferences with LIGO team members. So if LIGO's response whenever that drum begins banging anew sometimes comes off as a bit exasperated, there's a very good reason for it."
I think you are overlooking into this, there is no hostility whatsoever.
I have two coworkers like that. No matter how much communication we have seemingly nothing ever gets settled nor progress made. The one calls himself an anarchist. There’s a large difference between constructive “skepticism” and destruction of progress - but so much can hide under the false umbrella of “just trying to understand.”
It’s a difficult problem to solve. For example the phrase, “I want to have a serious conversation about immigration” can mean that you want to have an intellectually honest, detailed conversation about immigration. You want to talk about the pros and cons and how best to balance them for everyone involved, seek out more perspectives and information, and in general shine some light on an issue that often generates nothing, but heat.
Or it can be the prelude to a racist scree laden with FUD. We have to be careful not to let the the purveyors of the latter poison the well against the former group, but it can be hard to manage when people are smart enough to disguise their intentions.
> how do you (did?) resolve that kind of work-place conflict?
Figure out a domain they operate exceedingly well in, determine the minimum amount of information they need and firewall them from everything else. A side effect of such disagreeability is not being involved in the sort of open-ended discussions which delineate upper from middle management.
They don't "love" greek letters, you simply run out of letters. And you can't use words since that could be easily mistaken for a product between single variables. Once you learn them, things start getting way, way easier
That would be the case if all the other letters in the alphabet were used in the equation. This is rarely the case. In fact more often than not, all letters of the greek alphabet are used.
By custom, Greek letters usually mean different things than letters of Latin alphabet. And also it's customary that certain letters in Latin alphabet are used for specific things.
For example, Latin letter 'x' usually means a variable of interest / data point. Latin letter 'a' could be instead a constant or variable that is thought to be fixed for the time being.
If you want more unknown variables in addition to 'x', you can use y, z, maybe w, but if you want more than that you are out of letters and are often better off with super/subscripting (if it makes sense in the context), because a, b, c, d would be interpreted as constants. Especially in statistics/ML x is reserved as symbol for the independent variable and y is reserved as symbol for the dependent variable; z, w are common for latent variables. f,g,h are common shorthands for functions.
i,j are double-booked as an "arbitrary index symbol" or imaginary units. k,m,n are also constants, and often reserved specifically as constants that denote the dimensionality or sequence lengths (m times n matrix, sums x_1 + ... + x_n, sequences (x_1, ..., x_n), etc). (k can be also be an index in addition to i and j.) o is easily confused with 0 or a circle that is usually a function composition sign (I usually see the letter o only in the CS small-o-notation context, rendered in fancy typeface). p,q,k are again constants or sometimes alternative indices in complicated sums where i and j are not enough, but from p to v you have relatively underused letters. However, they are not totally "free" either: s and t and r and l are again common symbols for scalar variables like length or time or rotation; in statistics, p often is reserved for probabilities (conditional probability of x given m is p(x|m) etc). In linear algebra u and v can be arbitrary vectors, or unit vectors, or in complex analysis they are real / imaginary parts of a complex valued function.
Upper case letters are reserved for matrices and operations or (especially consonants like K or C) sometimes again constants.
In other fields things might go differently, but the general gist is that I do often feel like the alphabet is not enough.
Most often Greek letters get quite much use when you need symbols for angles or rotations (for example, Fourier transformation pairs) or as (hyper)parameters of probability distributions.
I cannot phantom a reason to put your health at a risk just to accomplish the ego of someone who should just do his work. I personally find it humilating. Care to explain better? Sometimes I'm really curious about how someone can have such a radically different view from me on such simple arguments, and I always love finding the reasoning behind that.
I can see this argument its not exactly burried. The article states there was no associated health risk. The more general point is a surgeon that openly requires signing your organ, is better than one less well trained surgeon in the world. From a utilitarian pov. Not everyone would necessarily care, like you do. Which is definitely true if you look at the range of responses on here. That this guy did it without consent is what's properly bad, tangibly more than the physical result of his breach of ethics.
An alternative would be a system where publishing isn't as important as obtaining results. Let small journals take care of everyday research and let only the big works end up in something that really define someone's carreer. There would be a lot less people with a "valuable" publication, but we do have other ways to judge people and assign spots as researcher. The problem is the way jobs in academia are assigned: the more you published, the more you get paid. This shifts the attention from knowledge to publishing. Just value people with the usual attitudinal tests unless thay discovered something truly remarkable.
Well, this is isn't always the case. Most of the time they are not really hidden, they are just a huge amount of new results not correlated with each other, that everyone knows about. Then someone comes and finds the thing that correlates them all. Think about special relativity and what will probably happen when we will finally solve the general relativity/quantum theory riddle.
