@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

neuralreckoning

@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social

I'm a computational neuroscientist and science reformer. I'm based at Imperial College London. I like to build things and organisations, including the Brian spiking neural network simulator, Neuromatch and the SNUFA spiking neural network community.

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neuralreckoning, to random
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

Asimov's first Foundation novel has a wonderful scene that I think prefigures the LLM arms race we're going through at the moment. A bunch of characters are using formal mathematical tools to analyse the meaning of verbose and seemingly eloquent political statements:

"That," replied Hardin, "is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Hoik, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications - in short, all the goo and dribble - he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out."

neuralreckoning, to random
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

Can anyone explain something about university finances to me? The finance people say that grant overheads don't actually cover the cost of research. I would take this to mean that each grant is a net financial loss to the university. So why do they want us to get more grants?

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@locha at least for my university, donations are not a major contributor to university income. Teaching is, and I know that being research active encourages more students to apply but honestly not sure I understand the economics of that either because we don't take more students if more apply we are just more selective.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/finance/annual-report/financial-review/income/

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@locha they do love the word excellence.

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@Thcoudreau @locha but it's not like they want to forbid us to apply, they are actively encouraging us to do so!

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

in LA I have to have discipline to only hit up a taco truck once per day max. One of the hardest parts of living here aside from the rent and proximity to rich people tbh

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@jonny I lived next door to a Korean restaurant in Paris and had the same problem with bibimbap. Dangerously addictive.

NicoleCRust, to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

How do you pack a 95K word (nonfiction) book into a 40 minute talk?

How many words are in 40 minutes? My estimate is 4-5K. That's ~20-fold compression. Something like half of 1 (of 10) chapters in the book.

Obviously you don't just read off the first half of the first chapter. But an outline of all of it is also super unsatisfying; it needs more depth than that. Clearly you present the central thesis and why it matters. But what to support it? This is a problem I've never encountered before. Not yet sure how to wrap my head around it.

Any advice? Any pointers to book talks you love?

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@NicoleCRust pick one coherent thread that goes through that hits the central thesis and a bit more. Choose the thread by thinking about what you want listeners to do after? Read the book? Take some action? Tailor to that. Not sure if that's obvious but that would be first approach.

albertcardona, to Bloomscrolling
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@albertcardona

neuralreckoning, to random
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

"If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell [scientists] they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they already know what they are going to discover." - David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules.

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@jonny get used to seeing a lot of it being quoted by me in your timeline. 😉

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

In this society that emphasizes competition and mastery to create value, so many people say you have to focus on one thing to be successful, but no one really says how to do that.. When I was younger I heard that advice, I decided to focus on neuroscience, but even within this field there's actually millions of potential things to focus on.

If anyone wants to share their method/s of deciding what to devote serious time to, feel free to reply

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@axoaxonic I didn't but my path wasn't the easiest and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. Peter Dayan once told me (when I went to him for advice early in my neuro career) that I should anyway expect to relearn and fundamentally change my approach to science every 4 years or so. I think he was about right.

neuralreckoning, to random
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

I'm thinking about a new way of interviewing candidates for a PhD. The idea would be to assume they're smart and competent, take their research proposal and do a 1h brainstorming session role-playing the first week of the PhD. Good idea? Could it introduce biases? Improvements?

tante, to random
@tante@tldr.nettime.org avatar

Magic market words

In tech-related discourse "decentralization", "Open Source", "democratization", "federation" have become weird terms. Not because of the specific architectural or technological concept they are describing but as a way to hide the fact that the speaker thinks that "markets" are the cure-all to anything. Anything is seen as an issue of needing "more competition", "more choice" which - given how many of us have been trained all our lives - might sound like a great idea.

https://tante.cc/2024/03/12/magic-market-words/

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@tante unfortunately this does match my experience. I wish it didn't because - as a left wing anarchist - I think decentralisation etc. are very important goals. But yeah, every time I use those words I get a bunch of crypto tech bros popping up in my notifications.

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

The thing about that "the papers will disappear if the journals do" article is that they wont and the only reason is piracy.

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@jonny I didn't read the article but I assume they didn't discuss this obviously highly salient point?

elduvelle, (edited ) to academia
@elduvelle@neuromatch.social avatar

Why is it that all university training for their staff consists of silly animations and extra-slow videos with individual sentences coming up one at a time with no way to just see all the text at once?
Do they think that making us waste our time in an extremely frustrating way is going to make us remember the contents better?

Spoiler alert: it won’t


(Edit: typo)

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@elduvelle so there's a delicatessen near where I live which looks beautiful but all the food tastes rubbish. It confused me for a long time, until I realised that it's run by people who have seen a real deli, and are copying the visual appearance, but who don't actually like food. I suspect a similar thing is happening in university training courses.

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

Can you imagine being a boss and trying and get someone back to work after having a baby. Anything aside from "holy shit you just had a goddamn baby go ahead and do whatever forever" is just unimaginable behavior to me

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@jonny I vote Jonny for boss.

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@jonny well with respect to your original post, my university gives 4 months at full pay for new parents which is brilliant and I've done it twice, but, well, I can't say that all their policies and practices are so good.

elduvelle, to academia
@elduvelle@neuromatch.social avatar

Is it common that US universities don’t pay their faculty for 3 months every year? What’s up with that 🤔

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@elduvelle lots of medical schools there don't pay a salary at all, right?

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@NicoleCRust @jonny @elduvelle seems like a small step from this to treating academics as self employed contractors. Great idea from university manager point of view, but something we should absolutely resist. So glad this isn't a thing over here.

neuralreckoning, to random
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

How can we fix academic publishing? I just wrote a new article outlining my thoughts on this based on all the attempts I've seen, what has worked and what has failed, and finishing with the strategy we developed for @ScholarNexus. I'd love to hear your feedback!

https://thesamovar.github.io/zavarka/how-do-we-fix-publishing/

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@elduvelle @ScholarNexus yeah sorry it's a bit long! 😂

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@elduvelle @ScholarNexus I know the problem. 😞 I just had a day where I got a grant rejection in the morning and a grant submission deadline in the afternoon, so I had to write this to detox my brain.

tdverstynen, to ai
@tdverstynen@neuromatch.social avatar

Apparently, according to Blaise Aguera y Arcas at , AGI is defined as the abilities that LLMs do, thus LLMs have AGI and it has arrived.

Maybe the folks working on should study circular inference a little bit more.

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@manisha @tdverstynen actually I agree with you, it would be much more responsible to have a companion talk making the points you raise. And I bet that talk would be a lot more interesting and surprising for a lot of participants.

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@NicoleCRust @manisha @tdverstynen as always the key is not to be prescriptive. If someone wants to do fundamental research disconnected from industry, good on them. If someone else wants to work closely with applications, good on them too. The problems only start when we insist that only one of these approaches is good and only reward that.

neuralreckoning, to random
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

I've been thinking a lot about how we could have a non-hierarchical science, and one idea has crystallised.

The way science is done now, senior scientists have a lot of decision making power: which papers get published, which grants get funded, who gets hired. This introduces a hierarchy and concentration of power that has both social problems (bias, well documented potential for abuse of trainees), as well as scientific ones (ideas that challenge old ways of thinking have a much harder time than they should).

However, I wouldn't want to entirely eliminate the collective expertise of senior scientists. It's always amazed me just how well some of them can cut through nonsense and see to the heart of an issue. I distinctly remember enthusiastically going to one of my postdoctoral advisors to talk about my latest complicated modelling idea and getting the response "yeah you could do that but what would it tell us about X?" and realising that they were completely right. I avoided months of fruitless work thanks to that one ten minute conversation.

But do they need to have decision making power to do that? I don't think so. We should give decision making power to junior scientists: they should decide what ideas they work on, how to carry out their research, where to do it, who to collaborate with, and what to publish. The additional role of senior scientists is to give the junior scientists advice, which those junior scientists are entirely free to ignore. You don't need to force people to listen to advice. If the advice is good, freely given and not binding, people will seek it out. And there's no reason it has to only be senior scientists who are in this advice giving role, and no reason that as a senior scientist you need to be in this role if you don't want to be.

This inverts the power dynamics in a really progressive way. With this approach, there's no way to impose your idea of how science should be done on anyone, instead you have to persuade them. This is exactly how it should be. By placing arbitrary authority at the heart of science we've made it unnecessary for established ideas to argue for their value, because the holders of those ideas can just deny publication, grants and jobs to those who disagree. Why bother arguing when you can do that?

An obvious follow-up question is: OK, but then how do you allocate funding? It's a good question and one I'm happy to discuss ideas about. But it's not a case of us having a good answer already and needing a strong argument for an even better way. The current system is a hierarchy whose very nature is contrary to the basic values of science. I suspect almost any alternative would be better. Personally, without a clear winner in mind, I suspect the best approach would be heterogeneous: let's try out different ideas and see what works instead of all the countries in the world converging more or less on variations of this same basic formula.

neuralreckoning,
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

@jonny I mean, virtually everyone does... 🤷

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