NicoleCRust

NicoleCRust, 7 months ago to random

How do we support the Katalin Karikó's?

There's a lot of reasonable outrage today around how Katalin Karikó was treated throughout her career (full disclosure: by my employer, UPenn). Obviously a number of someones made a huge mistake by not recognizing the brilliance and potential of her work - no question there!

What I've been thinking about and I'd love to get some scenius input on: how could we, as an academic community, do better?

Here's one summary of what happened:
https://billypenn.com/2020/12/29/university-pennsylvania-covid-vaccine-mrna-kariko-demoted-biontech-pfizer/

Taking seriously the notion that 1) we want to support the Katalin Karikó's, 2) high-risk, high-reward research takes time, and 3) everyone needs to go through a job evaluation at some point, here are a few ideas:

*) Better support to help geniuses communicate (and fund) their ideas.
*) More funding for high-risk, high-reward projects
*) A longer evaluation period for individuals engaged in high-risk/high-reward research

What would you add/change?

NicoleCRust, 10 months ago to science

Metaphors in science - know any?

I’m fascinated by the role that metaphors play in scientific discovery. Like Darwin’s “tree” of life. When we shift how we think about what we’re working on, sometimes it inspires us to see it in a whole new way that clicks.

Know any good accounts of metaphors in science - others or your own?

#science #metaphor

NicoleCRust, 8 months ago to random

6 thought provoking questions posed to @awaisaftab (psychiatrist) and myself (brain researcher) and we hit on so much:

The challenge of escaping reductionism. Theories of consciousness. Are mental disorders brain disorders? Why should anyone care about philosophy? Is epistemic iteration is failing? And what bits of brain research are awaiting their Copernican moment?

With nods to @summerfieldlab, @knutson_brain, @tyrell_turing, @Neurograce, @eikofried and so many more.

Read it all here (and let's discuss)!

https://awaisaftab.substack.com/p/advancing-neuroscientific-understanding

NicoleCRust, 8 months ago to random

On jargon - is it useful?

Is it necessary and useful for scientists to say "mnemonic" to refer to "memory" and "affect" to talk about "emotion"?

In other words, given that everyone understand emotion and mood and no one really understands what "affect" is until you are really deep into things, why is the term affect useful and important at all? And should we reserve it for deep dives (as opposed to public facing websites and such)? And does anyone call themselves an "emotion researcher?" or a "mood researcher?"

@PessoaBrain @knutson_brain

NicoleCRust, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to random

Looking for: complex systems that defy model reduction.

The behavior of a complex system is hard to predict from its parts alone because it follows from how the parts interact.

Model reduction is a way to capture the behavior of a complex system more simply (eg to capture the magnetism of 1g of Fe2O3, you don't have to model all 1022 molecules and their interactions). My sense is that model reduction works best when you have many repeated copies.

I'm looking for some good (ideally concrete) examples of complex systems that defy model reduction. I anticipate that they will be made of heterogeneous parts.

Thanks in advance!

#complexity

NicoleCRust, 3 months ago to random

Do psychologists "measure"?

Weird question, right?

"Measurements of attributes such as emotions, well-being, or intelligence are widely used for various purposes in society, but it remains a matter of discussion whether psychological measurement is analogous to measurement in the natural sciences, and to what extent it qualifies as measurement at all.'
https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2300693
Edit: author is here! @mieronen

My initial take: what?! This seems silly. But I'm starting to warm up to it. It's about causality. Consider: "insomnia causes fatigue"; no one disputes it. But there's not a physical thing in the world called insomnia that causes a physical thing in the world, fatigue billiard-ball-style. Rather, the physical causal chain happens by way of a lack of sleep causing the brain state that leads to the mind state of fatigue (in other words, that word "cause" is doing some heavy lifting in that phrase). The question is: can you meaningfully talk about causality when you have abstracted away from physical interactions?

On one hand, of course - you can develop causal models formulated entirely at the psychological level (rewards, punishments, surprises, mood) that make falsifiable predictions and you can both perturb and measure these things to test those models.

On the other hand, we probably do need to take some care that we aren't confusing ourselves as we throw around that word "cause" interchangeably for things that physically interact and abstractions of those things.

Thoughts? I'm particularly curious about cases in which this type of abstraction has led researchers astray.

NicoleCRust, 7 months ago to random

Trying to wrap my head around what makes for a good model (of something complicated):

Following on my enthusiasm for a certain type of explanation of "mood" (summarized in this post: https://neuromatch.social/@NicoleCRust/111262116419902198) I'm trying to wrap my head around my lack of enthusiasm for a different type of explanation of the same thing. I'm not here to dump on anyone's work and I suspect that it's probably largely a matter of taste (and I anticipate the other model will resonate better with some other folks). Really just trying to wrap my head around differences in "explanations" of complicated things in ways that invite conversation.

In explanation 1 (which resonates with me): One big goal of the brain is to find good things (and avoid bad ones) and it does this, in part, via reward-based learning. Here, mood is a running average of unexpected rewards and it is formalized in models of reward based learning to demonstrate how "mood" makes learning more efficient. The gist: mood informs us about how things (like our environment) are changing and motivates us to act accordingly. One thing I appreciate about this approach is that it facilitates the mathematical formalization of slippery things (like mood) into models that can be tested, and those models inform not only what mood is but also what it's good for.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703769/

In explanation 2 (which I struggle a bit more with): One big goal of the brain is to maintain stability in the face of a changing environment. To do that, it has to make predictions and act to minimize its uncertainty (aka minimize free energy via active inference). In this framework, acute emotions signal uncertainty about the environment and mood is a hyperprior that furnishes a higher-level prediction about the value of lower-level emotional states. The purpose of mood is to convey confidence about the consequences of actions. One thing I struggle with is that after I read those words I don't feel that I have a much better sense of what mood is or what it's for than I did before I read them; it's not that I don't understand this framework at large; it's more that I do not experience an "aha" when I read it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6340107/

What I suspect one difference is: I anticipate that mood is not just about reward-based learning and explanation 1 is really just a slice of what mood is about; in contrast, explanation 2 is more expansive (it's something akin to a theory of everything). But I wonder if this coverage is the same thing that makes explanation 2 a bit too vague for me to appreciate.

Thoughts?

NicoleCRust, 23 days ago to random

Summer reading recs?!

I’m looking to compile a big pile of IRL books for summer beach reading.

Big fan of scifi, specfic, murder mysteries. Strong female characters = bonus points. Can’t deal with darkness. Nothing high brow or tedious. Nonfiction lover but that list is already bursting at the seams.

I also love long series - 3 body problem, wheel of time, foundation … those waves all have good memories attached.

If that brings anything to mind, please send the rec!!

NicoleCRust, 7 months ago to random

How do you stay connected with curiosity and awe?

I suspect most researchers experience ups and downs. I periodically find myself disconnected from curiosity and awe and I need to find that compass again. (Writing a book like I’m doing now is arguably an overindulgence there).

I worry that researchers are globally a bit disconnected from it, coming out of the pandemic coupled with increasing pressures to produce.

One impression I have is that the special swath of researchers who inhabit this furry elephant are particularly in touch with curiosity and awe.

How do y’all stay connected to it?

NicoleCRust, 9 months ago to Neuroscience

I’ve noticed a strong alignment between those who think that the computer metaphor for the brain makes little sense and those who’ve thought about how the brain might give rise to emotion.

As much as I love all the progress happening in NeuroAI to push our understanding of perception, memory & intelligence forward, I very much think they are right - there’s a crucial swath that doesn’t seem to fit with that agenda.

#neuroscience #neuroAI #philosophy

NicoleCRust, 8 months ago to random

Elaboration of "leading theory of consciousness is pseudoscience"
from the perspective of one (of 124) authors, Hakwan Lau
https://psyarxiv.com/28z3y

(For the 124 author post, see this from yesterday: https://neuromatch.social/@NicoleCRust/111074417017972359)

Among many highlights from Lau's piece:

Defines pseudoscience as

i) a set of important claims with far-reaching implications that are ii) neither currently supported by science nor are they likely to be so in the foreseeable future (perhaps even in principle), and yet they iii) masquerade as being already scientifically tested and established.

Explains why IIT is a problem as:

"Flat earth theory is clearly wrong but we don’t see articles appearing in Science11–13, Nature14, The New York Times15,16, The Economist17, NewScientist18,19, etc, repeatedly, over many years, sometimes by authoritative figures, proclaiming that it is a leading, empirically tested, and well established scientific theory. Therefore, flat earth theory is, in a sense, more ‘harmless’ and less threatening than the rise of IIT and panpsychism in the media."

Explains why IIT is pseudoscience as:

IIT shares many common features with other pseudoscientific ideas: that it is unresponsive to empirical challenges4–7; that it uses an unnecessarily complex and impractical4 language that diverges from mainstream science; that its popularity is mainly driven by the opinions by a few authoritative figures, and populist appeal8,23, rather than consensus within the scientific community or empirical success, etc. It is also notable that proponents of IIT publicly engage with religious leaders on the very topic of panpsychism24 and related metaphysical matters, and openly profess the ‘spiritual dimension’ of their ‘science’, together with controversial figures like Sadhguru25 and the New Age alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra26.

Also explains the events leading up to the letter and much more (for that, have a read).

Really curious to hear thoughts!
@WorldImagining, @axoaxonic +++

NicoleCRust, 9 months ago to science

Words for early stages of ‘theories’?

That word theory gets thrown around a lot. Some of my colleagues hold it to a really high bar whereas others use it pretty interchangably with hypothesis testing.

There’s an early phase of research that I’m not sure how to label. It’s not so much about levels, but something else. Here’s an example: what would you call the contribution of Copernicus to planetary motion? Ptolomy had these elaborate descriptions of everything revolving around the earth as cycles and epicycles to make up for wonky trajectories, and Copernicus came along and demonstrated that it all becomes a lot simpler if it’s all revolving around the sun. “Theories” of why the planets revolve as they do (Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s bending space time) came later.

Was Copernicus’s contribution a theory, replotting the data in a more sensible way, or something in between? Whatever it was, it was important, and it led to all that followed. But what do we call it (aka how do we regard it)?

#science #philosophy

NicoleCRust, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

Neurophilosophers - am I getting this right?

Namely: what psychologists call "processes" are what philosophers would call "things" (not processes)

The philosophical distinction between things versus processes is the idea that these are two different ways of thinking about the world. In the things way of thinking, the world is made up of just that: things – dogs, cats, me, you, this book, that pencil. In contrast, the process way of thinking shifts the emphasis from thinking about things in a static way to acknowledge the reality that everything is always changing. It's the famous idea that you can't step in the same river twice because the river you would step into a second time is a changed river and thus not the same as the one you stepped into before. From a process perspective, the idea of a thing called "a dog" or "a river" or "you" is an abstraction that captures some aspects of reality (the static aspects) but fails to capture some others (the changing ones).

One way in which the "things" way of thinking manifests in brain/mind research is the idea that there are modules that our brains flexibly combine to accomplish complex tasks; things like vision, audition, memory, attention and decision making. While these are often called "processes" by brain/mind researchers, philosophers would point out that in the way that most brain researchers think about them, they are very much "things" (I think - is that right?)

@yoginho @WorldImagining @ehud @PessoaBrain @dbarack

NicoleCRust, 8 months ago to random

Wow! 124 brain researchers call out what journalists call the "leading theory of consciousness" (integrated information theory, IIT) as pseudoscience.

https://psyarxiv.com/zsr78/

💯​: We need testable theories about the brain to move forward. Every theory starts as a proto-theory (and that's fine). But when theories are not even wrong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
we must acknowledge that.

Especially when the stakes are as high as they are here, with big ethical implications (eg for organoids and coma patients, as the authors describe).

NicoleCRust, 8 months ago to random

Provocative

As a young psychologist, this chills me to my bones. Apparently is possible to reach the stratosphere of scientific achievement, to publish over and over again in “high impact” journals, to rack up tens of thousands of citations, and for none of it to matter. Every marker of success, the things that are supposed to tell you that you're on the right track, that you're making a real contribution to science—they might mean nothing.

(I agree: time to rethink the idea that any individual is how this works).

I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psychologys-loss

NicoleCRust, 4 months ago to random

Should neuroscientists stay on X or go? Let’s ask a bunch of people who have decided to stay. Voices are missing here.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ejn.16236

NicoleCRust, 3 months ago to random

Thoughts on these provocative ideas (about how research in psychology should proceed)?

The last author tipped me off to this one. Curious to hear impressions.

Beyond Playing 20 Questions with Nature: Integrative Experiment Design in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4284943

(also here, behind the BBS paywall: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/beyond-playing-20-questions-with-nature-integrative-experiment-design-in-the-social-and-behavioral-sciences/7E0D34D5AE2EFB9C0902414C23E0C292)

The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment’s specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. The researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm—and with far greater efficiency.

NicoleCRust, 3 months ago to random

If you were to recalibrate, what would you do?

I always suspected I would do something like study those amazing desert ants that navigate via the earth’s magnetic field. But when thinking through the question “How do you want to spend the next 10 years?” more seriously (pretending there are few constraints), that’s not where I actually point myself.

Acknowledging that it’s a tremendously priveleged (and emotional) thought experiment, What would you do with your next 10 years, assuming that thing needs to be useful enough that it’s reasonably supported (and you would continue to get a paycheck)?

NicoleCRust, 10 months ago to random

The fascinating power of the placebo

Excellent, friendly summary here.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-expectations-and-conditioning-shape-our-response-to-placebos/

NicoleCRust, 4 months ago to random

Done writing the book.

(Deep inhale).

~90K words. A few years of work. A transformative journey that did not end at all as I thought when I started. I'm grateful to have done it - what a privilege. A much bigger conceptual project than anything I've done up to this point.

I got to think intensely for a better part of a few years (in parallel to running a lab and teaching as a professor). Somehow there was not time for that before. I'm not exactly sure where I found it; I just did.

There will be many revisions going forward. And it won't hit the shelves anytime soon. But I'm going to pause and celebrate this moment, where every one of the bits are finally in place. I learned so much along the way. Even today, on the last day, I was fascinated, and I'm grateful. (That said, I'm also a bit tired).

What's the book about? A slice of the spirit behind it is captured here: https://www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neuroscience/is-the-brain-uncontrollable-like-the-weather/

NicoleCRust, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

List of great scientific theories - what are your favorites?

(I’m curious to follow up on the discovery stories behind them). To kick things off:

Gravity, planetary motion (ptolomy > copernicus > newton > einstein)

Temperature (galileo > celcius/farenheit > thompson aka kelvin (themodynamics) > statistical mechanics

Genetic code / central dogma (DNA > mRNA > protein)

Neuron doctrine (cajal vs golgi)

Neurons communicate via chemical transmission (dale/eccles)

Memory engrams (semon …)

#science #neuroscience #philosophy #history

NicoleCRust, 2 months ago to random

Fascinating first person account by a psychologist who faked data

The scientist: Diederik Stapel. A Dutch social psychologist. He wrote a book explaining the context and how one thing led to another until he was caught. Nick Brown translated it into English. Freely available here:

http://nick.brown.free.fr/stapel

Page 101:

I also became increasingly skilled in the use of techniques that could put a healthy-
looking shine on otherwise mediocre results. If I didn’t get the effect I wanted across all the
different measures I’d used or the questions I’d asked, I would use the ones that did show
that effect. If an effect was present in an experiment, but not strongly enough to be tapped
by all of the types of measurements I’d used, I would make it stronger by combining the measures where the effect seemed to be only partly working. ...

Page 102:

After years of balancing on the outer limits, the gray became darker and darker until
it was black, and I fell off the edge into the abyss. I’d been having trouble with my
experiments for some time. Even with my various “gray” methods for “improving” the data,
I wasn’t able to get the results the way I wanted them. I couldn’t resist the temptation to go wanted it so badly. I wanted to belong, to be part of the action, to score. I really, really wanted to be really, really good. I wanted to be published in the best journals
and speak in the largest room at conferences. I wanted people to hang on my every word
as I headed for coffee or lunch after delivering a lecture. I felt very alone.

p103

I was alone in my tastefully furnished office at the University of Groningen. I’d taken
extra care when closing the door, and made my desk extra tidy. Everything had to be neat
and orderly. No mess. I opened the computer file with the data that I had entered and
changed an unexpected 2 into a 4; then, a little further along, I changed a 3 into a 5. It
didn’t feel right. I looked around me, nervously. The data danced in front of my eyes.
When the results are just not quite what you’d so badly hoped for; when you know that that
hope is based on a thorough analysis of the literature; when this is your third experiment
on this topic and the first two worked great; when you know that there are other people
doing similar research elsewhere who are getting good results; then, surely, you’re entitled
to adjust the results just a little?

NicoleCRust, 4 days ago to science

When should one call themselves an X researcher?

There are so many different types of researchers. Weather researchers, climate researchers, brain researchers. And within those categories, the nuances (like memory researchers).

When someone says they are an X researcher, what does that imply to you? In other words, what qualifies? Does it just imply that they are curious about X? Or perhaps that they know a bit more about it - perhaps they've mastered some scholarly literature or they've done at least one experiment? Or maybe even published a paper in a peer reviewed journal? Or maybe even more - perhaps they have a body of work on the topic; maybe they even run a lab (and have grants to support X research).

On one hand, no one should gate keep curiosity! On the other, certain terms imply knowledge and qualifications. I'm a "researcher". But just because I know a lot about memory doesn't automatically mean that people should listen to me about climate or economics. And I once read a very good book about ecosystems, but I don't think that means I should quality as an ecosystem researcher. So what, then, might instead?

#science

NicoleCRust, 4 months ago to random

Simple RNN models that capture neural network criticality / edge of chaos?

I'd like to play around with simple (tutorial-like) recurrent neural network models that capture the phenomenon of criticality. Something like the smallest possible number of recurrently connected model neurons that can recapitulate phenomenon (like information processing peaks for intermediate coupling weights).

Any leads?

NicoleCRust, 9 months ago to random

Citations to social media posts?

I've seen this happen a few times in academic talks as well as peer-reviewed publications: someone quotes and cites a post from a social media (like a post here).

Under what conditions do you think this is appropriate? I'm not so sure it's a great idea.

The thoughts I post here are somewhere between "musing things through" and things I'd write in an archival publication. I don't want to have to hold them to the same bar that I hold for archivable/publishable words (if I did, I'd stop musing). I'm dismayed to think that my musings might be used in a publication to make some point.

But I can also see when it might be relevant/important.

My take is that we should hold words on social media to the same bar as traditional "personal communication" where we seek permission from the author to use the quotes (definitely in publications; ideally in formal talks as well).

Any disagreements?