Damn, I relate to this so hard. Like, even more than most memes on this community. I really struggle to explain how I handle time perception to people. It sometimes causes issues with my support workers, because I come across as hyper capable and smart, but I struggle so hard when time gets involved. I literally can't remember what happened last week unless I have some logs to look back on. Well, can't remember is probably inaccurate — I do remember, I just can't distinguish those memories from ones that happened two weeks ago, or two months ago (I can probably distinguish it from two years ago, but that's only because I've moved house and changed jobs since then)
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I don't have any specific examples, but the standard of code is really bad in science. I don't mean this in an overly judgemental way — I am not surprised that scientists who have minimal code specific education end up with the kind of "eh, close enough" stuff that you see in personal projects. It is unfortunate how it leads to code being even less intelligible on average, which makes collaboration harder, even if the code is released open source.
I see a lot of teams basically reinventing the wheel. For example, 3D protein structures in the Protein Database (pdb) don't have hydrogens on them. This is partly because that'll depend a heckton on the pH of the environment that the protein is. Aspartic acid, for example, is an amino acid where its variable side chain (different for each amino acid) is CH2COOH in acidic conditions, but CH2COO- in basic conditions. Because it's so relative to both the protein and the protein's environment, you tend to get research groups just bashing together some simple code to add hydrogens back on depending on what they're studying. This can lead to silly mistakes and shabby code in general though.
I can't be too mad about it though. After all, wanting to learn how to be better at this stuff and to understand what was best practice caused me to go out and learn this stuff properly (or attempt to). Amongst programmers, I'm still more biochemist than programmer, but amongst my fellow scientists, I'm more programmer than biochemist. It's a weird, liminal existence, but I sort of dig it.
Not all memory foams are equal. I've found that quality makes a huge difference. Unfortunately, the good stuff can get pretty pricey. It sounds like you're talking about memory foam insoles, and I know that a lot of those tend to be the rubbish kind
That's so funny. I feel ridiculous enough owning one (the reason I own it was because I went to a weird university where fancy white-tie events were common and most students probably went to at least one of those in their time there. )
Good luck with your company. That sounds like a lot of pressure. I'm glad that you have a few more years of buffer room, and I hope that you're able to look after yourself in the meantime; I know how easy it is to burn out when you're trying to run your own business.
Wise person. I got good at sharpening, and I ended up monetising it as a hobby, which I inevitably regretted
I got good at sharpening because I had a bunch of weirdly shaped knives, like this saddler's round knife
Ooh, I love that cardigan thing. It's giving streetwear, which is an interesting juxtaposition with the cosiness of the knitwear.
You should tell your friend that a random internet stranger thinks they're very funny
Whenever I see that happen, I think "wow, thanks for showing why this community needs that rule in the first place". If dudes were more chill about women trying to build their own spaces, then perhaps it wouldn't be necessary to have such a hard rule.
"If they don’t want to ride with all women, that’s not the kind of ride I want to be on anyway,”
Yes! This is the solidarity that we love to see.
Being in community with trans folk (and especially trans women) has infinitely improved my ability to be comfortable in and even enjoy my own gender, as well as making me a better feminist.
Assholes on the right like to ask "what is a woman?", but the truth is that I don't know. I know that I am a woman, but I am just one data point and I don't feel equipped to answer such a general question. It's only through being open to other women's lived experiences that I can usefully build my idea of what it means to be a woman.
None of us are free until all of us are free.
Useful context: I am a biochemist with a passing interest in neuroscience (plus some friends who work in neuroscience research).
A brief minor point is that you should consider uploading the preprint as a pdf instead, as .docx can cause formatting errors if people aren't using the same word processor as you. Personally, I saw some formatting issues related to this (though nothing too serious).
Onto the content of your work, something I think your paper would benefit from is linking to established research throughout. Academia's insistence on good citations throughout can feel like it's mostly just gatekeeping, but it's pretty valuable for demonstrating that you're aware of the existing research in the area. This is especially important for research in a topic like this tends to attract a lot of cranks (my friends tell me that they fairly frequently get slightly unhinged emails from people who are adamant that they have solved the theory of consciousness). Citations throughout the body of your research makes it clear what points are your own, and what is the established research.
Making it clear what you're drawing on is especially important for interdisciplinary research like this, because it helps people who know one part of things really well, but don't know much about the others. For example, although I am familiar with Friston's paper, I don't know what has happened in the field since then. I also know some information theory stuff, but not much. Citations are way of implicitly saying "if you're not clear on where we're getting this particular thing from, you can go read more here".
For example, if you have a bit that's made up of 2 statements:
- (1): Something that's either explicitly stated in Friston's paper, or is a straightforwardly clear consequence of something explicitly stated
- (2): Something that your analysis is adding to Friston's as a novel insight or angle
Then you can make statement 2 go down far easier if that first statement. I use Friston in this example both because I am familiar with the work, but also because I know that that paper was somewhat controversial in some of its assumptions or conclusions. Making it clear what points are new ones you're making vs. established stuff that's already been thoroughly discussed in its field can act sort of like a firebreak against criticism, where you can have the best of both worlds of being able to build on top of existing research while also saying "hey, if you have beef with that original take, go take it up with them, not us". It also makes it easier for someone to know what's relevant to them: a neuroscientist studying consciousness who doesn't vibe with Friston's approach would not have much to gain from your paper, for instance.
It's also useful to do some amount of summarising the research you're building on, because this helps to situate your research. What's neuroscience's response to Friston's paper? Has there been much research building upon it? I know there have been criticisms against it, and that can also be a valid angle to cover, especially if your work helps seal up some holes in that original research (or makes the theory more useful such that it's easier to overlook the few holes). My understanding is that the neuroscientific answer to "what even is consciousness?" is that we still don't know, and that there are many competing theories and frameworks. You don't need to cover all of those, but you do need to justify why you're building upon this particular approach.
In this case specifically, I suspect that the reason for building upon Friston is because part of the appeal of his work is that it allows for this kind of mathsy approach to things. Because of this, I would expect to see at least some discussion of some of the critiques of the free energy principle as applied to neuroscience, namely that:
- The "Bayesian brain" has been argued as being an oversimplification
- Some argue that the application of physical principles to biological systems in this manner is unjustified (this is linked to the oversimplification charge)
- Maths based models like this are hard to empirically test.
Linked to the empirical testing, when I read the phrase "yielding testable implications for cognitive neuroscience", I skipped ahead because I was intrigued to see what testable things you were suggesting, but I was disappointed to not see something more concrete on the neuroscience side. Although you state
"The values of dI/dT can be empirically correlated with neuro-metabolic and cognitive markers — for example, the rate of neural integration, changes in neural network entropy, or the energetic cost of predictive error."
that wasn't much to go on for learning about current methods used to measure these things. Like I say, I'm very much not a neuroscientist, just someone with an interest in the topic, which is why I was interested to see how you proposed to link this to empirical data.
I know you go more into depth on some parts of this in section 8, but I had my concerns there too. For instance, in section 8.1, I am doubtful of whether varying the temporal rate of novelty as you describe would be able to cause metabolic changes that would be detectable using the experimental methods you propose. Aren't the energy changes we're talking about super small? I'd also expect that for a simple visual input, there wouldn't necessarily be much metabolic impact if the brain were able to make use of prior learning involving visual processing.
I hope this feedback is useful, and hopefully not too demoralising. I think your work looks super interesting and the last thing I want to do is gatekeep people from participating in research. I know a few independent researchers, and indeed, it looks like I might end up on that path myself, so God knows I need to believe that doing independent research that's taken seriously is possible. Unfortunately, to make one's research acceptable to the academic community requires jumping through a bunch of hoops like following good citation practice. Some of these requirements are a bit bullshit and gatekeepy, but a lot of them are an essential part of how the research community has learned to interface with the impossible deluge of new work they're expected to keep up to date on. Interdisciplinary research makes it especially difficult to situate one's work in the wider context of things. I like your idea though, and think it's worth developing.
Iconic
I liked that although Knights of Guinevere was clearly ragging on Disney, it felt like it wasn't just a cathartic trauma dump from Dana Terrace and crew — it was actually being used to say something meaningful. It's a good sign when the pilot episode of a show has such a strong sense of themes.
I'd heard a lot of hype when the pilot was released, but didn't get around to watching it until I randomly thought "I wonder what Dana Terrace is up to nowadays? Hopefully she's working somewhere better than Disney, because surely there must be someone with power out there who recognised how Disney was squandering her potential". When I saw that it was her and some of the Owl House team who made Knights of Guinevere, that caused me to immediately go watch it. The only disappointment was that we don't know when new episodes will be available, but hopefully things will be regular once we do start getting episodes.
Something that I'm disproportionately proud of is that my contributions to open source software are a few minor documentation improvements. One of those times, the docs were wrong and it took me ages to figure out how to do the thing I was trying to do. After I solved it, I was annoyed at the documentation being wrong, and fixed it before submitting a pull request.
I've not yet made any code contributions to open source, but there have been a few people on Lemmy who helped me to realise I shouldn't diminish my contribution because good documentation is essential, but often neglected.
I'm meant to be going to sleep, but I remembered a time when I saw someone use the scary words in a masterfully executed piece of rhetoric.
She acted like she agreed with the word vomit of red-scare propaganda that was coming out of this dude's mouth, but redirected the topic to how companies like Walmart have effectively lobbied for socialism, but only for them. This confused him and set him off guard, especially because he had coded her as someone who believes "socialism bad" and so had his guard relatively low already.
She explained that because Walmart pays their employees so low that many of them are reliant on social security benefits, this meant that Walmart was effectively receiving taxpayer subsidies from the government. She seeded the idea that part of why there's so much red-scare propaganda is because the capitalist class want us rallying against socialism, but she framed it like "companies like Walmart are being deceptive because they perpetuate anti-socialist messaging to detract that they are the main beneficiaries of socialism". She said it much better though.
It helps that the dude already had pretty strong views in favour of the state doing stuff to look after its people, but had just drank the koolaid about the terms. She facilitated him refining his views on that matter until he was vehemently arguing in favour of socialist policies to all his mates in the pub — he just didn't know that was what he was arguing. She even managed to link up those views to the anti-corporate angle, so that when he was talking about Walmart being a beneficiary of socialism, it didn't sound like he was being anti-socialist.
I remember watching in awe of how gracefully she manoeuvred through the conversation. The subtle manipulation she deployed was so skillful that I even wondered whether this was unethical. I concluded it wasn't though, because ultimately she hadn't got him saying anything he didn't already believe. I low-key wish I had a recording of that conversation, because I felt like I learned a lot about how to do guerilla class consciousness building.
Okay, bed time now — for realsies.
This is part of why my Lemmy username is what it is. It's sort of a reaction to feeling like I need to use non-scary terms all the time — I was curious what it would feel like to wear my ideology on my sleeve, so to speak.
Below is a not very interesting anecdote about an example of someone reacting poorly to me saying I was an anarchist. It is a bit rambly because I am quite ill, and by the time I realised this, I didn't want to waste what I had written. So here's your disclaimer that the below story may be incoherent and deeply mundane. I'm going to get some sleep and hope I wake up feeling better, wish me luck.
The silliest example of someone reacting badly to the word "anarchism" was when I was at university during the peak of the pro-Palestine protests. We had occupied a university building, and the atmosphere at night was chill, but stimulating levels of social. A varied group meant conversation topics bounced around all sorts of stuff, many of which lined up with either stuff I know from ADHD infodiving, or because my late best friend taught me. The vibe of the conversation often became quite opinionated, but in a friendly way.
There was a dude who I argued with a bunch, and he seemed to be quite impressed by how relatively well informed I seemed on a wide variety of topics (I don't actually know much, I just know how to shut up when I don't know shit, and back myself when I do), so he asked me what subject I studied. He was extra impressed when I said "biochemistry", given that that hadn't been one of the topics of the night, so he realised that my opinions were coming from things that were side interests at best. I'm not just saying this to brag, but because one of the key parts to the story is how this guy seemed to have a quite deep respect for me based on the breadth of my knowledge and how I'd argued my opinions that differed from his.
I hadn't used the word "anarchism" to describe my beliefs, but for once, it wasn't because I was hiding it — the vibe was so political that it was fairly safe to assume everyone there was likely either an anarchist or a communist or something variant thereof (on the backside of the big whiteboard in the occupied lecture theatre, there was a tally chart recording how many anarchists there were Vs communists. This really tickled me because that's what rivalry between our peoples should look like — acknowledging the differences in perspective between the "factions", while recognising we were all there because our goals were the same, which is why the "rivalry" was joked about).
Anyway, when I used the big, scary A-word, this guy's demeanor completely changed. I have never seen such a rapid drop in respect for a person, much less been on the other side of it. He had asked me about what I would envision as a solution to some problem or other, and I summarised the view, and said "so, Anarchism basically". He had a ridiculously erroneous notion of what anarchism was (he seemed to sincerely believe that anarchists would oppose buildings, because they're a structure), but he was so set in his viewpoint that literally anything I said from that point was inherently laughable. This probably isn't a very interesting story, but it will always stick out to me in a cautionary tale kind of way. I'd been talking to this guy all night (which started when I noticed someone seeming a bit uncomfortable with the extent to which he did devil's advocate style discussion. I joined the conversation initially to deflect him from that person, but ended up relishing the challenge of keeping this abrasive, but seemingly good-faith guy on his feet).
TL;DR: people's biases are wild. Someone can agree with you all night, and then suddenly that all changes in one word. Sometimes people feel threatened by the big scary words, and sometimes they find you literally laughable. I thought I was prepared for bad reactions, but I wasn't prepared for the latter kind of bad reaction. It was very surreal at the time.
So many people outside of academia are gobsmacked to learn the extent to which academic publishing relies on free labour, and how much they charge.
To publish a paper open access in Nature, it costs almost $7000. And for what? What the fuck do they actually do? If you want to make the data or code you used in your analysis available, you're the one who has to figure out how to host it. They don't provide copyediting services or anything of the like. I'd call them parasites, but that would be an insult to all the parasitic organisms that play important roles within their respective ecosystems.
Perhaps once, they served an essential role in facilitating research, back when physical journals were the only way to get your research out there, but that age has long since passed and they've managed to use that change to profit even more.
Sure, the individual researchers are rarely paying this fee themselves, but that's still a problem. For one, it gatekeeps independent researchers, or researchers from less well funded academic institutions (such as in the global South or emerging economies). Plus even if the individual researchers aren't paying directly, that money still comes out of the overall funding for the project. For the cost of 4 papers published in Nature, that's an entire year's stipend for a PhD student in my country. I'm using Nature as an example here because they are one of the more expensive ones, but even smaller papers charge exorbitant amounts (and don't get me started on how people who justify the large fees charged by more prestigious journals don't acknowledge how this just perpetuates the prestige machine that creates the toxic "publish or perish" pressure of research)
he most offensive bit though is that if you are doing government funded research, then you have to pay an extra fee to make that research available to the taxpayers who funded it. It's our fucking research, you assholes! How dare you profit off of coerced free labour and then charge us to even be able to access what is rightfully ours. France has the right idea here — they have legislation that mandates that all government funded research must be open access. That doesn't solve the root problem of needing to eradicate the blight of the academic publishing industry as it currently exists, but it's a start.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but once I started writing, my rage overcame me and it was cathartic to scream it out from my soapbox.
This isn't exactly what you asked for, but I really enjoyed this long piece from The Guardian that looks at the history of how scientific publishing became the massively profitable behemoth it is today. Reading it as a scientist (i.e. someone who has spent a while marinading in a broth of "man, fuck the academic publishing industry" rhetoric in my community) was mind-blowing.
"He blew the doors off of something we already knew was happening."
Usually when an investigation blows the doors off of something, it's because although many people were aware of what was happening inside, not enough did. Even if the primary gain is bringing awareness to an issue, investigative journalism like this is still important. After all, the doors were closed for a reason
I wish I had a better answer, but the best that I can suggest is that it might help to find solidarity with other women who aren't able to become pregnant. I know a lot of cis women who struggle with this, and it causes them stress in a manner that seems analogous to gender dysphoria. A surprising number of cis women experience this, but it's not spoken about much because of how much stigma there is around it.
196 @lemmy.blahaj.zone rule was also in the race
Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world How do you build a life up from scratch?
Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world Harm reduction tips for an All Nighter
196 @lemmy.blahaj.zone John Finnemore is Peak Autistic-gaze Media
196 @lemmy.blahaj.zone Cis-admin rule
I'm surprised by how much I know. It perhaps shouldn't be surprising given that I have both autism and ADHD and that makes me enthusiastic about learning basically everything, but I'm chuffed with how well rounded my knowledge is.
I studied biochemistry at university, but over the last 5 years or so, I've been doing a lot more reading in topics like the history and philosophy of science, philosophy more generally, political theory, disability theory, queer theory, economics, design, programming etc.. My knowledge in each of these areas is relatively shallow, but I seem to be pretty good at forming lateral links between things I know, which means I can be quite fun to have in depth discussions with. It helps that I got a hell of a lot smarter when I stopped being so attached to my identity as a smart person and learned how to say "no, I haven't heard of $thing, tell me more" or "I think I've heard of that, but I'm not sure — remind me?"
A year or so ago, a friend who studied English called me "well read" and it gave me a bit of an existential crisis. "But I don't actually fully read most of the books I talk about. Many of them I just skim them until I find a chapter or two that's most useful to me!". Turns out that that kind of reading strategy is typical of people who are well read.
My late best friend was a historian, and one of the things I loved about our friendship is arguing with him about random shit. His background meant he often approached an issue in a completely different way to me, and we'd often ask questions or make points that would require the other to go away and think about it for a while before forming a response. I think he'd be really proud of me (and also aggravatingly smug due to him being a significant driving force behind me getting more into history).