UlrikeHahn

@UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org

Academic @Birkbeck, Univ. of London
Centre for Cognition, Computation, and Modelling

was just at Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study working on Digital Democracy with Davide Grossi and Michael Maes

currently here: Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU

back to London next year

works on #rationality #argumentation #testimony #SocialNetworks #misinformation #ComputationalSocialScience #DigitalDemocracy

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neuralreckoning, to random
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

If you're considering a life in academia it's worth watching this video and deciding if it's worth it to you or not. All of this is true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8

For me the answer is yes, despite all the problems, for two reasons.

Firstly, I'm lucky enough that I do have considerable freedom to work on the things that I'm interested in. If I was more interested in success or if I was on a 'soft money' position and forced to chase constant grants, I don't know if that would be true. But, such luck is rare.

Secondly, as a socialist I would feel very uncomfortable spending my creative energy on most of the non-academic things I'm qualified for: advertising and surveillance (i.e. tech companies), finance, or startups (making venture capitalists even richer). I could imagine academia getting bad enough that I'd make that choice, but for me it's not there yet. I completely understand that it is that bad for others and I mean no criticism of them.

In a way I suppose this is a sort of defence of academia, but it's a half hearted one at best. I think it's absolutely tragic and depressing that academia has become like this. Doing research should be one of the most joyful and creative things anyone could do with their lives.

UlrikeHahn,

@NicoleCRust @neuralreckoning agreed. Loved her, loved the video. But it doesn’t reflect my experience either. It’s not that I haven’t encountered the challenges, it’s that they haven’t played out in the same way for me. That’s largely good fortune, but maybe also some different expectations as I experienced other professional environments prior to academia. Much of the bad stuff strikes me as not unique - we just expect academia to be better (and we should hold it to that!).

djnavarro, to random

I mean I’m all in on the critiques of 21st century tech capitalism, and I am so far from an expert on quantum computing that I feel bad about commenting on this but even so I can’t help thinking that this says nothing whatsoever about modern computing and just says that most people really do not understand combinatorics.

UlrikeHahn,

@djnavarro put slips of paper with the numbers 1 to 10 on them (one per number) in a hat and draw (with replacement) 82 times = as many possible sequences as there are atoms in the universe….

…a lot cheaper than the quantum computer…

UlrikeHahn, to random

Melanie Mitchell takes a look at the term “AGI”

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado7069

UlrikeHahn, to random

“There is no golden path to discovery. One of my problems with all the focus on p-hacking, preregistration, harking, etc. is that I fear that it is giving the impression that all will be fine if researchers just avoid “questionable research practices.” And that ain’t the case.”

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/04/04/gold/

UlrikeHahn, to random

had missed the UK House of Lord's report on LLMs and generative AI coming out

  • well worth a read

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5804/ldselect/ldcomm/54/54.pdf

kissane, to random
@kissane@mas.to avatar

one of these days I'm going to do something about how little serious book chatter there is on mastodon and then you'll all be sorry 👾

UlrikeHahn,

@kissane am currently knee deep in an attempt to collectively read an academic text (I mean how serious can you get?) here on Mastodon with a view to also figuring out what kind of tools/features are needed to really make this work and what current features might create problems

hope to have some useful insights on this in coming weeks…

UlrikeHahn, to random

Something I think the fediverse needs to come to grips with ASAP is the difference between individuals and corporate entities.

The protocol doesn't care who or what the interacting agent is, but it matters.

Companies/institutions both have vastly different resources and different interests to individuals.

This makes me wonder if different types of accounts could be marked to indicate actor type, and if we need guidance rules for non-individual actors

some examples why follow 1/2

UlrikeHahn, to random

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/3/pgae111/7626151

“Twitter users who share links to lower-quality news sources also use more harmful language—even in non-news posts that are unrelated to (mis)information (β = 0.13). These consistent findings across different datasets and levels of analysis suggest that misinformation and harmful language are related in important ways, rather than being distinct phenomena”

UlrikeHahn, to Neuroscience German

Thought I‘d try something: this book by Juerrero has come up a lot in some of the most interesting conversations I‘ve had on this platform about , and and systems but it‘s not an easy read. I am now determined to tackle it and will be posting updates as I go…

care to join me? OA at https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545662/context-changes-everything/

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.

UlrikeHahn,

@jonny @tdverstynen aren‘t large numbers of articles uncited? I find it hard to imagine most articles have been pirated…

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/academic-papers-citation-rates-remler/

petersuber, (edited ) to random

On average, researchers rate themselves above average in following ethical research practices.

#Ethics

UlrikeHahn,

@petersuber @icymi_law as far as I can see, there is no mathematical reason such that their estimates can‘t simply be true….

UlrikeHahn,

@petersuber @icymi_law

but they only have 30% response rate, so they only have a third of the judgments of the reference population...those can all lie above the median

it's a poor design....

UlrikeHahn, to random

I wrote something on the #BlueskyBridge and surrounding debate

https://write.as/ulrikehahn/bridging-to-bluesky-the-open-social-web-consent-and-gdpr

I had hope #LawFedi would produce such analyses but I couldn't find anything so there we are...

all comments (and corrections!) welcome!

UlrikeHahn,

@osma

thanks Osma, to the extent that lawful processing rests on my consent, though, it's my server's privacy policy that I signed up to, it's the only one I saw. No?

if I live in a GDPR jurisdiction then any data controllor/processor with my data needs to comply with GDPR.

UlrikeHahn,

@osma

the fact that somebody can do something with data doesn't make that something legal....

UlrikeHahn,

@osma there are potential legal consequences for bad actors along with other possible sanctions such as social ones. That‘s the normal way we deal with rule violations. What I‘m not yet understanding is what you see that is unique to fedi here (not saying you‘re wrong, just saying I don‘t see it yet). Anyone handling personal data subject to GDPR has to act in accordance with this (and other…) laws -fedi or elswhere.

UlrikeHahn,

@osma

is that true of other things as well: email, webpages?

techn. design features matter (as was part of the point of the piece!), but -at other end of the spectrum- technology alone won't be enough to stop bad actors (not just here, but also elsewhere in life) - so part of the answer is people understanding the law and its implications, and legal sanctions where violations occur.

In between is the design space this call is asking people to explore:

https://ico.org.uk/media/about-the-ico/documents/4026232/joint-statement-data-scraping-202308.pdf

UlrikeHahn,

@osma

for that exploration to happen, developers have to take the issue seriously - it sounds like on that we are both agreed?

as I'm not a software developer, though, I won't be of much use in that, I'm afraid.

UlrikeHahn,

@osma "I just think a lot of the discussion around privacy on fedi is not based on reality of what either the technical protocols or the human policies actually take into account"

I'm happy to believe that! I guess I was motivated to write what I did because I saw a corresponding 'lack of reality' when viewing the discourse from the other side, namely a seeming belief that one could infer from the mere fact of a design reality or human practice that it was legally or ethically ok....

Lab_Horizons, to llm

LLMs like ChatGPT are transforming neuroscience, enabling unprecedented data synthesis and potentially surpassing human understanding in unravelling the brain’s complexities

Read more: https://bit.ly/3wnRFPx

UlrikeHahn,

@Lab_Horizons @ai

the underlying paper in Neuron (also linked to in the article) is OA and is here:

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(24)00042-4

UlrikeHahn, to LLMs

I can't help but wonder whether the real implication of is the realisation of how much the model of people have been working toward is threatened by the advent of -
full suddenly means not just access for people, but also training machines, and the more those can generate content (including online post-peer review comments!) and flood the ecosystem, the more gate keeping will be required

it feels to me like the implications are profound

@open_science

UlrikeHahn,

@feinstruktur

I think many people have that intuition (I myself do), the problem I see is about making that difference stick in practice (if that's what one wants to do). I don't think that's easy and I'm inclined to suspect that neither the regulatory nor the technical tools we currently have are fit for purpose for enabling that.

UlrikeHahn, to random German

#STS scholars, social media scholars, anyone….: Are there any good reviews on gender differences in attitudes to consent and privacy issues surrounding online social media that you could recommend?

and, likewise, for cross-cultural attitudes?

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.

UlrikeHahn,

@neuralreckoning @GunnarBlohm I‘m sympathetic to a lot of what you wrote Dan, but I wonder if you slightly overestimate senior „decision making power“. My first editorship was 12 years post (3 year) phd. That wasn’t in any way unusual and I have no greater editorial power now. You also don‘t (from my experience) need more experience to join grant awarding panels, and in the departments I‘ve worked in hires aren’t made just by senior staff. I don‘t feel much in charge of anything tbh.

UlrikeHahn,

@neuralreckoning @GunnarBlohm I think my point is that decisions are made by people who seek out positions of influence. In my experience, not a whole lot of ‚seniority‘ is required for those because many, if not most, academics can‘t be bothered, and volunteers are in short supply. And that means, conversely, also that most ‚senior‘ academics don‘t have the kind of decision making power I took your post to suggest.

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