@skarthik@neuromatch.social
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

skarthik

@skarthik@neuromatch.social

I am a neuroscientist at MIT.

Neurophysiology and computational modeling on visual attention, eye movements, and executive functions.

Interests span math, science, history, politics, economics, and philosophy.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

Circulating word is that #LAPD plans to disperse #UCLA Palestinian solidarity encampment at 6. A number of groups including faculty and campus unions are planning on rallying in defense. Meanwhile an administrator has entered the camp to negotiate

#StudentSpring #StudentProtests

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@jonny

Stay safe!!!

skarthik, to philosophy
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

Good riddance to what was a colossal waste of money, energy, resources, and any sane person's time, intellect, and attention. To even call these as exploratory projects is a disservice to human endeavor.

"Future of humanity", it seems. These guys can't even predict their next bowel movement, but somehow prognosticate about the long term future of humanity, singularity blah blah. This is what "philosophy" has come to with silicon valley and its money power: demented behavior is incentivized, douchery is rationalized, while reason is jettisoned.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/28/nick-bostrom-controversial-future-of-humanity-institute-closure-longtermism-affective-altruism

skarthik, to Neuroscience
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

Great write-up by @annaleen on the modern history of the pseudoscience of "brainwashing" and how it has been (/tried to be) used for mostly nefarious ends.

We can say this "psychopolitics" is part and parcel of what the great political scientist Richard Hofstadter termed the "paranoid style in American politics".

Awesome to see a mention of Liang Qichao and how his term "xinao" (wash-brain) which meant modernization was usurped and became a negative connotation. He was one of the great early reformers who wanted to modernize Chinese philosophy by seeking a radical break from Confucianism. Pankaj Mishra's "From the ruins of empire" does a great job of his intellectual response to western imperialism in remaking Asia.

First time also hearing/reading about "stochastic terrorism".

(H/T: @DrYohanJohn )

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/12/1090726/brainwashing-mind-control-history-operation-midnight-climax/

skarthik, to india
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

With elections in India in full swing, this is fantastic infographic on India and its elections from the very beginning (1952 to present) in The Hindu. This is like a crash course of Indian history since independence!

Whatever your political ideological stance, India remains the most important, interesting, and unlikely experiment in politics.

https://www.thehindu.com/infographics/2024-04-17/previous-lok-sabha-elections-since-independence/index.html#_

#India #History #Elections #Politics

skarthik, to history
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

Fantastic storytelling/documentary/history/ethnography/mythology/folklore of the humble and quintessential coconuts!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96MpIxMxgow

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

They did WHAT
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/05/no-data-no-problem-undisclosed-tinkering-in-excel-behind-economics-paper/

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@jonny @NicoleCRust

Reminded me of this:

https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-not-to-excel-at-economics-13646

neuralreckoning, to random
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

"the challenges that science is experiencing now ... are due to a lack of emphasis on ... the hard intellectual labor of choosing, from the mass of research, those discoveries that deserve publication in a top journal"

🤔

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado3040

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@jonny @neuralreckoning

That sentence started off well, and then ended up as a word salad (whut?!?). 😂​

And at the end, the editor of the biggest/most impactful journal is implying that elites like him and his institutions are victims of elites in academic institutions. Wow!

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@tdverstynen @jonny @neuralreckoning

Yeah... the incentives are so lopsided for mostly positive studies/hypothesis.

I have been told many a times that I will have no career prospect if I publish, "everyone else is seeing phenomenon X in these experiments, but I do not in similar experiments." (or) "phenonmenon X is an artefact".

Aside from the publishing, the replication issue concerns me deeply as someone who straddles both theory and experiments. I have conducted long complicated experiments, get robust results etc., (and I am happy I see interesting effects in my data), but I always fear if the experiments and methods we engage in are becoming so complicated, not easy to record (or easy to overlook certain things one might take for granted) that replication becomes impossible.

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

Second @jonny 's views on Graeber.

Even before reading his magisterial books (especially Debt), you can start here @neuralreckoning which is apposite about the current state of academia and innovation:

"There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet."

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

That article gives reasons as to why "disruptive science" has declined, and Nature doesn't seem to know why?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5

@zackbatist @brembs

NicoleCRust, to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

Worst word (pronunciation)?

My vote: Colonel = “ker-nal”. How does one justify the ghost R to anyone?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-colonel-pronounced-r-and-more-questions-our-readers-180953036/

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@NicoleCRust

🤣​ By pretending like you are in East Asia and the R and L spectrum is collapsed.

Though English is my first language, it still amuses me that we have spelling competitions. In most languages, including my mother tongue, no one asks for how to spell something: "you spell it exactly how you said it".

skarthik, to Economics
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

Folks, please help me buy a mega mansion by the end of this week, I am promised that I could get a lunch salad for free in return. Thanks!

#Economics #Technology #Apps #GigEconomy #Uber

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@jonny

Indeed!

DrYohanJohn, to Neuroscience
@DrYohanJohn@fediscience.org avatar

What do you think are the best critiques of the predictive processing framework in neuroscience?

I like the way that it has made top-down processing more popular in the minds of experimentalists. But I am skeptical that only errors are propagated up the hierarchies.

#Neuroscience

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@DrYohanJohn @NicoleCRust

How can you determine how much non-spherical a cow is without first having created/understood a spherical cow?

PessoaBrain, to random
@PessoaBrain@neuromatch.social avatar

Non-determinism in classical (and quantum) physics

Very interesting talk by Nicolas Gisin suggesting that mathematical real numbers are really "random" (given they require infinite bits to be represented).

Thought @NicoleCRust and other folks might like it.

h/t @WiringtheBrain

Better link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx4u_96cAfc

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@NicoleCRust @PessoaBrain @WiringtheBrain

Yeah... once non-computable reals are involved (i.e., uncountably infinite number of them than the countably infinite computable reals or rationals), and let's say you have dynamics (i.e., Newtonian mechanics), then whatever is generated as a deterministic sequence can be indistinguishable from "random". Chaotic systems if we do not know the initial conditions is exactly that.

A practical way to circumvent/ameliorate this deterministic vs non-deterministic as a scientist is you just compute what you can and work with that.

NicoleCRust, to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

Virtually all the protein molecules in our body are replaced during the course of a year.

A fun fact with philosophical implications (ala: Where is the "you")?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/biological-thermodynamics/8FC8CAB10BFF5A4391B14FB171D7D351

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@NicoleCRust @Andrewpapale

This is a good reference to have wrt memories and the synaptic trace theory:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28710971/

tdverstynen, to random
@tdverstynen@neuromatch.social avatar

For those of you wanting to know how to maximize the likelihood of your grants getting funded in the US, here’s a helpful primer:

NIH: Know how to describe the best possible application of your research in a medical context.

NSF: Know how to describe the most cost effective way of achieving a basic science objective.

Dept. of Defense: Know whose ass to kiss and the most effective way to kiss it.

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@tdverstynen

Oh, it's a lot lot more than that depending on how one defines spending the yearly budget allocated.

NSFs annual budget is ~10billion.

Every year's audit on the DoD is very illuminating. Here are some highlights of the 2023 budget:

  • Year budget is ~842billion. With nearly 3 million employed, the payroll is about 269billion. The rest is for all the maintenance, procurement, research, industrial deals etc., etc.,
  • More than half that budget every year enters the military industrial complex, i.e., taxpayers money enters corporate coffers
  • DoD possesses 36billion worth of stuff it absolutely does not need.
  • Roughly 20billion worth of weapons inventory is unaccounted for.
  • Nearly 5billion worth inventory that they "lost track of"
  • DoD's audits were so bad that they had to adjust their ledgers to the tune of 7 trillion, and even after that the pentagon couldn't show receipts for 2.3trillion.
  • How much, and where the investments in the private sector are made is not fully transparent or can be requested by FOIA either.
johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Hindustani music has lots of ragas, but they're often organized into the 32 kinds shown here, of which only 10 are very commonly used. These kinds are called "thaats".

Each thaat is a 7-note scale. I'll explain them in a western way, not an Indian way. This will make it clear how 𝑢𝑛𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 the ideas are to anyone who has studied western music theory.

Let's imagine our thaat starts with the note C. Then:

• it must contain C
• it must contain D or D♭, but not both
• it must contain E or E♭, but not both
• it must contain F or F♯, but not both
• it must contain G
• it must contain A or A♭, but not both
• it must contain B or B♭, but not both.

So, we get 2⁵ = 32 thaats. It's really unsurprising that C and G are locked in place, while the other 5 notes are flexible - after all, C and G are the 'tonic' and 'dominant', also called the 1 and 5, the most important notes in a scale.

A lot of thaats match familiar western modes, but later I'll show you some that may not. Maybe some expert on jazz can say if they've seen them.

Thaats are just the start of the story, since we can get extra ragas by leaving out some notes in a thaat... and as a result, different ragas can come from the same thaat.

But there's a more urgent issue: what are all the letters in this chart? The notes in the thaat are called

sa re ga ma pa dha ni

or for short

S R G M P D N

These are a lot like the western "do re mi fa so la ti".

But as I've said, we get a binary choice only for 5 of these notes, namely R G M D N, since the other 2 are locked in place. That's what the chart shows. It's a binary tree with 32 leaves, namely the thaats.

(1/n)

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@johncarlosbaez

In carnatic music (the South Indian counterpart), we have the Melakarta classification... which is more complete than the thaat system vis-a-vis the 12 tone scale in western music, and it has 36*2 =72, 7 note scales/ragas. All of them have western modal counterparts and more. We also have compositions and expositions in all of the 72 and their derived/children ragas.

There are also group/permutation structures (graha/sruti bedham, i.e., base pitch shifts) to transform one raga to another. Leaving certain notes out (like having only pentatonic for example), gives rise to janya (child/originating from one of the 72) ragas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melakarta

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@johncarlosbaez

Thanks for the article!

yeah... what's the genus (janya) for a raga is not always very clear/in contention. Some double count it, others are stricter as to what is the parent. And for some, it is hard to assign just one parent, since many compositions/ideas for them have come from both the supposed parent (for eg., major pentatonic Mohanam can be both Ionian (Shankarabharanam) and Lydian (Kalyani)).

The graha/sruti bedham group theory is definitely one of my favorite parts to emerge from the classification structure... including for example (I am using western mode names here) the most common western modes, Ionian-Lydian-Phrygian-Aeolian-Dorian-Mixolydian forming a cyclic group.

And then there are a few which are total isolates. So what do category theory people call such structures, where some elements from subgroups, and some don't. Groupoids? Magma?

I have wanted to build this into an illustrative chart for a long time, but never managed to (more like lazy).

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@johncarlosbaez

I was trained on it as a singer till high school. As you may know about the Indian tradition, it was all by hearing and aural-oral passing. Only later, after I stopped learning/singing and well into college, did it feel like there is group structure etc., to all this

The wiki on it is a good start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graha_bhedam

I also found this blog from wayback.

https://nvijayanand.blogspot.com/2007/05/partitioning-melakarta-ragas-into.html

NicoleCRust, to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

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/

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@NicoleCRust

Just read the article!

I like this format of polling people who are doing related work to chime in with their short answers.

skarthik, to Bangladesh
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

Good day to remind everyone of the guy who will be feted, mourned, and deified nationally and internationally as a "Grand strategist", "Mr. Realpolitik", 'Statesman", "Great Man of History" etc., etc.,

Everyone knows about the Vietnam war, and what happened in "Indo-China", much less so around the same time what happened in South Asia from 1970-71. Remains one of the toughest books I have ever read.

#Bangladesh #Kissinger #Nixon #Pakistan #India #History #Geopolitics #TheBloodTelegram #Genocide

NicoleCRust, to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

Books written by anthropologists embedded with scientists?

I'm reading a book about an anthropologist who embedded with psychiatrists for several years to figure out how they are trained an what they think. Here's a great quote:

"Sometimes they talk about mental anguish as if it were cardiac disease: you treat it with medication, rest, and advice about the right way to eat and live. A person who has had a heart attack will never be the same—he will be always a person who has been very seriously ill—but he is not his heart attack. His heart attack is in the body, not the mind. When psychiatrists talk in this manner, psychosis and depression become likewise written on the body ... Sometimes, though, psychiatrists talk about distress as something much more complicated, something that involves the kind of person you are: your intentions, your loves and hates, your messy, complicated past ... From this vantage point, mental illness is in your mind and in your emotional reactions to other people. It is your “you.”

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/104443/of-two-minds-by-t-m-luhrmann/

In it, Luhrmann references another book in which an anthropologist embedded with nuclear weapons researchers:

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520213739/nuclear-rites

I'm so curious about this genre. Are there other books like it that you know and would recommend?

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@NicoleCRust

Tanya Luhrmann's work is a classic! Her work on psychosis and the hearing voices movement, as well as differences in the "nature" of the voices in different societies in US, Ghana, and India is a classic. Also, immense opportunity for us to reevaluate psychiatry and "mental disorders".

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/06/the-sound-of-madness/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26349837/

There used to be a web collective called neuroanthropology that existed in the late 2000s till early 2010s, don't know what happened to them.

skarthik, to india
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

The great man is giving a talk today/Sunday at 4pm here at MIT.

Come if you can and are in the Boston area.

#PSainath #India #Journalism #History #Politics #PeoplesArchiveOfRuralIndia #PARI

NicoleCRust, (edited ) to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

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!

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@NicoleCRust

How about the "simple" example of a van der Pol oscillator? Does that count towards failure of model reduction?

Either as a single second order ODE, or as two coupled first order ODEs, the system has no individual oscillating parts/intrinsic oscillators, yet what emerges is an oscillator, i.e., a limit cycle.

skarthik,
@skarthik@neuromatch.social avatar

@NicoleCRust

For highD, best way is to "visualize" such oscillators as traveling/moving on a n-torus in the phase space. (they can be quasi-periodic etc., which is its own thing including as a transition to chaos and intermittency).

With regards to the Rajan et al., paper, we can suppress chaos in high dimensional RNNs quite well even without invoking stimulus dependency (i.e., driven activity), a global "adaptation level" with competitive dynamics can avert chaos in autonomous systems.

Here's the introduction from a great paper from my PhD advisor from 1978, which I believe should be cited more:

"The following problem, in one form or another, has intrigued philosophers and scientists for hundreds of years: How do arbitrarily many individuals,
populations, or states, each obeying unique and personal laws, ever succeed in harmoniously interacting with each other to form some sort of stable society, or collective mode of behavior? Otherwise expressed, if each individual obeys complex laws, and is ignorant of other individuals except via locally received
signals, how is social chaos averted? How can local ignorance and global order,
or consensus, be reconciled? This paper considers a class of systems in which this dilemma is overcome."

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-7758-7_10

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