and after the citation, some ice cream would be nice
It’s a collection of short stories. 18 of them, to be exact. Some of them (3 of them, to be exact) have been previously posted here (specifically, this one, this one, and this one). The other 15 have appeared nowhere. The stories are about all kinds of things (meteorologists on a murderous planet; grocery store … Continue reading hey, I wrote a book!
A piece of short fiction very loosely inspired by the development of GPT-3. 100% human-authored. Tropic of Zamza was one of the better novels Vela Hirasawa had proxywritten this quarter. It was the fourth book in her Zamza series, and also the sixth in her Explorations of Tarnasia docuvolumes. Stylistically, it mostly resembled the previous … Continue reading Tropic of Zamza
A few months ago, I posted an online preprint titled The Generalizability Crisis . Here’s the abstract: Most theories and hypotheses in psychology are verbal in nature, yet their evaluation overwhelmingly relies on inferential statistical procedures. The validity of the move from qualitative to quantitative analysis depends on the verbal and statistical expressions of a hypothesis being closely…
Russ Poldrack writes that he will be flying less : I travel a lot – I have almost 1.3 million lifetime miles on United Airlines, and in the last few years have regularly flown over 100,000 miles per year. This travel has definitely helped advance my scientific career, and has been in many ways deeply fulfilling and enlightening. However, the toll has been weighing on me and Miles’ article really…
A political candidate running for regional public office asked a famous political psychologist what kind of television ads she should air in three heavily contested districts: positive ones emphasizing her own record, or negative ones attacking her opponent’s record. “You’re in luck,“ said the psychologist. “I have a new theory of persuasion that addresses exactly … Continue reading The parable…
Now that I’ve got your attention: what I hate—and maybe dislike is a better term than hate—isn’t the open science community, or open science initiatives, or open science practices, or open scientists… it’s the term. I fundamentally dislike the term open science. For the last few years, I’ve deliberately tried to avoid using it. I … Continue reading I hate open science
There’s a narrative I find kind of troubling, but that unfortunately seems to be growing more common in science. The core idea is that the mere existence of perverse incentives is a valid and sufficient reason to knowingly behave in an antisocial way, just as long as one first acknowledges the existence of those perverse … Continue reading No, it’s not The Incentives—it’s you
The question posed in the title is intended seriously. A lot of people have been studying the brain for a long time now. Most of these people, if asked a question like “so when are you going to be able to read minds?”, will immediately scoff and say something to the effect of we barely … Continue reading If we already understood the brain, would we even know it?
It’s become something of a truism in recent years that scientists in many fields find themselves drowning in data. This is certainly the case in neuroimaging, where even small functional MRI datasets typically consist of several billion observations (e.g., 100,000 points in the brain, each measured at 1,000 distinct timepoints, in each of 20 subjects). … Continue reading Neurohackademy 2018: A…
There are approximately 25 communities named Athens in North America. I say “approximately”, because it depends on how you count. Many of the American Athenses are unincorporated communities, and rely for their continued existence not on legal writ, but on social agreement or collective memory. Some no longer exist at all, having succumbed to the … Continue reading The great European capitals of…