Dan Levenstein

Brand blunder - Wikipedia

Oops I did the thing 😬🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_b...

This seems to fly in the face of “thou shall not assume causation from correlation” and “thou shall not assume function from form”

From what I can tell, the argument is that an adaptive system (evo/bio/neuro) will learn to use any knob available, so if we see a knob we should assume it’s used?

But the good news is that I finally finished the final revisions on the last hangover paper from my PhD and it only took 4 years so I guess you can say Today Was The Day I Finally Became Doctor?

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Some really good tips here. Wish I had learned number 3 earlier, or ever for that matter 🥲

www.reddit.com/r/GradSchool...

Really enjoyed this conversation! Makes me think we should find a way to finish our GAC paper.... @repromancer.bsky.social @dlbarack.bsky.social ;)

The Electric Motor and the Drill - we use AI in the wrong way Power tools are better than general purpose tools for most applications, my science planning app planyourscience.com is a result of this philosophy

In which @kordinglab.bsky.social argues LLMs are more like an electric motor than a drill, and starts to build a drill for scientific research.

open.substack.com/pub/kording/...

ML papers need to come with a pronunciation guide…. for reproducibility.

Yes very cool but how do we pronounce it?

“Muppy” or “Moopy”?

Sad to miss it. Pls report back the good stuff 😜

0/10 Thanks for the interest in our preprint. Some takes say it negates or fully supports the “manifold hypothesis”, neither quite right. Our results show that if you only focus on the manifold capturing most of task-related variance, you could miss important dynamics that actually drive behavior.

I’m with you - the ability to train neural models (with interpretable mapping to cells, circuits, and regions) to perform complex tasks in rich environments is new* and exciting and we’re just scratching the surface.

*someone can always point out 1-2 pioneers before their time 😜

For a while it felt like bsky was recapturing the prof involvement of science twitter but not the students (the former PhDs/postdocs of science twitter are the new-profs of bsky 😅).

Lately it feels like a lot more students getting on the bus 🧪🦋🚌 🙌🙌🙌

#neuroskyence

Fela Kuti: Enter the Shrine

TFW there’s a whole new podcast about Fela Kuti for the ride home 🤩🙌

open.spotify.com/episode/203S...

Sometimes I think the best we can hope for is productively wrong 😉

Where do you think this is *not* the case? (i.e. what parts of theoretical neuro today are truly new?)

Where do you think this will not be the case in 20 years? (i.e if research progresses in a direction you think it should, what will be the new stuff we’re not talking about today?)

I for one really enjoyed your recent and groundbreaking paper on Cross-Task Sharing of Mid-Level Features Predicts Perceptual Learning Transfer and would love to do a PhD with you…

A cholinergic mechanism orchestrating task-dependent computation across the cortex In an ever-changing environment, animals often need to switch between performing different tasks involving distinct sets of cognitive processes. Many such tasks involve neural activity distributed acr...

The basal forebrain plays the cortex like a piano.

around 12 years ago I had the good fortune to meet Massimo Scanziani and told him about my ongoing postdoc project that I was preparing a manuscript on, his first question was "what is the central message of your paper?"

That one prompt changed the way I write papers forever

Oh man. Science Neural Circuits would be my new favorite journal.

There’s an interesting parallel here to neural network interpretability…

Understanding the recipe is not the same as knowing how the cake tastes at inference.

I am really proud that eLife have published this paper. It is a very nice paper, but you need to also read the reviews to understand why! 1/n

Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way.

We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere:

This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA

It’s quite the opposite!

(thread)

congrats Ann! you're killing it :D

Ahhh this is great. I remember @repromancer.bsky.social taking about this when he was working on his EG paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Did not realize it came from Amari

Ahh good to know re: reproducibility.

Jascha actually came and presented the delay learning stuff here a few weeks ago, super cool! Made me think it’s time to get into training some spiking networks 😉

There are a small number of papers that I still think about regularly 10 years after reading them and this is one of them.

Off-manifold coding in visual cortex revealed by sleep Low-dimensional neural manifolds are controversial in part because it is unclear how to reconcile them with high-dimensional representations observed in areas such as primary visual cortex (V1). We ad...

I’ve also always wondered how all these D’s relate - coding, communication, fractal, movement-related 😵‍💫

An interesting perspective on this from @lukesjulson.bsky.social and @eliezyer.bsky.social:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1) This is a great idea.

2) I would be happy to mentor a project like this. If you want to do a project eg at the intersection of Philosophy of Science and NeuroAI, please feel free to reach out to discuss, or just put my name as a suggested mentor!

Could you recommend an “Amari to the rescue” paper to start with? Have been meaning to dig into his work.

During my PhD, I remember someone saying something to the effect of “really easy to wake an animal up with neural stimulation, really hard to put them to sleep”.

That was until Yang Dan’s lab took up the challenge 😂