Marco Giancotti

The "publish or perish" culture must perish. Scientists need time to think.

We just published our Slow Science Manifesto, where we argue that huge changes are needed in the way we fund, publish, and evaluate science.

Read more and sign here: www.slow-science.com

Hi Jay, you have a lovely podcast! And I'm always happy to chat about these topics.

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In everything novel—reading a book, meeting people, learning to paint—you start overwhelmed. Then compression kicks in. But different people, with different goals, form different framings. That's how you end up talking past each other, each living in a different tiny world.

Perhaps it's easier for our brains to store pre-built archetypes that do a few things reliably, than to track "particles" that can interact in an infinity of ways. I could only converge on those categories because I had a clear goal guiding what was meaningful.

Then "two hourglasses" became just "hourglasses," because they always came in pairs. My framing acquired more named objects, while its rules became simpler. The tiny world I built in my mind grew in variety, but its physics shrank.

At first I described the shapes verbosely: "two pairs of triangles, each pair pointing at each other." But those descriptions are easy to fumble. So they evolved into "two hourglasses" and "two bowties." Shorter, easier, more evocative.

I have aphantasia and I've been doing fMRI experiments for neuroscientists. This week's task: see an image of triangles, wait 8 seconds, then "picture" it. I can't picture anything, so I convert images into words and repeat them to myself.

To think better, you need to understand how thought works. But it's one thing to theorize about its building blocks, and another to see them in action, real-time.

Thinking is an action.

The image at left is of Galileo's birthplace in Pisa -- on plain looking 4-story pink apartment building. On the right his is ornate baroque tomb in Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. Pix by me, 2009.

Happy 462nd Birthday to Galileo Galilei, born #OTD in 1564 -- a crucial figure in the early stages of what we now call the scientific revolution. Here are photos that I took in 2009 of his (rather humble) birthplace in Pisa, and his ornate tomb in Florence: #science #history #histsci

Imitate the imitating. That might be the deepest loop of all.

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We are extraordinarily good imitators. Indeed, we are overimitators. Chimps will skip unnecessary steps to solve a problem. Humans copy even the wasteful ones. We'll even switch to less effective strategies under peer influence.

Studies estimated the average IQ of Americans in the early 1800s at around 70—not because they were dumber, but because their culture was poorer in sophisticated concepts. Their framings had fewer moving parts, which translated into poorer mental models.

Italian culture has "simpatia"—being likeable, charming, fun—a concept that doesn't exist in Japan. English has "sarcasm," but that black box is largely absent from Japanese culture. Sarcasm is simply not a thing here.

Non-residents think the core tenet of Japanese culture is "obey the rules." It's not. It's "never stand out or make a fuss." It's perfectly fine, in Japan, to break the rules as long as that's what everyone does and expects you to do.

What gets synchronized isn't just behavior. It's the thinking patterns from which behavior arises. Culture is the mass-synchronization of framings: not "how things might unfold" but "what things exist in the first place."

Sometimes there is a good initial reason behind a cultural standard, but that reason becomes irrelevant. QWERTY minimized typewriter jamming but is now sub-optimal for digital keyboards. Once a feedback loop starts, how it started ceases to mean anything.

And culture is, by and large, random, arbitrary, and self-reinforcing. Like walking lanes forming in a corridor: the first two people dodge left or right, and everyone behind follows. Which side doesn't matter. It just sticks.

The sure-fire way to spot a tourist in Tokyo is not by their appearance or the language they speak, but by how loudly they talk in public. Those miraculous scenes have nothing to do with the Japanese DNA: it's their culture.

For an Italian like me, this whole process is nothing short of a miracle. I grew up in a city where metro train boarding during rush hour feels like a prelude to the apocalypse.

Ikebukuro is a terminal, so trains always start empty. The "senpatsu" queue gets on fast but stands. The "kouhatsu" queue skips a train but gets a seat. Speed vs comfort, chosen in real time by thousands of strangers without a word.

In Ikebukuro Station, Tokyo, commuters form double queues at each train door. One line boards the next train. The other waits for the train after that. No one directs them. There are no detailed instructions. People just seem to know.

On Darwin's birthday, the charming doodles his kids left all over his manuscript of "On the Origin of Species" www.themarginalian.org/2016/04/06/c...

I would reply with a 2000-word (AI-written) response in the same style saying "no" without ever really saying it explicitly.

Good taste is ageless!

Does playful teasing help great apes learn about social relationships? Abstract. Understanding social relationships is critical to succeeding in primate societies. In species with complex social networks (including humans), co

Great apes may use playful teasing to learn about their social relationships. In a new paper, Erica Cartmill & I propose a bond-testing hypothesis for ape teasing. Out today in Phil Trans Biology: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Out if context quotes

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I now consider the brain to be an organ you can observe and study, a black box you can tinker with (carefully) to better understand it. This exploration can show you what works best for you, how to be kind to yourself, and how to "use" your brain more expertly.