Ben Lyo

Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich

No work, no school, no shopping: What to know about the Jan. 30 general strike Activists are calling for a national general strike on Friday to protest DHS and ICE raids.

notice: general strike tomorrow! hit the trump administration where it hurts the most
www.advocate.com/politics/gen...

and to think that a chicken egg is just one really large cell

We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine co-operation. The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home and to act together. tldr: apes together strong

A joy to see Mark Carney affirm the principle of mutualism as the only real way for the weak to counter the strong.

As the great Ursula Le Guin once wrote: "We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand."

Ironic given Nature's role in the degradation of research culture

Our new paper (with @biotay.bsky.social) is out and on the cover story of @currentbiology.bsky.social !!!! Veronika, a Carinthian mountain cow flexibly uses a “multi-purpose tool” to scratch herself. A video and more information will follow in the comments.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

there's something perverse about a world where money and capital can so effortlessly cross borders but people's entire lives are constrained by the accident of where they were born

I am excited to share some new results investigating how subcortical signals are channeled via VM to engage specific inhibitory networks in L1 of mPFC. Check out our preprint linked below if you’re interested in reading more! 🥳

The front cover of the book: Crick, by Matthew Cobb

Loved this brilliant biography of Crick by @matthewcobb.bsky.social But what struck me from the start: it's also a portrait of a lost time in science: no grant applications or teaching, big travel budgets: the job only to think, talk & get science done. Future scientific biogs will be so different.

I have to repost this whenever it crosses my feed.

This head is spinning continuously, but we see it rotating back and forth...

...presumably because of our strong prior expectation that faces are convex.

This is a very nice example of the Hollow-Face illusion promoted by Richard Gregory:

www.richardgregory.org/experiments/

What neuroscience can tell AI about learning in continuously changing environments Nature Machine Intelligence - Durstewitz et al. explore what artificial intelligence can learn from the brain’s ability to adjust quickly to changing environments. By linking neuroscience...

Unlike current AI systems, animals can quickly and flexibly adapt to changing environments.

This is the topic of our new perspective in Nature MI (rdcu.be/eSeif), where we relate dynamical and plasticity mechanisms in the brain to in-context and continual learning in AI. #NeuroAI

Context Widows or, of GPUs, LPUs, and Goal Displacement

a fantastic essay that argues that the current discourse on whether LLMs can "do science" is missing the bigger picture. instead, he argues they are merely tools that intensify (and expose) the pre-existing structural failures within academia.
artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/context-wi...

This is what the government did with 120K+ Japanese Americans in 1942.

I know. I was there in those camps.

🔊 Super excited to announce the first ever Frontiers of Probabilistic Inference: Learning meets Sampling workshop at #ICLR2025 @iclr-conf.bsky.social!

🔗 website: sites.google.com/view/fpiwork...

🔥 Call for papers: sites.google.com/view/fpiwork...

more details in thread below👇 🧵

Dear academics

We could dramatically reduce our administrative workload if we all just agreed not to ask for reference letters until we made our list of finalists.

This is massive collective action problem has already been solved by…

*checks notes*

…every other industry on earth.

“To write well is to think clearly” - which is to say that by delegating more and more of your writing effort to AI, you are inviting the slow erosion of your own ability to think clearly.

Multiscale organization of neuronal activity unifies scale-dependent theories of brain function Analysis of cellular recordings from five phylogenetically diverse species uncovers a conserved, multiscale organization of neuronal activity that resolves disparate theories of brain function. This hierarchical structure allows the brain to operate across multiple timescales, enhances information flow, flexibly reconfigures activity during behavior, and balances functional resiliency with efficiency across scales.

I've been arguing that we will be able to train foundation models on neural data from different species, because I suspect that there are sufficiently preserved motifs in neural computation across the phylgenetic tree.

This paper appears to support that idea!

www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

🧠📈 🧪

How do interneurons reshape neural responses? I'm excited to present work with @eerosim.bsky.social at #NeurIPS2024 that proposes a nonlinear recurrent circuit model motivated by efficient coding theory.

Poster: 4:30p on Fri, Dec 13
Paper: openreview.net/forum?id=ojL...

Excited to present work with @jfeather.bsky.social @eerosim.bsky.social and @sueyeonchung.bsky.social today at Neurips!

May do a proper thread later on, but come by or shoot me a message if you are in Vancouver and want to chat :)

Brief details in post below

South Korea declares emergency martial law – live President Yoon Suk Yeol accuses opposition party of controlling parliament and sympathising with North Korea as he declares martial law on TV A spokesperson for the finance ministry says south Korea’s most senior economy officials will hold a meeting now…

South Korea declares emergency martial law – live

[Reproducing my most viral post] When discussing Universal Basic Income, inevitably the retort comes: "So you just want people to not have to work, is that it?" Accompanied by a smug smirk, expecting me to backpedal and hem and haw, say "Of course not, that's silly." Except...yes. Yes, I do. 1/11

Good morning Skywalkers,

Today we look at celebs who also published research. Naturally a large chunk of the attention these items receive is related to the fame of their authors.

Hence we will be accusing every single one of these stars of gaming their Altmetric Attention Score.

Here we go
1/11

So many people confuse LLMs (or genAI, in general) for models of human cognition, language, learning, etc., so I thought it may be useful to share once more my brief comment, titled "Psychological models and their distractors". (open access link: rdcu.be/cGQpY) 🧵 1/n

#neuroskyence #neuroai

NYU has a lot of CS faculty and postdoc positions this year. Here's all that I know of:

Faculty:
Courant CS: apply.interfolio.com/157060
@nyutandon.bsky.social CSE: apply.interfolio.com/156275
AI: apply.interfolio.com/157569
Quantum: apply.interfolio.com/158835

(Postdocs in next post) 1/3

🙋🏻‍♂️!

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