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

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

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."

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...

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! 🥳

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/

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

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.

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

[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

The New York Review of Books is delighted to alight upon Bluesky. Please follow us for essays and reviews about literature, politics, art, history, philosophy, science, society, and culture.

This list likely reflects mainly my interests and circle, and I’m sure I’ve missed many people, but I gave it a try: (I’ll be slowly editing it until it reaches 150/150) go.bsky.app/7VFUkdn (also, I tried but couldn't remove my profile...)

Nation’s Women Fantasize About Some Future Election That Isn’t Absolutely Pivotal To Their Well-Being theonion.com/nation-s-wom...

5/ So, how can we then actually distinguish computational models? I think the answer is both obvious and a hard pill to swallow for many computational folks: we need to build more models that have specific physiological correlates that we can use as empirical anchors.

Musical training does not enhance neural sound encoding at early stages of the auditory system: A large-scale multisite investigation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.02.610856v1

Distinct categorical representations for faces, limbs, corridors, characters, and cars emerge at different times in human brain development: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... Interesting implications for learning here! #neuroscience 🧪

Surely he can’t have just said that because … oop, I stand corrected

What are we even doing here? "A 63-year-old climate activist and professional cellist faces up to seven years in prison after being arrested on Thursday while performing a Bach solo outside the headquarters of one of the world’s largest fossil fuel financier Citibank in downtown New York"