In the New Yorker’s Newsdesk blog last week, Gary Marcus expresses his skepticism of “deep learning,” an approach to artificial intelligence pioneered by Geoffrey Hinton that received some unusually high-profile coverage in the Times. I honestly don’t know enough about deep learning models to evaluate … Read More →
Category Archives: in the news
I’m all for replications and reporting of null results, but what about the bees?
I may have seemed a bit hard on meta-analysis last week, but I should say that there’s really no way to mount a good scientific argument without some form of it. You have to consider results across multiple studies, and come up with some sort … Read More →
If America’s Boyfriend were a Cognitive Neuroscientist…
Last week, America’s Boyfriend Nate Silver made meta-analysis cool beyond belief. The image of a lone geek, sitting at the end of a vast pipeline of data, and turning it into something everyone wants to hear about, is a certain breed of scientist’s deepest fantasy. … Read More →
Diversity of Tactics in the Neurobiology of Language
If you are looking for something to eat in San Sebastiàn early in the evening — as you might be if you were, like me, a jet-lagged scientist forced to walk in the dark to the inaugural lecture of the Neurobiology of Language Conference that … Read More →
The giant soda ban as epistemological crisis
This sounds like the setup to a joke, but I really was just minding my own business on a bench in Washington Square Park when I was approached by a perky young woman with an iPad and some pointed questions about New York’s proposed ban … Read More →
Failure is not an option, it’s an inevitability.
I was on a rooftop at an OHBM party, chatting with Niko Kriegeskorte about the ineluctable cruelty and arbitrariness of nature when my partner texted from back in NYC to say she had just seen Werner Herzog on the subway. As an enthusiast of Hebbian … Read More →
Targeting the basal ganglia
Is it nit-picking to complain that this Times Magazine article — about the use of “big data” to predict and control consumer behavior — contains a brief introduction to Ann Graybiel’s work on the role of the basal ganglia in habit formation? I worry that this falls … Read More →
Lehrer was a Science Journalist
I always thought Proust was a Neuroscientist was a terrible title. It promises to dazzle, surprise, and delight me in a way that I will find singularly exhausting. “Did you realize,” it says to me, “that in addition to shaping the course of 20th Century … Read More →
MOOCs as capital-biased technological change
X7Q73MX48QHW Last week my Twitter feed briefly turned into a kind of massively open online course about MOOCs, in response to this thoughtful critique by Aaron Bady of an earlier post by Clay Shirky advancing an optimistic view of the role that free, open courses can … Read More →