Karthik Srinivasan

I am a neuroscientist at MIT.

Neurophysiology and computational modeling on visual attention, eye movements, and executive functions.

Interests span math, science, history, politics, economics, and philosophy.

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Last Notes

2024-04-20 15:28:43

With elections in India in full swing, this is fantastic infographic on India and its elections from the very beginning (1952 to present) in The Hindu. This is like a crash course of Indian history since independence!
Whatever your political ideological stands, India remains the most important, interesting, and unlikely experiment in politics.
https://www.thehindu.com/infographics/2024-04-17/previous-lok-sabha-elections-since-independence/index.html#_
#India #History #Elections #Politics

2024-04-13 02:02:46

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@npub19d9…f02p
Oh most certainly, he's for me in the same league as Graeber!

2024-03-27 15:33:53

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@npub1qzd…5jf8
This is a good overview of some of the issues.
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5zf4s

2024-03-27 13:40:30

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@npub1qzd…5jf8
Neurons being one difference. There are several other major differences, at the level of learning, network dynamics, functions, and behaviors too.

2024-03-21 22:42:47

Wow!
(via @npub15sw…x855 )
#Psychiatry #Psychotherapy #MentalHealth #History #US #SovietUnion #Bystander #SocialOrder
https://neuromatch.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/135/854/188/694/720/original/457c8449a31cc2e9.jpeg

2024-03-12 17:22:32

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@npub19d9…f02p
Once you choose a (any) criterion for evaluation, it is impossible to not be biased. This is not just an issue in academia, it's in society writ large. I would suggest we should go with what we think are the best "metrics" available at the moment, but when that starts becoming problematic, break the vicious cycle by making the selection/evaluation random. This type of idea has been around for a long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

2024-03-12 13:21:59

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@npub15sw…x855
So, in Poincare's terms (continuous everywhere, differentiable nowhere), consciousness is a "monster" and an "outrage against human sense", or according to Hermite, a "lamentable scourge"? If so, full agree.

2024-03-03 07:55:34

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@npub10l8…ath2
Only partially so. No?
I remember the Schwartz going through this problem in 780 with us. I can't find the reference in my emails, but I distinctly remember it as a paper from John Daugman... who showed with different low/bandpass filtered versions of the same image, you get these overlapping zero crossings (as the image representation), yet, you can't construct back which one is correct (when all are correct, I am using the word "correct" loosely). So, that Logan "unique" zeros condition might be an over restrictive one.
Irrespective, I think it is an important inverse problem to be solved.
I think we can reframe the Daugman critique of zero crossings in general as a primary motivation for the plemelj-schwartz-hay formulation: avoid the above issue either in the original image domain (or its equivalent hilbert transform domain), convert/extend the signal to analytical continuity, so the bands (of filters or filtered images) can be composed by simple linear superpositions of "paths" that are ultimately along a contour.

2024-02-25 06:26:12

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@npub1ary…md4c @npub1skv…aky3
The celebrity-ization/PR-ization of science and scientists has to cease. It's just pernicious.
When geniuses arrive or when important work is done, the rest of the tribe will know. That's what our training is. We don't need all this glitter.
Luiz, we have now reached a point when no one is going to read a BBS style article... most peoples reading of papers' is the tweet threads that are done on them. Imagine your filling-in paper as a 10 point thread.

2024-02-08 00:39:44

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@npub15sw…x855
I am now imagining the model of {least action, least time, virtual work, Einstein-Hilbert} 🤣🤣
But we are in the ML era: formal, model, framework, principle, theory are all just squashed into "foundational models".

2024-01-24 03:35:28

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@npub1skv…aky3
🤣 By pretending like you are in East Asia and the R and L spectrum is collapsed.
Though English is my first language, it still amuses me that we have spelling competitions. In most languages, including my mother tongue, no one asks for how to spell something: "you spell it exactly how you said it".

2024-01-23 19:18:45

Folks, please help me buy a mega mansion by the end of this week, I am promised that I could get a lunch salad for free in return. Thanks!
#Economics #Technology #Apps #GigEconomy #Uber
https://neuromatch.social/system/media_attachments/files/111/806/636/567/137/652/original/ec723ee6ec5b13ee.jpeg

2024-01-21 16:52:28

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub1ary…md4c @npub1zll…lhfq
Yeah... once non-computable reals are involved (i.e., uncountably infinite number of them than the countably infinite computable reals or rationals), and let's say you have dynamics (i.e., Newtonian mechanics), then whatever is generated as a deterministic sequence can be indistinguishable from "random". Chaotic systems if we do not know the initial conditions is exactly that.
A practical way to circumvent/ameliorate this deterministic vs non-deterministic as a scientist is you just compute what you can and work with that.

2024-01-17 03:33:10

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@npub1knz…c73p
Pann's in the Saivite tradition in Tamilnadu is a good marker for the evolution of atleast some of these ragas/scales, many from the time of Manikkavasagar. If you go to the temples in Tamilnadu, even now they still sing those hymns in most of the ragas listed in the wiki.
However, I don't know whether it was developed any time earlier, like what's the dates for the different Sangam periods is just rife with politics.
But the Panns/hymns in Saivite traditions, Tevarams have definitely been transmitted/spread since at least the 8th century. It coincides with the three main kingdoms back then, and especially the Cholas and their massive temple building schemes. There are earlier Pallava kingdom edicts on music too, but I don''t know what's in them.

2024-01-17 01:18:07

@npub1kq0…8hsx
I saw your boosted post about this biorxiv paper
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.15.575721v1?med=mas
So they are saying/concluding that there is no such thing as a "low-dimensional neural manifold" when it comes to cognitive processes. Whither all the dim reduction techniques, jPCA/rotational dynamics etc., etc.,?

2024-01-15 08:27:46

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@npub1knz…c73p
That's fantastic, thanks a lot! I will definitely think about the restricted group action and tonic change as morphism.
On the Z/7 thing, while the Melakarta raga might not exist: For example with the Ionian, with the invalid one with 2 fourth intervals and no fifth interval for the Ionian cycle group, it is not a melakarta raga, but what is called as "dwi(two) madhyma (ma/fourth) panchama (pa/fifth) vajra(extinguished)" raga called "Hanumasri" (S R1 G2 M1 M2 D1 N2 S')
These dwi-madhyama-panchama-vajra basically collapses the 72 into 36 (i.e., two fourths, and no fifth). So we may still be able to classify it as acting on Z/7 (for the Ionian cycle atleast) if the objects of the groupoid are not just restricted to the Melakarta. With this we can have 108 scales, instead of 72 that complete the scheme.
If you need any help with deciphering indian musical scales /terminologies etc., that might help with your classification/mathematization, please let me know, happy to help.

2024-01-15 03:37:14

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@npub1knz…c73p
I was trained on it as a singer till high school. As you may know about the Indian tradition, it was all by hearing and aural-oral passing. Only later, after I stopped learning/singing and well into college, did it feel like there is group structure etc., to all this
The wiki on it is a good start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graha_bhedam
I also found this blog from wayback.
https://nvijayanand.blogspot.com/2007/05/partitioning-melakarta-ragas-into.html

2024-01-15 02:25:10

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@npub1knz…c73p
Thanks for the article!
yeah... what's the genus (janya) for a raga is not always very clear/in contention. Some double count it, others are stricter as to what is the parent. And for some, it is hard to assign just one parent, since many compositions/ideas for them have come from both the supposed parent (for eg., major pentatonic Mohanam can be both Ionian (Shankarabharanam) and Lydian (Kalyani)).
The graha/sruti bedham group theory is definitely one of my favorite parts to emerge from the classification structure... including for example (I am using western mode names here) the most common western modes, Ionian-Lydian-Phrygian-Aeolian-Dorian-Mixolydian forming a cyclic group.
And then there are a few which are total isolates. So what do category theory people call such structures, where some elements from subgroups, and some don't. Groupoids? Magma?
I have wanted to build this into an illustrative chart for a long time, but never managed to (more like lazy).

2024-01-15 01:38:40

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@npub1knz…c73p
In carnatic music (the South Indian counterpart), we have the Melakarta classification... which is more complete than the thaat system vis-a-vis the 12 tone scale in western music, and it has 36*2 =72, 7 note scales/ragas. All of them have western modal counterparts and more. We also have compositions and expositions in all of the 72 and their derived/children ragas.
There are also group/permutation structures (graha/sruti bedham, i.e., base pitch shifts) to transform one raga to another. Leaving certain notes out (like having only pentatonic for example), gives rise to janya (child/originating from one of the 72) ragas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melakarta

2024-01-14 12:30:42

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@npub1ql2…q4qh
wow... your post is serendipitous, I had been listening to rimjhim gire sawan all day yesterday (finally realizing the Lata ji version with the visuals of monsoon in Mumbai is my preferred version over Kishore da's).
On Chennai, there are a few I can think of, Madras Nalla Madras being the oldest from Anubhavi Raja Anubhavi, Potta padiyudhu from Satya, Madras Suthipaaka poren from May Madham. But all of them are a little too punchy, and don't have the nostalgic romance that rimjhim or baton baton mein have.

2024-01-10 22:26:59

I was an invited speaker at the Neurips conference in New Orleans in Dec 2023 for the NeuroAI social.
I was more than surprised to be invited to what is now primarily an AI/ML conference (despite "Neural" being the first word, and the conference's origins in comp neuroscience). To say that the successful AI systems currently deployed and neuroscience/study of biological intelligence have diverged would be an understatement, it was a somewhat odd choice for the organizers to invite a neurophysiologist like me.
So, I took the invite as an opportunity to talk about attention in biological vision and how whatever they now call as attention in AI/ML/CNN/transformers
is almost orthogonal to what many others and I study within visual neuroscience or psychology or cognitive science.
While the talk was a partial critique of current AI models, it was more a call for them to take seriously the one instance of intelligence (i.e., the biological world) seriously and how it still has much to offer towards designing better AI systems.
If attention is not one of the cognitive ingredients that makes up the intelligence recipe towards autonomous systems, I don't know what is.
The talk slides can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/927f50bfvqpwtserizgl5/NeuroAI_Neurips_KS2023.pdf?rlkey=r3pgvsyoudwczapjijx80pj7l
#Neurips2023 #NeuroAI #Attention #Vision #BiologicalVision #SpaceVariance #NonlinearCompression #EyeMovements #Neurodynamics #AutonomousSystems #AI #ML

2023-11-30 06:23:31

Good day to remind everyone of the guy who will be feted, mourned, and deified nationally and internationally as a "Grand strategist", "Mr. Realpolitik", 'Statesman", "Great Man of History" etc., etc.,
Everyone knows about the Vietnam war, and what happened in "Indo-China", much less so around the same time what happened in South Asia from 1970-71. Remains one of the toughest books I have ever read.
#Bangladesh #Kissinger #Nixon #Pakistan #India #History #Geopolitics #TheBloodTelegram #Genocide
https://neuromatch.social/system/media_attachments/files/111/497/794/517/928/528/original/8d80905c8a8d1f1a.jpeg

2023-11-29 04:07:10

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@npub1kq0…8hsx
hahaha... nice one.
"Matrix multiplication" in the brain itself seems quite low, it is even worse. Softmax(QK)V: multiply, simplex it, then multiply, but do that all simultaneously.

2023-11-17 17:34:06

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@npub1skv…aky3
Tanya Luhrmann's work is a classic! Her work on psychosis and the hearing voices movement, as well as differences in the "nature" of the voices in different societies in US, Ghana, and India is a classic. Also, immense opportunity for us to reevaluate psychiatry and "mental disorders".
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/06/the-sound-of-madness/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26349837/
There used to be a web collective called neuroanthropology that existed in the late 2000s till early 2010s, don't know what happened to them.

2023-11-14 22:28:49

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@npub15sw…x855
Regime is both a representation and changes the representation/memory (how can we differentiate between content vs context addressability?)

2023-11-14 19:26:40

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@npub15sw…x855
That's the analogue for representation and memory too. 😜

2023-11-10 21:27:18

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@npub15sw…x855
I am not sure this quote is entirely apocryphal. The man was famous for his acerbic tongue, quick wit, and an economy for words. He is also simultaneously the most prolific/voluminous single author in history.
All that subsequent sanitizing (of both him and his words) most definitely plays into the idea that he might have not made such a quip.

2023-11-06 22:18:02

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@npub15sw…x855
This chronology is very handy.
It reflects the sad state of the field that despite the discovery of shunting inhibition in crab nm junctions in 1953, very few network level models include it.

2023-10-27 00:24:26

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@npub1skv…aky3
For highD, best way is to "visualize" such oscillators as traveling/moving on a n-torus in the phase space. (they can be quasi-periodic etc., which is its own thing including as a transition to chaos and intermittency).
With regards to the Rajan et al., paper, we can suppress chaos in high dimensional RNNs quite well even without invoking stimulus dependency (i.e., driven activity), a global "adaptation level" with competitive dynamics can avert chaos in autonomous systems.
Here's the introduction from a great paper from my PhD advisor from 1978, which I believe should be cited more:
"The following problem, in one form or another, has intrigued philosophers and scientists for hundreds of years: How do arbitrarily many individuals,
populations, or states, each obeying unique and personal laws, ever succeed in harmoniously interacting with each other to form some sort of stable society, or collective mode of behavior? Otherwise expressed, if each individual obeys complex laws, and is ignorant of other individuals except via locally received
signals, how is social chaos averted? How can local ignorance and global order,
or consensus, be reconciled? This paper considers a class of systems in which this dilemma is overcome."
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-7758-7_10

2023-10-26 23:53:58

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@npub1skv…aky3
How about the "simple" example of a van der Pol oscillator? Does that count towards failure of model reduction?
Either as a single second order ODE, or as two coupled first order ODEs, the system has no individual oscillating parts/intrinsic oscillators, yet what emerges is an oscillator, i.e., a limit cycle.

2023-10-25 00:12:30

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@npub1mev…sf0a @npub15sw…x855
The first part as you mention about info in hand, like voltage is from a known "distribution", so one would construe it as PRNG
The second can be from chaos (deterministic), yet impossible to know the generator unless the initial conditions are known, so TRNG.

2023-10-25 00:01:08

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@npub15sw…x855
but those true RNGs aren't truly random either. They are still from a distribution, maybe not known to someone who can hack it if they don't know the source of the RNG.
True randomness is philosophically incoherent/undefinable. No?

2023-10-24 21:16:30

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@npub1skv…aky3
Yeah, it was/is a great paper!
'However, cunningly chosen parsimonious models... for such models there is no need to ask the question "Is the model true?"' 👏
However, unfortunately, if we write like this now (a style I wholly endorse and enjoy), it will be a desk reject.

2023-10-16 23:20:24

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@npub1scr…teus
Not my field, but common knowledge, yet very very shocking for either an insider or an outsider: China has poured more concrete in the last 2-3 years than the US did in the 20th century!
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-us-cement

2023-10-16 23:15:53

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@npub15sw…x855
Of course, it is Rabinovich, nothing less to expect!
Maybe I am in the minority, but do people who apply dynamical systems think: we have found an attractor and that's the end of the story.
It's like saying, this enormous state machine finds its ONE state and then stays there. People don't conceptualize how you move from state to state?

2023-10-13 03:11:50

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@npub14d7…dm4s @npub1skv…aky3 @npub1zll…lhfq
TLS is usual hard even with archive (whatever paywall sophistry they have).

2023-10-13 02:29:27

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@npub15sw…x855 @npub1skv…aky3
hahahaha... how long have we talked about this? 🤣 (I am just laughing at my own laziness).

2023-10-13 01:32:03

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub15sw…x855
Yeah... 1 is a red herring. What does low dim have to do with attractors in state space (especially given the review is concerned with mostly fixed points).
2 is absolutely crucial.
3 as Yohan said need not hold given anything can bifurcate the system (unless the system is linear, in which case, boring).
4 makes no sense. Why should the isometry of distance be equal to/proportional to the equal displacement dimension of the external variable? For example: We have six orders of magnitude change in the luminance of visual inputs. An integrator network performing lateral inhibition should exhibit isometry? That flies against the face of Weber-Fechne. And that is just the retina. Why should anything like this be adhered elsewhere in the brain. Nonlinear compression is inevitable.

2023-10-12 22:57:58

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@npub15sw…x855
I have no way of interpreting this. Got all excited with the title and abstract. 😞

2023-10-12 21:11:26

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@npub15sw…x855
hmmm.... I am having an extremely hard time parsing whether what they show is the underlying dynamics or is an artefact of their processing (neural time series data->pca-> 1d subdimension-> gradient-> nonlinear regression fit of params-> lin dyn sys-> energy landscape correlate with decision) to say there is fixed-point dynamics.

2023-10-11 21:39:19

A nice hatchet job from the New Yorker!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie
The story of morally and intellectually bankrupt superstar researchers who elevated what is/was/has always been a somewhat semi-decent, hardly scientific enterprise called behavioral economics (within social psychology) into a juggernaut of "just-so stories" that swayed nations, industries and academias to form absolutely horrendous worldviews and make decisions likewise.
The field: The poor need to be nudged (read, extra inconvenience) to make rational decisions with marginally any value to them. Meanwhile, dear corporations, here are some tax write-offs and subsidies; you can also engage in open thievery. That's our way to nudge you to do the right thing, i.e., fudging with the accounts. This is how we social engineer (All this, based on absolutely moronic and morally dubious "studies". I am reminded of the evo-psych psychopaths).
As if economics as it stands isn't dismal and unscientific enough, whether you legitimize with a couple Nobels or not, this is like "polishing a turd".
Of course not much is likely to change in academia across fields as well. It will continue to seek and hire more such people who will bring the money, fame, and storytelling at the expense of hard work and reality. Knowledge building and intellectual work... what's that?
#Dishonesty #Academia #BehavioralEconomics #Management #BusinessSchools #Economics #Nudge #pHacking #SocialPsychology

2023-10-11 00:38:06

When even the Wall Street Journal starts to write articles like this, people better...
Big Tech Struggles to Turn AI Hype Into Profits:
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ais-costly-buildup-could-make-early-products-a-hard-sell-bdd29b9f
"It [Github copilot] has also been a money loser because it is so expensive to run.
Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month."
"Using it [GPT-4] to summarize an email is like getting a Lamborghini to deliver a pizza."
#AI #BigTech #Hype #Enshittification

2023-10-05 19:42:07

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@npub1q6j…uec6
Thanks for sharing. Excellent obit!
Here's a short 3min clip of him talking about some of what the FT article covers when he was honored by the then President of India, Pranab Mukherjee. Almost every sentence he utters in this video is important:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBQVEfCsN4c

2023-10-04 01:17:51

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@npub14d7…dm4s
I am always reminded me of the quip from the great Jonas Salk (after he synthesized the polio vaccine): “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

2023-10-03 22:56:59

mRNA derived vaccines are indeed great (I am a beneficiary), and the researchers who did the foundational work on mRNA richly deserve the honor.
A lot of people have already weighed in on the mistreatment/shutting of one of the winners, Katalin Kariko and the brokenness of academic research, bias against women, incentive structures, awards, grants etc.,
However, there is myopia/distortion/rank hypocrisy on other fronts that deserves ridicule as well.
This sentence in the citation, to put it mildly, is preposterous:
" ... contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times."
In a world of roughly 8 billion people, roughly 13.5 billion doses of Covid19 vaccines have been administered so far. About 3 billion of those are mRNA vaccines (you can guess who got them). So, what do they mean when they say "human" health? Which humans are they talking about? Who do they think vaccinated the world?
This has to be either the greatest sleight of hand or complete ignorance/denial of how and what kind of Covid-19 vaccines were rolled out to save the world. It's as if the rest of the world doesn't exist or didn't as well develop vaccines quickly and save themselves.
What we witnessed the last three years was not "unprecedented ... development" using mRNA techniques to counter "one of the greatest threats to human health" as the citation points out, instead it was how the entire rich world failed so completely and spectacularly to see itself as part of a common humanity even after it had the means to do so.
#Vaccines #mRNA #NobelPrizeMedicine #Research #Covid19 #Inequality #Health

2023-09-28 17:04:38

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@npub14qw…5ndf
Wow!
To be added with his autobiography: https://www.sfn.org/-/media/SfN/Documents/TheHistoryofNeuroscience/Volume-6/c4.pdf

2023-09-27 18:29:22

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@npub1skv…aky3
A lion (Leo Tolstoy)?

2023-09-26 01:19:23

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@npub18p2…v9yu
What paper is this?
I have heard similar assumptions that it now means human neuroimaging. I guess, then I don't count as someone doing cognitive neuroscience.

2023-09-22 05:31:00

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@npub14d7…dm4s
And now they have been fast-tracked to have human trials, all the qualms one has about BCI research in academia and hospitals, it's like spitting on them.

2023-09-20 04:59:36

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub1gpe…aa0f @npub12ss…c7zf
Found it. Was a former toxic landfill (not gas plant, sorry my bad!) that was sold as a neighborhood... became cancer central and other major health issues for everyone living there!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/04/01/new-orleans-gordon-plaza-epa/

2023-09-20 03:43:26

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@npub1skv…aky3 @npub1gpe…aa0f @npub12ss…c7zf
I remember there was a similar study in the poorer neighborhoods of New Orleans and some industry (think it was a natural gas plant), and how it affected children's mental health, performance in school etc., Can't seem to find a link.

2023-09-20 00:51:13

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@npub14d7…dm4s
That's interesting! I assumed most scientists were anti-realists given the history of the science (atleast since enlightenment).
In the land of pragmatism, the Popperian infection is very serious huh?

2023-09-19 22:47:44

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@npub14d7…dm4s
Aren't we all anti-realists? :)

2023-09-18 17:51:39

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@npub1rha…zzz7
Yup, that was a nasty episode!
I highly recommend the book on Luzin and his acolytes on their math worldview, it's called "Naming Infinity". For me personally, it was a little low in details on the math, and a bit more on their religiosity and their removal by Stalin. Nonetheless very moving.

2023-09-14 23:21:27

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@npub1skv…aky3
Related to the Kekule story, mostly hypnogogia:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj5866
Hypnopompia is even less understood/studied.
#Sleep #REM #Dreams #Neuroscience #N1

2023-09-08 21:00:58

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@npub1mev…sf0a
Oh, you decided to come here at its worst. 🤣

2023-09-08 04:41:26

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@npub15sw…x855
Did this happen before or after the Hegel whirlwind? ;)

2023-09-08 00:56:26

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@npub1mev…sf0a
what's the thread? I only see the tweet you screenshotted.

2023-09-07 23:54:12

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@npub1nhj…3688
Yeah, I know that paper. For lack of a better (as in a more disparaging) phrase, I will term papers of that sort as "fashionable nonsense".

2023-09-07 23:52:42

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@npub1tlm…r2eh @npub14d7…dm4s
I completely agree with this!
It was just an exercise to check my own sanity as well as see if others think in similar ways, vis-a-vis ML/NN systems will discover physical laws and all that nonsense.

2023-09-05 23:57:13

A somewhat contrived question. I want to know if we can generalize or extend the idea of model complexity used in machine learning, statistical learning theory, and deep nets. Alternately, what are its limits? (Indirectly, I want to tease apart what either “model” or “complexity” means in this worldview. They do not seem to be “models” that one uses in science typically nor their measure of complexity seem to line up with any scientific model).
In ML, we typically use, “the number of free parameters” as proxy for model complexity, i.e., weights and biases etc., then penalize for over-parameterization with some information criteria (AIC, BIC etc., etc.,), or regularize (with dropout etc.,) to arrive at bias-variance tradeoff curves. Then there is the double descent (Belkin et al.,) for deep-nets that seems to buck the trend of standard ML (kernel) methods.
My question: if we are to turn this approach to scientific models, how can we evaluate their complexity in the same machine learning framework (yes, I know this sounds bizarre)?
For example, take any simple physics model, as explanatory as it is, it is also predictive. If I were to treat it as a purely predictive model, and try to plot the bias-variance curve, what would constitute its complexity (x-axis), and where/when does its error start going up (y-axis, so the model breaks)? If we can’t do this ML-ification of a simple physics model, why not?
Corollary: Take some nonlinear dynamical system that is the model of some physical phenomenon, how do you define its model complexity? (Are the three parameters of a Lorentz attractor the model complexity of the system in ML parlance?)
#MachineLearning #Science #Models #ModelComplexity #BiasVariance

2023-09-05 00:54:04

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@npub1twh…5j6z
This is sadly standard across most nations on how they cover people who come from the non-dominant group and not just misogyny. No?
It would be refreshing to read the following examples though:
a bio of George W. Bush in every article citing him as "a former drunk, addict, and a loser rich son whose President father ensured he would get elected to the high political offices of his country."
(or)
a bio of Cameron saying, "a wealthy and snobbish Etonian who formerly had to do certain things with a pig to ensure that he became worthy of joining the Tory leadership"
and so on...

2023-09-03 19:34:46

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@npub1ary…md4c
Hahaha...tell me about it. We both know and have experienced atleast one person like that 😉

2023-09-03 19:27:58

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@npub1ary…md4c @npub1del…shhr
wait... if I am understanding you correctly: you are getting old and you think increasingly that everything we think about some scientific phenomena (in our case the brain) could be wrong?
If so, isn't this unsettling a good thing? And an actual sign of maturity in saying we don't really have an overarching scientific theory/paradigm in our field (which we don't). Also, even the most successful scientific theories and ideas are historically contingent and time bound.
Isn't it more common for older people to be inflexible, stodgy, and thus delay and worse, shoot down new/other ideas? (paraphrasing the famous Planck quote on scientific development).

2023-09-02 04:21:27

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@npub1l3d…82al
same!

2023-09-02 01:17:03

Depressing and simultaneously a reflection of our zeitgeist:
If you don't have history/algo recommendation turned on youtube and search for "mechanisms of attention" or "attention mechanisms", you get pages and pages of videos on attention in transformers/deep-nets in AI. Just "attention" includes a lot of songs/music videos along with explanation on transformers. You squint a bit as you scroll, you might miss the very few videos on attention in psychology and/or neuroscience.
It's as if the most relevant and meaningful idea/usage for the vast majority of people is meant to be difficult to access and learn about.
#Attention

2023-09-02 00:22:13

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@npub1ary…md4c
You were pretty sharp on an off day too! :)

2023-08-31 00:27:27

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@npub15sw…x855
Is "all of the above" (i.e., cooperate, compete, and divide up labor) an option?

2023-08-30 20:46:32

The phenomenology of @npub1ary…md4c unentangled and integrated! 😉
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7AX7n6nkmTSm1Fsz0jLZQO?si=c-57xdXkSN2OM-46ZMujgw
Very good episode!
He articulates the lumpers vs splitters worldview very well.
#Neuroscience #Philosophy #Emergence #Cognition #Emotion #Attention

2023-08-19 23:53:35

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@npub1mev…sf0a
Also, the only cosmology and milk combination reference in India that I am aware of is the churning of Kshira Sagara (ocean of milk), which is paal kadal in tamil, that gave rise to our universe, life and immortality. That is, Indian version of the big bang.

2023-08-19 23:28:23

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@npub1mev…sf0a
I don't think there is one in Tamil.
Galaxy itself is vinmeen mandalam (agglomeration of skyfish)
We have a great name for the Milky Way from Sanskrit, which was what the "astronomers" of ancient India (with their different mother tongues) probably called it... it's AakashGanga (Space/Sky Ganga).

2023-08-19 23:23:36

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@npub1mev…sf0a
hahahaha!

2023-08-19 23:19:29

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@npub1mev…sf0a
tooth ache?!? ;)

2023-08-12 02:46:49

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@npub1dn4…cue6
Most certainly! The problem is, the Washington consensus was very clear from the outset, food security for us, insecurity for the rest. "Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people", a pithy statement attributed to Henry Kissinger is its foundation.
While, it is inevitable India has to embargo export of food grains, there are parts of the world (especially Africa) that have been forced to be almost entirely dependent on imports. It's a very sad state of affairs.

2023-08-12 00:16:50

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@npub1z4e…jhuf
Yes, I restricted my thread to India, but this is a worldwide trend.
As an example: Orange in Florida for example has plummeted so significantly, 200million crates to roughly 20 million (Hurricane Ian last year followed by heatwaves this year are cited as the main reason). The same heatwave is expected to reduce American rice production (America grows nearly 85% of its own rice in the southern states and California).

2023-08-11 10:02:30

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This is a great addendum in the Science magazine for replacing the Turing test for AI models with a "Weizenbaum test":
"Rather than a test of intelligence [like Turing test], a Weizenbaum test would assess the public value of AI technologies, evaluating them according to their real-world implications rather than their proponents’ claims."
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adk0176
Weizenbaum's questions to make such an assessment in the Bulletin of Atomic scientists seems to be apt not just for AI, but all of technology.
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum

2023-07-27 00:10:23

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That’s the state of India, its food, agriculture and roughly 80% of its people (~1.1 billion).
Now back to the rice export ban from India with which we started. Why is this a big deal internationally?
India is THE largest exporter of rice and accounts for 40% of the total. These predominantly feed the poorest peoples in Africa (western and sub Saharan) and other parts of Asia. That’s feeding about another billion people. With the wheat market in deep trouble following Russia-Ukraine, the world was already straining (look at Egypt, Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa), now with the Indian rice ban, and Thailand and Vietnam (the next largest exporters) not being able to meet the world's demand to fill India's void, it can just tip over. Expect a lot of hunger and misery.
The great philosopher and one of the very few economists, and intellectuals of our times, Amartya Sen (who lived through the Bengal famine of 1943) wrote, “All famines are political… No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”
We might have to sadly upend that worldview (I hope I am horribly, completely wrong on this count!).
#GlobalWarming #PoliticalEconomy #ClimateChange #FoodSecurity #RiceBan #India #SouthAsia #SubContinent #Agriculture #Food #AgriculturalCrises #Inequality #EcologicalCrises

2023-07-27 00:09:36

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What’s the principal outcome of all these agricultural policies?
Decimation of livelihood in the Indian countryside leading to the largest internal migration within any country in modern history (you can call it internal displacement, sub-national refugees, asylum seekers) from the rural to the urban.
And no, before you jump in, this urbanization is no sign of progress. No viable replacement for their livelihoods has been created. The manufacturing sector remains teetering, and the high tech service sector is saturated. The primary education system is criminally underfunded, opportunities to reskill hardly exist. Most important of all, even with skills and training, some of the highest levels of unemployment while we can boast of having the 5th largest economy. Meanwhile, the two richest Indian billionaires must have worked so hard that they now are combined wealthier than two of the relatively wealthy states (Punjab and Haryana). If there is anything that has a sensational growth that any economist can be proud of, it’s the rate of growth of inequality in India.
8/9
#GlobalWarming #PoliticalEconomy #ClimateChange #FoodSecurity #RiceBan #India #SouthAsia #SubContinent #Agriculture #Food #AgriculturalCrises #Inequality #EcologicalCrises

2023-07-27 00:09:18

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Here’s a litany of the wonderful things that the Indian state has been responsible for, one way or another since we became “liberal” in 1991:
-Failures in proper grain storage, management, and distribution. In doublespeak, supply chain. So much so that large amounts of food grains (strategic reserves) are left to rot rather than feed the hungry and emaciated. India produces enough “essential food grains” to feed two Indias. At the height of COVID-19, the first and only priority was to make sanitizers out of rice rather than to feed the largest number of humans in the world who went hungry. The free food public distribution for 80% of the population came much later.
Per capita consumption of essential food grains have plummeted. For a few years, they were as low as what it was in the Bengal Famine of 1943 (which killed 5 million people) under the British Raj! Starvation deaths for the first time in Independent and Democratic India. To this day, the per capita consumption is lower than what it was pre 1991.
-Failure to pay farmers "Minimum support prices" as recommended by the Swaminathan committee (this has been so since late 2000s).
Predatory land grabbing by corporations (Indian and international), with the full support of the Indian state for “development”, hell-bent on extracting every bit of value that can be extracted from adivasi lands all the way to agricultural lands.
Predatory consumption and resource extraction by the largest corporations within and from outside India while pacifying a tiny middle class in the megalopolises. While the wonderful malls, beauty products and luxury cars were parading these megacities; electrification, irrigation, and basic access to credit were delayed or denied to the people who produced their food.
Subsidizing agribusiness and acquiescing to the WTO agreements. Somehow the poorest farmers and agricultural workers in the world must restructure themselves to be market viable, but the US (and EU) has every right to be protectionist and subsidize its agriculture to the tune of 65 billion$ annually. Even more perverse, for example, the subsidy offered year-on-year for sugar and cotton produced in the US is more than the total revenue they generate. Some efficient market viable agriculture.
Letting market forces dictate, and forcing farmers from planting food crops to cash crops.
An example: Wayanad (literally means paddy country) in Kerala went from paddy farms to vanilla cultivation. Indian market for vanilla, near zero. When the global market found a better offer from Madagascar and Indonesia (not blaming them), the plantations collapsed. Many parts of Wayanad didn’t make it back to paddy.
Forcing farmers in a vicious cycle of debt-despair-suicide. The less I say about this, the better for everyone, including my own sanity.
These are just the tip of the iceberg, the list goes on.
7/9
#GlobalWarming #PoliticalEconomy #ClimateChange #FoodSecurity #RiceBan #India #SouthAsia #SubContinent #Agriculture #Food #AgriculturalCrises #Inequality #EcologicalCrises

2023-07-27 00:09:00

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However, let’s not give the Indian governments a free pass.There are many proximal causes for the decimation of the backbone of Indian society and livelihood, that is the Agricultural sector.
Those proximal causes should be squarely blamed on the state (not just the current dispensation). Several serious policy flaws, failures, and disastrous ideologies have been set in motion since 1991, when India “liberalized” and opened itself to the "free market" regime. Hey, we are global players now, let’s see what we can do.
6/9
#GlobalWarming #PoliticalEconomy #ClimateChange #FoodSecurity #RiceBan #India #SouthAsia #SubContinent #Agriculture #Food #AgriculturalCrises #Inequality #EcologicalCrises

2023-07-27 00:08:45

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Rice is not the only basic food commodity that is off the roofs. Wheat prices have soared too, and price controls were put in earlier. Most recently, a kilo of tomato costs as much as 200 Rupees now. Adjusted for currency exchange and purchasing power, that's like buying a kilo of tomato for more than 10$ in the US! How does that "cost of living crisis" sound?
India has forever been an "ecological basket case", heavily dependent on an almost clockwork arrival of the monsoons for its ecological and economic revival. The effect of erratic monsoons and intense heatwaves has forced very large areas of formerly arable land to waste. Top soil degradation is fully apace thanks to intense adoption of monocultures, use of fertilizers and herbicides etc.,
Global warming is the distal cause for which India will and should take no blame and must point the finger at the West.
5/9
#GlobalWarming #PoliticalEconomy #ClimateChange #FoodSecurity #RiceBan #India #SouthAsia #SubContinent #Agriculture #Food #AgriculturalCrises #Inequality #EcologicalCrises

2023-07-27 00:08:31

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It's slowly dawning on the “stalwart agricultural and economic experts” in New Delhi, trained at the premier institutes that know how agriculture works better than farmers and agricultural scientists, i.e., the Harvard Kennedy School, the University of Chicago and the likes. They are realizing that Food security is a matter of national security and economy. And that at some level, though they are the elites, they are realizing they are still from India, and when they call for help from their buddies in DC or Brussels, it might go to the voicemail. Not that they know what they are doing about food security, they will be making a hash of it anyway.
The volatility in the grains futures markets in Singapore and Chicago, the staggering drop in crop yields, and inflationary pressure have all caused one of the largest price hikes for rice in India within a year.
The export ban is a way to stabilize prices and feed its people. India is still the country with the highest absolute number and percentage of malnourished children. Oh, also, there is an election coming up next year, no incumbent government (state or central) would like to be on the receiving end of getting voted out by angry starving masses. Democracy at work you know.
4/9
#GlobalWarming #PoliticalEconomy #ClimateChange #FoodSecurity #RiceBan #India #SouthAsia #SubContinent #Agriculture #Food #AgriculturalCrises #Inequality #EcologicalCrises

2023-07-27 00:08:14

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What is said of India extends to the entire Indian subcontinent/South Asia as well.
Pakistan too is a wheat and rice basket and a major rice exporter, and we saw what happened when nearly a third of the entire country was flooded last year. This year, the temperatures soared to 50 degrees across most of that flooded region.
Sri Lanka, in a moment of hubris and misguided thinking (however good willed) decided to ban all intensive farming overnight and forced everyone to adapt to organic farming without nary a transition plan. The result, a complete collapse of everything.
Bangladesh, which in normal monsoon has roughly 5-10% of its delta region swallowed by water, now has more than 20% sinking. It too produces a bunch of essential food grains for largely domestic consumption, but also some exports (especially lentils).
Of course, Bangladesh will be the canary in the coalmine when global warming hits the fan and when “climate politics” starts. This is a people already preparing for climate adaptation, not waiting for the reversing to happen, they are well aware nothing is getting done elsewhere.
Europe saw Syria (that civil war began with a global warming induced drought in the late 2000s) come and were repelled, wait when Bangladesh comes at you, and they will come.
3/9.
#GlobalWarming #PoliticalEconomy #ClimateChange #FoodSecurity #RiceBan #India #SouthAsia #SubContinent #Agriculture #Food #AgriculturalCrises #Inequality #EcologicalCrises

2023-07-27 00:08:03

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With erratic monsoons now a regular feature, intense floods are followed immediately by heatwaves that have caused the entire agriculture cycle to go haywire, crop yields to plummet, and near droughts across all major food basket regions in India.
Tamilnadu, my home state, used to be rice-country, historically recorded by both the Tamils and later the Brits as giving three harvests a year. Now it is barely struggling to give a single harvest.
West Bengal, one of the largest rice producers has reported highest levels of aridity in its arable lands.
Punjab, and Haryana, the heartlands of most agriculture have had multiple crop collapses, the worst top soil degradation because of intensive practices, and fertilizer polluted irrigation ways (not to mention the highest levels of cancer).
Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the two most populous states, and heavily reliant on agriculture as both economy and livelihood have had one of the worst years on record for yields on almost all food crops.
Riverbeds, lakes, and canals that depend almost exclusively on the monsoons are drying up.
All across the country, groundwater has plummeted and deep wells are now dug that reach waters from a few million years back.
2/9
#GlobalWarming #PoliticalEconomy #ClimateChange #FoodSecurity #RiceBan #India #SouthAsia #SubContinent #Agriculture #Food #AgriculturalCrises #Inequality #EcologicalCrises

2023-07-27 00:07:44

For those who might not know, following a week after the Russia-Ukraine wheat embargo, there are even bigger and ominous signs hinting at global food insecurity and the catastrophic agricultural crises coming our way.
India last week banned export on all non-basmati rice varieties.
I repeat: EXPORT BAN ON ALL non-basmati RICE varieties.
[Aside, export of basmati variety will continue, the demand for which is relatively small in India when compared to the nearly 15 major varieties of rice (it's home to at least a 1000 varieties) consumed by very large populations everyday(these are the ones which are now banned). Basmati is a "festive" and only occasionally consumed variety in India. It is largely exported to the richer nations, many of whom think it is the only variety of rice from India.]
Why is India banning rice now?
Answer: global warming.
What’s happening in the India (and South Asia at large) should both terrify you and wake you up
Here’s more (facts? trivia? bothersome news? how the world actually works?).
1/9
#GlobalWarming #PoliticalEconomy #ClimateChange #FoodSecurity #RiceBan #India #SouthAsia #SubContinent #Agriculture #Food #AgriculturalCrises #Inequality #EcologicalCrises

2023-07-26 04:19:55

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Coda:
Reading these excerpts on Weizenbaum's "no human being could ever fully understand another human being", I am reminded of a paragraph from the great anthropologist David Graeber's less read work, "Lost People" that states this quite stunningly:
"If it is really true... that what makes us human is above all our capacity to make history, and if history consists of actions that could not have been predicted beforehand, then that would mean that the fundamental measure of our humanity lies in what we cannot know about each other. To recognize another person as human would then be to recognize the limits of one's possible knowledge of them. Their humanity is inseparable from their capacity to surprise us."
For too long, in the name of science and technology, for mostly nefarious and monetary purposes, the naysayers have insisted on making machines out of humans, and rendered them soulless and disenchanted. It's time to put the soul of value back into humans.
8/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum

2023-07-26 04:19:32

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e seems to have been on the mark with respect to climate change:
"The later Weizenbaum was increasingly pessimistic about the future, much more so than he had been in the 1970s. Climate change terrified him. Still, he held out hope for the possibility of radical change. As he put it in a January 2008 article for Süddeutsche Zeitung: “The belief that science and technology will save the Earth from the effects of climate breakdown is misleading. Nothing will save our children and grandchildren from an Earthly hell. Unless: we organise resistance against the greed of global capitalism.”"
7/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum

2023-07-26 04:19:18

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Human agency, the ability to make history, and usher progress:
"Just as the bomber pilot “is not responsible for burned children because he never sees their village”, Weizenbaum wrote, software afforded generals and executives a comparable degree of psychological distance from the suffering they caused."
"... Bound by an algorithmic logic, software lacked the flexibility and the freedom of human judgment. This helps explain the conservative impulse at the heart of computation. Historically, the computer arrived “just in time”, Weizenbaum wrote. But in time for what? “In time to save – and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilise – social and political structures that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them.” "
This is an absolutely wonderful synthesis of status quo, the relegation of agency and willful denial of responsibility by replacing humans with technologies and that has only intensified.
As the author notes later:
"Weizenbaum was always less concerned by AI as a technology than by AI as an ideology – that is, in the belief that a computer can and should be made to do everything that a human being can do. This ideology is alive and well. It may even be stronger than it was in Weizenbaum’s day."
What is this"ideology"? It goes something like what the political philosopher Slavoj Žižek wrote: “they know it, but they are doing it anyway”, which he riffs from Marx who wrote of the capitalists, "they do not know it, but they are doing it". Marx himself was riffing on Jesus (from Luke):'Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they're doing".
6/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum

2023-07-26 04:18:59

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Values, decisions, judgements: are they fit for optimization?
"For Weizenbaum, judgment involves choices that are guided by values. These values are acquired through the course of our life experience and are necessarily qualitative: they cannot be captured in code. Calculation, by contrast, is quantitative. It uses a technical calculus to arrive at a decision. Computers are only capable of calculation, not judgment. This is because they are not human, which is to say, they do not have a human history – they were not born to mothers, they did not have a childhood, they do not inhabit human bodies or possess a human psyche with a human unconscious – and so do not have the basis from which to form values."
"(It would be a “monstrous obscenity”, Weizenbaum wrote, to let a computer perform the functions of a judge in a legal setting or a psychiatrist in a clinical one.)"
This is as succinct an argument to make for why we should not be making value judgements that humans are "meat machines" or "biological automata" or just a "bag of neurons" with a body attached, or the urge to suggest that we are neither special or unique since every trait that a human possesses is now replicable by a machine. The one word is VALUE and that's quite a loaded word!
5/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum

2023-07-26 04:18:40

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What differentiates humans from machines, the question at the heart of "human intelligence" and Weizenbaum's:
"In 1976, Weizenbaum published his magnum opus: Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation... The book is indeed overwhelming. It is a chaotic barrage of often brilliant thoughts about computers. A glimpse at the index reveals the range of Weizenbaum’s interlocutors: not only colleagues like Minsky and McCarthy but the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the critical theorist Max Horkheimer, and the experimental playwright Eugène Ionesco."
"The book has two major arguments. First: there is a difference between man and machine. Second: there are certain tasks which computers ought not be made to do, independent of whether computers can be made to do them. The book’s subtitle – From Judgment to Calculation – offers a clue as to how these two statements fit together."
4/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum

2023-07-26 04:18:15

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Weizenbaum and what he saw as necessary political action:
"Weizenbaum supported the action [MIT students protests of 1969] and became strongly affected by the political dynamism of the time. “It wasn’t until the merger of the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and MIT’s role in weapons development that I became critical,” he later explained in an interview. “And once I started thinking along those lines, I couldn’t stop.”
"... MIT was receiving more money from the Pentagon than any other university in the country. Its labs pursued a number of projects designed for Vietnam... Project MAC – under whose auspices Weizenbaum had created Eliza – had been funded since its inception by the Pentagon... wrestled with this complicity, he found that his colleagues, for the most part, didn’t care about the purposes to which their research might be put. If we don’t do it, they told him, somebody else will. Or: scientists don’t make policy, leave that to the politicians. Weizenbaum was again reminded of the scientists in Nazi Germany who insisted that their work had nothing to do with politics... Consumed by a sense of responsibility, Weizenbaum dedicated himself to the anti-war movement... Where possible, he used his status at MIT to undermine the university’s opposition to student activism. After students occupied the president’s office in 1970, Weizenbaum served on the disciplinary committee. According to his daughter Miriam, he insisted on a strict adherence to due process, thereby dragging out the proceedings as long as possible so that students could graduate with their degrees."
3/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum

2023-07-26 04:17:59

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Weizenbaum vs what he termed the "Artificial Intellgentsia":
"Minsky was bullish and provocative; one of his favourite gambits was to declare the human brain nothing but a “meat machine” whose functions could be reproduced, or even surpassed, by human-made machines. Weizenbaum disliked him from the start... Weizenbaum’s trouble with Minsky, and with the AI community as a whole, came down to a fundamental disagreement about the nature of the human condition."
"... he [Weizenbaum] argued that no computer could ever fully understand a human being. Then he went one step further: no human being could ever fully understand another human being. Everyone is formed by a unique collection of life experiences that we carry around with us, he argued, and this inheritance places limits on our ability to comprehend one another. We can use language to communicate, but the same words conjure different associations for different people – and some things can’t be communicated at all. “There is an ultimate privacy about each of us that absolutely precludes full communication of any of our ideas to the universe outside ourselves,” Weizenbaum wrote."
2/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum

2023-07-26 04:17:42

A must read longform on the pioneer of AI chatbot who became AI's main and earliest detractors, Joseph Weizenbaum (of ELIZA fame here at MIT) by Ben Tarnoff!
Weizenbaum's was a lone voice in the 1970s, and many of his views are as apt now as they were then. Almost the entire article is chock full of quotes, and so here is a thread with quotes and a few of my thoughts interspersed.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai
"There is so much in Weizenbaum’s thinking that is urgently relevant now. Perhaps his most fundamental heresy was the belief that the computer revolution, which Weizenbaum not only lived through but centrally participated in, was actually a counter-revolution."
I too had my early training in computer science, and have come to see it increasingly as counter-revolutionary not even delivering on its promises of economic productivity (topic for another day). With my expertise in neural networks, I should be riding atop the current wave of AI to the bank, instead, I mostly see it as a land of false promises mediated by dangerous levels of silicon valley mythmaking.
1/8
#AI #HistoryOfAI #Computing #Critique #Technology #Ideology #ManVsMachine #MIT #Weizenbaum