Comment author: adam_strandberg 08 July 2014 03:27:41AM 0 points [-]

I wrote a blog post describing the article, talking about criticisms of Crick and Koch's theory, and describing related research involving salvia:

http://the-lagrangian.blogspot.com/2014/07/epilepsy-consciousness-and-salvia.html

Enjoy.

Comment author: Andy_McKenzie 07 July 2014 10:19:49PM *  2 points [-]

AFAIK, there is really no good standardized exam for neuroscience. Eg, see someone ask the same question and get no replies here: http://www.funfaculty.org/drupal/node/4331

The old Kandel textbooks used to have questions at the end of at least some chapters, but recent editions do not have them IIRC.

If you're interested in the medical side of things, there's a lot of good practice multiple choice questions you can do for psychiatry and/or neurology, that med students use when preparing for Step I. USMLERx and UWORLD are both good qbanks, but they're fairly expensive and you'll only want a subset of them.

For awhile I was going through CalTech's 100 Questions: http://www.cns.caltech.edu/academics/100questions.html , but I only got until #18 or so before my interests change too much to make it worthwhile to continue. (Some of which you can find here: http://brainslab.wordpress.com/category/100-questions/.)

Please update me if you find anything, since I'd be curious about this too.

Comment author: adam_strandberg 08 July 2014 12:17:00AM 0 points [-]

The 100 Questions link is really nice- I particularly liked this question: "How random are synaptic events? And why (both from a functional as well as from a biophysical point of view)?" I am not sure why this question hadn't already occurred to me, but I'm glad I have it now.

Comment author: adam_strandberg 07 July 2014 08:44:39PM 0 points [-]

The link to the original paper is broken.

Useful Standardized Tests?

3 adam_strandberg 07 July 2014 08:26PM

When trying to learn something new, it's very useful to have goals not just in terms of reading and absorbing content (i.e. read this physics textbook) but also to have new things that you can do (i.e. be able to solve any momentum transfer problem). "Be able to pass this test" is a more action-y and exciting way to view knowledge acquisition than just "read this book".

Unfortunately, as everyone knows, standardized tests usually suck. But given how many of them there are, there must be some good ones out there- even if the score doesn't tell you as much as you'd like, then at least you can gauge how you're doing by how confusing or difficult it is for you to work through the questions. (I feel like it would be a good idea to work any standardized test you were studying for your own purposes without looking at the multiple choice answers to really test yourself.) For my purposes, I would say that a good standardized test is one such that, if you actually know the material that the test is testing, you can confidently say that you know the field.

I would say that the Physics GRE is probably an example of a good standardized test. I never took it, but I was a physics major as an undergrad, and looking over the questions I can see that it cuts a pretty good swath across the field. If you know enough to answer all those questions and know why your answers are right, then you have a very solid grounding in the field. I, for one, would need to review some stuff I've forgotten if I were to take it for real (namely optics).

For starting to learn new programming languages, a less conventional "standardized" test is solving Project Euler problems in that language.

I'm particularly interested in examples of this for cognitive science and/or neuroscience, since I'm trying to read a lot about those fields and I'd like to know what's expected of someone educated in them. Also there tend to be many fewer resources for workable problems in these fields than in the harder sciences, which I'm more used to.

 

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 18 March 2014 05:30:56PM 4 points [-]

Regarding color you might want to have a look at the as usual funny and detailed XKCD color survey: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

Comment author: adam_strandberg 19 March 2014 10:46:32PM 2 points [-]

Even better than that is this series of blog posts, which talks about color identification across languages, the way that color-space is in a sense "optimally" divided by basic color words, and how children develop a sense for naming colors:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-part-i/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-part-ii/

Comment author: Stabilizer 08 February 2014 05:53:30AM *  13 points [-]

Philosophy Bro writing as Popper:

So how does science proceed, if induction is fucked (which it is) and we can't logically determine how to have new ideas (which we can't)? Easy - just take a fucking guess. No, I don't mea- dammit, you asshole, I don't mean "guess how science works", I mean guessing just is how science works. Just start guessing shit and go from there. Of course you're going to make a couple stupid guesses at first. Seriously, some of the shit you're going to try is going to be genuinely fucked in the head. Remember when we thought heavier objects would fall faster? Boy was that wrong. But we took a guess, tried it out, and it didn't work. Instead of being whiny babies about it, scientists just took another guess and then tested that out, too. That's the process: guess, and then you test that guess. And if the test works, you're like "Huh! That was an even better guess than I thought." And the more tests it survives, the more people are like, "Great guess! I'll bet that's probably it." And then you get to a test that your guess doesn't pass, and you're like, "Welp, close but no cigar. Back to the drawing board."

We'll eliminate the fucking stupid guesses pretty quickly - it doesn't take long to show that we can't move things with our minds. Eventually, you start to build a pretty cool system of things so you can make better and better guesses. and you can totally use data to make good guesses; you don't always have to invent something completely new every time. I'm just saying that's all the data does, helps make good guesses. It doesn't prove shit.

And look! That method is deductive! What incredibly good news! You don't have to derive a universal statement from a bunch of single events, which is great because you can't; instead, you just guess a universal statement and then see if you can't find an event that breaks it. You can't get from "the sun keeps rising" to "the sun will always rise" but if one day the sun doesn't come up, you can be damn sure about "the sun does not always rise." All you need is one bad apple and you know for sure that not every apple is good, no induction needed. QED, motherfuckers.

And - AND - now we know what is and isn't science! Holy fuck I am on fire here. Not actually. Just- look, I'm solving lots of things, is my point. Scientific theories are falsifiable - they're incompatible with certain things we could observe. They predict shit, and then we see if that shit really happens. Back when we thought Newton's Laws were totally, completely true, Mercury had this weird fuck wobble in its orbit that said we should find another planet. Except we looked and no planet. And now we know for sure that Newton wasn't completely right. Einstein? He was a patent clerk for fuckssake, and he came up with a fucking incredible guess. And we just keep devising more and more complicated tests to check it out, and it keeps on passing. When it does finally fail, we'll fucking know. There won't be aaaaany confusion whatsoever. Souls? How the fuck would we go about testing for souls? "Well, we cut him open, and we didn't find a soul, so..." "Yeah, but you can't see souls! That's the whole point!" So you're saying we can't ever test for souls? That's fine, just, it means souls can't come to the science party. They're not falsifiable. You must be THIS FALSIFIABLE to ride the science ride, and souls just aren't.

Comment author: adam_strandberg 24 February 2014 06:44:00AM *  10 points [-]

Also, this from his summary of Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra":

Humanity isn't an end, it's a fork in the road, and you have two options: "Animal" and "Superman". For some reason, people keep going left, the easy way, the way back to where we came from. Fuck 'em. Other people just stand there, staring at the signposts, as if they're going to come alive and tell them what to do or something. Dude, the sign says fucking "SUPERMAN". How much more of a clue do these assholes want?

Comment author: adam_strandberg 19 February 2014 04:46:55AM *  2 points [-]

I am deeply confused by your statement that the complete class theorem only implies that Bayesian techniques are locally optimal. If for EVERY non-Bayesian method there's a better Bayesian method, then the globally optimal technique must be a Bayesian method.

In response to Decision Theory FAQ
Comment author: adam_strandberg 09 July 2013 01:00:06AM 0 points [-]

In section 8.1, your example of the gambler's ruin postulates that both agents have the same starting resources, but this is exactly the case in which the gambler's ruin doesn't apply. That might be worth changing.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 March 2013 07:48:59PM 13 points [-]

I don't understand why we can't simply build an LFTR. I can't find anything online about why we can't just build an LFTR. I get the serious impression that what we need here is like 0.1 wild-haired scientists, 3 wild-haired nuclear engineers, 40 normal nuclear engineers, and sane politicians. And that China has sane politicians but for some reason can't produce, find, or hire the sort of wild-haired engineers who just went ahead and built a molten-salt thorium reactor at Oak Ridge in the 1960s.

Comment author: adam_strandberg 03 March 2013 05:19:50AM 2 points [-]

According to Wikipedia, there are at least 4 groups currently working on LFTRs, one of which is China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR#Recent_developments

Comment author: fela 09 February 2013 06:47:15PM 15 points [-]

Jared Diamond, in Guns Germs and Steel, argues that when the time is ripe scientific discoveries are made quite regardless of who makes them, give or take a few decades. Most discoveries are incremental, and many are made by multiple people simultaneously. So wouldn't a discovery that isn't published be just made elsewhere in a few years time, possibly by someone without many ethical concerns?

Comment author: adam_strandberg 10 February 2013 06:15:10PM 14 points [-]

Even a few years of delay can make a big difference if you are in the middle of a major war. If Galston hadn't published his results and they weren't found until a decade or two later, the US probably wouldn't have used Agent Orange in Vietnam. Similarly with chlorine gas in WWI, atomic bombs in WWII, etc. Granted, delaying the invention doesn't necessarily make the overall outcome better. If the atomic bomb wasn't invented until the 1950s and we didn't have the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then the US or USSR would probably have been more likely to use them against each other.

View more: Prev | Next