This book is brilliant. Incredibly precise exposition of how reasons - grounded in beliefs, desires, and knowledge - drive behavior
This is the kind of philosophy I really enjoy. No outlandish thought experiments, no semantic sleight-of-hand, no clever moves aimed to stump opponents... Just clear, rigorous analysis
One key insight: the distinction between a triggering cause (stimulus A -> action/outcome B) and a structuring cause (the reason *why* A->B)
You can't understand complex systems, like living organisms without taking account of why they are structured the way they are
If you focus only on immediate mechanism and physical causes, you miss the configurational, historical causality that defines living organisms
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Really excellent, insightful article highlighting crucial role of culture in understanding variation in heritability 👇 But I have a quibble... (thread below)
The article frames phenotypic variance as capable of being partitioned into a component explained by genetic variance and a component explained by environmental variance. 2/n
And it looks in detail at how environmental variance and gene-environment interactions (and therefore heritability) are all sensitive to cultural differences, clustering, sampling effects, etc. 3/n
I think @Lise_Eliot and colleagues have done a real service to the field in performing this exhaustive meta-analysis of the messy literature on sex differences assessed by neuroimaging
Longish thread: *Assessed by neuroimaging* is important here, as it’s an extremely gross level at which to look for differences, compared to what can be done in other animals (where lots of fine differences are observed).
So there could, in the first instance, be NO sex differences observed by neuroimaging and that would not have any bearing on whether differences exist in microarchitecture, distribution of cell types, synaptic connectivity, gene expression profiles, cellular physiology, etc.
This is a really interesting and important paper showing that very large samples are required to get reliable associations between brain imaging and behavioral phenotypes
The starkest conclusion is that the vast sea of literature to date claiming such associations is completely polluted by false positives (not a surprise given they never replicate)
This paper by Paul Cisek is essential reading for cog neuro folks: Resynthesizing Behavior Through Phylogenetic Refinement pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31161495/ - really about reframing and anchoring cognitive concepts in simpler, more ancient mechanisms
This paper really lays out a fundamental paradigm shift for cognitive science that is much more grounded in biology, IMO... It's incredibly well thought out and presented - great pics too!
My marginalia are pretty much just emphatic "yes!"es 👍
Very interesting piece. Like all psychiatric disorders, anorexia is quite heritable, so vulnerability has some biological basis. But how it is expressed may depend on cultural context and experience
But is it an issue with body image and social competition or is it a compulsion around appetite and starvation (as framed in the piece)?
Machine-Learning Maestro Michael Jordan on the Delusions of Big Data and Other Huge Engineering Efforts - IEEE Spectrum spectrum.ieee.org/artificial-int…
A very interesting read, with a healthy dose of anti-hype skepticism, particularly about the dangers of torturing data until it confesses to something...
This is just the multiple testing problem, magnified by the huge dimensionality of modern datasets. (And the hubris in thinking you can correct for it)