Thread by @eigenrobot

a thing im coming to appreciate at a new level is my first animal behavior lab PI

his field had been arguing about a facet of animal behavior for decades, there were all sorts of inelegant models with inorganic parameterizations lifted from rational actor economics

so, this guy comes up with a neat simple model of how his favorite animal might actually act in an abstraction of their real circumstances, and goes to show that this tailored structural model can explain their behavior equally well as the boring reduced form

there were some experimental elements of this that i was involved in; we had some neat approaches to falsifying one of them that we were developing with a really impish line of argument

i dont know how it turned out because i left after a year to go into biochemistry. worst mistake of my intellectual life

but this guy, I admire his intellectual selflessness. he *loved* his model and preferred its aesthetic, but still managed to stay playful and a bit detached from how it might play out in experiment. exceptional professional self-control here; hard to be honest when you're pumped

i think it helped that he seemed like the kind of guy who just enjoyed the thrill of having come up with the model itself. and that had done similar feats before; he didn't feel like he needed to prove himself. exceptional mathematician for biology, had a respectable erdos number