Postdoc at @kriegeskortelab studying flexible visual processing in minds and machines https://t.co/Clqb1lYwyL
Sep 5, 2023 • 24 tweets • 9 min read
NEW PAPER 🧵: Deep neural networks are complicated, but looking inside them ought to be simple. In this paper we introduce TorchLens, a package for extracting all activations and metadata from any #PyTorch model, and visualizing its structure, in as little as one line of code. 1/
Paper:
1/ NEW PREPRINT #2: Your visual experience is full of colored shapes. How does your brain encode colors, shapes, and the way they’re combined? biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh…2/ In this study we examined 1) do separate brain regions encode these features, or are they encoded by the same regions? And 2) if the latter, how are these features encoded relative to each other: independently or interactively?
Aug 13, 2020 • 8 tweets • 1 min read
1/ NEW PREPRINT: Much work has examined the “binding problem” of how the brain encodes combinations of visual features. But how do convolutional neural networks do it?
biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh…2/ In this paper, we looked at how CNNs encode color/shape combinations: are these features encoded independently or does the representation of one feature interact with the other feature?
Jun 20, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
@General_Jagoff @MattWalshBlog Go to the actual study in PNAS. It was so deeply flawed that the authors had to issue a correction specifically stating that it doesn’t show what people are taking it to show (that black people aren’t more frequent victims of violence).
@General_Jagoff @MattWalshBlog Meanwhile there are plenty of carefully controlled studies showing that black people *are* disproportionate victims of violence... e.g. journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…
Apr 12, 2020 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
1/ Tragically, the famous mathematician John Conway has recently passed away to COVID-19. To commemorate his life, here's a thread about his most famous creation, the Game of Life, which raises many provocative questions about the nature of complex systems.
2/ The Game of Life is a system consisting of an infinite grid of squares, that can be either black (alive) or white (dead). Every time step, the squares evolve according to three simple rules:
Mar 24, 2020 • 31 tweets • 4 min read
1/ Just finished the fantastic (if pretentiously titled) biography "William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert Richardson. James is one of those people who grabs your attention and gets more interesting the more you learn about them. Some thoughts
2/ First, and most obviously, the guy is phenomenally quotable, on any number of topics... a smattering of examples (some of his better ones are longer than Tweet length and rely heavily on his obsession with italics, unfortunately):
Feb 22, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Pointing out hypocrisy in political opponents can be fun/satisfying (feels like a "knockdown argument"--got em!) and has its uses but 1) it often replaces the work of making the case for an alternative vision, promoting laziness (1/4)
2) "inconsistent" isn't the worst thing an ideology can be (e.g. consistent sociopathy/sadism is bad; why should "at least they're consistent" always have a positive connotation?), and (2/4)
