The lesson for all the students out there is that science is a community project. Most of us make individually small contributions to this project. Success is measured at the collective level. Many of our professional (and personal) dysfunctions could be fixed by more fully embracing this view.

In fairness to Grossberg, he made valuable contributions to computational neuroscience. The problem is that his grievances alienated all the people who would otherwise have appreciated his contributions. I see this as a cautionary tale about what happens when scientists are obsessed with credit.

When I started grad school, my advisor counseled me that I'd know that I'd made it in neuroscience when Grossberg accuses me of stealing his ideas. Probably his advisor told him the same thing!

Connectionists mailing list.

If I were him, what I would be worried about is other people getting called "the Stephen Grossberg of X" which would probably mean someone whose genuine scientific contributions are overshadowed by their narcissism and shameless self-aggrandizement.

🤣 totally!

Some background reading on what this research is about:
gershmanlab.com/pubs/cell_le...
gershmanlab.com/pubs/memory_...
www.cell.com/current-biol...

This plot is a nice illustration of what the system (blue diamond) can accomplish relative to throwing LLMs directly at the problem: high success rate and much lower computational cost. A reasoning LLM (red diamond) achieves an okay (still worse) success rate, but requires twice as much computation.

Thanks, Nancy!! I'm teaching it this semester, so your students can take my class if they're interested.

And of course please correct me if I've misunderstood anything!

I'm really glad Jeong et al did this work. It's a valuable empirical contribution and will stimulate new theoretical work, even if I'm not yet completely persuaded by their interpretation.

The paper posits that latent cause models should treat G1 and G3 the same. Some do, but I could imagine some (capable of retrospective revaluation) that don't.