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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 13h

Awesome.

Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 1d

Here’s a picture of Thalorion The Destroyer reading my calculus textbook. I hope he likes it! Otherwise he might unleash doom on humanity.
www.amazon.com/dp/B0DX6BPPZ8

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 1d

Interesting perspective. I think peer-review is imperfect but does more good than harm. I've published >100 papers and reviewed... dunno, many 100s of manuscripts. My thinking is that the incentive structure is the root of the problem, although I could be wrong. I agree with your suggestions though.

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 1d

Fair point. I suppose the question is whether the entire system needs to be revamped (I'd find that unlikely to happen, given that too many people are too vested in it) or whether relatively small changes can have meaningful impact.

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 1d

I'd love to see the evaluations in academia based on one paper every five years. Not a perfect solution, but it would increase scientific publishing signal-to-noise-ratio by encouraging researchers to put more effort into a smaller number of papers.

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 1d

Hehe, yep, although I'm not so active here. I'm mostly building up content (tutorial posts on data science and LLM mechanisms) on mikexcohen.substack.com.

Nice to hear from you, Luiz!

Mike X Cohen | Mike X Cohen, PhD | Substack

Former neuroscience professor, current independent educator. I help people understand applied math and AI, machine-learning, deep learning, LLM mechanisms, etc. My motto is "you can learn a lot of mat...

mikexcohen.substack.com

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 1d

That was definitely part of my decision, although I wouldn't call it a "problem." More that I was (and still am) in an extremely fortunate situation, and decided to spend my time in a career that had higher positive impact for more people, and that was also more personally satisfying.

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 1d

Thank you for taking the time to share you lucid and honest opinion.

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 3d

Thank you kindly, Thomas. My feelings, reactions, and motivations are definitely not unique, but ex-academics have an unfortunate habit of reticence.

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 4d

Karl Gauss (yeah, *that* Gauss) sent me a fax this morning to say that he really enjoyed working through today's Daily Data Challenge.
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/ddc-23-dis...

DDC-23: Distributions of MNIST pixel values

A data challenge a day helps you master machine learning

mikexcohen.substack.com

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 6d

You earned them.

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 6d

That is a fantastic title and topic. Congrats!

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 6d

Why I left academia and neuroscience.

This post on Substack has gained a lot of traction. I think many people identify with it.
(Most of my posts are technical tutorials on machine-learning and LLM-mechanisms.)
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/why-i-left...

Why I left academia and neuroscience

Don't worry, this isn't yet another story of rage-quitting.

mikexcohen.substack.com

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 6d

Thank you, Felipe :)

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 6d

Daily Data Challenge 8: Test for Pythagorean triplets
A data challenge a day helps you master machine learning.
More exercises and solutions at mikexcohen.substack.com

youtube.com/shorts/LlqS2...

Daily Data Challenge 8: Test for Pythagorean triplets

YouTube video by Mike X Cohen

youtube.com

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 11d

Bootstrapping: because sometimes asking “what if?” 10,000 times is a valid math strategy.
open.substack.com/pub/mikexcoh...

Confidence intervals 2/3: bootstrapping methods

Learn computational statistics in the second part of this three-part series.

open.substack.com

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 11d

genAI never fails to deliver the laughs.

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 12d

Daily Data Challenges are going strong.

Today's challenge is to create this beautiful graph using numpy and matplotlib. Can you do it?
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/ddc-18-err...

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 12d

This is not a skeet.
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/this-is-no...

This is not a post

Will pipes exist in 100 trillion years?

mikexcohen.substack.com

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 26d

Have you done your Daily Data Challenge?
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/ddc-8-test...

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 27d

People talk a lot about GPT5 and hallucinations and trust and so on.

But let's not forget that GPT2 is the ultimate arbiter of truth and science.

Proof of my claim? This zinger from GPT2.

Wanna explore GPT2's wisdom in your own private Python session? mikexcohen.substack.com/p/lessons-on...

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 28d

GPT2 is hilarious.

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 28d

Dear bluesky neuroscientists: You should pay attention to the field of LLM mechanistic interpretability.

Not because LLMs are like real brains (they are absolutely nothing alike), but because mech interp analysis methods would be useful in neuroscience.

Start learning here: tinyurl.com/48pum4pb

LLM breakdown 1/6: Tokenization (words to integers)

Large language models can't read; instead, they are given numbers that come from text.

mikexcohen.substack.com

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · 29d

One of my fav quotes: "The way you do anything is the way you do everything."

The problem with these pithy faux-philosophical quotes is that they don't stand up to scrutiny. For example, I definitely do not pick my nose with the same rigor, depth, and intensity with which I write 600-page textbooks

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Mike X Cohen PhD, Sincxpress Education @mikexcohen.bsky.social · Sep 8

Can you code the Fourier transform from scratch?

I bet you can. Spend 20 minutes on the Substack post, and you'll learn everything you need to understand and code the FT in Python.
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/the-fourie...

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