Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 17

In the grand scheme of things the main thing that matters is advances in microscopy and imaging methods. Almost all results in neuroscience are tentative because we can't see everything that's happening at the same time.

1 1

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 16

I also have a stack of these, I call it 'apocalypse food'.

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 16

You are correct about this.

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 16

But so is every possible mapping,so the choice of a specific mapping is not contained within the data. Even the fact that the training data comes in X,y pairs is not sufficient to provide a mapping that generalizes in a specific way. The brain chooses a specific algorithm that generalizes well.

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 16

(Consider that one can create an arbitrary mapping between a set of images and a set of two labels, thus the choice of a specific mapping is a reduction of entropy and thus constitutes information.)

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 16

The set of weights that correctly classifies images as cats or dogs contains information that is not contained either in the set of training images or in the set of labels.

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 16

Learning can generate information about the *mapping* between the object and the category. It doesn't generate information about the object (by itself) or the category (by itself) but the mapping is not subject to the data processing inequality for the data or the category individually.

A Complete-ish Guide To Making Scientific Figures for Publication with Python and Matplotlib

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 16

(Also Inkscape and MSWORD, unfortunately)

dendwrite.substack.com

1 2 4

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 16

GPT is already pretty good at this. Maybe not perfect, but possibly as good as the median academic.

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 15

What do you mean by 'generate information'? What is an example of someone making this sort of claim?

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 13

Paying is best. Reviews should mostly be done by advanced grad students/postdocs who could use the cash.

Nature vs. Nurture vs. Putting in the Work

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 12

When people discuss whether a particular trait is innate or environmental, it is usually assumed that each of these components is fixed.

open.substack.com

1 2

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 7

Why wouldn't you want your papers to be LLM-readable?

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 4

If such a value to society exists, it should not be difficult for the PhD student to figure out how to articulate it themselves. A lack of independence of thought when it comes to this sort of thing would be much more concerning.

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 4

Oh you were on that? Small world.

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 3

But I do think in our efforts to engage with the previous work on this, we made this paper overly long and technical. We present the bottom-line formulation of the plasticity rule in the Calcitron paper.

A generalized mathematical framework for the calcium control hypothesis describes weight-dependent synaptic plasticity - Journal of Computational Neuroscience

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 3

One of the reasons we wrote this paper is because the calcium control is a great theory but there were two semi-conflicting mathematical forumlations of it, both of which had some inelegenancies. I think we managed to clean them up, and made it more 'theory'-like.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The brain modifies synaptic strengths to store new information via long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD). Evidence has mounted that long-term synaptic plasticity is controlled vi...

link.springer.com

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 3

I know that e.g. Yuri Rodrigues has a paper that incorporates second messengers but at that point it's not really parsimonous any moren

1 1

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 3

The leading theory for plasticity is calcium control, which I've done some work on. I do think that I've contributed on that front with the Calcitron and the FPLR framework which came out in the past few months. Anything beyond calcium control gets into simulation territory.

2 2

Toviah Moldwin @tmoldwin.bsky.social · May 3

The reason why it's less active now is because people kind of feel that single neuron theory has been solved. Like the LIF/Cable theory models are still pretty much accepted. Any additional work would almost necessarily add complexity and that complexity is mostly not needed for 'theory' questions.