Newsletter
Brain structures and behaviour and other things
November 8, 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Brain structures and behaviour
Excerpt: A lot of people like to talk about the role of various brain regions in human behaviour. Fewer like to talk about brain structures. But in many ways, looking at the brain structures rather than all the different subdivisions into regions tells a cleaner story about behaviour. Let me show you how.
Main idea: The brain is an integrator. It takes in information from all over the body, and puts it together to decide how you should act. This messy integration acts as a bottleneck, forcing the brain to streamline as much as possible. Rarely does it try to ‘think’.
On the popularity of magic mushrooms. A personal account, but well articulated. No surprise they are increasingly being legalized, with emphasis on their therapeutic benefit.
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The cracks in Open Access Research, or ‘For-Profit Academic Publishers Love LLM Garbage’. To publish a paper open-access (i.e. anyone can read it for free—no paywalls), you as a researcher pay an ‘article processing charge’:
Under the old model, academic libraries paid for printed academic journals to be delivered so that professors and grad students could read them. This was a high-margin business, but there was still a verifiable service being rendered by the publishers: someone had to format, archive and deliver the physical pieces of paper. With the internet, the dead trees became vestigial; the subscriptions were to the online versions of these journals, but they were sold as a package: the libraries had to subscribe to an entire publishers’ catalogue in order for their academic institution to remain competitive.
But this model wasn’t incentive-compatible. Once an academic has published an article, they want it to be read by as many people as possible. And the internet makes it very easy for these pdfs to slip through paywalls. Just like streaming music allowed the big labels to maintain market dominance, the publishing corporations figured out a new model: Open Access. Who could possibly be against Open Access!
This new model is extremely profitable for journals, especially since they usually get academics to do the hard work of reviewing and ensuring formatting etc. It’s also, in theory, entirely unnecessary. The growing popularity of pre-publication and pre-print sites like arxiv.org demonstrate that academics could just do it all themselves.
But, because these journals are for profit, then they are incentivised to encourage as many article processing fees as possible:
But the APC model means that academic journals are aiming for a future in which we’re swimming in LLM garbage. Which actors want more pdfs in circulation? The ones getting paid $1,500 or $3,450 or $12,290 a pop.
Nature is the 12K figure. So it’s not surprising that we’re seeing them forced to retract literally hundreds of papers again and again.
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Australia banning social media for under-16s. The implied identity checks, though a distinct privacy concern, will probably reduce anonymous posting. But that doesn’t seem to be the goal, so one wonders whether it’ll really have positive effects. Especially since, as demonstrated again and again, social media doesn’t seem to be the problem affecting the youth.
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The Lost Art of Memory. A commentary on novelty’s rise, memory’s fall, and what vanished in between:
as a people who have almost unending access to notepads, note apps, and voice and video recording, it seems reasonable for us to be a people who have let memory slide in favor of creativity … Yet this convenience likely comes at a cost—we may be losing access to a fundamentally different way of thinking and perceiving, one that emerges only through a deeper form of engagement with memory
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I told you so. An insider’s account of an outsider’s confusion about the democratic strategy to ‘defeat’ trump.
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The fluoride people were right. Contra a previous marginalium.
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How to survive the age of anger. A psychoanalyst offers a path through the divisive world of online grievance and populist outrage.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,