Here, I am not trying to come up with a new brilliant idea on institutional change or policy. All such attempts seem to have failed. What I'm aiming for is to get a clearer view of the problem and find a role I can play personally to make situation less bad, however minutely.
The majority component of a researcher's "intrinsic motivation" should be "curiosity" towards her subject of inquiry, but is that all? There may a portion of "intrisic altrism", the desire to contribute to making the world a better place. Can't such driving force be recruited?
My opinion is that "intrinsic motivation" of each researcher is the strongest driving force which must be made most of. But going back to "give resource to labs and see what comes out" type of R&D is no longer appropriate, that's what got us into trouble in the last century.
We increasingly rely on science as the last resort to all the global problems we face; "Innovating out" is our only option. But such pressure on scientists may be undermining their very creativity and productivity that are needed for such innovation.
In the next few weeks I will think hard about the ever widening gap between what the society wants scientists to do and what scientists themselves want to/can do. The problem has been acknowledged for more than two decades, but no solution seems to have worked so far.
Prof. Sean Carroll says he has't seen TENET yet under COVID spread. Such a shame! He should have so much interesting things to say about the film, more than anyone else. The film company should send him a DVD for review. https://mobile.twitter.com/seanmcarroll/status/1330895778252877825
素晴らしいのに十分に顧みられていないと思える本があると、これは自分が再読・三読しなければ、という謎の使命感が湧いてくる。 It's like... somebody has to do justice to this book! and nobody seems to be doing it! then maybe it's up to me.
David Marrが脳の計算論的理解についてPoggioと論文を出したのが32歳のとき。数年後、遺作”Vision”に収められる「マーの3レベル」につながる議論と思索の日々は、さぞ刺激的で楽しかったことだろう。自分もいま32歳。SignificanceはMarrの何万分の一でいいから、自由かつ大胆に考える態度を倣いたい。
Thomson著へのGopnikコメント。“This book should be required reading for the increasingly large number of scientists and philosophers who are interested in understanding Buddhism”—Alison Gopnik
Hofstadter & Sander (2013) "Intelligence, to our mind, is the art of rapid and reliable gist-finding, crux-spotting, bull’s-eye-hitting, nub-striking, essence-pinpointing... this is nothing but ... the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies."
Romain Brette (2019) "Is coding a relevant metaphor for the brain?" https://cup.org/2EzAoYF …脳科学における「符号化(coding)」という比喩の有効性を問う論文。後半40ページは27名による公開レビューと著者のレスポンス。元論文だけでも読みたい。（参考まで：@Mujinaclass）
An Unprecedented Textbook of General Relativity: How a 15-year-old Can be Introduced to Einstein’s Equations - Introduction of the book written by @beatphysfreak https://rmaruy.hatenablog.com/entry/2020/07/23/231904
科学哲学者Hasok Chang、商業出版社の利益追求、水準引き下げ方針に怒る。"Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis and other similar profit-seeking corporations are destroying academic publishing. " "I will not publish books or articles with them." (2018年のpdf）https://www.people.hps.cam.ac.uk/index/teaching-officers/chang/publishing
@Daichi__Konno Direct fit論文はじめ一連のご議論、興味深く拝見しています。実は今、動画制作の試みの題材として、「科学と理解」について、既存の議論の紹介と自分の意見をまとめた動画をつくろうと考えています…。できたらお見せしますので、昨日の議論なども踏まえてご意見いただければ幸いです。
Now we are having a somewhat strange sense of relief, that the worst time may have passed. Is that so? Keep in mind that pandemic and extreme weather are totally independent events, summer will hit upon us with no more mercy than in pre-corona years.
現役の研究者でありながらここまで広く深く研究史をまとめられるのは凄い。また、脳科学の現状についてこれほど謙虚な姿勢を表明する研究者も珍しいかも。いま実験などが停滞している神経科学者・院生などに、Matthew Cobb ”The Idea of the Brain: A History”はかなりお勧めです。
Stay human. I like that. And I can't help asking. What is human? Who can judge whether I am one? Can technology change the condition of being human?What kind of knowledge do I need to decide my own human way of living? I have no answer to any of the above.
Among the three of us staying at home, the three-year-old is making an unrivaled 'progress'. However incoherent she seems to behave, she's making more sense of the world every minute, in her own way. I'm getting a chance to witness an intelligence bootstrap itself, 24h a day.
I don't intend to be a grown-up who preach to teenagers "how not to waste time", but I feel so upset to hear some of them are staying at home, bored, sleeping through the day. Please don't "wait for things to be back to normal", today is your life, I only wish you can live it.
I had assumed that we'll be facing heatwaves and typhoons AFTER we have dealt with Covid. I was totally mistaken about that. We'll be facing them UNDER Covid, which requires something impossible: to evacuate our homes while keeping social distance. NOW this is trouble.
A theoretical physicist, associate professor Shimpei Kobayashi stood up for Japanese teenagers forced to stay at home. He's doing a 24-hours live lecture covering all of high school level physics. Has spoke for 16 hours so far...
@Scott_E_Page Thank you! I had a hunch that you are doing something valuable but couldn't figure out the intention. I wondered whether your educational goal was either a) incentivise people to better predict about COVID impact or b)teach students how market works in general.
I can't believe how most people are wishing "things will be back to normal soon". But what's normal? Weren't we in a 'crisis' in the first place? The notion of stationary state that we can peacefully return to is simply dellusional.
In that sense, to view the coming few months as the time to 'keep our heads down and endure' is completely mistaken, on the contrary, THIS IS THE BONUS TIME (before the harsh summer) to do what we live for, especially those of us who commit to intellectual endeavor.
I know people have reason to be anxious, yet the disproportionate amount of fear towards this pandemic compared to climate crisis puzzles me. I mean, which seems more dangerous, virus that we can get away from by staying at home, and heatwaves/typhoons that can destroy our homes?
Resilience to economic standstill vary vastly among us. Some people can still observe the situation at ease, some are already losing space to breathe. Redistribution may not gain its momentum unless we have some sense of predictability of the situation.
Now people are sharing the sense of emergency, and hoping to 'get back to normal' within weeks or a few months. But I can't help wondering, what if we could prolong this emergency mode a bit longer, say just ten more years, to meet the 2030 goal of the Paris Agreement.
Paradoxically, I am mentally more healthy after the covid spread; it distracted me from my 'climate anxiety'. But eventually, hot hot summer will come which should wipe out the viruses and haunt us again with the original problem.
Schools have shut down, many companied switched to working from home. Some people regard this as fanatic overreaction or lack of self determination. But in this case that sarcasm is off the point; it is we who commute as usual that are free-riding the lowered risk of outbreak.
Perhaps Prof. Pinker assumes that turning to coal is our 'rational' choice under the constraint of no nuclear. So wrong! In Japan we (especially policymakers but also many intellectuals) care about the next 1-2 years at most. Our irrationality maybe way beyond his imagination.
I disagree. To me some people are just using the decline of nuclear plants as an excuse to stick to fossil fuels. And at least in our country, nuclear is far from carbon neutral considering the energy cost to clean up the Fukushima Daiichi plant. https://x.com/sapinker/status/1224591490757857283