OREL Medium: Trajectories in Cognitive Science Session @ CogSci 2021

 

This content was originally posted to the Orthogonal Research and Education Lab blog on July 30.

Congratulations to Jesse Parent, Avery Lim, Bradly Alicea, and Anusha Sharma for heading up the “Trajectories in Cognitive Science” discussion group, held during the CogSci 2021  conference. The event happened in six parts (which we will recap) and is now on YouTube. We are also archiving the slides and reference list on the Open Science Framework (in progress).

Part I: Frontier Map and Cognitive Futures. Presenter: Jesse Parent.

The first part of the session involved an overview of Frontier Maps and the role of maps and visualizations in understanding how ideas form fields of study. Frontier Maps also enable casual learners to get an intellectual grasp on a certain area of study by learning its history and current trends.

Part II: Adjacent Futures. Presenter: Bradly Alicea.

The second talk was given by Bradly Alicea, and involved introducing the idea of Adjacent Futures, which is based on the notion of the adjacent possible. Our focus was on both the possibilities that define scientific discovery and interdisciplinary exploration and the factors (sometimes quite practical) that block combinatorial discovery that often define the boundaries of a given field.

Part III: The Place of Development in the History of CogSci. Presenters: Jesse Parent and Anusha Sharma.

This session (brought to us by Jesse Parent and Anusha Sharma) covered the rich history of developmental approaches in Cognitive Science, and how development has served as an alternative to the concept of “static adult minds”. The presentation was an in-depth presentation of the review article “The Place of Development in the History of Psychology and Cognitive Science” by Gabriella Airenti (Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 895). In the session, we explored the foundational concepts of Piaget as well as longstanding debates such as nature vs. nurture and representationalism vs. brain function.

Part IV: Neurodiversity and Cognitive Science. Presenter: Jesse Parent.

The fourth presentation was also by Jesse Parent, and covered the role of Neurodiversity in Cognitive Science. This was a short review of a book called “Neurodiversity Studies: a new critical paradigm”. Neurodiversity covers a number of alternative frameworks for understanding human cognition, including but not limited to queer, feminist, and critical race perspectives. Such perspectives contribute not only to the diversity of views in the field, but also lead to novel intellectual trajectories.

Part V: Trajectories of Interest in Developmental Psychobiology. Presenter: Avery Lim.

Avery Lim presented on a number of possible trajectories for developmental psychobiology considered broadly. This possibility space (discussed in Part II) includes building off of the study of phenomenology such as developmental critical periods or computational models of psychophysiology. A number of open questions were also posed that motivated our discussions in Part VI.

Part VI: Open Discussion!

If you are interested in discussing these topics further, you might be interested in joining the Orthogonal Lab Slack or the Computational Critical Periods Discord. You can also catch Saturday Morning NeuroSim weekly on YouTube, or get in contact to get on our mailing list and join in person.

Silver Linings of COVID-19

PLoS headquarters when most of its staff is working remotely (click to enlarge).

A Brady Bunch pun on remote work from our friends at Numenta (click to enlarge).

This potentially tasteless title brings to mind the positive elements of canceling classes, academic conferences, and workplace meetings: the ability to do these activities virtually. Among my current projects, I am involved in a number of working groups that are entirely virtual. These group utilize Zoom and Google Meet to give talks and hold meetings, with Github, Google Docs, and a host of other tools to manage contributions and research products (papers, talks, social media posts). This might be called the "Zoom/Slack" paradigm. Below is a Twitter thread from a Sloan Foundation program officer that asks for thoughts on alternatives to this standard.

Potential support for people collaborating outside the Zoom/Slack paradigm (click to enlarge).

In 2014, I posted on a concept called a theory hackathon, which was held as a hybrid physical and virtual event. The idea is to define and work on problems that are best solved in teams where not all members can meet live. But online meetings are evolving beyond awkward encounters and technical glitches. Often, live physical meetings are meant to cement social ties. Indeed, below is an informal survey that asks this very question.

Why are live events (as opposed to virtual) so important (click to enlarge)? 

In general, live physical conferences seem to be useful for social connection. Revisiting the tweet from Josh Greenberg, perhaps what is needed aside from virtual meeting spaces and file exchange/ chat functionality is a frictionless social platform. This could be conventional social media, or more likely a virtual reality platform integrated with live video/version controlled file exchange/chat capabilities.

Virtual meetings and virtual work are not without their own rhythm and customs. Aside from the potential for social disconnection, it also poses a challenge for personal habituation and ultimately productivity. Below is a link to a Twitter thread that gives tips for meeting virtually for people who are unaccustomed to doing so.

Online meeting tips from Mozilla Open Leaders (click to enlarge).

Carpentries-style tips for synchronous online meetings (click to enlarge).

There are also tips for working from home more generally. As with virtual meetings, capacity to work remotely has been accelerated in the age of social media [1]. The link below gives tips about working from home as an adjustment from working in a large office or public place. Generally, virtual work does require a change in expectations, from dealing with technical glitches to dealing with gaps in social presence [2].

Tips on adjusting to working at home (click to enlarge).

Well-being while working from home (download) (click to enlarge).

Draft workbook on how to host an online conference (click to enlarge).

Online conference are more than simply scaling up virtual meetings. There is a method to conducting and organizing online conferences [3], and there are a number of options regarding the medium. Returning to the issue of greater social connectivity in virtual meeting, one solution is to hold the conference in a virtual world such as Second Life. In this type of meeting, you are able to meet other people as avatars, and even interact with the venue itself. Below are two examples of my experiences with Second Life academic events in the past, one being a continuing lecture series called Embryo Physics, and the other a conference called Simulation and Second Life.

Tour of the Embryo Physics Course @ Silver Bog, Second Life (click to enlarge).

My avatar at the Simulation and Second Life conference, 2007 (click to enlarge).

As a bonus, there is a new agent-based model of COVID-19 transmission created by Paul Smaldino and implemented in NetLogo. This model demonstrates the efficacy of social distancing (hence the resurgent interest in working virtually).

Discussion of COVID-19 transmission model as a Twitter thread (click to enlarge).

Be sure to also check out the Living Computation Foundation's "Pandemic in a Box"! Click to enlarge.

NOTES:
[1] Williams, A. (2017). How the Rise of Social Media Fostered a Culture of Remote Working. Social Media Week, April 14.

[2] Oh, C.S., Bailenson, J.N., and Welch, G.F. (2018). A Systematic Review of Social Presence: Definition, Antecedents, and Implications. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, doi:10.3389/frobt.2018. 00114.

[3] Reshef, O., Aharonovich, I., Armani, A., Gigan, S., Grange, R., Kats, M.A., Sapienza, R. (2020). How to organize an online conference. arXiv, 2003.03219.

Things that Just Happened in London.....

This week, the Royal Society is hosting a workshop called "From Connectome to Behavior", hosted by the OpenWorm Foundation. A program can be found here. 

The Monday and Tuesday sessions included talks by OpenWorm senior contributors as well as mathematical, biological, and engineering researchers from around the world (including John White, a C. elegans  research legend). Fortunately, you can get a taste for the topical diversity on the OpenWorm Twitter feed, and from the screenshots below.

The Wednesday session was a day for demos and less formal talks, as evidenced by the robotics contingent showing off their latest hardware. Living worms also made an appearance!

How good is the OpenWorm simulation suite? Take a simple test: which one is the real worm, the worm on the left or the worm on the right? View the video footage and vote here.

Here is some OpenWorm-related artwork on display, designs by Matteo Farinella. 

If what you see here looks good and you would like to learn more, please get in touch with the OpenWorm community! Hope to see you soon!

Thanks to the Royal Society of London for being an excellent host!

An Infographical Survey of the Bitcoin Landscape

Josh Wardini sent me information on a new Bitcoin infographic that serves as a survey of events over the last 10 years in the world of Bitcoin development and legal regulation. Many interesting factoids in this graphic, some of which were unbeknownst to me. In the next few paragraphs, I will discuss my impressions that are brought to bear by each subset of factoids.

The relationship between blockchain and mining is an interesting one, and underscores the power of blockchain as both a data structure and a secure transaction system. Bitcoin is also its own economic system, complete with social interactions. In particular, the competitive and cooperative aspects of cryptocurrency can serve as a model for understanding the social structure of markets.

This is another interesting feature of bitcoin: the network has computational power to both unlock the value of existing blockchain as well as to create new currency. Bitcoin mining has always been a bit of a black box to me [1], but it seems as though it has potentially two roles in the bitcoin economy. In a Synthetic Daisies post from 2014, I mentioned that the supply of bitcoin is fixed (in the manner of a precious metals supply), but it turns out that it is not that simple. Of course, since then blockchain technology has become the latest hot emerging technology in a number of areas unrelated to Bitcoin and even the digital economy [2].

It turns out the computational systems (unlike people) is not all that hard to understand. However, digital currency, which is based on human systems, is much harder to understand (or at least fully appreciate). In 2013, I did a brief Synthetic Daisies mention of a flash crash on one of the main Bitcoin exchanges. There is a lot of opportunity to use blockchain and even perhaps cryptocurrency in the world of research. If ways are found to make these technologies more easily scalable, then they might be applied to many research problems involving human social systems [3].

NOTES:

[1] So I sought out a few introductory materials on Bitcoin mining to clarify what I did not know: 

a) startbitcoin (2016). Beginner's Guide to Mining Bitcoins. 99 Bitcoins blog, July 1.

* mining consists of discovery blocks in the blockchain data structure, the discovery of which is rewarded through a "bounty" of x bitcoins. From there, inequality emerges (or not).

b) Mining page. Bitcoin Wiki.

* the total number of blocks is agreed to by the community, as is the total amount of computational power of the network. This makes the monetary supply nominally fixed, but is not required by the technology.

c) Hashcash Algorithm page. Bitcoin Wiki.

Despite the clear metaphoric overtones, Bitcoin mining is essentially like breaking encryption in that it requires a massive amount of computing power thrown at a computationally hard problem, but is also has elements of an artificial life model (e.g. competition for blockchain elements).

Water-cooled rigs probably maximize your investment margin....

[2] Of course, there has been innovation in the use of blockchain for Bitcoin and more general cryptocurrency transactions. For more, please see:

Portegys, T.E. (2017). Coinspermia: a cryptocurrency unchained. Working Paper, ResearchGate, doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.33317.91360.

Brock, A. (2016). Beyond Blockchain: simple scalable cryptocurrencies. Metacurrency project blog, March 31.

[3] A few potential examples:

a) Data Management. 1  2

b) Alternative forms of social exchange.

c) Smart contracts.

d) Peer-to-peer cloud storage.

e) Electronic health records.

Reaction to the Future, part infinity

Alvin Toffler, futurist and author of Future Shock and The Third Wave, died recently at the age of 87. Future Shock and The Third Wave [1] were favorite books of mine when I was in High School, and contains a lot of unexplored themes. The book's main argument was that rapid technological change is accompanied by a number of negative social effects, including reactionary political movements and collective psychocultural responses. As the rate and scope of technological change has increased [2], this shock to human society has become more acute [3]. The Thrid Wave was more directly related to cultural change, and assumed that major observed  transitions in cultural evolution [4] required profound shifts in sociology, economics, and psychology.

We can see this effect in our own society, particularly with respect to the economy of mind. As a cultural trend, more young people are pursuing a life of creative and/or mental productivity [5]. While some of this productivity is tangible (see the contemporary focus on applications of University research),  In particular, there is a strain of austerity thinking [6] that has arisen since 2008 which views intellectual expertise more generally and academic activity more specifically as a superfluous fraud. Since many of these pursuits require public (government) funding and/or provide no immediate tangible return, there is ideological bias at play as well. More generally, future shock can manifest itself as a revolt against modernity.

The blogger Drugmonkey, advancing the Mellon Doctrine (among other types of reactionary thinking) in the realm of biomedical science. 

Don't be a neo-reactionary! Hint: you don't need to appeal to religion to take this point of view.

The legacy of Toffler's ideas have gotten a bit muddled [7], and in exposed one of the problems with futurism: namely, it is hard to discern solid predictions from quasi-religious pronouncements. The unfortunate event of Toffler's death also coincides with the 50th Anniversary of the first episode of Star Trek (circa 1966). Star Trek's prime directive is an interesting detail of the Starfleet Academy rulebook consistent with Toffler's argument. The prime directive is more directly related to cultural evolution, and states that Starfleet cannot interfere in the normal trajectory of a given culture's development [8]. It is not clear how this works in practice, however, since mere cultural contact can change the trajectory of cultural evolution more than simple exposure to various foreign technologies [9]. On the other hand, if they are adopted, the introduction of single tools or cultural practices can have profound effects on a culture's trajectory.

This concept will take a long time to become culturally consistent. How long? Probably much longer than predicted by Gene Roddenbery (creator of Star Trek).

Some people who might argue that Toffler and Roddenbery are simply products of their era (the 20th century, a period of rapid technological change). Their views on the outcomes of change (technological advancement and modern cultural mores) are biased towards a historical positivism. In other words, progressive technological change is inevitable, even if we mediate this path to eventual enlightenment. Yet this view ignores the basic outlines of historical complexity -- that cultural and technological complexity does tend to increase, even if the process is painful, chaotic, and uneven [10].


NOTES:
[1] Toffler, A.   Future Shock. Random House, 1970 AND Toffler, A.   The Third Wave. Bantam Books, 1980.

[2] this is not necessarily equivalent to the rate of innovation, but rather has to do with the dynamics of technology adoption. For those of you who are familiar with early period (pre-2005) Wired magazine, ideological constructions around the term "neo-Luddite" characterizes the cultural aspect of this effect. For more, please see: Katz, J.   Return of the Luddites. Wired, June 1, 1995.

[3] this can be observational (such as noticing the preponderance of payphones in an several-decades old movie) or more profound (such as automation-related job losses).

[4] the major transitions of cultural evolution may or may not result from directional trends in cultural complexity.

[5] AKA The "yuccie" manifesto. For more, please see: Infante, D.   The hipster is dead, and you might not like who comes next. Mashable, June 09, 2015.

[6] Austerity thinking is associated with an obsession with debt which is underlain by a number of cultural and epistemic biases. There are a number of cultural antecedents that stress the connections between debt and morality, while most if not all cultural traditions are ill-equipped to deal with the logic and technical details of modern economics and finance. This latter point (an incompatibility between cultural traditions and advanced technology) was addressed in the book "Technopoly" by Neil Postman. A similar conceptual gap is also seen amongst popular responses to technologies such as genetic modification, which comes into conflict with many traditional cultural themes involving cleanliness and purity.

[7] There is a fascinating political subtext to how Toffler's ideas played out in society, namely his association with Newt Gingrich and anti-neo-luddite politics in the 1990s. Not particularly in line with Toffler's own views, but definitely a study in historical context. For more, please see: Murphy, T. Newt's New-Age Love Gurus. Mother Jones, January 30, 2012.

[8] For one interesting dissent on the optimality of the prime directive, please see: Clint, E.   The Prime Directive: Star Trek’s doctrine of moral laziness. Skeptic Ink blog, November 4, 2012.

[9] This statement is consistent with a process called "trans-cultural diffusion". For more, please see. Albrecht, K.   Trans-cultural diffusion. September 13, 2013.

[10] The essential lesson from the emerging field of cliodynamics. For more, please see: Turchin, P.   Arise 'cliodynamics'. Nature, 454, 34-35 (2008).

Thought (Memetic) Soup: November edition

This content is cross-posted to Tumbld Thoughts. Here are a few short observations on the state of the world and data, circa Summer 2014. Haven't gotten around to cross-posting these yet. The meta-theme is social disruption, evolutionary change, and economic dynamics, in spite of ideonational bias. These include Disruption du jour (I), Satire Makes it Doubly Skewed (II), and Ideonational Skew - Satire = Epistemic Closure? (III).

I. Disruption du jour

Is the idea of disruptive innovation a useful concept, or is it largely a misapplied buzzword. In the original definition of "creative destruction", Joseph Schumpeter described a process of innovation that resembled an avalanche or an earthquake. For example, most innovations do not reshape their respective industries, but a few key innovations (born out of creative ferment) do.

The modern notion of disruptive innovation does not make the distinction between the effects of innovation in different industries, nor are all so-called "disruptions" equally as valuable. Schumpeter's model of disruptive innovation resembles a power law, while the modern conception of disruptive innovation argues that transformative changes are ubiquitous. Here are some readings on the myth and controversies surrounding the concept:

Lepore, J.   The Disruption Machine. New Yorker, June 23 (2014).

* a critique of the "disruption" industry.

Bennett, D.   The Innovator's New Clothes: Is Disruption a Failed Model? Bloomberg Businessweek, June 18 (2014).

* perhaps Lepore is right -- disruption for disruption's sake is not a viable model of economic change.

Bennett, D.   Clayton Christensen Responds to New Yorker Takedown of 'Disruptive Innovation'. Bloomberg Businessweek, June 20 (2014).


* a rebuttal to the Lepore article from the modern "disruption" guru.

II. Satire Makes it Doubly Skewed

Two (intentionally) skewed views on Evolution [1, 2]: God does not do art, and monkeys still exist. Or something like that. Anyways, here is a sampling of creationism satire from Summer 2014.

[1] Pliny the In-Between   Theistic evolution. Evolving Perspectives blog, July (2014).

[2] Why There are Still Monkey (fake book in the Dummies series). Timothy McVeins Twitter post, June 20 (2014).

III. Ideonational Skew - Satire = Epistemic Closure?

Statistical conspiracy theory? Here is a link to John Williams' Shadowstats site and (appropriately) three readings [1-3] that critique the overall approach. For example, in one reading, it is suggested that the "shadow" in the Shadowstats name consists of an inappropriate modeling methodology.

[1] Aziz   The Trouble with Shadowstats. Azizonomics, June 1 (2013).

[2] Krugman, P.   Always Inflation Somewhere. Conscience of a Liberal blog, July 19 (2014).

[3] Hiltzik, M.   A new right-wing claim: Obama must be lying about inflation. The Economy Hub, Los Angeles Times, July 23 (2014).