How are Rubin’s/Pearl’s causal inference frameworks and RL paradigms not formal logical systems with limitations? Why is someone like me, a rando C-student computationalist outsider, asking these questions. Math/CS insiders really suck at rudimentary and healthy contrarianism. It is embarrassing.

The AI bubble further inflates. What is up with neurotech startups that just take some scientific hypothesis name and plaster it to some arbitrary agent wrapper to milk investors for millions.

All I am getting from this is that mathematical understanding in the context of intelligence is so poorly defined that OpenAI and Anthropic are milking it for social brownie points and laughing in our faces like some sick joke. openai.com/index/ten-ad...

Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

OpenAI shares new results on long-standing open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science, including advances in geometry, cryptography, and complexity.

openai.com

They dissolved departments to get around the tenure contracts. We need a new system of doing science. This was my undergrad backup if my U of I app didn’t work out. www.wbez.org/education/20...

Illinois Institute of Technology cuts 160 faculty and staff just before fall semester

University officials say finances have taken a hit from declines in research funding and foreign student enrollment. Faculty say leaders’ slow response and lack of transparency have deepened the crisi...

wbez.org

So P(behavior|do(wave)) is basically an “ephapse on” counterfactual. Well for I am more interested in P(spike|do(wave)) or more specifically P(spike|do(extracellular waveform)). It’s worth the labor just to stick it to the more limited mescoscale ephaptic hypothesis. neurips.cc/virtual/2025...

Anyone else immediately skeptical of this?

Leah Banellis@leahbanellis.bsky.social · 2w ago

No robust interoceptive-mental health pattern emerged: ❌ Not for cardiac 🫀 or respiratory 🫁 sensitivity. ❌ Not for perceptual precision. ❌ Not for confidence. ❌ Not for metacognitive efficiency. Bayesian analyses generally favoured the null. 💣

🤨

Leah Banellis@leahbanellis.bsky.social · 2w ago

Sensing your body (‘Interoception’) is everywhere in theories of mental health. But when we tested how well hundreds of people sensed their heart and lungs, the link to symptoms was almost nowhere to be found. 💣 🚨New @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper 🚨🎉 asks why 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

“In 2022, 10 million people competed for 35,000 railway jobs” People have no idea the scale of the fermenting bottom-up pressure for the imminent societal and democratic change across the globe. This is not an isolated movement. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/w...

India’s ‘Cockroach’ Moment

Narendra Modi caved to the demands of India’s young people — a nod to their real power.

nytimes.com

Back to the issue of illusionism. Why do physicists think the passage of time is an illusion? Makes no sense after studying neuroscience. A lot of physics doesn’t make sense after studying neuroscience.

This is impressive level punching up to hypocrisy. Never seen a single thread of tweet live rent free in the minds of AI and VC execs calling/rooting for him to get canned. GOATed.

The fact that counter-factuals have physical meaning for biological systems is fucking insane.

One thing they don’t teach you is writing a meta research program as career feedback or to give some credit this happens via osmosis of grant writing and/or privileged access to career workshops.

Sweet new review on neural traveling waves from my collaborator, Zac & pals! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Neural traveling waves in cortex: Network mechanisms and potential roles in neural computation

First discovered in anesthetized animals, neural traveling waves (nTWs) have now been observed throughout the brains of awake animals, where they infl…

sciencedirect.com

Good morning Murmuration and Blue Sky

The engineering behind GPS needs to constantly adjust for a natural speed limit on cause and effect. Assuming the same happens in the brain over trillions of small interactions/field effects, is the same correction done via innateness or error prediction or both? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_a...

Error analysis for the Global Positioning System - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Kevin Mitchell@wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Thanks to @pessoabrain.bsky.social and @thetransmitter.bsky.social for featuring our paper and to @aliyarumana.bsky.social and Peter Tse for engaging so generously with the ideas! 😊 www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

I guess the day came where my natural curiosity finally stumbled upon the relativistic effects of ephaptic coupling, if they do apply in the brain at all would be interesting. Now I see the long term dividends of UIUC’s Phys 225 and 487 courses. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefimen...

Reform begins with dissent of what is sacred. Always has been and always will be, even innovators are beholden to his rule. This means criticizing established hierarchy from within. Let’s begin with how ineffective Cold War era peer review is dealing with AI use and for-profit journal monopolies.

my biology advisor says scientists get paid to produce a product of grant proposals, and papers are commercials for those grant proposals. I guess I never thought about it like that before

This comment in this thread is what screams to me internal failure of current academic institutions. That one Rutgers neurosci prof said thought I was tone deaf and I think he was tone deaf as well so I didn’t even bother continuing the conversation. www.reddit.com/r/AskProfess...

This is interesting. “Co-evolution of self-replication and function in a digital primordial soup” arxiv.org/abs/2607.09211

Co-evolution of self-replication and function in a digital primordial soup

While traditional evolutionary algorithms hard-code reproduction, self-replication can emerge spontaneously within digital ``primordial soups''. This paper investigates the co-evolution of this emerge...

arxiv.org

Personal vendettas will unravel the whole grant system, perhaps even internationally. This is why I stopped caring about MAGA as a threat last year because the whole thing was set to collapse before MAGA. m.youtube.com/watch?v=wxN2...

Academia's Dirty Secret Is Going to Court

YouTube video by Sabine Hossenfelder

m.youtube.com

This was on my Youtube recommendation feed after watching some Charles Tilly vids. No I didn’t know but it all and a lot of things make sense now. Hopefully we get Solarpunk with NYC as the epicenter. m.youtube.com/watch?v=hgB0...

Mahmood Mamdani, "State Formation and Conflict"

YouTube video by Columbia University

m.youtube.com

Hypothesis: mesoscopic ephaptic coupling is, like any firing rate coding, statistically ambiguous and non-identifiable. Local circuits have to use context from chemical/electrotonic synapses and local ephapses to decipher where the mesoscopic ephaptic signal is coming from.

Hypothesis: This fear acts as a counterfactual that will enable us to get our crap together and act.

BWJones@bwjones.bsky.social · 3w ago

The United States of America is well into a period of extended mediocrity. This stagnation, brain drain, economic hardship by the majority of Americans, and loss of opportunity bodes ill for the future of the country. We need to start orchestrating a turnaround ASAP, or risk continued decline.

Illusionism is a cop out and bad neuroscience.

Air quality index Apple uses got maxed out today.

There is a type un-described geographically stationary migration I have been thinking about for years. It is abstract one in which folks, en masse, voluntarily commit too to social change. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_m...

Human migration - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Police charge a crowd in France expecting panic. Nobody moves. The officers are forced to retreat. Collective stillness as the most powerful form of resistance.

Hypothesis: If LLM’s suck at writing compilers they will suck at deriving biophysical laws from experimental data.