p-hacking: when a child asks multiple parents for permission until they get a positive result.
Sam Gershman
2,686 posts
Sam Gershman
@gershbrain
Professor, Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University
- My 3-year-old daughter said she wanted to be a professor, so I asked her what professors do. "Talk to each other, drink wine, and put trees on their heads." Sounds about right.
- Everyone racking their brains about explainable AI should have a look at the cognitive science literature on how people explain their own behavior. People have very detailed explanations. The only problem is that these explanations can be very wrong!
- Coming in October! What Makes Us Smart: The Computational Logic of Human Cognition
- I was thinking about writing a paper called "What the hell is the insula doing?" but then realized I could write this paper about literally any brain region.
- I was asked to present some advice to young investigators. Here are my slides. Happy to hear suggestions! gershmanlab.webfactional.com/docs/advice_yo…
- As a reviewer for NeurIPS, I'm surprised that no reviewers want to give high ratings to any papers. Even those I gave an 8 or 9 to, nobody else gave higher than 6. Why is everyone so negative? A good paper doesn't have to be perfect as long as it's making progress.
- Before you write a review of a paper in which you say "It's mostly meh" (a direct quote), stop to consider that you might be talking to a grad student who spent years on the project and is now internalizing the social norms of their profession.
- Replying to @gershbrainNature Communications charges $5890/article and has published 159 articles in the last 7 days. Much of that is paid by federal grants. This means that the money spent on *one* journal over the course of 2 weeks could support an entire graduate cohort for a year.
- Wired is using something called "hype", a concept from quantum mechanics, to confuse familiar concepts with cutting-edge research.Stitch Fix is using something called eigenvector decomposition, a concept from quantum mechanics, to tease apart the overlapping “notes” in an individual’s style. Using physics, the team can better understand the complexities of the clients’ style minds. wired.trib.al/IvWQkYM
- I told my 3yo that anything can break with enough force and he asked me if holes can break.
- Replying to @gershbrainNeedless to say, I told my kids to preregister their design and correct for multiple parents.
- People sometimes ask me about reading suggestions for cognitive science and related topics, so I thought I would put together a (highly subjective) annotated reading list: gershmanlab.webfactional.com/docs/Getting_s… I might expand this later since I'm sure I forgot some things.
- I don't understand "data available upon request". Isn't that actually more work for the authors? Wouldn't it be easier to document it once and put it somewhere on the internet rather than having to respond to e-mails long after you've forgotten where you've even put the data?
