6 ms·

I'm confused. This article doesn't say anything. It makes no points and has no insight. "There's a lot of data in neuroscience?" Is that the message? An unusual

I'm confused. This article doesn't say anything. It makes no points and has no insight. "There's a lot of data in neuroscience?" Is that the message? An unusual number of Nautilus articles frontpage HN like this one, where there doesn't seem to be any value in the article itself. What is going on?

friendlybus 7y ago
The message is there are some potential new workflows. Revelation is running out of steam, processing huge quantities of data and relationships between nodes is the new hotness.
Balgair 7y ago
It's that the author is undergoing a 'crisis', not that the field is. The title is clever, not descriptive. More broadly, there is a crisis. Our statistical methods/understandings are not working out in these large N-dimensional data sets, at least for the researchers that were raised on excel and not numpy. Aside: I'm surprised that the FAANGs haven't revolutionized statistics yet. When you have 'phase changes' where a LOT more data becomes available, you get to see very low probability events. It's happened in psych, in bio, in physics most famously, in politics, in economics, etc. We have a LOT more data now in for statistical use, but it's still just Poisson distributions and t-tests. What gives?
- johnc1231 7y ago
  It might vary from field to field, but in genetics Excel is a complete nonstarter, and even numpy is not going to work on sufficiently large datasets. The project I work on, http://hail.is http://hail.is, was started to help deal with this.
  - dang 7y ago
    It doesn't look like that project has been discussed on HN before. One of you should definitely post it! If you email hn@ycombinator.com we can give you some tips on how to do that, and possibly also put the submission in the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380).
- garmaine 7y ago
  > Aside: I'm surprised that the FAANGs haven't revolutionized statistics yet. What does that even mean?
  - Balgair 7y ago
    Like, with QM, we had the time and equipment to start pointing radium at some gold foil. We came up with some surprising results. With economics, we finally got enough data in to say that people really are not rational at all. With biology, we finally got the time and equipment to poke audio amplifiers into rabbit brains and some strange stuff happened. Etc. Similarly, with all this 'big data', I would have guessed that we would have come up with something kinda like that. Finally, we have all this stuff coming in. It's all fairly well captured, fairly well correlated, and fairly valuable so you can pay people to just screw around in the labs and see what drops out.
    - garmaine 7y ago
      One of those stands out as different from the others: statistics. It's a branch of math. It's fundamental. We've proven its properties to be comprehensive, such that any other formulation with the same basic axioms would do the same thing. It's not like when we got a lot of experience gathering physical data we suddenly realized we were doing integrals and derivatives wrong.
      - Balgair 7y ago
        I mean sort-of? Math is a brach of logic, sure, but the computer has acted like a microscope for math already. We can more easily check our conjectures and see if they hold true. Also, we've been able to communicate better, so that has helped out math as well. Even though math is 'above' us little humans, the day-to-day work of mathematicians has been helped out a lot, even in the small ways of not having to lug your mortal-coil through the library stacks. So, with all this big data, I'd have guessed that we could have seen more edge cases with statistics. Little areas where someone said 'huh that's funny'.
    - asdff 7y ago
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  I used to think corporations were where things get invented. It seemed that way to me, looking at Microsoft and Netscape and Apple and SGI growing up. And that in academia, people only made toys, and only got to the earliest stage of invention: ideas partly evaluated. But my experience in software companies has been that in a corporation you are a slave to convention. Because even if you innovate in your domain, that innovation will be invisible to the rest of the corporation. Because when they look at it, they will evaluate it by asking which conventions it follows. But inventions by definition don’t follow conventions. What people like is to see conventions followed, and the results of that. It reads as progress. Now I think it’s primarily artists who invent. But it’s hard to much production as a solo artist. So those who succeed are artists who split their time between doing their work in secret and public ally playing the game of performing conventions in a corporate body. If you split your time that way, you will be praised for applying convention and then periodically your secret art will appear as a magic trick and delight people who are already happy with you. Without the convention theater, the art will just strike them as confirmation that you’re out touch with the organization. The same is true in academia really. It’s just a different set of convention theater, around publishing rather than sales.
nottrobin 7y ago
Possibly the point they're trying to make is similar to this article from a week or so ago about theoretical physics: https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-50-years-auid-1292 https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-... Namely that the field seems to be doubling down on increasingly hard computational problems, with deminishing returns, rather than generating wholly new avenues of exploration or insights. Of course, I've no idea if this is a valid complaint about either neuroscience or theoretical physics.

friendlybus 7y ago

The message is there are some potential new workflows. Revelation is running out of steam, processing huge quantities of data and relationships between nodes is the new hotness.

Balgair 7y ago

It's that the author is undergoing a 'crisis', not that the field is. The title is clever, not descriptive. More broadly, there is a crisis. Our statistical methods/understandings are not working out in these large N-dimensional data sets, at least for the researchers that were raised on excel and not numpy. Aside: I'm surprised that the FAANGs haven't revolutionized statistics yet. When you have 'phase changes' where a LOT more data becomes available, you get to see very low probability events. It's happened in psych, in bio, in physics most famously, in politics, in economics, etc. We have a LOT more data now in for statistical use, but it's still just Poisson distributions and t-tests. What gives?

johnc1231 7y ago
It might vary from field to field, but in genetics Excel is a complete nonstarter, and even numpy is not going to work on sufficiently large datasets. The project I work on, http://hail.is http://hail.is, was started to help deal with this.
- dang 7y ago
  It doesn't look like that project has been discussed on HN before. One of you should definitely post it! If you email hn@ycombinator.com we can give you some tips on how to do that, and possibly also put the submission in the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380).
garmaine 7y ago
> Aside: I'm surprised that the FAANGs haven't revolutionized statistics yet. What does that even mean?
- Balgair 7y ago
  Like, with QM, we had the time and equipment to start pointing radium at some gold foil. We came up with some surprising results. With economics, we finally got enough data in to say that people really are not rational at all. With biology, we finally got the time and equipment to poke audio amplifiers into rabbit brains and some strange stuff happened. Etc. Similarly, with all this 'big data', I would have guessed that we would have come up with something kinda like that. Finally, we have all this stuff coming in. It's all fairly well captured, fairly well correlated, and fairly valuable so you can pay people to just screw around in the labs and see what drops out.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    One of those stands out as different from the others: statistics. It's a branch of math. It's fundamental. We've proven its properties to be comprehensive, such that any other formulation with the same basic axioms would do the same thing. It's not like when we got a lot of experience gathering physical data we suddenly realized we were doing integrals and derivatives wrong.
    - Balgair 7y ago
      I mean sort-of? Math is a brach of logic, sure, but the computer has acted like a microscope for math already. We can more easily check our conjectures and see if they hold true. Also, we've been able to communicate better, so that has helped out math as well. Even though math is 'above' us little humans, the day-to-day work of mathematicians has been helped out a lot, even in the small ways of not having to lug your mortal-coil through the library stacks. So, with all this big data, I'd have guessed that we could have seen more edge cases with statistics. Little areas where someone said 'huh that's funny'.
  - asdff 7y ago
erikpukinskis 7y ago
I used to think corporations were where things get invented. It seemed that way to me, looking at Microsoft and Netscape and Apple and SGI growing up. And that in academia, people only made toys, and only got to the earliest stage of invention: ideas partly evaluated. But my experience in software companies has been that in a corporation you are a slave to convention. Because even if you innovate in your domain, that innovation will be invisible to the rest of the corporation. Because when they look at it, they will evaluate it by asking which conventions it follows. But inventions by definition don’t follow conventions. What people like is to see conventions followed, and the results of that. It reads as progress. Now I think it’s primarily artists who invent. But it’s hard to much production as a solo artist. So those who succeed are artists who split their time between doing their work in secret and public ally playing the game of performing conventions in a corporate body. If you split your time that way, you will be praised for applying convention and then periodically your secret art will appear as a magic trick and delight people who are already happy with you. Without the convention theater, the art will just strike them as confirmation that you’re out touch with the organization. The same is true in academia really. It’s just a different set of convention theater, around publishing rather than sales.

nottrobin 7y ago

Possibly the point they're trying to make is similar to this article from a week or so ago about theoretical physics: https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-50-years-auid-1292 https://iai.tv/articles/why-physics-has-made-no-progress-in-... Namely that the field seems to be doubling down on increasingly hard computational problems, with deminishing returns, rather than generating wholly new avenues of exploration or insights. Of course, I've no idea if this is a valid complaint about either neuroscience or theoretical physics.