7 ms·

Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can understand systems. Those people, in t

Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can understand systems. Those people, in turn, are the ones doing this research. This is likely a large part of why our knowledge of neuroscience is largely mechanistic and without a sense of the larger picture. Compare to the invention of the perceptron, which took a joint effort between a polymathic neurophysiologist and a logician.

lamename 2y ago
I agree that the selection for memorization is high, and I've worked with many neuroscientists who cared more about biological "stamp collecting" than understanding systems. But in my experience neuroscientists have to have a solid level of systems thinking to succeed in the field. There are too many factors, related disciplines (from physics to sociology), and levels of analysis to be closed off.
orwin 2y ago
Luckily, those two different traits are learnable, so I'd guess as the field advance and mature, this will change? Honestly 'our knowledge of [X] is largely mechanistic and without a sense of the larger picture' is weirdly applicable to most scientific fields once they escaped the 'natural philosophy' designation.
- generalizations 2y ago
  I doubt it, I used the perceptron as a neuroscience-related example of what happens when we have the right people trying to put the pieces together, not just memorizing.
lazystar 2y ago
> the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can understand systems. sounds similar to the problem with tech coding interviews. ive refactored the backend orchestration software of a SaaS company's primary app and saved 24tb of RAM, while getting 300% faster spinup times for the key part of the customer app, but i bomb interviews because i panic and mix up O(n) for algorithms and forget to add obvious recursion base cases. i know i can practice that stuff and pass, its just frustrating to see folks that have zero concept of distributed systems getting hired because they succeed at this hazing ritual. but with that said, i suppose no industry or job will ever be free from "no true scottsman" gate-keeping from tenured professionals. hiring someone that potentially knows more than you puts your own job security at risk.
- godelski 2y ago
  I moved from Physics and Engineering to CS and honestly, I found the interview process very odd. It is far more involved and time consuming of a process than the interviews in other fields. In other fields, it is expected that if you can "talk the talk" you can "walk the walk." Mostly because it is really hard to talk in the right way if you don't have actual experience. Tbh, I think this is true about expertise in any domain. I don't think it is too hard to talk to a programmer about how they'd solve a problem and see the differences between a novice and a veteran. A traditional engineering interview will have a phone screen and an in person interview. Both of which they'll ask you about a problem similar to one they are working on or recently solved. They'll also typically ask you to explain a recent project of yours. The point is to see how you think and how you overcome challenges, not what you memorize. Memorization comes with repetition, so it's less important. I remember in one phone interview I was asked about something and gave a high level answer and asked if it was okay for me to grab one of the books I had sitting next to me because I earmarked that equation suspecting it would be asked. I was commended for doing so, grabbed my book, and once I reminded myself of the equation (all <<1m?) gave a much more detailed response. In a PhD level interview, you're probably going to do this and give a talk on your work. Where people ask questions about your work. IMO the tech interviews are wasteful. They aren't great at achieving their goals and are quite time consuming. General proficiency can be determined in other ways, especially with how prolific GitHub is these days. It's been explained to me that the reason for all this is due to the cost of bad hires. But all this is expensive too, since you are paying for the time of your high cost engineers all throughout this process. If the concern is that firing is so difficult, then I don't think it'd be hard to set policy where new employees are hired in under a "probationary" or "trial" status. It shouldn't take months to hire someone...
  - kenjackson 2y ago
    > I found the interview process very odd. It is far more involved and time consuming of a process than the interviews in other fields. What part is too time consuming? What you describe in the engineering interview sounds like a software engineer interview process as well.
stinos 2y ago
Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can understand systems It's not impossible for people who are good in memorization to also be good in understanding systems. Those people, in turn, are the ones doing this research. Although common, it's not quite so that only people with a pure medical background do neuroscience. All in all, having met quite some people in the field, the things you're hinting at never occurred to mee as an actual problem. My guess is because the people who actually have issues get weeded out very soon. Like: before even finishing their PhD. It's not an easy field.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  >It's not impossible for people who are good in memorization to also be good in understanding systems and it might not be "good at memorization" that's being selected, it might be "conscientiousness", one of the Big Five, and a relatively important parameter.
timr 2y ago
This is pretty true for MDs, but I don't know how true it is for PhDs. The classic meme is that MDs love organic chemistry, but they hate biochemistry [1], because one is about memorization and the other is...less so, anyway. But then again, neuroscientists do tend to love their big books of disjointed facts, so maybe it's more like medicine than I realize. I remember the one class I took on neuroscience was incredibly frustrating because of the wild extrapolations they were making from limited, low-quality data [2], that made it almost impossible to form a coherent theory of anything. [1] ...except for the Krebs cycle! Gotta memorize that thing or we'll never be able to fix broken legs! [2] "ooh, the fMRI on two people turned slightly pink! significant result!"
pepinator 2y ago
The perceptron is not such a deep concept.
tensor 2y ago
> Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can understand systems. This sounds like one of those complete bullshit memes that certain groups of people like to repeat. Very similar to tech people being "creatives" while other groups like sales are somehow not. Utter bullshit. > Compare to the invention of the perceptron, which took a joint effort between a polymathic neurophysiologist and a logician. While cross-field collaboration often yields the best insights, I hope you're not implying that computer scientists are somehow better at "understanding systems" compared to biologists. Not only are computer scientists hugely guilty of pretending that various neural networks are anything at all like the brain (they are not), its also the case that biological systems are fantastically more complicated than any computing system.
godelski 2y ago
> Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can understand systems. It isn't limited to the medical field. This is quite common in most fields. I understand testing knowledge and intelligence is an intractable problem, but I my main wish is that this would simply be acknowledged. That things like tests are _guidelines_ rather than _answers_. I believe that if we don't acknowledge the fuzziness of our measurements we become overconfident in them and simply perpetuate Goodhart's Law. There's an irony in that to be more accurate, you need to embrace the noise of the system. Noise being due to either limitations in measurements (i.e. not perfectly aligned. All measurements are proxies. This is "measurement uncertainty") or due to the stochastic nature of what you're testing. Rejecting the noise only makes you less accurate, not more.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  if something happens comprehensively across fields, it's likely to be a good idea. the idea that one guy who interviewed people "properly" could assemble a team that was better at the job across the board and disrupt that industry, and other such guys across other industries would disrupt those industries, seems a little farfetched.
  - godelski 2y ago
    > if something happens comprehensively across fields, it's likely to be a good idea. I don't have high confidence that this is likely. I've seen a lot of bad habits happen simply because "that's how X does it." Which often misses a lot of context. Those things matter, and often matter a lot. Not to mention that information is always passed via a game of telephone [0]. This is related to "trust, but verify". If a big player is doing something it is worth looking at to see if it's a good idea for you. Same with when something is popular. But you have to be careful too. It's easy to miss context or small details that make a big difference. As an example, Google has a surplus of high quality candidates. Any arbitrary filter is helpful to them as they just need to down select. So a highly noisy process (i.e. random with a small bias) will yield good results for them. You'll even MEASURE positive results! This isn't necessarily (might be, might not be) true for anyone who isn't big tech or highly bureaucratic. (Same is true for college admissions) It's important to remember that big players don't maintain their status simply because no other can out innovate. Rather momentum is a bitch. It can make up for a lack of innovation and still out compete. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game
dillydogg 2y ago
This hasn't been my experience at all in medicine and science. I perhaps have more exposure to both science and medicine than most because I have an MD-PhD. Perhaps at the medical student level there is truth to this, but the physicians who are conducting clinical research are often at academic centers where they go specifically for the opportunity to do research. Academic centers almost universally pay much less than private hospitals. In my area, physicians make double salary in private practice over academia. And this all ignores that the authors are PhD scientists. So I'm confused how this is categorized as "medical field" in the first place. I found that the ability to memorize is essentially useless in PhD level biological science (I studied immunology, so I can't necessarily speak to other fields), and it is all systems level conceptualizing. I think this is a team with many talented people who came together to do their best. But I'm sure I'm naive. There seems to have been a lot of new interest and debate about what is happening in the glymphatics sphere.
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago
  I don't know how neuroscientists fare wrt knowledge of biology, chemistry, etc. that is relevant to their field, but the real problem is when they wade into philosophical waters without the requisite philosophical chops or background to do so [0]. Others can be guilty of similar sins, of course, and since the early 20th century, when philosophy and the classical liberal arts in general evaporated from school curricula, scientists have generally been quite poor at this, despite unwittingly treading into subject matters they are ill-prepared to discuss. Compare how a Schroedinger or a Heisenberg[2] talk about philosophical stuff, and then look at someone like Krauss [3]. The former may not have been great philosophical thinkers, but there is a huge difference in basic philosophical education and awareness, and these are not just isolated cases. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/01/against-neurobabble.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/01/against-neurobabble... [1] https://a.co/d/1RMG66X https://a.co/d/1RMG66X [2] https://a.co/d/4lrBokZ https://a.co/d/4lrBokZ [3] https://a.co/d/5qoMLqU https://a.co/d/5qoMLqU
  - dillydogg 2y ago
    Sure, I agree that, when neuroscientists begin to wade into the realm of consciousness etc., they are wandering into a world they are unequipped to discuss. In my experience with my neurobiology colleagues, they are pretty dialed into their neurocircuits. I do have qualms with their experimental models on the behavioral end as a non-neuroscientist. To really answer your question, I think I need to talk about the books modern day neuroscientists are writing and I have to say I simply agree. I think these self-help kind of books are not good! Too bad they are so easily propagated in the media.
Panzer04 2y ago
I don't really believe that. The real issue is that basic science in medicine is hard. You can't test a human in ways that might cause harm, which really limits how much investigation we can do. Ethics and morals also restrict what can be done to animals to investigate the basics on them too, though admittedly a lot of the time things just don't carry over anyway. That being said, I think the rise of "evidence-based" medicine is also causing issues. It gets used as a cop-out to avoid thinking about the mechanics of what is actually happening in an injury. While this is certainly a good things for treatments where A or B superiority is uncertain, there's a lot of cases where I think an RCT just doesn't really make sense. A pet example: I broke my ankle recently, and this dug into the literature and common practice. A significant number of people will get end-stage arthritis a few years after "simple" ankle fractures and often the doctors have no idea why. At the same time, an important part of ankle anatomy is often left unfixed (the deltoid ligament) because a few studies back in the 80s found it wasn't necessary to fix it. The bone that serves an equivalent purpose IS fixed (if broken) though. Mechanically, they restrict the ankle joint and prevent it moving in certain directions. When presented with biomechanical reasons for fixing it, and concurrent common poor outcomes for some patients, I've seen the response from surgeons thusly - "it's not supported by evidence" presumably because there isn't an RCT demonstrating definitive superiority. So much of medicine and treatment is literally just hearsay and whatever your surgeon happened to read last week. As a whole the standard is rising, but so much research is so disjoint, disorganised and inconsistent that doctors often have no definitive guidance. It's probably more of a problem in some fields (like ortho) than others, but its still surprising when you see it yourself.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > So much of medicine and treatment is literally just hearsay and whatever your surgeon happened to read last week. I think that you can replace "medicine" with "technology" and "surgeon" with "programmer". Something that I don't know about medicine into highly advanced countries: How do surgeons learn about the latest techniques? I assume they subscribe to some key industry/professional journals and/or go to annual conferences to discuss specific techniques. I know that dentists do it because I have asked multiple dentists about it. (In my life, the type of doctor that I visit the most often is a dentist for twice-annual checkups, so I see regular improvements to care and treatment.) Finally, I doubt that most surgeons would agree with your statement.
HelloMcFly 2y ago
> Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information Easy to agree with > to the exclusion of people who can understand systems On what basis do you draw this conclusion? I'm not saying the field is full of systems thinkers, but I have no evidence that they are at higher or lower concentration than many other skilled disciplines. Many of the specialties within medicine require systems thinking to be effective physicians.

lamename 2y ago

I agree that the selection for memorization is high, and I've worked with many neuroscientists who cared more about biological "stamp collecting" than understanding systems. But in my experience neuroscientists have to have a solid level of systems thinking to succeed in the field. There are too many factors, related disciplines (from physics to sociology), and levels of analysis to be closed off.

orwin 2y ago

Luckily, those two different traits are learnable, so I'd guess as the field advance and mature, this will change? Honestly 'our knowledge of [X] is largely mechanistic and without a sense of the larger picture' is weirdly applicable to most scientific fields once they escaped the 'natural philosophy' designation.

generalizations 2y ago
I doubt it, I used the perceptron as a neuroscience-related example of what happens when we have the right people trying to put the pieces together, not just memorizing.

lazystar 2y ago

> the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can understand systems. sounds similar to the problem with tech coding interviews. ive refactored the backend orchestration software of a SaaS company's primary app and saved 24tb of RAM, while getting 300% faster spinup times for the key part of the customer app, but i bomb interviews because i panic and mix up O(n) for algorithms and forget to add obvious recursion base cases. i know i can practice that stuff and pass, its just frustrating to see folks that have zero concept of distributed systems getting hired because they succeed at this hazing ritual. but with that said, i suppose no industry or job will ever be free from "no true scottsman" gate-keeping from tenured professionals. hiring someone that potentially knows more than you puts your own job security at risk.

godelski 2y ago
I moved from Physics and Engineering to CS and honestly, I found the interview process very odd. It is far more involved and time consuming of a process than the interviews in other fields. In other fields, it is expected that if you can "talk the talk" you can "walk the walk." Mostly because it is really hard to talk in the right way if you don't have actual experience. Tbh, I think this is true about expertise in any domain. I don't think it is too hard to talk to a programmer about how they'd solve a problem and see the differences between a novice and a veteran. A traditional engineering interview will have a phone screen and an in person interview. Both of which they'll ask you about a problem similar to one they are working on or recently solved. They'll also typically ask you to explain a recent project of yours. The point is to see how you think and how you overcome challenges, not what you memorize. Memorization comes with repetition, so it's less important. I remember in one phone interview I was asked about something and gave a high level answer and asked if it was okay for me to grab one of the books I had sitting next to me because I earmarked that equation suspecting it would be asked. I was commended for doing so, grabbed my book, and once I reminded myself of the equation (all <<1m?) gave a much more detailed response. In a PhD level interview, you're probably going to do this and give a talk on your work. Where people ask questions about your work. IMO the tech interviews are wasteful. They aren't great at achieving their goals and are quite time consuming. General proficiency can be determined in other ways, especially with how prolific GitHub is these days. It's been explained to me that the reason for all this is due to the cost of bad hires. But all this is expensive too, since you are paying for the time of your high cost engineers all throughout this process. If the concern is that firing is so difficult, then I don't think it'd be hard to set policy where new employees are hired in under a "probationary" or "trial" status. It shouldn't take months to hire someone...
- kenjackson 2y ago
  > I found the interview process very odd. It is far more involved and time consuming of a process than the interviews in other fields. What part is too time consuming? What you describe in the engineering interview sounds like a software engineer interview process as well.

stinos 2y ago

Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can understand systems It's not impossible for people who are good in memorization to also be good in understanding systems. Those people, in turn, are the ones doing this research. Although common, it's not quite so that only people with a pure medical background do neuroscience. All in all, having met quite some people in the field, the things you're hinting at never occurred to mee as an actual problem. My guess is because the people who actually have issues get weeded out very soon. Like: before even finishing their PhD. It's not an easy field.

fsckboy 2y ago
>It's not impossible for people who are good in memorization to also be good in understanding systems and it might not be "good at memorization" that's being selected, it might be "conscientiousness", one of the Big Five, and a relatively important parameter.

timr 2y ago

This is pretty true for MDs, but I don't know how true it is for PhDs. The classic meme is that MDs love organic chemistry, but they hate biochemistry [1], because one is about memorization and the other is...less so, anyway. But then again, neuroscientists do tend to love their big books of disjointed facts, so maybe it's more like medicine than I realize. I remember the one class I took on neuroscience was incredibly frustrating because of the wild extrapolations they were making from limited, low-quality data [2], that made it almost impossible to form a coherent theory of anything. [1] ...except for the Krebs cycle! Gotta memorize that thing or we'll never be able to fix broken legs! [2] "ooh, the fMRI on two people turned slightly pink! significant result!"

pepinator 2y ago

The perceptron is not such a deep concept.

tensor 2y ago

> Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can understand systems. This sounds like one of those complete bullshit memes that certain groups of people like to repeat. Very similar to tech people being "creatives" while other groups like sales are somehow not. Utter bullshit. > Compare to the invention of the perceptron, which took a joint effort between a polymathic neurophysiologist and a logician. While cross-field collaboration often yields the best insights, I hope you're not implying that computer scientists are somehow better at "understanding systems" compared to biologists. Not only are computer scientists hugely guilty of pretending that various neural networks are anything at all like the brain (they are not), its also the case that biological systems are fantastically more complicated than any computing system.

godelski 2y ago

> Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can understand systems. It isn't limited to the medical field. This is quite common in most fields. I understand testing knowledge and intelligence is an intractable problem, but I my main wish is that this would simply be acknowledged. That things like tests are _guidelines_ rather than _answers_. I believe that if we don't acknowledge the fuzziness of our measurements we become overconfident in them and simply perpetuate Goodhart's Law. There's an irony in that to be more accurate, you need to embrace the noise of the system. Noise being due to either limitations in measurements (i.e. not perfectly aligned. All measurements are proxies. This is "measurement uncertainty") or due to the stochastic nature of what you're testing. Rejecting the noise only makes you less accurate, not more.

fsckboy 2y ago
if something happens comprehensively across fields, it's likely to be a good idea. the idea that one guy who interviewed people "properly" could assemble a team that was better at the job across the board and disrupt that industry, and other such guys across other industries would disrupt those industries, seems a little farfetched.
- godelski 2y ago
  > if something happens comprehensively across fields, it's likely to be a good idea. I don't have high confidence that this is likely. I've seen a lot of bad habits happen simply because "that's how X does it." Which often misses a lot of context. Those things matter, and often matter a lot. Not to mention that information is always passed via a game of telephone [0]. This is related to "trust, but verify". If a big player is doing something it is worth looking at to see if it's a good idea for you. Same with when something is popular. But you have to be careful too. It's easy to miss context or small details that make a big difference. As an example, Google has a surplus of high quality candidates. Any arbitrary filter is helpful to them as they just need to down select. So a highly noisy process (i.e. random with a small bias) will yield good results for them. You'll even MEASURE positive results! This isn't necessarily (might be, might not be) true for anyone who isn't big tech or highly bureaucratic. (Same is true for college admissions) It's important to remember that big players don't maintain their status simply because no other can out innovate. Rather momentum is a bitch. It can make up for a lack of innovation and still out compete. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game

dillydogg 2y ago

This hasn't been my experience at all in medicine and science. I perhaps have more exposure to both science and medicine than most because I have an MD-PhD. Perhaps at the medical student level there is truth to this, but the physicians who are conducting clinical research are often at academic centers where they go specifically for the opportunity to do research. Academic centers almost universally pay much less than private hospitals. In my area, physicians make double salary in private practice over academia. And this all ignores that the authors are PhD scientists. So I'm confused how this is categorized as "medical field" in the first place. I found that the ability to memorize is essentially useless in PhD level biological science (I studied immunology, so I can't necessarily speak to other fields), and it is all systems level conceptualizing. I think this is a team with many talented people who came together to do their best. But I'm sure I'm naive. There seems to have been a lot of new interest and debate about what is happening in the glymphatics sphere.

lo_zamoyski 2y ago
I don't know how neuroscientists fare wrt knowledge of biology, chemistry, etc. that is relevant to their field, but the real problem is when they wade into philosophical waters without the requisite philosophical chops or background to do so [0]. Others can be guilty of similar sins, of course, and since the early 20th century, when philosophy and the classical liberal arts in general evaporated from school curricula, scientists have generally been quite poor at this, despite unwittingly treading into subject matters they are ill-prepared to discuss. Compare how a Schroedinger or a Heisenberg[2] talk about philosophical stuff, and then look at someone like Krauss [3]. The former may not have been great philosophical thinkers, but there is a huge difference in basic philosophical education and awareness, and these are not just isolated cases. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/01/against-neurobabble.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/01/against-neurobabble... [1] https://a.co/d/1RMG66X https://a.co/d/1RMG66X [2] https://a.co/d/4lrBokZ https://a.co/d/4lrBokZ [3] https://a.co/d/5qoMLqU https://a.co/d/5qoMLqU
- dillydogg 2y ago
  Sure, I agree that, when neuroscientists begin to wade into the realm of consciousness etc., they are wandering into a world they are unequipped to discuss. In my experience with my neurobiology colleagues, they are pretty dialed into their neurocircuits. I do have qualms with their experimental models on the behavioral end as a non-neuroscientist. To really answer your question, I think I need to talk about the books modern day neuroscientists are writing and I have to say I simply agree. I think these self-help kind of books are not good! Too bad they are so easily propagated in the media.

Panzer04 2y ago

I don't really believe that. The real issue is that basic science in medicine is hard. You can't test a human in ways that might cause harm, which really limits how much investigation we can do. Ethics and morals also restrict what can be done to animals to investigate the basics on them too, though admittedly a lot of the time things just don't carry over anyway. That being said, I think the rise of "evidence-based" medicine is also causing issues. It gets used as a cop-out to avoid thinking about the mechanics of what is actually happening in an injury. While this is certainly a good things for treatments where A or B superiority is uncertain, there's a lot of cases where I think an RCT just doesn't really make sense. A pet example: I broke my ankle recently, and this dug into the literature and common practice. A significant number of people will get end-stage arthritis a few years after "simple" ankle fractures and often the doctors have no idea why. At the same time, an important part of ankle anatomy is often left unfixed (the deltoid ligament) because a few studies back in the 80s found it wasn't necessary to fix it. The bone that serves an equivalent purpose IS fixed (if broken) though. Mechanically, they restrict the ankle joint and prevent it moving in certain directions. When presented with biomechanical reasons for fixing it, and concurrent common poor outcomes for some patients, I've seen the response from surgeons thusly - "it's not supported by evidence" presumably because there isn't an RCT demonstrating definitive superiority. So much of medicine and treatment is literally just hearsay and whatever your surgeon happened to read last week. As a whole the standard is rising, but so much research is so disjoint, disorganised and inconsistent that doctors often have no definitive guidance. It's probably more of a problem in some fields (like ortho) than others, but its still surprising when you see it yourself.

throwaway2037 2y ago
> So much of medicine and treatment is literally just hearsay and whatever your surgeon happened to read last week. I think that you can replace "medicine" with "technology" and "surgeon" with "programmer". Something that I don't know about medicine into highly advanced countries: How do surgeons learn about the latest techniques? I assume they subscribe to some key industry/professional journals and/or go to annual conferences to discuss specific techniques. I know that dentists do it because I have asked multiple dentists about it. (In my life, the type of doctor that I visit the most often is a dentist for twice-annual checkups, so I see regular improvements to care and treatment.) Finally, I doubt that most surgeons would agree with your statement.

HelloMcFly 2y ago

> Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information Easy to agree with > to the exclusion of people who can understand systems On what basis do you draw this conclusion? I'm not saying the field is full of systems thinkers, but I have no evidence that they are at higher or lower concentration than many other skilled disciplines. Many of the specialties within medicine require systems thinking to be effective physicians.