Hi Abby, I‘m happy to entertain well-meaning criticism, but it feels your comment rests fairly heavily on credentialism and does not seem to offer any positive information, nor does it feel like high-level criticism (“their actual theory is also bad”). If your background is as you claim, I’m sure you understand the nuances of “proving” an idea in neuroscience, especially with regard to NCCs (neural correlates of consciousness) — neuroscience is also large enough that “I published a peer reviewed fMRI paper in a mainstream journal” isn’t a particularly ringing endorsement of domain knowledge in affective neuroscience. If you do have domain knowledge sufficient to take a crack at the question of valence I’d be glad to hear your ideas.
For a bit of background to theories of valence in neuroscience I’d recommend my forum post here—it goes significantly deeper into the literature than this primer.
Again, I’m not certain you read my piece closely, but as mentioned in my summary, most of our collaboration with British universities has been with Imperial (Robin Carhart-Harris’s lab, though he recently moved to UCSF) rather than Oxford, although Kringelbach has a great research center there and Atasoy (creator of the CSHW reference implementation, which we independently reimplemented) does her research there, so we’re familiar with the scene.
Hi Mike! I appreciate your openness to discussion even though I disagree with you.
Some questions:
1. The most important question: Why would synchrony between different brain areas involved in totally different functions be associated with subjective wellbeing? I fundamentally don’t understand this. For example, asynchrony has been found to be useful in memory as a way of differentiating similar but different memories during encoding/rehearsal/retrieval. It doesn’t seem like a bad thing that the brain has a reason to reduce, the way it has reasons to reduce prediction errors. Please link to brain studies that have found asynchrony leads to suffering.
2. If your theory is focused on neural oscillations, why don’t you use EEG to measure the correlation between neural synchrony and subjective experience? Surely EEG is a more accurate method and vastly cheaper than fMRI?
3. If you are funding constrained, why are none of your collaborators willing to run this experiment for you? Running fMRI and EEG experiments at Princeton is free. I see you have multiple Princeton affiliates on your team, and we even have Michael Graziano as a faculty member who is deeply interested in consciousness and understands fMRI.
My advice is to run the experiment I described in my original comment. Put people in an fMRI scanner (or EEG or MEG), ask them to do things that make them feel suffering/feel peaceful, and see how the CDNS changes between conditions. This is an extremely basic experiment and I am confused why you would be so confident in your theory before running this.
Hi Abby, thanks for the clear questions. In order:
In brief, asynchrony levies a complexity and homeostatic cost that harmony doesn’t. A simple story here is that dissonant systems shake themselves apart; we can draw a parallel between dissonance in the harmonic frame and free energy in the predictive coding frame.
We work with all the high-quality data we can get our hands on. We do have hd-EEG data of jhana meditation, but EEG data as you may(?) know is very noisy and ‘NCC-style’ research with EEG is a methodological minefield.
We know and like Graziano. I’ll share the idea of using Princeton facilities with the team.
To be direct, years ago I felt as you did about the simplicity of the scientific method in relation to neuroscience; “Just put people in an fMRI, have them do things, analyze the data; how hard can it be?” — experience has cured me of this frame, however. I’ve learned that neuroimaging data pipelines are often held together by proverbial duct tape, neuroimaging is noisy, the neural correlates of consciousness frame is suspect and existing philosophy of mind is rather bonkers, and to even say One True Thing about the connection between brain and mind is very hard (and expensive) indeed. I would say I expect you to be surprised by certain realities of neuroscience as you complete your PhD, and I hope you can turn that into determination to refactor the system towards elegance, rather than being progressively discouraged by all the hidden mess.
In brief, asynchrony levies a complexity and homeostatic cost that harmony doesn’t. A simple story here is that dissonant systems shake themselves apart; we can draw a parallel between dissonance in the harmonic frame and free energy in the predictive coding frame.
I appreciate your direct answer to my question, but I do not understand what you are trying to say. I am familiar with Friston and the free-energy principle, so feel free to explain your theory in those terms. All you are doing here is saying that the brain has some reason to reduce “dissonance in the harmonic frame” (a phrase I have other issues with) in a similar way it has reasons to reduce prediction errors. There are good reasons why the brain should reduce prediction errors. You say (but do not clearly explain why) there’s a parallel here where the brain should reduce neural asynchrony/dissonance in the harmonic frame. You posit neural asynchrony is suffering, but you do not explain why in an intelligible way. “Dissonant systems shake themselves apart.” Are you saying dissonant neural networks destroy themselves and we subjectively perceive this as suffering? This makes no sense. Maybe you’re trying to say something else, but I have made my confusion about the link between suffering and asynchrony extremely clear multiple times now, and you have not offered an explanation that I understand.
I’ve learned that neuroimaging data pipelines are often held together by proverbial duct tape, neuroimaging is noisy, the neural correlates of consciousness frame is suspect and existing philosophy of mind is rather bonkers, and to even say One True Thing about the connection between brain and mind is very hard (and expensive) indeed. I would say I expect you to be surprised by certain realities of neuroscience as you complete your PhD, and I hope you can turn that into determination to refactor the system towards elegance, rather than being progressively discouraged by all the hidden mess.
I agree neuroimaging is extremely messy and discouraging, but you’re the one posting about successfully building an fmri analysis pipeline to run this specific analysis to support your theory. I am very annoyed that your response to my multiple requests for any empirical data to support your theory is you basically saying “science is hard”, as opposed to “no experiment, dataset, or analysis is perfect, but here is some empirical evidence that is at least consistent with my theory.”
I wish you came at this by saying, “Hey I have a cool idea, what do you guys think?” But instead you’re saying “We have a full empirical theory of suffering” with as far as I can tell, nothing to back this up.
I know that this is the EA forum and it’s bad that two people are trading arch emoticons...but I know I’m not the only one enjoying Abby Hoskin’s response to someone explaining her future journey to her.
Inject this into my veins.
Maybe more constructively (?) I think the OP responses have updated others in support of Abby’s concerns.
In the past, sometimes I have said things that turned out not to be as helpful as I thought. In those situations, I think I have benefitted from someone I trust reviewing the discussion and offering another perspective to me.
I’m not sure ‘enjoy’ is the right word, but I also noticed the various attempts to patronize Hoskin.
This ranges from the straightforward “I’m sure once you know more about your own subject you’ll discover I am right”:
I would say I expect you to be surprised by certain realities of neuroscience as you complete your PhD
‘Well-meaning suggestions’ alongside implication her criticism arises from some emotional reaction rather than her strong and adverse judgement of its merit.
I’m a little baffled by the emotional intensity here but I’d suggest approaching this as an opportunity to learn about a new neuroimaging method, literally pioneered by your alma mater. :)
[Adding a smiley after something insulting or patronizing doesn’t magically make you the ‘nice guy’ in the conversation, but makes you read like a passive-aggressive ass who is nonetheless too craven for candid confrontation. I’m sure once you reflect on what I said and grow up a bit you’ll improve so your writing inflicts less of a tax on our collective intelligence and good taste. I know you’ll make us proud! :)]
Or just straight-up belittling her knowledge and expertise with varying degrees of passive-aggressiveness.
I understand it may feel significant that you have published work using fMRI, and that you hold a master’s degree in neuroscience.
I’m glad to hear you feel good about your background and are filled with confidence in yourself and your field.
I think this sort of smug and catty talking down would be odious even if the OP really did have much more expertise than their critic: I hope I wouldn’t write similarly in response to criticism (however strident) from someone more junior in my own field.
What makes this kinda amusing, though, is although the OP is trying to set himself up as some guru trying to dismiss his critic with the textual equivalent of patting her on the head, virtually any reasonable third party would judge the balance of expertise to weigh in the other direction. Typically we’d take, “Post-graduate degree, current doctoral student, and relevant publication record” over “Basically nothing I could put on an academic CV, but I’ve written loads of stuff about my grand theory of neuroscience.”
In that context (plus the genders of the participants) I guess you could call it ‘mansplaining’.
Greg, I have incredible respect for you as a thinker, and I don’t have a particularly high opinion of the Qualia Research Institute. However, I find your comment to be unnecessarily mean: every substantive point you raise could have been made more nicely and less personal, in a way more conducive to mutual understanding and more focused on an evaluation of QRI’s research program. Even if you think that Michael was condescending or disrespectful to Abby, I don’t think he deserves to be treated like this.
Hmm I have conflicting feelings about this. I think whenever you add additional roadblocks or other limitations on criticism, or suggestions that criticisms can be improved, you
a) see the apparent result that criticisms that survive the process will on average be better.
b) fail to see the (possibly larger) effect that there’s an invisible graveyard of criticisms that people choose not to voice because it’s not worth the hassle.
At the same time, being told that your life work is approximately useless is never a pleasant feeling, and it’s not always reasonable to expect people to handle it with perfect composure (Thankfully nothing of this magnitude has ever happened to me, but I was pretty upset when an EA Forum draft I wrote in only a few days had to be scrapped or at least rewritten because it assumed a mathematical falsehood). So while I think Mike’s responses to Abby are below a reasonable bar of good forum commenting norms, I think I have more sympathy for his feelings and actions here than Greg seems to.
So I’m pretty conflicted. My own current view is that I endorse Abby’s comments and tone as striking the right balance for the forum, and I endorse Greg’s content but not the tone.
But I think reasonable people can disagree here, and we should also be mindful that when we ask people to rephrase substantive criticisms to meet a certain stylistic bar (see also comments here), we are implicitly making criticisms more onerous, which arguably has pretty undesirable outcomes.
Based on how the main critic Abby was treated, how the OP replies to comments in a way that selectively chooses what content they want to respond to, the way they respond to direct questions with jargon, I place serious weight that this isn’t a good faith conversation.
This is not a stylistic issue, in fact it seems to be exactly the opposite: someone is taking the form of EA norms and styles (maintaining a positive tone, being sympathetic) while actively undermining someone odiously.
I have been in several environments where this behavior is common.
At the risk of policing or adding to the noise (I am not willing to read more of this to update myself), I am writing this because I am concerned you and others who are conscientious are being sucked into this.
Hi Charles, I think several people (myself, Abby, and now Greg) were put in some pretty uncomfortable positions across these replies. By posting, I open myself to replies, but I was pretty surprised by some of the energy of the initial comments (as apparently were others; both Abby and I edited some of our comments to be less confrontational, and I’m happy with and appreciate that).
Happy to answer any object level questions you have that haven’t been covered in other replies, but this remark seems rather strange to me.
For the avoidance of doubt, I remain entirely comfortable with the position expressed in my comment: I wholeheartedly and emphatically stand behind everything I said. I am cheerfully reconciled to the prospect some of those replying to or reading my earlier comment judge me adversely for it—I invite these folks to take my endorsement here as reinforcing whatever negative impressions they formed from what I said there.
The only thing I am uncomfortable with is that someone felt they had to be anonymous to criticise something I wrote. I hope the measure I mete out to others makes it clear I am happy for similar to be meted out to me in turn. I also hope reasonable folks like the anonymous commenter are encouraged to be forthright when they think I err—this is something I would be generally grateful to them for, regardless of whether I agree with their admonishment in a particular instance. I regret to whatever degree my behaviour has led others to doubt this is the case.
Your responses here are much more satisfying and comprehensible than your previous statements, it’s a bit of a shame we can’t reset the conversation.
2. Another anonymous commentator (thanks to Linch for posting) highlights that Abby’s line of questioning regarding EEGs ultimately resulted in a response satisfactory to her and which she didn’t have the expertise to further evaluate:
if they had given the response that they gave in one of the final comments in the discussion, right at the beginning (assuming Abby would have responded similarly) the response to their exchange might have been very different i.e. I think people would have concluded that they gave a sensible response and were talking about things that Abby didn’t have expertise to comment on:
_______
Abby Hoskin: If your answer relies on something about how modularism/functionalism is bad: why is source localization critical for your main neuroimaging analysis of interest? If source localization is not necessary: why can’t you use EEG to measure synchrony of neural oscillations?
Mike Johnson: The harmonic analysis we’re most interested in depends on accurately modeling the active harmonics (eigenmodes) of the brain. EEG doesn’t directly model eigenmodes; to infer eigenmodes we’d need fairly accurate source localization. It could be there are alternative ways to test STV without modeling brain eigenmodes, and that EEG could give us. I hope that’s the case, and I hope we find it, since EEG is certainly a lot easier to work with than fMRI.
Abby Hoskin: Ok, I appreciate this concrete response. I don’t know enough about calculating eigenmodes with EEG data to predict how tractable it is.
Thanks, but I’ve already seen them. Presuming the implication here is something like “Given these developments, don’t you think you should walk back what you originally said?”, the answer is “Not really, no”: subsequent responses may be better, but that is irrelevant to whether earlier ones were objectionable; one may be making good points, but one can still behave badly whilst making them.
(Apologies if I mistake what you are trying to say here. If it helps generally, I expect—per my parent comment—to continue to affirm what I’ve said before however the morass of commentary elsewhere on this post shakes out.)
Just want to be clear, the main post isn’t about analyzing eigenmodes with EEG data. It’s very funny that when I am intellectually honest enough to say I don’t know about one specific EEG analysis that doesn’t exist and is not referenced in the main text, people conclude that I don’t have expertise to comment on fMRI data analysis or the nature of neural representations.
Meanwhile QRI does not have expertise to comment on many of the things they discuss, but they are super confident about everything and in the original posts especially did not clearly indicate what is speculation versus what is supported by research.
I continue to be unconvinced with the arguments laid out, but I do think both the tone of the conversation and Mike Johnson’s answers improved after he was criticized. (Correlation? Causation?)
Generally speaking, I agree with the aphorism “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar;”
For what it’s worth, I interpreted Gregory’s critique as an attempt to blow up the conversation and steer away from the object level, which felt odd. I’m happiest speaking of my research, and fielding specific questions about claims.
Hi Gregory, I’ll own that emoticon. My intent was not to belittle, but to show I’m not upset and I‘m actually enjoying the interaction. To be crystal clear, I have no doubt Hoskin is a sharp scientist and cast no aspersions on her work. Text can be a pretty difficult medium for conveying emotions (things can easily come across as either flat or aggressive).
Hi Abby, to give a little more color on the data: we’re very interested in CSHW as it gives us a way to infer harmonic structure from fMRI, which we’re optimistic is a significant factor in brain self-organization. (This is still a live hypothesis, not established fact; Atasoy is still proving her paradigm, but we really like it.)
We expect this structure to be highly correlated with global valence, and to show strong signatures of symmetry/harmony during high-valence states. The question we’ve been struggling with as we’ve been building this hypothesis is “what is a signature of symmetry/harmony?” — there’s a bit of research from Stanford (Chon) here on quantifying consonance in complex waveforms and some cool music theory based on Helmholz’s work, but this appears to be an unsolved problem. Our “CDNS” approach basically looks at pairwise relationships between harmonics to quantify the degree to which they’re in consonance or dissonance with each other. We’re at the stage here where we have the algorithm, but need to validate it on audio samples first before applying it too confidently to the brain.
There’s also a question of what datasets are ideal for the sort of thing we’re interested in. Extreme valence datasets are probably the most promising, states of extreme pleasure or extreme suffering. We prefer datasets involving extreme pleasure, for two reasons:
(1) We viscerally feel better analyzing this sort of data than states of extreme suffering;
(2) fMRI’s time resolution is such that the best results will come from mental states with high structural stability. We expect this structural stability to be much higher during pleasure than suffering.
As such we’ve been focusing on collecting data from meditative jhana states, and from MDMA states. There might be other states that involve reliable good emotion that we can study, but these are the best we’ve found conceptually so far.
Lastly, there’s been the issue of neuroimaging pipelines and CSHW. Atasoy‘s work is not open source, so we had to reimplement her core logic (big thanks to Patrick here) and we ended up collaborating with an external group on a project to combine this core logic with a neuroimaging packaging system. I can’t share all the details here as our partner doesn’t want to be public about their involvement yet but this is thankfully wrapping up soon.
I wish we had a bunch of deeply analyzed data we could send you in direct support of STV! And I agree with you that is the ideal and you’re correct to ask for it. Sadly we don’t at this point, but I’m glad to say a lot of the preliminaries have been now taken care of and things are moving. I hope my various comments here haven’t come across as disrespectful (and I sincerely apologize if they have- not my intention but if that’s been your interpretation I accept it, sorry!); there’s just a lot of high-context stuff here that’s hard to package up into something that’s neat and tidy, and overall what clarity we’ve been able to find on this topic has been very hard-won.
Hi Abby, to be honest the parallels between free-energy-minimizing systems and dissonance-minimizing systems is a novel idea we’re playing with (or at least I believe it’s novel—my colleague Andrés coined it to my knowledge) and I’m not at full liberty to share all the details before we publish it. I think it’s reasonable to doubt this intuition, and we’ll hopefully be assembling more support for it soon.
To the larger question of neural synchrony and STV, a good collection of our argument and some available evidence would be our talk to Robin Carhart-Harris’ lab:
(I realize an hour-long presentation is a big ‘ask’; don’t feel like you need to watch it, but I think this shares what we can share publicly at this time)
>I agree neuroimaging is extremely messy and discouraging, but you’re the one posting about successfully building an fmri analysis pipeline to run this specific analysis to support your theory. I am very annoyed that your response to my multiple requests for any empirical data to support your theory is you basically saying “science is hard”, as opposed to “no experiment, dataset, or analysis is perfect, but here is some empirical evidence that is at least consistent with my theory.”
One of my takeaways from our research is that neuroimaging tooling is in fairly bad shape overall. I’m frankly surprised we had to reimplement an fMRI analysis pipeline in order to start really digging into this question, and I wonder how typical our experience here is.
One of the other takeaways from our work is that it’s really hard to find data that’s suitable for fundamental research into valence; we just got some MDMA fMRI+DTI data that appears very high quality, so we may have more to report soon. I’m happy to talk about what sorts of data are, vs are not, suitable for our research and why; my hands are a bit tied with provisional data at this point (sorry about that, wish I had more to share)
Hi Abby, I‘m happy to entertain well-meaning criticism, but it feels your comment rests fairly heavily on credentialism and does not seem to offer any positive information, nor does it feel like high-level criticism (“their actual theory is also bad”). If your background is as you claim, I’m sure you understand the nuances of “proving” an idea in neuroscience, especially with regard to NCCs (neural correlates of consciousness) — neuroscience is also large enough that “I published a peer reviewed fMRI paper in a mainstream journal” isn’t a particularly ringing endorsement of domain knowledge in affective neuroscience. If you do have domain knowledge sufficient to take a crack at the question of valence I’d be glad to hear your ideas.
For a bit of background to theories of valence in neuroscience I’d recommend my forum post here—it goes significantly deeper into the literature than this primer.
Again, I’m not certain you read my piece closely, but as mentioned in my summary, most of our collaboration with British universities has been with Imperial (Robin Carhart-Harris’s lab, though he recently moved to UCSF) rather than Oxford, although Kringelbach has a great research center there and Atasoy (creator of the CSHW reference implementation, which we independently reimplemented) does her research there, so we’re familiar with the scene.
Hi Mike! I appreciate your openness to discussion even though I disagree with you.
Some questions:
1. The most important question: Why would synchrony between different brain areas involved in totally different functions be associated with subjective wellbeing? I fundamentally don’t understand this. For example, asynchrony has been found to be useful in memory as a way of differentiating similar but different memories during encoding/rehearsal/retrieval. It doesn’t seem like a bad thing that the brain has a reason to reduce, the way it has reasons to reduce prediction errors. Please link to brain studies that have found asynchrony leads to suffering.
2. If your theory is focused on neural oscillations, why don’t you use EEG to measure the correlation between neural synchrony and subjective experience? Surely EEG is a more accurate method and vastly cheaper than fMRI?
3. If you are funding constrained, why are none of your collaborators willing to run this experiment for you? Running fMRI and EEG experiments at Princeton is free. I see you have multiple Princeton affiliates on your team, and we even have Michael Graziano as a faculty member who is deeply interested in consciousness and understands fMRI.
My advice is to run the experiment I described in my original comment. Put people in an fMRI scanner (or EEG or MEG), ask them to do things that make them feel suffering/feel peaceful, and see how the CDNS changes between conditions. This is an extremely basic experiment and I am confused why you would be so confident in your theory before running this.
Hi Abby, thanks for the clear questions. In order:
In brief, asynchrony levies a complexity and homeostatic cost that harmony doesn’t. A simple story here is that dissonant systems shake themselves apart; we can draw a parallel between dissonance in the harmonic frame and free energy in the predictive coding frame.
We work with all the high-quality data we can get our hands on. We do have hd-EEG data of jhana meditation, but EEG data as you may(?) know is very noisy and ‘NCC-style’ research with EEG is a methodological minefield.
We know and like Graziano. I’ll share the idea of using Princeton facilities with the team.
To be direct, years ago I felt as you did about the simplicity of the scientific method in relation to neuroscience; “Just put people in an fMRI, have them do things, analyze the data; how hard can it be?” — experience has cured me of this frame, however. I’ve learned that neuroimaging data pipelines are often held together by proverbial duct tape, neuroimaging is noisy, the neural correlates of consciousness frame is suspect and existing philosophy of mind is rather bonkers, and to even say One True Thing about the connection between brain and mind is very hard (and expensive) indeed. I would say I expect you to be surprised by certain realities of neuroscience as you complete your PhD, and I hope you can turn that into determination to refactor the system towards elegance, rather than being progressively discouraged by all the hidden mess.
:)
I appreciate your direct answer to my question, but I do not understand what you are trying to say. I am familiar with Friston and the free-energy principle, so feel free to explain your theory in those terms. All you are doing here is saying that the brain has some reason to reduce “dissonance in the harmonic frame” (a phrase I have other issues with) in a similar way it has reasons to reduce prediction errors. There are good reasons why the brain should reduce prediction errors. You say (but do not clearly explain why) there’s a parallel here where the brain should reduce neural asynchrony/dissonance in the harmonic frame. You posit neural asynchrony is suffering, but you do not explain why in an intelligible way. “Dissonant systems shake themselves apart.” Are you saying dissonant neural networks destroy themselves and we subjectively perceive this as suffering? This makes no sense. Maybe you’re trying to say something else, but I have made my confusion about the link between suffering and asynchrony extremely clear multiple times now, and you have not offered an explanation that I understand.
I agree neuroimaging is extremely messy and discouraging, but you’re the one posting about successfully building an fmri analysis pipeline to run this specific analysis to support your theory. I am very annoyed that your response to my multiple requests for any empirical data to support your theory is you basically saying “science is hard”, as opposed to “no experiment, dataset, or analysis is perfect, but here is some empirical evidence that is at least consistent with my theory.”
I wish you came at this by saying, “Hey I have a cool idea, what do you guys think?” But instead you’re saying “We have a full empirical theory of suffering” with as far as I can tell, nothing to back this up.
I know that this is the EA forum and it’s bad that two people are trading arch emoticons...but I know I’m not the only one enjoying Abby Hoskin’s response to someone explaining her future journey to her.
Inject this into my veins.
Maybe more constructively (?) I think the OP responses have updated others in support of Abby’s concerns.
In the past, sometimes I have said things that turned out not to be as helpful as I thought. In those situations, I think I have benefitted from someone I trust reviewing the discussion and offering another perspective to me.
[Own views]
I’m not sure ‘enjoy’ is the right word, but I also noticed the various attempts to patronize Hoskin.
This ranges from the straightforward “I’m sure once you know more about your own subject you’ll discover I am right”:
‘Well-meaning suggestions’ alongside implication her criticism arises from some emotional reaction rather than her strong and adverse judgement of its merit.
[Adding a smiley after something insulting or patronizing doesn’t magically make you the ‘nice guy’ in the conversation, but makes you read like a passive-aggressive ass who is nonetheless too craven for candid confrontation. I’m sure once you reflect on what I said and grow up a bit you’ll improve so your writing inflicts less of a tax on our collective intelligence and good taste. I know you’ll make us proud! :)]
Or just straight-up belittling her knowledge and expertise with varying degrees of passive-aggressiveness.
I think this sort of smug and catty talking down would be odious even if the OP really did have much more expertise than their critic: I hope I wouldn’t write similarly in response to criticism (however strident) from someone more junior in my own field.
What makes this kinda amusing, though, is although the OP is trying to set himself up as some guru trying to dismiss his critic with the textual equivalent of patting her on the head, virtually any reasonable third party would judge the balance of expertise to weigh in the other direction. Typically we’d take, “Post-graduate degree, current doctoral student, and relevant publication record” over “Basically nothing I could put on an academic CV, but I’ve written loads of stuff about my grand theory of neuroscience.”
In that context (plus the genders of the participants) I guess you could call it ‘mansplaining’.
Greg, I have incredible respect for you as a thinker, and I don’t have a particularly high opinion of the Qualia Research Institute. However, I find your comment to be unnecessarily mean: every substantive point you raise could have been made more nicely and less personal, in a way more conducive to mutual understanding and more focused on an evaluation of QRI’s research program. Even if you think that Michael was condescending or disrespectful to Abby, I don’t think he deserves to be treated like this.
Hmm I have conflicting feelings about this. I think whenever you add additional roadblocks or other limitations on criticism, or suggestions that criticisms can be improved, you
a) see the apparent result that criticisms that survive the process will on average be better.
b) fail to see the (possibly larger) effect that there’s an invisible graveyard of criticisms that people choose not to voice because it’s not worth the hassle.
At the same time, being told that your life work is approximately useless is never a pleasant feeling, and it’s not always reasonable to expect people to handle it with perfect composure (Thankfully nothing of this magnitude has ever happened to me, but I was pretty upset when an EA Forum draft I wrote in only a few days had to be scrapped or at least rewritten because it assumed a mathematical falsehood). So while I think Mike’s responses to Abby are below a reasonable bar of good forum commenting norms, I think I have more sympathy for his feelings and actions here than Greg seems to.
So I’m pretty conflicted. My own current view is that I endorse Abby’s comments and tone as striking the right balance for the forum, and I endorse Greg’s content but not the tone.
But I think reasonable people can disagree here, and we should also be mindful that when we ask people to rephrase substantive criticisms to meet a certain stylistic bar (see also comments here), we are implicitly making criticisms more onerous, which arguably has pretty undesirable outcomes.
I want to say something more direct:
Based on how the main critic Abby was treated, how the OP replies to comments in a way that selectively chooses what content they want to respond to, the way they respond to direct questions with jargon, I place serious weight that this isn’t a good faith conversation.
This is not a stylistic issue, in fact it seems to be exactly the opposite: someone is taking the form of EA norms and styles (maintaining a positive tone, being sympathetic) while actively undermining someone odiously.
I have been in several environments where this behavior is common.
At the risk of policing or adding to the noise (I am not willing to read more of this to update myself), I am writing this because I am concerned you and others who are conscientious are being sucked into this.
Hi Charles, I think several people (myself, Abby, and now Greg) were put in some pretty uncomfortable positions across these replies. By posting, I open myself to replies, but I was pretty surprised by some of the energy of the initial comments (as apparently were others; both Abby and I edited some of our comments to be less confrontational, and I’m happy with and appreciate that).
Happy to answer any object level questions you have that haven’t been covered in other replies, but this remark seems rather strange to me.
For the avoidance of doubt, I remain entirely comfortable with the position expressed in my comment: I wholeheartedly and emphatically stand behind everything I said. I am cheerfully reconciled to the prospect some of those replying to or reading my earlier comment judge me adversely for it—I invite these folks to take my endorsement here as reinforcing whatever negative impressions they formed from what I said there.
The only thing I am uncomfortable with is that someone felt they had to be anonymous to criticise something I wrote. I hope the measure I mete out to others makes it clear I am happy for similar to be meted out to me in turn. I also hope reasonable folks like the anonymous commenter are encouraged to be forthright when they think I err—this is something I would be generally grateful to them for, regardless of whether I agree with their admonishment in a particular instance. I regret to whatever degree my behaviour has led others to doubt this is the case.
Greg, I want to bring two comments that have been posted since your comment above to your attention:
Abby said the following to Mike:
2. Another anonymous commentator (thanks to Linch for posting) highlights that Abby’s line of questioning regarding EEGs ultimately resulted in a response satisfactory to her and which she didn’t have the expertise to further evaluate:
Thanks, but I’ve already seen them. Presuming the implication here is something like “Given these developments, don’t you think you should walk back what you originally said?”, the answer is “Not really, no”: subsequent responses may be better, but that is irrelevant to whether earlier ones were objectionable; one may be making good points, but one can still behave badly whilst making them.
(Apologies if I mistake what you are trying to say here. If it helps generally, I expect—per my parent comment—to continue to affirm what I’ve said before however the morass of commentary elsewhere on this post shakes out.)
Gregory, I’ll invite you to join the object-level discussion between Abby and I.
Just want to be clear, the main post isn’t about analyzing eigenmodes with EEG data. It’s very funny that when I am intellectually honest enough to say I don’t know about one specific EEG analysis that doesn’t exist and is not referenced in the main text, people conclude that I don’t have expertise to comment on fMRI data analysis or the nature of neural representations.
Meanwhile QRI does not have expertise to comment on many of the things they discuss, but they are super confident about everything and in the original posts especially did not clearly indicate what is speculation versus what is supported by research.
I continue to be unconvinced with the arguments laid out, but I do think both the tone of the conversation and Mike Johnson’s answers improved after he was criticized. (Correlation? Causation?)
Generally speaking, I agree with the aphorism “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar;”
For what it’s worth, I interpreted Gregory’s critique as an attempt to blow up the conversation and steer away from the object level, which felt odd. I’m happiest speaking of my research, and fielding specific questions about claims.
Hi Gregory, I’ll own that emoticon. My intent was not to belittle, but to show I’m not upset and I‘m actually enjoying the interaction. To be crystal clear, I have no doubt Hoskin is a sharp scientist and cast no aspersions on her work. Text can be a pretty difficult medium for conveying emotions (things can easily come across as either flat or aggressive).
Hi Abby, to give a little more color on the data: we’re very interested in CSHW as it gives us a way to infer harmonic structure from fMRI, which we’re optimistic is a significant factor in brain self-organization. (This is still a live hypothesis, not established fact; Atasoy is still proving her paradigm, but we really like it.)
We expect this structure to be highly correlated with global valence, and to show strong signatures of symmetry/harmony during high-valence states. The question we’ve been struggling with as we’ve been building this hypothesis is “what is a signature of symmetry/harmony?” — there’s a bit of research from Stanford (Chon) here on quantifying consonance in complex waveforms and some cool music theory based on Helmholz’s work, but this appears to be an unsolved problem. Our “CDNS” approach basically looks at pairwise relationships between harmonics to quantify the degree to which they’re in consonance or dissonance with each other. We’re at the stage here where we have the algorithm, but need to validate it on audio samples first before applying it too confidently to the brain.
There’s also a question of what datasets are ideal for the sort of thing we’re interested in. Extreme valence datasets are probably the most promising, states of extreme pleasure or extreme suffering. We prefer datasets involving extreme pleasure, for two reasons:
(1) We viscerally feel better analyzing this sort of data than states of extreme suffering;
(2) fMRI’s time resolution is such that the best results will come from mental states with high structural stability. We expect this structural stability to be much higher during pleasure than suffering.
As such we’ve been focusing on collecting data from meditative jhana states, and from MDMA states. There might be other states that involve reliable good emotion that we can study, but these are the best we’ve found conceptually so far.
Lastly, there’s been the issue of neuroimaging pipelines and CSHW. Atasoy‘s work is not open source, so we had to reimplement her core logic (big thanks to Patrick here) and we ended up collaborating with an external group on a project to combine this core logic with a neuroimaging packaging system. I can’t share all the details here as our partner doesn’t want to be public about their involvement yet but this is thankfully wrapping up soon.
I wish we had a bunch of deeply analyzed data we could send you in direct support of STV! And I agree with you that is the ideal and you’re correct to ask for it. Sadly we don’t at this point, but I’m glad to say a lot of the preliminaries have been now taken care of and things are moving. I hope my various comments here haven’t come across as disrespectful (and I sincerely apologize if they have- not my intention but if that’s been your interpretation I accept it, sorry!); there’s just a lot of high-context stuff here that’s hard to package up into something that’s neat and tidy, and overall what clarity we’ve been able to find on this topic has been very hard-won.
Hi Abby, to be honest the parallels between free-energy-minimizing systems and dissonance-minimizing systems is a novel idea we’re playing with (or at least I believe it’s novel—my colleague Andrés coined it to my knowledge) and I’m not at full liberty to share all the details before we publish it. I think it’s reasonable to doubt this intuition, and we’ll hopefully be assembling more support for it soon.
To the larger question of neural synchrony and STV, a good collection of our argument and some available evidence would be our talk to Robin Carhart-Harris’ lab:
(I realize an hour-long presentation is a big ‘ask’; don’t feel like you need to watch it, but I think this shares what we can share publicly at this time)
>I agree neuroimaging is extremely messy and discouraging, but you’re the one posting about successfully building an fmri analysis pipeline to run this specific analysis to support your theory. I am very annoyed that your response to my multiple requests for any empirical data to support your theory is you basically saying “science is hard”, as opposed to “no experiment, dataset, or analysis is perfect, but here is some empirical evidence that is at least consistent with my theory.”
One of my takeaways from our research is that neuroimaging tooling is in fairly bad shape overall. I’m frankly surprised we had to reimplement an fMRI analysis pipeline in order to start really digging into this question, and I wonder how typical our experience here is.
One of the other takeaways from our work is that it’s really hard to find data that’s suitable for fundamental research into valence; we just got some MDMA fMRI+DTI data that appears very high quality, so we may have more to report soon. I’m happy to talk about what sorts of data are, vs are not, suitable for our research and why; my hands are a bit tied with provisional data at this point (sorry about that, wish I had more to share)