If you're considering a life in academia it's worth watching this video and deciding if it's worth it to you or not. All of this is true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8

For me the answer is yes, despite all the problems, for two reasons.

Firstly, I'm lucky enough that I do have considerable freedom to work on the things that I'm interested in. If I was more interested in success or if I was on a 'soft money' position and forced to chase constant grants, I don't know if that would be true. But, such luck is rare.

Secondly, as a socialist I would feel very uncomfortable spending my creative energy on most of the non-academic things I'm qualified for: advertising and surveillance (i.e. tech companies), finance, or startups (making venture capitalists even richer). I could imagine academia getting bad enough that I'd make that choice, but for me it's not there yet. I completely understand that it is that bad for others and I mean no criticism of them.

In a way I suppose this is a sort of defence of academia, but it's a half hearted one at best. I think it's absolutely tragic and depressing that academia has become like this. Doing research should be one of the most joyful and creative things anyone could do with their lives.

Didn't know about this before posting and I think because of the interesting discussion that followed I'll leave my post up, but do see this comment since it seems the author of the YouTube video has some problematic views.

https://synapse.cafe/@axoaxonic/112225621387460997

The representation of occluded image regions in area V1 of monkeys and humans https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960982223010539 by @tylermorgan et al.; #neuroscience

"contextual influences rapidly alter V1 spiking activity in monkeys over distances of several degrees in the visual field, carry information about individual scenes, and resemble those in human V1."

Slowly, but surely, I am getting better at saying 'no'. It's not easy, though, and I'm still having to back-track occasionally.

To any new PIs out there, this is the absolute most important skill you have to learn!

#justsayno #academia

If you're at #CCN2023 and interested in multimodal processing, come and chat with us at our poster P-3B.68 with @marcusghosh from 1-3pm today in the Marquee.

https://2023.ccneuro.org/view_paper.php?PaperNum=1062

If you're not at CCN, check our thread/preprint and we'd be happy to discuss!

https://neuromatch.social/@neuralreckoning/110785811144218374

I'm at Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience 2023 (https://2023.ccneuro.org) in Oxford , and enjoying it.

Most of the time I work on synaptic and cellular stuff and a bit of neural population data analysis. So the cognitive and ML/AI angles at this meeting are out of my comfort zone, but also the reason I'm here... much easier to get up to speed on the gist of a research area by spending a few days at a meeting than trying to decipher what's going on reading papers at home on your laptop