Bryce Allen Bagley

@[email protected]
345 Followers
53 Following
106 Posts
Interdisciplinary applied scientist working at various intersections of physics, AI, applied math, and neuroscience | MD student @Stanford | anti-ableism | 2nd gen Belizean-American
Complexity ScienceUnderstandings beyond reductionism
Equity + Anti-extinctionFight for all people, present AND future
PostdisciplinaryArbitrary borders in knowledge are absurd
Everything is based on theoryWhether or not it’s acknowledged
Bryce Allen BagleyApr 15, 2024
Nicole RustApr 13, 2024

Brainstorming corrections for scientific myopia

I’m convinced that we’ve inadvertently created a scientific culture that disproportionately dissuades high-level, big-picture thinking. How do we rectify that?

A few venues I know. Please add to this list!

We write at a high-level. Venues: perspective pieces of journals, thetransmitter.org, aeon.org, etc

We hold workshops to discuss things, at a high-level. Venues like https://www.tfi.ucsb.edu/ & https://esforum.de/ have interesting models.

We devote some time to this at conferences (I’ll be trying that here: https://2024.ccneuro.org/; let’s see how it goes). Know any other examples?

We write, read and discuss books.

I understand astrophysics does something organized (given shared resources): everyone is polled; plans are discussed; reports are written.

The Foundations Institute | UC Santa Barbara | The Foundations Institute | UC Santa Barbara

Advancing scientific progress by reassessing foundational ideas.

Bryce Allen BagleySep 9, 2023
George MusserSep 8, 2023
"As she prepared to leave for college, she started to understand that most #Duke students there would not be like her.... 'I never felt like I was the poor kid, and then you get to Duke, and you realize some of these kids have yachts and have mansions.'... Lower-income students must navigate: the costs of joining fraternities and sororities, eating at off-campus restaurants, joining friends for spring-break." That was my experience at #BrownUniversity in the '80s, too. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/07/magazine/duke-economic-diversity.html
Show threadBryce Allen BagleySep 9, 2023

@gmusser In oddly coincidental timing, I just learned that WashU is adopting a financial aid policy to replace all federal loans with scholarships and grants. That’s on top of over 20% of students now being Pell Grant recipients like those of us in this thread, up from I believe single-digits when I was there.

Sharing that happy news because it gives me hope that at least one top university is taking this issue as seriously as they ought to. Hopefully others will follow suit.

Show threadBryce Allen BagleySep 9, 2023

@gmusser Similar to mine at WashU in StL, though only a few years ago. I had a very difficult time relating to most of the students, but count myself fortunate to have found my people through befriending some of the professors, a few other engineering and physics students, and the residents of a co-op full of oddballs.

No matter what, I absolutely love the university, because they believed in me enough to offer the scholarship which made it possible to attend a school like that.

Show threadBryce Allen BagleyMay 17, 2023
@cian My bad. Drawing what are claimed to be rich analogies between deep learning (rate encoded networks, especially) and neurophysiology. I would expect the upper bound on the usefulness of deep learning analogies can’t come close to reaching the bound for mechanistic models.
Show threadBryce Allen BagleyMay 15, 2023
@cian Has this approach ever produced generalizable insights? It always seemed a bit like a cottage industry sort of thing. Though I admittedly stopped paying attention to those sorts of claims years ago after being rather underwhelmed by the hand-wavy justifications given to support their asserted value.
Bryce Allen BagleyMar 27, 2023
George MusserMar 20, 2023
When my company moved us from private offices to an #OpenPlan, they surveyed us about our workflow and needs. Then we discovered they’d already built out the space; the consultation process was a sham. This is common, as I write in #ScientificAmerican. A major insight from #InclusiveDesign, #DisabilityRights, and #DeafSpace is that people should be meaningfully involved in designing their physical environment. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fixing-the-hated-open-design-office/
Fixing the Hated Open-Design Office

Open-office designs create productivity and health problems. New insights from Deaf and autistic communities could fix them

Scientific American
Bryce Allen BagleyMar 13, 2023
Monica Di, PhD Mar 11, 2023
For my #neuro nerds 🧠
Bryce Allen BagleyMar 10, 2023
Dr Pieter PeachMar 9, 2023
“In a letter published by JAMA Pediatrics, I and a group of my colleagues estimated that from January 2020 to May 2022, 10.5 million children lost primary or secondary caregivers to COVID-associated deaths.* The toll on these children is enormous. After a caregiver dies, children may experience grief, inadequate care and separations from other family members. They may have decreased access to food, support and housing. They can be at higher risk of violence and abuse.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-number-of-children-orphaned-by-covid-keeps-rising/
The Number of Children Orphaned by COVID Keeps Rising

HIV has taught us how to care for children who have lost a parent, but more countries need to step up

Scientific American
Bryce Allen BagleyFeb 8, 2023
Show threadAlbert CardonaFeb 7, 2023

@ArminLak

Wow, the #Neuropixels preprint just landed!

“Large-scale brain-wide neural recording in nonhuman primates” Trautmann et al. 2023

“4416 electrodes along a 45 mm shank, and 2496 along a 25 mm shank. … users can programmably select 384 channels, enabling simultaneous multi-area recording with a single probe. We demonstrate recording from over 3000 single neurons within a session, and simultaneous recordings from over 1000 neurons using multiple probes”
#neuroscience