greetings from NYC; my philosophical roots

in the last post i said i would explain why we like arguing so much. in a way, many academics do. for me, it may be in part temperament. in part, it may have something to do with my upbringing at home. it may also have something to do with my graduate training. but New York, New York... is one big reason.

i went to New York city in 2007, a day before i taught my first class as a faculty member at Columbia, with just a suitcase. i remember on the flight from Heathrow to JFK, i kept thinking about a line from a movie i had just watched recently: "... and we all come to New York, to be forgiven." i was 27 years old.

living in Manhattan was fun. Columbia gave me good subsidized housing. work-wise, i was struggling, coz i didn't know how to get funding for my kind of work. i wasn't very well connected as i was trained in the UK. i spent a lot of time partying, drinking, and eating really well downtown.

but this is not to say i wasn't stimulated intellectually. ever since i left NYC for Los Angeles, people often ask if i missed the city. there are of course things i miss, but above all, it is philosophy that brings me back. back then i taught a seminar with Ned Block at NYU. i lived just a block away from David Rosenthal. New York, of course, was and still is the center of the philosophical universe - at least for the kind of philosophy that i care about. hanging out and arguing with these guys, together with many others (like my good friend, collaborator, and drummer Richard Brown) helped me get through the scientific/administrative chores, and kept me inspired.

i wrote my undergrad thesis in philosophy. in Hong Kong i was lucky to have Joe Lau as a professor and advisor. he went to MIT and worked with Ned Block and Bob Stalnaker for his PhD, and is a really wonderful teacher. as an undergrad i read all the good stuff - Michael Tye, Bill Lycan, Tyler Burge,  Putnam, Fodor, etc etc - stuff that i still find useful at work today. ever i since i went to grad school and started doing human neuroscience, every now and then i would contemplate leaving science to go back to do philosophy. there are points where it was a close call. somehow... i stayed. but living in NY helped me scratch that constant itch.

scientists love to bash how useless philosophy is. often, those who know least about philosophy tend to be the most dismissive. i suppose that makes sense: as in most other fields, finding the good stuff to read isn't easy, and if you don't know your way around, it gets confusing. somehow, neuroscientists don't tend to pick up some random articles in economics journals and talk trash about them though.

to me, the value of philosophy is clear. at the very least, like chess playing it helps sharpen your thinking. with a good audience, one gets really useful critical feedback that you can't really get when you give a talk to a science crowd, becoz the whole purpose of giving a talk is different....

the past few days i've actually been in this city. gave a seminar at CUNY, chatted with friends about the paper i'm writing. it's been really really fun and rewarding. tonite is the final gig, at NYU, where i will have 10 mins max to present my paper. really, it's just to start the convo; people who haven't read the paper already wouldn't want to be there; they are there for the Q&A, which would take up the rest of the 2 hours. in philosophy, you give a talk to be grilled. the grilling is the best part.

to be honest with you, even though i've done this before, this is pretty frightenting. this is gonna be tough. all this arguing about statistics pale in comparison. but i suppose this is in the spirit of the project of the book - we have to do things right by industry standards. if the views we propose are philosophically relevant, we can't just moonlight it. we have to talk to the experts and to try to win their approval.

so, wish me luck. this is the paper which i mentioned in a post back in August, where i promised we can talk about consciousness in robots and trees and whatnot too, by building a theory based on empirically plausible assumptions rather than some axioms based on one's own imagination. i will post it here after revising it based on the harsh criticisms i will no doubt face tonite.

you want 'good data', or you want to test your hypothesis correctly?

the past week i've been rather active on FB. i used to enjoy arguing about stuff there, from the philosophical to the political. but haven't done it for a while (specifically, pretty much since the last US election). but we posted a paper on bioRxiv recently, and it attracted some comments.

long story short: one key finding related to consciousness and the PFC is that TMS to the latter can change visual metacognition. it was done by Rounis et al (including yours truly) a long time ago. in fact that was when the psychophysical measure meta-d' was first introduced. meanwhile, multiple studies have firmly established the empirical link between PFC and visual metacognition. besides correlational observations, causal manipulations to PFC activity, e.g. lesions, neurofeedback, or chemical inactivations in monkeys, all changes metacognition. so we can take it to be a done deal; the details of the original study aren't so critical anymore.

but when Bor et al attempted to replicate it anyway, it didn't work. in a way, no surprises: the study was done long ago and perhaps wasn't set up in the most robust way possible (we didn't use Brainsight); we thought it was a long shot back then (Vincent Walsh, the expert on TMS and visual perception, told me it wouldn't ever work!) and didn't want to invest the time & resources. also, we all know in cog neuro we often lack power. so when things don't 'replicate', it may well just be a false negative. Bor et al specifically did it in a way that was not so powerful (they elected to use a between subject design).

but the funny thing is we think they actually replicated it, but just interpreted it wrong (i saw someone on twitter calling it a 'replication failure failure'): they found the effect but insisted that they needed to chuck away some subjects becoz their data were 'bad' - after which the effect was gone. so we did a simulation to see if excluding subjects is really good for you. we found that it isn't - surprisingly it doesn't really change the false positive rate re: testing the hypothesis. i.e. the validity of the stat is just as good whether you exclude subjects or not.

so a long discussion ensued, started with Bor saying that "obviously" they disagree. it really wasn't such an obvious issue to me: do you want to chuck away data just becoz they 'look bad', even when you already know that keeping them won't hurt the validity of your statistical tests? and knowing the validity wouldn't change part also wasn't trivial; took us some time to do the analysis to find out.

anyway, go see the paper and the discussion to decide for yourself.

i'm sure my co-authors are all amused by how much time i can spend on social media to argue about stuff; especially becoz in this case we already know the answer re: the role of PFC in visual metacognition, due to the many other studies. so is all this arguing back and forth really worth it? yeah, there's something strange about that. i'll explain in my next post.....

mid-autumn festival & misc.

haven't posted for a while. the terrible news i reported in the last post still feels very raw. and it has been a month full of depressing news.

when i was a grad student at Oxford, there was a certain professor who famously misbehaved on all sorts of levels. thankfully, he's eventually ousted by the university, amid rather unusual circumstances. but the lesson i've learned then was that tenure is a system that makes me feel rather ambivalent. most of the times, it is a much appreciated privilege that i myself now enjoy. we have to give academics the freedom say what they wish to say, w/o repercussions such as losing their jobs. but every now and then, when certain colleagues abuse this system, it makes me feel sad and angry. especially when that's done against junior people e.g. grad students.

at these times, i find myself engaging in the pathological behavior of paying more attention to how messed up the world at large is in general. this somehow helps to normalize things. as we say in just 7 syllables in Cantonese: under Heavens, all crows are equally dark.

my thoughts are with the victims of the completely avoidable tragedy that just happened in Las Vegas

whenever i think of the last US presidential election, i feel that undeserved tenure is a relatively small imperfection of the world.

on a more positive note, it has been a good month in Hong Kong. i get to see my friends and my folks a lot. tonite is Mid-Autumn Festival aka the Moon Festival, where families gather and celebrate. it's never exactly clear to me what we are celebrating for. there are some fun folk legends about a beautiful woman who took some drugs and flew to the moon and stuff. but one story i liked was that when the Chinese was once ruled by the Mongols, they started a riot / revolution by hiding a secret message in the Moon Cakes, to synchronize their attacks on the same date.

my people are ever the practical and 'results-oriented'. despite our common love of seafood and tolerance for hot and humid summers, Hong Kongers aren't quite the same as the Catalans. as such, i have long assumed that Pro-Independence is a position not taken by many. but actually, today i learned that according to a certain politician and lawyer (who himself is Pro-Beijing), there are over a million people in Hong Kong who are pro-independence. let's say, what an enlightening news. over a million!

those who know me will know that there's a lot i wish to say but don't feel i should say it all here. let me say that in general, i recommend people to never apply to work in labs before talking to those who have worked with the prospective PI. or at least ask about the PI's colleagues what the PI is like. in general i'm very happy to chat about such things. as to politics, as i've warned you i will talk about this here from time to time, but not too much.

but it doesn't mean these are irrelevant to the main theme of the blog: my book will ultimately be about standing up to things too. it's about starting a (small, scientific) revolution together. to do so we need to clean up our acts first, to generate enough trust, as ammunition. we don't start a revolution with an idea. we do so with a coalition, with people, who aren't feeling that they are being exploited in the process.

i promise my next post will be more coherent.