November & the BioRxiv effect for mentorship / paper submission

just realize this is my first post of the month; November has been insanely hectic. perhaps as usual, this is the season when RAs need to apply to PhD programs, postdocs look for faculty jobs. besides the reference letters writing ***which is only a small part of it***, all of a sudden everyone wants to finish their manuscripts, get them submitted before their applications. as a co-author / senior author, of coz i mustn't be the weakest link holding them back...

i wonder if this means i've been taking on too much, biting off more than i could chew. throughout the year i'd like to think i generally keep myself not counter-productively busy. but maybe November is the best time to take stock. it's not a good estimate of how much one can do annually, if one cannot survive November. ah well, i'm still alive, just barely.

perhaps bioRxiv has changed things too, and i hadn't fully taken that into account. now applicants can get their papers submitted right before the application. and it wouldn't just be an empty claim that a paper is in review. people can actually click on the link to see the paper while it's going through the chimney. perhaps this means more people are rushing to finish manuscripts this time of the year now?

speaking of mentees and students, one of the fun things i've been doing since i've been back in HK is to be involved in the selection for Rhodes Scholars (there's one from the city every year, who get to be funded to study at Oxford). i'm happy to say this year we have a philosophy major winning it. i think it's the first time since 2001 (when i myself won it, with some inexplicable luck)

a truly exhausting month... still one more week to go & one more flight to take (for yet another conference in Japan). it may sound cliche but when i think of how well the young people will do, it makes it all the more bearable and worthwhile. increasingly, i realize they will be the target audience of my book too. the book will be about the future. winning them over is more important than convincing or impressing senior colleagues.

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.....