Pueblo Serna

There's been a lot of conversation lately about negative incentives in academic science. A good example of this is Xenia Schmalz's nice recent post . The basic argument is, professional success comes from publishing a lot and publishing quickly, but scientific values are best served by doing slower, more careful work. There's perhaps some truth to this argument, but it overstates the misalignment in incentives between scientific and professional success. I suspect that people think  that quantity matters more than quality, even if the facts are the opposite. Let's start with the (hopefully uncontroversial) observation that number of publications will be correlated at some magnitude with scientific progress. That's because for the most part, if you haven't done any research you're not likely to be able to publish, and if you have made a true advance it should be relatively easier to publish.* So there will be some correlation between publication record and th...

tl;dr: Analogies between Piaget's theory of development and formal elements in the Bayesian framework. Intro I'm co-teaching a course with Alison Gopnik at Berkeley this quarter. It's called "What Changes?" and the goal is to revisit some basic ideas about what drives developmental changes. Here's the syllabus , if you're interested. As part of the course, we read the first couple of chapters of Flavell's brilliant book, " The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget ." I had come into contact with Piagetian theory before of course, but I've never spent that much time engaging with the core ideas. In fact, I don't actually teach Piaget in my intro to developmental psychology course . Although he's clearly part of the historical foundations of the discipline, to a first approximation, a lot of what he said turned out to be wrong . In my own training and work, I've been inspired by probabilistic models of cognition and cognitive ...