Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I would generally endorse the claims you make, but would differ on your analogy about psychologists not needing to know about advances in neuroscience for the same reason programmers don’t need to know about transistors, and the conclusion you draw from that.
First, I’d stand behind the theme that:
The problem facing neuroscience in 2018 is that we have a lot of experimental knowledge about how neurons work– and we have a lot of observational knowledge about how people behave– but we have few elegant compressions for how to connect the two. CSHW promises to do just that, to be a bridge from bottom-up neural dynamics – things we can measure – to high-level psychological/phenomenological/psychiatric phenomena – things we care about. And a bottom-up bridge like this should also allow continuous improvement as our understanding of the fundamentals improve, as well as significant unification across disciplines: instead of psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and so on each having their own (slightly incompatible) ontologies, a true bottom-up approach can unify these different ways of knowing and serve as a common platform, a lingua franca for high-level brain dynamics.
In short, brain-stuff isn’t neatly modularized like computer-stuff, and so advances in the lower levels of the stack can have big impacts about how things are (or should be) done higher up in the stack. If CSHW does turn out to be generative in the ways I list, I think it’ll have direct impact on psychology and psychiatry; they couldn’t help but change. In particular, a theory which might allow unification across the different psychological sciences is a big deal.
Re: your conclusion, I think it’s easy to underestimate how risk-adverse academia is, and the degree to which academic politics plays a role in which ideas gain traction and which don’t. The idea that psychologists and psychiatrists are currently working from good models, and if a better model comes around, science will straightforwardly prove this new model is better and the community will naturally and quickly adopt it—I think it would be great if all of these things were true, but I have little confidence any of them are.
Instead, I think there are huge structural problems which allow considerable arbitrage if you have a better-than-average model of what’s going on. Granted, the bit about how “all neuroscientists, all philosophers, all psychologists, and all psychiatrists” should drop what they’re doing and learn CSHW is hyperbole. But I think it’s the correct direction to push.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I would generally endorse the claims you make, but would differ on your analogy about psychologists not needing to know about advances in neuroscience for the same reason programmers don’t need to know about transistors, and the conclusion you draw from that.
First, I’d stand behind the theme that:
In short, brain-stuff isn’t neatly modularized like computer-stuff, and so advances in the lower levels of the stack can have big impacts about how things are (or should be) done higher up in the stack. If CSHW does turn out to be generative in the ways I list, I think it’ll have direct impact on psychology and psychiatry; they couldn’t help but change. In particular, a theory which might allow unification across the different psychological sciences is a big deal.
Re: your conclusion, I think it’s easy to underestimate how risk-adverse academia is, and the degree to which academic politics plays a role in which ideas gain traction and which don’t. The idea that psychologists and psychiatrists are currently working from good models, and if a better model comes around, science will straightforwardly prove this new model is better and the community will naturally and quickly adopt it—I think it would be great if all of these things were true, but I have little confidence any of them are.
Instead, I think there are huge structural problems which allow considerable arbitrage if you have a better-than-average model of what’s going on. Granted, the bit about how “all neuroscientists, all philosophers, all psychologists, and all psychiatrists” should drop what they’re doing and learn CSHW is hyperbole. But I think it’s the correct direction to push.