Good story? Yeah, I think it’s a pretty good story—I don’t think it’s special pleading / rationalization. In particular, I was guessing that this was the story before I knew the age range of synaptic pruning, and then when I looked that up, I was surprised and pleased at how good a match it was.
Maybe this doesn’t apply to you, but if I had that experience I’d be very wary of double counting. Sometimes I’ve thought “X explains Y! Hey, it predicts Z should be true. And look, it is!” and later on I recall that I read about X explaining Y in the past, and oh would you look at that, they talked about Z as evidence. Or I read about Z in the past, which lead to me developing X. I forget where it came from, see Z again, count it as extra evidence, then read my notes and find I wrote about Z in the past.
I mostly wrote this post before (re)reading that book chapter, and it does seem like some of the things I wrote in this post are rehashing ideas in the literature. Yay! That’s very reassuring! For example, it seems like Fletcher and Frith have written this with a qualitatively similar idea to my Section 4.2.
Here, I’d also be wary of double counting. Though maybe you’ve written through notes, or your mind is less of a black box to you, so you note where your ideas came from.
Thanks! I looked up the synaptic pruning age range this morning. I had a vague recollection that there was such a thing as “synaptic pruning” but really couldn’t remember its age range, and definitely hadn’t previously connected it to schizophrenia. The grand total amount of time I’ve spent thinking hard about schizophrenia was probably like one day in 2021 (which didn’t go anywhere), and one day in summer 2022 (where I had this idea, and felt pretty good about it, and then moved on to other things), and today. (Plus maybe one more day total, also summer 2022, to research and write up the blog post about blindness and schizophrenia.) Schizophrenia is not a significant interest of mine, personally or professionally; I am not concerned that I have figured out a bunch of things about this particular schizophrenia theory sometime in the past, and then mostly forgot them, and then re-discovered them to my delight this morning :-P
For the second thing you mention, yeah I have great confidence that I didn’t remember that chapter of Dehaene. I came at this theory via the path described in Section 2. I only noticed the connection to Dehaene’s “global workspace” stuff this morning when I was about to submit this post, and figured I should first skim through my long-term-to-do list to see if there was anything else about schizophrenia that I had ever marked as worth reading, and one of them was a thing that mentioned that chapter. Hmm, maybe I should have said “Yay! That’s very nice!” instead of “Yay! That’s very reassuring!” The fact that Dehaene and Fletcher and Frith said similar things as me counts for really-not-very-much in my mental calculus. Neuroscientists say all kinds of things, and they’re usually wrong, otherwise they wouldn’t disagree with each other so much. :-P Dehaene in particular has said lots of things that I agree with and lots of things that I disagree with; I don’t see him as more trustworthy on this topic than any of the neuroscientists promoting probably dozens of other contradictory theories of schizophrenia. And I don’t know who Fletcher and Frith are, off the top of my head. I’m still happy to have found that chapter in case I want to dive further with a lit-review someday; it would give me a place to start.
Maybe this doesn’t apply to you, but if I had that experience I’d be very wary of double counting. Sometimes I’ve thought “X explains Y! Hey, it predicts Z should be true. And look, it is!” and later on I recall that I read about X explaining Y in the past, and oh would you look at that, they talked about Z as evidence. Or I read about Z in the past, which lead to me developing X. I forget where it came from, see Z again, count it as extra evidence, then read my notes and find I wrote about Z in the past.
Here, I’d also be wary of double counting. Though maybe you’ve written through notes, or your mind is less of a black box to you, so you note where your ideas came from.
Thanks! I looked up the synaptic pruning age range this morning. I had a vague recollection that there was such a thing as “synaptic pruning” but really couldn’t remember its age range, and definitely hadn’t previously connected it to schizophrenia. The grand total amount of time I’ve spent thinking hard about schizophrenia was probably like one day in 2021 (which didn’t go anywhere), and one day in summer 2022 (where I had this idea, and felt pretty good about it, and then moved on to other things), and today. (Plus maybe one more day total, also summer 2022, to research and write up the blog post about blindness and schizophrenia.) Schizophrenia is not a significant interest of mine, personally or professionally; I am not concerned that I have figured out a bunch of things about this particular schizophrenia theory sometime in the past, and then mostly forgot them, and then re-discovered them to my delight this morning :-P
For the second thing you mention, yeah I have great confidence that I didn’t remember that chapter of Dehaene. I came at this theory via the path described in Section 2. I only noticed the connection to Dehaene’s “global workspace” stuff this morning when I was about to submit this post, and figured I should first skim through my long-term-to-do list to see if there was anything else about schizophrenia that I had ever marked as worth reading, and one of them was a thing that mentioned that chapter. Hmm, maybe I should have said “Yay! That’s very nice!” instead of “Yay! That’s very reassuring!” The fact that Dehaene and Fletcher and Frith said similar things as me counts for really-not-very-much in my mental calculus. Neuroscientists say all kinds of things, and they’re usually wrong, otherwise they wouldn’t disagree with each other so much. :-P Dehaene in particular has said lots of things that I agree with and lots of things that I disagree with; I don’t see him as more trustworthy on this topic than any of the neuroscientists promoting probably dozens of other contradictory theories of schizophrenia. And I don’t know who Fletcher and Frith are, off the top of my head. I’m still happy to have found that chapter in case I want to dive further with a lit-review someday; it would give me a place to start.