That’s a pretty cool histogram in figure 2.
witzvo
Karma: 351
Thanks! Lest it confuse anyone else, please note that that review is all about effects of tDCS on the cerebellum and not a review of tDCS on the cerebrum or other brain structures. The cerebelar tDCS itself seems to have many effects including cerebellar motor cortical inhibition, gait adaptation, motor behaviour, and cognition (learning, language, memory, attention), though.
Here’s a general review of the effect of tDCS on language
“”″ Despite their heterogeneities, the studies we reviewed collect- ively show that tDCS can improve language performance in healthy subjects and in patients with aphasia ( fi gure 4). Although relatively transient, the improvement can be remark- able: Monti and colleagues 52 found an improvement of approxi- mately 30% and Holland and Crinion 63 report a gain of approximately 25% in speech performance in aphasic patients. Intriguingly, no report described negative results in aphasic patients. “”″
EDIT:
Interestingly, there’s limited evidence that it can be effective for patients suffering from autism too. E.g. case study finding 40% reduction in abnormal behavior for a severe case and improved language learning for minimally verbal children with autism.
This seems really interesting. I’d like to learn more about it. So far I’m frustrated with the quality of information I’ve found. Here’s a PMC search and a review behind a firewall.
Yootling is one good approach to the problem.
[LINK] Givewell discusses the progress of their thinking about the merits of funding efforts to ameliorate global existential risks.
create community norms whereby the the amount social praise you get is proportional to the strength of your case for the impact of your action is.
Agreed. We need more thinking/work on this. “Thumbs up” for example, don’t seem to cut it because some things are so easy to like, whether they actually have real impact or not that they are not at all proportional to merit.
Thanks!
Whoa. Fascinating! Thanks! I really like the idea of this approach. I’m, ironically, not sure I’m decisive enough to decide that decisiveness is a virtue, but this is worth thinking about. Where should I go to read more about the general idea that if I can decide that something is a virtue and practice acting in accord with that virtue that I can change myself?
Thinking about it just for a minute, I realize that I need a heuristic for when it’s smart to be decisive and when it’s smart to be more circumspect. I don’t want to become a rash person. If I can convince myself that the heuristic is reliable enough, then hopefully I can convince myself to put it into practice like you say. I don’t know if this means I’m falling into the rationalization trap that you mentioned or not, though. I don’t think so; it would be a mistake to be decisive for decisiveness sake.
I can spend some time thinking more about role-models in this regard and maybe ask them when they decide to decide versus decide to contemplate, themselves. In particular, I think my role-models would not spend time on a decision if they knew that making either decision, now, was preferable to not making a decision until later.
Heuristic 1a: If making either decision now is preferable to making the decision later, make the decision promptly (flip coins if necessary).
In the particular case that prompted my original post, my current heuristics said it was a situation worth thinking about—the options had significant consequences both good and bad. On the other hand, agonizing over the decision wouldn’t get me anywhere and I knew what the consequences would be in a general sense—I just didn’t want to accept that I was responsible for the problems that I could expect to follow either decision, I wanted something more perfect. That’s another situation my role-models would not fall prey to. Somehow they have the stomach to accept this and get on with things when there’s no alternative....
Goal: I will be a person with the self-respect to stomach responsibility for the bad consequences of good decisions.
Heuristic 1b: When you pretty-much know what the consequences will be of all the options and they’re all unavoidably problematic to around the same degree (multiply the importance of the decision by the error in the degree to define “around”), force yourself to pick one right away so you can put the decision-making behind you.
Am I on the right track? I’m not totally sure about how important it is to be decision-making behind yourself.
fixed. Thanks.
I notice that I have a hard time getting myself to make decisions when there are tradeoffs to be made. I think this is because it’s really emotionally painful for me to face actually choosing to accept one or another of the flaws. When I face making such a decision, often, the “next thing I know” I’m procrastinating or working on other things, but specifically I’m avoiding thinking about making the decision. Sometimes I do this when, objectively, I’d probably be better off rolling a dice and getting on with one of the choices, but I can’t get myself to do that either. If it’s relevant, I’m bad at planning generally. Any suggestions?
Just in case anyone wants pointers to existing mathematical work on “unpredictable” sequences: Algorithmically random sequences (wikipedia)
An example of using Bayes to “generate hypotheses” that’s successful is the mining/oil industry that makes spatial models and computes posterior expected reward for different drilling plans. For general-science type hypotheses you’d ideally want to put a prior on a potentially very complicated space (e.g. the space of all programs that compute the set of interesting combinations of reagents, in your example) and that typically isn’t attempted with modern algorithms. This isn’t to say there isn’t room to make improvements on the state of the art with more mundane approaches.
the “you’re a simulation” argument could explain anything and hence explains nothing. He managed to predict scoffing, but that wasn’t a consequence of his hypothesis, that was just to be expected.
Links: Young blood reverses age-related impairments in cognitive function and synaptic plasticity in mice (press release)(paper)
I think the radial arm water maze experiment’s results are particularly interesting; it measures learning and memory (see fig 2c which is visible even with the paywall). There’s a day one and day two of training and the old mice (18 months) improve somewhat during the first day and then more or less start over on the second day in terms of the errors they are making. This is also true if the old mice are treated with 8 injections of old blood over the course of 3 weeks (the new curves lie pretty much on top of the old curves in supplemental figure 7d). Young mice (3 months) perform better than the old mice (supplemental figure 5d) they learn faster on the first day and retain it when the second day starts (supp 7d).
However, if you give 8 injections of 100 micro liters of blood from 3 month old mice to 18 month old mice, the treated mice perform dramatically better than the old-blood treated old mice (2c) and much more like young mice (this comparison is less certain; I’m comparing one line from 2c to one line from supp. 7d, but that’s how it looks by eye).
One factor in the new blood that plays a role is GDF11. From another paper: “we show that GDF11 alone can improve the cerebral vasculature and enhance neurogenesis”
The New York Times gives an overview and other known effects of young blood such as rejuvenating the musculature / heart / vasculature of old mice with young blood. Young Blood May Hold Key to Reversing Aging, e.g. Restoring Systemic GDF11 Levels Reverses Age-Related Dysfunction in Mouse Skeletal Muscle
I think the use of exclamation points should be tastefully rare, or it does give the wrong impression.
Thanks Badger. This is great!
a market where your scoring was based on how much you updated the previous bet towards the truth.
This is interesting. Can someone point me to documentation of the scoring? Thanks. (unless it’s a CFAR secret or something)
but a reaction to an environment in the broadest sense inherently unsuitable to humans.
So, can you say more about what aspect of your environment is bugging you? Captivity?? Do you want to try living somewhere more “outdoors”?
Interesting. Something’s a bit odd, though. If the events are rare, then it’s hard to know what the correlations are with any precision. If the events are common, then, yes, we should be able to see the anti-correlation, but this would be a really bad sign—there’d be no reason to think that the disastrous event where both co-occur isn’t right around the corner.
ETA: I exaggerate a bit. There’d be no reason if the independence model was true. If, in reality, there was some circumstance specially protecting us somehow the situation wouldn’t have to be dire.