It does feel like it’d be “better” if good behavior came from the company’s intrinsic behavior but laws like this help (re)establish norms that encourage those sorts of actions.

Likewise, it’d be better if kids say please and thank you because of a genuine sense of gratitude, rather than just to avoid parental nagging—-but that nagging helps develop appreciation for others’ actions.

Any replacement system needs to somehow serve as a token for people who can't/won't actually read your papers.

There’s also a lot of path dependency. SHA256 makes a lot of sense once you already have lots of digital data but you’d probably do something else entirely in a more analog world.

PLOS One does publish pretty much anything, but that was always meant to be the point: "here's some data, make of it what you will. "

[*] Nothing usually happens if you push back on this fake deadline, though I suppose your paper might end up in a different issue of a printed journal. It's just annoyingly rushed--give me a week!

I appreciate a birthday text/email, but a thoughtful email is nicer and an physical card/letter is better still.

LLMs have more stuff bolted onto them (embeddings, RLHF) but the autoregressive core is a direct descendent of that sort of language model.

Pasting something directly into the chat interface seems weird, but if you could somehow just see where P(token | context) falls off a cliff, that's a pretty good hint that your writing has problem.

I suspect another big part of it is that marketing and sales are relatively easy to measure and to scale.

You can hire one, two, or three new salespeople and expect that revenue will change more or less proportionately. Fixing (or ignoring) a handful issues doesn’t scale so smoothly—-there are jumps where the product suddenly seems much better/worse.

Obviously, there are limits: I’m not sure what my local grocery store or bus line would do with 100 new workers, but I have no doubt they could put a few people to work right away.

MRI is, in general, a lot harder than people often imagine. It uses complicated physics to measure convoluted physiological changes to indirectly measure brain activity, which is obviously stupifying involved--and then relate that to other, often complicated factors like behavior, lifestyle or disease state.

I think it's reasonably well-known that the BOLD response is complex and doesn't directly reflect "average" spiking activity. Some studies find that it's sensitive to the amount of synchrony (=more neurons firing together in time) rather than the rate. The paper you mention shows another dissociation: neurons can get more fuel by extracting oxygen more efficiently OR have having more overall oxygen to extract at the same rate. Thus, it's not noise, but it is complicated.

EEG "spellers" c. 2000 required a cooperative participant who's actively engaged in a behavioural task: you attend to the letter/word you want to send and thereby produce a different response when it (vs the other letters) flash.

Implanted electrodes can do a lot better but it's still not something that will let someone "slurp" your thoughts out of you -- it'd be like subvocalizing them.

The author lists for economics papers are traditionally alphabetized, so more of your output will be known by your name if it occurs early in the alphabet. Abbie Ableson gets lots of mentions as "Ableson et al." while Zhang Zhu will almost always be relegated to the "et al". If name recognition matters, you’d expect successful academic economists to be clustered at the beginning of the alphabet—-and this appears to be true.

In most psychology journals, the author list is instead ordered by contribution/senority, and this effect disappears. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/08953300677652608...

One paper doesn’t make a career (she wrote many dozens), it’s not always cited weirdly, and even if it is, some people may remember the coauthors (as they should).

But since you mention lived experience, I’ll add that I’ve certainly been asked if I’m "even aware" of results from co-authored papers where my name was listed second—-and I don’t think this is very uncommon experience.