Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar

Rachel Flood Heaton

@rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social

300 followers 355 following 369 posts

Cognitive scientist, industrial designer, and electrical engineer. I make neurally plausible computational process models of visual cognition.

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Kordo's avatar Kordo @kordo.bsky.social
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"It is not that power corrupts, but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to be come drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted" - Frank Herbert (great Acton quote, btw)

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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I hope that the pendulum doesn't swing so hard in the other direction that we lose actual computational cognitive science research funding. The real research is valuable.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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If research was the goal, they had people with the wrong skillsets working on it. These kinds of models have contaminated cognitive science, but most of the people who work on them know that's not what they're doing. Sometimes they do give in to the temptation to make big claims about minds, though.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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The right understands limited working memory capacity. The left hasn't yet learned. Tell people 3 things at most. In the simplest way possible.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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Oh you can cover something other than Biden's age ad nauseum. Nice.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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That did not work for me. I am on zyrtec every day of the year and still had it twice.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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“There are fundamental conflicts of interest in an institution investigating its own institutional member...one of the things that making the outcome of these reports public does is provide discipline and accountability for institutions to do a good job.” (CK Gunsalus)

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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A Bad AI boom could not have come at a worse time for humanity. Maybe if we had energy sorted already it would be alright, but as it stands Bad AI directly contributes to carbon emissions and even assists in spreading misinformation about climate change.

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Timothy Burke's avatar Timothy Burke @bubbaprog.ilovecitr.us
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1. The guy who wrote the "don't vote" essay says we're obligated as Americans to root for the Michigan Wolverines

www.nytimes.com/2022/12/08/o...

2. he lives in 3 Rivers, MI & says your vote doesn't matter "even in municipal races." I found EIGHT elections in the past 10y decided by 1 vote there

26 replies 113 reposts 573 likes

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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It takes a lot of grit for women to stay in (often) hostile environments for years to develop computational STEM skills. So a very hard thing for me is when someone who is not computational at all claims to do computational research. It just feels like a slap in the face.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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Also people who rent homes with garages. Lots of those too. I rarely charge outside of home but I do wish there were a lot more DC fast chargers.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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Interestingly, some of the discrimination I saw against women in engineering was a sort if false benevolent sexism: "She probably wouldn't be comfortable around us with the way we behave so maybe we won't put her through that and just not let her in." But yes also thinking our brains are inferior.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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Consistent with this claim, I was a beneficiary of admission into an engineering program. (I should have gotten in on merit anyway, but likely wouldn't have in that era.) I was most often the only woman in large classes, which necessarily implies there were no black or latina women.

1 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

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Jamison Foser's avatar Jamison Foser @jamisonfoser.bsky.social
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something I've been thinking about lately that might be useful to some of y'all right now is that sometimes when you can't muster any optimism or hope you can decide to continue fighting anyway on behalf of others who still have some

12 replies 98 reposts 520 likes

Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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People around me keep getting COVID. It's definitely a thing this summer.

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Reposted by Rachel Flood Heaton

alisonborealis (she/her)'s avatar alisonborealis (she/her) @alisonborealis.bsky.social
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I LOVE all these "everybody contributes to science" projects, but PLEASE stop calling them citizen science and start calling them COMMUNITY SCIENCE projects (and community scientists) instead.

It's a far more inclusive and non-limiting term.
#SciComm

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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Just to be clear they upended Chevron. They didn't uphold it.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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Depends—they would have to poll centrist voters to see whether some people not liking a back woman loses more votes than others not trusting the faculties of a white man.

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Margarita Noriega 's avatar Margarita Noriega @margarita.bsky.social
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We had so much immaculate H20, it was incredible, there was so much oxygen in the water, it became a gas

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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If someone speaks reasonably articulately about doing super bad stuff you should believe them.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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Computational research is now extremely common in psychology, but psychology has not fully adopted research ethics standards from computational fields. Before doing computational projects, make sure you understand standards for attribution, code licensing, and what constitutes code plagiarism.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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I take this to mean the people who trained it fine tuned it with a little bit devaluing language and a smidge of gaslighting before they put it out into the world.

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Kieran Healy's avatar Kieran Healy @kjhealy.bsky.social
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New version of chatbot reaches level of function where it responds to all queries by making a little twisty-wrist gesture with pinched fingers and saying “But isn’t it more *complicated* than that?”

89 replies 207 reposts 1302 likes

Reposted by Rachel Flood Heaton

Ed Zitron's avatar Ed Zitron @zitron.bsky.social
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this is a declaration of war against creatives and it should be reported as such

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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Fun fact of the day: the NSF doesn't distinguish between a PI and co-PI in terms of seniority or scientific responsibility on a grant. PIs aren't directing co-PIs in the NSF's mind. I think a lot of people don't realize this.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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Do you want specific proper names subbed in? Or do you want the workflow to decide or randomize names for you?

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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Academic misconduct is not an abstract victimless crime. Being impacted by someone else's misconduct has consequences for people's livelihoods, especially in early career. Fighting the misconduct takes a toll on a person's mental health and hamstrings their ability to do their other research.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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"Wouldn't you like more attention on your work so the AI community knows about it?" No. No, I would not. Not yet anyway.

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Dr. Damien P. Williams (Temporarily Logged Off)'s avatar Dr. Damien P. Williams (Temporarily Logged Off) @wolvendamien.bsky.social
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In case you're ever wondering what the monkey's paw version of "i wish people were more interested in my work" looked like, just ask anyone who was doing serious, critical, and nuanced work around "AI" before 2014.

2 replies 25 reposts 131 likes

Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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Classes are okay but the more degrees you get the more BS you encounter while getting them, which gets increasingly intolerable the more educated and accomplished you become yourself.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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Figure out what you want to do with advice from real humans on something like stackexchange. It will help you pinpoint any issues with syntax if you just google the strings that aren't working.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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'That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable.' Oh my heart.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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What happens when you image search for 'this is fine' now?

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Reposted by Rachel Flood Heaton

Reposted by Rachel Flood Heaton

Encephalophagy's avatar Encephalophagy @encephalophagy.bsky.social
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I'm done sugarcoating violence. Let's call bullying what it is: abuse.

2 replies 16 reposts 70 likes

Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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I have cancelled my subscription and I'll come back if this gets fixed.

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Rachel Flood Heaton's avatar Rachel Flood Heaton @rachelfloodheaton.bsky.social
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This was also true of all extinct species until it wasn't 🦕 Thanks for the debate. FWIW the thing I loathe about doom is injecting it as a joke. I do not want to hear when I complain about heat to look on the bright side because it's the coolest summer I'll experience for the rest of my life.

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