The MANDA Lab Odyssey

A few quick observations.  When talking to MS or PhD students during seminar presentations or other scientific meetings, I sometimes notice that they answer questions about very concrete topics (e.g., mathematical models of memory) quite confidently and fluently .  However, fluency is primarily verbal in nature. A lot of fluent sequences of words but without a genuine sense of understanding. I wonder if that is partly an LLM effect. All of us use AI these days. When you ask AI to explain something, it does so fluently but not always in the simplest words.  The only solution to this that I can think of is the old-school pen-and-paper approach to reading papers, writing down equations and struggling to make sense of them, drawing simple pictures of how you think matrices transform through the equations of the models, etc. This is, of course, time-consuming. An LLM will spit out the answers in seconds, and you read the answer and go away with the feeling that you've understo...

 I was asked this question recently in a podcast done by the institute. This is a podcast that replaces "reflection talks" that faculty used to give before their 5y contract renewals or promotions.  The reflections podcast, with Richa Chadda, senior manager at the faculty affairs office. I used to accept people to the lab simply on the basis of an interview to gauge interest. I thought the rest could be discerned from their CV. Unfortunately, this quickly backfired because CVs don't reflect reality. More often than not, CVs are exaggerated. In other cases, they are filled with internship experiences but each lasting a month or two. In other words, there is a distinct lack of depth and commitment shown in most CVs but people are quite articulate these days and a simple interview is insufficient to gauge preparedness to take on research in cognitive science. The other issue is people think research in cognitive science is easier than say in quantum physics. So many people w...