Institute of Neuroscience Menu

Bill Bialek (Princeton/CUNY) will be holding an in-person AMA (Ask Me Anything) on "The future of Neuroscience and Biophysics" on Thursday 8/25 at 4pm in the Knight Campus Beetham Seminar room (1st floor). Zoom option available (link on ION mailing page or contact Luca Mazzucato). 

This event will be a great opportunity to discuss new directions and outstanding questions with one of the deepest thinkers at the interface of biology and physics!

Hello dear colleagues!

After many years wandering through as many disciplines, I would like to invite you all to my dissertation defense.

Please RSVP at https://jon-e.net/dissertation

A zoom link will be sent to the provided email before the defense

(and I will also send it as a reply to this email for my departmental colleagues)

If you are unable to make it, the dissertation, slides, and a video of the talk will be available at that link^ afterwards 😊

Special thanks to my committee: Melissa Baese-Berk, Santiago Jaramillo, Matt Smear, and Mike Wehr

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~~~~~~Abstract~~~~~~~  

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I will be presenting a vision of science as we could make it. I argue the most fundamental problems in science are not theoretical or experimental, but infrastructural. The problems with our publication, communication, data, analytical, and experimental systems that define the daily experience of science are not isolated, but symptomatic of profound deficits in basic digital scientific infrastructure. Our infrastructural deficits are not unique to science, but structured by the dominant modes of informational capitalism that increasingly define our daily experience, period. As the logic of the digital enclosure movement transforms old enemies into new ones, publishers into surveillance conglomerates, universities into factories: will we keep running on our treadmills of funding and prestige, playing out the clock as our working conditions deteriorate to the point where publicly funded science is little more than a training program for pharmaceutical and advertising companies?

Drawing from decades of digital infrastructural history within and beyond science, I will sketch a path by which we might build systems that empower, rather than control us. I will argue a better future for science is not utopian, nor solely dependent on funding and administrative agencies, but something we can organize ourselves. Woven together with my work in ill-defined phonetic categories and distributed experimental systems, I have written a love letter to the power of swarms: how by embracing heterogeneity and rough consensus we might make science more boisterous, creative, and human.

Looking forward to seeing you, and wishing everyone well

-jonny