Mark Histed

Neuroscience, information processing, recurrent networks, brain stimulation, causality.
PI@NIH (pers opinions here only).
Prev: NEPA @MIT @UChicago
#ScienceMastodon #science #neuroscience

publications: https://markhisted.org/publications
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/markhisted

Last Notes

2026-05-31 13:23:37 UTC

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Hopefully this moves the needle and encourages the pharma industry to speak up.
I have heard from several sources that pharma execs know exactly what’s going on and what the damage will be, but they can justify inaction because the effects won’t hit their stock prices soon.

2026-05-31 13:23:32 UTC

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“The damage inflicted over the past 16 months is prologue.
The OMB’s proposal for overhauling U.S. government grantmaking would explicitly subordinate expert peer review to political gatekeepers and make ideological alignment with the administration a prerequisite for funding.”

2026-05-31 13:23:24 UTC

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“The argument, advanced privately by some industry leaders, that intervention would be futile is not credible. Technology executives recently persuaded the administration to abandon a proposed executive order on artificial intelligence…”

2026-05-31 13:23:13 UTC

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Biocentury is pharma trade press and widely read in the industry.

2026-05-31 13:23:03 UTC

“As the admin moves from cutting budgets and attacking elite universities to dismantling the foundations of the US research enterprise, pharma CEOs have remained silent.
Their silence is a choice.”
https://www.biocentury.com/article/659615
https://fediscience.org/system/media_attachments/files/116/669/400/996/215/638/original/6367eef1486ea749.jpeg

2026-05-06 21:04:24 UTC

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So we choose a reasonable rigor std, do our best to peer review, & accept some errors, worked out by followup work.
(There are many issues w/ glam journals, over-selling, favoring huge labs—etc. But this 'some are wrong' issue is just the nature of reality.) /end

2026-05-06 21:04:19 UTC

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This framework is well-worked out in theory—we must choose an error criterion ("wrong"), which comes w/ a cost in time/$.
This isn't ex it (need a cost term), bt same idea, fm David Heeger's notes.
Type 1/2 errors, sensitivity/specificity: same idea.
https://www.cns.nyu.edu/~david/handouts/sdt/sdt.html
https://fediscience.org/system/media_attachments/files/116/529/657/235/270/666/original/5c5c14adf5308acb.png

2026-05-06 21:04:13 UTC

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Why not a bad thing?
Because these journals by def'n are publishing exciting, novel, possibly field-changing work.
You do NOT want to further encumber that work—CNS papers are far too long already—with a sky-high rigor standard. Or you will get rigor mortis of science.
3/

2026-05-06 21:04:08 UTC

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Every scientific mentor I know, including me, tells all our first-year grad students this.
It's widely known inside science.
2/

2026-05-06 21:04:02 UTC

A good number of papers in Science and Nature are wrong...
and that's not a bad thing.
(What's something everyone in your field knows but people outside the field don't?)
1/

2025-12-27 20:03:21 UTC

Learned this week that both of my siblings live in Sears kit houses. They were solidly built - still in very good shape.

2025-11-15 16:04:03 UTC

Seen on DC Metro
🙄
https://fediscience.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/554/559/143/732/895/original/6d35ec93c2a48890.jpeg

2025-05-15 21:02:14 UTC

Despite some ups and downs at NIH, we do have an open position for a postbac and are considering candidates.
Our work is at the intersection of neuroscience and AI, and we aim to understand how the brain's densely connected recurrent networks operate. 🧪