A theoretical monstrosity. (this is not interesting)
Yesterday sumofthedharma
told me that this -ive-ournal has become a monster. Maybe
so. How can I feel starved for human contact when I'm back in a
dorm surrounded by people again? Maybe it's just a bad habit--an
unlearning of the ability to internalize the inner monologue.
Instead it just gets spat thoughtlessly out into your faces. I
apologize, sincerely, but then I do it anyway. Hmmm.
I'm too lazy to do the reading for the poli sci course, so I think I'm letting that drop. Which means I am back in theory land for another term. I will rule the skies! I'm the Red Baron!
Well, not really. It's looking like I'll be taking the course I really ought to have been shopping all along, Computational Cognitive Science, which nicely wraps up an entire body of thought I find myself moving at into a nice semester-long package. The methodology is a little nonstandard--more about constructing and training models than positing and testing hypotheses. I hoped to take a Philosophy of Science class so I could better judge the legitimacy of this sort of thing but, eh...the course sucked.
So this means I will spend another semester without historical context. However, I do get a sort of reductionist trump card, both because (a) cog sci/psych experiments and theories can be more rigorously verified/falsified than social science ones, so whipping out a theory in an argument carries much more authority, methinks, and (b) reductionism serves as a trump card, sort of--social scientific theories often posit a model of human behavior and cognition that suits the overall schema, but rarely do they start small and work with empirically sound stuff on up. That's my Holy Grail, maybe.
Babble babble babble. All this is probably just a countersnipe at Piotr.
P.S. Why does Statistics homework have to be so trivial? One of the problems for this week was literally "Take the sample mean of this data." What the fiddly fuck? I miss Abstract Algebra, with it's hours of ridiculous formal proofs. I guess this will make it easier to take five classes this term, though--which looks likely, since I can't figure out what to drop. Too much to learn.
I'm too lazy to do the reading for the poli sci course, so I think I'm letting that drop. Which means I am back in theory land for another term. I will rule the skies! I'm the Red Baron!
Well, not really. It's looking like I'll be taking the course I really ought to have been shopping all along, Computational Cognitive Science, which nicely wraps up an entire body of thought I find myself moving at into a nice semester-long package. The methodology is a little nonstandard--more about constructing and training models than positing and testing hypotheses. I hoped to take a Philosophy of Science class so I could better judge the legitimacy of this sort of thing but, eh...the course sucked.
So this means I will spend another semester without historical context. However, I do get a sort of reductionist trump card, both because (a) cog sci/psych experiments and theories can be more rigorously verified/falsified than social science ones, so whipping out a theory in an argument carries much more authority, methinks, and (b) reductionism serves as a trump card, sort of--social scientific theories often posit a model of human behavior and cognition that suits the overall schema, but rarely do they start small and work with empirically sound stuff on up. That's my Holy Grail, maybe.
Babble babble babble. All this is probably just a countersnipe at Piotr.
P.S. Why does Statistics homework have to be so trivial? One of the problems for this week was literally "Take the sample mean of this data." What the fiddly fuck? I miss Abstract Algebra, with it's hours of ridiculous formal proofs. I guess this will make it easier to take five classes this term, though--which looks likely, since I can't figure out what to drop. Too much to learn.