[Ghostt8117]

This type of comment is my least favorite on HN. "Seems quite trivial," "non-sequitur to compare them," "foolish." I am not able to read the paper as I do not have access, but the published perspective has 131 citations which seem to consider everything from task-specific human abilities, to cortical processing speeds, to perception and limb movements and eye movements, and so on.

I'm glad you thought about it too, but to assume that the authors are just silly and don't understand the problem space is really not a good contribution to conversation.

[cscheid]

(Disclosure: I’m a former academic with more than a handful of papers to my name)

The parent comment is harshly criticizing (fairly, in my view) a paper, and not the authors. Smart people can write foolish things (ask me how I know). It’s good, actually, to call out foolishness, especially in a concrete way as the parent comment does. We do ourselves no favors by being unkind to each other. But we also do ourselves no favors by being unnecessarily kind to bad work. It’s important to keep perspective.

[Ghostt8117]

I realized that I do have institutional access and so I was able to read the paper, and I stand by my initial criticism of the above comment.

"It seems to me all this paper does is define tasks in a highly abstract way that imposes a uniform cost to process '1 bit of task information'."

The paper uses this number and acknowledges that it is not the only possible measure, and explains why they use this number and how it was derived. It is just the start of the paper, not "all this paper does." The paper primarily focuses on counterarguments to this number to then address the primary question of the relationship between the inner and outer brain.

A few questions it poses: does the superior colliculus contribute to a bottom-up "saliency map" to ultimately direct the attentional bottleneck in cognition? Why does the brain use the same neural circuitry for both rapid/parallel sensory processing and slow/serial cognition? This is not even how other parts of the body work (e.g., type I and II muscle fibers). Perhaps the associated routing machinery between input and output accounts for the billions of neurons? Maybe, like the visual cortex, the prefrontal cortex has a fine-grained organization of thousands of small modules each dedicated to a specific microtask?

We do ourselves the most favors by reading research with some skepticism, and asking questions. We do ourselves no favors by writing comments after only reading an abstract (please, tell me if I'm wrong). I only point out that discounting research so blithely does nothing for improving research. This was a perspective paper - an author asking questions to better understand a possible issue and guide research. And maybe the commenter is right, maybe this is the wrong focus, but I do not believe it was truly considered.