
You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are? (2018) - Tomte
https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1014267515696922624
======
eli_gottlieb
It's amazing how many of the "bullshit insane" things in neuroscience make
perfect damn sense from a Bayesian brain standpoint.

If you're saccading to update an approximate posterior _model_ of the visual
scene, you don't _need_ to "pause" or "blank out" the blur of the saccade.
Each fixation is a _sampling_ of the environment under generative assumptions,
so yeah, your previous posterior becomes your new prior, and as long as the
saccades don't take _too_ long, your new prior is accurate enough to make
decent predictions! Since what we consciously experience is the predictions
themselves, we don't notice any gaps until the bottom-up prediction error
signals become _huge_.

------
golem14
Nice writeup. Would be great to have a traditional blog-like version of it,
the twitter feed is somewhat painful to read.

~~~
soared
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html)

~~~
SomeHacker44
This should be the linked post by the moderators.

------
afpx
Ok, so now how do I hack my eyes so that I see enemies better in FPS games?

~~~
romwell
By fixating on the cross-hair, and using the mouse to look around (rotating
the camera) instead of moving your eyes, I'd guess?

------
parliament32
Why do people think it's a good idea to post a 1700 word writeup on Twitter?
I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm legitimately curious why anyone would want do
this. Do you think your audience enjoys reading tiny post after tiny post? Do
you just love posting short messages in sequence SMS-style?

~~~
hombre_fatal
Well, it has 28k retweets, 72k likes, and a hundreds of 1-on-1 engagements and
Q&A. More than I've seen in pretty much any Disqus comment section.

Doesn't seem like the best tweet to die on to make your point. The results
surely answer all of your questions.

It's a weird format, but I encourage you to at least try and appreciate it
instead of dismissing it. I'll try: It's kind of like what a blog post might
look when annotated on genius.com: each point can spawn its own discussion and
people can engage the author on any subtopic right there alongside the
content.

Another benefit of the anti-narrative format is that it has an immediate
quickstart. One second you're reading the opening tweet about how "bullshit
our brains are", and the next you've learned something interesting. You might
not have even clicked into a longer-form format about how the eyes work,
there's just no commitment.

~~~
jimfleming
Yep, people post long-form content to Twitter because there's engagement
there. Literally no other reason because it is a terrible medium for reading
and writing long-form content like this. But that level of engagement is rare
on proper "long-form" sites and personal blogs.

