#AcademicRunPlaylist - 12/11/25

Another later end to the day, but earlier I was able to catch some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Dmitri "Mitya" Chklovskii on building a self-supervised dynamical model for neuroscience and AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF3Uhrm__U4

Next was "Neuroethics" by Walter Glannon. It's fairly shocking to read a book that's nominally about an area of bioethics that manages to ignore the main lessons of the Belmont Report, but this one does. While the early chapters are good, things start to take a turn when uncritically engaging with "moral modification," and only gets worse when examining transhumanism and brain computer interfaces. There are many better books on this topic, even if some of their scientific citations are dated https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553520/neuroethics/

Last was "Moorings: Voyages of Capital Across the Indian Ocean" by Nidhi Mahajan. Through connected ethnographies spanning the informal trading routes of the Indian Ocean, Mahajan explores how informal international maritime traders live and work in a shifting economic and legal landscape. This book is probably best read by folks who have deep knowledge of the socioeconomic and political history of Eastern Africa, Western India, and the Gulf Coast as there's not a lot of time spent reviewing those topics. If you have a bit of a foundation however it's a fascinating micro view of a unique and nearly timeless phenomena https://www.ucpress.edu/books/moorings/paper