I very often go around in circles in research, vaguely orbiting what I’m seeking. Revisiting similar things over the years. Then suddenly something will bring a bunch of things together.
2014 I was writing my every thought down on index cards for 6 months or so when I could. Thousands of index cards. [they’re cheap] collected my various writings and discovered
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation was the best way for me to put together groups of words into topics — but I had to analyze it even further than that because there are so many ways to split up the same data. etc.
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It wasn’t until maybe 2021 until I was satisfied BEYOND A DOUBT, that Cognitive Science was “the” interdisciplinary category that best fit my main set of interests; in fact, all of them could somehow fit in there. And yet, why? and that was another parallel question that ran along side.
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it was awesome though. i had to categorize all my writing output that I’d collected from 1989-2018 or so until a bunch of categories emerged that I then had to make further sense of becaues they were just sets of words and see what they might represent as topics… ..and the picture began to emerge which ended up fitting perfectly into the very same fields that overlap in cognitive science. Quite thrilling ultimately. Not much I can do with that information but it was a long process of discovery.
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