Passengers have many legal rights. For instance they can't be left on the tarmac for over 3 hours. It's not a simple situation like "flying is a privilege". If there is no law that this is violating Congress should clearly pass more protections for airline passengers ASAP.

Furthermore, the "I was just following orders" type defense is pretty poor given certain historical contexts of its use ... people need to use their own judgment of a situation in the moment. The passengers refusal to move should not have gotten to the point of force, it should have gone up the chain, where I would hope a different course of action would have been decided. I know it's difficult in the moment, but clear thinking heads would have realized that.

I mean, I guess you don't really need to understand how the brain works to do surgery on it. Just get the tumor out, or cut the appropriate pathways to stop epilepsy spreads, etc.

His lack of understanding in neuroscience is still pretty astonishing. Combining the ignorance with the god complex is more frightening.

It is binary at one stage of processing. when a neuron has enough input it fires an action potential which is a binary one or zero. that then gets "read" by the synaptic terminal and turns back into an analog signal to a "post synaptic" neuron.
As you said, how this signal is then processed by the next neuron depends on a lot of factors including the effects of other neurons. Synaptic strength refers to the amount of electricity the post synaptic neuron sees given this binary 1 or 0 and is often measured at rest. However, if other neurons are firing it can go up or down, amplifying or shrinking it by activating other voltage sensitive ion channels or by increasing the conductance across the lipid bilayer of the cell so that the electricity leaks out of the dendrite of the neuron before it is processed at the soma (the cell body where a new action potential can be generated)

I'm a bit surprised the grad student or expert didn't discuss neuromodulators more. The fact is we already have the full connectome of a much simpler system, a worm (C Elegans). And this full mapping is considered insufficient to fully understand the simplified worm behavior because it doesn't fully capture the diversity of different neuromodulators and how they effect processing in neurons. It matters if the neuron is releasing dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, etc. There are ways to approximate these from EM images by analyzing the synapse properties, but ultimately it leads to a much larger problem in understanding neural processing.

In a similar light, the connectome project does not do a good job capturing synaptic strength. We don't really know just from the electron microscopy how strong the connections are. We can try and approximate it by looking at the size/formation of the synapse but ultimately this falls short.

For instance, my memory is that thalamocortical projections (thalamic nuclei to L4 of the cortex) do not make up the primary inputs to L4 on a structural connectivity level, but the strength of those connections are much stronger then the more numerous cortico cortical connections. I don't think the connectome from EM images will be able to pull that out.

The connectome is important, the same way knowing the human genome is important. However, it's really not going to tell us how to simulate a person. It's an important step to be sure, one we are still a good ways away from finishing last I checked (which was three years ago ...)

There are some valid points here, but I think there are multiple interpretations to these issues and it's not so clear cut.

I'll just pick an easy one. Trigger warnings are no more a restriction of free speech then calling a movie rated R VS PG13, it's just more specific, so lets get that out of the way. Take a read of a classic like John Stuart Mills “On Liberty”. He does a great dissemination of freedom and balancing it with causing harm developing the harm principle and the offense principle. It's well thought out and addresses these very issues. There is a recognition that free speech should be regulated depending on if it causes harm. For instance it's illegal to yell “fire!” in a crowded movie theater since it could cause harm from a stampede of people trying to leave. I apologize if I get things wrong, but the following is my understanding here, but look here if you're interested. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Theory_of_liberty)

It's a difficult concept to define what is an act of harm. In general this is highly related to concepts of political correctness and has it's very roots in classical liberal thought. In my understanding, Mill would say not to restrict free speech in the case offense only in the case of harm. However, psychology and neuroscience make this line less distinct in caseses of trama or deep internalized concepts where we might see words leading to genuine harm of an individual, not just offense. This means that harm is less universal and depends on the individual and it leads to the idea of separating spaces based on the line between offense and harm. My understanding is the idea of rating systems, red light districts come from this. Also, now, a newer concept of safe spaces. It's easy to say that people should just suck it up, but it's not always that clear cut and there is historical precedence for this idea.

I'm pretty sure the 84 Lumber commercial was a bit pro trump, if not at least neutral. That was the point of the great big door at the end. The idea being that policies will allow selected people to come in legally as trump talked about in his speeches.

As far as the comments from top democrats, the devil is in the details. We often miss the nuance.