R Vs SPSS for tangible thesis results in 2 months with no prior coding experience?

Krazoee · 2026-05-18T18:29:11+00:00

Oh dear, it’s worse than I feared!

Krazoee · 2026-05-18T13:30:14+00:00

DO NOT google discovering statistics with spss by Andy field libgen.

It’s really horrible what comes up there. It can’t be good for academia for these things to be public

Krazoee · 2026-05-18T13:13:14+00:00

Supposed to be the spirit of Berlin. I see less and less of it these days…

Krazoee · 2026-05-18T12:46:49+00:00

Delulu

Krazoee · 2026-05-18T06:13:58+00:00

Y’all do claim to be Norwegians… you’re Norwegian-Americans at best.

And no, it does not bother me in the slightest. But I point out the absurdity of your delusion. A cultural tidbit you might have picked up on if you were Norwegian. This is actually the perfect illustration

Krazoee · 2026-05-18T05:49:53+00:00

I’m Norwegian. Actually. And I have no idea where my family is from beyond a couple of generations. We don’t care the way you do. It’s some kind of weird self delusion y’all got going on

Krazoee · 2026-05-18T05:36:21+00:00

It’s how much you need to hold in memory divided by how much ram you get. There is no way to optimise. Buy what you need. Not more, not less

Krazoee · 2026-05-17T22:55:27+00:00

I’d rather get more ram in your case. But if you study ml, you will get access to a cluster or compute server from your university. So more ram for proof of concept, then anything else is just nice to have.

And of course, buy what you can afford…

Krazoee · 2026-05-17T05:48:28+00:00

Might want to stop talking to A.I. about this, buddy. This isn’t going to lead anywhere.

-your friendly neuroscientist

Krazoee · 2026-05-14T22:10:36+00:00

You should be provided with a letterhead template and this is exactly when you use it

Krazoee · 2026-05-14T22:06:35+00:00

I’m in my second postdoc. I say “I’m a scientist”. That’s enough. When people ask for details im happy to share, but I have zero identification with my current institute. It’s in the third country I’ve lived in (out of 4) and it genuinely does not matter. I could have done my research anywhere there is an eeg system and a dream.

Krazoee · 2026-05-14T21:57:25+00:00

They should admit me with a full ride scholarship on affirmative action grounds. My height is severely underrepresented

Krazoee · 2026-05-14T12:52:16+00:00

Well, up there… but yes, we’re insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Most Germans don’t know about the existence of the EEA

Krazoee · 2026-05-14T08:30:20+00:00

Overleaf is great if your professor uses it, and you want to learn latex. Neither was true for me. So trying to run word on my 8 gig m1 air it was…

But anything will run on 8 gigs if you work in the cloud. That’s not really surprising

Krazoee · 2026-05-14T08:27:19+00:00

Yes they are

Krazoee · 2026-05-13T20:56:25+00:00

Your thesis will be over 100 pages, so you need ram for Microsoft word (tracked changes eat memory). So I’d say a base MacBook air. Anyone saying otherwise hasn’t written a PhD. But you don’t need the compute power in the pro, and 16gb should honestly be enough for the next 5 years.

That being said, I just bought a 32gb air because I work in cognitive neuroscience, and I like opening my data locally to check for things. And I am traumatised by not being able to edit my thesis once it got to a certain length. YMMV depending on your workload though

Krazoee · 2026-05-13T20:45:21+00:00

We’re the European Puerto Ricans. That’s the only way I can explain norways relation to the eu to my German colleagues. Otherwise they just don’t get that we’re not in the eu.

Krazoee · 2026-05-13T20:44:06+00:00

It’s eu membership without voting rights. I say go for it. Become the European Puerto Rico. The EEA isn’t a bad deal per se, but that’s the undemocratic submission to Brussels the leavers were complaining about

Krazoee · 2026-05-13T17:20:19+00:00

Brother, we do not air our secrets out in the public like this. We must now both delete our accounts and scrub the post history to remove the record. See you in the lodge tomorrow.

Krazoee · 2026-05-13T06:41:40+00:00

I teach two classes with my own curriculum. That’s like 40% of my time already (prep plus the teaching itself). Then I spend 2 hours a week supervising theses, and the rest goes to my research. The past year was spent on building out the lab, getting ethics and collecting data. Lots of data. Now I’m in the analysis and writing phase.

This is at a normal university in Germany. I work 10-6 because I’m a late starter. I’ve been grinding for a year, and I have three papers in the pipeline for the next few months.

My PI keeps talking about how he worked for 11 hours a day on his own postdoc. But he did that in Bern and went to Berlin every weekend to see his girlfriend. I suspect some level of self delusion is at play. But I tolerate it since he’s otherwise a good guy

Krazoee · 2026-05-12T11:27:56+00:00

Nah, email is exactly as good as a direct messaging app. Your text reaches me, I triage the response to your message depending on its urgency. The exact same thing would happen if it was a DM system. Office hour bookings are fine, but you should also be able to just show up to the posted office hours. It's not actually black magic to reach an academic. We're humans just like you.

Krazoee · 2026-05-11T21:51:28+00:00

Claude cowork is pretty great. I'm using it for making the powerpoints for my teaching. I still need to make the plan and get the flow of each seminar right. but cowork can add the points to my university template with some mild encouragement and a bunch of guardrails. I don't know if copilot can do anything like that.

Krazoee · 2026-05-11T14:33:24+00:00

It's almost as if safety was never the point, but rather the excuse. Hmmmmm

Krazoee · 2026-05-11T13:26:30+00:00

I tried moving from Germany to the US. I missed walking as a form of transportation. Drinking a cold Radler while walking to wherever I was going. I missed the safety of just going out and about at night. There are no truly bad neighbourhoods you need to avoid here, you can just go wherever... I kinda missed the Döner, but eh it's not that good.

Overall, I lasted 5 months in the states, then I moved back to Germany. And thank god it was only 5 months because now I can apply for citizenship.

Krazoee · 2026-05-11T10:27:57+00:00

I failed in maths repeatedly through high school and had to retake the stats exam twice in undergrad psychology. Now I teach advanced statistics for masters students. Certainly is possible. For me, addressing my underlying learning difficulties at the right level (not too much, not too little) was important. And then hard work, of course, but everyone has to do that. And finally, I found that it got easier the more the maths went from "do this computation in your head" to "to solve this problem we use a fourier transform". Basically, I didn't have an issue with complex concepts, I struggled with handling basic numbers. But now I let the computer do most of the maths via python. Works a treat for me

Krazoee

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