Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an over-rated article by those outside the field of neuroscience. While it brings up a few good points, it fails to acknowledge the sophistication of our neuroscience and behavioral techniques, and the value of converging evidence across levels of description. Also, its relatedness to the present article is tenuous at best.
Mostly agreed. In my eyes, the takeaway from this piece is not that neuroscience is futile and that we should give up, but rather that we now should redouble efforts on analysis methods to make sense of the large, complex datasets that we are on the cusp of generating.
I'd have preferred to see follow up experiments conducted on the microcircuit. If the test bed was made into a platform to ease set-up and experimentation by other researchers, maybe the paper would be built upon. Specifically, I'd like to see a series of behavioral neuroscience papers that looked at specific responses to user behavior, differences in task demand, etc, then coupled with inferences from knowledge about "neurons" i.e. transistor, registers, etc, that one would gather from the "harder" neurosciences.