Updated: 2023-08-31 20:54:05
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Updated: 2023-08-30 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , August 30, 2023 Neuron–astrocyte networks might perform the core computations performed by AI transformer blocks Fascinating ideas from Kozachkov et . al Their text contains primers on Astrocyte biology and the transformers found in AI Generative Pre-trained Transformers such as ChatGPT . Significance Transformers have become the default choice of neural architecture for many machine learning applications . Their success across multiple domains such as language , vision , and speech raises the question : How can one build Transformers using biological computational units At the same time , in the glial community , there is gradually
Updated: 2023-08-28 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , August 28, 2023 A shared novelty-seeking basis for creativity and curiosity I pass on the abstract of a target article having the title of this post , sent to me by Behavioral and Brain Science . I'm reading through it , and would be willing to send a PDF of the article to motivated MindBlog readers who wish to check it out . Curiosity and creativity are central pillars of human growth and invention . While they have been studied extensively in isolation , the relationship between them has not yet been established . We propose that curiosity and creativity both emanate from the same mechanism of novelty-seeking . We first present a
Updated: 2023-08-25 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , August 25, 2023 The promise and pitfalls of the metaverse for science A curious open-sourse bit of hand waving and gibble-gabble about the metaverse . I pass on the first two paragraphs and links to its references . Some technology companies and media have anointed the metaverse as the future of the internet . Advances in virtual reality devices and high-speed connections , combined with the acceptance of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic , have brought considerable attention to the metaverse as more than a mere curiosity for gaming . Despite substantial investments and ambitiously optimistic pronouncements , the future of the
Updated: 2023-08-23 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , August 23, 2023 Why citizens vote away the democracies they claim to cherish . Here is an interesting bit of research from Braley et . al reported in Nature Human Behaviour . Their abstract : Around the world , citizens are voting away the democracies they claim to cherish . Here we present evidence that this behaviour is driven in part by the belief that their opponents will undermine democracy first . In an observational study N 1,973 we find that US partisans are willing to subvert democratic norms to the extent that they believe opposing partisans are willing to do the same . In experimental studies N 2,543, N 1,848 we revealed to
Updated: 2023-08-17 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Thursday , August 17, 2023 Born Rich I want to pass on a few slightly edited clips from an interesting essay in The Dispatch by conservative writer Kevin Williamson that a friend pointed me to . And then I pass on the comment on Williamson's ideas offered by another friend : Wow , this one’s a big gulp of the Kool-Aid . This thesis is patently untrue . As the one percent continues to grow in our current corporate low-tax , constantly crippled regulated business environment , the fallacy of this perspective grows along with it . This is exactly the thinking that book I recommended discusses Oreskes and Conway : How American business taught us to
Updated: 2023-08-15 17:34:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Tuesday , August 15, 2023 Human History gets a rewrite . I want to point to two articles I have enjoyed reading , both describing the recent book by Graeber and Wengrowa The Dawn of Everything : A New History of Humanity The review by Deresiewicz is in The Atlantic Magazine , and The New Yorker Review is by Lewis-Krause . Some clips from Deresiewicz : The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau elaborated by subsequent thinkers popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond , Yuval Noah Harari , and Steven Pinker and accepted more or less universally . The
Updated: 2023-08-11 13:30:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , August 11, 2023 The immaturity of America's therapeutic culture I recommend reading the most recent NYTimes David Brook's piece and pass on here ChatGPT 4's response to my request to summarize the main its 1,472 words . It produced the following 339 words which nicely cover Brook's core points . nbsp I think I will start using ChatGPT 4 more frequently for this purpose since I've only recently realized that MindBlog readers who do not subscribe to the NYTimes can not read articles that I point to . nbsp Also , I simply don't have the time to generate summaries myself , because I want to be working on other things . Summary of the Essay on
Updated: 2023-08-09 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , August 09, 2023 What is intelligence I want to share a message sent by Clint Sprott to the Chaos and Complexity seminar group at the University of Wisconsin which he started many years ago it is currently engaged in a discussion of : intelligence I asked ChatGPT to define intelligence and whether it is : intelligent User How would you define intelligence ChatGPT Defining intelligence is a complex and multifaceted task , as it encompasses a wide range of abilities and capacities exhibited by living organisms and artificial systems . Intelligence can be broadly described as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge , learn from
Updated: 2023-08-07 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , August 07, 2023 America's legacy of poverty The injustice of place . Having moved back into the house in which I grew up in Austin Texas , and watching the city inexorably move towards becoming a dystopian metroplex , the analysis of Edin , Schaefer and Nelson makes me feel like returning to the Midwest , where I spent most of my adult life as a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison . They paint the most clear and focused explanation for the roots of inequality in America that I have read , concluding that the upper Midwest is the best place to live in America . Here is the concluding paragraph of their piece in the The
Updated: 2023-08-04 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , August 04, 2023 18-month old humans discriminate moral violations from disobedient or unexpected events Fascinating studies from Kassecker et al . open source have used multiple methods eye-tracking , observations of expressive behaviors to probe the developmental origins of human moral cognition by assessing infants’ ability to differentiate between prototypical harmful moral and harmless conventional violations : Humans reason and care about ethical issues , such as avoiding unnecessary harm . But what enables us to develop a moral capacity This question dates back at least to ancient Greece and typically results in the traditional
Updated: 2023-08-03 11:59:10
Generative AI art is a recent development with the potential to bring in a new era of human creativity. There are two main problems that I see and i’m probably glossing over plenty of other hurdles that others have covered. Barriers are typical of any new technology as it emerges and promises to become useful […]
Updated: 2023-08-02 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , August 02, 2023 Work as war . and Pritzker's Formulae To Spot An Idiot Too fascinating pieces on how in the areas of politics and business our more recently evolved primate capabilities for empathy and compassion are being subverted by the more primitive instinctual drives regulating fear and combat . This post is another example of using MindBlog as an archive of some bonbons I have enjoyed , entering them so that I easily look them up later , and also on the odd chance that a few readers might find them interesting . Work as War . We’re in the Era of the Top Gun’ . C.E.O and , nbsp Pritzker's Formulae To Spot An Idiot Posted by Deric
Updated: 2023-07-31 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , July 31, 2023 The visible gorilla . A staple of my lectures in the 1990s was showing the invisible gorilla’ video , in which viewers were asked to count the number of times that students with white shirts passed a basket ball . After the start of the game a student in a gorilla costume walks slowly through the group , pauses in the middle to wave and moves off screen to the left . Most viewers who are busy counting the ball passes don’t report seeing the gorilla . Here's the video : Wallish et al . now update this experiment on inattentional blindness in an article titled The visible gorilla : Unexpected fast—not physically
Updated: 2023-07-28 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , July 28, 2023 Unnarratability The Tower of Babel redux where have all the common narratives gone I pass on some clips from Venkatesh Rao's recent Ribbonfarm Studio . posting Perspectives like his make me feel that one's most effective self preservation stance might be to assume that we are on the dawn of a new dark age , a period during which only power matters , and community , cooperation , and kindness are diminished a period like the early middle ages in Europe which did permit under the sheltered circumstances of the church a privileged few to a life of contemplation . Strongly Narratable Conditions The 1985-2015 period , arguably ,
Updated: 2023-07-26 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , July 26, 2023 A MindBlog paragraph on non-dual awareness massaged by Bard and ChatGPT-4 This post is using MindBlog to archive a further example example of the sort shown in Monday’s post of GPT bots editing a paragraph I wrote , this one being on non-dual awareness . nbsp The paragraph : The fact that there is no there there means it . Empty is empty . The ground state is just the mute body doing its thing . From its depths storylines rise and fall , bonbons to savor or ignore . The body can know that it has found a new ground state , and can be no longer willing to just play nice if the upstairs word salad is dinking around with or
Updated: 2023-07-24 18:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , July 24, 2023 The evolution of transhuman forms a MindBlog paragraph edited by GPT implementations In this post I am documenting the final result of passing a paragraph I wrote on future human evolution through a number of different GPT generative pre-trained transformers This is to archive the results of this exercise for myself , and in case it might be of interest to a few MindBlog readers . The bots were prompted by a request to re-write or edit the paragraph to make it more accessible to a reader with a college education . The bottom line is that the edited versions with the most depth and coherence were obtained using Open AI’s
Updated: 2023-07-20 00:10:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , July 19, 2023 Proxy Failure is an Inherent Risk in Goal-Oriented Systems I will pass on the title and abstract of another article to appear in Behavioral and Brain Science for which reviewers comments are being solicited . MindBlog readers can email me to request a PDF of the target article . nbsp Dead rats , dopamine , performance metrics , and peacock tails : proxy failure is an inherent risk in goal- oriented systems Authors : Yohan J . John , Leigh Caldwell , Dakota E . McCoy , and Oliver Braganza Abstract : When a measure becomes a target , it ceases to be a good measure . For example , when standardized test scores in education
Updated: 2023-07-17 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , July 17, 2023 MindBlog's reading list . I've decided to pass on links to articles I have found worthwhile reading realizing that I am not going to have time to frame their ideas into longer posts because I'm speading more time now at my Steinway B's keyboard than at my computer's keyboard . If you encounter a paywall with any of the links , you might try entering the URL at https : archive.is An installment of Venkatesh Rao’s newsletter : The permaweird narrative Jaron Lanier There is no . A.I in The New Yorker Human Beings Are Soon Going to Be Eclipsed David Brooks in The New York Times commenting on Douglas Hofstadter's recent ideas .
Updated: 2023-07-14 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , July 14, 2023 Adversarial’ search for neural basis of consciousness yields first results Finkel does a summary of the first round of results of an adversarial colloboration' funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation in which both sides of the consciousness debate agreed on experiments to be conducted by theory-neutral” labs with no stake in the outcome . It pits integrated information theory IIT the sensory network hypothesis that proposes a posterior hot zone” as the site of consciousness , against the global neuronal workspace theory GNWT which likens networks of neurons in the front of the brain to a clipboard where sensory
Updated: 2023-07-12 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , July 12, 2023 The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence I would recommend having a read through Evgeny Morozov's piece in the NYTimes as an antidote to Marc Adreessen's optimistic vision of AI that was the subject of MindBlog's June 23 post Here is a small clip from the article , followed by the titles describing different problem areas he sees : Discussions of A.G.I . are rife with such apocalyptic scenarios . Yet a nascent A.G.I . lobby of academics , investors and entrepreneurs counter that , once made safe , A.G.I . would be a boon to civilization . This is why , for all the hand-wringing , so many smart people in the tech industry
Updated: 2023-07-10 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , July 10, 2023 Inheritance of social status stability in England from 1600 to 2022. From historical records Clarks demonstrates open source strong persistence of social status across family trees over 400 years , in spite of large increases in general levels of education and social mobility . Significance There is widespread belief across the social sciences in the ability of social interventions and social institutions to significantly influence rates of social mobility . In England , 1600 to 2022, we see considerable change in social institutions across time . Half the population was illiterate in 1,800, and not until 1,880 was compulsory
Updated: 2023-07-07 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , July 07, 2023 A meta-analysis questions the cognitive benefits of physical activity . I give up . If anything was supposed to have been proven I would have thought it would be that exercise has a beneficial effect on brain health and cognition . Now Ciria et al . offer the following in Nature Human Biology : Extensive research links regular physical exercise to an overall enhancement of cognitive function across the lifespan . Here we assess the causal evidence supporting this relationship in the healthy population , using an umbrella review of meta-analyses limited to randomized controlled trials RCTs Despite most of the 24 reviewed
Updated: 2023-07-05 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Wednesday , July 05, 2023 Why music training slows cognitive aging A team of Chinese collaborators has reported experiments in the Oxford academic journal Cerebral Cortex titled Functional gradients in prefrontal regions and somatomotor networks reflect the effect of music training experience on cognitive aging which are stated to show that music training enhances the functional separation between regions across prefrontal and somatomotor networks , delaying deterioration in working memory performance and prefrontal suppression of prominant but irrelevant information . I'm passing on the abstract and a clip from the paper's conclusion , and can send
Updated: 2023-07-03 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Monday , July 03, 2023 What Babies Know from zero to 1 year core systems of knowledge The journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences has sent out to reviewers the précis of a book , What Babies Know by Elizabeth S . Spelke , Harvard Psychology Dept . The abstract of her précis : Where does human knowledge begin Research on human infants , children , adults , and non- human animals , using diverse methods from the cognitive , brain , and computational sciences , provides evidence for six early emerging , domain-specific systems of core knowledge . These automatic , unconscious systems are situated between perceptual systems and systems of explicit
Updated: 2023-06-30 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff Friday , June 30, 2023 Managing the risks of AI in pragmatic ways . I want to pass on the final paragraphs of a recent commentary by Venkatesh Rao on the tragedy of the Titan submersible , which was a consequence of Stockton Rush , the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions , taking a number of design risks to reduce costs and increase profits . The bulk of Rao's piece deals with issues in the design of potentially dangerous new technologies , and the final paragraphs deal with managing the risks of artificial intelligence in pragmatic ways . AI risk , understood as something very similar to ordinary kinds of engineering risk such as the risk of
Updated: 2023-05-04 21:00:23
All of the students experienced a strong sensation of sweetness while sucking on lemons, and many asked for a second piece! Then the party became even more interesting when a couple of students decided to see how their Oreos would taste.
