This year I’m going to be kinder, more positive, work harder, and put more faith in myself until the very first minor obstacle throws me off for the next 350+ days

Next discussion date is in 10 minutes: Wed, Nov 12, at 12:30 pm EDT. The paper: Marvin Minsky, “Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence” (1961)​. A long but non-technical paper - it is mostly conceptual. Darren Lott will lead the discussion.

The next foundational paper of complexity science will be discussed Thurs, July 10, at 2:00 pm EDT. Paper: C. E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948). people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/te...

And also @annaleptikon.bsky.social ! 😊 So nice to meet people from the online world in person!

Join @braininspired.bsky.social today to revisit another foundational work in cognitive / complexity science, and reflect on how biology confronts the intelligence. These diagrams are the first logic gates. They inspired von Neumann and others in the design of logic circuits for digital computers.

The next foundational papers of complexity science discussion will be Thurs, May 15, at 12:00 pm EDT / 6 pm CEST. We will discuss: W. S. McCulloch and W. Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (1943) ​

My coauthor explaining the idea for our next paper to me

The next complexity discussion call by @braininspired.bsky.social will be tomorrow Wed, April 2, at 6:00 pm EST. Topic: L. Szilárd, “On the Decrease of Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by the Intervention of Intelligent Beings” (1929) with Susanne Still braininspired.co/complexity-g...

Learning in a world of sparse rewards: open.substack.com/pub/kording/...

Visualize and download school segregation data for every state, county, metro area, commuting zone, geo school district, and local educational agency in the US since 1991. edopportunity.org/segregation

Announcing a short course! ifp.org/economics-of... Pierre Azoulay Matt Clancy Janet Freilich Ina Ganguli Ben Jones Chad Jones Kyle Myers John Van Reenen + me

Economics has core insights that get ignored by politicians. The most fundamental? A price isn't just a number—it's a signal wrapped in an incentive. But why do policymakers need to know this? www.economicforces.xyz/p/prices-are...

Is it possible that bsky has no "save" function? In this case I guess I have to repost things that sound vaguely interesting, to save them for myself in the future

OK, every year I try to explain to my students how LLMs work, and every year I have to do a big trawl for good resources and activities. Here's this year's haul of *introductory* materials. (In-class activities + visualizations, not so much readings.)

Loved, reread, and recommend @cherylmisak.bsky.social's book on Ramsey. Glad he gets appreciated adequately.

I've created a list to follow new works, events and news related the history of economics (including some philosophers) bsky.app/profile/unde... And most of them can be followed at once with @hugocerqueira.bsky.social's HET starter pack here bsky.app/starter-pack...

If we could record all neurons we still would not know how they communicate: medium.com/@kording/628...

Sounds like something Gregg Henriques would have an opinion on (reducing conceptual clutter in psychological science...through an unified theory of knowledge)

A recent paper by @annaleptikon.bsky.social et al. argues that organismic agency is not computational in nature. This week for #complexitycat I not only review that paper but also discuss how the notion of computation used by the authors is narrow... 1/2🐈‍⬛ amahury.github.io/posts/review...

I recently joined the Sky Meadow Institute as a Research Consultant and Brendan Graham Dempsey (Founder) invited me to discuss the intersection of our works (meta-rationality and the meaning paradigm) and my newest theory, autopoiethics, on his Metamodern Meaning Podcast. Links & more in comment

Boycotting X (formerly Twitter) out of disagreement with its owner or given the rise of objectionable content strikes me as counterproductive. The harm to the information ecology from removing reasonable voices (especially from scientists) outweighs any symbolic impact of the boycott. (1/3)

Paul Feyerabend was born OTD in 1924. Knowledge is not a body of consistent theories converging on truth. It is “an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible … alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth … forcing the others into greater articulation.” 🧪🦋🦫 #PhilSci #STS

Q: What does the B in 'Benoit B. Mandelbrot' stand for? A: For 'Benoit B. Mandelbrot'.

Some of the books I read in 2024

One of the shortest and best books I read in 2024 is "The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reflections on Faith, Science, and Economics" by Vernon L. Smith. It contains Smith's lecture at the Acton Institute’s annual conference in 2016, commentary on it, and a conversation and interview with him.

After reading more theology recently: They're not the same picture, but they rhyme. God = Optimality (axiomatic normativity) Christ = resource rationality (embodied/incarnated ideal) Holy Spirit = Proleptic rationality/Aspiration

Recent reckless shopping at a rare bookshop (right one) "History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1939, First Edition, commissioned by Stalin"

Kahneman would resist so long as he can't see it because wysiati Thaler would resist so long as it is stored with the cashews Zimbardo would write up how he resisted, but it would be fake Freud would be torn, but Id would win Mischel would pretend it was a picture of a ring, but would give in

Yes, very excited

"The worldview is the Markov blanket for the social organism", "a strategy for collective survival". Bobby Azarian quoted in Brendan Graham Dempsey's "The Evolution of Meaning: A Universal Learning Process"

Season finale of 2024 has me on the edge of my seat

Ted Sumers' incredible dissertation work "Reconciling truthfulness and relevance as epistemic and decision-theoretic utility" now out in Psych Review! 🧵 to come, but TL;DR is that communicative relevance must be grounded in the listener's *action* policy. Preprint here: https://psyarxiv.com/e9m3j

"In a series of in-depth interviews with leading AI researchers and founders—including Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Mark Zuckerberg—Dwarkesh Patel [portraits] the technology that is transforming our world." (Forthcoming July next year)

This is a fantastic paper! Go read it. Gigerenzer (as you’d expect) doesn’t mince words or beats around the bush. An important context that should also be included is how this debate interacted with the sociobiology/EP debates and evolutionary concerns more broadly.

I don't get it. Why is Gigerenzer at odds with Kahneman and Tversky? Shouldn't we all agree that our evolved modes of thought optimise accuracy and efficiency across most everyday contexts, yet sometimes give wrong answers that are avoidable by formal methods when those are worth the effort?

"Exploring Consciousness with Neuroscientists & Philosophers" | @anilseth.bsky.social , John Vervaeke, Philip Goff www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ6y...

A new tutorial on RL by Kevin Patrick Murphy, a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind who also wrote several comprehensive, well-regarded textbooks on ML/DL. This ought to be a good read 👀 arxiv.org/abs/2412.05265

An updated intro to reinforcement learning by Kevin Murphy: arxiv.org/abs/2412.05265! Like their books, it covers a lot and is quite up to date with modern approaches. It also is pretty unique in coverage, I don't think a lot of this is synthesized anywhere else yet

Contratulations @mokriegleder.bsky.social !!

🚀 Early-career researchers, are you ready for an unforgettable interdisciplinary adventure? Registration is OPEN for Interdisciplinary College (IK) 2025! 🌍✨ 🧠 Focus Topic: Augmenting Minds & Bodies 📆 March 14-21 at scenic Lake Möhne, Germany 💡 Cognitive Science, AI, Neuroscience, Robotics & more!

My paper on hierarchical plans is out in Cognition!🎉 tldr: We ask participants to generate hierarchical plans in a programming game. People prefer to reuse beyond what standard accounts predict, which we formalize as induction of a grammar over actions. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kBQr2Hx2x...

(1/5) Very excited to announce the publication of Bayesian Models of Cognition: Reverse Engineering the Mind. More than a decade in the making, it's a big (600+ pages) beautiful book covering both the basics and recent work: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204941...

AI’s largely backward-looking and imitative probability-based approach relying on data alone cannot parallel human theory-based causal logic and reasoning—forward-looking and capable of generating genuine novelty, argue Teppo Felin and Matthias Holweg: www.researchgate.net/publication/...