Goal of the tournament? Just wow.

"With the evening sun melting away across the pitch extra time arrived like one of life’s inevitabilities, like New York traffic, aimless possession, tactical Paraguayan fouls, death." Good sports writing is underrated. www.theguardian.com/football/202...

lol, nicely pitched. NB This line of argument is already an axis of conflict, as there are emerging fights over leveraging AI in the world of Accommodations. This is one of several reasons why theories of AI that only see top-down imposition are missing how its diffusion is happening.

"... the apparent convergence reported by global spectral measures largely disappears after calibration, while local neighborhood similarity, but not local distances, retains significant agreement across different modalities." arxiv.org/abs/2602.14486

"as AI gets better than knowledge workers at answering small questions...people are likely to focus on big ones. Large language models may commoditise expert knowledge. But that makes knowing how to think, which is the main skill drummed into philosophy students, all the more valuable." #philsky

Would you include the Churchlands as *main characters* in the history of Cognitive Science? (I'm not asking whether their work is important –it is–, but if you deem their work as paradigm-shifting, or originating a bona-fide research program in Philosophy and/or Neuroscience)

I like the Grateful Dead and I like European prog rock... but Terrapin Station is still pretty baffling. Why?? (Heard it for the first time today.)

I used to argue a lot with ecological psychologists on prelapsarian twitter, but I feel like we need their perspective more than ever now — perhaps in coordination with that of the phenomenologists.

FIFA organizers are enraged as they were led to believe that it's always sunny in Philadelphia

There's a tornado warning in the Boston area (?!) and I'm listening to Exile on Main Street on the train. Good times.

Messi is truly a phenomenon. Just wow.

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

This was excellent.

One of the things that perplexes me most about human memory is how we can recall distant events with sustained effort. Sometimes it can take minutes, hours or several days of dwelling on episodes in the past before a vivid memory appears that was manifestly there all along. We don't seem to have

"...Homo academicus is caught between two fields of power: on one side, the forces of money and politics; on the other, the “writers and artists” and “heretics” who produce cultural capital in the first place." lareviewofbooks.org/article/acad...

Perhaps this is naively idealistic but I sometimes think that Robert Brandom's framing of rationality, reason and discourse could really be helpful with all... this. * gestures in every direction where nerd attention is allocated *

Great essay by Ted Chiang on consciousness. He nails the centrality of context. "An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential." www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

Last month Dawkins declared Claude conscious and was mocked. @garymarcus.bsky.social cleverly called it The Claude Delusion. My (and Nagel's?) take: Both are wrong for the same reason. Here's why the question of machine consciousness will never be settled scientifically. arxiv.org/abs/2606.00226

"The results were so divergent that one has to wonder: If we cannot agree on how to define a ripple, what else might we be getting wrong?" 🎶 Ripple in still water... www.thetransmitter.org/reproducibil...

What would Wittgenstein* have said about LLMs? * earlier or later, either will do :P

Perhaps the epistemological crisis induced by the use of LLMs will serve as a demonstration of the limits of subjective Bayesianism? Only half joking here.

Is anyone else having a hard time figuring out how to feel given all this? [vaguely gestures around]

“Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning.” Merleau-Ponty We never meet raw facts first, then add meaning later. A door is already an exit, a face already a mood, a silence already a threat or invitation. To be conscious is to be caught in significance.

"Life does obey principles of physics and chemistry, but for now life is too complex, and too dependent on historical contingency, for us to deduce its detailed properties from basic principles." * Historical contingency is the dark matter of so many sciences.

"These trends demand that scientists reckon with the purpose of scientific institutions. Is our goal simply to build a collection of scientific facts, or to also cultivate a living, evolving community of scientific knowers?"

i have dubbed today Smooth Day - the first day of the spring/summer where you can sing along with the opening line of Santana’s “Smooth” and genuinely mean it

Really like this video explaining "progmatism": prog + pragmatism. It's the secret third thing between rockism and poptimism. youtu.be/i7XccVA00dA?...

"Furthermore, each model relied on individually unique brain features and did not generalize across participants." (Shades of the Anna Karenina principle?) www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

"To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago." If you think it is necessary to be on Twitter to communicate your fact-based worldview, the reality is that worldview is being smothered.

Multiverse? It's called having an imagination

Capitalist (sur)realism.

"I would position AI as a post-enlightenment project. Stripped of an enlightenment telos and shorn of its commitment to absolute knowledge, what remains is a logocentric husk which reveals a distinct mode of explanation that stubbornly resists universalisation." @cavvia.bsky.social just brilliant.

How good are AI tools at recreating bibliographies? If you're an AI-for-science enthusiast, have you tried getting an AI tool to recover all the papers *you* think are important for your little corner of research space? (In my experience, the ability to dive deep is still limited.)

A lot of AI/ML relies on sampling from large datasets. These samples need to be relatively unbiased in order to get good performance. Animals learn continually from highly correlated — and therefore biased — behavioral episodes. Is there work exploring how brains circumvent the issue of bias? 1/2

"As AI-augmented research proliferates, the scope of scientific inquiry is contracting." www.ft.com/content/0c63... [paywalled]

Do you work or study in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence, or philosophy? What does the term 'representation' mean to you? We invite you to participate in a brief survey on key conceptual questions across fields. eu.surveymonkey.com/r/VX9GNXM

"This storm is what we call progress." - Walter Benjamin

I've been inspired to become a founder of a new startup that develops brain-to-brain interface technology. It's called Talk. We're going to reinvent communication for the digital age. The best part is that we're able to zero-shot transfer the full computational stack already used by your brain!

Supercharging the phenomenon of'searching where there's available light'? 😅

Morning Bluesky.

Quilicura, Chile, one of the communities I wrote about in EMPIRE OF AI, has launched a brilliant initiative to inspire more responsible AI prompting. Today, don't use AI; ask the townspeople instead: quili.ai. So heartened to see this creative act of resistance.

"With L. asiatica, though, "the perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported", Domnauer says." Wild. The implications for human perceptual systems are... hard to wrap one's head around. www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Your favorite Pink Floyd album says more about who you are than your zodiac sign or your Myers-Briggs Personality Type

This point about professional inertia is spot on, and applies to pretty much every institution. Structure is necessarily more long-lived and stable than function. What's not necessary is the degree to which institutional structure leads to individual cognitive hysteresis (e.g., in science).

My prediction / hope for 2026: this will be the year we start seeing the theoretical neuroscience and #NeuroAI fields start embracing spiking as something beyond a poor man's ReLU. Spikes aren't just the brain's activation function but they are fundamentally different. 1/ 🧠🧪🤖

the root of " #survive " is "living-over" and when I think about it I have survived a good many things; they have affected me, yes, they have torn me apart the way ice tears potholes from asphalt, but I have lived over them and laid fresh layers of life over every crack, no matter how wide. #vss365

"However, as we lack a ground-truth understanding of how these complex models work, it can be hard to tell if our tools provide meaningful insights." There's a disconcerting divergence between prediction accuracy and "explanation", broadly construed.

I am a great proponent of analogies in science, but I have gradually learned that the ability to jump from one analogy to another is perhaps more important than the ability to devise one in the first place: apprehending the latent invariant is the key phase transition, cognitively.

On the other hand, any conclusions we draw will have a very short shelf life, because the machines are in constant flux. Meanwhile, the ease with which one can do this research will sap the attention of researchers away from the harder work of understanding humans.

The belief that an LLM can help you write science reveals such magical thinking about language (and LLMs). If your writing is unclear, an LLM won't find its meaning hidden in the words. Only you can explain what you mean; the LLM does not read your mind. It completes with what *others* have written.