paltering זה מונח בלי תרגום מדויק לעברית שמתייחס לסוג ספציפי של הונאה בה מספקים מידע אמיתי כדי ליצור מחשבה כוזבת. אז, זה נכון ש״רק״ 44% בסקר בבריטניה תומכים בהכרה...אבל גם רק 18% מתנגדים. לחלק גדול אין דעה, ובקרב בעלי הדעה היחס הוא 70\30 בעד. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paltering

THE PROPHECY

sun set as street light

I'm going to throw someone who studies how seahorses get around into a neuroscience conference and see how long it takes for people to work out they don't mean "navigation in the hippocampus" like that

teaching the "imagination, pretense, and make-believe worlds" seminar is a yearly reminder that I should one day make this shirt.

the lab had a summer reading group about vagueness, indirect speech, deniability, it's been on my mind. One week was dedicated to 'Euphemism", which led to the book "Euphemism & Dysphemism", which led to a book on dirty jokes and euphemism in Shakespeare (Shakespeare's Bawdy, by Partridge).

The Announcer (since it was planted, about twenty years ago, this tree always turns before the others in the Yard)

לבי לבי על כל מי שאוהב לקרוא על העת העתיקה, מעי מעי על מי שהולך לעבור כמה ימים של שיח בלתי נסבל על אתונה וספרטה

out now in Open Mind: "People Evaluate Agents Based on the Algorithms That Drive Their Behavior" by Bigelow & me Paper: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... OSF: osf.io/yzbrq/?view_...

"yeah she's a Smaugadoodle; half covetous dragon, half poodle"

YES, it is finished

five minutes apart

this is very (pause) cool

the girl has been drawing Variations on a Little Guy and I love them so

אז ב"אין פרטנר למשא ומתן" הם התכוונו לזה פחות בתור תיאור מצב ויותר בתור todo item?

in Cambridge (MA) tomorrow (!)

Our new lab for Human & Machine Intelligence is officially open at Princeton University! Consider applying for a PhD or Postdoc position, either through Computer Science or Psychology. You can register interest on our new website lake-lab.github.io (1/2)

- "ugh, I'm having a hard time writing" - "well, remember that Perfect is the Enemy of the Good" - "oh. what's the enemy of a Sweaty Pile of Garbage?"

thunderstorms are not for everyone

i'm guessing people know it, but I came across it for the first time this week and was stricken

there's no need to be mean about it

the first day of school is a great time to appreciate how arbitrary connections are, noticing e.g. "wait you like K-Pop Demon Hunters?" "Yeah!" "Guess we're best friends" "Seems so!" (this is an earnest appreciation post, I love this)

friend, sighing: "...so yeah, that's how I feel, good to get that out there" me, patting their shoulder gently: "I don't see how this advances the plot"

Like a parent, AI can guide or smother. It's time to think about how we build this relationship. Check out my new essay with Brett Smith www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/deve...

came across this recently, from "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift", written by Swift (a preemptive eulogy); I liked it so much that I thought of committing it to memory, but

oh, nice write up in The Register about Illusion Illusions: www.theregister.com/2025/08/19/v... original paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2412.18613

my family plays this game, "you fell asleep at a talk, but have to ask a question at the end; what can you get away with?" it varies by field. e.g. mom, clinical/social: did you control for gender? dad, vision science: can't all this simply be explained by 'attention'?

Nice write-up of work led by Igor Bascandziev, & with @carenwalker.bsky.social & @adani.bsky.social on a recent project from our Caplan grant. Thought Experiments Can Enhance Science Learning! Thanks to Jill Anderson at Usable Knowledge for the interview. www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable...

Starship: 🎵 We built this city on rock 🎵 Urban Planner: Nice, solid foundation Starship: 🎵 and roll 🎵 UP (into intercom): Darcy, cancel my 3 o'clock

"On a scale of 1 to 7, how much is 'Serial'?"

Can AI models introspect? What does introspection even mean for AI? We revisit a recent proposal by Comșa & Shanahan, and provide new experiments + an alternate definition of introspection. Check out this new work w/ @siyuansong.bsky.social, @harveylederman.bsky.social, & @kmahowald.bsky.social 👇

thinking about the time someone tried to impersonate our Department Chair on July 4th

Applications are now open for our #KempnerInstitute Research Fellowships! Postdocs studying the foundations of #intelligence or applications of #AI are encouraged to apply. Learn more and apply by Oct. 1: bit.ly/3UvpSpe #LLMs #NeuroAI #ML @shamkakade.bsky.social

I appreciate the writing style in this philosophy piece

my friend/colleague Frank Jäkel wrote a book on AI. I sadly don't know German but I happily know Frank, and I've heard him talking about this for a while now, and just on that basis I'd recommend the German speakers in the audience check it out

Due to popular demand, we are extending the CogInterp submission deadline again! 🗓️🥳 Submit by *8/27* (midnight AoE)

I appreciate the attempt at multiple justifications here, though I do wonder at the middle one. I'm imagining a ranger watching you leave the park with a hissing raccoon under your arm, and just giving a depressed "it won't work, you know".

late capitalism vapors

I wrote about these 'illusion illusions' previously here: arxiv.org/abs/2412.18613

trying this with GPT-5 and charting new frontiers in gaslighting

If you work on artificial or natural intelligence and are finishing your PhD, consider applying for a Kempner research fellowship at Harvard: kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/kempner-inst...

Now officially out: "Re-evaluating Theory of Mind evaluation in large language models" royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... (by Hu, Sosa, & me)

whelp, they changed the link: news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

the other day I saw a baby bunny and a fat mouse enter our heavily fenced yard together, and I never had more sympathy for children-book villains

fun write up about our recent work on the limits of mental simulation: news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor... (original paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...)

Successful prediction of the future enhances encoding of the present. I am so delighted that this work found a wonderful home at Open Mind. The peer review journey was a rollercoaster but it *greatly* improved the paper. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

fun visual-puzzle task in my daughter's kids mag: match the POV in the 8 squares above/below the main image to the relevant figure in the main image (daughter unsurprisingly got it right and fast; Gemini craps the bed; ChatGPT-o3 'thinks' incorrectly for ~13 minutes then crashes without answer)

fun visual-puzzle task in my daughter's kids mag: match the POV in the 8 squares above/below the main image to the relevant figure in the main image (daughter unsurprisingly got it right and fast; Gemini craps the bed; ChatGPT-o3 'thinks' incorrectly for ~13 minutes then crashes without answer)

leaving these outside the walls of Troy