Author: robert.adlington

What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself. — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/baudrillard-on-ai.html

“Gaba is the off switch of the brain,” says the neuropsychopharmacologist Prof David Nutt, of Imperial College London, who is also one of the creators of Sentia. At the most basic level, brain activity consists of billions of neurons turning on and off, he says. “The turning on is glutamate; the turning off is Gaba.”…

I love that Christian has a driver’s license, and I feel like I’ve been really consistent about that since the beginning of this conversation. — Read on wesleyanargus.com/2025/02/14/office-hours-after-hours-professors-merve-emre-and-christian-nakarado/

The ability to be funny is not an advanced cognitive function that sits on top of the capacity for logic and reason. Humor is more primitive, more fundamental. It is accidental unearthing of buried possibility. If cheaper AIs can crack better jokes than the expensive ones, that suggests that humor is more of an instinct…

Alberini hypothesises that early unrecalled memories may function as schemas upon which adult memories are built. Like the foundations of a home, they remain concealed but crucial. — Read on www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/16/why-cant-we-remember-our-lives-as-babies-or-toddlers

Every American stands at the end of a continuing, decades-long effort to build and maintain the systems that support our lives — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/how-the-system-works.html

some people would think that reading a baby a book about farm animals is teaching them about farm animals, but really it’s teaching them about the concept of a book and how there’s new information on each page of a single object, but really, beyond that, it’s teaching them how language works, and beyond that…

all of Musk’s preening on social media obscures what is actually happening. That is what content is really good at doing. It feels transparent to see an influencer bake bread in her grandma chic retro kitchen or to see a billionaire storm a corporate headquarters to vanquish his enemies to unemployment. But content does not…

This from a comment: LLMs are not: intelligent. But most humans aren’t either. We keep comparing LLMs to the top 1% or 0.1% in a given field and laughing because, well, they can’t do the tasks the top in a given field can do. But LLM are handily crushing your average person at cognitive tasks.…

Michael Polanyi’s Republic of Science principle is a valuable guide that describes the way the scientific community ideally organizes itself so knowledge is generated and shared freely, leading to beneficial innovations. When scientists are free to work on problems that fit their abilities and interests and are well-informed about the work of others, they learn,…