Category: Blog

Though written in 2007, the arguments still stack up: So, it looks as if there are two possibilities. Perhaps our science over-estimates the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space-ships…

https://kottke.org/24/04/feathers-are-one-of-evolutions-best-inventions

I read his Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea in grad school and when I came back to reading about the mind, I started by rereading CE and then went on to his latest, From Bacteria to Bach and Back He is, without doubt the biggest influence on my thought. I find his reductive, materialist,…

On a pu mesurer que tous les domaines cognitifs ne sont pas touchés de la même façon : le langage, expressif comme réceptif, est affecté chez les jeunes enfants, davantage que la motricité ou le raisonnement non verbal. Nous avons aussi pu constater que, si le temps d’écran a son importance, le contexte d’exposition compte beaucoup si ce…

Using fMRI to scan the brains of people at rest, he has found that hyperphantasic people have greater connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in “higher-order” thinking such as planning and decision-making, and the areas responsible for visual processing, which lie towards the back of the skull. “My guess is that if you…

Gravity is so universal. And I think this is very fundamental, it’s a phenomenon that affects everything, everyone, all the time, everywhere. It does absolutely everything: it connects everything and everyone. We all experience it in the same way, whether we are a person or a planet, a black hole or a balloon, a hammer,…

There are four kinds of emotionally immature parents, according to Gibson: driven parents, who try to perfect everyone around them; passive parents, who avoid all conflict; rejecting parents, who don’t seem to enjoy being with their child at all; and emotional parents, who have mood swings, are emotionally inconsistent and need others to stabilize them.…

https://kottke.org/24/04/0044373-capricious-social-media-a

He talks about the tiny attention span of his pupils. “Since the lockdowns, I’ve found that I can only engage a classroom on one thing for 15 minutes max, before needing to change the activity. They can’t actually listen for longer than five minutes.” His own ability to focus has changed, too. — Read on…

Anyone who posts videos to TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube is providing more than enough training material for someone to make a pretty good clone. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/how-an-automated-spokemodel-drove-the-internet-insane.html