Tag: Consciousness
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Confidently Wrong – Marginal REVOLUTION
The authors then correlate respondents’ scores on the objective (uncontroversial) knowledge with their opposition to the scientific consensus on topics like vaccination, nuclear power, and homeopathy. The result is striking: people who are most opposed to the consensus (7, the far right of the horizontal axis in the figure below) score lower on objective knowledge…
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The Genetic Evolution of the Human Race and Its Consequences for the Industrial Revolution
We do not claim that the Black Death instantly made Europeans smarter. Instead, we suggest that the post-plague economy may have amplified long-running selection on traits linked to educational attainment: learning ability, self-control, and long-term planning. In that sense, the Black Death looks less like a one-off catastrophe and more like a hinge in the…
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Edward O. Wilson: The Real Problem of Humanity
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. — Read on www.harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/james-watson-edward-o-wilson-intellectual-entente
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En abandonnant l’écriture à l’IA, nous risquons de nous empêcher de réfléchir
si écrire, c’est penser, un texte écrit avec l’assistance de ChatGPT ne matérialise-t-il pas les pensées du générateur de texte, plutôt que les nôtres ? Du contenu soi-disant neuf Et à quoi pense donc ChatGPT ? Heureusement, à rien : on l’a dit, le programme se contente de régurgiter les textes figurant dans son corpus d’entraînement, en en…
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Game design is simple, actually – Raph Koster
Some of this is down to personality types, some of it is down to social dynamics, how they were raised, what their local culture is like, what trauma they have had, and countless other psychological things. That’s why one fancy term for this is psychographics. The big thing is, it’s not enough that the problems…
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Aiming for Fullness: The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind.
The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a…
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Interleaved Thinking
Interleaved thinking is essential for LLM agents: it means alternating between explicit reasoning and tool use, while carrying that reasoning forward between steps.This process significantly enhances planning, self‑correction, and reliability in long workflows. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/3/minimax/
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Thinking is not Objective, has a Point of View
The Python developer reads case studies about Go’s performance and their amygdala quietly marks each one as a threat to be neutralized. The Rust advocate looks at identical problems and their Default Mode Network constructs narratives about why “only” Rust can solve them. We’re not lying. We genuinely believe our reasoning is sound. That’s what…
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Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human
…behind the scenes, there had been robust conversation and debate by Wikipedia editors as to exactly what constitutes an “unusual” death, and that several previously listed “unusual” deaths had been deleted from the list for not being weird enough. For example: People who had been speared to death with beach umbrellas are “no longer an…
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To really understand a concept, you have to “invent” it yourself in some capacity.
To really understand a concept, you have to “invent” it yourself in some capacity. Understanding doesn’t come from passive content consumption. It is always self-built. It is an active, high-agency, self-directed process of creating and debugging your own mental models. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/30/francois-chollet/