Minds, memory, and bias. Below, everything that touches this field, including pieces that live mostly in neighboring territory.
The core idea Some processes are easy to run in one direction and hard to run in the other. Mix yellow and blue paint and you get green in a second. Hand someone a can of green paint and ask which yellow and…
Recall and recognition are two ways of retrieving the same stored information, and they differ sharply in how much work they demand. Recall means producing a target from memory with little or no external cue.…
Here are 20 examples of prevailing wisdom turned on its head: - Seeing is believing Believing is seeing. - What goes up must come down What goes down can rise again. - Actions speak louder than words Words can…
A recent Nature Magazine article (Scale dichotomization reduces customer racial discrimination and income inequality) by a team from Yale University, Rice University and University of Toronto - Rotman School…
I love this nuanced interview of my CASBS at Stanford cohort fellow David Dunning. David became famous thanks to (or because of) a 1999 paper he wrote with Justin Kruger: "Unskilled and unaware of it: How…
The original “fitness beats truth” (FBT) theorems do not require an explicit assumption that “seeking truth is costly.” The key requirement, instead, is that evolution favors any perceptual or cognitive…
TL;DR: leaderboard rankings are unreliable This picture is worth a t̶h̶o̶u̶s̶a̶n̶d̶ billion words . Based on an preprint on the ArXiv server (The Leaderboard Illusion) by a team led by Shivalika Singh, Marzieh…
I saw a post by @juergen schmidhuber recently ( that gave me pause. About convolutional neural networks and the neocognitron, a 1979-80 neural network architecture by the Japanese scientist Kunihiko Fukushima…
I saw a post by Jürgen Schmidhuber recently (all links in comments) that gave me pause . About convolutional neural networks and the neocognitron, a 1979-80 neural network architecture by the Japanese…
A study by Eugine Leung and Oleg Urminsky showed up in my feed today through Richard Hahn by way of Stefano Puntoni (thank you all!!). "The narrow search effect and how broadening search promotes belief…
Raffi Krikorian this is great! Gen AI can "generate" (an infinite amount of) novel things riffing on a theme, but I am sure that humans were involved in curating what was carved into stone. That's augmented…
This article from @Anil Ananthaswamy for @quanta magazine (my favorite science magazine!) delivers a concise description of my own experience of using AI for scientific discovery: Hallucinations are a feature,…
In view of the highly anticipated SpaceX IPO, I wanted to understand how the rest of the US stock market might be impacted, specifically the top stocks comprising the indices (e.g., Nasdaq 100, S&P 500) that…
A super interesting article in PNAS, "AI–AI bias: Large language models favor communications generated by large language models" by Walter Laurito (FZI Research Center for Information Technology), Benjamin…
One consequence of the current genAI hype is companies, large and small, rushing to apply it to use cases that are either inappropriate or for which the technology is not yet ready. Of course, the more…
An article in Nature today (behind paywall, Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research) raises some interesting issues and questions about the use of ai and genai in…
One irregular dispatch when a new piece lands: notes on AI, evolution, complexity, and the biology of discovery. No noise.
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