Where new things come from. Below, everything that touches this field, including pieces that live mostly in neighboring territory.
I was hit hard by learning about Danny Kahneman's very deliberate decision to end his life by assisted suicide in Switzerland last year (Danny's former collaborator on the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and…
With all the healthy chatter about "verifiability" ignited by Andrej Karpathy, I want to point out that even if "verifying" (a program) can be hard, it is still easier than coming up with a good idea for a…
I have been thinking about dating for 25 years. As in, how does someone find the right partner for their life? Incidentally, I found mine on a dating app AFTER meeting her in real life, which made for an…
Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicilin is a classic example of serendipitous discovery. "Fleming kept a messy lab. He left petri dishes, microbes and nearly everything else higgledy-piggledy on his lab…
Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicilin is a classic example of serendipitous discovery. "Fleming kept a messy lab. He left petri dishes, microbes and nearly everything else higgledy-piggledy on his lab…
Serendipity has been, and still is, a most intriguing concept to me, central to my philosophy of life as well as to pretty much all my research -both as a topic AND as an engine of progress. The core principle…
As a serendipity engineer, I am always looking for examples of discoveries made serendipitously. The quintessential example is Alexander Fleming's stumbling upon penicillin, a discovery of monumental import to…
In a recent perspective in Nature, Thomas Fink of the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences makes an interesting case for why the creativity of (good or great) mathematicians is, and will remain for some…
Allie K. Miller is pointing to the trigger point of a Cambrian explosion in innovation. People (myself included) have been criticizing the "chatbot interface" but it turns out that it is a super effective way…
The conviction that hashtagserendipity can be, if not systematized, at least harnessed for augmented scientific discovery, has fueled my (obviously nonlinear) professional trajectory. As we saw with Fleming's…
Understanding Cognitive Biases Through a Sampling Limitations Framework: A Comprehensive Review and Theoretical Integration Abstract This paper presents a comprehensive theoretical framework that…
A one-way function is a fundamental concept in cryptography that's relatively easy to compute in one direction but extremely difficult to reverse. Let me explain with an example: Think of mixing paint colors -…
Here’s a clear comparison between recall and recognition, showing their differences in task demands and neuro-cognitive mechanisms. 1. Example Tasks Type Example Task Cognitive Demand --- --- --- Free Recall…
Eli Lilly's Chorus unit, established in 2002, emerged as one of the most successful innovations in pharmaceutical R&D productivity, achieving 3-10x productivity improvements over traditional development models…
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…
Based on the handwritten notes in the image, the text is organized into a large mind map titled "The Future Belongs to Curators". Here is a detailed extraction of all the notes, grouped by their apparent…
That's the title of a short IEEE Spectrum piece ( and a case in point as a second follow-up to Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf's post on how mediocre current hashtagAI systems, particularly hashtagLLMs, are at…
I saw a post by @juergen schmidhuber recently ( that gave me pause. About convolutional neural networks and the neocognitron, a 17-80 neural network architecture by the Japanese scientist Kunihiko Fukushima (…
Jeremy Levin, my biggest issue with ACH has always been how flippantly the "CH" part of it has been treated compared to the quasi-monopolistic focus on the "A": where do the competing hypotheses come from, how…
In his 60 minutes interview with Anderson Cooper two years ago, legendary music producer Rick Rubin gave viewers, as usual, incredible insights into his success and also about the future (of humans and AI).…
With all the healthy chatter about "verifiability" ignited by Andrej Karpathy, I want to point out that even if "verifying" (a program) can be hard, it is still easier than coming up with a good idea for a…
I don't know Lauren Ducrey but she recently posted what I think is the most concise summary of the uses of hashtaggenAI: "This is my biggest question when I'm using AI: Am I being lazy or am I being curious?"…
In a conversation with economist Tyler Cowen last month, Peter Thiel expresses his view that hashtagLLMs will make things "worse for the math people than the word people." He continues: "What people have told…
You can always count on Derek Lowe for an incisive (meaning, with tooth) analysis of a half-baked paper with a promising title ( While Derek focuses on the paper's poorly defined categories (can a target…
Thank you Kes Sampanthar for your read on this paper. All the assumptions made by Daron, all the things he neglects, suggest a linear approximation whereby he applies a very short term gradient (most gains…
I have found surprisingly few mentions of this so far, but I am sure (I hope) it will become obvious: the future belongs to critical thinkers and curators, humans who can detect the relevant patterns but not…
One irregular dispatch when a new piece lands: notes on AI, evolution, complexity, and the biology of discovery. No noise.
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