Yohan J John
🧠 computational neuroscience | neurophenomenology 2.0? 🤖
Science Writer, Kempner Institute for the study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University
(views here are my own)
- Reposted by Yohan J JohnMorning Bluesky.
- Reposted by Yohan J JohnQuilicura, Chile, one of the communities I wrote about in EMPIRE OF AI, has launched a brilliant initiative to inspire more responsible AI prompting. Today, don't use AI; ask the townspeople instead: quili.ai. So heartened to see this creative act of resistance.
- "With L. asiatica, though, "the perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported", Domnauer says." Wild. The implications for human perceptual systems are... hard to wrap one's head around. www.bbc.com/future/artic...
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- This point about professional inertia is spot on, and applies to pretty much every institution. Structure is necessarily more long-lived and stable than function. What's not necessary is the degree to which institutional structure leads to individual cognitive hysteresis (e.g., in science).
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- "However, as we lack a ground-truth understanding of how these complex models work, it can be hard to tell if our tools provide meaningful insights." There's a disconcerting divergence between prediction accuracy and "explanation", broadly construed.
- Amid the rise of billion-parameter models, I argue that toy models, with just a few neurons, remain essential—and may be all neuroscience needs, writes @marcusghosh.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...
- I am a great proponent of analogies in science, but I have gradually learned that the ability to jump from one analogy to another is perhaps more important than the ability to devise one in the first place: apprehending the latent invariant is the key phase transition, cognitively.
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- "A formalist is a man who can't understand a theory unless it is meaningless." Some real gems in Saul Gorn's "Compendium of Rarely Used Cliches": noemata.net/last+fawned/...
- My mind has still not fully processed the fact that Werner Herzog has an Instagram account.
- Heard the #Geese album after a break of a few weeks. It already sounds like an old classic.
- As it turns out, it will also remove hyphens indiscriminately. What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches...
- Reposted by Yohan J JohnI hope someone draws this wonderful story about Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and the power of the arts to help us see things differently, to the attention of our Education Secretary. Do read it, it will lift your spirits.
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- Really like the concept of haptic visuality. My favorite kinds of art criticism have much in common with phenomenology, broadly construed. youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?...
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- Have there been any major new theoretical papers in cog sci and/or philosophy of mind about human conceptual structure inspired* by large language models? __ * the inspiration could well be 'adversarial'. 😛 #AI #philosophy #cogsci
- "... the list of special sciences has become so long that nobody is able any more to derive full advantage from all this wealth, to survey and enjoy all these treasures of cognition." - Edmund Husserl, 'Formal and Transcendental Logic' (1929)
- I had no idea that reading was taught this way now in the US. Appalling. www.apmreports.org/episode/2019...
- Reposted by Yohan J JohnLove being reminded to do this every year. It's a win/win all round
- Just finished a show called 'The Lowdown'. A comedy-noir tale set in present-day Tulsa. Has a slight touch of The Big Lebowski, but also a darker side, especially in the last few episodes. Pulp done right!
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- "One organism might peer out from another organism, but not live there." I'm in awe of VanDerMeer's ability to conjure the uncanny.
- This video is hilarious, and should be very relatable to anyone who's tried to make sense of a math concept purely through Wikipedia. youtu.be/33y9FMIvcWY?...
- Very nice. Point #8 reminds me of how Hegel and Marx talk about "moments".
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- Oh hell yes.
- I used to generate spiral patterns using center-surround networks just for fun... Never really thought of a use for them.
- One of my favorite facts: neurons and skin cells are 'cousins'. Intelligence is a phenomenon that lives at boundaries. The semipermeable cell membrane is where the ball got rolling. I wrote an essay riffing on this idea. yohanjohn.com/axispraxis/f...
- Reposted by Yohan J JohnNature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:
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- One thing that I find very confusing about modern AI research is the lack of a clear conceptual separation between contingent empirical findings and necessary consequences of the model architecture or analytic framework.
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- ChatGPT will never be forgiven for ruining the em-dash.
- Reposted by Yohan J JohnWhen people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
- Brilliant video on autumn colors and photosynthesis. Reminds me that molecular biology is the big blind spot in my scientific 'general knowledge'. Need to rectify that but I have no idea where to start. youtu.be/wOjkeyjJ364?...
- Reposted by Yohan J JohnThis is a lovely article, showing that the spirit of enquiry and the thirst for new knowledge persist in a world where stupidity is so popular. www.quantamagazine.org/first-shape-...
- Great video! I recently picked up some foxtail millet from the Indian store. It's pretty good for upma. youtu.be/g31NneNoBcE?... #India #food
- A very different approach to "chill music to work to". :P #NowPlaying
- Reposted by Yohan J JohnWhen I was an undergrad, I saw a talk by Oliver Sacks about music. During the Q&A, someone asked Sacks if he thought science would reveal the deepest mysteries of art. Sacks (a rare humanist among scientists) said that he doubted it, at which Eric Kandel (the host) leaped up and grabbed the mic.
- Like a coven of witches playing post-punk. #music
- "Oscar Wilde once defined fox hunting as the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. Were he alive today he might describe the quest for artificial general intelligence as the unfathomable in pursuit of the indefinable."
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- Good god that Taylor Swift album is atrocious. Perhaps it will put the final nail in the coffin of nihilistic millennial poptimism.
- I'd never heard Richard Sutton speak before. He's sharp! And I think this discussion has changed how I think about the bitter lesson. youtu.be/21EYKqUsPfg?... #AI #ML #RL
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- "This is anxious, fragmented music as liable to erupt in a paranoid shriek as a bald declaration of love." Just heard it. Brilliant, unhinged album. A great follow up to Cameron Winter's solo album. pitchfork.com/reviews/albu...
- Once in a while a friend will send me an excerpt from a book and I'll react with something like "Ooh that's spot on, where's it from?" And it will turn out to be from a book that I myself recommended to them a few weeks or months earlier. 😅
- They just want more HF for their RLHF.
- Reposted by Yohan J JohnTHE MEME IS REAL
- Francis Fukuyama: ‘The neoliberals went too far. Now, we need more social democratic policies’ english.elpais.com/culture/2022...
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