Thomas F. Varley
Dual PhD: Complex Systems & Computational Neuroscience - Postdoc at UVM in the Vermont Complex Systems Institute.
Information theory, synergy, and emergence.
Connoisseur of collapse phenomena
- I don't get the dooming around AI and art. I'm a potter and (sometimes) glassblower, two fields that were mechanized and automated decades ago - but I still sell wares and enjoy going to galleries to see other artists' works. The existence of factory mugs doesn't make much of a difference imo?
- Has this kind of hyperfocus on "critique" always been a feature of American/progressive activism? Or is it new? It feels very academia-brained, like the best possible thing you can do is find new and creative ways to articulate "critiques" of how things are actually problematic.
- Reposted by Thomas F. VarleyFinally published: “Your brain on nature: A scoping review of the neuroscience of nature exposure” www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A synthesis of multiple EEG, fMRI, and fNIRS studies to map the mechanisms behind the restoring effects of nature on the brain 🧠🌱
- New Substack, and this one is definitely doozy. I did a deep dive into the idea that repeated COVID-19 infections (even when they're "mild") might be doing bad things to our brains...and it looks like it definitely is. open.substack.com/pub/synergie...
- Introducing a new scientific computing library: syntropy. Syntropy is a comprehensive package for information theory, aimed at both theoreticians and data analysts working on discrete, continuous, and mixed data. 1/N github.com/thosvarley/s...
- This package grew out of my work in graduate school and my postdoc - inspired by the networkx package, I wanted a one-stop-shop for discrete and continuous multivariate information theory, all in Python for maximum accessibility. Years later, here it is. 2/N
- I've included estimators for different data types: discrete estimators, covariance-based estimators for Gaussian data, and two different non-parametric estimators (normalizing flow-based and KNN-based). Also mixed, for data with discrete and continuous components. 3/N
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View full threadI have no personal interest in Julia or MATLAB, but I do have Opus 4.5 and might try and see if it can automate the porting/translation process, just to see if it works.
- Reposted by Thomas F. Varley“Oughtposting vs isposting” is immediately load bearing for me
- Reposted by Thomas F. VarleyHow complex should network models be? 🚨 In our latest paper we quantify (if and) when higher-order interactions are informative versus reducible to pairwise structure without losing functional signal (e.g., diffusion behavior). 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/
- Something about ChatGPT seems to be fundamentally evil in a way that even other LLMs are not. Grok's abuses are downstream of Twitter's toxic usebase and lax guardrails, but I kind of think that ChatGPT may actually be intrinsically evil in ways that are strange, inhuman, and unholy.
- New preprint on unifying the zoo of multivariate higher-order information measures into a common form. May be of interest to anyone interested in higher-order interactions, complex systems, emergence, or complexity. 1/N arxiv.org/abs/2601.08030
- There are many different information-based measures of multipartite interactions in complex systems, which are generally thought to represent different "types" of information-sharing. In this paper, I focus on 4: 1. Total correlation 2. Dual total correlation 3. S-information 4. O-information 2/N
- In a previous paper with @popeme.bsky.social, we showed that the dual total correlation can be written in terms of a linear combination of joint and leave-one-out marginal total correlations. 3/N pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37095282/
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View full threadFinally, thanks to @doctorjosh.bsky.social for reading it, and letting me pursue this little side-project when I should have been doing the job I'm actually paid to do. FIN 16/16
- Could AI design an email search function that actually works? I will retract every criticism I've ever made of Gen-AI if it can do that.
- This is a joke, but I think this is probably closer to how children were raised for most of human history: extended community networks sharing the burden of childrearing. My understanding is that this way is better for everyone; parents and children.
