Even in mice, decision-making involves complex brain activity
If it’s this complex in mice, what are we to make of simplistic representations of human thinking in pop psychology textbooks?
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Jay Richards: AI, Robots, and Moravec’s Paradox
Why is it comparatively easy to develop a program to play chess, as opposed to teaching a robot to walk freely?
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Lots of things are immaterial and we just don’t realize it
An entire business process is driven by immaterial assumptions about a source of payment based on electrons with no fixed location.
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Study: Ballooning science fraud abetted by editors
Part of the problem, the study authors say, seems to be that many honest scientists are sleepwalking around the seriousness of the situation.
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Albert Einstein: His mind was exceptional; his brain wasn’t
That was not what researchers expected. But the prior commitment to materialism in neuroscience makes the evidence difficult to accept and learn from.
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No wonder students “pretend to have” progressive views …
Researchers found that many students who claim to have progressive views are just pretending but Orwellian exclusions and firings may force conformity.
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Why do scientists lie? What changes would help stop it?
An economist argues that some of the institutions which enable science to be a successful endeavour also abet and encourage fraud.
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Warning signs that the AI bubble is due to collapse
As Jeffrey Funk notes, the extravagant hype is aimed at attracting investors, not describing the actual products.
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YouTube channels sold and repurposed? What next?
YouTube is one of the factors that is slowly killing network TV, which naturally makes its channels more valuable.
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An American journalist on Britain’s censorship crackdown
Taylor Lorenz is shocked because she is left wing in an American sense: rallies and riots. British PM Keir Starmer by contrast thinks Big Brother got it right.
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Study: Fraudulent Science Networks Outpacing Legitimate Science
A new dark age for science may not need a repressive government; it only needs a situation where stakeholders cannot enforce standards.
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Computer scientist responds to claims that chatbots are conscious
Of course the chatbot’s words sound empty to a sensitive year because the life behind them was many uses earlier.
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Sophisticated (yes!) world of humans from 300,000 years ago
The human mind has no history. We see it when and where we see it. But we must be looking for it — not for some brute who may never have existed.
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New investment in Substack and the future of media
A key change has been the decline of many older media, which depend on a strict separation between a few content providers and a vast mass of content absorbers.
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Is the tech media becoming more skeptical of AI boosterism?
If tech media are catching on to the fact that many claims about AI are boosterism in search of investment, the discussion will soon become much more useful.
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Why we think fish must be dumb — even when they aren’t
Our model of how life form acquire and show intelligence is drawn from theory, not from observation.
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AI takeover? Maybe not. Sniff the wind…
It is not clear how the new AI world is creating advances that many people would recognize as such.
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AI researchers: Bad actors target chatbots with bogus articles
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are supposed to help with this problem but the actually don’t perform any better.
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“Bad paper sleuths” worry that the government is misusing science
They worry that current reform efforts will cause the public to doubt science — though trust in science has been falling for many years.
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New NIH director assails Big Six science publishing monopoly
Jay Bhattacharya believes, among other things, that Americans should have the right to read the articles that their taxpayer dollars fund.
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