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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Researchers: Left-handedness is not a golden key to creativity
Because great creativity and left-handedness are both relatively rare, people may tend to associate them, researchers suggest.
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AI, unemployment, and what Einstein got wrong
Unemployment due to AI is widely predicted — and he believed in it — but things don’t really happen that way.
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Had to happen: Deepfake Marco Rubio calling U.S. officials
Unfortunately, the pointers offered for detecting deepfakes without electronic assistance don’t sound very reassuring.
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Wimbledon AI line judge doesn’t work out as planned…
AI may or may not mean more accurate decisions but it will mean decisions made due to events that would never otherwise have occurred.
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What happens when people uncritically use AI-generated content?
The AI revolution is not turning out as boosters hoped. But it is probably turning out the only way it could.
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Fat factory helped Neanderthals survive 125,000 years ago
The fat factory required a good deal of co-ordination of the work of many hands and co-operation.
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Babies may suffer more from pain than older people do
Knowledge of what is happening (which babies lack) often helps to contain and suppress pain.
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Can transparent peer review help resolve the replication crisis?
It will force those who are attempting to subvert honest enquiry to adopt much more doublespeak than they used to need.
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The Tao of meow: Cats mew mostly for humans
It will be most interesting to see what the AI comes up with. but its range of analysis should include body language in order to capture much animal communication.
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