Pinned I don't think Chiang's case of comparing LLMs to Word docs is compelling. At least, it's not convincing! There are lots of better anti-AI-consciousness arguments, we don't need to pretend these systems are dumb or don't understand anything. People have eyes.
They buried the lede on this new study. It's not that exercise beats out SSRIs for depression treatment, but that *just* dancing has the largest effect of *any treatment* for depression. That's kind of beautiful.
1. "Education experts" have been saying for decades that we must wait to start teaching reading until 6-7 for neuroscientific reasons. These reasons appear, as far as I can tell, to be basically made up. Consider this recent article, which quotes a bunch of experts on this.
Dreams are synthetic data. But why use data so unconnected from the real world? My answer is that it probably helps with overfitting to our daily lives.
Citation formatting is so pointless. It's just a reflection of the inability of humans to let go of busy work. Why does it matter what city a publishing company is located in????
I once knew a guy in college who couldn't imagine pictures. He said he got a flicker of an image while reading the part of Paradise Lost where Lucifer raises a flaming sword to storm the gates of heaven, and that was the only image he ever saw in his mind
1. You might remember the finding in evolutionary psychology that women prefer more masculine faces for short-term mating partners, but prefer less masculine faces for long-term mating partners. Yeah, it doesn't replicate.
The most fundamental difference between the new vs old Star Treks
John von Neumann has become the poster-child for scientific genius lately. Probably because of the current thinking that genius = high IQ + rationality. But actually von Neumann envied Einstein, the greater scientist, because Einstein had something he lacked.
Scientists sequenced Beethoven's genome from a strand of hair and found a funny result. Applying the gene-wide associations studies to musicality (that we know, there are methodological limits), Beethoven's genetic propensity to musicality was... low?
btw my jaw dropped when I found this. Why is this number so high? How do 37% of *all* children in the US get reported to Child Protective Services at some point?
Elon Musk has blocked all Substack links on Twitter from being RTed or liked. This gives huge advantage to the MSM he claims is bad, but ok. Canceled my Twitter blue, and likely won't be on this godforsaken platform for much longer. Please follow me on Substack (link below)
That was a shocking fast drop-off. RIP the humanities.
