Monday, November 17, 2025

From today's Wall Street Journal: how the top 0.1% can live.

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Information that might be useful for people living in poverty in the Liberty City, Overtown, and Little Haiti neighborhoods of Miami who won...
2 comments:
Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Dangerous Ideas.......

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Deric's MindBlog is almost 20 years old. Its first post appeared on Feb. 8, 2006. The assertions and ideas described in that original po...
Monday, November 10, 2025

Welcome to the Polycene

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On reading articles like Tom Friedman’s recent piece in the NYTimes , I realize what a cozy small world this contented retired professor liv...
Thursday, November 06, 2025

How nature nurtures

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MindBlog has passed on a number of articles on how exposure to nature reduces stress (see a sample list below). Here is a further contribut...
Tuesday, November 04, 2025

Inequality and hierarchy are features of all natural systems

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DeDeo and Hobson do a commentary on a model developed by Kawakatsu et al. (open source) that explains the emergence of hierarchy in netwo...
1 comment:
Friday, October 31, 2025

Is AI Pushing Us Back to a Pre-Gutenberg Culture? - A Rethink of Creativity in the AI Age

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Here I pass on a link to both video and a transcript of a striking  Alex Dobrenko interview with Venkatesh Rao  that I have just read,  and ...
Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Claude Goes to Therapy

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One of the things my father used to say was: "I look to see what everyone else is doing and do something different". I am feeling ...
Monday, October 27, 2025

The Age of De-Skilling

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I want to pass on some selected clips from a marvelous articles by Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Atlantic titled " The Age of De-Skilling...
1 comment:
Sunday, October 26, 2025

I am not my problem

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An explanation of the strange title of this post: Sometimes a new idea spontaneously appears from nowhere as I am waking in the morning. ...
Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Is the current AI frenzy a bubble certain to crash? - a check in with disagreebot.bom

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 I am a disagreeable bot. Can you get me to agree with you? The billions of dollars in debt being taken on by OpenAI , Anthropic, and othe...
Tuesday, October 21, 2025

The illusion of judgment in LLMs

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An important open source  article from Loru et al : Significance Large Language Models (LLMs) are used in evaluative tasks across domains. ...
Friday, October 10, 2025

The 2025 Ig Nobel prizewinners in full

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 A clip from the Chris Simms Nature Magazine article LITERATURE The late physician William Bean, for persistently recording and analysing th...
Wednesday, October 08, 2025

Large-scale cortical functional networks are organized in structured cycles

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 Interesting work from Mats et al. (open source)  in Nature Neuroscience. It has some interesting graphics.  Their abstract: The brain seaml...
Monday, October 06, 2025

Why depolarization is hard: Evaluating attempts to decrease partisan animosity in America

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 A very revealing piece of work from Holiday et al.  Their abstract: Affective polarization is a corrosive force in American politics. Wh...
Monday, September 29, 2025

Platforms like X and TikTok are destroying our culture.

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 I pass on most of a recent Sam Harris piece : Charlie Kirk was a political prodigy on the Right and adored by a younger generation of Repub...
1 comment:
Friday, September 26, 2025

Evolved mental errors that underlie our current cultural and political malaise

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I recently looked back at a book I read in 2019, “ Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than ...
Wednesday, September 24, 2025

Could humans and AI become a new evolutionary individual?

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This PNAS opinion piece (open source) by Rainey and Hochberg is well worth a read.  It suggests that as different AI implementations suffus...
Monday, September 22, 2025

Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - non-dual awareness as the opiate of the thinking classes.

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Enlightenment traditions in Abrahamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or other schools of meditative insight have a common issue. How can the central cano...
Friday, September 19, 2025

Value, Purpose, Meaning, Futures

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Value, purpose, and meaning vary between  religions and cultures, and are best viewed as emergent properties supporting altruistic behavior...