Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty

Wow, in an article with title of this post Breznau et al. show that different research teams presented independently with the same data and social science hypothesis reach opposing conclusions about what the data show.  

Significance

Will different researchers converge on similar findings when analyzing the same data? Seventy-three independent research teams used identical cross-country survey data to test a prominent social science hypothesis: that more immigration will reduce public support for government provision of social policies. Instead of convergence, teams’ results varied greatly, ranging from large negative to large positive effects of immigration on social policy support. The choices made by the research teams in designing their statistical tests explain very little of this variation; a hidden universe of uncertainty remains. Considering this variation, scientists, especially those working with the complexities of human societies and behavior, should exercise humility and strive to better account for the uncertainty in their work.

Abstract

This study explores how researchers’ analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers’ expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team’s workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers’ results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings.

A deep-learning model of prescient ideas demonstrates that they emerge from the periphery

 The abstract of a fascinating open source article from Vicinanza et al.:

Where do prescient ideas—those that initially challenge conventional assumptions but later achieve widespread acceptance—come from? Although their outcomes in the form of technical innovation are readily observed, the underlying ideas that eventually change the world are often obscured. Here we develop a novel method that uses deep learning to unearth the markers of prescient ideas from the language used by individuals and groups. Our language-based measure identifies prescient actors and documents that prevailing methods would fail to detect. Applying our model to corpora spanning the disparate worlds of politics, law, and business, we demonstrate that it reliably detects prescient ideas in each domain. Moreover, counter to many prevailing intuitions, prescient ideas emanate from each domain's periphery rather than its core. These findings suggest that the propensity to generate far-sighted ideas may be as much a property of contexts as of individuals.

Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - Or, Mindfulness as the opiate of the thinking classes?

This New Year’s post is directed to the small number of MindBlog readers who might be sympathetic to some of my private random rants. Perhaps I should keep them to myself, but here goes…..

All enlightenment traditions - such as Abrahamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or other schools of meditative insight - have a common issue. How can the central canon or dogma of the way things are be renewed and kept fresh? The usual practice is to repeat a liturgy set down by gurus of a given tradition, but with each repetition by a particular vendor the gospel begins to loose its force. The transforming clarity of the initial enlightenment fades as the habituation and desensitization associated with all repetitive activities begins to set in. ‘Reset buttons’ that are temporarily effective can sometimes be found by turning to different vendors of the central message, who in this smartphone age can each package and deliver their respective theory or practice sessions in a sonorous and calming voices. This frequently is done in 10-30 min chunks that better accommodate our modern diminished attention spans, as well as in longer lectures from workshops or retreats. This approach can be seen in aggregator Apps such as Sam Harris’ “Waking Up,” which delivers the messages of many different teachers. (I wonder if generation Alpha,  born in this century, exists in even more transient states of tik-tok mind, twitter mind, or instagram mind that preclude even this level of engagement?)

I would guess that over the past year or two I have listened to ~150 such lectures. As I see the same basic points reframed in many different ways, I begin to think “Y’know, it seems that the fundamental axioms of enlightenment that are expressible in language are being repetitively rediscovered throughout history and repeatedly archived.  I feel like their verbal messages are as ingrained in my consciousness as the language of the mathematical and chemical structures I have known most of my life.”

My flippant ‘mindfulness as the opiate of the thinking classes’ phrase in the title of this post is meaning to point to the fact that the market for vendors of enlightenment is a distinctive one. Existential angst, or worrying about value, purpose, and meaning seem most pressing to a relatively small number of highly urbanized and literate humans. I can’t imagine that my two Abyssinian cats, who I sometimes takes to be my best role models, spend a significant fraction of their time worrying about the meeting of it all, or pondering the subtleties of epistemology and ontology. 

So….what beyond words? A space or perspective that doesn’t contain them can only be pointed at by using them in the dualistic context of a sender and receiver. I can, for example, try to use words to give a crude voice to the mute homeostatic generative visceral organic axes of valence and arousal that underlie and generate everything that I am and experience right now: “Dude, get a grip, I (the visceral one) am the one who is actually running this show, deciding where it goes and whether it works or shuts down, the sooner the “I” you imagine yourself to be realizes this and lets go, the sooner some kind of sane space is attained. All of the surface behaviors acted out for others to see - the family man, the professor, the pianist - are shadow play shimmering on the surface of this basic organic substrate, like water insects skittering around on the surface of a pond. What is writing these words is just another one of the contents of consciousness flitting past. Just turn yourself around to look quickly for the writer…what do you see? What do you see as you imagine being first born into this world? The brief glimpses of expanded naive awareness sometimes elicited by questions such as these have the potential of permitting a scrubbing, refreshing, or renewal of consciousness in a way that permits more choice in selecting which prior individual selves and self habits rise to compose current self conscious life. 

Different iterations of these sentiments, different vendings of the sort mentioned in the first paragraph above, can be found in two previous MindBlog posts. One from Nov. 25:  

Perhaps an increasing number of people who engage techniques for facilitating non-dual awareness find themselves seeing and experiencing the "I" or self that feels threatened by our anxious times from a more useful perspective - an inclusive expanded awareness that includes the reporting "I" or self as just one of its many contents that include passing thoughts, perceptions, actions, and feelings.  A calm can be found in this expanded awareness that permits a  dis-association of the experienced breathing visceral center of gravity of our animal body from the emotional and linguistic veneer of politics and conflict. This does not remove the necessity of facing various societal dysfunctions, but offers the prospect of doing so without debilitating the organic physiological core from which everything we experience rises.  

And the other from Oct. 26, passing on a masterful exposition from James Low that I can not improve on.

If you want stability, if you want real peace, you already have that in the nature of awareness. But if you look to manifestation, to patterning of yourself, to thinking you could establish a stable personalty, to live a life in which you were happy all the time, or in which you were your own person, that way madness lies. To find our original face, to find the ground of our primordial being, we need to release our fixation on the dialogic movement of subject and object, and allow ourselves to be the space within which the movement of experience is occurring. Awareness means being aware that we are present without being something as such. This is a great mystery. When we look at phenomena the world, things exist as something. A car is not a cow, an apple is not an orange, compare and contrast, category allocation. That’s how our cognition, our conceptual elaboration functions to give a seemingly enduring structure to identifications. But awareness can’t be caught. It’s not a thing. You can’t pin a tail on the donkey, there is no donkey there. The mind is not an object for itself, it is self luminous awareness, but you can’t catch it. You can never know your mind but you can be your mind. We are awareness and that’s a very important distinction.

The pitfalls of defining neural correlates of brain functions

Rust and Le Doux do a useful brief opinion piece from which I pass on two clips, and recommend you read the whole open source text.

...neuroscientists should avoid conflating circuits that control behavior with mental states, especially in the absence of evidence that the two map onto one another. These equivalencies need to be very carefully investigated rather than presumed.

Considerable evidence suggests that circuits involving the amygdala control behavioral and physiological responses to threats. In animal research labs, threats are often recapitulated by pairing a tone with an aversive stimulus such as a weak shock to elicit ‘fear-related behaviors’ such as freezing upon hearing the tone again. The neural circuits that learn the association between the tone and shock and produce freezing behavior are among the best understood in the brain. The problem lies in labeling these circuits with the term ‘fear’, because it presumes that the threat elicits a mental state, a subjective experience, of fear that is caused by activity in the amygdala. However, mounting evidence suggests that the amygdala is not required for the mental state of fear. Instead, the mental state of fear crucially depends, at least in part, on cortical circuits that interpret or conceptualize what is occurring in the social and physical environment and in one’s body. In this framework, amygdala circuits control nonconscious defense behaviors (such as freezing) as opposed to conscious experience. Should this framework be correct, the extensive ongoing efforts devoted to targeting amygdala circuits and rodent behaviors such as freezing and avoidance are unlikely to provide a direct route to treatments for human fear and anxiety disorders. These lines of research can help, but not without recognizing the centrality of subjective experience.

Wormholes in quanturm computers

I pass on this link to a YouTube video sent out by the Chaos and Complex Systems Discussion group at the University of Wisconsin. Totally fun to watch, but I don't think any of us understand it.

Rigorous study does not find that exercise and mindfulness training improve cognitive function in older adults.

Wow, here is a study by Lenze et al. - not confirming the results of numerous other less rigorous studies reported in MindBlog posts - that is unable to demonstrate that the use of mindfulness training, exercise, or a combination of both can significantly improving cognitive function in older adults with subjective cognitive concerns. In their randomized clinical trial that included 585 participants, mindfulness training, exercise, or both did not result in significant differences in improvement in episodic memory or executive function composite scores at 6 months. Gretchen Reynolds provides context and a summary of the work in a Washington Post article.

A smart phone intervention that enhances memory in older adults.

Martin et al.  offer an open source article that describes a smartphone intervention that enhances real-world memory and promotes differentiation of hippocampal activity in older adults.  I have downloaded the HippoCamera smartphone App described in the text from the Apple App Store, and found a research passcode is required, for which the following clip of text from the article is relevant: "As of the time of writing, this is a research-dedicated application that requires an access code that can be obtained from a corresponding author."

Significance

The ability to vividly recollect our past declines with age, a trend that negatively impacts overall well-being. We show that using smartphone technologies to record and replay brief but rich memory cues from daily life can improve older adults’ ability to reexperience the past. This enhancement was associated with corresponding changes in the way memories were stored in the brain. Functional neuroimaging showed that repeatedly replaying memory cues drove memories apart from one another in the hippocampus, a brain region with well-established links to memory function. This increase in differentiation likely facilitated behavior by strengthening memory and minimizing competition among different memories at retrieval. This work reveals an easy-to-use intervention that helps older adults better remember their personal past.

Abstract

The act of remembering an everyday experience influences how we interpret the world, how we think about the future, and how we perceive ourselves. It also enhances long-term retention of the recalled content, increasing the likelihood that it will be recalled again. Unfortunately, the ability to recollect event-specific details and reexperience the past tends to decline with age. This decline in recollection may reflect a corresponding decrease in the distinctiveness of hippocampal memory representations. Despite these well-established changes, there are few effective cognitive behavioral interventions that target real-world episodic memory. We addressed this gap by developing a smartphone-based application called HippoCamera that allows participants to record labeled videos of everyday events and subsequently replay, high-fidelity autobiographical memory cues. In two experiments, we found that older adults were able to easily integrate this noninvasive intervention into their daily lives. Using HippoCamera to repeatedly reactivate memories for real-world events improved episodic recollection and it evoked more positive autobiographical sentiment at the time of retrieval. In both experiments, these benefits were observed shortly after the intervention and again after a 3-mo delay. Moreover, more detailed recollection was associated with more differentiated memory signals in the hippocampus. Thus, using this smartphone application to systematically reactivate memories for recent real-world experiences can help to maintain a bridge between the present and past in older adults.

Neurocomputational evidence that conflicting prosocial motives guide distributive justice

A fascinating perspective and analysis from Hu et al. who show that three prosocial motives (fairness, harm aversion, and rank reversal aversion) are encoded by separate neural systems, compete for representation in various brain areas processing equality and harm signals, and are integrated in the striatum, which functions as a crucial hub for translating the motives to behavior (see also the commentary by Armstrong and McKee).  

Significance

Resource allocation in human societies usually triggers discussions about fairness, but satisfactory solutions to distribution problems also involve other prosocial motives that may prescribe different actions. Here, we address how the human brain mitigates such conflicts between multiple prosocial motives (fairness, harm aversion, and rank reversal aversion) during wealth distribution. Combining a experimental paradigm with fMRI and integrated neurocomputational modeling, we show that different prosocial motives are separately represented and integrated into choices by neural activity in striatum and its interactions with different brain regions. These findings extend unidimensional economic theories of third-party social preferences, characterize biological bases for individual and contextual differences in resource distribution behavior, and have economic and political implications for the design of taxation policies.

Abstract

In the history of humanity, most conflicts within and between societies have originated from perceived inequality in resource distribution. How humans achieve and maintain distributive justice has therefore been an intensely studied issue. However, most research on the corresponding psychological processes has focused on inequality aversion and has been largely agnostic of other motives that may either align or oppose this behavioral tendency. Here we provide behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging evidence that distribution decisions are guided by three distinct motives—inequality aversion, harm aversion, and rank reversal aversion—that interact with each other and can also deter individuals from pursuing equality. At the neural level, we show that these three motives are encoded by separate neural systems, compete for representation in various brain areas processing equality and harm signals, and are integrated in the striatum, which functions as a crucial hub for translating the motives to behavior. Our findings provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the cognitive and biological processes by which multiple prosocial motives are coordinated in the brain to guide redistribution behaviors. This framework enhances our understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying equality-related behavior, suggests possible neural origins of individual differences in social preferences, and provides a new pathway to understand the cognitive and neural basis of clinical disorders with impaired social functions.

Can we move beyond social media's current destruction of civil society?

I strongly recommend that you read Ezra Klein's NYTimes essay on Twitter. He begins by noting that the metaphor of Twitter as a global town square is wrong on three levels. I pass on some clips:

First, there isn’t, can’t be and shouldn’t be a “global town square.” The world needs many town squares, not one. Public spaces are rooted in the communities and contexts in which they exist. This is true, too, for Twitter, which is less a singular entity than a digital multiverse. What Twitter is for activists in Zimbabwe is not what it is for gamers in Britain.

Second, town squares are public spaces, governed in some way by the public. That is what makes them a town square rather than a square in a town. They are not the playthings of whimsical billionaires. They do not exist, as Twitter did for so long, to provide returns to shareholders...A town square controlled by one man isn’t a town square. It’s a storefront, an art project or possibly a game preserve.

Third, what matters for a polity isn’t the mere existence of a town square but the condition the townspeople are in when they arrive. Town squares can host debates. They can host craft fairs. They can host brawls. They can host lynchings. Civilization does not depend on a place to gather. It depends on what happens when people gather.

Twitter has real strengths, many of which are the flip side of its weaknesses. It is as flat a medium as any that has existed. It is as fast a medium as has ever existed; that can be maddening, but it can also draw attention to something that is happening and has to change right now. It is an unusually confrontational medium, and that has permitted movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo to flower and for socialists to get a new hearing in American politics — and it has also, of course, given new succor and life to the racist right. Put simply, Twitter’s value is how easy it makes it to talk. Its cost is how hard it makes it to listen.

It is a failure of imagination to think that our choice is the social media platforms we have now or nothing. I keep thinking about something that Robin Sloan, a novelist and former Twitter employee, wrote this year: “There are so many ways people might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and conviviality might be organized. Look at these screens, this wash of pixels, the liquid potential! What a colossal bummer that Twitter eked out a local maximum, that its network effect still (!) consumes the fuel for other possibilities, other explorations.”

What’s surprised me most as Twitter has convulsed in recent weeks is how threadbare the social media cupboard really is. So many are open to trying something new, but as of yet, there’s nothing that feels all that new to try. Everything feels like a take on Twitter. It may be faster or slower, more decentralized or more moderated, but they’re all variations on the same theme: experiments in how to capture attention rather than deepen it, platforms built to encourage us to speak rather than to help us listen or think.

We do not make our best decisions, as individuals or as a collective, when our minds are most active and fretful. And yet “active and fretful” is about as precise a description as I can imagine of the Twitter mind. And having put us in an active, fretful mental state, Twitter then encourages us to fire off declarative statements on the most divisive possible issues, always with one eye to how quickly they will rack up likes and retweets and thus viral power. It’s insane.

And it will get so much worse from here. OpenAI recently released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence system that can be given requests in plain language and spit out remarkably passable results...What ChatGPT can do is a marvel. We are at the dawn of a new technological era. But it is easy to see how it could turn dark — and quickly. A.I. systems like this make the production and manipulation of text (and code and images and eventually audio and video) functionally costless. They will be deployed to produce whatever makes us most likely to click. But these systems do not and cannot know what they are producing. The cost of creating and optimizing content that grabs our attention is plummeting, but the cost of producing valuable and truthful work isn’t.

These are technologies that lend themselves to cacophony, not community. I fear a world in which the business models behind them run on our attention or profit off our anger. But other worlds and other models are possible.

In Taiwan, as described by Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s minister of digital affairs, key parts of digital infrastructure are managed at the level of what we sometimes call civil society — the layer of associations and organizations between the government and the market.. The PTT Bulletin Board System is still owned by the student group that started it. It was part of how Taiwan responded so early and so effectively to the coronavirus. “It has no shareholders,” Tang said. “No advertisers. It is entirely within the academic network. It’s entirely open source. It's entirely community governed. People can freely join it. It’s a public digital space.”

Wikipedia remains one of the most-visited sites on the web, and it is owned and managed by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. It shows. Wikipedia has never tried to become more than it is. It never pivoted to video or remade itself around an algorithmic feed in order to harvest more of our attention. It is a commons but one that is governed so we may use it rather than so that it may use us. It gives so much more than it takes. It thrives, quietly and gently, as a reminder that a very different internet, governed in a very different way, intended for a very different purpose, is possible.

There are those who believe the social web is reaching its terminal point. I hope they’re right. Platform after platform was designed to make it easier and more addictive for us to share content with one another so the corporations behind them could sell ever more of our attention and data. In different ways, most of these platforms are now in decline.

What if the next turn of the media dial was measured not by how much attention we gave to a platform but by how much it gave to us? I am not sure what such a service would look like. But I am hungry for it, and I suspect a lot of other people are, too.

The dawn of mediocre computing.

This post is a followup on MindBlog's 12/07/22 post on OpenAI's ChatGPT essay generating system. It was mentioned in Venkatesh Rao's essay "The Dawn of Mediocre Computing" that my techie son, Jonathan Bownds,sent to me. After pasting in the first two paragraphs of Rao's article, I want to pass on some essential clips that Jon extracted from Rao's overly long text, the sort of logorrheic writing that is responsible for the TLDR (too long didn't read) acronym. 

Well, we all knew it was coming. Computers already easily overwhelm the best humans at chess and Go. Now they have done something far harder: achieved parity with David Brooks at writing.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released as a research beta two days ago, has done to the standard high-school essay what cameras did to photorealistic painting and pocket calculators did to basic arithmetic. It is open sign-up and free for now, but I suspect not for much longer, so go try it; and make sure to trawl social media for interesting and revealing examples being posted by people.

Definitions:

Mediocre computing is computing that aims for parity with mediocre human performance in a realish domains where notions of excellence are ill-posed.

Excellent computing is computing that aims to surpass the best-performing humans in stylized, closed-world domains where notions of excellence are well-posed.

Most of us spend most of our time in realish domains. The urban built environment, workplaces, shopping, and modern systems of roads are all examples of realish domains. But I want to focus on two big and important ones in particular: language and money. Vast numbers of mediocre humans make good livings producing words and/or moving money around. These activities are also the home domains of the two frontiers of computing today, Al and crypto. The Second and First Foundations of the mediocre future of computing.

Via seemingly unrelated computational pathways, these two realish domains have succumbed to computerized automation. Incompletely, imperfectly, and unreliably, to be sure, but they definitely have succumbed. And in ways that seem conceptually roughly right rather than not even wrong. Large language models (LLMs) are the right way for software to eat language. Blockchains are the right way for software to eat money. And the two together are the right way to eat everything from contracts to code.

This reeks of real yin-yangery that extends to the roots of computing somehow. It's not just me hallucinating patterns where there are none.

I'm not trying to be cute here. I sincerely believe mediocre computing in realish domains is not just harder than excellent computing in stylized domains, but constitutes a whole higher category of hardness. There is an element of Moravec's paradox in my reasoning here. Roughly, the paradox states that tasks that look simple, and which all humans can do, are harder for Als than tasks that look hard, and which seem like exceptional achievements among humans.

Individuals prefer to harm their own group rather than help an opposing group

From Gershon and Fridman:  

Significance

Understanding the principles guiding decisions in intergroup conflicts is essential to recognizing the psychological barriers to compromise and cooperation. We introduce a novel paradigm for studying group decision-making, demonstrating that individuals are so averse to supporting opposing groups that they prefer equivalent or greater harm to their own group instead. While previous models of group decision-making claim that group members are driven by a desire to benefit their in-group (“in-group love”) rather than harm their out-group, our results cannot be explained by in-group love or by a harm minimizing strategy. Instead, we propose that identity concerns drive this behavior. Our theorizing speaks to research in psychology, political theory, and negotiations by examining how group members navigate trade-offs among competing priorities.

Abstract

Group-based conflict enacts a severe toll on society, yet the psychological factors governing behavior in group conflicts remain unclear. Past work finds that group members seek to maximize relative differences between their in-group and out-group (“in-group favoritism”) and are driven by a desire to benefit in-groups rather than harm out-groups (the “in-group love” hypothesis). This prior research studies how decision-makers approach trade-offs between two net-positive outcomes for their in-group. However, in the real world, group members often face trade-offs between net-negative options, entailing either losses to their group or gains for the opposition. Anecdotally, under such conditions, individuals may avoid supporting their opponents even if this harms their own group, seemingly inconsistent with “in-group love” or a harm minimizing strategy. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, these circumstances have not been investigated. In six pre-registered studies, we find consistent evidence that individuals prefer to harm their own group rather than provide even minimal support to an opposing group across polarized issues (abortion access, political party, gun rights). Strikingly, in an incentive-compatible experiment, individuals preferred to subtract more than three times as much from their own group rather than support an opposing group, despite believing that their in-group is more effective with funds. We find that identity concerns drive preferences in group decision-making, and individuals believe that supporting an opposing group is less value-compatible than harming their own group. Our results hold valuable insights for the psychology of decision-making in intergroup conflict as well as potential interventions for conflict resolution.

Autism attenuates the perception of the mind-body divide

A fascinating piece of work from Berent et al.:  

Significance

Across cultures, people consider the mind as ethereal, distinct from the body. But whether Dualism arises only from culture (nurture) or also spontaneously (from human nature) is unknown. To address this question, here, we turn to autism spectrum disorder (ASD)—a congenital disorder that compromises intuitive reasoning about the minds of others (theory of mind, ToM). If ToM promotes Dualist reasoning, then Dualist reasoning ought to be attenuated in ASD. Our results show that, compared to controls, people with ASD are more likely to view bodies and minds alike (in line with Physicalism). Moreover, a Physicalist stance is linked to difficulties with ToM. These results shed light on ASD and on the mind-body distinction in humans.

Abstract

People are intuitive Dualists—they tacitly consider the mind as ethereal, distinct from the body. Here we ask whether Dualism emerges naturally from the conflicting core principles that guide reasoning about objects, on the one hand, and about the minds of agents (theory of mind, ToM), on the other. To address this question, we explore Dualist reasoning in autism spectrum disorder (ASD)—a congenital disorder known to compromise ToM. If Dualism arises from ToM, then ASD ought to attenuate Dualism and promote Physicalism. In line with this prediction, Experiment 1 shows that, compared to controls, people with ASD are more likely to view psychological traits as embodied—as likely to manifest in a replica of one’s body. Experiment 2 demonstrates that, unlike controls, people with ASD do not consider thoughts as disembodied—as persistent in the afterlife (upon the body’s demise). If ASD promotes the perception of the psyche as embodied, and if (per Essentialism) embodiment suggests innateness, then ASD should further promote Nativism—this bias is shown in Experiment 3. Finally, Experiment 4 demonstrates that, in neurotypical (NT) participants, difficulties with ToM correlate with Physicalism. These results are the first to show that ASD attenuates Dualist reasoning and to link Dualism to ToM. These conclusions suggest that the mind-body distinction might be natural for people to entertain.

How modern human brains are different from those of other hominids and chimps.

Work pointed to in the previous post continues to add to the list of behaviors once presumed to be unique to humans that have now been found in other animals (morality, having a ‘self’, etc.) Previous MindBlog posts (list, von Economo neurons etc. do search..) have noted emerging evidence for brain features unique to - or much more pronounced in - humans than other primates. Now Pinson et al. have found that a single amino acid change in the transketolase-like 1 (TKTL1) protein on production of basal radial glia, the workhorses that generate much of the neocortex, appears that the modern human has more neocortex to work with than the ancient Neanderthal did. Here is their abstract:

Neanderthal brains were similar in size to those of modern humans. We sought to investigate potential differences in neurogenesis during neocortex development. Modern human transketolase-like 1 (TKTL1) differs from Neanderthal TKTL1 by a lysine-to-arginine amino acid substitution. Using overexpression in developing mouse and ferret neocortex, knockout in fetal human neocortical tissue, and genome-edited cerebral organoids, we found that the modern human variant, hTKTL1, but not the Neanderthal variant, increases the abundance of basal radial glia (bRG) but not that of intermediate progenitors (bIPs). bRG generate more neocortical neurons than bIPs. The hTKTL1 effect requires the pentose phosphate pathway and fatty acid synthesis. Inhibition of these metabolic pathways reduces bRG abundance in fetal human neocortical tissue. Our data suggest that neocortical neurogenesis in modern humans differs from that in Neanderthals.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT answers some questions from MindBlog

Given a recent posting in which I played with the DALL-E 2 A.I. system that generates images when you tell it what you want to see, I was motivated by a Venkatesh Rao essay "The Dawn of Mediocre Computing" to try out an essay generating system - OpenAI's ChatGPT, released as a research beta several days ago. After puttering through a number of references and joining the OpenAI Discord Server, I fundamentally don't get it and have nothing original to pass on in this post, but I thought some MindBlog readers might enjoy spending some time in the rabbit hole I am just now exiting. I pass on the following MindBlog queries and ChatGPT's rather remarkable replies: 

Question: what is the predictive processing model for brain function? 

The predictive processing model is a framework for understanding how the brain works. It proposes that the brain is constantly generating predictions about the world around us and that these predictions are used to inform our perception, behavior, and action. According to this model, the brain is always trying to make sense of the sensory information it receives by comparing it to its internal models and predictions. If there is a mismatch between the sensory information and the brain's predictions, this can lead to the experience of surprise or prediction error. The brain then uses this prediction error to update its internal models and make more accurate predictions in the future. This process is thought to be the basis for how we learn and adapt to our environment. 

Question: What are the main models for brain function? 

There are many different models or frameworks for understanding how the brain works, each of which offers a different perspective on brain function. Some of the most prominent and well-known models include the following:

The neural network model, which proposes that the brain is composed of interconnected networks of neurons that communicate with each other through electrical and chemical signals.

The cognitive model, which emphasizes the role of higher-level cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and decision-making in brain function.

The computational model, which views the brain as a biological computer that processes information using algorithms and rules.

The systems model, which focuses on the ways in which different brain regions and systems interact to produce complex behaviors and mental states.

The evolutionary model, which emphasizes the role of natural selection in shaping the brain and its functions.

The dynamic systems model, which proposes that the brain is a complex, self-organizing system that is constantly adapting and changing in response to experience. 

Each of these models offers a different perspective on brain function and can be used to help understand different aspects of the brain and its behavior.

Question: Explain critical race theory 

Critical race theory is a school of thought that explores the ways in which race and racism affect and are embedded in the laws, policies, and social structures of society. It is a framework for understanding how society and its institutions can perpetuate inequality along racial lines, and it emphasizes the importance of examining the interplay between race, power, and the law. Critical race theory is often used as a lens for analyzing issues related to inequality and social justice. It is a critical approach to the study of race and racism that seeks to challenge and dismantle the ways in which race and racism operate in society. 

ADDENDUM: I suggest readers have a look at this article on "Sentience and Sensibility"

A collection of animal stories

I've accumulated several items on animal behaviors in my list of potential post subjects, and have decided to simply pass them on to allow animal curious MindBlog readers to have a look. 

Farad Manjoo notes that ants, not humans, own the world. 

Not only land animals like humans toss objects at irritating neighbors, octopuses who gather at feeding sites with abundant food and competition for it sometimes throw silt at each other.

Crows understand the concept of recursion as well as children, and better than macaque monkeys. 

Wild Chimpanzees display declarative referential gesturing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Z-Library Kerfuffle and the whack-a-mole problem

Several months ago a friend told me about the Z-Library that he was using to download recently published fiction to evaluate candidates for book club reading. He thought it was sanctioned by publishers. I checked it out, decided to download a book, the book looked promising, so I bought the Amazon Kindle version. As this New York Daily News article makes clear in its description of the seizing of many Z-Library domains by the FBI, it is a pirate site, a file sharing service that evades copyright restrictions. I asked Wikipedia about Z-Library, and brought up a page with a description not only of Z-Library and its recent shut down in the U.S., but learned about the existence of many shadow libraries scattered over many different countries accessed by several metasearch engines. A box on this page, partly shown in the screen clip below, indicates it is part of a series on file sharing. I went to Anna's Archive, one of sites mentioned under the heading of Academic file sharing, and was able to easily download the entire text of a copyrighted Amazon Kindle Book I had purchased. Given the thousands of motivated individuals around the world who can't afford or don't have access to publications they need or want, there seems little prospect of denting the anarchy that prevails. 

Intuitive physics learning in a deep-learning A.I. model

A fascinating open source article from Piloto et al. in Nature Human Behaviour that addresses a major shortcoming of current artifician intelligence systems:

‘Intuitive physics’ enables our pragmatic engagement with the physical world and forms a key component of ‘common sense’ aspects of thought. Current artificial intelligence systems pale in their understanding of intuitive physics, in comparison to even very young children. Here we address this gap between humans and machines by drawing on the field of developmental psychology. First, we introduce and open-source a machine-learning dataset designed to evaluate conceptual understanding of intuitive physics, adopting the violation-of-expectation (VoE) paradigm from developmental psychology. Second, we build a deep-learning system that learns intuitive physics directly from visual data, inspired by studies of visual cognition in children. We demonstrate that our model can learn a diverse set of physical concepts, which depends critically on object-level representations, consistent with findings from developmental psychology. We consider the implications of these results both for AI and for research on human cognition.

The Computational Society

The most recent issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences presents a forum in its 25th Anniversary Series: Looking Forward. Several of the contribution are open source (you can email me to request access to those that are not), and I would like to point to Nick Charter's brief article "The computational society," passing on his initial and final comments. I suggest you read through his descriptions of what he thinks are four promising lines of work.

How do individual human minds create languages, legal systems, scientific theories, and technologies? From a cognitive science viewpoint, such collective phenomena may be considered a type of distributed computation in which human minds together solve computational problems beyond any individual. This viewpoint may also shift our perspective on individual minds.

To make the computational society more than a metaphor, we need conceptual tools and methods to understand social phenomena in information-processing terms. Fortunately, several different, yet complementary, approaches have emerged in recent years. Here I highlight four promising lines of work: (i) social interaction as computation, (ii) the computational Leviathan, (iii) collective self-correction and rationality, and (iv) computation through spontaneous order.

Cognitive science may stand on the brink of a new revolution, seeing social, organizational, and cultural processes as distributed computation. If so, we will need to look afresh at the computational role of individual minds. For example, rather than seeing each developing child as a lone minilinguist or a scientist-in-the-crib, we may, following Adam Ferguson, see humans as primarily learning to contribute to collective computations beyond the understanding of individual understanding.

The non-duality industry as a panacea for the anxieties of our times?

One of MindBlog's subject threads is meditation, and some recent posts have dealt with characterizing non-dual awareness (to find these, look in the right column of this blog, under "Selected Blog Categories, and click on 'meditation.') One of the descriptions I have pointed to is given by James Low, who has training in several lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, and has been teaching the principles of Dzogchen in Europe for over 20 years. Low's website links to an array of audio and video (YouTube and Vimeo) presentations he has done. One of the participants in a recent discussion at my house urged me to check out YouTube snippets recorded by Rupert Spiro, also British, whose YouTube videos and personal wesite (The Essence of Non-Duality) offer his teachings. 

After finding the YouTube outlets for these two meditation gurus, I googled 'non duality websites' and was rewarded with an array of rabbit holes to jump into...further teachers, and a "Nonduality Institute" that engages scientific studies of non-dual awareness. 

Perhaps an increasing number of people who engage techniques for facilitating non-dual awareness find themselves seeing and experiencing the "I" or self that feels threatened by our anxious times from a more useful perspective - an inclusive expanded awareness that includes the reporting "I" or self as just one of its many contents that include passing thoughts, perceptions, actions, and feelings.  A calm can be found in this expanded awareness that permits a  dis-association of the experienced breathing visceral center of gravity of our animal body from the emotional and linguistic veneer of politics and conflict. This does not remove the necessity of facing various societal dysfunctions, but offers the prospect of doing so without debilitating the organic physiological core from which everything we experience rises. 

The Huberman Lab Cornucopia

A friend mentioned enjoying a podcast on meditation from hubermanlab.com, so I listened to it, and decided to look a bit further into who Andrew Huberman is and what he does. Regarding his "How and Why to Meditate" podcast, I think his pedagogy is good. He does some very effective chunking of just a few core ideas and repeats them over and over again. Starting about a year ago he began to generate - completely separate from his lab research as an associate professor in the Standford University Medical School Neurobiology department - podcasts, interviews, and writing (see The Neural Network Newsletter). at an amazing rate, a veritable orgy of self-optimization nuggets ideally suited for his age cohort of 40- to 50-somethings. He has a rapid, logorrheic and rambling speaking style that, at least to me, detracts from the effectiveness of his presentations. I think MindBlog readers might enjoy clicking some of the above links and grazing through his material. Before his social media with thousands of followers persona burst on the scene, his publication list shows him puttering along the conventional academic research route, with his laboratory generating 1-4 papers a year on brain plasticity and repair, split roughly equally between laboratory research and commentary/review articles.