Currently, most concrete policy proposals for police change are falling far short of what people seem to wish to see; conversely, some of the more popular slogans don’t seem well matched with concrete agendas. I decided to try my own hand at forming a reasonable policy agenda that would match the force of slogans such as...
Pop wisdom says that chaos theory proves that these high-dimensional complex systems -- such as the weather, the economy, army ants, and, of course, stock prices -- are intrinsically no-way-around-it-unpredictable. So ironclad is the assumption, that in common perception any design for predicting the outcome of a complex system...
Eight studies reveal a (possibly universal) bias in human imagination
Triangulation by near-opposites, to locate concepts. Consider, “good Sith”, “hypersexual asexual” or “nonhuman person”. This is a linguistic hack that is one of the fastest ways I know of bootstrapping high precision terms, because it’s entirely dependent on details of concepts that people who think in blobs like...
Technology can realize greatly intensified forms of continuous democratic participation, but such applications must be openly developed and publicly owned.
The long read: In search of a half-remembered passage among the French writer’s voluminous work, I turned to AI to help me find it. The results were instructive – just not about Proust
RNA secondary structure folding algorithms predict the existence of connected networks of RNA sequences with identical structure. On such networks, evolving populations split into subpopulations, which diffuse independently in sequence space. This demands a distinction between two mutation thresholds: one at which genotypic...
Mesoscopic organization in soft, hard, and biological matter is examined in the context of our present understanding of the principles responsible for emergent organized behavior (crystallinity, ferromagnetism, superconductivity, etc.) at long wavelengths in very large aggregations of particles. Particular attention is paid to...
Computational mechanics defines pattern and structure with the goal of detecting and quantifying the organization of complex systems. The field developed from methods introduced in the 1970s and early 80s to (i) identify strange attractors as the mechanisms that drive weak fluid turbulence via the reconstruction of attractor...
Last year in Get the Lead Out of Turmeric! I reported that adulteration of turmeric was a major source of lead exposure among residents of rural Bangladesh. Well there is good news: the lead is gone! Wudan Yan at UnDark reports the remarkable story of academic research quickly being translated into political action that improves...
One morning in 1946 in Los Angeles, Stan Ulam, a newly appointed professor at the University of Southern California, awoke to find himself unable to speak. A few hours later he underwent an emergency operation. His skull was sawed open and his brain tissue sprayed with newly discovered antibiotics. The diagnosis----encephalitis,...
There’s a narrative I find kind of troubling, but that unfortunately seems to be growing more common in science. The core idea is that the mere existence of perverse incentives is a valid and…
Discussions of metascience often focus heavily on process. Identifying better granting strategies, better incentives, better values, better hiring practices and so on. The qualities of individuals and the actual details of human knowledge are often treated as a black box. It's a curious focus, because process only takes you so...
I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.
The American people deserve a choice. They deserve a candidate who will reject the failed policies of the past and embrace the failed policies of the future. It is my honor to announce I am throwing my hat into both the Democratic and Republican primaries (to double my chances), with the following platform...
What do ZIRP, the AI panic, and the meaning crisis have in common?
As a banana who lives among humans, I am naturally interested in humans, and in the social sciences they use to study themselves. This essay is my current response to the Thiel question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” And my answer is that surveys are bullshit.
For according to that which is present to them doth thought increase in men.
Actually-existing and near-future AIs are net harmful—never mind their longer-term risks. We should shut them down, not pussyfoot around hoping they can somehow be made safe.
A 9-fold enneagram of political groups embedded in a 12-fold symbolic icosahedron in virtual reality
In 1987, there was a trend amongst orcas - they started wearing salmon as hats! Read this to uncover all the details of this phenomenon!
Back in 2011, the field of psychology went into crisis. Some of the most famous and widely-cited experimental results could not be replicated by others. These were findings published in the field’s most prestigious academic journals, and going back for decades. Since then, more and more scientific fields have turned out to...
Show My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin, Ep Frank Lantz, founding chair, NYU Game Center. - 28 Aug 2023
I was recently asked to speak briefly before a private screening of the movie "Oppenheimer". The audience contained many people who work on AI, and the organizer asked me to speak because I have worked both on AI and also at Los Alamos National Laboratory (in 1997 and 1998). Although my work at Los Alamos was unrelated to...
Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work.
