When I was 18, I was convinced that evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics were wrong. By chance I picked off The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker and thought I have found what I needed - strong arguments to disprove. Pinker convinced me that not only was I wrong but that these are some of the most incredible and interesting sciences in existence. Does anyone else have books or stories like this? Something that changed your entire worldview in one sweep?

@tekbog Data mining in the data warehouse

@NTFabiano The brain is massively modular in the sense of evolutionary functions. Specific ancestral problems had specific evolved solutions that activate given evolved cues for those problems.

@Peter96355998 @Melissa_WongMT @TheChiefNerd @DOGE If his numbers are correct, he should make the bet. You only get to iterations by starting. But he's been in this game long, iteratively - and that's why it's less than 1% of his wealth.

RT @timothycbates: NIce paper from @JoHenrich & others on Zero-sum culture suppressing effort. Systems that suppress effort: 1. Promote con…

@paulg @elonmusk Is the worry here that the system is too fragile, and removing parts would be dangerous - or that the system is too powerful, and touching it would be dangerous?

@CherryC02466949 My girlfriend too 🥰

@Iotadeca What was the post that was removed? I agree I think he often goes too far. His own philosophy is that if you don't have to walk back at least 10% of your actions then you are not moving fast enough (which is not an excuse from critique, which is necessary for better decisions)

How much time have you spent thinking about what the world is like from the view of a neural net?

A la Geoffrey Miller, we speak in order to expose the quality of our minds to be judged by potential mates. Every time we write text, we are projecting our cognitive operations, to display a large set of well functioning modules. We can call the sum of those displays "intelligence" The way I view it is that large language models, by taking in petabytes of data from the internet, have created statistical representations of the inputs & outputs of various cognitive modules - and have learned to replicate them. But as people love to point out, LLMs have not replicated the mechanisms themselves, only their projections. I think this is beside the point - it has replicated de-facto models of the mechanisms, and it works surprisingly well! The ultimate function is fulfilled to some degree - even if the proximate implementation is way different.

@EvidenceBaseShi @CartoonsHateHer Not everyone lives in the US. Your wages are high and taxes are low

@CartoonsHateHer My centrist theory is that nutcases on either side feel comfortable pushing their views and attempting overreach when the zeitgeist leans more towards them. Expecting more blatant lunacy from the right in the next few years

@morallawwithin 9

@Lucidly_Elias And traps? I wonder if that's going too far

@StefanFSchubert @timothycbates Mid in sense of "healthy range" I presume

But of course the trick is to say something everyone agrees with but everyone thinks others disagree

@OrwellMil87668 @tenobrus @FeralPHunter I always thought of it this way - you want the creative freedom of an artist, or a sportsman, achieved via disciplined practice