Yohan J John

Here's the latest installment in my series on neuroscience and the hyperreal. I look at the potential dangers of "walled garden thinking", and why extensible modeling is important. open.substack.com/pub/yohanjoh... #neuroscience

"By sheer numbers, this is one of the largest-ever exercises of disenfranchisement in the history of the world." But the protest movement gives me hope.

I've probably shared this before but it bears repeating. "... although the phenomenon described by the Dunning-Kruger hypothesis may be to some degree plausible for some skills, the magnitude of the effect may be much smaller than reported previously." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

as much as I understand the cynical disappointment of prize winning writers using AI, I really don't like these articles that are basically Pangram puff pieces. pointing to 'internal research' and Pangram's own statements is like asking L'Oréal why its cosmetics are superior to competitors

"But this is a perverted idea of progress. What good is a proof of the Riemann conjecture if there is no one who understands it?" And in what sense is it a proof in the first place?

The brain's "who's in charge?" depends on the dynamics of the moment, not on a fixed org chart. #neurosience

Eugenist plutocrats are hoovering up decades of bio & patient data. What could possibly go wrong?

uh oh "We show that the formalised Lean proof does not correspond to the NL proof of blow-up of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations."

Holy shit.

“The fact that it was a demonstration image, for publication, should put to rest claims that photo 51 held the magic data unknown, unseen, undreamed-of before,” Comfort says.

Young people are falling out of love with technology. They want it and need it, sure, but they also hate it, feel enslaved by it and, unlike any other generation, long for the past, writes Jemima Kelly. Read @jemima.bsky.social in today's FT Edit 👉 ft.trib.al/miFZSMp

One of my favorite physics/biology facts. Life is 'where the light gets in'.

Just recently I was thinking that when the dust settles and the histories get written, Subjective Bayesian epistemology will shoulder some of the blame. Only half joking. 😛

Ricoeur on reading, very relevant for LLMs that act via the interface of language: "reading ... is at its best a struggle between two strategies, the _strategy of seduction_ pursued by the author in the guise of a more or less trustworthy narrator ... , and the _strategy of suspicion_ pursued ...

i worry that men think being A Good Guy is dramatically and heroically intervening on behalf of an endangered woman and then being publicly rewarded on a grand scale when actually being A Good Guy is just usually saying, “hey man that’s not funny” or “wow that’s fucked up” and there is no reward

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

This looks pretty cool.

Women trying to succeed in Silicon Valley AI and effective altruist spaces are reporting feeling serious social pressure to attend sex parties - where people have reported being sexually assaulted, like below. Events like Aella’s “Slutcon,” which is happening again this weekend.

Wild things are probably happening at a University Near You. fnl.mit.edu/how-we-learn...

A forgotten machine future. What an album.

"... cingulate theta power was equally and non-specifically predictive of outcome with either an antidepressant or placebo." Perhaps one day there will be biomarkers for susceptibility (receptivity?) to different types of placebo. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"We found strong evidence that pupil diameters were larger when the depth illusion was that of a hole (funnel) than of a bump (cone)." This sort of finding aligns nicely with an 'embodied perception' framing*. __ * sans the irrelevant anti-representation verbiage, of course. :P

This performance by Marisa Anderson is pretty special. Cosmic rumblings from they electric guitar. Shall have to check out the album, "The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music". youtu.be/rix14jBM03I?...

Recent news items about AI remind me of "kayfabe"... which led here. "The territory, real AI research with genuine but limited capabilities, has been almost entirely obscured by the map, a hyperreal landscape of predictions, narratives, and branded futures." www.stephendiehl.com/posts/ai_kay...

"With AI music, however, it’s this constant hustle, a never-ending “can you tell this was made by a machine?” shell game. By design, it has no character or animating ethos, except for subterfuge." This point by @stevenhyden.bsky.social really nails it. stevenhyden.substack.com/p/im-obligat...

Points for including vesicles in the lyrics? 😂 youtu.be/J6ILiEuUvM0?...

RIP Dolly Parton ❤️ Here's a lovely Dolly story: We worked together on "Transamerica." She told me that the bible passage that used to puzzle her the most was, "the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men." She said, "How the heck do you sin against the Holy Ghost, and-

Street art in her honor from SE Seattle

Woah.

Every few weeks I think about how there are plenty of people alive today who were too old to be in the target audience of 1950s rock and roll.