Ken Jennings, on his match with IBM’s Watson supercomputer: Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma […]
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Quote: On Academic Bravery
From an interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky (the world’s leading paranoid on the dangers of AI): Richard Hamming used to go around annoying his colleagues at Bell Labs by asking them what were the important problems in their field, and then, after they answered, he would […]
Quote: Nethack
A friend of mine on difficult video games and accomplishment: Have you heard of the game NetHack? It’s been in continuous development for the last 20 years or so. It’s all text-based graphics, very spartan in that sense, but those […]
Tylenol helps with emotional pain, too
One of the most interesting things we’re learning about pain is that both physical and emotional pain use the same parts of the brain. If someone feels the sting of rejection, most of the same circuits activate as if they’d […]
Quote of the week: on distractions
From the New York Time’s Why Writers Belong Behind Bars: It’s wonderful that writers can access medieval manuscripts, Swahili dictionaries and collections of 19th-century daguerreotypes at any moment. But the downside is that it’s almost impossible to finish a sentence […]
Pain/pleasure metaphysics: a request
Lately I’ve been looking into causal connections between brain states and pain/pleasure. I’m finding plenty of material on specifics such as nociceptors, gate circuits, correlative fMRI studies, and so forth, but there doesn’t appear to be a lot of research, […]
Quote: the most important idea in neuroscience?
Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You could go from love to hate, but you cannot at the same time, toward the same object, the same person, want […]
SS2010 Highlights: Day 1
SS2010 Highlights: Day 1: The Future of Human Evolution Michael Vassar: The Darwinian Method A solid talk about the scientific method and rationality. People can be rational without being scientific; good organizational structures can protect against bias (but may be […]
SS2010
I’ll be at the Singularity Summit this weekend in San Francisco. Look for M. Edward Johnson. I’ll also have rocking sideburns.
Neuro musings, part 1: neurobiology, psychology, and the missing link(s)
I’m flying out to Salt Lake City tomorrow for a month of thinking about neuroscience; I process ideas by writing, so I’m kicking off an open-ended series of pieces dealing with the stuff I’m thinking about. Part 1: Neurobiology, psychology, […]