An open source article from the latest PNAS from Schut et al.: Significance   As AI systems become more capable, they may internally represent concepts outside the sphere of human knowledge. This work gives an end-to-end example of unearthing machine-unique knowledge in the domain of chess. We obtain machine-unique knowledge from an AI system (AlphaZero) by a method that finds novel yet teachable concepts and show that it can be transferred to human experts (grandmasters). In particular, the new knowledge is learned from internal mathematical representations without a priori knowing what ..read more

 Fascinating open source research reported by Gervais et al. (Open source): Significance   Religion is a cross-cultural human universal, and religions may have been instrumental in the cultural evolution of widespread cooperation and prosociality. Nonetheless, religiosity has rapidly declined in some parts of the world over just a handful of decades. We tested whether long-standing religious influence intuitively lingers, even in overtly secular and nonreligious societies. Using a classic experimental philosophy task, we found that even atheists in nonreligious societies show evidenc ..read more

This post on an exchange with DeepSeek R1 is a followup on my previous post describing the Chat GPT 4o response to some of my idea fragments - further convincing me that current LLMs'  power to integrate and expand on concepts expressed in language are superior to mine.    I presented exactly the same prompt to DeepSeek R1 that I had given to ChatGPT 4o: and the results astound me: prompt:    I’m curious to see how you might respond to reading the following notes on testing different topic ideas to write about and develop.  The issue is not one of whether the idea ..read more

Interesting open source article describing experiments by Leshin et al.  (Our current MAGA overlords would like to ban such perspectives.) Their abstract:  Adults tend to view men (more so than women) as default people, with numerous real-world consequences for gender equity. In the United States, the tendency to center men in concepts of people develops across middle childhood, yet the specific mechanisms that contribute to it remain unknown. Here, we investigate one subtle but potentially powerful social mechanism: the category labels that parents use to describe boys/men and girls ..read more

I pass on another interaction with ChatGPT 4o that has amazed me, Below  is my prompt, followed by its response. (Anthropic Claude.ai, Perplexity, and Gemini responses to the same prompt were also impressive, but didn't have the same depth and quality.)  Addendum to above paragraph: .... But then, I thought to try DeepSeek V3 and obtained a poetic and nuanced result equivalent to ChatGPT 4o.  I paste it in below the Chat GPT 4o result. The prompt:: Please act as a author who integrates and organizes, and then further crafts and elaborates on, the ideas in the following clips of ..read more

Here is the abstract and part of the introduction (giving examples of system breakdowns) of a fascinating and approachable analysis by Moran et al.  Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me.  Abstract Sociotechnical systems, where technological and human elements interact in a goal-oriented manner, provide important functional support to our societies. Here, we draw attention to the underappreciated concept of timeliness—i.e., system elements being available at the right place at the right time—that has been ubiquitously and integrally adopted as a quality standard i ..read more

In the post just before this one, I described a co-authorship with Chat GPT-4o that majorly diminished my sense of  agency or 'psychological ownership' with respect to the product generated.  So stumbling upon Erik Hermann's  brief article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences was especially timely The link gives partial contents  and motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the entire article from me. Here is the abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) reshapes and challenges psychological ownership of created content. This article examines how GenAI disrupts original ..read more

My following exchange with Chat GPT 4o - in which it responds to some of my idea fragments - convinces me that AI's current power to integrate and expand on concepts expressed in language (see Ezra Klein/Ben Buchanan discussion),  is superior to mine.    Here is the exchange: prompt:    I’m curious to see how you might respond to reading the following notes on testing different topic ideas to write about and develop.  The issue is not one of whether the ideas are novel, but whether I might devise, with your help,  a different permutation, perspective, or take ..read more

Yet another clip from my personal journal... While going through items selected from my multiple input streams for more careful attention I frequently feel a growing sense of emptiness. Finally this makes me stop to re-discover, yet again, that I have begun  slowly dialing up impatience and speed, driven by the unnecessary felt obligation to restrict attention only to potential shinny objects that I might show to others, to maintain a façade of being performative, The antidote is to let go of this, and let it be OK to just enjoy things for their own sake, letting happen the moments of "I ..read more

A brief review by Rachel Nuwer in the Scientific American points to an article by Zheng and Meister with the title of this post (motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me).   I pass on an initial clip from Nuwer's review and then the abstract of the Zheng and Meister paper:  PEOPLE OFTEN FEEL that their inner thoughts and feelings are much richer than what they are capable of expressing in real time. Entrepreneur Elon Musk is so bothered by what he calls this “bandwidth problem,” in fact, that one of his long-term goals is to create an interface that lets the human br ..read more