ishmajl.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Just wow. Every academic process that supposedly ensures ethical, scientific and legal standards seems to have failed.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Max Taylor-Davies will present our new paper at the Evostar conference on Thursday: Emergent Kin Selection of Altruistic Feeding via Non-Episodic Neuroevolution arxiv.org/abs/2411.10536 A joint work with @hamongautier.bsky.social , Timothé Boulet and myself. A quick summary below:

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

I'm thrilled that a version of 'Conscious Artificial Intelligence and Biological Naturalism' has just been accepted as a target article in Behavioural & Brain Sciences 😀 An open-call for commentaries is coming soon www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

submitted 12 days ago • 4 comments

By evaluating models via pass@k, where success requires just one correct solution among k attempts, they uncover that RL-trained models excel at low k (e.g., pass@1) but are consistently outperformed by base models at high k (e.g., pass@256)

submitted 13 days ago • 3 comments

1/2 Truffle gorillas in Noubalé-Ndoki The gorillas of the Goualougo Triangle (Congo) do not scratch the ground for insects or earthworms (as previously thought), they actually search for truffles, and this seems to have a cultural component. (paper) link.springer.com/article/10.1...

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

I try to avoid reading things about LLMs and AI unless I know that they are going to be good. This paper by @fintanmallory.com "Large Language models are stochastic measuring devices" is going to be good philpapers.org/archive/MALL...

submitted 18 days ago • 5 comments

Proud to announce our primer on "Ten principles for reliable, efficient, and adaptable coding in psychology and cognitive neuroscience" www.nature.com/articles/s44... This primer is for beginners to get started, advanced programmers to improve, and PIs. #psychology #psychsci #cogsci #neuroskyence

submitted 18 days ago • 2 comments

The Roads Both Taken xkcd.com/3076

submitted 18 days ago • 72 comments

How did life emerge in our biosphere? An important part of our understanding of this might be grounded in the physics of phase transitions and the maths of bifurcation theory. Here's our review paper with @manlius.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08492

submitted 19 days ago • 1 comment

New chapter out by me where I argue that people who claim to collaborate with LLMs are mistaken about the role of the bots, and that they're weak ass tools rather than serving the role of an actual collaborator academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

submitted 25 days ago • 2 comments

I'm looking for a postdoc to work on justice-oriented audit frameworks. Closing date April 30, 2025. pls share widely

submitted 31 days ago • 1 comment

Air pollution has dropped significantly in #Paris in the last 15 years as a result of a deliberate strategy. Mayor @annehidalgo.bsky.social’s leadership has traded car space for green space, safe bike space, kid space.. and traded pollution for people. Good trade.

submitted 24 days ago • 43 comments

Nature have picked up our survey. We think it's the largest survey of AI researchers ever conducted. Here's a quick thread on some of the headlines @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

submitted 23 days ago • 5 comments

New paper Mutual benefits of social learning and algorithmic mediation for cumulative culture In this pure modeling paper, we attempt to explore how recommendation algorithms might alter the dynamics of social learning and cumulative cultural evolution. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

submitted 25 days ago • 3 comments

Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic arxiv.org/abs/2503.19672 - very excited to have this article out! 😊 With Henry Potter and George Ellis.

submitted 39 days ago • 14 comments

we disagree. the idea of AI systems as a "full moral agent worth of cognition" not only rests on faulty understanding of cognition, such line of argument only benefits AI corps/developers allowing them to evade accountability for systems they choose to build/deploy papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

submitted 25 days ago • 1 comment

“Errors” “falsehoods” etc. But “lies” suggests intention and (even tho it is impossible to get rid of this altogether) we really should avoid ascribing “knowledge,” “intention” or any other anthropomorphized “mental” states to LLMs.

submitted 26 days ago • 2 comments

What is life? How can we understand it? Is thermodynamics the key? A new, graph-theoretic formal proposal by @sfiscience.bsky.social Pedro Márquez-Zacarías and co-workers, suggests how self-organized living processes emerge out of more basic components arxiv.org/abs/2503.03950

submitted 31 days ago • 1 comment

Discussions around AI ethics and sustainability tend to happen in different circles, with different people and from different perspectives... but what if we had these important conversations together? 🤝

submitted 31 days ago • 1 comment

Are you interested in enhancing robots' autonomous navigation?🤖🧭 By learning and exploiting hippocampal-like motivational cognitive maps, robots can find the location of diverse rewards and orchestrate their behavior according to their internal states. oscarguerrerorosado.github.io/Post-MoHA.html

submitted 35 days ago • 1 comment

ICYMI: Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

"It’s not that OpenAI picked something cute and accidentally the co-founder of that studio hates. OAI picked Ghibli because Miyazaki hates their approach It is display of power: You, as artist, animator, illustrator, writer are powerless. We will take what we want & do what we want. Because we can"

submitted 36 days ago • 6 comments

Training with more data = better LLMs, right? 🚨 False! Scaling language models by adding more pre-training data can decrease your performance after post-training! Introducing "catastrophic overtraining." 🥁🧵👇 arxiv.org/abs/2503.19206 1/10

submitted 38 days ago • 1 comment

Working at the intersection of social choice and learning algorithms? Check out the 2nd Workshop on Social Choice and Learning Algorithms (SCaLA) at @ijcai.bsky.social this summer. Submission deadline: May 9th. I attended last year at AAMAS and loved it! 👍 sites.google.com/corp/view/sc...

submitted 38 days ago • 0 comments

I miss her so much, but the work is on the rest of us now. @ursulakleguin.com at the 2014 National Book Awards. "I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now." www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9N...

submitted 40 days ago • 27 comments

getting this paper published was a bit painful but I am proud of it: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... We use deep RL to find mechanisms that help (real) people sustain the commons. Well done to Raphael Koster and Miruna Pislar (not on BlueSky). non-paywalled version on arxiv.

submitted 41 days ago • 1 comment

"Only we – adult humans – see the world suffused with causality...The scientific story of how our causal minds develop features another superpower: human sociality. It’s our unique sensitivity to other people that lets us acquire our special causal understanding." - @marielgoddu.bsky.social

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

How can we link archaeological artifacts to evolutionary processes? In our last paper, we show how navigating the epistemological issues and pitfalls of phylogenetic reconstruction reveals universal principles of evolution—variation, transmission, and selection. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

submitted 45 days ago • 1 comment

What are the bounds to morphological complexity? Would plants on another planet look different from those here? Probably not due to fundamental evolutionary constraints. Check this @sciam.bsky.social paper by the great Karl Niklas jstor.org/stable/24975...

submitted 45 days ago • 1 comment

Why are AI enthusiasts behaving like professional magicians who do not understand their own tricks? What's wrong with the dominant cognitive model of the mind? Neuroscientist Paul Cisek shares his thoughts with me here: open.substack.com/pub/buildcog...

submitted 45 days ago • 6 comments

What are the implications of considering #TippingPoints in #restoration strategies? Thanks to the organizers of the #RamonMargalefColloquia & @ricardsole.bsky.social for the opportunity to give this lecture! Some topics were: #ClimateChange #WarningSignals #DynamicalGhosts #Antrhopocene

submitted 45 days ago • 0 comments

Ozymandias

submitted 47 days ago • 697 comments

If you are a researcher who is interested in neural and/or mental representations, consider responding. And you'll be helping out an undergraduate student too! (I helped a little with drafting the questions for the survey.)

submitted 46 days ago • 0 comments

🚨 New paper 🚨 Out in @commspsychol.bsky.social: "Manipulating attention facilitates cooperation" with Claire Lugrin and @ccruff.bsky.social We use gaze data and display manipulations in one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma games and find that these manipulations can drive choices through attention 👇

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments

First evidence of narwhal play They have been recorded for the first time using their tusks to stun their prey, as well as to manipulate them for no other purpose than play. (paper) www.frontiersin.org/journals/mar... (blog) studyfinds.org/video-narwha... (videos) figshare.com/s/b6171dd102...

submitted 50 days ago • 0 comments

In chaotic systems, the smallest fluctuations get amplified. As scientist Edward Lorenz put it in the 1960s and 70s, even a seagull flapping its wings might eventually make a big difference to the weather. Here's how scientists came to understand what chaos is, and how to wrangle it: 🧵

submitted 50 days ago • 1 comment

This piece is very much worth reading ⬇️

submitted 50 days ago • 2 comments

the most powerful & wealthiest corporations whose business models relies on theft, rights infringements, environmental destruction, aggressive data collection & surveillance say that the regulatory guardrails developed to tame them are a “step in the wrong direction” www.politico.eu/article/goog...

submitted 51 days ago • 10 comments

Like a slime mold www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-3

submitted 52 days ago • 2 comments

𝗜𝘀 𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗮 𝗱𝗶𝗿𝘁𝘆 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗯𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆? Definitely some thought provoking papers in this collection. It's definitely alive and well in conceptual neuroscience at least! link.springer.com/collections/...

submitted 52 days ago • 2 comments

Please repost @sjgreenwood.bsky.social and I just launched a new personalized feed (please pin) that we hope will become a "must use" for #academicsky. The feed shows posts about papers filtered by your follower network. It's become my default Bluesky experience bsky.app/profile/pape...

submitted 54 days ago • 24 comments

Is teleology really obsolete? This special issue explores how goal-directedness remains crucial in biology, mind, and society—despite its exile from analytic philosophy. link.springer.com/article/10.1... #Philosophy #Teleology

submitted 54 days ago • 0 comments

🚨🚨We are pleased to announce that the talk given by @ricardsole.bsky.social at the IAS Seminar is now available to view on our YouTube channel. Please click on the link below to access the video Ricard Solé - Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems youtube.com/watch?v=Hv-y...

submitted 53 days ago • 0 comments

A beaver dam in British Columbia shows its ability to hold back sediment pollution during heavy rainfall, sediment damages freshwater habitat. Two pairs of beavers are making a new wild home in Studland #UK & their unrestricted www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... #nature #climatecrisis

submitted 54 days ago • 12 comments

Theta dynamics in human hippocampus during real and imagined walking are similar! Beautiful work from the Suthana lab.

submitted 54 days ago • 1 comment

Misinterpreting Cited Work "The decline in citation fidelity among senior researchers...[may indicate they] rely more on their established reputations or heuristics, potentially leading to less detailed engagement with individual citations." Preprint: doi.org/10.48550/arX... #AcademicSky 🧪

submitted 58 days ago • 3 comments

Metaphysics Question: How do you feel about Downward Causation?

submitted 58 days ago • 4 comments