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thosvarley.bsky.social
Dual PhD: Complex Systems & Computational Neuroscience - Postdoc at UVM in the Vermont Complex Systems Institute. Information theory, synergy, and emergence. Connoisseur of collapse phenomena
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Posts 15 Comments 35

Anyone claiming to be baffled by the increase in disability following COVID is either deliberately trying to obfuscate the reality of what's happening...or a moron.

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Very happy to have been allowed to make a contribution to this really neat paper. Congratulations to Maria Grazia Puxeddu and @popeme.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s42...

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

The big problem with this place is that it was a refugee boat from Twitter for people who thought that Twitter (and their Tweets in particular) were Very Serious Business...and frankly, those people are kind of lame?

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

I feel like every discussion around Gen AI is either boosters wildly claiming that AI will bring about a science-fiction future by next week, or Left-ish hipsters sneering "lol, you're so stupid to be impressed by a predictive." Both of which seem like very silly takes, imo.

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

New blog post. In 2025, the American right is basically 4chan circa 2014, while the American left has become Tumblr from the same era. What a piece of Internet history can tell us about our current political hellscape. synergies.substack.com/p/the-4chan-...

submitted 118 days ago • 3 comments

Question: there's been a lot of discussion on rising rates of ADHD. The two camps seem to be: "it's just better diagnostics" vs. "environmental exposures", but I wonder if a third option might be: modernity increasingly demands super-human abilities to focus and avoid ubiquitous distraction.

submitted 16 days ago • 2 comments

Has anyone set up something like an, idk, Zoom support group for scientists who feel destabilized or traumatized by everything that's been happening? Just a place to talk, vent, maybe grieve? If there is no such thing...would people like one?

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

Any other ECRs really struggling with imagining a future in academia right now? Its always been a brutal, exploitive system that asks too much of us...but now, with everything falling apart, I'm finding it *really* hard to imagine a positive future if I commit to saying in it for the long haul.

submitted 21 days ago • 1 comment

A new study shows that during early maturation, the human brain self-organizes into a unified system capable of supporting synergistic processing and cognitive functions. @antontokariev.bsky.social; @thosvarley.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s42...

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

🚨New paper🚨 Here, we show that the peri-natal period is associated with a global transition of brain activity from a redundancy dominated framework to a synergy-dominated one. 1/N www.nature.com/articles/s42...

submitted 26 days ago • 1 comment

The phenomenon of right wing weirdos converting to Catholicism and then *immediately* inventing Protestantism all over again is fascinating to me.

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

In response to the (admittedly ludicrous) AI hype, I feel like a lot of people in Academia and progressive spaces have reflexively adopted a kind of intellectual hipsterism - making a big show of how unimpressed they are with LLMs and how useless they think they are. Which is also ludicrous!

submitted 31 days ago • 1 comment

Is it too doomer-pilled to suggest that, between the COVID-19 pandemic, the insane trade wars, and accelerating climate change, that we've collectively transitioned to the downslope side of industrial modernity? It feels like things will just keep slowly getting worse and worse.

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments

This is sort of consistent with my hazy intuition that "functional specialization" hypotheses are probably too strong. I kind of feel like maybe the brain is just a giant, reverberating liquid state machine: everything is (on some level) causally integrated with everything else.

submitted 34 days ago • 3 comments

I think a lot about how much of RFK Jr's popularity stems from people who have legitimate grievances against institutions that were supposed to protect us, but instead became co-opted by capital interests. He won't *fix* any of these issues, but there's a sense in which he is our ironic punishment.

submitted 36 days ago • 1 comment