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
367 posts
1,357 followers
378 following
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Something about the requirement that factors be independent gives this an effective information-like flavor, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
Given the link between synergy and colliders, do you think that the negativity reflects some notion that the factors are "colliding" on the targets?
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Not to go all AI-doomer, but I'm beginning to fear that kids born today are going to grow up in a world that verges on nightmarish.
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Maybe it's because I'm mostly connected to academics and other Science Twitter people, but I really don't see much of that second group.
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I don't think "science reform" advocates are even remotely to blame for the recent Trump EO...but I also understand why some people would be exasperated by them. Quite a few seem to have set themselves up as self-appointed, social media gatekeepers - quick to call out and talk down to others.
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This isn't a person, it's a population of people w/ a common illness.
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The vast majority of Trump voters aren't overt neo-Nazi's or Christian Nationalists. Most are basic run-of-the-mill Republicans who are into Trump. I don't think the crazies will have the same appeal or penetration with conservatives who are otherwise normie.
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I am optimistic that one day Trump will finally die of old age, and this entire movement will implode because no one has anything like the charisma or mass appeal required to sustain this level of support. I really do think it's all on him.
(Big win for the "Great Man Theory of History" btw).
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Gen AI is already disrupting education from primary school up to graduate school. Less than five years ago, the idea of synthetic videos of this quality (even if they're imperfect) was unthinkable.
It probably won't create utopia/dystopia, but it's clearly not "just autocomplete" either.
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Are AI hype-men overselling generative AI to make money? Yes, definitely. There's a ton of BS out there. But Gen. AI is already disrupting education from primary school all the way up to college. The impacts are already being felt. The reflexive "meh, it's not that effective" stance is (imo) absurd.
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I don't understand this brand of AI skepticism. Are these things perfect videos? Of course not. But less than 5 years ago, synthetic content of this quality was absolutely unthinkable. The incredible acceleration is undeniable, but people insist on being all hipster about it.
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I do some work with people who have severe dysfunction in energy and metabolism (ME/CFS), and while they're not a representative population, I have heard enough folks say "stimulants created illusory energy that pushed me outside of my envelope and then crashed" that I think this is a real concern.
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I sort of feel like the way people have started to make diagnoses into "identities" (analogous to gender or sexuality) has kind of created an inflexible framework that doesn't allow for much discussion of context.
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How many people are struggling to sit for 9 hours a day at an email job and make it through boring corporate meetings who would have no noticeable impairment at all if they were, say, a white water rafting guide or something.
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The "masking fatigue" thing worries me a bit. Obviously if it works for people then good for them, but if some underlying energetic process is dysfunction, I kind of worry that "masking fatigue" could result (in the long term) in burnout.
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I'm not sure they will. Some will, certaintly, but the USA has always been far-and-away the most generous funder of science in the world. It's not even close. There's really nowhere for the brains to drain too. Even recent attempts in Europe to recruit American scientists have been for 10-15 jobs.
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Silken windhound
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I disagree with that. Think about statistical synergy: information that "emerges" through the interaction of multiple streams and a "processor". You could say that it's just "information modification", but it's novel in that it's not reducible to either input (i.e. not storage or transfer).
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Huge thanks to Anton Tokariev (our fearless leader), Olaf Sporns, and others in NYC and Helsinki for making this paper possible. 5/5.
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I am *really* excited by this work, as it's one of the first times we've found that synergy is not only *correlated* with some cognitive state/behavior, but is actually *predictive* of future development.
Lots more to come in this vein. 4/N
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Not only that, but the degree of enrichment and mother/infant bonding the baby receives (these were all NICU babies) modulates the trajectory of the redundancy/synergy transition. It makes it smoother and more linear, while the standard-care babies began to show synergy later. 3/N
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This isn't just a fun summary statistic: the degree of synergistic information present in infant EEG recordings predicts cognitive performance almost two years later. Whatever synergy is "doing" in baby brains, seems to be related to long-term neurodevelopment. 2/N
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My guess is that this probably played some role in our modern culture war, too. For ex. I firmly believe that pretty much all modern progressive critiques of the system are essentially accurate, but that the way that activists approached trying to mainstream them was utterly doomed from the outset.
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Will it replace all human jobs soon? Probably not. Are the smug critics who can't come up with a take more sophisticated than "it's a worthless theft machine, good for nothing but cheating badly" off the mark? Obviously.
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I used ChatGPT to write a whole Nvim plugin in Lua so my text editor could interface with my music player. I have almost no experience w/ Lua, but was able to offload 90% of the work to the LLM. Sure it wasn't perfect, and clearly struggled as things got more complex, but it was still remarkable.
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I'm right there with you, although (as a neuroscientist myself) I also feel some trepidation that, if the ultimate conclusion is: "it's all just a big wibbly-wobbly ball of echos where everything is coupled to everything else" then...the project of neuroscience might simply be impossible.
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This raises some interesting data science-y questions: how can we identify where novel information is *generated* (or integrated, or computed or [your favorite buzzword here]) versus where it's just "echoing".
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I don't think it makes sense (or is even necessary) to construct some grand, psychodynamic theory of Trump's understanding of economics.
I think he just likes getting as much as possible for as little as possible.
(Which is a fairly normal impulse, at least for American businessmen)?
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Contra most other comments on this, I don't think it's that he fails to understand the idea of mutually beneficial exchange so much as I think it's that he feels strongly that if you *could have gotten the shirt for free* (by scamming, bullying, etc), then you're a sucker.
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Yeah recent elections have shown pretty clearly that educational attainment (of any sort) is associated with voting for Democrat.
But imo, most of the issues I'm discussing really are things that go back to the Clinton, or more recently, Obama years. Current trends are too recent.
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If Democrats 10, 20, 30 years ago had actually fought to reinforce the social safety nets and build a better world for Americans, we wouldn't be here.
But instead they sat with their thumbs up their asses and let Capital hollow out our country and ultimately deliver us into the maw of MAGA.
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Now the GOP is using the legitimate feelings of anger of Americans who feel screwed by exorbitant student loan debts, administrative overgrowth, and low return on high investments to push their own (insane) anti-intellectual program.
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I think about this too w.r.t. to higher education in the US. A lot of people have been crying out for years that the neoliberalization of higher ed was a problem, but all the people with the power to push back (tenured profs) were happy to sit back and enjoy their "winnings"...
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I think so. Why not say "well, I'm not an immunologist, but these are the people who I trust and they say vaccines are okay."
Seems like a little epistemic humility would do us all a world of good.