Mechanistic Mind
Cognitive science asks: what are the mechanisms that make up a mind? This is a blog about cognitive science, linguistics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and life. Also sometimes about effective altruism and the wider world. Sometimes told through the lens of game design, and I hope you find these posts entertaining as well as thought-provoking.
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Numbers without a Zero — Representation in the Brain
There is a mystery at the heart of computational neuroscience. It concerns the nature of representation and raises questions from abstract algebra. This post is about the brain, but it has implications for how we think about ML. You probably know that “neural networks” originally took inspiration from biological networks of actual wet, squishy neurons,…
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Diversity of Mechanism in the 👁️👁️
A theme of this blog is that intelligent behavior of humans, animals, and AI systems is made up of mechanisms that we can understand individually. It’s commonly understood that the mechanisms of artificial intelligence mirror the functionality that we find in biological behavioral systems like the brain, but I find that computer scientists underestimate the…
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Levels of Analysis in Machine Learning
There’s a concept from cognitive neuroscience of multiple levels of analysis of intelligence. I think this is something that ought to be better known in the world of machine learning, because I find it very helpful for organizing my thoughts.
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Dvorak Keyboard, my Experience
I’ve used Dvorak for a long time and I’m happy with it. I don’t recommend switching unless you experience pain from typing, or you really want to optimize your typing skill for some reason. If you do switch, switch to Colemak, which is like Dvorak but more similar to Qwerty and easier to learn. This…
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⭐ Review: Children of Time and the abstract purpose of grammar
The book Children of Time features a race of spiders that have developed their own language. What is their language like? How is it structured? And what’s the deal with spider webs?
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Hyperbolic Discounting and Pascal’s Mugging
Google tells you that it is “a psychological bias where people to prioritize immediate rewards and satisfaction over future rewards”. In fact, this is only half right. Hyperbolic discounting also causes people to overvalue distant rewards in addition to overvaluing near-term rewards!
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⭐ Creating Magic the Gathering cards with generative AI
Can generative AI can be used to create novel Magic the Gathering cards? Yes! This is both an article about designing for a card game and about how to work with generative AI for a project like this.
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Contra Alexander on the Bitter Lesson and IQ
Scott Alexander argues in favor of treating intelligence as a coherent and somewhat monolithic concept. This is a post about the perils of measurement. I argue that intelligence is multifaceted and it’s a mistake to think of it as a linear scale.
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Maximizing Goals and Satisfaction Goals
Like most people, I have goals that pull me in multiple directions. I have life goals, professional goals, and goals relating to other people. I use the GTD system, which encourages me to write down a list of all the projects that I’m working on. When I write that list down, it feels overwhelming! There…
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AI Task List Fulfillment
I start most of my mornings by writing out a to-do list for the day. I’ve noticed that generative AI has been getting really good, and it made me wonder how much of my list could be done for me automatically. I’m imagining I could write down my tasks and then AI could just do…
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Remember What We Talked About? Augmenting Language Models with Memory
In my last post, I talked about how Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are going to get better because they will incorporate a sense of reward seeking. Now I want to talk about how they’re going to improve by incorporating better memory for events. This will allow tools like ChatGPT to remember previous conversations.…
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Turbocharge Your MLM Business with an LLM
Writing about one Large Language Models (LLMs), one thing I get asked is “What’s the relationship between LLMs and MLMs? Are these large language models also Multi-Level Marketing schemes?” So today I want to talk about the use of LLMs to run MLMs. LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are revolutionizing industries, including Multi-Level Marketing (MLM). Here,…
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