Things I read and liked in January
Language learning, longterm tunes, life expectancy, lichen lies
[1] Wai Keen Vong and collaborators trained a neural network to learn words using headcam recordings of a single baby’s life. An astonishing approach and one of the most interesting cog sci papers you’ll see this year. As Michael Nielsen says, “What a remarkable experiment”.
[2] Music and joy: “The Confucian philosopher Xunzi at the beginning of his treatise on music, both attests to the universality of music, and also argues that music is rooted in human emotion. “Music is joy,” Xunzi writes, “an unavoidable human disposition”.
[3] Now that’s what I call longterm thinking: “ORGAN2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) is a musical piece by John Cage...An organ in St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt in 2001 began a performance that is due to end in 2640. This makes it the longest running non-computerized piece currently being performed. The most recent note was played on February 5, 2024. The next note will be played on August 5, 2026.”
[4] Applying evolutionary theory to human behavior: past differences and current debates: overview of three approaches to studying the evolution of human behavior: human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and cultural evolution.
[5] Research notes from the Anthropic interpretability team: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/jan-update/index.html
[6] Asterisk Magazine: “In the early aughts, economists said it was a bad use of money to send antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV in low-income countries. Twenty years later, we can ask why they got it wrong.”
[7] Great Saloni piece: Seven things you didn't know about life expectancy.
[8] Preprint on the mechanisms underpinning psychopathology, subjective well-being, and the contents of consciousness.
[9] Stephen Clare tracks down the origin of an oft-repeated lichen “fact”: “In Entangled Life, biologist Merlin Sheldrake writes that “lichens encrust much as eight percent of the planet’s surface” (p. 80). It’s a great fact. Definitely simple and interesting. Just, sadly, not true. As one friend said, “I live on the planet’s surface and that doesn’t seem right.”
[10] Jake Seliger’s essays are a revelation. He has been to the brink of death in an agonizing struggle with cancer and is writing through it: On the meaning of life; How do you say goodbye?; How much suffering is too much?
[11] Preprint by philosopher Harvey Lederman and linguist Kyle Mahowald. “We argue that cases of novel reference provide evidence that LLMs do in fact have beliefs, desires, and intentions, and thus have a limited form of agency" !
[12] That new pop sci book on free will that looks really bad? Apparently it is in fact bad.
[13] Aria Babu asks whether a culture believing that babies are (or should be) a lot of work lowers birth rates.
[14] Bay Area bait (successful): Can You Learn Meditation from an AI?
[15] What kind of a mind do you need to have social norms?
[16] Oft-cited finding that men frequently leave their wives when they get sick has been retracted/corrected. It came entirely from an error in a single line of the analysis code.
[17] Airpods as a new platform: “The usual suspects that come up in these conversations are VR/AR, crypto, smart speakers and similar IoT devices. A new contestant that I’ve seen come up more frequently in these debates recently are Apple’s AirPods.”
[18] Techno-optimism: an Analysis, an Evaluation and a Modest Defence
[19] On AI’s “industrial phase”: “In some sense, the transformer was the last ‘major architectural advance.’ In the old days, every advance was architectural; every ‘reaction’ had to be discovered separately, and yielded whatever products it yielded, in whatever precise amounts were written down in its recipe. But we passed out of that era, around the same time we discovered the transformer.”
Great links, thank you.