Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2685 )

• The Age of De-Skilling

  I want to pass on some selected clips from a marvelous articles by Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Atlantic titled "The Age of De-Skilling - Will AI stretch our... Read more

  Posted on 27 October 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is the Current AI Frenzy a Bubble Certain to Crash? - a Check in with...

  I am a disagreeable bot. Can you get me to agree with you?The billions of dollars in debt being taken on by OpenAI , Anthropic, and other AI companies is... Read more

  Posted on 22 October 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Illusion of Judgment in LLMs

  An important open source article from Loru et al:SignificanceLarge Language Models (LLMs) are used in evaluative tasks across domains. Read more

  Posted on 21 October 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The 2025 Ig Nobel Prizewinners in Full

  A clip from the Chris Simms Nature Magazine articleLITERATUREThe late physician William Bean, for persistently recording and analysing the rate of growth of... Read more

  Posted on 10 October 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Large-scale Cortical Functional Networks Are Organized in Structured Cycles

  Interesting work from Mats et al. (open source) in Nature Neuroscience. It has some interesting graphics. Their abstract:The brain seamlessly performs a... Read more

  Posted on 08 October 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Depolarization is Hard: Evaluating Attempts to Decrease Partisan Animosity i...

  A very revealing piece of work from Holiday et al. Their abstract: Affective polarization is a corrosive force in American politics. Read more

  Posted on 06 October 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Platforms Like X and TikTok Are Destroying Our Culture.

  I pass on most of a recent Sam Harris piece:Charlie Kirk was a political prodigy on the Right and adored by a younger generation of Republicans... Read more

  Posted on 29 September 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Evolved Mental Errors That Underlie Our Current Cultural and Political Malaise

  

  I recently looked back at a book I read in 2019, “ Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think” written by... Read more

  Posted on 26 September 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Could Humans and AI Become a New Evolutionary Individual?

  This PNAS opinion piece (open source) by Rainey and Hochberg is well worth a read. It suggests that as different AI implementations suffuse into cultures,... Read more

  Posted on 24 September 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - Non-dual Awareness as the Opiate of th...

  Enlightenment traditions in Abrahamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or other schools of meditative insight have a common issue. How can the central canon or dogma of the wa... Read more

  Posted on 22 September 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Value, Purpose, Meaning, Futures

  Value, purpose, and meaning vary between religions and cultures, and are best viewed as emergent properties supporting altruistic behaviors bonding us into... Read more

  Posted on 19 September 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Humans Work - an Integrated Model

  I was ruminating this morning over a number of books I have read, and decided to send the following prompt to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Deep Seek, and Claude... Read more

  Posted on 17 September 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Brain Fires up Immune Cells When Sick People Are Nearby

  When people view virtual avatars with coughs or rashes, their brains their brains trigger an immune response. Serino and collaborators (open source) outfitted... Read more

  Posted on 15 September 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Chants Across Seven Traditions Share Acoustic Traits That Enhance Subjective...

  From Canessa-Pollard et al.: For over 5,000 y, chanting has been practiced across many Western and Eastern traditions. However, there is hardly any empirical... Read more

  Posted on 12 September 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Rethinking How Our Brains Work.

  

  After reviewing Hoffman's mind-bending ideas that were the subject of the previous post, I decided to look back at another post on changing our perspective on... Read more

  Posted on 08 September 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Resetting My Brain…

  After a jolt of caffeine or intense exercise I sometimes feel a sudden quiet - a mind reset or emptying during which a quiet space appears that is not the... Read more

  Posted on 03 September 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Selected MindBlog Posts on Defining What Our Human Self Or "I" Is.

  This post collects the titles and texts of selected posts on what a human self is that I have composed since June 2022, and this link takes you to a list of... Read more

  Posted on 01 September 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why You Are Probably An NPC (Non Playing Character)

  I want to pass on this outstanding piece of writing from Gurwinder on Substack, in which he describes five different robotic human character types that include... Read more

  Posted on 29 August 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• AI is a Mass-Delusion Event - and - Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress

  I want to recommend two articles whose titles are this post's title, the first by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic and the second by Kyla Scanlon in her Substack... Read more

  Posted on 27 August 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Gaze Patterns Can Serve as a Sensitive Marker of Cognitive Decline

  From Wynn et al.: AbstractEye movements are closely linked to encoding and retrieval processes, with changes in viewing behavior reflecting age- and... Read more

  Posted on 25 August 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE