Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2549 )

• Never-Ending Stories - a Survival Tactic for Uncertain Times

  I keep returning to clips of text that I abstracted from a recent piece by Venkatesh Rao. It gets more rich for me on each re-reading. Read more

  Posted on 21 August 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Born Rich

  I want to pass on a few slightly edited clips from an interesting essay in The Dispatch by conservative writer Kevin Williamson that a friend pointed me to. Read more

  Posted on 17 August 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Human History Gets a Rewrite.

  I want to point to two articles I have enjoyed reading, both describing the recent book by Graeber and Wengrowa; “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of... Read more

  Posted on 15 August 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Immaturity of America's Therapeutic Culture

  I recommend reading the most recent NYTimes David Brook's piece, and pass on here ChatGPT 4's response to my request to summarize the main its 1,472 words. Read more

  Posted on 11 August 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What is Intelligence?

  I want to share a message sent by Clint Sprott to the Chaos and Complexity seminar group at the University of Wisconsin which he started many years ago - it is... Read more

  Posted on 09 August 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• America's Legacy of Poverty - The Injustice of Place.

  Having moved back into the house in which I grew up in Austin Texas, and watching the city inexorably move towards becoming a dystopian metroplex, the analysis... Read more

  Posted on 07 August 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• 18-month Old Humans Discriminate Moral Violations from Disobedient Or...

  Fascinating studies from Kassecker et al. (open source) have used multiple methods (eye-tracking, observations of expressive behaviors) to probe the... Read more

  Posted on 04 August 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Work as War...and Pritzker's Formulae To Spot An Idiot

  

  Too fascinating pieces on how in the areas of politics and business our more recently evolved primate capabilities for empathy and compassion are being subverte... Read more

  Posted on 02 August 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Visible Gorilla.

  

  A staple of my lectures in the 1990s was showing the ‘invisible gorilla’ video, in which viewers were asked to count the number of times that students with whit... Read more

  Posted on 31 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Unnarratability -The Tower of Babel Redux - Where Have All the Common...

  I pass on some clips from Venkatesh Rao's recent Ribbonfarm Studio posting.. Perspectives like his make me feel that one's most effective self preservation... Read more

  Posted on 28 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A MindBlog Paragraph on Non-dual Awareness Massaged by Bard and ChatGPT-4

  This popst is using MindBlog to archive a further example example of the sort shown in Monday’s post ...of GPT bots editing a paragraph I wrote, this one being... Read more

  Posted on 26 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Evolution of Transhuman Forms - a MindBlog Paragraph Edited by GPT...

  In this post I am documenting the final result of passing a paragraph I wrote on future human evolution through a number of different GPT (generative pre-traine... Read more

  Posted on 24 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Proxy Failure is an Inherent Risk in Goal-Oriented Systems

  I will pass on the title and abstract of another article to appear in Behavioral and Brain Science for which reviewers comments are being solicited. MindBlog... Read more

  Posted on 20 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog's Reading List.

  I've decided to pass on links to articles I have found worthwhile reading , realizing that I am not going to have time to frame their ideas into longer posts... Read more

  Posted on 17 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• ‘Adversarial’ Search for Neural Basis of Consciousness Yields First Results

  Finkel does a summary of the first round of results of an 'adversarial colloboration' funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation in which ... Read more

  Posted on 14 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence

  I would recommend having a read through Evgeny Morozov's piece in the NYTimes as an antidote to Marc Adreessen's optimistic vision of AI that was the subject... Read more

  Posted on 12 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Inheritance of Social Status - Stability in England from 1600 to 2022.

  From historical records Clarks demonstrates (open source) strong persistence of social status across family trees over 400 years, in spite of large increases... Read more

  Posted on 10 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Meta-analysis Questions the Cognitive Benefits of Physical Activity.

  I give up. If anything was supposed to have been proven I would have thought it would be that exercise has a beneficial effect on brain health and cognition. No... Read more

  Posted on 07 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Music Training Slows Cognitive Aging

  A team of Chinese collaborators has reported experiments in the Oxford academic journal Cerebral Cortex titled "Functional gradients in prefrontal regions and... Read more

  Posted on 05 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• What Babies Know from Zero to 1 Year - Core Systems of Knowledge

  The journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences has sent out to reviewers the précis of a book, "What Babies Know" by Elizabeth S. Spelke, Harvard Psychology Dept. Th... Read more

  Posted on 03 July 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE