BC SCIENCE
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

It is astonishing that most of cognitive science ignores an obvious reality. That there are two kinds of humans.

 Tomasello has a very credible hypothesis that what distinguishes humans from the great apes is the inclination towards shared intentional behavior. What is innate is the disposition and like personalities, it is what defines our cognition as we grow.
If cognitive preference is so critical in cognitive development then why is it that we seem to have completely ignored the difference in cognitive preferences between men and women?
Humans are that species of primates that wandered out into the savannah. The savannah is different enough from a dense jungle to exert the evolutionary pressures that encourage the development of planning and forecasting skills.
Furthermore, human infants required a disproportional amount of effort to rear. This meant the specialization of roles between women who were responsible for rearing offspring and men who were responsible for bringing home the bacon. Failure in either implied death.
To be competent in child rearing, one is constantly challenged in trying to understand the needs of a child. A good mother is one that best understands the needs of a child and how best to accommodate those needs. Needs here isn't confined to immediate needs.
In contrast, the male human in the savannah needs to figure out where the next meal is coming from. In the savannah a human is one of the least physically gifted animals. Humans are relatively slow bipedal mammals.
The only animal perhaps with an approximate speed as humans are bigger mammals. The kind of mammals that can gore and kill a human. So when humans went hunting, there was a real possibility that it would be their last hunt.
So how does a human conjure up the courage to attack another animal that can kill them? They need to develop a kind of cognitive skill that is the opposite of empathy. That is, apathy. A detachment from knowing the consequences of being killed or maimed for life.
So what we thus have are primates a inclination towards shared intentional behavior (i.e. cooperation) that is also differentiated by a preference for empathy or a preference for detachment.
I use the word preference here because humans are complex enough not to be completely devoid of empathy or completely devoid of the ability to detach themselves.
Humans like dogs, dolphins and killer whales hunt as a group. The most cognitively sophisticated of animals are the kinds that need to coordinate a group that seek out energy resources that are also other autonomous things.
Well, it turns out that the most important gender of a social species are the females. We can make an analogy with the human body. Our reproductive cells are encapsulated away from the other cells in the body that is doing all the work.
Biologically, the males of the species are the venturers and also the sacrificial lambs of the species. The females are the ones that are to be protected at all costs. The information to replicate individuals is only available to females.
Organic social groups therefore tend to be matriarchal in nature. Even in human experience, it is usually the women in the family that ensure the maintenance of bonds between other relatives.
But an unnatural thing happened with the scaling up of social groups into much larger societies. The power dynamics of the group changes because the mechanisms of social cohesion has to change from the order of O(n^2) to O(n log n)
Human shared intentionality is made more effective through the use of language. The standardization of languages allows larger groups to communicate. The codification of language allows for information to transcend generations.
The initial usefulness of the codification of language (i.e. writing it down) is to preserve legacy. Legacy in the form of ownership. Writing information of ownership on paper is necessary for resolving future disputes. In fact, going meta means writing down the rules of dispute.
Civilizations scale because norms are written down and agreed upon by their citizens. Not everything can be expressed and written down. These are the tacit norms of society that is carried from one generation to another through practices and rituals.
Now one can make the case that the switch in power dynamics from women to men is a consequence of the written word. See: https://t.co/z5S17hY5Zu
The written word emphasizes detachment instead of empathy. In C.S.Peirce formulation of signs, symbols are detached from individual grounding and are instead understood through norms shared by a collective.
The symbol grounding at the level of the collective is different from the symbol grounding at the level of the individual. The effect of abstraction is that the concerns of the individual are coarse grained away in favor of the concerns of the collective.
Because our thought processes are so dependent on the language that influences our thoughts, modern humans are unable to intuit what they've lost through the habit of using symbols to express thought.
What was lost was empathy. But here's the rub, language is not the core of general intelligence but rather empathy is at the core of general intelligence. Humans by virtual of being shared intentional beings require empathy to find meaning in this world.
Humans who commit suicide are the ones who momentarily discover the lack of meaning in this world. How does that happen if not for the same mechanism that allows for the detachment from this world?
Side note: The danger in American society is that the culture is verbal in nature and has a propensity to favor symbols over empathy. What happens when those symbols are discovered to be lies?
Humans are innately equipped with two kinds of minds. The empathic mind and the symbolic mind. The former addresses complexities of human relationships and the latter abstracts away the complexity the arises from combinatorial explosions of states of affairs.
Computers have shown that we can mechanize the symbolic mind. However, as GPT-3 has shown, the mechanized symbolic mind is devoid of meaning. It requires the empathic mind to discover meaning in the words.
That is because it is the empathic mind that is actually embodied, embedded, extended, enactive and affective in this world. The purpose of things that are digital is to transcend our legacy into the futire. The purpose of things that are analog is to live in the present.
Join me in this journey here: https://t.co/CKl7IvNWys
@threadreaderapp unroll

More from Carlos E. Perez

Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Nice to discover Judea Pearl ask a fundamental question. What's an 'inductive bias'?


I crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases.

explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. But isn't the logical thinking required for good causal reasoning also not an inductive bias?

An inductive bias is what C.S. Peirce would call a habit. It is a habit of reasoning. Logical thinking is like a Platonic solid of the many kinds of heuristics that are discovered.

The kind of black and white logic that is found in digital computers is critical to the emergence of today's information economy. This of course is not the same logic that drives the general intelligence that lives in the same economy.
FOR LATER READ
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Abduction is that thought process where we renew our past, question our present, and reimagine our future.

It was C.S. Peirce, a century ago, that coined the use of this term to describe a thought process that would convey hypothesis making.

A little over 50 years ago, proponents of Artificial Intelligence, proposed that deduction would be the core feature of human intelligence. This idea was driven by the bias towards formal logical systems and the emergence of computers.

This approach was in stark contrast to cybernetics (introduced a decade early) that proposed that dynamical systems were a model for intelligence. The descendant of this approach was coined as artificial neural networks.

This dynamical systems approach was later understood as being similar to an induction based thought process. Deep Learning leads to what can be characterized as Artificial Intuition.
LIFE
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Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Genes are to Evolution, Memes are to Culture, Dicenes are to General Intelligences.

Open-ended generative processes like evolution and human culture have a thing that is replicated and propagated by the process. For evolution, these are known as genes. For culture, these are known as memes.

It became obvious to me that there isn't an equivalent for individual brains. Is there something that is equivalent to this in general intelligent systems or biological brains?

I have come up with a term that describes these. The word I've invented is 'dicene'. This word is inspired by C.S. Peirce's dicent sign or dicisign. It is the combination then of dicent and gene, and thus dicene.

But why dicene over so many other possibilities like schemes, themes, intuitions, patterns, schemas, embeddings, attention, habits, explanations, ideas, meanings, representations, concepts, analogies, and lekta?
SOCIETY
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Those trained as physicists strive to see the world in terms of symmetries and processes that break symmetries. It's a meta-principle that guides their questioning.

This is very different from how many are taught physics (I guess in high school). We come to know of physics as consisting of laws that describe the behavior of inanimate (or is it indifferent) objects? These laws are described as expressions of equalities (i.e. equations).

But laws like Newton's f=ma or Einstein's e=mc^2 are derived from a higher meta principal. These principles are known as conservation laws. Energy, momentum, angular momentum are all conserved.

Conservation laws however are also derived from a higher principle. A conservation law implies that something remains the same as the situation of study change. Energy conservation implies that it is that something that does not change in time. In short, a symmetry.

This idea that laws are derived from conservation principles that is derived from symmetries is at the core of the study of physics. The laws of physics are only authoritative as long as they don't violate a higher principle. Ultimately, that principle is all about symmetry.
EDUCATION
Carlos E. Perez
Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine
Does artificial anthropocentric intelligence lead to superintelligence?

When I use the term Artificial General Intelligence, my meaning of 'General' comes from the psychology definition of the G-factor that is tested in general intelligence tests.

It is an anthropocentric measure. The question that hasn't been explored in depth is whether a "human-complete" synthetic intelligence leads to a superintelligence. The prevailing assumption is that this expected.

I am going to argue that this assumption may not be true.

The assumption that goes into AGI automatically exploding into a superintelligence is driven by the bias that human intelligence is perceived at the pinnacle of all intelligence.
TECH

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Phil Plait
Phil Plait
@BadAstronomer
1/ Today is #BlackHoleFriday, an annual science outreach event that, by complete coincidence I’m sure, is done on #BlackFriday. You’ll read lots of cool stuff about black holes on the hashtag. Here’s mine.


2/ Black holes are weird. Duh. People like to think of them as something like incredibly dense nuggets of stuff that sucks other stuff in. But they’re not like that.

3/ If you squeeze enough mass into a small enough volume, the gravity gets so intense that it’s impossible to escape them *if you get too close*. From far away, though, gravitationally they more or less act like anything with that much mass.

4/ So if the Sun turns into a black hole we wouldn’t get drawn in. In fact, we’d orbit it almost exactly the same way as we do now, though we’d freeze to death pretty rapidly, which, in the end, would still kinda suck.

5/ Black holes get weird *when you get close*. Anything with mass warps space — we feel that warp as gravity! — but black holes stretch space to its limit.
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Shrey Srivastava
Shrey Srivastava
@BlogShrey
#DDDD $LBPS $LOAC

A thread on the potential near term catalysts behind why I have increased my position in 4d Pharma @4dpharmaplc (LON: #DDDD):


1) NASDAQ listing. This is the most obvious.

The idea behind this is that the huge pool of capital and institutional interest in the NASDAQ will enable a higher per-share valuation for #DDDD than was achievable in the UK.

Comparators to @4dpharmaplc #DDDD (market capitalisation £150m) on the NASDAQ and their market capitalisation:

Seres Therapeutics: $2.33bn = £1.72bn (has had a successful phase 3 C. difficile trial); from my previous research (below) the chance of #DDDD achieving this at least once is at least


Kaleido Biosciences: $347m = £256m. 4 products under consideration, compared to #DDDD's potential 16. When you view @4dpharmaplc's 1000+ patents and AI-driven MicroRx platform (not to mention their end-to-end manufacturing capability), 4d's undervaluation is clear.
SCIENCE
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Lior Pachter
Lior Pachter
@lpachter
"The new answer to a 77-year-old problem"

😭


https://t.co/hm9NoaU4nr


https://t.co/8fKDiKjSWc


https://t.co/jkaicC1F2x


https://t.co/PpxWT4Jef4
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Navin Kabra
Navin Kabra
@NGKabra
Did you know that all the nuclear bombs we exploded in the '40s-50s-60s have permanently contaminated all the steel the world has produced since then? All steel in the world is divided into two categories: pre-1945 non-contaminated steel, and post-1945 contaminated steel.

How?

Nuclear bombs (including the tests) create a lot of radioisotopes that are not found in nature. For example Cobalt-60 (a radioactive version of Cobalt-59). And since the 1945 Trinity test, these have all dispersed in the atmosphere.

What does this have to do with steel?

The process of manufacturing steel uses atmospheric air (or atmospheric oxygen). Some of the radioisotopes like Cobalt-60 get pulled in too, and as a result, any steel produced after 1945 has embedded in it some of these radioisotopes, sitting there emitting gamma rays.

Why do we care about traces of radioisotopes in steel? When making Geiger counters, or medical devices to check for radioactive contamination, or astronomical instruments, the emissions from the contaminated steel would interfere with the measurements.

So we need pre-1945 steel

Pre-1945 non-contaminated steel is called "low background steel". And when we need it, where do we get it from?

We go, find pre-World-War-II sunken shipwrecks, and then salvage the steel (and lead) from those to build our instruments which need heavy radiation shielding.
SCIENCE
Sean McClure
Sean McClure
@sean_a_mcclure
@engexplain @nntaleb 1/10
Science is assumed to be “evidence-based” but that term alone doesn’t mean much. What constitutes good evidence? How is evidence being used? Is it supporting or refuting a hypothesis? Was the hypothesis and experimental design predetermined or found ex post facto?

@nntaleb 2/10
The reality is you can find “evidence” for almost any narrative. Limit the sample size, cherry-pick studies, etc. Systematic reviews, meta analyses, and randomized controlled trials are all susceptible to selective interpretation/narrative fallacy.

@nntaleb 3/10
At the heart of the problem is the over-reliance on simplistic statistical techniques that do little more than quantify 2 things moving together.

@nntaleb 4/10
Take Pearson’s correlation, based on covariance. Variation can increase simultaneously across 2 variables for countless reasons, most of which are spurious. Yet this simple notion of “causality” undergirds much of scientific literature.

@nntaleb 5/10
Information-theoretic (entropy based) approaches on the other hand can assess *general* measures of dependence. Rather than some specialized (linear) view based on concurrent variation, entropy encompasses the amount of information contained in and between variables.
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There's a deep-rooted psychological (and biological) reason why.

And today, I'm gonna to explain all of it so you can start profiting off of this knowledge 💰💰

*Now, this thread is going to be long and in depth. Make sure to favorite the top tweet now so you can come back to it later.

So. Down to the very core of every living being (humans, dolphins, bacteria, aliens), there are only two drivers:
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Right off the bat, we know that sex is a primary driver to human behavior.

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Men have a subconscious fear that their woman will leave them for someone more successful

Women have a fear that their man will leave them for someone younger & better-looking

We can conclude that men are attracted to looks, and women are attracted to status.

This is human nature down to its very core.

Crazy, blue-haired feminists will try to argue and say otherwise.

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Benefits of writing SRI RAMA Jayam!!!

Writing Sri Rama Jayam is known as Likitha Japam- Writing Meditation. This gives one a complete sense of surrender to an inner conscience and peace while writing or chanting the mantras.

#Sri_Rama_Jayam #RamaNavami

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You can write this in any language of your choice. It is the connecting chords with the divine and your inner self.

Below are some points that we came across on the benefits :

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1. Vedas tell that as the sun dispels the darkness, the chanting of Rama Nama dispels all evil and obstacles of life. It is a way of liberation and salvation of human suffering.

2. When you think, that all roads are blocked to walk away from day to day problems..

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writing ‘Sri Ram Ram Ram’ gives you the most needed clarity of thoughts to find away out of odd situations.

3. It was told that a calmness engulfs as one indulges in writing the Sri Rama Jayam bringing in more clarity of mind, tolerance & strength to withstand obstacles in life.

4. Devotion of service of life and its varied forms is devotion to God. So there is no right or wrong way of writing this. The very thought and process to write is a connection with god and finds a inner meaning.

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Sevak Sathaya
Sevak Sathaya
@Sevakofmata
Sharing one incident... After Modi's Trichy youth conference, the very next morning when police were clearing up their mini-control room, they found 5 strange boys who were roaming there with bags. When police enquired them "Sir, we are from Subramaniapuram in Trichy.

Whatever political meeting or conference is held in this ground, we come here on the same night or morning hours to collect the Liquor bottles to sell in the scrap shop for 50 paisa to 1 rupee per bottle and we used to earn Rs 200 to Rs 400 on each such event.

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we are much disappointed, sir!". Police seem were stunned and pleasantly surprised. This is what Modi magic does in this nation. Modi is the one who can lead our nation and make everyone prosper with hardwork in right direction and proper approach.

This funny but interesting anecdote was published by a statewide local daily Dinamalar. I have just translated and posting it here for rest of the nation;
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