I really do not like the recent push against anthropomorphic language

Andy Masley@andymasley.bsky.social · 18h ago

This is the first part of a 2 part post on why I believe that current AI models meet my criteria for really "thinking" and "understanding," and that prohibitions on using these words because they "anthropomorphize" AI seem philosophically confused to me. blog.andymasley.com/p/why-i-beli...

Welp, there’s that. Considering that learning even simple rules is exceedingly difficult for *5 year olds*, we really shouldn’t be surprised.

New paper 🍼📄 ManyBabies 3 is out (open access, registered report in Developmental Science). 30 labs, 33 languages, 839 infants set out to replicate a textbook finding: 7-month-olds learn abstract rules from speech (@garymarcus.bsky.social et al., 1999). We didn’t find it. 🧵

conservatively, 98% of ai discourse is believers in human exceptionalism taking roundhouse kicks to the face

Listen, I just think it's weird that the same people who are saying they're worried that AI is going to wipe out humanity are also eager for military contracts that will give AI control of weapons.

My God, I can actually give Opus 5.5 open ended assignments like "make this code run as fast as its C equivalent, or tell me why it can't be done" and leave it for several hours -- and it actually works and has done the job. And not by cheating with cgo either.

New PhD-opportunity at Aarhus University with a project investigating the cognitive correlates of having no inner speech. Supervised by Johanne Nedergaard and yours truly. Deadline 11 November. Starting date 1 February 2027. Get in touch if you want to know more. phd.arts.au.dk/applicants/o...

From unicorns to the assBench. We've come a long way! www.assbench.com

LLM AssBench

LLM Benchmark - One prompt, Multiple models, Multiple dates

assbench.com

How do philosophers and scientists of mind actually work together, and where does the collaboration break down? ISPSM is launching In Conversation, a new online series that aims to bring philosophers and scientists together to work through questions like these. 📅 23 Oct 2026, 1pm BST/8am EDT

That is indeed the correct conclusion to draw

Zoomer Antimillenarian@surcomplicated.bsky.social · last wk.

Processing petabytes of data is not the same thing as coming up with novel mathematical solutions to major unsolved problems. And true, these are not living, conscious beings. But the correct conclusion to draw here is that you don't have to be a living, conscious being to think and reason.

This is the far more likely pathway for how AI will end us all, btw. Not via some superintelligent swarm of paperclip maximizers, but by a cascading sequence of dumb fuckups driven by human beings who have arranged things to be fast-moving and catastrophically fragile while also being really lazy.

Kieran Healy@kjhealy.co · 2w ago

That’s a load-bearing assumption, Dr Strangelove. www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/p...

My plea to scholars of language, literature, literary history, and genre is to take this seriously, rather than standing opposed and incurious. It’s a massive opportunity for the humanities as such to reevaluate and refresh our methods and goals.

Sean Carroll@seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 4w ago

LLMs are going to fundamentally change what scholarship is. Pumping out true propositions used to be a viable career. Now much of that can be offloaded, leaving scholars the tasks of understanding, synthesizing, and deciding what is valuable. Goes for math, philosophy, parts of physics.

New episode!! 🎙️🎉 A conversation with @damianblasi.bsky.social about linguistic diversity and what it can tell us. Linguistic diversity is a precious part of our species' heritage. It also offers a wellspring of clues about history, culture, and the human mind. Listen: disi.org/the-natural-...

Reading the TiCS paper by @initself.bsky.social et al., reminded me of the debates around Hoffman et al's interface theory from a decade ago. I think my commentary on it featuredcontent.psychonomic.org/interfacethe... struck a similarly Umwelt-oriented position w/ sprinkles of predictive coding

#interfacetheory: True enough

In 1625, the astronomer Christopher Scheiner confirmed Johann Kepler’s hunch that images projected to the retina through the crystalline lens of the eye, much like images passed through telescope l…

featuredcontent.psychonomic.org

Gary Lupyan@glupyan.bsky.social · last mo.

Yes, exactly. Platonic representations are one of the many erroneous conclusions reached under the assumption that intelligence is a one-dimensional scalar.

Yes, exactly. Platonic representations are one of the many erroneous conclusions reached under the assumption that intelligence is a one-dimensional scalar.

Victoria Bosch@initself.bsky.social · last mo.

Are brains and artificial neural networks converging onto universal representations? There is a seductive idea making the rounds in NeuroAI / machine learning: train systems well enough, and they all converge on the same representation of reality (i.e. a unique world model). We have thoughts™ 1/n

To tell if a maze is solvable, just hang it by its corners If it tears into pieces, you’ve found a solution

A propos: the recently published article on categorization in @oecs-bot.bsky.social oecs.mit.edu/pub/mrj0pnj5/

Categorization — OECS

Categorization involves treating different things as the same. One common function of categorization is recognition. When an animal recognizes a new substance as being edible, it is categorizing it as...

oecs.mit.edu

Lisa Feldman Barrett@lisafeldmanbarrett.com · last mo.

How does your #brain turn light waves, air pressure, and racing hearts into sights, sounds, and emotions? By generating categories. @quantamagazine.org explains our recent @nature.com paper and why it matters. With @earlkmiller.bsky.social. www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-framew...

We are hiring a full professor for "Intelligence in biological and artificial systems". If you don't know about the German system yet, let me tell you a little bit about working as a professor at the institute. Thread 👇

Tim Kietzmann @timkietzmann.bsky.social · last mo.

📢 We are hiring a full professor in "Intelligence in Biological and Artificial Systems". Come join us at Germany's first and largest cognitive science program. Please share far and wide, and get in touch with any questions. www.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/universit...

context sensitivity in google translate

Seeing people who don’t understand what’s happening calling for executions of those responsible

Matthew Kollmer@matthewkollmer.com · last mo.

This "AI destroys rare books" news has effectively broken the Rare Books feed How to tell ppl that when rare booksellers & special collections talk about rare books, we don't just mean out-of-print? Like, Amazon isn't destroying the books folks associate with mahogany shelves in lavish bookshops?

Huge honors for Northwestern cognitive science 🎉 At @cogscisociety.bsky.social's meeting in Rio, Matt Goldrick (@mattgoldrick.bsky.social) won the Elman Prize & professor emeritus Doug Medin won the Rumelhart Prize — the field's top award. 🧠 More: news.weinberg.northwestern.edu/2026/08/13/t...

thanks Daniel for this v useful guide.

Daniel Lakens@lakens.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New Blog post: Which Data Repository Should you Use? In light of OSF closing down, I compare Zenodo, Dataverse, ResearchBox, PsychArchive, and local repositories on six important dimensions. If you want to know which to pick: It depends! daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/08/whic...

Incredible. When E—n M—k & his crew obliterated USAID in a weekend, they deleted a vast trove of publicly-funded knowledge: the Development Experience Clearinghouse. A Canadian high school student (!) happened to have downloaded the entire thing for a project. AidData has now posted it for all.

Before reimagining development data, remember what we’ve learned

Why we’re publishing a free, searchable, and ungated archive featuring a quarter-century of USAID evaluation reports.

aiddata.org

glad that more people are having that realization! it’s a bitter pill but the sooner we swallow it the more predictive the discourse around AI becomes.

Matt Steinglass@mattsteinglass.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Maybe that is a very misplaced stance, but my instinct is to question the presumption that I or humans in general are special. Clearly there are huge differences between what AIs do and what humans do, but it also seems wrong to say that an LLM is "merely mimicking". Functionally, that is not true.

This video on the HuggingFace-OpenAI incident, calmly presented by OpenAI researchers (Eric is great btw, hi Eric), is one of the best uses of your time all year in AI. I'll probably rewatch tomorrow to write about it more. www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Dy...

Black Hat USA 2026: The 'Breaking' News: The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident

The 'Breaking' News: The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident - A Technical Reconstruction and Its Implications for AI When AI Goes Rogue. The Incident That Changed Everything. An OpenAI evaluation agent…

youtube.com

What soft power looks like in 2026

Frank Pasquale@frankpasquale.bsky.social · 2mo ago

“Using Chinese models was like owning a house while using U.S. models was like renting one, they added. Rather than spending millions to train a model from scratch, developers can download a Chinese system and build an entirely new product on top of it” www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/t...

I think I speak for a lot of men (who don’t have daughters) when I say TIL

Miriam Posner@miriamposner.com · 2mo ago

Never in my life have my explanatory powers been as taxed as trying to explain to the 6yo that if she no longer wants bangs, she needs to grow them OUT, not cut them OFF. I tried drawing a diagram. I’ve had an easier time explaining Foucault to 19yo’s.

like us! No one is doing computer science and math with their naked brains. Pen & paper, math notation, computer language—these are our neurosymbolic add ons! @lampinen.bsky.social , @blaiseaguera.bsky.social , @kmahowald.bsky.social all get it. Not sure why this isn’t more obvious to folks

Andrea Lathrop@cabernet.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is a very good point. It's an LLM-system, at this point, not a pure LLM, so theoretical critiques about what an LLM can or cannot do should not be taken to be predictions of what an LLM-plus-a-bunch-of-stuff can or cannot do.

Exactly. And this is the sense of neurosymbolic intelligence that we humans inhabit as well!

Andrew Lampinen@lampinen.bsky.social · 2mo ago

In short, I argue that these results align with a long-standing connectionist perspective that classical symbols systems are external to intelligence rather than a fundamental part of it — and that this more accurately characterizes how human mathematicians reason as well.

Applications are open for SFI's 2027 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. SFI is looking for recent Ph.D. graduates with strong quantitative and computational skills who want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Alpha rhythm determines speech perception rate? And speeding it up makes unintelligibly fast speech comprehensible? This is nuts! www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...