Five years here: post #250!
disasters, successes, and more
I’ve been on
for just about five years now - this is my 250th post! That’s about fifty posts a year, more or less, of somewhere between about 1000 and 2000 words per post. Call it 400k words. That’s a lot.I sort of set myself the challenge of just writing regularly, keeping closely to my theme of brain and behaviour, and of how what we know about the brain intersects with the world.
And in the back of my mind was the idea that I could use
almost as a kind of a public journal, recording the various papers and findings in brain and behaviour as a lens to see the world anew with. I’ve generally tried to avoid commenting directly on politics - there’s lots of others doing that.Where I’ve gotten close to politics it’s generally been to look at the particular issue in a new way: like this piece on tariffs (Tariffs as ‘costly punishment’: Why? Because you foreigners are sooo unfair to me, because reasons) or unitary presidentialism as a collective cognition design flaw.
disasters
My most disastrous piece in terms of sudden, dramatic numbers of unsubscribes was this piece:
the agi dream keeps missing the point: intelligence isn’t some benchmark. it’s a social process.
I’ve no idea why so many hated that piece, but they did!
Key point:
Drawing on lessons from biology, economics, and cognitive neuroscience, I argue the pursuit of artificial general intelligence through ever-larger language models is not just technically questionable; it’s conceptually incoherent: scaling text prediction through ever-larger models is not intelligence (whatever else it might be).
Maybe people don’t want anyone to rain on their parade. Dunno.
Basically, I can’t take at all seriously the tech industry’s model of human cognitive function. It is so off base, it is hard to understand. Here’s a recent piece examining their thinking: the tech industry’s flawed model of your brain - a case study in how clever people can be so very stupid.
most popular pieces (reads)
A piece on memory: Sins of Memory - false memory implantation in adults is easy (bonus: here’s one way to do it)
and a piece on phones: ‘Just put your phone away’ - You’ll enjoy conversation more if you do
followed by: Aerobic exercise is good for the brain - mood, memory, education; five easy wins for behaviour change
growth
I don’t know if this is just me and what I’ve been writing about, but growth here has largely stalled out - I’m at about 6.6k subscribers, which is pretty good, but new subs are slowing down a lot. Including followers, I’m at a grand total of 10,694 today.
Maybe you could put the word out?
favourite pieces
I really liked doing this pair of pieces:
parasite, predator, hive: thinking with acid blood - cognitive architecture of the xenomorph
predators: evolution, culture, and the neuroscience of alien hunters
Kind of silly pieces in a way, but I wanted to think through what it would be like to think about these counterfactual aliens as if they were real beings. If we ever encounter aliens, we do have a strong set of frameworks to think about how they function - what their nervous systems are like, what their predator-prey relations look like, how they exploit resources in their environment, and all the rest of it. We won’t be starting from zero.
Other pieces I really liked doing included:
George Orwell’s 1984 through a neuroscience lens*
and
John Le Carré through a psychological lens
There are loads of other pieces in the archive - please browse.
And other pieces have turned up in my academic work: I started really thinking about and reading the academic literature in nationalism when writing my book, Talking Heads: The New Science of How Conversation Shapes Our Worlds (go buy it!), and ended up doing a few pieces here on nationalism (including this piece: Notes on a neuroscience of nationalism - Collective memory, imagined communities, mental time travel, agency, identity, which eventually turned into a recently published academic paper, described here:
Cognitive Republic
I’ve recently started a new project with a separate home and a new: The Cognitive Republic - Building Societies That Experiment, Learn, and Evolve - a book published section by section in public. Last time, I described what this endeavour is about:
a book-length project written online, in public - a new and scary experience for me, and I hope an exhilarating experience for you - the reader. Cognitive Republic started life as a book proposal: I have decided instead to release it here piece-by-piece to test the arguments and to engage in thinking in public.
We will examine how we can reinvent democracies as learning, adaptive, systems. You can read the introduction here, and the first intended section titles in this footnote.1
The writing will of course continue here but and will be thematically varied as always!
So you can:
and