Overview: Psychology

"In physics... the Observer Effect. Electrons, photons ... behave differently when under our gaze... Social media has made us both the observed and the observers, trapped in a relentless cycle of performing and watching... the line between genuine human expression and algorithm-driven self-parody has dissolved into a soup of memes, virtue vs…

"AI can not only improve short-term productivity of organizations but can also ... increase the organization’s collective intelligence."HBR starts well by pointing out the false dichotomy between thinking "about AI in terms of automation vs. augmentation... Augmentation doesn’t avoid automation, it simply hides it, usually in some l…

“About one in four people who began the experiment believing a conspiracy theory came out the other end without that belief... challenges conventional wisdom that evidence and arguments rarely help to change believers’ minds... [as they're] adopting such beliefs to meet various needs – such as a desire for control."The researchers develo…

"examines the impact of AI on human false memories--recollections of events that did not occur or deviate from actual occurrences... through suggestive questioning in Human-AI interactions, simulating crime witness interviews. Four conditions were tested: control, survey-based, pre-scripted chatbot, and generative chatbot" The 200 people…

A Large-Scale Human Study with 100 NLP Researchers

"The most common AI-based functionalities in participation tools are toxicity screening, analysis of inputs and translation. The first two in particular are meant to lighten the workload" of community managers."Toxicity screening ... is used to flag hateful or inappropriate inputs." Text is usually flagged and post-moderated, b…

"As AI-generated content blurs the line between human and machine online, “model collapse” might help us find new value in well-managed human communities."

I hope you had a good summer. I stayed and worked from home, and got a lot done thanks to the mercifully fewer meetings. I also read a lot of good stuff, and published one piece. Here's a selection.

When I first heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect I immediately created a tag for it - I just knew it was was significant. As the author here points out, it was both "too juicy to not be true. Everyone ‘knows’ that idiots tend to be unaware of their own idiocy".Unfortunately, it's poor science: "if you carefully craft random data…

Good piece on how "the free speech warriors... [behind] Truth Social and the ... decay of Twitter ... the “Festung” cities of unrestricted expression... still not happy... shouting into an echo chamber isn’t nearly as satisfying as they thought it would be... What they’re really after ... is our attention... The thrill of provocation quickly…

"it’s surprisingly unclear what the AI search startup actually is"- according to its CEO it is, depending on when he's asked:"an answer engine...almost like Wikipedia and ChatGPT had a kid,,,a mere “aggregator of information”"All three cannot be true. The chatobot itself "is more specific... “Perplexity AI is an AI-po…

Applying Dawkins' selfish gene perspective to the evolution of AI

"The problem is not that AI is smarter than us, the problem is that it’s becoming increasingly easy for us to outsource our skills to AI... If we outsource our writing skills, we lose our writing ability... If we depend on AI to analyze information and make decisions, we lose our ability to think critically and analyze complex situations ours…

"Good tools can ... corral the daily deluge of research, interviews and half-formed thoughts into something coherent" - Westenberg's (Mac-focused) productivity stack consists of "Butter for drafting, Linear for managing projects and to-dos, and Readwise for wrangling research material".Reading up on her use of Readwise, in…

"I had just finished recording the final video of my personal productivity mini-course when I turned on the camera and ad-libbed from the heart. I was unprepared for what came out."

Really brilliant monologue on creativity and AI, putting the current moment in a historical context of industrialisation stretching back to the invention of the printing press."If we really could substitute for our labor with machines — ones that don’t pollute or create even more work — it wouldn’t be a problem, as long as we all felt okay ab…

"what causes the flow state, and what happens in the brain... a new study claims to have answers".There were 2 theories:"Hyperfocus... two brain networks unlock the flow state: the default mode network (DMN)... involved in things like daydreaming... spikes the most when we’re not engaged in any tasks" and "the executive co…

A very sceptical take on "Google’s snorefest of an I/O presentation" and the current point in "the latest hype cycle... how exhausting the whole thing has become a year and a half after the release of ChatGPT".The days of being on the inevitable path to AGI because Silicon Valley had "thrown so much capital and compute&quo;…

What happens when we make machines "that we can’t help but treat them as people"?While "GPT-4o doesn’t represent a huge leap ... it more than makes up in features that make it feel more human... an ability to “see” and respond to images and live video in real time, to respond conversationally ... to “read” human emotions from visual…

In this edition: join the ChatGPT integration free trial, check out the results of my latest experiments, and enjoy the Alliteration of the Month: Bullshit, Botshit and Bubbles.

Another word for the lexicon: when bullshit meets AI you get "botshit". "we’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job... there’s a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence…

According to:MIT Professor of AI Rodney Brooks, ChatGPT "“just makes up stuff that sounds good"... where “sounds good” is an algorithm to imitate text found on the internet, while “makes up” is the basic randomness of relying on predictive text rather than logic or facts",Geoff Hinton: "the greatest risks is not that chatbots w…

At an AI conference, Jeff Jarvis "knew I was in the right place when I heard AGI brought up and quickly dismissed... I call bullshit... large language models might prove to be a parlor trick". The rest of the conference focused on "frameworks for discussion of responsible use of AI".Benefits - for some, AI can:"raise the f…

"does appealing to the (non-existent) “emotions“ of LLMs make them perform better? The answer is YES"

I asked Questy.ai, a startup, the following question: What is the best communication technique for reaching someone who believes many conspiracy theories, and sees all arguments as further evidence of conspirary?A summary of its response, which contained cited references:"When engaging with someone who holds fast to conspiracy theories and v…

How to use LLMs to solve "really hard problems"? The "AIdeas Collider" approach, piloted by Head of Innovation Design at MIT's Collective Intelligence Design Lab.

"how can you use ChatGPT to generate ideas and brainstorm within Obsidian?", which is currently my note-taking tool of choice. First, some generic advice for prompting:"be specific about the outcome that you want to achieve... providing a prompt that contains more descriptive language ...give preceding prompts ... [specify the] resp…

An interview with Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind & architect behind AlphaFold.

"ChatGPT only looks at the past... [it's response] based on an “average” of everything already said on the issue. It’s pure reversion to the mean"

"You Are Not a Parrot and a chatbot is not a human" - an interview/profile of Emily M. Bender, the "computational linguist at the University of Washington ... [who] co-wrote the octopus paper... to illustrate what ... LLMs ... can and cannot do"The paper: "Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Ag…