Overview: Science&Technology

from Alice Albrecht, who "runs re:collect, a startup building an AI-powered thought partner:... advances in AI and cheaper compute lower the bar for getting from a creative idea to a final output... though, we still need to provide the initial seed... and ... judge whether we’re heading in the right direction. We’re still the creative direct…

"5 interesting things ... distilled from a helicopter view of trust from various branches of psychology, sociology, behavioural science and Responsible Research and Innovation."focus on others: "perhaps similar to love and happiness, the more doggedly trust is pursued for its own sake, the more elusive it may become", so turn y…

counties that had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 exhibited 14% less physical distancing... higher Covid-19 infection and fatality growth rates ...the hormone oxytocin... promotes bonding... plays a role in trust... When participants trusted and felt trusted, oxytocin levels ... jumped... Trust just feels good... But risky if we give it to the w…

GPT-3... AI that can produce shockingly human-sounding (if at times surreal) sentences... imagine a future in which the vast majority of the written content ... is produced by machines... adjust, and adapt, to a new level of unreality ...video may turn out to be the easiest to detect ... Politicians will now be able to dismiss real, scandalous vid…

arguing with them or debunking their theories is likely only to generate publicity or money for them... generate a fake air of controversy over climate action ... deniers ... four different categories: the shill, the grifter, the egomaniac and the ideological fool... the fourth type of climate denier... utterly blinded by ... free-market creed. Th…

intellectual humility, the crucial characteristic that allows for admission of wrongness... crucial for learning... difficult to foster... a virtue worth striving for... entertaining the possibility that you may be wrong and being open to learning ...actively curious about your blind spots... It’s about asking: What am I missing here? our reali…

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

Vaccine denial is dangerous... you might think it would be of the utmost importance to try to talk some sense into these people. But there's a problem: According to a major new study in the journal Pediatrics, trying to do so may actually make the problem worse.

I’ve been meaning to blog about the ‘backfire effect’ cognitive bias since first coming across it last December. It went to the top of my ToBlog list thanks to a little serendipity...