I enjoyed talking with @kensycoop.bsky.social on the Many Minds podcast about the metaphors we use to conceptualize AI.
manyminds.libsyn.com/seven-metaph...
26.02.2026 16:27
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I enjoyed talking with @kensycoop.bsky.social on the Many Minds podcast about the metaphors we use to conceptualize AI.
manyminds.libsyn.com/seven-metaph...
what a crazy night for sam altman to be like "yeah we got that dept of war deal, and there's no moral concerns here"
I’ve been using the phrase “semiotic complexity” (but as a computer scientist I should probably be disqualified from coming up with phrases): arxiv.org/abs/2508.00095
Excited to see where this goes. Congrats!
New preprint with @psmaldino.bsky.social on the evolution of similarity-biased learning: osf.io/preprints/so...
This mathematical treatment both simplifies and extends our previous simulation treatment of the subject: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
This panel on surprise is co-sponsored by the MLA forum on Linguistics and Literature + the forum on Cognitive and Affect Studies, and we are hoping to put together something truly wide ranging. So if you have been doing research on surprise in any form or setting, we would love to see it!
Hosted by Acid Horizon, this free, open-to-the-public event will explore our recent book Digital Theory and its central claims.
Join us!
February 19, 2026 - 10AM EST.
www.acidhorizonpodcast.com
This is to say the decades long efforts to defund religious studies within the broader defund humanities movement is a grave error.
The world is dealing with authoritarian populisms which leverage religious traditions, beliefs, communities, & leaders to advance political goals & for profit. /5
What is your favorite finding from any paper that involves the application of computational methods to natural language data?
A neat paper I worked on, begun over 2 years ago when our concerns were more myopic, was just published today. It came out an excellent set of workshops at the Santa Fe Institute, led by the indefatigable Joshua Garland. The gist: sometimes inefficiency is good for you www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Really great new paper using agent-based modelling to show how an exploratory childhood can lead to innovation in the population at large.
royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...
If you're interested in a short behind-the-scenes of the retraction of a mega-metascience paper—the first of its kind (the retraction, not the paper)—this might be for you! Had to gloss over so many details to observe allotted time but happy to share an extended version of my slide deck with links.
I suspect many people interpret “X is describable by math” as equivalent to “X is reducible to math.”
Congrats!
Cells can sense the geometry of their environment, from tiny subcellular features to whole-tissue patterns. How can we engineer environments to systematically probe these responses?
🧵 I'm @lhinderling.bsky.social from @olivierpertz.bsky.social lab, let’s do a short tour on microfabrication!
I imagine this distinction comes up in anthropology. Maybe religious studies.
Is there a term of art for the materially real aspects of fictional entities via their effects in the physical world? Ex: Santa stories are related to people putting presents in stockings so that this action becomes a real-world manifestation of Santa stories.
Super proud of this paper with @apvelilla.bsky.social and @babeheim.bsky.social, now out in Psych Review.
Non-paywalled version (preprint) here: osf.io/preprints/so...
The way model evaluation often functions in machine learning has a similar feel to the way replicability is treated more generally, as a shortcut to truth. That parallel is what initially got me very interested in your work!
Introduce yourself with five concerts you’ve seen:
* The Jesus and Mary Chain
* Leonard Cohen
* Pixies
* Lou Reed
* Sigur Rós
My latest column for @newscientist.com is up for subscribers (including library card holders)! This was a fun and hard column to write because I had to explain quantum field theory in like 3 sentences 😹 I describe how unsolved problems drive creativity 🖖🏽
www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...
Wishing @helendecruz.net were here to see the pope recognize wonder as the key human ability. You should read their book Wonderstruck if you haven’t already.
Pretty much no one can make their ideas clear to others on the 1st attempt. The two main reactions are "let's painstakingly clarify this with some back and forth", and "doesn't matter as long as the various interpretations are themselves interesting", leading to the 2 main branches of philosophy.
A distributional semantic comparison of articles in Grokipedia vs Wikipedia could be interesting…
"Because science rejects claims to truth based on authority and depends on the criticism of established ideas, it is the enemy of autocracy. Because scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, it is the enemy of dogma. "
Today's offering from the #NaturalPhilosophy Symposium: Kevin Zollman @kevinzollman.com on Refutation and Models of Social Organization. Commentary by Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybOr...
New paper on formats of representation in LLMs. I defend pluralism both about the vehicles of representation in ANNs (e.g. neurons, polytopes, embeddings) and about the formats of representation (e.g. nominal, analogue, structural). Hope it’s useful to someone. philpapers.org/rec/MALFOR-2
As we put it here, “the shape is the meaning”: arxiv.org/abs/2509.00248
What problem is explainability/interpretability research trying to solve in ML, and do you have a favorite paper articulating what that problem is?
The biggest limitation to this is that all of this hermeneutics stuff takes place in the math/comp domain without translating it back into the linguistic/cultural. But that’s where we are looking next. I suspect we will have to learn how to read networks/geometries/etc as text.
5/5
