"We review every single play or musical that opens on Broadway," says Jason Bailey, an NYT culture editor. "We review hundreds of movies a year. ... That means we should also be reviewing and criticizing the biggest video game releases." - The New York Times
“We designed the telescope to wow the scientists,” Mike Menzel agreed. Now, he said, “We’re here in an art show, watching some images that we helped produce becoming things that are almost iconic.” - The New Yorker
The lonely are at substantially elevated risk for heart disease, stroke, obesity, addiction, and dementia; being lonely increases your overall risk of premature death by more than 60%. And the number of Americans afflicted by loneliness is not small: a recent survey found that more than 50 percent of us reported feeling lonely. - American Scholar
Where psychedelic experience was at the heart of the old counter culture, Bayesian reasoning seems to be at the heart of this counter culture. Where the old counter culture dreamed of a coming Aquarian Age of peace, love, and happiness, this one fears the destruction of humanity by a super-intelligent AI. - 3 Quarks Daily
"I think we’re at a moment with the development of AI where we have ways to provide support, encouragement, affirmation, coaching and advice. We’ve basically taken emotional intelligence and distilled it. And I think that is going to unlock the creativity of millions and millions of people for whom that wasn’t available.” - The Guardian
You're head of a pro-AI project that wants to scan people's retinas, so obviously you should name your project Orb and make it look, frankly, evil. - The Atlantic
“There’s a huge difference between hearing and listening. You have to understand the person you’re negotiating with without judgment, whatever your personal values might be.” - The Guardian
Few believe that LLMs are truly sentient, but some argue that they show signs of genuine intelligence and of having a conceptual understanding of the world. These claims, whether right or not, are forcing us to revise ideas about what intelligence and understanding actually are. - Prospect
It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science. - The New York Times
At first, our hominid ancestors probably did not count very high. Many body parts present themselves in pairs—arms, hands, eyes, ears, and so on—thereby leading to an innate familiarity with the concept of a pair and, by extension, the numbers 1 and 2. - Lapham's Quarterly
A new theory proposes the brain sorts memories by how likely they are to be useful as guides in the future. Memories of predictable things are saved in the brain’s neocortex, where they can contribute to generalizations about the world. Memories less likely to be useful are kept in the hippocampus. - Quanta
All of us experience aesthetic properties when we’re not in a condition to fully appreciate them because we are tired or distracted. Yet the virtues of a work may still be apparent to us. If the apprehension of aesthetic properties is tied to feeling states, how are dispassionate observers able to identify them? - 3 Quarks Daily
