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Wyrdweaver

@wordweaver.bsky.social

130 followers 650 following 420 posts

Practical Hypnotist. I am a work of fiction in that I was made by fiction.

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Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · Jan 1

New blog

phenomenalink @phenomenal.ink · Jan 1

blog.phenomenal.ink/an-introduct...

1. An Introduction

Who is Weaver?

blog.phenomenal.ink

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Reposted by Wyrdweaver

Konrad Kording @kordinglab.bsky.social · 5h

The Nobel prize in Econ to Phillipe Aghion is for innovation. Key driver for future world. And he is coauthor and mentor of my wife @imarinescu.bsky.social . Amazing development!

The New York Times @nytimes.com · 8h

Breaking News: The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for their work on how technology drives growth.

Three Share Nobel in Economics for Work on How Technology Drives Growth

Joel Mokyr was awarded half of the prize, and Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt shared the other half.

nyti.ms

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 1d

Datacolada posted about you

🏰meg⚔️ @Birthright Audiobook! @impavid.us · 3d

In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand

I'll go first: Six page commercial lease.

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Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 1d

Brilliant

Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 1d

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com

A comic strip in six panels. The panels inerlock like a jigsaw with knobs and sockets. Two stick figures walk right to left through all the panels.

Panel 1: Person 1 says "I hear you're working on a new theory."
Panel 2 & 3: Person 2 says: "Yes, I'm calling it the jigsaw model. I think it could change our whole View of reality."
Panel 4: Person 1 says "When Will you publish?:
Panel 5: Person 2 says "But a couple of things are still bothering me." (this piece/panel is a bit squint)
Panel 6: This piece is rotated ninety degees and fits to the others very badly. Person 2 is saying "Soon. I feel like I'm really close"
A second look at the whole comic shows that the last two panels read in the wrong order because the jigsaw has been put together incorrectly.

Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 2d

Switching on the invert colors accessibility settings on my phone display has tanked my screen time. Grey scale and so on never made as much of a difference. Something very unsettling about blackened out eyes and teeth.

Reposted by Wyrdweaver

Felipe De Brigard @felipedebrigard.bsky.social · 3d

I wrote a short commentary on Anil Seth's wonderful forthcoming paper in BBS. It is largely inspired by the work of Andy Clark, although some ideas I owe to Ned Block and Dan Dennett (probably not the same ideas!). I highly recommend Anil's paper to anyone interested in consciousness [1/2]

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 4d

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.

Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

Screenshot of a paper abstract:

“Core knowledge” refers to a set of cognitive systems that underwrite early representations of the physical and social world, appear universally across cultures, and likely result from our genetic endowment. Although this framework is canonically considered as a hypothesis about early emerging conception — how we think and reason about the world — here we present an alternative view: that many such representations are inherently perceptual in nature. This “core perception” view explains an intriguing (and otherwise mysterious) aspect of core-knowledge processes and representations: that they also operate in adults, where they display key empirical signatures of perceptual processing. We first illustrate this overlap using recent work on “core physics”, the domain of core knowledge concerned with physical objects, representing properties such as persistence through time, cohesion, solidity, and causal interactions. We review evidence that adult vision incorporates exactly these representations of core physics, while also displaying empirical signatures of genuinely perceptual mechanisms, such as rapid and automatic operation on the basis of specific sensory inputs, informational encapsulation, and interaction with other perceptual processes. We further argue that the same pattern holds for other areas of core knowledge, including geometrical, numerical, and social domains. In light of this evidence, we conclude that many infant results appealing to precocious reasoning abilities are better explained by sophisticated perceptual mechanisms shared by infants and adults. Our core-perception view elevates the status of perception in accounting for the origins of conceptual knowledge, and generates a range of ready-to-test hypotheses in developmental psychology, vision science, and more.

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Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 5d

Surely there's a long German word for it that could be compounded

Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 5d

Reposted by Wyrdweaver

Ned Block @neddo.bsky.social · 5d

Can Only Meat Machines be Conscious? New paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, free download until November 26 with this URL: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luwh4sIRv...

authors.elsevier.com

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Stefano Palminteri @stepalminteri.bsky.social · 5d

New (revised) preprint with @thecharleywu.bsky.social
We rethink how to assess machine consciousness: not by code or circuitry, but by behavioral inference—as in cognitive science.
Extraordinary claims still need extraordinary evidence.
👉 osf.io/preprints/ps...
#AI #Consciousness #LLM

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Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 5d

Refreshing.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0o...

Give me a single reason why Sora2 should exist.

YouTube video by Hank Green

www.youtube.com

Reposted by Wyrdweaver

Jorge Morales @jorge-morales.bsky.social · 10d

Interestingly, it may just be gaps all the way down. Our experiences themselves may be built out of impoverished signals. In other words, the richness of experience is not necessarily an illusion but a reconstruction. E.g.:

Subjective inflation: phenomenology’s get-rich-quick scheme

How do we explain the seemingly rich nature of visual phenomenology while accounting for impoverished perception in the periphery? This apparent misma…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 5d

If you know exactly how LLMs work, I think many of the frontier labs would want to give you a few millions or so for your knowledge.

Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 7d

have these be open access you cowards

Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 7d

Coincidence? I think not!
www.radiotimes.com/tv/entertain...

Have I Got News For You episode removed from BBC iPlayer after Victoria Coren Mitchell error

The BBC has issued an apology.

www.radiotimes.com

Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 8d

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Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 8d

It feels like comparing running to biking while equating distance. If I want to expend as much effort, I am going to have to set higher targets.

Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 8d

Not yet, I tend to be rather coherent. Closest that comes to mind has been losing the boundary between my partner and me when I was waiting for them to gather themselves during their first experience while I was holding them

Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 9d

People like Codex these days but nothing is really good at that, ime unless things have changed significantly since I last looked at it

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Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 9d

Which studies and polls?

Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 9d

Chatgpt will quote you now if the query is niche enough which I found out when we were discussing Kirsch on the server, take that as you will

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Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 11d

The AI2027 calculations are quite silly, which has been pointed out since it came out
www.lesswrong.com/posts/PAYfmG...
It seems like a result of working backwards from a predetermined prediction to make a model by setting the 6+ free parameters post hoc on 11 datapoints.

P.S. Goodhart, not Godwin.

A deep critique of AI 2027’s bad timeline models — LessWrong

Thank you to Arepo and Eli Lifland for looking over this article for errors. …

www.lesswrong.com

Reposted by Wyrdweaver

Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 12d

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 13d

That's quite the chart annotation.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A chart of "Major concerns of PhD candidates." The top text says, "Financial pressures top the list of concerns faced by PhD candidates, but concerns differ among the sexes. Those studying in the United States rank the political landscape as their main worry." The chart shows that in the full survey, political landscape is the biggest concern for about 20% of students (a bit higher for women than men) but there's an annotation saying "In US PhD students, this rose to 64%". Overall, the highest-rated concern was financial pressures at around 40%.

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Wyrdweaver @wordweaver.bsky.social · 13d

I will admit I like your ideas re: illusionism and enjoy your podcasts, but I could do without your favour, I think.