Some people are apparently claiming that Silicon Valley Tech Bros have consciousness, like normal humans.
As someone who studies these issues carefully, I can assure you that this is an utterly preposterous claim. Yes, they can mimic humans, but they are fundamentally incapable of original thought.
Would have been more convincing if he had presented some data.
Our department is hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor!! This is a joint-appointed position with Computational Social Sciences (css.ucsd.edu). It's 75+ degrees F and sunny today, just thought I'd mention apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04461
Dunno who still pays for Amazon Prime, but if you do, you might want to know that shipping is actually free for most orders w/o Prime & although it requires picking a later delivery date most of the time packages ship immediately anyway (I guess Amazon doesn't see a reason to delay shipping).
Do children reason about mental states when computing mutual exclusivity inferences? Check out this new paper from @knle.bsky.social!
Check out my new paper with @drbarner.bsky.social in JECP! We asked whether mutual exclusivity inferences involve epistemic reasoning about what a speaker knows, and whether children can infer speakers' knowledge of words from linguistic conventionality. (1/7) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Breaking News: Larry Summers will resign from teaching at Harvard as the university reviews his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Just building the case, here, for replacing "p-hacking" with "p-maxxing".
p = .054
I guess they must see the writing on the wall. No blue books for prolific.
You’re thinking about it wrong. It’s not that Italians are into chickens, it’s that Italian chickens are way smarter other chickens.
Well, it's hard to know short of them revealing their methods, which of course would be self-defeating. They claim 100% ability to detect bots (wow!), and close to that for short answer detection of AI. Both numbers seem... not real, & if real temporary.
Dunno about humans but man these chicks are SMART. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Seems like a good moment for scientists, reviewers, and especially editorial boards to think more carefully about how to view online data, and how to assure the validity of our data - that our findings are real.
With all due respect to the authors (the study raises a “potential” concern), but its framing overstates that concern imo. A few things worth flagging before everyone panics 1/
If we don't trust online testing in our classrooms due to AI & other tech, then we probably should worry more about online experimental data, especially when we are paying people to do studies, where there are huge incentives to automate, go quickly, enlist children, etc. Bots are just one worry.
One thing is sure: We often have no idea of the experimental conditions in which our participants are situated - on a bus, at a party, sober, or just doing something else. This seems not ideal scientifically.
Some great points of context. Though tbh, I think we need to think more critically about the validity of Prolific participants even if they're not bots, & how representative their responses are (unless we mean by representative, what the avg human looks like while scrolling & watching netflix).
Recent work has shown how vulnerable online survey research is to LLMs. Motivated by this, we examined our online Posner cueing data from Prolific. It's concerning. We now must carefully consider when (or whether?) online behavioral data can be trusted.
see our comment:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Approximately 40% of all studies preregistered on the Open Science Framework are never shared publicly. That’s a lot. Researchers give several reason, and null results and bad planning (or lack of priority) are the main reasons.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Possibly the best combination of dot arrays and metal possible. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lUC...
My review of Michal Pollan's book on consciousness: www.science.org/eprint/FTJG7...
Very cool new article by @urvi.bsky.social, Jessica Sullivan and @drbarner.bsky.social comparing English and Hindi speaking kids' ideas about infinity, showing a subtly more complicated view of how numerical morphological opacity relates to infinity beliefs.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
It never ends (you’ll see): another paper from @urvi.bsky.social this time on how language structure impacts children’s intuition that numbers are infinite (see?)!
By age 6, many children in the US believe that numbers are infinite, despite initially representing counting as a meaningless & finite chain of words. In a new paper w/ Jess Sullivan & @drbarner.bsky.social, we explored the basis for this conceptual change. 1/n
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
For the first time ever I actually started tracking how often I review & realized I actually review MORE than my implicit goal of 2 reviews / submission. For the first time in a while, I don't feel guilt when declining a review request. Highly recommend.
