Confessions of a researchaholic

I came across this interesting article about a psychiatrist who chose this profession due to his own early childhood symptoms and later decided to work in a prison because that is where the need is greatest.

Over the holiday season I read the following books (all in audio or electronic formats via hoopla), which, in retrospect, seem to depict one form or another of dystopia:

• Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
• Symbol Formation in Psychoanalysis by Marisa Pelella Melega
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Black Box by Shiori Ito
• Fall by Neal Stephenson

And I would say that reality beats fiction.

I highly enjoy reading this book by Cade Metz as a brief history of machine learning (and mostly neural networks) and a tabloid on the main characters involved. You probably won’t learn much about the actual science, but you will likely be entertained and inspired.

The most profound chart I have seen for a while; see the paper (and video presentation) here.

I read this book for the first time in 2016 after it won the Booker prize, and re-read it again during a recent period of no internet access.

The story centers around a woman who started by refusing to eat meat and gradually transitioned into refusing to eat anything at all as she believed she is becoming a plant. The book is divided into three parts from the perspectives of three different characters: the husband, the brother-in-law, and the sister of the main character. The plot is very imaginative and sensational (Korean pop style), especially the second part, while the third part is much darker and meditative.

The book is a good read, but I am not sure about the Nobel literature prize.

Just (belatedly) finished this book, which I found to be very easy and enjoyable to read, and full of interesting insights and perspectives.

The humans are essentially programmable and thus can advance faster than biological evolution which constrains other kinds of life forms on earth.

Our language and writing systems facilitate the preservation and transmission of knowledge across space and time beyond our individual brain capacity, and our ability to cooperate in large numbers allows us to build complex societies and technologies as well as to wield great damages to our environments.

This is an excellent overview of the evolution of biological intelligence and the relationships to the progress of artificial intelligence so far, covering the five major stages of steering, reinforcing, simulating, mentalizing, and language. Perhaps the major takeaway is the hierarchical structure of different brain components specializing in different tasks, analogous to the computational higher-order and global workspace theories as surveyed in https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708.
The text is very easy to follow and the illustrations are nice to look at.

I guess it is more intimidating to draw Taliban fighters than Caltrain passengers.

I avoid Duolingo Pro so that I won’t have enough hearts to to too many exercises.