Yohan J. John
@DrYohanJohn
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🧠computational neuroscience | emergence 🤖 Science Writer, Kempner Institute at Harvard University @KempnerInst 🎓 Lecturer at BU (views here are my own!)
Boston, MA
Joined March 2009
Here's the latest installment in my series on neuroscience and the hyperreal. I look at the potential dangers of "walled garden thinking", and why extensible modeling is important.
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Here's the next part of my series on neuroscience and hyperreality. I look at the distinction between forward and reverse modeling.
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Very sad to learn of the death on 18th July of Margaret (Maggie) Boden, a titan of cognitive science and AI. I met her many times, and respected her greatly. https://t.co/LA45gP7ncx
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Today I learned that the manifold hypothesis might be traceable all the way back to Helmholtz. From 'Operationalizing Kant Manifolds, Models, and Mathematics in Helmholtz's Theories of Perception' https://t.co/DjHN8DDArx
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I'm starting a series of essays that view neuroscience through the lens of Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality. The first part is out now.
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I love that it's not just "turtles all the way down", but turtles all the way up, down, left and right, filling up the entire plane. The reflected turtles get three stripes, as they are where three lines meet.
The proofs are over my head, but I still really love this paper. It also provides a nice metaphor for understanding emergence in a system that is completely "transparent" (since it is an abstract mathematical phenomenon). 1/n https://t.co/I6azonECrg
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Somehow this song seems appropriate. 😛 https://t.co/q9LNl7jM1f
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When someone says "brain circuit", you think:
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In which I connect some of the dots from BF Skinner to LLMs! :P
Have you ever wondered how reinforcement learning (RL) is used to train large language models (LLMs)? Check out the latest Kempner Byte, by @DrYohanJohn, which offers an intro to RL and explains how RL unlocks the potential of LLMs! https://t.co/CBIfm25EEP
#RL #ML #AI #LLMs
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Recently discovered a band called Gauley Bhai, from Kalimpong and Bangalore. Their new album 'Sunbari' is excellent. Nepali folk-rock with touches of Tuareg desert blues. https://t.co/SDxP14O0ri
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"... those who stayed shifted their attentions away from original research and toward hermeneutics: interpreting the scientific work of metahumans." Ted Chiang wrote this in the year 2000 in a sci fi essay in Nature (!?). Reminds me of research on interpretability in ML. 😛
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I had an interesting conversation with Sam Gershman recently. Check it out 👇
Check out the new Q&A with Kempner associate faculty member Sam Gershman to get a glimpse of his research on biological intelligence — including some exciting work on non-synaptic learning! https://t.co/ritn6vKObn
@PsychHarvard @gershbrain
#neuroscience #psychology #cogsci
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"LMCompress shatters all previous lossless compression records on four media types: text, images, video and audio." https://t.co/mz3LGfV5et
nature.com
Nature Machine Intelligence - Effective lossless compression requires that frequent patterns in the data can be identified. Li et al. explore using deep learning models to more effectively compress...
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Andor is a great example of a phenomenon we could call the Hegelian suspension of older genres in new ones. It's easy to discern the WW2 and Cold War spy thriller vibes suspended in (and revivifying?) a dessicated sci fi exoskeleton.
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biology is where overconfident quants go to die
DeepMind CEO believes all diseases will be cured in about 10 years ACCELERATE
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"People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work. They are right to be concerned: this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology."
The Urgency of Interpretability: Why it's crucial that we understand how AI models work
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This makes me think that an auditory approach to writing is far too often neglected — both in academic writing and in a lot of genre fiction. Analytic philosophy is some sort of formalist minimalism minus any rhythm. :P Continental philosophy is... prog rock? Jazz fusion? :P
To people asking what work 'ontological' is doing here, the answer is it slows the rhythm of an otherwise-too-jaunty sentence down a bit
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This was an interesting paper for me to wrap my head around. I came up with a little graphic that we didn't end up using, but I think some people might appreciate the visual analogy. (No points for guessing the inspiration. :P )
And for a broad perspective on how this framework helps untangle multiplexed information in neural recordings, check out our piece by @dryohanjohn. https://t.co/HttwPdziDd
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my hope is that AI can empower the Dumbest, Least talented slobs i know to replace everything i ever loved with One Million Years of Content
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