🚨📢 I’m delighted and proud to share our new @Nature paper “Online Images Amplify Gender Bias” What better day than Valentine’s Day to learn about gender stereotypes?🩷A thread 🧵.

An interesting direction for future research will be to explore whether (and ideally how) incorporating multimodal representations into LLMs shapes their capacity to emulate human embodied metaphorical reasoning, especially about metaphors relating to vision.

This work also connects to our prior work demonstrating systematic differences in color perception btwn vision classifiers (based on deep neural networks & transformers) and humans.

This work nicely complements a paper published last week showing that text-based LLMs struggle to recover sensorimotor aspects of human concepts:

Huge kudos to Ethan Nadler for leading this effort, and for our fantastic global team of collaborators: Sofronia Ringold, Tom Williamson, Antoine Pepin, Iulia-Maria Comşa, Karim Jerbi, Srini Narayanan, and Lisa Aziz-Zadeh.

This was a massive interdisciplinary effort – including physicists, neuroscientists, social scientists, and AI researchers from @GoogleDeepMind.

This has implications for the ongoing conversation around whether and to what extent LLMs can be treated as meaningful emulators of human cognition for psychological and/or sociological studies.

This suggests perceptual experience plays a role in metaphorical reasoning. It further suggests that LLMs are limited in their ability to recover the embodied aspects of metaphorical reasoning from statistical correlations among words alone.

We show that LLMs’ struggle to reason coherently about novel color metaphors and are less likely to reference embodied experience in their interpretations. By contrast, painters exhibit the highest rate of embodied reasoning when interpreting novel color metaphors.

𝐃𝐨 𝐋𝐋𝐌𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐚? In a forthcoming paper in 𝐶𝑜𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑆𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒, we show yes! But this synesthesia deviates significantly from the color associations of ppl, incl. colorseeing, colorblind, and painters

RT @NikoMcCarty: Another insane example of insect evolution. Female digger wasps:. 1. Remember locations of <10 nests at once. 2. Feed thei….

RT @Alf_N_Whitehead: "Each fact is more than its forms & each form participates throughout the world of facts. The definiteness of fact is….

Cool work!.

We are grateful to the authors of Centola & Baronchelli (2015) and Centola et al. (2018) for sharing their experimental data and for enriching discussion. We are also grateful to colleagues in the broader community who have given us helpful feedback as highlighted in our.

One key takeaway in our view is that the currently in vogue optimization-based models of human cognition and behavior may systematically overlook some of the fundamentally simple and categorical processes that characterize human social learning as satisficing. Despite their many.

Instead, participants follow a two-stage learning process akin to satisficing: they behave probabilistically until they acquire enough information to trigger a mental threshold and then their behaviors stabilize. We identify this threshold using the Tolerance Principle (TP), a

We find that dominant theories of social learning perform relatively poorly at capturing how ppl learn conventions in coordination games that task them with matching behaviors in social networks. Participants' behavior systematically deviates from imitation and optimization

I’m excited to share a preprint of a new collaboration with Spencer Caplan (CUNY) and Charles Yang (Upenn): “A Simple Threshold Captures the Social Learning of Conventions.”.

RT @michaelpollan: Tickets on sale. This should be good. An Evening with Paul Stamets, April 12, 2025 5:00PM | Ticket Office @ Zellerbach H….

RT @PhysInHistory: The friendship of mathematicians David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski reflected by Hilbert's 1909 obituary of Minkowski✍️….

RT @Amit_Goldenb: Does daily use of ChatGPT reduce loneliness? . I was very excited to see that OpenAI just published its first paper on GP….