On Brains, Minds, And Their Possible Uses

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On Brains, Minds, And Their Possible Uses

On Brains, Minds, And Their Possible Uses

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Via productiva. Audio version.
Listen now (16 min) | TL;DR: Introspection on how I do things and which rules and heuristics help me to be productive. Framed as Taleb's via negativa…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
Inferring utility functions from locally non-transitive preferences. Audio version.
Listen now (14 min) | TL;DR: Fanboying JvN, then a nuts-and-bolts description of the von-Neumann-Morgenstern theorem. A connection to reward modeling…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
Task Decomposition And Scientific Inquiry. Audio version.
Listen now (11 min) | TL;DR: A curious asymmetry between making and criticizing, the scientific method as an approach to task decomposition, and a…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
Puberty as Cause X? Audio version.
Listen now | TL;DR: GiveWell-esque analysis of adolescents' suffering. Life satisfaction during puberty, ITN model, developmental neuroscience of the…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
The Unreasonable Feasibility Of Playing Chess Under The Influence. Audio version.
Listen now | TL;DR: The wonderful tradition of playing chess drunk, Marr's levels of analysis, AlphaZero, and Iterated Amplification and Distillation.
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
Serendipitous connections: applying explanations from AI to the brain. Audio version.
Listen now | TL;DR: A small shift in perspective (Elhage et al., 2021) helps interpret the ventral stream in the biological brain as the residual stream…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
Belief-conditional things. Audio version.
Listen now | TL;DR: A little winter story about making beliefs come true. Epistemic status: this is >90% written to amuse. Not 100% though.
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
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