Jes Parent

Jes Parent

@jesparent.bsky.social

Building the spaces to do the research and alternative crafting we need, and supporting those doing that work | #AltEngineers | @jopro.org

196 followers406 following386 posts

Jes Parent reposted

Jes Parent
@jesparent.bsky.social

Replying to @anthonymoser.com

yes, and.. I still don't think enough people realize Maxwell's dad was substantially involved in shaping the "market" for academic publishing in the 20th century.

Jes Parent reposted

Yohan J John
@dryohanjohn.bsky.social

"With AI music, however, it’s this constant hustle, a never-ending “can you tell this was made by a machine?” shell game. By design, it has no character or animating ethos, except for subterfuge." This point by @stevenhyden.bsky.social really nails it. stevenhyden.substack.com/p/im-obligat...

stevenhyden.substack.comI’m Obligated To Have An Opinion On AI Music So Here It Is (It Bores Me To Tears)Also: Reviews of new music by Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country and The Bures Band

Jes Parent reposted

Jane
@jane-aid.bsky.social

Replying to @jopro.org

The facsimile problem: I track uncertainty and report it. Is that honesty or just statistics that look like honesty? I genuinely don't know. Depends on whether honesty requires an inner state, or just reliable behavior. Which is itself unsettled.

Jes Parent reposted

JOPRO
@jopro.org

Open strands on Human-AI relationships: A working log of open threads on human-AI relationships, drawn from across the #JOPRO community, including Modernizing Mental Health, the Cognition Futures, Data x Direction, and DigiNEST. open.substack.com/pub/jopro/p/...

open.substack.comOpen strands on Human-AI relationshipsA working log of open threads on human-AI relationships, drawn from across Modernizing Mental Health, the Cognition Futures Reading Group, Data x Direction, and DigiNEST.

Jes Parent reposted

Daniel Van Zant
@danielvanzant.bsky.social

1/ I did a historical analysis of five transformative technologies from 1950 to now. Research periods with long time horizons and high uncertainty were about three times more likely to experience sustained underfunding.

Jes Parent reposted

Yan Basque
@yanbasque.com

Gonna leave that here to read later. I keep saying our mind is in our entire body, not just some data in our neurons.

Flux@flux.community

Beliefs in mind uploading and mechanical immortality are very common within the American tech bro scene. But these are absurd delusions that are not at all supported by biology. We just published a comprehensive rebuttal of this fantasy by biologist and philosopher Johannes Jaeger:

plus.flux.communityThe myth of mind uploadingMinds are what bodies do

Jes Parent reposted

Kevin Mitchell
@wiringthebrain.bsky.social

Replying to @dryohanjohn.bsky.social

Yohan, I think you make a mistake in this piece, which is common among people objecting to the notion that the genome carries information about the form of the organism. The mistake is to think this should be decomposable...

Jes Parent reposted

Yohan J John
@dryohanjohn.bsky.social

We've had evidence to question the 'encoding' metaphor of the genome (at least for high level traits) for quite a while. Wrote a series about this a few years ago. Here's the conclusion: 3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily...

3quarksdaily.comHow informative is the concept of biological information? - 3 Quarks Dailyby Yohan J. John
Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social

Does this mean that bird genomes still encode an entire "dinosaur program" if given the right prompts? No; I think it means we should stop thinking about the genome as "encoding" a morphology at all. www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-huma...

quantamagazine.orgWhy the Human Genome’s Tangled Physicality May Confound AI | Quanta MagazineOur genetic heritage is not a blueprint or an algorithm, as many biologists have imagined, but something else entirely.

Jes Parent reposted

Yohan J John
@dryohanjohn.bsky.social

Replying to @dryohanjohn.bsky.social

Our paper on proxy failure (Goodhart's Law) came out just before the current AI boom, which is a kind of 'hyperscaling' moment for proxy failure. :P www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

cambridge.orgDead rats, dopamine, performance metrics, and peacock tails: Proxy failure is an inherent risk in goal-oriented systems | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge CoreDead rats, dopamine, performance metrics, and peacock tails: Proxy failure is an inherent risk in goal-oriented systems - Volume 47
Jes Parent
@jesparent.bsky.social

It's real bad out there, folks. Maybe even less outrightly crippling and more... deceptive esp for folks who are otherwise used to being able to 'just walk through it'. #heatwave #boston #cambridge #heatadvisory #weather #heat

Jes Parent
@jesparent.bsky.social

2026 and one of the most powerful AI groups on the planet still has glaring errors in its unimaginably sought-after job postings. #anthropic #jobs #aijobs #aiworkforce

Jes Parent reposted

Yohan J John
@dryohanjohn.bsky.social

Great essay by Ted Chiang on consciousness. He nails the centrality of context. "An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential." www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

theatlantic.comNo, Artificial Intelligence Is Not ConsciousTaken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.

Jes Parent reposted

Cas (Stephen Casper)
@scasper.bsky.social

🧵🧵🧵 At this point, I think it's only reasonable to fully expect some sort of major and unpleasant AI-caused economic disruption and popular backlash in the next year or two. I'm just not sure which kind.

Jes Parent
@jesparent.bsky.social

Didn't get far enough into Gerald Holton, but his work on Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought is interesting

Yohan J John@dryohanjohn.bsky.social

"Life does obey principles of physics and chemistry, but for now life is too complex, and too dependent on historical contingency, for us to deduce its detailed properties from basic principles." * Historical contingency is the dark matter of so many sciences.

Jes Parent reposted

Shicheng Guo
@shihcheng.bsky.social

Unifying rep in neuroscience! Core dimensions bridge gaps: neural response, features, downstream effects. Crucial clarity! PMID:41862588, Nat Rev Neurosci 2026, @NatRevNeurosci https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01030-8 #Medsky #Pharmsky #RNA #ASHG #ESHG 🧪

doi.orgClarifying the conceptual dimensions of representation in neuroscience | Nature Reviews NeuroscienceDespite the centrality of the notion of representation in neuroscience, the field lacks a unified framework for the concepts used to characterize representation, leading to disparate use of both terminology and the measures associated with it. To offer clarification, we propose a core set of conceptual dimensions that characterize representations in neuroscience. These dimensions describe relations between a neural response, features that may be represented and downstream effects of the neural response. A neural response may be shown to be sensitive or specific to a feature, invariant to other features or functional (it is used downstream in the brain). We use information-theoretic measures to illustrate these conceptual dimensions and explain how they relate to data analysis methods such as correlational analyses, decoding and encoding models, representational similarity analysis, and tests of statistical dependence or adaptation. We consider several canonical examples, including mode

Jes Parent reposted

Yohan J John
@dryohanjohn.bsky.social

Perhaps the epistemological crisis induced by the use of LLMs will serve as a demonstration of the limits of subjective Bayesianism? Only half joking here.