Category: Minds
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Narcissistic Injuries: Probably not caused by science
Sigmund Freud proposed that we have suffered three major blows to our self-image over the last few centuries: The Copernican Revolution showed us that we…
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Talent as Cognitive Attitude: It’s not what you have, but what you do with it
The differences in cognitive ability we see between people are too large to be explained by genetics. A lot of the difference is due to…
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The Narrow Beam of Consciousness: Why don’t we have more mental bandwidth?
Why is the beam of our conscious attention so narrow? We can only consciously perceive very little at any given time, even though our senses…
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Mathematica: Learning math means training your intuition
Mathematician David Bessis has written a book about what we do when we do mathematics. It’s one of the best books I’ve read recently. One…
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Feynman vs. The Abacus: Sometimes intuition wins over processing power
This is an anecdote from Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! It nicely shows what genius actually consists of: Not raw processing power (that’s what the…
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LLMs Are Not High IQ: AI doesn’t perform well in some intelligence tests
Practicing for intelligence tests doesn’t improve performance much. IQ tests really seem to measure some innate ability that is relatively unresponsive to training. Processing speed…
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Aristocracy and Ability: Two very different things
We’re not smart. We don’t work hard. We’re just posh. President of a Viennese private bank catering to the aristocracy I dislike of the concept…
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The Malleability of Intuition: How I got possessed by a benevolent spirit
Something within me takes control of my right hand and writes down the solution to the problem I have been thinking about. I don’t understand…
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Unedited: The smarter you are the easier it is to fool yourself
Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather…
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Personality Transplants
A spooky phenomenon: People who receive heart transplants sometimes change in a way that makes them resemble the donor. In some cases, they seem to…
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Terminal Lucidity
People experiencing terminal lucidity have typically suffered from dementia for a long time. Often they are gone so far they can’t talk or recognize their…
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Bigger Brains
To a first approximation, bigger brains = more neurons = smarter. Dig deeper, and it turns out to be more complicated than that. Honeybees have…
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Bees and Fish
Insects, for all their evolutionary success, aren’t smart. Take dragonflies for example. There are 3,000 extant species, so they’re doing alright, but they’re not geniuses:…
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AI Rationalizations
AIs like ChatGPT’s o3 take time to think before they answer. While doing so, o3 provides some commentary on its thinking process. For example, it…
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Questions about Intelligence
Do we understand intelligence enough to formalize it in mathematical or computer science terms? We don’t, because otherwise there’d be no need for AI benchmarking.…
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Questions about Appearance
Observing someone, watching them smile or frown or hesitate or eat or walk, we can’t help form an opinion about them. Doing so may be…
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When Being Smart is Not Enough
What kinds of problems can be solved with more intelligence, and for which is intelligence not sufficient? Dynomight speculates that a superintelligent AI could solve…
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The Egely Wheel: It fooled me
As a kid, I had a device that proved that I had the ability to move physical objects with my mind. It consisted of a…
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Why are More Neurons Better?
This is an excellent question whose answer is only obvious at first glance, asked by Scott Alexander on Astral Codex Ten. The correlation between the…
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Optical Illusions
Akiyoshi Kitaoka‘s collection of optical Illusions. He’s added to the site since 2002, so there’s a lot.
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Recurring Dreams
Did you ever have this dream: You have to take an exam that you forgot to prepare for. How about this one: You’re late for…
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The Major System
Anyone with sufficient motivation can remember almost anything. There is an ancient technique to remember hundreds of random numbers in a short amount of time…
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Optimum Introspection
I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something…
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The Mind is Flat
Our subconscious minds do the real thinking, and once they reach a conclusion, the conscious part of our mind is notified. At least that’s what…
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Where Is It Like to Be an Octopus?
Octopuses are the only smart invertebrate animals. Their brains are quite different from that of vertebrates like us: Rather than being centralised and profoundly integrated,…
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Other Minds
My five-year-old daughter said that spiders are insects and I was almost sure that they weren’t until she showed me a worksheet her kindergarten teacher…
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Coherence Tradeoffs
There is an optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation, that a too-unified society is a disadvantage, and a too-fragmented society is also a disadvantage Jared Diamond…
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Why Do We Like Music? No explanation is fully satisfying
Why do we like the things we like? For some, such as food or sex, the answer is obvious. Without them, we wouldn’t survive or…
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AI Tutoring: It’s not going to work as well as human tutoring
I’m increasingly encountering the belief that capable leaders have become rarer or have even disappeared. While most often observed in the political realm, some argue…
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Animals in Translation
Our senses continuously collect data including sounds, smells and visual input, but at any given time we’re consciously aware of only a tiny and heavily…
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The Righteous Mind
I know I’m late to the party, but Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, published in 2012, contains some important ideas. Haidt’s assertion that “anyone who values…
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The Maniac: John von Neumann, an alien among us
Biographies are a waste of time. There’s little to be gleaned from the lives of those we admire. The details of someone’s childhood or their…
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