Afternoon boost for this morning's newsletter - a really neat set of studies which show how collective intelligence can be enhanced if groups structure their discussions, breaking down big questions into smaller parts. Even when the component answers are still uncertain, the overall accuracy of the estimate improves!
https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/the-wisdom-of-deliberative-crowds
Judith Fan is the recipient of the 2026 Lila R. Gleitman Prize. Dr. Fan is an Assistant Professor of Psychology (and, by courtesy, Education & Computer Science) at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology at Princeton University in 2016, following an A.B. in Neurobiology and Statistics at Harvard College.
Congratulations!
What helps people understand conversational cues?
Correctly identifying implications correlated not just with "theory of mind", but also reflective and logical reasoning. Short-term memory? Not so much.
AI won't reduce the number of programmers. It will create millions more, because running code you cannot understand is not programming. It is faith.
https://www.ocrampal.com/there-will-be-more-programmers-not-fewer/
#programming #psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #philpsy #neurosky #philosophy
AI won't reduce the number of programmers. It will create millions more, because running code you cannot understand is not programming. It is faith. Part I — The Hypothesis The Democratization Arc, and What It Actually Produced. The prevailing narrative about AI and programming runs like this: LLMs will automate code
Do people learn more from #AI decision assistants?
This experiment found insignificant improvement in learning during and after three forms of AI-assisted decision-making, compared to human-only decision-making.
Why might #AI-assisted #dermatology decisions improve by about 10%?
Across 4,905 unaided and AI-aided decisions, clinicians were more likely to revise when the AI disagreed than when it agreed — even when the AI was wrong!
Thoroughly enjoyed this podcast about metaphor as a linguistic and cognitive phenomenon, not just a literary device.
I think I see metaphor as considerably more integral to (& hence frequent in) language than the host does, though: there are often many metaphors hidden in a single everyday sentence.
(e.g. "thoroughly", "enjoyed", "podcast", "about", "metaphor", etc. etc.: all metaphors) [1/2]
https://disi.org/the-aura-of-metaphor/
#podcast #metaphor #language #linguistics #CogSci #science #CognitiveScience
Do neuroscientists' claims about #freeWill impact students' #ethics?
A "deterministic passage ...from Crick" sometimes reduced decisions to proactively intervene in moral thought experiments compared to a "neutral #neuroscience text".
Tom Stafford
Ulrike Hahn
Nick Byrd, Ph.D.
Ben Balas
ocrampal
Gabriel Belmar 🧠✒️
Stan Carey