"The brain is much less like a machine than it is like the murmurations of a flock of starlings. Behaviors arise from interactions, not central control. Essay on the #EntangledBrain by Luis Luiz Pessoa #Neuroscience #ComplexityScience #CognitiveScience aeon.co/essays/how-the…

Conventional human language or vocab is always an approximation of human-interpretable reality — never its true representation. This is good enough to get by for everyday tasks. But not if you want to understand the fundamentals of reality. This is where math comes in.

Social identities shape our beliefs This new paper offers compelling evidence for the Identity Model of Belief: randomly assigning people to groups lowers their threshold for believing information that aligns with their identity. "These results support theories that emphasize

Ooph. Using AI, people did much better on practice tests, and notably worse on actual exams, when the AI was unavailable. AI might not be good for actually learning yet!

Is consciousness a measurable scientific fact—or a private mystery of the "Self" that science can’t solve?🌀 Since the Cambrian explosion, life has evolved to move, feel, and survive. But when did "survival" turn into experience? Science can map the brain’s wiring, but can it

Exercise improves brain health, but can it also delay brain aging? In a randomized controlled trial, we show that moderate- and heavy-resistance training significantly reduced accelerated aging in brain clocks (estimated with fMRI). The effect is global and distributed, not

we have long known that people who live at altitude die less from cancer. Arc Institute investigators developed an "altitude-in-a-pill" drug that tunes how your red blood cells bind to oxygen today, they demonstrated this enables potent anti-tumor activity in cancer models 🫢

I resigned from OpenAI on Monday. The same day, they started testing ads in ChatGPT. OpenAI has the most detailed record of private human thought ever assembled. Can we trust them to resist the tidal forces pushing them to abuse it? I wrote about better options for New York Times Opinion

AI is cool and all... but a new paper in Science Magazine kind of figured out the origin of life? The paper reports the discovery of a simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that can perfectly copy itself.

"Without evolutionary framing, each generation can label any novel technological transition as 'unnatural,' using their own experiences as a baseline while ignoring other preexisting societal conditions that are plausible evolutionary mismatches." psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-…

Feels a bit like that 2020 phosphine on Venus announcement. Not conclusive yet but it's among the better explanations we're currently left with. We need the mars sample return mission ASAP

Everyone is likely going through their own inner storm. While you may not know the details of their storm, as long as you can keep the storm in mind, it can be enough.

1/ New Post!! I've had 1-on-1's with ~75 fellows across AI safety/governance fellowships and keep noticing that a lot of fellows can't really reconstruct from scratch why they believe AI poses an existential risk. Here's what I think is going on and how to fix it!

The sigmoid can stay exponential longer than you can stay relevant

This should be a much bigger story. Whether we survive the age of automated military surveillance and weapons systems should not depend on whether individual CEOs are willing to stand up to threats from the most powerful government in world history. axios.com/2026/02/23/heg…

That isn’t a metaphor. Without effective antibiotics, common infections become dangerous again, and procedures we take for granted—hip replacements, organ transplants, cancer chemotherapy, neonatal care—become far riskier or impossible. What’s pushing us in that direction?

The universe may appear ideal for our type of life. But if there are other universes, intelligent entities may think the same about their fundamentally different universe.

happy Anthropic day for those who celebrate

Anthropic is obviously in the right in their conflict with the USG. As far as I can tell they have acted with integrity, and I support them in standing their ground. I am also worried this will create a set of martyr and prosecution beliefs at Anthropic. Just because you have