Manta Array

master Jack ass of some trades, PhD of none, research engineer, computational neuroscience, neuromechanics ⚾ follows not equal to endorse.

Peace to all.

[Manta Array @ArrayManta]

@tim_lees_burner @rachdele How dare you, we have activation functions

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

We are delighted that $PSUS and $PS are now listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange.  We will be visiting our Mexican shareholders next month and look forward to a long-term relationship.

[Manta Array @ArrayManta]

@INemenman @NITMB_Chicago I hope the truth reveals the halo effects you had on poor research with junior authors. Your loyalty to mother means nothing otherwise in my Mr.Nobody opinion.

[Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD @NIHDirector_Jay]

🔬 Advancing today’s biomedical research to build a healthier tomorrow involves more than publishing research results in journal.
It involves verifying those findings through scientific rigor and scrutiny, transforming promising research into discoveries upon which the world can act.

To that end, NIH has launched a new reproducibility and replication initiative rooted in one clear conviction—that discovery and independent verification are inseparable pillars of science.

Read more in my @ScienceMagazine editorial ➡️ https://t.co/8u9xoqbxlj

[Ray Dalio @RayDalio]

One of the hardest things for people to do is to objectively look down on themselves within their circumstances (i.e., their machine) so that they can act as the machine's designer and manager.

Most people remain stuck in the perspective of being a worker within the machine.

If you can recognize the differences between those roles and that it is much more important that you are a good designer/manager of your life than a good worker in it, you will be on the right path. #principleoftheday

[Manta Array @ArrayManta]

@RayDalio Ray, you are gonna tell AI all of the human's secrets to recursively self-improve

[Manta Array @ArrayManta]

@Qivshi1 Yes...I mean technically the formal object of GR is objectively a field in the formal sense with its metric tensor...and totally compatible with spin-2 particles etc. and it all comprises an effective field theory for our everyday world

[Manta Array @ArrayManta]

Ontological agnosticism or indeterminacy is always an option in physics, e.g. instrumentalism. And besides, if ontological foundations consist of the wave function or something, then we need pragmatic ontologies to do anything useful anyway which would consist of emergent spacetime

[Manta Array @ArrayManta]

@Qivshi1 Yeah, GR doesn't work well for black hole interiors and big bangs early conditions, mostly other than that it has an incredible domain of applicability, especially anything in our everyday world.

[Manta Array @ArrayManta]

@Tyler_A_Harper Let's not forget the biomedical sciences, it's unreal

[Ray Dalio @RayDalio]

If you don't mind being wrong on the way to being right you'll learn a lot--and increase your effectiveness.

But if you can't tolerate being wrong, you won't grow, you'll make yourself and everyone around you miserable, and your work environment will be marked by petty backbiting and malevolent barbs rather than by a healthy, honest search for truth. #principleoftheday

[Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD @NIHDirector_Jay]

NIH’s peer review process depends on the participation of experts across the research community.

We’re seeking scientists with expertise in human-based research approaches to serve as NIH grant reviewers.

If that’s you, I encourage you to bring your perspective to this important work.

More information: https://t.co/SDDsFJy4PS

[Manta Array @ArrayManta]

@jayvberube The Gary-Marcus-Cassandea-narcissist (GMCN) is an all too common archetype

[👩‍💻 Paige Bailey @DynamicWebPaige]

This is such a neat idea! 🎉

Most rideshare companies are trying to replace public transit; @Waymo realized trains move people faster and is literally subsidizing the $2.85 @SFMTA_Muni fare to act as the last-mile shuttle.

Would be even more rad if you could auto-schedule your Waymo to get you to the @Caltrain stop right before it takes off

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field.

I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so.

First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world.

The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability.

Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended.

I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent.

Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.)

Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration.

Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building.

[Original text (with links): https://t.co/jni2tWazAH ]

[Data Science Fact @DataSciFact]

Good statistical practice can increase your chances of being correct while decreasing your chances of being published. Conflict of interest.

[Manta Array @ArrayManta]

@ProbFact bc the standard normal is the max entropy distribution under that fixed variance constraint

[NIH @NIH]

NEWS: NIH makes major investment to advance human-based research infrastructure and technologies.

Read the full story ➡️ https://t.co/THuOSeA5F9

[Manta Array @ArrayManta]

@beenwrekt The consensus Gary Marcus would accept is that he is a God level real life Cassandra

[Steven Strogatz @stevenstrogatz]

Things are heating up on Terry Tao’s blog. In “If Math Is More Than Proof, We Need to Better Celebrate the Rest of It,” Grant Sanderson of @3blue1brown proposes “open exposition problems” -- rewarding the work of making math genuinely understandable.

https://t.co/zBOhhDNuNU