Jochen Weber

fMRI Matlab package for data analysis and visualization; for downloads go to and for infos to

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@jk_rowling -- Harry tells Voldemort to try remorse. Thank you for adding this bit. Dumbledore says, "it" is beyond any of their help, and yet Harry tries: "It’s your one last chance. (...) Be Elim, and try for some remorse."
https://t.co/G5HHLhn4yX

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@jiyunhyo 😂👌

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

At last got to writing another substack post -- inspired by an online conversation with @TheTomTTran (thanks for being such a super gracious star!! and don't miss the link to his recent short film, Red Necks, at the bottom of the article!):

https://t.co/jkZsL02EK5

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@gothburz Hit on the nose — and doing kind of the same thing it seems to “confess” about: confirming the readers’ expectations about how outrageously corporate and deep-state-ish the world has become… but it guess it takes one to know one.

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

Thank you, @TheDepsych, for sharing this. Gives voice to a deep longing in me for a change in culture: instead of plastering over feelings, can we learn to be with our own and each other’s discomfort and pain over how the world seems to be tearing apart at the seams…? I hope so!

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@peterboghossian Any single interpretation leads into a trap. If one is not willing to allow people to escape from the corner one paints them into, everything goes to hell in a handbasket, and no amount of charity or application of natural-selection logic can rescue humanity from its stupidity…

[Mark Shuquan Chen @shuquan_chen]

📢 New Publication Alert at JoPaCS! Many studies use variability as a proxy for flexibility across domains. Using emotion regulation as an example, we show that variability decoupled from context can be harmful volatility. Variability ≠ Flexibility. 🧵 https://t.co/jKxr1phBd7

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@jiyunhyo Over the course of the past 18 months or so, when we started applying AI for workflows (beyond silly toy examples), my main concern has been what to trust AI with (both w.r.t. what the AI gets access to, and with what critical decision making capacities to offload to AI)…

[Jiyun Hyo @jiyunhyo]

Coke or Pepsi?

That’s how some legal executives refer to Harvey and Legora internally. Both have penetrated the Am Law 100 faster than any vendor in recent memory.

Most legal workflows and know-how have historically lived in partners’ heads.

Now those same partners are typing prompts into Coke and Pepsi.

Yes, these companies say they won’t train their models on client prompts, and contractual privacy protections exist.

But the prompts still pass through the platform. Over time that means the workflows and reasoning patterns of lawyers inevitably flow through these systems.

They can still observe patterns like:

• how lawyers frame problems
• what types of tasks lawyers run most
• how legal reasoning workflows are structured

That alone is a massive transfer of know-how.

So my question:

What prevents Coke and Pepsi from absorbing these workflows across firms, experimenting internally with AI-native law firms, and eventually launching their own firm to compete with big law once their largest contracts expire in a few years?

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@jiyunhyo When life gives you lemons… 🌧️

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@jessesingal The same is true for many professions: during the study of medicine, people learn how to care about the health of human beings, but when you start practicing within a corporate healthcare setting, all of a sudden incentives become foregrounded that are not “medical knowledge”…

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@jessesingal Hmmm, it might be worth disentangling economics as an academic pursuit, which naturally includes macroeconomics, in particular the welfare and wellbeing of nations, and economic as practiced by corporately employed economists, whose job it is to maximize profits for corporations.

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

It is a pain article to read. And I cannot fully understand everything going on in your heart. The best I can offer is something I learned through living with a Chinese husband in the US during a time when people who look “non-American” have come under increasing suspicion for being “the source of problems”:

When people begin feeling the squeezing force of “Empire” (not a nation state, but the tendency of wealth leading those in power into decadence and ignorance of those less fortunate among them), they will seek a guilty faction. And humans have a terrible biological baggage or locating the guilty party in “outsiders.”

Our heritage as tribal creatures places unreasonable trust and faith in those whom we perceive as more similar, while placing distrust and suspicion on those with identity markers easily detected and labeled as “source of evil.”

The true source of evil — our lack of appreciating each other as fully human whenever we experience uncertainty and anxiety about the future — remains unaddressed, because our loyalty stems from an unconscious impulse, extending identifying with and relying on our familial blood bonds to those most superficially similar.

This is also why, in my estimation, the empire as a pattern repeats itself: the most greedy and unconscious are most successful at bubbling to the top of the power hierarchy, because they are most ignorant about the true human need and longing for achieving a global consciousness and peace. Who cares about peace if I can own 10% more next year? Everyone for themselves *is* the cultural norm of Western societies — with temporary solidarity moments after all round calamity.

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@jambarree @Rusty_Swarf Another way I could interpret the comic: some random family guy (head of household) who kept it together, then some tragedy strikes, and because we have maximally individuated everything, his family is without support, and one of the children becomes an assassin, leading to WW3…

[Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌 @Chris_arnade]

Almost everyone I intellectually respect, and admire, ends up with this view -- either via Eastern mysticism, stoicism, Catholicism, etc.

They may not always pull it off, but they understand contentment in this life (and sometimes even fulfillment) requires a humility.

This is different from a nihilistic fatalism, because you can impact your immediate surroundings, and change your own circumstances, but there are forces far larger than you (both in the here and now, and beyond) that you cannot change.

Or, to be less egg-headed about it, you really don't need to have a take on every twitter fight, or engage in every outrage.

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@soufisticated_ Der beste Moment für mich war Kayvan's Kommentar, dass Bitcoin nicht die Währung der Zukunft ist, sondern Nachbarschaft -- ähnlich wie wenn jeder eine "gedeckte Kreditkarte" hat, braucht es eben zwischenmenschliche Beziehung, damit aus einem Leben was wird, das sich gut anfühlt.

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@alex_prompter @andrewthesmart I see it as LLMs behaving quite similar to people who have taken test-optimized education too seriously: they “know” what they know, but when faced with sampling from a genuine unknown distribution, they lack the means (or courage in case of humans) to “think” outside the box.

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@EPoe187 So long as people talk about it *in order* to propose differences as the basis for decisions others find morally abhorrent, I consider resistance as almost guaranteed. The question then becomes: how can I honestly claim I am aware of and generally willing to deal with that issue?

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

@EPoe187 Instead of making a difference between individuals and institutions (going there), maybe one can make a reasonable, scientific *and also humanist* argument about *how to* go there.

The issue I see with *talking about* topics like “race and IQ” is HOW people talk about it…

[Jochen Weber @TheNeuroElf]

Started listening, and am curious to learn more as your vision unfolds. In my heart, the vision is very simple:

I am thinking of being a member of a group of people, where when they come to an obvious obstacle on their path, and it becomes clear that without some genuine sacrifice (say, one member of the group needs to lay down their life for the remainder of the group to continue), I as much as any other member would be happy to do so — because we all know that that which makes our lives worth living in the first place will live on, and will in fact only live on when someone is willing to make that sacrifice.

And the vision I have is asking myself: would I rather live on a planet where people share that vision, or on a planet where people are ego-centric, caring only about their own, individual survival?

For me the answer is clear. And in response, I am simply choosing to live on that planet — by doing the best I can identifying the people who share that vision. I appreciate that it is currently not the majority, because we have been told over and over again that what matters in life are our “individual genes and achievements.” And I am not even saying that they don’t matter…

But if that is all that matters, the end game is really clear: those who are most successful caring about their own, individual survival will take whatever measures necessary to make that happen, hurting and killing whoever stands in their path.

Whether humans will make it remains to be seen. At least I know for myself which path I want to take.