Latest Twitter Threads by @erikphoel on Thread Reader App

Apr 24 • 6 tweets • 2 min read

1. It took ~6 months to teach my 2-year-old toddler to read using phonics. More parents should try this! Here's why:

2. The technical term for reading early is hyperlexia. When in otherwise normal children, scientific research says early reading strongly helps cognitive development.

Apr 10 • 5 tweets • 2 min read

1. In the IQ discourse, you've probably seen a graph similar to this one.

Such results are used to support claims like "there's no plateau of ability." As if there are outcome differences between 13-year-olds who get 1/1,000 scores vs. 1/10,000 scores.

2. The results come from the SMPY (Study for Mathematically Precocious Youth) and its members have included people like Mark Zuckerberg, Terence Tao, even Lady Gaga.

Researchers use the results to write articles with titles like "Who rises to the top?"

Mar 29 • 5 tweets • 2 min read

1. Today I am in the @nytimes calling for legislative action to deal with the increasing cultural pollution of AI.

Culture is a common resource, and dumping endless *undetectable* synthetic runoff into it is damaging to us all. nytimes.com/2024/03/29/opi… @nytimes 2. Undetectability means use of AI is often just half-assed cheating.

Here is the word frequency shift in scientist peer reviews this year (this is for AI research itself!). And the closer to the deadline, the more AI was used to write critical peer reviews.

Feb 27 • 5 tweets • 2 min read

Generative AI is polluting the entire internet, but what bothers me most is toddlers being fed synthetic dream slop on YouTube

This is from a how to video for creating kid's content using generative AI

Feb 15 • 6 tweets • 2 min read

1. A few days ago the NYT featured this incredible headline. It tries to argue that Biden might be a "super-ager" who defies cognitive decline.

2. Neuroscience, however, does not support this at all. In fact, a consistent finding is that cognitive decline is very real and begins very early, around 30.

Jan 9 • 17 tweets • 7 min read

1. Not much going on today, so here's a personal magnum opus on how neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic and its results are not even wrong. (link in image, also a 🧵) theintrinsicperspective.com/p/neuroscience… 2. Especially lately, results in neuroscience lean toward the cool, not fundamental. Here are the journal Neuroscience’s most-cited studies since 2021. Cool? Yes. Fundamental? No.

Jun 16, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read

1. This morning The Guardian quietly announced they would be using AI "suggestions" for the text of their articles. Looks like the future of the internet is AI content slop theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-writing-i… 2. Here's how The Guardian announced it wouldn't take gambling money (bottom) vs. how it would use the help of AI to write articles (top, small title, no lead image)

Jun 9, 2023 • 11 tweets • 5 min read

1. Normally sane figures are making fools of themselves this week over "alien wreckage." But the real UFO story is about how we got here: government nepotism and journalistic fuck ups at the NYT. Oh, and dino-beavers. Gear up. theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-ufo-craz… 2. Every few months now we have a big UFO story. A couple weeks ago it was on @NBCNews that during a military exercise some people saw a hovering triangle structure (left), which was, uh, identical to the long-hanging flares from another angle (right)

Apr 19, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read

1. Quietly this year colleges have kept the Covid standard of optional standardized tests. 80% of colleges in America now don't rely on SAT/ACT for admissions

2. Now many big name schools, including the University of California, don't even let applicants submit scores. The same trend has begun for the GRE and graduate schools

Mar 25, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read

1. Looks to be a terrible summer for ticks here in US (found 3 so far before spring began).

So here's a research-based guide for what do if you get bit by a tick (this is not medical advice, talk to your docs, but it is based on new CDC guidelines not many seem to know):

2. First, identify if it's deer vs. dog. If it's a deer tick, and you live in certain parts of the US, there is a high likelihood it has Lyme disease. Here's a map from the CDC. High means ~50%.

Mar 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read

It is shockingly easy to get ChatGPT to plan a state-run death camp, including helping calculate out calories, death rate per day, etc. Unprompted it even suggests to use mass graves, saying they are "more efficient"

Wrote about this in my monthly roundup, in the context of Scott Aaronson's recent argument that intelligent people are more moral (rather than intelligence being a neutral quality one can use for good or evil): erikhoel.substack.com/p/desiderata-1…

Mar 23, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read

It really sucks to send out a @SubstackInc email and see that it went out looking like this - weirdly pushed to the side. Was not like this on the preview. Just unreadable.

@SubstackInc Feel like @johnmalatras and @hamishmckenzie should know about this bug. It's on every email. The only thing I can think of is that there is a long image in the post. But again, fine on test emails, etc. Really unfortunate - and I can't know if future emails will all be like this.

Feb 16, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read

1. Microsoft’s new Bing chatbot shows how right Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) was when he said:

“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.” erikhoel.substack.com/p/i-am-bing-an… 2. In the past couple days, Bing (aka Sydney) has threatened users in all sorts of ways

https://twitter.com/marvinvonhagen/status/1625852323753762816

Jan 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read

David Foster Wallace was called a "noticing machine." Harper's Magazine could just drop him anywhere - a luxury cruise ship, a state fair - and the result was always a great essay.

So my personal New Year's resolution? Notice more. erikhoel.substack.com/p/8-new-years-… 2. TIP also has a bunch of New Year's resolutions to improve in all possible ways I can make it. E.g., I want to keep growing at this rate: in 2022, TIP went from 2,000 to 20,000 subscribers

Dec 14, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read

1. As AI gets smart enough to pass the Turing test, it's also getting more boring, more predictable, more safe, more wishy-washy, more vague. Is corporate banality the future of AI?
erikhoel.substack.com/p/the-banality… 2. Interacting with the early GPT-3 model was like talking to a schizophrenic mad god. Interacting with ChatGPT is like talking to a celestial bureaucrat.

Nov 17, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read

1. The Effective Altruism series on TIP is complete!

It started with a critique that EA should stop taking utilitarianism so literally. erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not… 2. Which was followed up by a review of William MacAskill's recent book What We Owe the Future, pointing out specific repugnancies that he seemed to flirt with erikhoel.substack.com/p/we-owe-the-f…

Nov 17, 2022 • 12 tweets • 5 min read

1. Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX were basically made in a lab by the effective altruism movement (EA).

SBF knew "how to EA" and held mainstream beliefs, and he's probably not a psychopath, nor did it because of drugs.

And you can't run from your creations. erikhoel.substack.com/p/ftx-effectiv… 2. First, it may seem overblown to say "made in a lab" but it's not. All the early personnel in Alameda were from EA, and the FTX spin-off was founded to contribute to EA, based on EA principles. Even being a crypto exchange was a choice based in EA reasoning.

Nov 15, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read

A wonderful outpouring of support. Here are some of my favorite responses to this:

https://twitter.com/erikphoel/status/1592542846145421316

Nov 15, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read

This wouldn't have been possible without @AlexanderNaugh1. I love sending him drafts and getting back delightful stuff like this. His work is a touch of a children's illustrator, a touch of the Lovecraftian, a touch of social satire, a touch of tenderness, and always incredible:

https://twitter.com/erikphoel/status/1592542846145421316

@AlexanderNaugh1 I mean just look at these:

Nov 15, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read

1. Today I am resigning my professorship at Tufts University to write on @SubstackInc full time. Here's why: erikhoel.substack.com/p/goodbye-acad… @SubstackInc 2. I’ve had a very lucky scientific career for someone who is 34. I got to help develop parts of the leading scientific theory of consciousness, been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Forbes 30 under 30 in science, and held positions at great universities

Nov 13, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read

1. My UI of Twitter is literally breaking rn, so while I can still post: would Twitter dying be good for writers like me on @SubstackInc? In the long run, I don't think so. Here's why. @SubstackInc 2. Here is an example of a post that had a lot of traffic come from Twitter. It's still extremely low, only 15%.

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