Latest Twitter Threads by @erikphoel on Thread Reader App

Jul 31 • 7 tweets • 3 min read

1. "Education experts" have been saying for decades that we must wait to start teaching reading until 6-7 for neuroscientific reasons. These reasons appear, as far as I can tell, to be basically made up. Consider this recent article, which quotes a bunch of experts on this.

https://twitter.com/erikphoel/status/1950942957655273549

2. E.g., Maryanne Wolf says that brain myelination needs to reach a certain stage, and that teaching reading prior to 5 is "really wrong" and that she would ban teaching reading prior to 6 nationwide if she could.

Sep 10, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read

1. Neuralink's grand vision of augmenting normal humans has a serious problem: we probably have "merged" with computers as much as we can. Humans are surprisingly limited in terms of input/output to ~10 bits per second *regardless* of medium (even pure thought, etc).

2. A great example of this is that, AFAIK, Neuralink has not accomplished much more than what was done with EEG headsets 20 years ago. Even right now, you can play Elden Ring with your mind the same way Neuralink allows (to much hype).

Sep 4, 2024 • 7 tweets • 3 min read

1. There is a growing high strangeness to life in the 21st century, because products and systems are generated unconsciously.

These were hidden in a big set of Curious George stickers ordered for my kid's 3rd bday. I laughed (we almost handed them out as party favors). But...

2. Curious George was always a bit edgy, sure. He originally gets shanghaied by the suspiciously colonialist Man with the Yellow Hat.

But how could such stickers happen? Some blind scrapping of the web? AI-generation?

Jun 30, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read

1. You might remember the finding in evolutionary psychology that women prefer more masculine faces for short-term mating partners, but prefer less masculine faces for long-term mating partners.

Yeah, it doesn't replicate.

2. It's funny because, at least in a way, such much-trumpeted evopsych results are the entire underlying premise of the popular Chad meme.

Jun 25, 2024 • 12 tweets • 4 min read

1. In June's Scientific American the editors falsely linked homeschooling to abuse in order to call for things like background checks into parents. Unfortunately, SciAm neglected the base rate. theintrinsicperspective.com/p/scientific-a… 2. Similar op-eds linking homeschooling to abuse recently appeared in the Post and ProPublica. But why now?

Spurred by Covid, homeschooling has become a political battleground due to its rising popularity.

Apr 24, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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, 2024 • 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…

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