Tommy Blanchard

What to make of the neural activity observed before the moment people report their intention to act?

Nothing much, argues @tommyblanchard.bsky.social—naturally the intention to act precedes the action. This does not challenge ‘free will’, quite the opposite:

buff.ly/7x6N5fO

Normies are just weirdos you haven't gotten to know yet

This is the front cover of the new edition of @thelancet.com (thanks to @profstevegriffin.bsky.social for sharing) #HealthPolicy #Science 🧪🧵

We Are All Hive Minds Intelligence without a central planner

New article about swarm intelligence and taking the neuron's point of view:
"Just as ant colonies regulate foraging without a leader and slime molds solve mazes without a nervous system, the human brain builds and adapts itself without a central control."

The Lego instructions for assembling “trash can beside trash bag”:

Heaven hath no joy like a 2-year-old with bubbles

What neuroscience and AI really have in common A conversation with Mike Cohen

I had a conversation with Mike X Cohen about the relationship between AI and neuroscience:

I love seeing intelligent people I highly respect saying something really stupid. It makes it clear that it’s okay if I’m a little idiot sometimes too.

Loved this book!

Not to brag, but I was just told by the coordinator of the course I'm teaching that my “delivery of satisfactory checklist items each week is noticed”

Talk about gracious praise. This is why we do the work.

26 (Hopefully) Useful Thoughts For 2026 A Listicle About Self-Control, Understanding, and Sampling Bias

26 (hopefully) useful thoughts/concepts: cognitivewonderland....

"Unarticulated thoughts often feel much stronger than they are once you say them. It’s common once you put your thought into words, to realize it sounds like just as weak an argument as the ones you criticized."

Hell yeah! It's such a good book. Very cool to have a signed copy!

Excession is mindbending because superintelligences are the main characters. Inversions takes the whole thing and lets you appreciate it from a totally different perspective.

The Player of Games?

That rocks! Tight focused story that really pulls you in and gives you a sense of life in The Culture and the devious nature of Special Circumstances. Consider Phlebas? Not as tight a story but what a wild ride.

And in each case I just find myself thinking “Hell yeah, it was a good book” instead of trying to come up with why my personal favorite is better. They’re all just so good in their own way I can’t really fault anyone for loving any particular one best.

I have 3 books left in the series, but so far Use of Weapons is my personal favorite. Whenever I finish one, I look up what other fans say, and for each one there is some group of fans saying it’s their favorite and making some case for it.

The cool thing about The Culture novels is that they’re all so good it isn’t surprising when different fans cite different favorites. Each one just builds on The Culture universe and helps you appreciate the others more by giving you a different perspective on that world.

I'm fine with a pinch of characters. What I'm complaining about is advice saying to center everything on them

But I grew up reading books about ideas and that’s what I want to write, not narratives about people who happen to work in the realm of ideas.

it to philosophical ideas. That’s the interesting bit to me, not whether Hubel wore funny ties or had a troubled relationship with Wiesel.

Maybe this is a naive view, and it probably limits my possible audience.

But it’s been done a lot, and leaves out what’s actually interesting about it to me: The logic of how the damn visual system works and how a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind vision can change how we see seeing, abstracting the scientific understanding and tying

If anything, focus on the human drama takes away from what I want to focus on—the idea drama.

I’m currently writing about the visual system. Sure, writing about Hubel and Wiesel’s early cat experiments could be neat.

I like reading Mary Roach as much as the next person, she’s amusing, but I absolutely do not want to be a writer like her. I don’t want to tell amusing anecdotes about quirky figures who happened to find something neat. I want to focus on the ideas and findings.

Yeah, often individual figures are important to talk about when exploring an idea. But advising that you need to find some interesting person as your protagonist for every science story?

Written by science journalists, they advise to focus on the elements of a story—including “characters”, meaning scientists. Find someone quirky that you can anchor the story to.

I hate that kind of science writing.

It’s amazing how demotivating writing advice can be [RANT MODE ENGAGE]

I don’t have any formal training in science writing, so I’ve read a couple of books over the past year on the topic.

I've seen articles talking about how dads roughhousing with their kids has benefits for the kids’ emotional development, but I've never seen one that mentions the primary benefit: satisfying the dad's deep-seated need to just pick someone up and chuck them across the room

Strawmen and Worldview Solipsism How our concepts carve up the world informs our views more than explicit argumentation

New article is out, talking about strawmen, steelmen, and talking past each other. "There's a conceptual gulf that makes communication difficult. We don't always appreciate the conceptual resources we are using that make things seem obvious."