Cameron Buckner

Far fewer Americans support political violence than recent polls suggest Well-known flaws in conventional polling methods may be creating the incorrect perception that many Americans think political violence is justified.

theconversation.com/far-fewer-am...

"If we lose hope, we're doomed."

We must continue Dr. Jane Goodall's mission and all fight for the future of the planet.

I just fended off a sophisticated phishing attempt. Lessons:

1. They knew what bank I use and spoofed its phone number, so call showed on phone as from bank.

2. They mimicked a fraud-prevention call -- someone tried to use your card, is this charge right. When you think that's going on, you get

Phillip Kieval and I have a new commentary on Binz et al.'s Centaur model and its role in discovering a new theory of human cognition:

psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

nobody will remember:
- your salary
- how “busy you were”
- how many hours you worked

people will remember:
- the twenty-first night of september
- changin' the minds of pretenders
- chasin' the clouds away

I finally found an adversarial example for humans in the wild!

I'm guessing journos are going to stop asking me why the "hard data" are so good, given the economic news has been so grim.

The lesson I hope they draw is an eternal one: Bad policy leads to bad outcomes, but the actual economy doesn't move at the pace of the political cycle.

Looks very interesting, thanks for the pointer!

Cameron Buckner delivers a keynote (Pałac Staszica, Warsaw 2025)

@cameronbuckner.bsky.social delivers his keynote on reasoning LLMs during #ESPP2025

Tobias and the Mental Machines

Home | ESPP 2025 Conference Warsaw ESPP 2025 Interdisciplinary Conference in Warsaw: Submit abstracts by March 3, 2025. Explore philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science with keynotes by Borg, Buckner, Newcombe, and Schumacher. Tra...

Keynote on Friday at ESPP:
espp2025.ifispan.edu.pl

Keynote on Tuesday at KogWis: kogwis2025.philosophy-cognition.com

these models produce for themselves before answering difficult questions and inner speech in humans, and various metrics of "faithfulness" we might apply to decide whether this text accurately portrays aspects of the underlying computational processes producing the answers.

Today I am headed to Europe to give two keynotes, at KogWis 2025 (in Bochum) and ESPP (in Warsaw).
Both talks will be about philosophical implications of and interpretation of "reasoning" models, especially drawing links between the text which occurs in the "Chains of Thought"...

Yeah, now write such a line of code for any question anybody could ask. Amazing nobody has tried that before! AI could be both easy and transparently interpretable. Such short-sightedness.

Rotman Visiting Speaker: Cameron Buckner - The Rotman Institute of Philosophy "LLMs as Models of Reasoning" Abstract: Recent advances in large language models that use self-prompting like GPT’s o1/o3 and DeepSeek have begun to encroach on human-level performance on “higher re...

www.rotman.uwo.ca/event/rotman...

Today I am giving a lecture to the Rotman Institute for Philosophy at University of Western Ontario...

And here I was hoping to eventually be able to get one that was liquid cooled...

There's another term for purely theoretical psychology that may explain this...

👀😬

Novels are just synthetic training data for humans.

Global AIDS funding to be pulled from Trump clawbacks request The White House is backing off $400 million in proposed PEPFAR cuts due to GOP objections.

Some really great news: funding for PEPFAR--about $400M for the global fight against HIV and AIDS--has been restored. Millions of lives will be saved.

www.politico.com/live-updates...

Another review of my book is out at Philosophy of Science, by Bruce Rushing and Daniel Hermann:

resolve.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The Climate Brink | Andrew Dessler | Substack The Choice is Ours: Climate Disaster or a Sustainable Future. Click to read The Climate Brink, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

here's the truth: climate change is costing us lots and lots of money. and renewables save us money.
www.theclimatebrink.com?utm_source=n...

GOP plan to sell more than 3,200 square miles of federal lands is found to violate Senate rules A plan to sell more than 3,200 square miles of federal lands has been ruled out of Republicans’ big tax and spending cut bill after the Senate parliamentarian determined the proposal by Senate Energy ...

Senator Mike Lee is now trying — for the third time — to sell-off YOUR public lands to the highest bidder.

We’ve built a bipartisan coalition to repeatedly block his efforts, and will keep doing so until he gets the message:

Our public lands are not for sale!

🏔️🏔️🏔️

apnews.com/article/publ...

China breaks more records with surge in solar and wind power Between January and May, China added 198 GW of solar and 46 GW of wind, enough to generate as much electricity as Indonesia or Turkey

China is absolutely eating our lunch www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Mechanistic Interpretability Needs Philosophy Mechanistic interpretability (MI) aims to explain how neural networks work by uncovering their underlying causal mechanisms. As the field grows in influence, it is increasingly important to examine no...

arxiv.org/abs/2506.18852

It's kinda already happening though, MI groups are already peppered with philosophers...

I am once again begging journalists to understand that tech CEOs can *say* literally any random shit about AI

Watch: AI will solve world hunger by deciphering the Voynich Manuscript!

Until there is literally any evidence AI can do said thing it’s not news, it’s just make believe

Of course, Budding hedges a bit that the metrics reviewed aren't perfect. I think this one is a good supplement if anyone is thinking about this line:
proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/...

The paper is particularly valuable in the way that it connects classic discussions of representation in earlier generations of ANNs to detailed technical discussions of recent architectural advances in LLMs. More of this, please, everyone!

Interventions on the MLP modules are robust on textual variants of the same facts, suggesting causal systematicity is satisfied (albeit approximately, and in a distributed and potentially superimposed manner).