All posts tagged: Thinking

Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines gain

Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines gain

Published by skeptic

Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D. His final day at Meta was last week, and he has since joined Thinking Machines Lab. His move to Thinking Machines Lab (TML) comes as the AI startup expands on multiple fronts. TML just signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips and making it one of the first startups to run on the hardware. The agreement, announced this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia, and puts TML in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. (Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year and has more recently been picking off TML’s founders one by one.) The talent picture remains fluid. Wang and Kenneth Li — a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month — are the latest examples of a talent …

New study reveals how political bias conditions the impact of conspiracy thinking

New study reveals how political bias conditions the impact of conspiracy thinking

Published by José Betancourt

A recent study published in Political Psychology suggests that a person’s general tendency to believe in conspiracies strongly predicts their endorsement of specific political rumors, but mostly when those rumors attack their political rivals. The research provides evidence that psychological traits and political loyalties work together to shape what people are willing to believe. These findings help explain how political divisions feed into the spread of misinformation. Previous work has identified two separate predictors of these beliefs. First, people have varying levels of “conspiracy thinking,” which is a general psychological tendency to assume that secret, sinister forces control world events. Second, people tend to favor their own political groups. They usually accept theories that blame their political rivals and reject theories that accuse their own side. The researchers designed this study to see if these two separate factors actually interact with one another. The scientists suspected that general conspiracy thinking might have a stronger effect when a rumor aligns with a person’s political bias. People naturally want to protect the reputation of their own group …

The problem with thinking you’re part Neanderthal

The problem with thinking you’re part Neanderthal

Published by skeptic

“The interpretation of genetic data is not straightforward,” Chikhi says. “We always have to make assumptions. Nobody takes data and magically comes up with a solution.”  Embracing the uncertainty  Most of the half-dozen population geneticists I spoke with praised Chikhi and Tournebize’s ingenuity and appreciated the spirit of their critique. “Their paper forces us to think more critically about the model we use for inference and consider alternatives,” says Aaron Ragsdale, a population geneticist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His own work likewise suggests that the earliest Homo sapiens populations in Africa were probably structured—and that this is the likely reason for genomic patterns that other research groups had attributed to hybridization with a mysterious “ghost lineage” of hominins in Africa. Yet most researchers still believe that modern humans and Neanderthals did probably have children with each other tens of thousands of years ago. Several pointed to the fact that fossil DNA of Homo sapiens who died thousands of years ago had longer chunks of apparent Neanderthal DNA than living people, which is exactly what …

The Strait Of Hormuz Crisis Exposes A Fatal Flaw In Economic Thinking

The Strait Of Hormuz Crisis Exposes A Fatal Flaw In Economic Thinking

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Kurt Cobb via Resource Insights, Even a 4–5% loss in global energy supply could translate into a comparable drop in economic activity due to energy’s central role in all production. Disruptions in oil and LNG flows through the Strait of Hormuz are already removing a significant share of global energy, with cascading impacts across industries. Rising energy costs trigger widespread knock-on effects—from food and travel to semiconductors—potentially leading to a severe global recession. A priest, an engineer, and an economist are stranded on a desert island. The first order of business is to get some food. The priest suggests that they all pray. The practical-minded engineer suggests that the three men make a net to catch some fish. But where will they find the necessary materials? The priest and the engineer turn to the economist and ask him if he has any ideas. The economist replies, “Assume a fish.” This well-worn economist joke summarizes one of the chief flaws in contemporary economic theory. That theory almost completely ignores the role of physical resources, assuming …

how conspiratorial thinking and wind farm opposition fuel each other

how conspiratorial thinking and wind farm opposition fuel each other

Published by José Betancourt

A generalized tendency to believe in secret plots can predict whether someone will oppose the construction of a local wind farm months later. Likewise, coming to oppose that local wind farm can deepen a person’s general conspiratorial worldview over time. These mutually reinforcing perspectives can potentially stall the transition to renewable energy sources if community concerns go unaddressed. The research was recently published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. Transitioning to renewable energy often relies heavily on the expansion of onshore wind power. Local communities, however, frequently resist the construction of new turbines in their neighborhoods. Residents might worry about changes to the landscape, the potential impact on local wildlife, or the economic fairness of the development. Without community acceptance, ambitious national goals to mitigate climate change can face severe delays. Previous research indicated that people with a high propensity to believe in conspiracy theories were more likely to oppose local wind farms. A conspiracy mentality is a general worldview characterized by the assumption that secretive, malevolent groups are orchestrating societal events behind the scenes. …

How to Break a Loop of Stuck Thinking

How to Break a Loop of Stuck Thinking

Published by Jenni Sidey

Let me tell you a funny story: A few days ago, my 3-year-old told me she had a sore armpit. I asked her some questions, concerned. I assumed she’d strained her lats hanging from the jungle gym, or something similar. Then, she showed me her “armpit.” She was showing the inside of her elbow, where she gets eczema that flares up periodically. Poor baby had a red patch that needed ointment. But what was amusing was when I said to her, “Oh, it’s your elbow,” she kept insisting it was not her elbow that was sore. It was her armpit. She adamantly told me the pointy part was an elbow, and the part she was referring to was most definitely her armpit. Her explanation was smart; it just didn’t match my terminology. Why am I telling this story? Because it illustrates one of the fundamental root causes of stuck thinking: We try to solve a problem based on an assumption of a reliable narrator. Medical doctors, mechanics, and tech troubleshooters all face these types of …

Kamala Harris Teases 2028 Presidential Run: “I’m Thinking About It”

Kamala Harris Teases 2028 Presidential Run: “I’m Thinking About It”

Published by Jenni Sidey

Former Vice President Kamala Harris has openly teased the possibility of running for president again in 2028 – telling an audience at the National Action Network’s annual convention in New York City alongside Rev. Al Sharpton: “Listen, I might, I might. I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking about it.” The crowd erupted into chants of “Run again!” as Harris spoke. “I served for four years being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States,” she told the audience. “I spent countless hours in my West Wing office, footsteps away from the Oval Office. I spent countless hours in the Oval Office, in the Situation Room. I know what the job is. And I know what it requires.” She added that recent travels across the country, especially in the South, had reinforced her view that “the status quo is not working, and hasn’t been working for a lot of people for a long time.” This isn’t her first hint… October 2025 (BBC Interview): In her first UK interview after the election, Harris gave her strongest early signal …

All Thinking Is Biased Thinking

All Thinking Is Biased Thinking

Published by Jenni Sidey

Have you ever been told you should change your attitude or that your thinking is biased in some way? Did you ever think something would turn out one way, but the result was the opposite? Perhaps your first meeting with a colleague was great, but they turned out not to be the person you thought. Many times a day, we make judgments and decisions. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were trailblazers in this area of research. They gave people tasks and asked them to make decisions and judgments (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). For example, they gave people descriptions of someone. Then the people had to choose that someone’s most likely job from a list such as pilot, farmer, or doctor. Or, based on a person’s attractiveness, they were asked how skilled the person might be. Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) is a delightful roam about this area. Biases and Heuristics From this work, patterns in our thinking called biases and heuristics were identified. For example, you can read about the confirmation bias and …

College Students Losing Ability to Participate in Class Discussions Since They Offloaded Their Thinking to AI

College Students Losing Ability to Participate in Class Discussions Since They Offloaded Their Thinking to AI

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech It’s well known that students from grade schools to the big universities are increasingly outsourcing their thinking to large language models (LLMs). The consequences are already measurable: elementary students are losing cognitive skills, leading them to tank their exams. Harder to quantify — but impossible to miss if you’ve spent any time in school lately — is the situation unfolding across classrooms, where students from all layers of society have become empty vessels that parrot the outputs of AI without critically engaging with the subject matter at hand. One student at Yale University, identified as Amanda, told CNN that the monotonous prose of ChatGPT is even seeping into Ivy-league seminars. As the student and her classmates have observed, in-class conversations among peers are becoming increasingly flat and predictable, a symptom of students leaning on AI to think through discussions for them. During one memorable awkward silence in class, Amanda told CNN she saw “someone typing ferociously on their …

How Trump Turned The Power of Positive Thinking Into Delusion

How Trump Turned The Power of Positive Thinking Into Delusion

Published by Sam Flores

Beyond personal philosophy, Peale’s political orientation is also aligned with what would eventually become Trump’s. An enthusiastic supporter of the America First movement, a precursor to MAGA, Peale opposed internationalism in general and entry into World War II in particular. He later got involved in Republican politics, supporting the presidential campaigns of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, another congregant at Marble Collegiate. (Before he married off the Trumps, Peale officiated at the marriage of Nixon’s daughter, Julie, to Eisenhower’s grandson, David, in 1968.) When Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy, Peale urged his pal to embrace the power of positive thinking and run again—just as Trump did in 2024. So, while observers note that Trump has violated traditional conservative values by levying tariffs, eschewing international agreements—ranging from the Paris Climate Agreement to the World Health Organization and the Iran Nuclear Deal—and threatening to seize other countries’ territory in the name of national security, he’s actually treading on a mentor’s well-worn ideological path. The thing is, positive thinking is necessary but not sufficient when …