Debbie Foster

The Matthew Effect plays into the Great Man theory of history…. We find it intuitively easy to understand human-sized stories, where someone does something, whereas vague wafts of social change driven by multiple factors might get academics excited... but tend to leave everyone else bored to tears.

My research had reminded me of the custom of ta'arof, or never saying exactly what you mean, and three-part refusals. But I'd barely guessed, when reading of Iran, how hard it might be in life to tell where custom ends and conviction begins.

For this happened sometimes, all the time in fact; when she let her gaze go slack, then all sorts of things started creeping in at the edges, fantastic things: serpents with many heads; wolves devouring the sun. A friend studying neuroscience had told her once that eyesight was largely memory, that your brain saw a pattern and filled in the rest.

In patients with functional weakness, these imaging studies show that the structures that suppress unpleasant memories of traumatic experiences are overactive. Perhaps the neurons of the motor cortex are suppressed, too, collateral damage from a haunted brain struggling to quiet itself. In patients with functional tremors--not the circumscribed

The relevance of the death instinct isn't restricted to behaviour that is manifestly self-destructive. The death instinct is also expressed across a spectrum of mental states characterised by passivity and inertia. These states can be construed as small resistances and oppositions to vitality, and they seem particularly prevalent in the modern

So one way to make LLMs more goal-directed is just to tell them to think harder. But the limitation of CoT prompting is that it assumes that the model can effortlessly figure out how best to break down the problem into manageable steps. In fact, many real-world problems have several competing solutions, some of which may turn out to be dead ends.

His resistance to the truth about himself is expressed as curiosity about something else, a ruse familiar to psychoanalysts.

What makes you come alive? Ultimately, there is no more noble ambition than answering this question

Two tracks opened in my mind. One track held the world I knew to be real—the solid ground below me, the air in my lungs, the sun that rose in the morning. And on the other track, moving in the opposite direction, was a new reality, one I had never considered. On this track inexplicable things appeared, impossible things, ones that terrified me.