Debbie Foster

But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions —and to live with them.

When it comes to learning, Triumph is the real foe; it’s Disaster that’s your teacher. It’s Disaster that brings objectivity. It’s Disaster that’s the antidote to that greatest of delusions, overconfidence. And ultimately, both Triumph and Disaster are impostors. They are results that are subject to chance. One of them just happens to be a better

A confabulation is not a falsification; unlike a fabulist, a confabulator has no intent to deceive, but he also has no insight that the stories he tells are entirely of his own invention. Rather, a confabulation is a story that is true for the person who tells it, even if the facts have no grounding in the real world: a new memory in the place of

being an adult was all about not pointing out the obvious in situations where the obvious was too painful to take in.

The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense.

Success is the lifelong experiment of discovering what makes you feel most alive.

So approximations to many of the rules that linguists proposed to explain human language learning may actually emerge in LLMs, and remain hidden among the near-infinite complexity of their billions of trainable weights. Ironically, the transformer does seem to have been serendipitously named – it learns from scratch to carry out some of the very

Superattractors are "super" for two reasons. First, they are complex packages of functionally interrelated cultural attractors. Like a machine built from an array of interacting components, shamanism involves non-ordinary states, narratives of otherworldly contact, and goal-oriented services. Hero stories include not just triumphant endings but

Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.