Debbie Foster

In Galton's words, we can see the foundation stones of the modern idea of genius. It is a rare gift, possessed by individuals, which allows them to achieve greatness.

Our minds evolved to understand the world, which requires that the world be understandable. And we are of this world.

Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.

"God veil our faults,' as the old folks say. A simple, much overused prayer. But what little wisdom it contains. A philosophy of sorts. I love how modest it is. I mean, they could have said, 'God erase our faults.' Now that would've been ambitious. But ‘veiľ is better. It presupposes that to live a life is to have faults, that no one is perfect and

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.

As the psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary writes in her book ‘Future Tense,’ anxiety can help narrow attention and heighten focus and detail-orientation. Anxiety can be a form of caring, of our minds highlighting what matters. It tells us that achieving our goals will require effort, and it pushes us to think about what efforts, exactly, we should

There are three basic systems at work, two enabling us to be ON, one enabling us to switch OFF. Both of the ON systems manage and direct our energies and attention towards or away from things in our world in anxiety, fear, reward or pleasure.

In 1998 Tani argued that embodiment is what drives subjective experience. When our brain makes a prediction and it proves right, sensory inputs do not rise to the level of conscious awareness; we are on autopilot. But when the prediction is wrong and not easily fixed, the discrepancy summons our attention so that the brain can bring everything it

the most important reason why AI systems are not like us (and probably never will be) is that they lack the visceral and emotional experiences that make us human. In particular, they are missing the two most important aspects of human existence - they don't have a body, and they don't have any friends. They are not motivated to feel or want like we