Juan Orbea

NeuroengineeringStudents will learn the fundamentals required for understanding neural circuits and designing and building interfaces between neurons and artificial neural hardware. Suggested subjects are 6.002, 6.003 and 6.009.

Girard's point o departure is what he calles "mimesis," the conflict that arises when human rivals compete to differentiate themselves from each other, yet succeed only in becoming more and more alike. At certain points in the life of a society, according to Girard, this mimetic conflict erupts into a crisis in which all difference dissolves in... See more

Socrates isn’t giving many graduation addresses these days. Yet this wisdom is at the heart of a new generation of aptitude assessments intended to help individuals, including middle- and high-school students, understand themselves better.

This future is only possible if we remove the many obstacles standing in the way of building new infrastructure. New power plants, transmission lines, transportation infrastructure, and better energy technology are all being held back by red tape that stop us from building a better future. This paper will help us show policymakers and thought... See more

Complexity – A typical complex system is composed of myriad individual constituents or agents that once aggregated take on collective characteristics that are usually not manifested in, nor could easily be predicted from, the properties of the individual components themselves. For example, you are much more than the totality of your cells and,... See more

We also cover some of Chris’ personal passions over the years, including his attempts to reduce what he calls ‘research debt’ by starting a new academic journal called Distill, focused just on explaining existing results unusually clearly.

Domesticated type – has the ability to coordinate much larger groups of people than the wild type, and he does this by taking consciousness and culture and making a move that simplifies both of them, while maintaining a substantial portion of their capacity to generate synergistic capabilities, and enabling social systems to scale. We move from... See more

A superintelligence is a mind that is much more intelligent than any human. Most of the time, it’s used to discuss hypothetical future AIs.