Laura Pike Seeley

FOR A DECADE now, many of the most impressive artificial intelligence systems have been taught using a huge inventory of labeled data. An image might be labeled “tabby cat” or “tiger cat,” for example, to “train” an artificial neural network to correctly distinguish a tabby from a tiger. The strategy has been both spectacularly successful and... See more

I realized the benefits to be gained from a formal list of mental model heuristics drawn from the decades of published research on the subject. So, I revisited the literature and sketched a list of eight heuristics for designing to support mental models.

However, Sini Eräjää, Greenpeace’s European food and forests campaign lead, said it would be “a terrible idea” to cut down natural forests and replace them with wood plantations.

Nowadays, whenever I feel scared in the face of a decision and yearn for the safety of an optimizing formula, I try to remind myself that there’s another way of feeling safe. It’s not about perfection, about invulnerability, about control. It’s about leaning into the fact that we are imperfect and vulnerable creatures and that even when we’re... See more

The brain is continually making predictions about the causes of the sensory information it receives, and it uses that information to update its predictions. In other words, we live in a “controlled hallucination” that remains tied to reality by a dance of prediction and correction, but which is never identical to that reality.