John Dobbin

“The world is not a machine. We have no dominion. We must learn to collaborate with the rest of nature, living & abiotic.” —Stuart Kauffman noemamag.com/emergence-is-n…

Congratulations to Westminster Council for their acceptance of Banksy’s brilliant statue near Pall Mall. Let’s hope it stays — a welcome note of calmness and humour at a time of growing extremism.

No brain required: This is how the single-celled stentor learns, via @EurekAlert! @ucsf eurekalert.org/news-releases/…

You gotta admit—this is a pretty badass picture from the Emirati cabinet meeting.

@interintellect_ The Name of the Rose - Eco

Which contemporary novels do you think deserve to become classics? We're all familiar with the classics, from The Iliad of Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. But which contemporary novels, published after 1960, do you think will be remembered as classics years from now?

The world's steepest train. On the Scenic World Railway on the Blue Mountain in Australia, you can descend into the rainforest at a 52° angle. Originally a 19th-century coal mine railway, it now offers a thrilling tourist experience.

Yes, and the ant population vastly exceeds humans, too (by a ratio of 2.5 million to one). What’s your point?

‘Preventing conflict’ is a recipe for perpetuating old ways of thinking

@normonics @sage_teacher True: it’s what is selected for memory that’s important. Now, where are my dang keys!?

Getting memory right is important We have made great strides in memory with @sage_teacher But there is a subtlety that the below misses: Forgetting, when done properly, is a feature not a bug. We don't forget only because we "run out of space", we forget because forgetting is functional and adaptive.

1. Does research by @CaraOcobock @Anthrofuentes & others, widely reported in SciAm & elsewhere, finally dispel hunter-gatherer myths that have persisted since the 60's? In a preprint led by @vivek_vasi The Meanings&Dividends of Man the Hunter osf.io/preprints/osf/… we respond🧵

X's Grok is failing to accurately verify video footage from the Iran conflict, and is sharing its own AI-generated images about the war. wired.com/story/fake-ai-…

In defense of Dubai. A very personal essay about the city on the cover of today’s @WSJ Review. wsj.com/world/middle-e…

𝗗𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 Another mega paper that deserves close attention. Lots of implications, including emergence and evolution iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108…

@ChiefDisrupter All good

@JohnDobbin Thanks buddy 🙏🏼 hope you and fam are ok

I have a desk at UTS started my PhD in Finance and this week going to my first class in Multivariate statistics. I’ve met other PhD students mostly in their final year. I’m building a Longevity Retirement Security Index (LRSI) for Australia to predict retirement security.

@JonoH @TheNationalNews Another good article on it here:

If you just heard some booms in Abu Dhabi and Dubai it could be a THAAD interceptor going up. Here is a good article from @TheNationalNews yesterday on the tech. thenationalnews.com/news/mena/2026… Be vigilant, stay safe.

@SVG__Collection Awesome album

“Blow by Blow” by Jeff Beck was released on this day in 1975.

The @Guardian's "Ideas Interview" profiles "tech legend @stewartbrand" on the occasion of his new book #Maintenance: Of Everything from @stripepress and discusses his views on "#Musk, #Bezos and his extraordinary life" theguardian.com/technology/202…

The BBC just released a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies, the classic novel by William Golding. It's beautifully made, but it's still telling the wrong story. A few years ago, I went looking for the *real* Lord of the Flies. I wanted to know: has it ever actually happened? Have kids ever been shipwrecked on a deserted island? It took me a year of research, but I found it. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and drifted for eight days without food or water. They washed up on 'Ata, a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, and what happened on that island was the exact opposite of William Golding's novel. These boys set up a small commune. They built a food garden, stored rainwater in hollowed-out tree trunks, created a gym with improvised weights, and built a badminton court. One of them, Stephen (who would later become an engineer) managed to start a fire using two sticks. They kept it burning the entire time. Of course they fought too. But then they argued, they had a rule: go to opposite ends of the island, cool down, then come back and apologize. As one of them told me: ‘That's how we stayed friends.’ Back home, everyone assumed that the boys – Luke, Stephen, Sione, David, Kolo and Mano — were dead. When they were finally discovered by an Australian captain named Peter Warner, he radioed their names to Tonga. After twenty minutes, a tearful response came back: ‘You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it's them, this is a miracle!’ Peter commissioned a new ship, hired all six boys as his crew, and named the boat the Ata, after the island where he found them. They remained friends for the rest of their lives – Peter and Mano even became soulmates. I tracked them down, and it became one of the central chapters of my book Humankind. Here's what struck me most: William Golding (the author of Lord of the Flies) was a troubled man, an alcoholic who once said ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am of that sort by nature.’ I think he was projecting his own darkness onto children. And we turned it into a lesson about human nature that we teach to millions of kids around the world. I think the real lesson is the opposite. When real children found themselves alone on a real island, they didn't descend into savagery. They cooperated, they took care of each other, they survived. I'm not saying that the Tongan castaways were representative of all kids everywhere. But I am saying that every kid who has to read or watch the fictional Lord of the Flies also deserves to know what actually happened when it played out in real life. Stories are never just stories. We become the stories that we tell ourselves.

Google research confirms multi-agent systems degraded performance by 39–70% on sequential reasoning tasks, with independent agents amplifying errors by 17.2x. perplexity.ai/page/why-ai-ag…