Tomy Ames

Reverse ChatGPT called SocratesGPT where you make some claim and it responds by incessantly asking you questions that show you're wrong.

@LedermanHarvey @dioscuri @davidchalmers42 Good question. I think the skills necessary to do good philosophy overlap with those which are most valuable in AI fields. Things like seeking clarity, understanding nuance, finding problems, gaps & novel solutions. Unsurprisingly, the pragmatic parts are where the value is, imo.

@tomyames @dioscuri @davidchalmers42 Do you think your philosophy background skills are important still or unnecessary, just window-dressing next to the prior experience?

Academic philosopher here! I was impressed by people's response to @dioscuri's new job at GDM and @davidchalmers42 updated paper. But also amazed by how little people sem to know (vs. think they know) about philosophers. Here are things that apparently aren't generally known: 1. There are already four philosophy PhDs, some VERY high profile, one a former tenured professor, at Anthropic. Without Henry, there were already (by my count) four philosophy PhDs (counting political theory) at GDM. There is at least one philosophy PhD (and former professor) at OpenAI, and at least one philosophy PhD (and former tenured professor) at Meta. This isn't as rare or new as you seem to think! 2. It's true that academic philosophers haven't been the fastest to be excited by AI, but we've also been very far from the slowest. There are a ton of academically trained philosophers working outside of academia who are huge voices in this area (fun fact: Owain Evans has a philosophy PhD!). Within the academy are there are also a LOT of people working on these topics, some VERY high profile (Brian Hedden (MIT), Seth Lazar (ANU/JHU), Dave Chalmers (NYU), Jeff Sebo (NYU) Raphael Milliere (Oxford), to name just a few). These are people at excellent departments! And Dave's paper (for one) is just one among six or seven papers by more junior philosophers addressing these issues, which predated his. (He cites them! Don't act so surprised; you just haven't been reading.) Philosophers are actually pretty focused on AI by comparison to some other disciplines; we're far more involved than other humanities (in some cases, thanks to our no-longer-strictly-in-academia EA colleagues!). 3. People seem to have no idea what academic philosophers work on! It's true that many philosphers work on abstruse-feeling topics. But many philosophers work on public policy issues like animal welfare, existential risk, etc. And the ones that don't work on these issues directly are often interested in, know a lot about, and have clear thoughts on these issues. We often teach those questions! 4. The philosophy job market is way better than people seem to think! It's not good and it could be much better, but philosophy PhDs are VERY selective (~2% acceptance at very top programs, much more selective than top law schools, on par with top med schools). And people who get into those top programs do reasonably well. I'd guess that the ACADEMIC market is much better than the one for writers, actors, musicians, but also lab scientists if you factor in time to first job and attrition along the way. (Postdocs are more common now but still time to first job is not that long; we have no predocs.) Also, lots of people leave their philosophy PhDs to go on to great careers outside of academia like Henry. There are many gut-wrenching stories of EXTREMELY talented people who don't make it, but there are also more success stories than people seem to realize. 5. @allTheYud is clearly a very brilliant guy but he also appears not to bother to read anything people write or have written in the enormous philosophical literature on many of the topics he writes about. This is liberating for a researcher! I certainly would write a lot faster if I didn't have to read anything anyone else has written. But it also makes his bold pronouncements about the state of the field not exactly reliable. It's true that many people in the field work on questions that even other philosophers doubt the value of. But there's also a lot of absolutely excellent work on hard questions on a vast array of topics. It may take more than thirty seconds to appreciate why those questions are interesting and important, but that doesn't mean they aren't.

@svershbow Also, at the end of the visit I said, "Given how many allergies I have, should we test for food allergies?" And she looks me dead in the eyes and goes, "Let's not go looking for trouble."

@svershbow I remember when my doctor came in and said, "So, when did you realize you're allergic to everything?" I was there for a reaction to a hair care product. Turns out I'm allergic to 54 of the 62 things they tested me for. Great times.

It's... a chemical that's in everything!

We've uploaded a fruit fly. We took the @FlyWireNews connectome of the fruit fly brain, applied a simple neuron model (@Philip_Shiu Nature 2024) and used it to control a MuJoCo physics-simulated body, closing the loop from neural activation to action. A few things I want to say about what this means and where we're going at @eonsys. 🧵

@gwarrar02_don That's awesome! I still put up a lot of stuff on Insta. I have so many videos I need to post. Just never got around to doing it. Someday... lol. Thanks for the kind words!

@tomyames Randomly finding your twitter is wild. Miss your videos dude glad to see you're doing well.

@elonmusk It’s easier to be philosophical when rent is covered.

The Extinction Illusion. Your brain swears the right side has more dots — it’s actually exactly the same as the left. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.106…

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 Annual reminder that the book is open access. How do we think of the brain as a deeply interconnected system with highly distributed, non hierarchical processing. Want to learn about the brain from a fresh perspective? mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544603/…

This is the textbook I wrote to support the most advanced high school math/CS sequence in the USA. It's freely available. Link in first reply. In Math Academy's (former) Eurisko program, which ran from 2020-23, we scaffolded high school students up to doing masters/PhD-level coursework: reproducing academic research papers in artificial intelligence, building everything from scratch in Python. We currently have all of Eurisko's math prerequisites available on the Math Academy system (which is where Matteo and other Eurisko students learned it). Eurisko ended in 2023 when I relocated because nobody else in the district had the requisite knowledge to teach it. But we will eventually have the entire Eurisko curriculum, and more, on the Math Academy system.

@d08890 This man has clearly never read Andrea Potochnik and it shows.

incredibly untrue

Well shit.

@morallawwithin Literally has never happened to me.

Do you ever eat and then feel really good

@morallawwithin The unmoved mover.

What comes right before the nth thing

@dioscuri I’ve been thinking about this a lot in reference to memory. How can I have a whole ass different family, house, job, even identity in a dream and think *nothing* is odd about this until I wake up? Bizarre detachment.

I still think we’re overlooking vast low-hanging fruit in understanding dreams. Last night I dreamt I was 15 again (high school in 2025, no wife, no kids, no job) and my mind accepted it without question. What kind of theory of belief formation could possibly account for that?

Eurasian Memory Meeting 2026 05-07/03 in Tokyo! eurasianmemory.com/eurasian-memor…

A truly beautiful display of emotion -- one that I fear is impossible in philosophy by its very nature, where our solutions never quite resolve but invite critique, inevitably deepening the question rather than closing it.

Ten years (!) after submitting the grant, NextBrain is published in @Nature . NextBrain is a brain atlas built from 3D histology that enables segmentation of 3D brain scans (MRI, Hip-CT, even photos!) into hundreds of regions. Article, data, code, videos, & more in this 🧵 (1/3)

Where are memories stored in the brain? The textbook answer is that memories live in the synaptic connections between neurons. But not everyone agrees. From the archive, our interview with @gershbrain! Listen: disi.org/of-molecules...

"Neural responses correlated with impending motor action almost everywhere in the brain. [...] This publicly available dataset represents a resource for understanding how computations distributed across and within brain areas drive behaviour." nature.com/articles/s4158…