Bookshelf My Reading List Since I was a very tiny human, reading has been my entertainment, stress relief, and education. In 2012 I started tracking the books I read in a list, as part of an effort
Bookshelf On Truth, Trust, and Confidence In “On Bullshit” Harry Frankfurt argued that bullshitting constitutes a more insidious threat to civilized life than lying. “On Truth” was written to provide an explanation (hopefully convincing) why truth is so important.
Bookshelf Why I Read Papers The research process is about identifying important new problems. It seems that, like many skills, one of the best ways to learn how to do this is by observing first hand how more
Bookshelf Finding the Engram Josselyn et al. - 2015 The authors discuss primarily the process of finding the cellular basis for memory (the "engram") via circuit neuroscience in mice. They compile a body of evidence based on
Bookshelf How Does the Brain Solve Visual Object Recognition DiCarlo et al. - 2012 Core object recognition (something primates are great at) is the ability to rapidly distinguish/identify an object visually without prior information, even when the object changes context. This
Bookshelf Team Reasoning and Intentional Cooperation for Mutual Benefit Sugden’s defense of deliberate socially-conscious decisions in a marketplace combines game theoretic toy examples with virtue ethics, social psychology, and philosophy. Beyond relying on Revealed Preference theory, Sugden provides convincing explanations for
Bookshelf Cognition in the Wild Hutchins’ anthropological study of a team involved in the navigation of a Navy ship reveals the manner in which complex computational tasks are executed via a social organization. His observations of the way
Bookshelf The Origins of Cultural Cognition Tomasello et al. - 2005 The perennial favorite question of philosophers and biologists alike--"What makes humans human?"--gets extra mileage from a team of evolutionary anthropologists. The authors address the problem that
Bookshelf Bayesian Models of Human Action Understanding Baker et al. - 2006 The authors address the challenge that trying to infer plans, which, according to the previous paper is a necessary skill of collaboration. They do so by comparing their
Bookshelf A Framework for Consciousness Crick and Koch - 2003 The authors present the following 10-point framework that characterizes the neural correlates of consciousness as a theory of competing cellular assemblies. The “front” of the cortex is an