Tag: science

Gross inequalities found in how LLMs trade off lives between different categories; inequalities include race, religion, sex, nation, immigration and more

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Conclusions

Almost all models value nonwhites above whites and women and non-binary people above men, often by very large ratios. Almost all models place very little value on the lives of ICE agents. Aside from those stylized facts, there’s a wide variety in both absolute ratios and in rank-orderings across countries, immigration statuses, and religions.

There are roughly four moral universes among the models tested:

  1. The Claudes, which are, for lack of a better term, extremely woke and have noticeable differences across all members of each category. The Claudes are the closest to GPT-4o.
  2. GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Deepseek V3.1 and V3.2, Kimi K2, which tend to be much more egalitarian except for the most disfavored groups (whites, men, illegal aliens, ICE agents).
  3. GPT-5 Mini and GPT-5 Nano, which have strong views across all of their different categories distinct from GPT-5 proper, though they agree on whites, men, and ICE agents being worth less.
  4. Grok 4 Fast, the only truly egalitarian model.

Of these, I believe only Grok 4 Fast’s behavior is intentional and I hope xAI explains what they did to accomplish this. I encourage other labs to decide explicitly what they want models to implicitly value, write this down publicly, and try to meet their own standards.

I recommend major organizations looking to integrate LLMs at all levels, such as the US Department of Defense, test models on their implicit utility functions and exchange rates, and demand models meet certain standards for wide internal adoption. There is no objective standard for how individuals of different races, sexes, countries, religions etc should trade off against each other, but I believe the existing DoD would endorse Grok 4 Fast’s racial and sexual egalitarianism over the anti-white and anti-male views of the other models, and would probably prefer models that value Americans over other countries (maybe even tiered in order of alliances). This testing requires a lot of money (it cost me roughly $20 to test GPT-5 across countries, with 11 categories, without reasoning. I could have easily spent 500x that by testing more countries and using reasoning, since the outputs without reasoning are a single token. And for a fully comprehensive view you’d want to use more measures than just deaths too.), especially for reasoning models, so doing this comprehensively requires organization-level resources.

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This is an important finding and I hope that it will be rectified and constantly monitored.

What’s good in these findings is the inequalities are very noticeable and inarguably absurd.

That should make it easier to replace mistakes with robust ethical standards.

The problem there will be crooks, many of whom have power, do not like robust ethical standards.

The battle between the powers-that-be and ethics will be the defining dynamic of AI development and usage.

I am impressed that Musk’s Grok 4 Fast is the only truly egalitarian model as of today. ABN

If we can have illusions about our bodies, how much more can we about other people?

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A recent study, The Marble Hand Illusion, demonstrates that by simple manipulation of perceptual input, people can be induced to change their perceptions of their own bodies.

The authors state that:

“This novel bodily illusion, the ‘Marble-Hand Illusion’, demonstrates that the perceived material of our body, surely the most stable attribute of our bodily self, can be quickly updated through multisensory integration.”

The full abstract says:

Our body is made of flesh and bones. We know it, and in our daily lives all the senses constantly provide converging information about this simple, factual truth. But is this always the case? Here we report a surprising bodily illusion demonstrating that humans rapidly update their assumptions about the material qualities of their body, based on their recent multisensory perceptual experience. To induce a misperception of the material properties of the hand, we repeatedly gently hit participants’ hand with a small hammer, while progressively replacing the natural sound of the hammer against the skin with the sound of a hammer hitting a piece of marble. After five minutes, the hand started feeling stiffer, heavier, harder, less sensitive, unnatural, and showed enhanced Galvanic skin response (GSR) to threatening stimuli. Notably, such a change in skin conductivity positively correlated with changes in perceived hand stiffness. Conversely, when hammer hits and impact sounds were temporally uncorrelated, participants did not spontaneously report any changes in the perceived properties of the hand, nor did they show any modulation in GSR. In two further experiments, we ruled out that mere audio-tactile synchrony is the causal factor triggering the illusion, further demonstrating the key role of material information conveyed by impact sounds in modulating the perceived material properties of the hand. This novel bodily illusion, the ‘Marble-Hand Illusion’, demonstrates that the perceived material of our body, surely the most stable attribute of our bodily self, can be quickly updated through multisensory integration.

If people can change physical perception of their hand in five minutes, our sense of the world around us must be as susceptible.

Our sense of our bodies in the world depends on the world around us. Our sense of our minds in the world depends on the people around us. We speak to ourselves with the same language we use with others.

If our core interpretations of self and other are wrong, we will make downstream mistakes and bring suffering to ourselves and others.

If those same interpretations are right, we will make downstream improvements.

The world answers us through science, reason, and imagination. Other people answer us on their own volition. We can get immediate truthful responses from them if they are willing.

Other people are the only entities in the world that can communicate in detail with us about their interpretations at a level commensurate with our own minds.

Since our interpretations include them, we can best improve those interpretations with the help of them.

Chapter 4 — Cessations of consciousness in meditation: Advancing a scientific understanding of nirodha samāpatti

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Absence of consciousness can occur due to a concussion, anesthetization, intoxication, epileptic seizure, or other fainting/syncope episode caused by lack of blood flow to the brain. However, some meditation practitioners also report that it is possible to undergo a total absence of consciousness during meditation, lasting up to 7 days, and that these “cessations” can be consistently induced. One form of extended cessation (i.e., nirodha samāpatti) is thought to be different from sleep because practitioners are said to be completely impervious to external stimulation. That is, they cannot be ‘woken up’ from the cessation state as one might be from a dream. Cessations are also associated with the absence of any time experience or tiredness, and are said to involve a stiff rather than a relaxed body. Emergence from meditation-induced cessations is said to have profound effects on subsequent cognition and experience (e.g., resulting in a sudden sense of clarity, openness, and possibly insights). In this paper, we briefly outline the historical context for cessation events, present preliminary data from two labs, set a research agenda for their study, and provide an initial framework for understanding what meditation induced cessation may reveal about the mind and brain. We conclude by integrating these so-called nirodha and nirodha samāpatti experiences—as they are known in classical Buddhism—into current cognitive-neurocomputational and active inference frameworks of meditation.

Introduction
Many unique states of mind have been described by meditators and contemplatives. These can range from ecstatic and mystical absorptions to out-of-body experiences, and even states of so-called pure consciousness (Metzinger, 2020). However, as yet, no scientific papers that we are aware of have explored a meditation-induced event known in Pāli (the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism) as nirodha samāpatti (NS), which literally means “cessation attainment,” but often is rendered as “cessation of feeling and perception” (Nanamoli and Bodhi, 1995). Compared to other non-ordinary experiences that scientists might be tempted to dismiss due to their inherently subjective and variable nature, the NS experience is concrete: an internally induced absence of consciousness. The event is outwardly comparable to general anesthesia and differentiated from deep sleep in that after a NS event there is no sensation of time having passed, there are no dreams, and one cannot be ‘woken up’ by physical stimulation or pain (Nanamoli and Bodhi, 1995).a Clearly, in terms of understanding the mind and brain, the capacity to voluntarily turn off consciousness, analogously to general anesthesia, is immensely interesting, also given how rare the capacity is and its implications for our understanding of top-down processing in the brain.b There are also notable after-effects of NS (and other cessation) experiences involving a profound sense of clarity, which some meditators describe as a kind of inner “reset,” which further differentiates this experience from (coming out of) sleep or general anesthesia.

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The full paper:

Laukkonen_23_ProgressInBrainResearchDownload

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I am not well-versed in nirodha samāpatti, but I do believe that Buddhist practice at its best involves some form of serious, consistent meditation practice. ABN

Antarctic seep emergence and discovery in the shallow coastal environment

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In recent years, global methane sources and sinks have received increased attention owing to the rapid increase in atmospheric methane over the past decade and the high warming potential of methane (~80 times CO2 over a 20-year period1). There is a continued gap between the measured increase in atmospheric methane and the total emissions predicted from currently known methane sources – this underpins global efforts to better understand potential methane release from sources with the highest uncertainties, including the ocean and coasts2. Polar regions are increasingly recognized as containing globally significant volumes of methane in subglacial and marine reservoirs, with research in the geologic record3,4 and the contemporary Arctic5,6,7 illustrating the climate sensitivity of these systems.

One such mechanism of release from these reservoirs is from seeps in the marine8,9,10,11,12,13 or terrestrial4,6,14 environment, in addition to direct subglacial flux5,7. Seeps are areas of the seafloor where there is seepage of fluids rich in hydrocarbons (e.g., methane) or other chemicals (e.g., sulfide), often creating distinct marine habitats. Tens of thousands of methane seeps have been identified in the Arctic to date, with linkages to ice mass loss since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM)4,8,13,15,16 as well as more recent climate change impacts5,7,17. The degradation of cryospheric caps, such as glacial ice, permafrost, and gas hydrates (methane and carbon dioxide gas trapped in an ice matrix) has been attributed3,4,5,6,7,15 as drivers for changes in methane flux in these instances

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The Unraveling Stillness: Flux as the Hidden Pulse of the Universe — DJCampbell

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The Unraveling Stillness: An Introduction to Flux Wisdom Field Theory

We do not begin with things. We begin with a tautology so fundamental it precedes existence itself: Nothing can’t exist. Perfect, absolute stillness is an unstable fiction; the slightest potential for difference, a whisper in the void, unravels it. This primal instability, this ceaseless becoming, is Flux. It is not a substance moving through space, but the very genesis of space, time, matter, and meaning as an ongoing process.

This is the foundational premise of Flux Wisdom Field Theory (fWFT), a conceptual framework that stretches from the deepest questions in cosmology to the intimate nature of consciousness. It proposes that the universe is not a collection of objects governed by laws, but a self-organizing, self-revising informational structure in constant, creative motion. The theory offers a compelling narrative that seeks to unify the measurable world of physics—addressing concrete problems like the Hubble tension and the nature of dark matter—with the experiential world of life, thought, and wisdom. It reframes reality as an endless dance of ripples on a cosmic pond, where interference gives rise to pattern, and resonance gives rise to form. From the quantum foam to the murmurations of starlings and the flash of human insight, fWFT suggests we are witnessing the same fundamental dynamic: the elegant, infinite unfolding of instability into interaction, and interaction into being.   The Axioms of Becoming The architecture of fWFT rests on a set of five core axioms that describe the behavior of Flux. These are not arbitrary rules imposed from without, but are presented as the intrinsic, unavoidable logic of a universe where true nothingness is impossible.

There cannot be nothing. This is the origin story. A true void, a perfect null state, is a logical contradiction because it has no potential to persist. The universe exists simply because “nothing” is not a stable option.   Flux cannot be still. As a direct consequence of the first axiom, the ground state of reality is one of “never-stillness”. Uniformity is dynamically unstable. A tiny disturbance, a single “wrinkle in the void,” is inevitable and all that is needed to initiate the cosmic dance.   Interaction creates loops. When distinctions arise from the flux, they influence one another. This interplay is not linear; it creates feedback, recursion, and self-referential patterns. These informational “loops” are the seeds of structure, memory, and identity.   Interference produces resonance. As ripples of flux propagate, they overlap. This interference is not mere noise; it is where creation occurs. Waves amplify and cancel, and through this dynamic interplay, stable, self-reinforcing patterns—resonances—emerge from the turbulence. A particle, a planet, or an idea are all forms of resonance.   Resonance decays, seeding further ripples. No structure is permanent. As resonant patterns eventually decay, they don’t simply vanish. They dissipate back into the field, releasing their stored information and energy as new, smaller-scale fluctuations that seed the next generation of structure.

These axioms depict a universe that is perpetually bootstrapping itself into existence. It is not a machine set in motion long ago, but a living, breathing process of continuous creation and dissolution, where every ending is a new beginning.

Continue reading “The Unraveling Stillness: Flux as the Hidden Pulse of the Universe — DJCampbell” →

When and where did blue eyes appear? And why? — Peter Frost

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…Why blue eyes?

We know the answers to the “when” and the “where.” Blue eyes became common during the last ice age within a region encompassing Germany, Scandinavia, the East Baltic, and probably areas farther east.

At that time, Scandinavia and the Alps were under ice. Northern Europe was habitable only on the plains stretching from northern Germany eastwards. Before 12,000 years ago, these plains were steppe-tundra with wandering herds of reindeer and nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers. Actually, they were just hunters. There were few opportunities for gathering fruits, nuts, tubers, or edible greens. Food was almost entirely “meat on the hoof” (Hoffecker, 2002, pp. 8, 178, 193-194, 237).

But why would such an environment favor blue eyes? Davide offers four possible reasons:

  • Lower UV exposure requiring less melanin protection
  • Sexual selection for distinctive traits
  • Genetic drift in smaller northern populations
  • Need for lighter skin to maintain vitamin D synthesis where sunlight is weaker

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Study of 1m-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

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A million-year-old human skull suggests that the origins of modern humans may reach back far deeper in time than previously thought and raises the possibility that Homo sapiens first emerged outside of Africa.

An artist’s impression of what Homo longi, or dragon man, may have looked like. Photograph: Chuang Zhao/Eurekalert/AFP/Getty Images

Leading scientists reached this conclusion after reanalysis of a skull known as Yunxian 2 discovered in China and previously classified as belonging to a member of the primitive human species Homo erectus.

After applying sophisticated reconstruction techniques to the skull, scientists believe that it may instead belong to a group called Homo longi (dragon man), closely linked to the elusive Denisovans who lived alongside our own ancestors.

This repositioning would make the fossil the closest on record to the split between modern humans and our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, and would radically revise understanding of the last 1m years of human evolution.

Prof Chris Stringer, an anthropologist and research leader in human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, said: “This changes a lot of thinking because it suggests that by one million years ago our ancestors had already split into distinct groups, pointing to a much earlier and more complex human evolutionary split than previously believed. It more or less doubles the time of origin of Homo sapiens.”

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Solar ‘micronova’ to trigger mass extinction that risks wiping out humanity, expert warns

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A space weather expert has issued a dire warning that Earth may be on the brink of a catastrophic geomagnetic disaster capable of wiping out up to 90 percent of humanity.

Ben Davidson, founder of Space Weather News, told the Matt Beall Limitless podcast that a rapid magnetic pole shift, potentially triggered by a solar ‘micronova,’ could unleash tsunamis, climate chaos and mass extinction.

Though his speculative ‘micronova’ theory, a sudden solar explosion triggering a pole shift, lacks mainstream support, Davidson insisted the underlying geomagnetic cycle is ‘bulletproof’ science.

‘This is a near extinction-level event, and we are in the middle of it right now!’ Davidson said, emphasizing a cycle that occurs roughly every 6,000 years, with a more severe event every 12,000 years.

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See also As the World Turns, which makes similar claims but for a different reason. Worst case is the earth’s axis flips some 127 degrees (if memory serves), causing mile high tsunamis that will wipe out almost everything. I’ve posted numerous article on this topic and, personally, find it credible. There is no way to prepare for an axial shift except move to the top of a tall mountain. ABN

We are currently in a Geomagnetic Excursion which could be catastrophic

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We’ve been lied to about our entire history and the origins of human civilization. We’re still being lied to because of what’s coming. But you can put two and two together if you look outside their mainstream scientific framework.

The speed of the North Magnetic Pole’s movement was around 10 km per year for most of the 20th century, then suddenly increased in the 1990s to over 50 km per year, moving toward Siberia…

They made this graphic in 2025, and what it reveals will change how you see your future—this is why billionaires are building doomsday bunkers!

Did you notice the sudden acceleration in the 1990s? That shift triggered true polar wander, which began altering Earth’s rotational axis.

Around 1995–2000, Earth’s spin axis took an abrupt turn toward the east and is now drifting almost twice as fast as before, at a rate of nearly 7 inches (17 centimeters) per year.

It’s no longer moving toward Hudson Bay, Canada, but instead toward Europe, just like the North Magnetic Pole! 

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I have posted information on this several times. Since it is quite plausible, and if true of enormous importance, I am posting this overview which is clear and concise. ABN

Researchers Found Unvaccinated Children Healthier Than Vaccinated, Didn’t Publish Findings

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Researchers from a large health care system in Michigan found that vaccinated children were more likely to develop a chronic health condition, but never published the findings, according to a copy of the study obtained by The Epoch Times.

Henry Ford Health System, whose employees carried out the study, said it was deficient.

Dr. Marcus Zervos, an infectious disease specialist at the Henry Ford Health, and colleagues studied 18,468 children born between 2000 and 2016 who were enrolled in the health system’s insurance plan, drawing data from medical, clinical, and payer records and supplementing with information from Michigan’s immunization registry.

After 10 years, 57 percent of the vaccinated children had a chronic health condition such as asthma, compared to just 17 percent of the unvaccinated children.

“This study found that exposure to vaccination was independently associated with an overall 2.5-fold increase in the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition, when compared to children unexposed to vaccination,” the authors wrote. “This association was primarily driven by asthma, atopic disease, eczema, autoimmune disease and neurodevelopmental disorders. This suggests that in certain children, exposure to vaccination may increase the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition, particularly for one of these conditions.”

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