Ari Benjamin
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aribenjamin.bsky.social
Ari Benjamin
@aribenjamin.bsky.social
250 followers 220 following 72 posts
Computational neuroscientist in the connectionist tradition.

https://ari-benjamin.com
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aribenjamin.bsky.social
It is possible to work on neural networks as a neuroscientist and actively oppose how AI is developing and how it will affect society.
November 2, 2025 at 10:14 PM
Reposted by Ari Benjamin
matanmazor.bsky.social
Consciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations

my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field.

osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
October 10, 2025 at 6:05 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
Truly crazy - Texas groups are demanding absolute ideological alignment.

There are multiple TT job calls at Texas public universities right now. I will not be applying.
expressnews.com San Antonio Express-News @expressnews.com · Sep 18
Mark A. Welsh III resigned as president of the Texas A&M University flagship on Thursday in a stunning fallout that comes a week after a viral “whistleblower” video circulated that raised questions about a professor’s teaching on gender identity issues. bit.ly/4mrwjVD
September 19, 2025 at 1:20 AM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
Do you plot transcriptomic data, coloring each cell by its cell type? ~ Don't use a default colormap! ~

Instead, use colormaps that capture biological meaning. If two cell types are very similar, their colors should be similar too. Read on 🧵

🧬💻
September 18, 2025 at 4:03 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
This is real – Anthropic just agreed to a $1.5B class action settlement for authors of copyrighted works it stole. File your claim here: www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

Unclear if this is just 'books' or journal articles too, but I'm putting mine in anyway
www.reuters.com/sustainabili...
ryanestrada.com Ryan Estrada @ryanestrada.com · Sep 6
Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.
Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI
Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.
www.theatlantic.com
September 8, 2025 at 1:56 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
what’s crazy is how they figured this out. makes for good science reading!

“Replication of an alien genome within one’s own cytoplasm echoes the endosymbiotic domestication of organelles [mitochondria]. Clonal males may thus be regarded as organelles at the superorganism level” 🤯
September 3, 2025 at 11:44 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
This interview of Monica López-Hidalgo by @analog-ashley.bsky.social is inspiring. All scientists’ job description should include this, great model
thetransmitter.bsky.social The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · Sep 1
Neurociencias Para Todos brings neuroscience education to remote communities in Mexico. @analog-ashley.bsky.social‬ talked with founder Monica López-Hidalgo about the program’s efforts and the importance of making neuroscience accessible to all.

www.thetransmitter.org/community/br...
Bringing neuroscience to rural Mexico
Monica López-Hidalgo’s outreach program, Neurociencias Para Todos, gives schoolteachers tools to bring neuroscience to their communities.
www.thetransmitter.org
September 2, 2025 at 8:50 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
who is liable when an error is made by a BCI-using human with AI intervening in the output? The human? The BCI manufacturer? No one?
September 2, 2025 at 12:16 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
Get on my wavelength, man
August 30, 2025 at 3:42 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
Oh no how is it that "neuromodulation" means such different things across communities? Who let this happen?

For the record, the right answer is serotonin, etc.

The wrong answer is brain stimulation in a medical context, DBS, TMS etc. I will endlessly defend this turf.
August 29, 2025 at 6:26 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
me: Dang I wish there weren’t such incentives for self-promotion all the damn time

also me: *logs on to see what papers folks are promoting today*
August 15, 2025 at 8:07 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
“scientific progress can’t be cleanly separated from questions about our values. By aiming for a value-free science, we risk missing the political and moral values already implicitly embedded in the technologies we create.”
August 15, 2025 at 10:39 AM
Reposted by Ari Benjamin
mosheroperandi.bsky.social
I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts.

Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment
crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...
There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence. So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone. Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism. No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
July 13, 2025 at 1:07 AM
Reposted by Ari Benjamin
glassbottommeg.bsky.social
Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird.

(he drew a bird into a spectrogram, played that sound to a starling, and the starling reproduced it back to him with enough accuracy he got his bird drawing back in their call's spectrogram) www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQC...
I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird
YouTube video by Benn Jordan
www.youtube.com
July 28, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Reposted by Ari Benjamin
carlbergstrom.com
One man cannot, overnight, change a fact as written in thousands of copies of hundreds of different books across the world's libraries.

But under pressure from the politicians or guided by his own depravity, he can rewrite history overnight by altering the output of the LLM he owns.
July 24, 2025 at 12:33 AM
Reposted by Ari Benjamin
sagan.bsky.social
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower, Former President of the United States
June 22, 2025 at 12:51 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
TIL that Earth and the inner planets don't have stable orbits. Their eccentricities evolve chaotically, and by a lot. In about 1% of simulations, inner planets collide with each other in the next few billion years

www.scholarpedia.org/article/Stab...
Numerical integration of the averaged equations of motion of the solar system 10 Ga backward and 15 Ga forward. For each planet, the maximum value obtained over intervals of 10 Ma for the eccentricity is plotted versus time. For clarity of the figures, Mercury, Venus and the Earth are plotted separately from Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The large planets behavior is so regular that all the curves of maximum eccentricity appear as straight lines. On the contrary the corresponding curves of the inner planets show very large and irregular variations, which attest to their diffusion in the chaotic zone
June 17, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Reposted by Ari Benjamin
rswilliamson.bsky.social
New work from the lab highlighting the differential effect of arousal on distinct excitatory projections!
biorxivpreprint.bsky.social bioRxivpreprint @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · Jun 10
Pupil-linked arousal differentially modulates cell-type-specific sensory processing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.09.658645v1
June 10, 2025 at 10:01 AM
Reposted by Ari Benjamin
jayjoseph22.bsky.social
The claim that some researchers conducted scientific studies of a group of twins "separated at birth" and reared apart without contact is at best a myth, and at worst a lie.

www.madinamerica.com/2020/02/expl...
Exploding the “Separated-at-Birth” Twin Study Myth
In twin studies, pairs were often not “separated at birth." They were raised nearby, often by family members, and interacted frequently.
www.madinamerica.com
June 7, 2025 at 2:29 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
Proud of Williams College for choosing to decline all new federal grants because of anti-DEI requirements

www.science.org/content/arti...
U.S. college is first to decline federal science grants because of new DEI language
Williams College says NSF and NIH requirement related to discrimination “undermines” academic freedom
www.science.org
June 8, 2025 at 2:37 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
Interesting preprint: functional connectivity between pairs of neurons in V1 isn't about tuning properties nearly as much as it is about which neurons engage with pupil diameter. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

IMO we should be looking more often to neuromodulator receptor profiles in cortex
June 5, 2025 at 3:27 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
A study recently made the rounds here claiming that ‘interdisciplinarity reduces impact’. But, citations are inflated by bubbles. Which bubbles would pop given higher rates of interdisciplinary migration?
dingdingpeng.the100.ci Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · Jun 3
Academia will form these little pockets -- people whose theorizing is outrageous & supported by methods outdated since the 90s -- but once it reaches a critical size those people just review each others papers & grants, form societies, hand out awards etc, like a self-contained parallel society.
June 3, 2025 at 2:02 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
I’d love to see this method applied to embeddings of genes in models of single cell ‘omics data. Would be a fast way to match orthologous genes across species
emollick.bsky.social Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · May 23
Huh. Looks like Plato was right.

A new paper shows all language models converge on the same "universal geometry" of meaning. Researchers can translate between ANY model's embeddings without seeing the original text.

Implications for philosophy and vector databases alike. arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12540
May 23, 2025 at 1:20 PM
aribenjamin.bsky.social
Full solidarity with Harvard means that every institution needs to stand up and deliberately provoke Trump. Opening new fronts. It can be petty. Science and medicine has the winning cards and everyone knows it.
May 23, 2025 at 3:16 AM
Reposted by Ari Benjamin
karenho.bsky.social
it took me a very long time to learn that openly identifying problems before other people do, but not having immediate, non-threatening solution(s) in hand to solve them, rapidly increases the likelihood of being professionally punished, especially if you are a non-white woman
rincewind.run Micah @rincewind.run · May 21
everyone likes to be the guy suggesting the new product ideas, nobody likes to be the guy who says “actually this is a bad idea and we should slow it down”
May 21, 2025 at 2:11 PM