I’ve hosted 465+ episodes of The Armen Show since 2017, including 250+ long-form interviews with scientists, authors, scholars, researchers, and other thinkers. Conversations span human behavior, science, technology, culture, learning, decision-making, and ideas. Guests have included Temple Grandin, David Sinclair, Nicholas Christakis, Steven Strogatz, James Nestor, Derek Sivers, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Robin Hanson, and many others. Explore the show: youtube.com/thearmenshow/

We've solved a lot of things. It's interesting to see how much has shifted. It's the same land but very different.

Some will want to have you situated in StupidVille but it's important that you stay on the ground in SmartLand. These are representations of similar to cities. Also some of my writing would have LLMs exclaiming they are not part of its creation

"Another parallel is context-dependent activation. You do not use all of your knowledge equally at every moment. If you are discussing taxes, certain memories and concepts become more accessible; if you are playing tennis, a different set becomes relevant. Transformer attention and mixture-of-experts routing have a somewhat analogous property: the underlying system is large, but only particular pathways become strongly active for a given situation."

We have all these odd ways comparisons and power plays are made.

14. The easiest way to be liked by people is to reinforce their identities. This is not difficult. People will often directly tell you what the characters they play are. Then you reinforce them, even if you don't buy their identities. Remember you're doing birdsong or dancing.

8. If you are rejected socially, or ostracized from a group, it is almost certainly because of a social transgression. You will almost certainly not be informed of your social transgression. If you do receive a reason, it will probably be an invented moral transgression.

Doing things at an okay level is better than only planning them but at a superb level, because the planning not getting to the doing would negate the action potential in the planning.

Propping up too many things is unsustainable, which is why it is not a supported endeavor. If it had longevity to it, it would have a strong base behind it.

En ce qui concerne la capacité à changer ce que vous faites, il existe toujours une multitude de façons de réorganiser, de modifier ou de donner une nouvelle forme à votre journée.

That's a good one - building frameworks in the background or sending messages or whatever one might do, showcasing a lot of that can mean a lot instead of being hidden and never noticed.

It's good to see people in public that can focus and have clarity of mind, and that can set aside over-eating or constantly eating and drinking. Putting aside all the sensory material for a period of time is a sign of a person with more ability.

Encouraging forgiveness can skip a step: acknowledging what happened and hearing how it affected someone. Dr. Martha Sweezy on validation before forgiveness, from episode 415 of The Armen Show.

Being right about a political issue doesn’t give us sole ownership of the conversation. Being wrong doesn’t erase our standing as citizens. Robert Talisse on democratic disagreement, from episode 436 of The Armen Show. @RobertTalisse

Not every opportunity deserves maximum effort. But some deserve a completely different process. The important part is deciding which is which before your default level of effort decides for you. thearmenshow.substack.com/p/…

It's great to see updates like GPT-6 Astra coming out, along with research on the male fruit fly brain that has a full mapping, and all the fast-paced updates we are getting in life. It's important to keep up and take part and make use of all that is currently showing up because you can be an instrumental element in the next few years as opposed to just washing it happen or even not paying attention to it at all.

A large new GWAS of the Big Five is a useful reminder that genetic influence on personality looks less like “genes for traits” and more like thousands of tiny effects interacting with development and environment. It is interesting that the within-family results suggest the genetic associations are unusually robust rather than mostly reflecting family background.

There is acting all across the lands. Not all the acting is in movies.

Dr. Ilana Yurkiewicz @ilanayurkiewicz with Dr. Justin Sonnenburg @GutBugs2 on the microbiome as connected with increase in chronic disease

Even Douglas Hofstadter, who was seriously mathematically talented, acknowledged that there were plenty of people whose mathematical gifts far surpassed his own. He wrote about the experience of bumping up against an "abstraction ceiling" in his head. Not a hard threshold where he was suddenly incapable of learning more advanced math, but rather a soft threshold where the amount of time and effort required to learn math began to skyrocket until learning more advanced math was effectively no longer a productive use of his time. That level is different for everyone.