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Dan Butler

@danieljbutler.bsky.social
178 followers 492 following 176 posts

interests: software, neuroscience, causality, philosophy | ex: salk institute, u of washington, MIT | djbutler.github.io

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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 14/07/2025
The Bluesky Python SDK is so cool!
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 24/06/2025
Cool work out of @arcinstitute.org . My question is, do models like this let us perform novel in-silico experiments the way first-principles models do, or are they just clever way of extrapolating existing experimental data from one context to another?
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Philip Hubbard @philiphubbard.bsky.social · 18/06/2025
Cleaning up disk space, I found this image I made for someone not long after the release of the #HHMIJanelia #Drosophila hemibrain #connectome in 2020. It shows EPG neurons in pink providing inputs to PFL1 neurons in transparent grey. I'm not sure if the image was ever used.
Two sets of connecting fly neurons with fine, wispy arbors.
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Ricard Solé @ricardsole.bsky.social · 08/06/2025
Against reductionism: "Our understanding of the world is built up of innumerable layers. Each is worth exploring, as long as we do not forget that it is one of many. Knowing all there is to know about one layer (...) would not teach us much about the rest". Erwin Chargaff
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
To all the international students, post-docs, scientists, and other academics I’ve been friends with over the years - we support you, and we want you here
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
There’s this idea that intelligence involves good predictive models of the world. But most of our lives, we can barely predict anything. We are however extremely good at explaining things in retrospect. I expect human-like AI will be similar
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Manlio De Domenico @manlius.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
The response of IIT researchers to the 2023 paper labeling the field as pseudo-science. This is the only way science can go ahead: debating. Still, this is an opinion piece and I think that it's the time for calling the necessity of evidence in support of any theory www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Consciousness or pseudo-consciousness? A clash of two paradigms - Nature Neuroscience
Integrated information theory (IIT) starts from consciousness, which is subjective, and accounts for its presence and quality in objective, testable terms. Attempts to label as ‘pseudoscientific’ a th...
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 11/03/2025
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 08/03/2025
What exactly has to change about a data-generating process for the new data to be “out-of-distribution”? Who’s to say that the thing that changed isn’t just an under-sampled variable in the joint distribution?
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
Great read - and free!
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 26/01/2025
Reading “The Emergent Multiverse” by David Wallace, and it is *by far* the best explanation of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that I’ve read. Now I think MWI’s name is a total misnomer. (1/2)
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 24/12/2024
It would be interesting to use these as test-cases for an AI scientist. Can an AI come up with explanations for how these artificial lifeforms work?
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Is someone going to make a Chimpanzee Cell Atlas so we can do a diff and figure out what makes us different?
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
Ooo looks juicy. I wish there were some mention of AI/ML - all these scientific AIs are going to need to deal with levels of explanation
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
That feeling when you're journaling and you write / think your way to a better understanding
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
The learning hypothesis is false. Functional neural circuits are genetically programmed
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
Super interesting. I guess the key question is whether structures like this are found in real models
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Is there a way to hide re-posts in my Bluesky feed? I’m also guilty of re-posting quite a lot, but this is getting ridiculous. I follow people because I want to know what *they* have to say
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Ugh I was wondering why he wasn’t on here. One of my fave accounts on X
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
@philipgoff.bsky.social does it bother you that the causal structure of the brain that makes it produce utterances like "I see this inherently subjective redness" would be the same whether the universe were composed of subjective redness or not?
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
I love this post, but one nitpick: science isn't just about compressing the facts either. Compression is a side-effect of the real goal, which is to find explanations. Proof: imagine a highly compressed representation of a system, versus an explanation of that system - which does the scientist want?
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
What do learning theorists think of ARC-AGI by @fchollet.bsky.social ? Are there theory papers that are relevant?
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Laura @lauraruis.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
How do LLMs learn to reason from data? Are they ~retrieving the answers from parametric knowledge🦜? In our new preprint, we look at the pretraining data and find evidence against this: Procedural knowledge in pretraining drives LLM reasoning ⚙️🔢 🧵⬇️
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Mike Schatz @mikeschatz.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
Sometimes you just have to persevere through negative reviews. Reviewers, please be kind :) #methodsmatter bit.ly/gs2-scholar
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NPR @npr.org · 24/11/2024
The Foldscope brings a powerful science tool to schools that can't afford microscopes. Scientists use it too. Its creators have handed out 2 million units, including a new mini-model for younger kids.
npr.org
Fold paper. Insert lens. This $2 microscope changes how kids see the world
The Foldscope brings a powerful science tool to schools that can't afford microscopes. Scientists use it too. Its creators have handed out 2 million units, including a new mini-model for younger kids.
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
Both are true: LLMs are low-intelligence, LLMs are useful. How? Because they're mostly doing memorization - plus interpolation. AI researcher Francois Chollet does a lovely job explaining this: open.spotify.com/episode/5mpm... Hand-wavey but convincing, in my opinion.
open.spotify.com
Pattern Recognition vs True Intelligence - Francois Chollet
Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) · Episode
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
Anyone have refs to quantitative models of what is going on here? Which genes are switching on and triggering which downstream effects?
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
One possible path for NeuroAI is ending up with a very complex "digital twin" and no real insight into how it works. But hey, AlphaFold and LLMs are changing the world and no one really knows how they work, so maybe I shouldn't be concerned.
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Great time lapse video of expansion microscopy
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
@alxndrmlk.bsky.social are you familiar with Joseph Halpern’s book Actual Causality? Looking for people or resources to help me understand a few key points in there
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Bluesky is an open federated protocol but has a moderation system, correct? So what happens when two users on two servers with different moderation standards interact and one server tries to remove the content of one of the two users? Does the convo look different on each server?
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
@philipgoff.bsky.social what is a panpsychist explanation (or sketch) of why the brain has internal representations of qualia but not electrical charge (or other fundamental physical quantities)?
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Can Bluesky facilitate these kinds of intense discussions? Or is it just too crowded?
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
... and boy does this make neuroscience harder. I love the "Can a biologist fix a radio?" series of papers, but artificial systems tend not to exhibit the same degree of redundancy as biological systems - in that sense they're actually *easier* to understand
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Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 29/04/2024
Great psychologist turned philosopher Mariel Goddu and I wrote this Nature review of the development of human causal learning, 20 years worth of comparative, developmental, philosophical and computational work. Empowerment included. Free to read at this link. nature.com/articles/s44...
nature.com
The development of human causal learning and reasoning
Nature Reviews Psychology - Humans have a unique capacity for objective and general causal understanding. In this Review, Goddu and Gopnik describe the development of causal learning and reasoning...
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Dan Butler @danieljbutler.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
"What Emergence Can Possibly Mean" - great read from Sean Carroll (@seanmcarroll.bsky.social) and Achyuth Parola arxiv.org/abs/2410.15468
arxiv.org
What Emergence Can Possibly Mean
We consider emergence from the perspective of dynamics: states of a system evolving with time. We focus on the role of a decomposition of wholes into parts, and attempt to characterize relationships b...
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