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Nathan Whitmore

@nathanww.bsky.social
86 followers 127 following 226 posts

I design tech for cognitive enhancement at the MIT Media Lab. he/him. Was @brain_juices on twitter.

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Nathan Whitmore
Mineral Cup & Ore Cup @mineralcup.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
#MinCup26 Round 2 Match 7 It's blue skies ahead as multicoloured cubes of #Halite are up against the bubbly cool-toned #Chrysocolla. VOTE: www.mineralcup.org/2026/vote-re... RESULTS: www.mineralcup.org/2026/vote-re...
Split photo of seafoam green minerals. One one side, translucent sea foam-green cubes on a crust of milky-white crystals. On the other, bobby aqua-green milky-translucent crystals perched on a grainy grassy-green base rock
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Reposted by Nathan Whitmore
Grace @gracekind.net · 08/09/2026
P != NP by the way (OpenAI do NOT steal this)
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Seems like there's a significant market for a two wish willow.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
At this point we should just bring back the theory that autism is caused by your child being abducted and replaced by a Fae child. That's not like..more wrong.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
I'm attending the NYC neuromodulation conference this weekend! (Presenting our research on slow wave entrainment). Come say hi if you're around!
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
For folks who think a misaligned AI would likely cause human extinction: Why are there still mosquitoes? After all we want to get rid of mosquitoes. We are much more intelligent than mosquitoes. Their existence is a negative for pretty much every human preference. Yet mosquitoes are doing fine.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
I see your SF AI billboards and raise you the Boston T ads
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Solar fuckin railways
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Like sorry that whale is guilty af.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Weirdly they also stated the the whale "had committed no crimes" which smells like a doth protest too much situation to me.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Normal people watching Backrooms: What?? don't go in there!!! Urban explorers watching Backrooms: ooooooh what's in there????
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
At least in the anglosphere
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
For whatever reason there seems to be much greater cultural recognition that hypothermia and frosbite are dangerous than recognition of heatstroke and dehydration as something that can kill you.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
That is essentially the whole reason we care about aging as a clinical target. If you can reverse aging, you don't have to try and treat/prevent hundreds of different age-linked problems.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
The fundamental contradiction with Bryan Johnson is that if you could actually reverse aging at a fundamental level, you wouldn't need a 4 in 1 skin peptide for the same reason 11 year olds don't need a skin peptide--your skin would just be nice on its own.
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Reposted by Nathan Whitmore
Gregg Gonsalves @gregggonsalves.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Defend Public Health has launched an all-out, multipronged campaign to block proposed new OMB rules for federal grants, which threaten to politicize all federal funding, from medical research to grants for bridge repairs and disaster relief. www.defendpublichealth.org/press-releas...
defendpublichealth.org
Defend Public Health Launches Multi-Pronged Campaign Against OMB Grant Rules | Defend Public Health
Defend Public Health has launched an all-out, multipronged campaign to block proposed new Office of Management and Budget rules for federal grants, which threaten to politicize all federal funding, fr...
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
Tbh I don't really undertsand the hype around smart rings. They are essentially smart watches with more constraints on processing and sensing capability.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Which TBH we have never been able to--at best you get a point estimate at one stage in a person's development. But now that we can no longer pretend this is meaningful I think we should drop grades in favor of curiosity driven learning.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
My undergrad didn't have grades--you just learned about stuff that was helpful for your career ambitions and then usually did some sort of final project. I think expanding this model is going to be the future if we can't reliably assess students
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Reposted by Nathan Whitmore
The Guardian @theguardian.com · 15/06/2026
Right now, we could be living through a hantavirus disaster. The world avoided that, and this is why | Devi Sridhar
theguardian.com
Right now, we could be living through a hantavirus disaster. The world avoided that, and this is why | Devi Sridhar
As the isolation period comes to an end for those caught up in the outbreak on a cruise ship, let’s celebrate a good news story, says Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh University
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Reposted by Nathan Whitmore
Kristian G. Andersen @kgandersen.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
On OMB's proposal to make all grants political: "Speak up! Now’s the time! Standing by the side of the room, glancing around nervously and hoping that somebody else does something will lead us to disaster. These are not normal times, so stop acting as if they are." www.science.org/content/blog...
science.org
Action! Action Now.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
The gas engine can operate in its most fuel efficient regime 100% of the time because the battery provides a buffer for energy?
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
In other words the virus seems to be behaving the way it usually does, which means it's probably not contagious enough to cause a large outbreak off the ship
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
This is very reassuring. An infection in a flight attendant would be a signal that for whatever reason this hanta irus is transmitting more easily than it normally does. But with infection ruled out our picture is still very limited contagious spread www.reuters.com/business/hea...
reuters.com
KLM flight attendant tested negative for hantavirus infection, WHO says
The World ​Health Organisation on ‌Friday said a Dutch ​KLM flight ​attendant who had ⁠been in ​contact with ​a woman who died from a ​hantavirus infection ​in Johannesburg had tested ‌negative ⁠for a...
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Reposted by Nathan Whitmore
Ellen Pao @ekp.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
Lancet predicts 14M more deaths in the next 4 years. That includes almost half a million children under the age of 5. www.thelancet.com/article/S014...
thelancet.com
Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis
USAID funding has significantly contributed to the reduction in adult and child mortality across low-income and middle-income countries over the past two decades. Our estimates show that, unless the a...
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
I swear Gemini is trolling me
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
So why haven't we seen it yet? I think the aggregate brain hours devoted to human enhancement is pretty tiny currently (compared to AI) and the people doing this work are often not the ones using the work (This is arguably good; it's because most researchers focus on things like dementia and stoke)
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Improving healthspan might be the first place we see this (there are a number of longevity researchers personally using their research to stay healthy longer, which makes them more productive) but I'd guess we eventually see it in neurotech too--but we haven't reached the knee of the curve yet
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
An interesting thing to think about is that recursive self improvement probably applies to humans too: it's pretty reasonable to think that we could make a researcher 15% more productive, enabling them to discover something that makes people 50% more productive, etc...
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
True though I suspect they think of that as a solvable problem, the same way they think of bone structure/height as solvable.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
People seem to get hung up on the idea that they're incorrect about what women are looking for in a partner. Which is true but pretty explicitly *not the point* www.newyorker.com/culture/crit...
newyorker.com
The Captivating Derangement of the Looksmaxxing Movement
In their warped and wrongheaded way, the omnipresent influencer Clavicular and his looksmaxxing compatriots are intent on demystifying the ideal of natural beauty.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
I actually think the reasons looksmaxxers do what they do are pretty straightforward. It's about developing a form of social capital that is intrinsic and can't be taken away
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
The children yearn for the mines.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 14/03/2026
I think the current weird state of the world makes more sense when you remember that we are quite literally living in the post apocalypse. It's been like 4 years since people were suddenly dropping dead on the street, of course things are weird.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
I think it's worth thinking about the benefits and costs of a creative world where everyone is a director, but as far as I've seen this is rarely talked about.
this.is
The name of our domain allows us to create beautiful and easy to remember URLs.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
A really common argument is that people using Suno etc are not being creative or furthering creative culture. I find this a little silly; creativity is about bringing some new vision into the world and whether you use words or strings to do that is immaterial.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
I think one thing that's missing from the AI art discourse is the acknowledgement that some creative pursuits have always been about prompting and tuning. Like film/stage directors, screenwriters, composers, fashion designers...
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Projections like this make me think we have actually reached a technological singularity (as Kurzweil defines it, a point at which the accelerating pace of change that makes predicting the future essentially impossible)
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 22/02/2026
I feel like most people don't realize that if you have a Bluetooth or WiFi enabled device on you (earbuds, smartwatch, fitness thing) it is more or less constantly broadcasting a locator beacon. www.kold.com/2026/02/17/f...
kold.com
FBI using ‘signal sniffer’ technology to search for Nancy Guthrie’s pacemaker
The device is attached to low-flying aircraft to identify Bluetooth signals, like those emitted from pacemakers.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
It's more that things like brain and behavioral complexity are not necessarilly very good indicators of consciousness. There isn't a threshold where we can say "below this level you are definitely not conscious" in a way that applies to llma
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
So one wants AI to be sentient *less* than these CEOs
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Ever since the Blake Lemoine incident every AI company has been empahtic that their models are *not* conscious, probably because if the models were conscious then their business model would just be slavery.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
We're also much more complex than a toddler but I wouldn't say that means the toddler lacks consciousness. Complexity/intelligence and sentience seem to be too separate things and we don't have good ways to measure the latter
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
This is basically the made out of meat argument though. There are differences sure, but no.one has really.given a good reason for why embodiment is *necessary* for consciousness. (And it's conspicuously absent from most of the leading models)
no.one
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
The assumption that consciousness could occur in systems with simpler/different brain organization than ours
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Technically behaviorism is a little different--its a branch of psych/philosophy that basically says "we are bad at mechanistic interpretability so the best way to understand a mind is through how it behaves". But behaviorism doesn't make any claims about consciousness.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
It's the same reason we assume some animals and young children have conscious experience, even though their brains are organized much differently from ours
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
There's also a good case to be made that the human brain contains a lot of reinforcement learning and CNN-like motifs doing various things
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Yep. That explains a lot about why priming and implicit learning work.
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Nathan Whitmore @nathanww.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Of course this argument is weaker for LLMs than for other humans, because they are *less* similar. But it implies that the closer to human behavior something gets, the more convinced we should be that it's conscious...and LLMs are the most humanlike entities we've ever seen
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