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Showing posts from June, 2014

Salience Theory: Joined at the mind.

Each child has a fully structured brain, two cerebral hemispheres, a fully formed brain stem, cerebellum and spinal cord. There was also the bridge of tissue, through which neurological information might be shared; within days of their birth, it became apparent that if one twin was pricked with a needle, the other would cry. The existence of conjoined twins like Tatiana and Krista proved to me years ago several things about consciousness. 1) It can be distributed. 2) It is substrate dependent. :Some would read those two conclusions above as contradictory in a way, if the consciousness is bound to a singular substrate (one brain) as asserted in 2) how can it also be distributed across brains as asserted in 1) ?? The answer is that consciousness itself emerges from a piecing together of interactions between different cognitive modules that don't distinguish strongly what their sensory input drivers are. We know that the particular piece of brain that unifies the h...

More wrong hiring practices being sold as gospel.

This article describes a supposedly effective question for separating the wheat from the chaff under highly competitive hiring processes. Unfortunately for several reasons such tactics filter out excellent potential candidates in favor of those with either an agenda (money!) driving them or a pathology (sociopath!) driving them, you want to bias away from both types. Below some insights I've gained from having been on both sides of the table. Regarding "superstars": The reduced pool of jobs (particularly as concentrated in particular cities) and large relative pool of viable candidates for those jobs are allowing companies to be very picky about what they finally select and that is making it extremely difficult to land a role purely on the merits of talent *even for the superstars* particularly in areas that are dense with the type of roles that are coveted for what ever reason. NYC is a perfect example of that right now, one of the hottest markets in the world for pr...