u/roughman99

I’m wondering whether the following hypothesis is plausible, and whether there is any literature that already tests something close to it.
Some autistic savants can calculate the weekday of an arbitrary date extremely quickly, sometimes without being able to clearly explain the algorithm they are using. One possibility is that this is not ordinary explicit symbolic calculation, but an unusual learned computation implemented implicitly in high-level cortical circuitry.
A comparative experiment with apes might help distinguish this from a more evolutionarily ancient pattern-learning account.
You could train symbol-competent apes on a large number of date-like inputs mapped to one of seven outputs according to a hidden Gregorian-calendar-like rule. Importantly, the animals would never be taught the rule explicitly.

Then test the following:

a) memorization of trained examples
interpolation to unseen combinations within the training range
b) extrapolation to dates far outside the training range
c) performance around structurally informative cases such as leap-year and century-like boundaries

Run the same task in ordinary humans and, ideally, people with exceptional calendrical calculation ability.

My hypothesis would be that apes may become very good at memorization or local interpolation but fail at systematic long-range extrapolation, whereas human calendar savants may generalize rapidly despite being unable to verbalize the procedure.
If that happened, would it be reasonable to interpret it as evidence that calendrical savantism depends on a human-specialized frontoparietal/prefrontal computation that can operate implicitly, rather than simply enhanced associative pattern learning?
More specifically, is there a known reason to think anterior prefrontal cortex, hierarchical rule representations, or human-specific frontoparietal connectivity would be necessary for this kind of implicit algorithmic generalization?
And has anything remotely like this been tried in comparative cognition?

So I have been coding with Claude Code and Codex for a while now. There is a pretty big problem with using these agents in the long term.

First things first- deadlines are much tighter now, and rightfully so, because we can do much more. But while your coding agent is working on a new feature, you are not expected to wait around while it just does its thing. You need to be opening up another tab and work on the next feature.

This is crazy because humans are limited in the number of tasks they can work on at the same time. Context switching is expensive for the brain to do.

Switching agent tabs endlessly to maximize your work output is terrible for your mind. Is there not a huge thing in psychology called mindfulness now where you need to focus and be mindful of the present moment? This is the EXACT opposite. Instead of being present in the moment you think about which one of the tasks I’m doing is done and what’s next.

The thing is that no one cares about our mental health. They care about us delivering- and the truth is that we CAN deliver. We can get a lot done with these coding agents. But at what cost?

I think I’m going to need to create some rules for myself to not overdo it with these coding agents - and maybe we are going to have to think of a better way for us devs to manage our workload while keeping us sane in the long run.

Wdyt?

I seem to see a problem with data scientists being obsessed with graph ml without any real reason. Like really trying to force it on problems that can be solved much easier. I call this graph psychosis because graphs are the type of thing that can represent pretty much anything in the world but is totally unreasonable in many cases.
Is this a real phenomenon? Do you know anyone like this?

When I was younger, before I got rolandic epilepsy, I was really terrified of epilepsy in general. In quite an unusual way, my whole family remembers it.

I read in the book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” about two cases that were interesting-

1. The woman who lost her sense of proprioception 2. The woman who heard spontaneous music because she had temporal lobe epilepsy

Two of these cases had some sort of early signs, in the first case the woman dreamt about losing her sense of body before it happened. In the second case the woman was humming, for a long time, the songs that occurred during her seizures.

I was wondering if my case could be explained similarly- perhaps my subconscious somehow knew this was going on. I think it had to be no more than 2-3 years before my first seizure that I was terrified of epilepsy.

Anyone had a similar case where they had some sort of “precognition” of their own epilepsy? You thought about epilepsy maybe? Scared of it? Etc?