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FAMU Sports Hall of Fame announces 50th anniversary celebration
The FAMU Sports Hall of Fame will celebrate its 50th Anniversary with the induction of its newest class on Sept. 18, 2026, at the Al Lawson Center.
Sweet treats stir up sweet memories at downtown Doniphan business
Within these walls, bright, cheery colors, the smells of warm chocolate and caramel, and the sounds of laughter welcome both the young and young at heart who
Google Calendar expands color options for event differentiation
Predefined colors nearly double and there's now a color picker
Nuanced differences on business issues separate Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls
Both Democratic gubernatorial candidates vow to boost Colorado's business atmosphere, but they offer different approaches to doing so.
Colorado influencer uses social media to cover elections
Influencer Haley Metzger's Instagram explains Colorado politics to tens of thousands.
Early-Onset Cancers Are On The Rise. Knowing Your Family History Is Crucial.
By Cara Anthony and Blake Farmer - Nashville Public Radio and KFF Health News HealthDay ReportersWEDNESDAY, June 17, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Bryce Ramsey of Madison, Mississippi, was 33 when she was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Upon noticing blood in her stool, she blamed the hemorrhoids she’d developed after delivering her son eight years earlier. Ramsey didn’t initially link her symptoms ...
Deion Sanders' Son Ready To Get His Health Checked After Cancer Survivor Father's New Initiative
Deion Sanders’ health scare began with a routine scan, the kind that most men would rather delay. Fortunately, it caught his bladder cancer early, and now the Colorado head coach is trying to push that lesson onto other men, starting with his eldest son.
Where Colorado's Republican gubernatorial candidates stand on business issues
The Republican gubernatorial candidates largely agree on issues like housing and job creation but offer different implementation plans.
A graduated tax plan could undercut Colorado’s business competitiveness, analysis warns
A proposal to move Colorado to a graduated income tax — taxing individuals and businesses at different rates based on their earnings — could generate more than $2 billion in its first year, but it may also weaken the state’s business climate, according to a new analysis from the Common Sense Institute. Initiative No. 195, […]
Kraft Group files complaint against Town of Foxboro over entertainment licensing - Boston News, Weather, Sports
FOXBORO, MASS. (WHDH) - The Kraft Sports + Entertainment Group filed a complaint against the Town of Foxboro, accusing it improperly charging fees to renewRead More
Kraft Group sues Town of Foxboro over entertainment licensing - Boston News, Weather, Sports
FOXBORO, MASS. (WHDH) - The Kraft Sports + Entertainment Group is suing the Town of Foxboro, accusing it of misuing its licensing authority. The companyRead More
Blue state’s anti-ICE pledge collapses as GOP warns of new sanctuary ‘confederacy’
Colorado reverses controversial requirement that attorneys certify they would not share court information with federal immigration enforcement agencies.
Central City Flower Girls: A treasured tradition marks its 94th year
CENTRAL CITY OPERA Central City News: The 94th presentation of the Central City Flower Girls got off to its usual booming start, thanks to a perfectly timed dynamite blast that reverberated from an undisclosed location within earshot of the Teller House Garden. The window-rattling boom may startle those unfamiliar with the time-honored tradition, but it generates knowing smiles and a smattering of applause from everyone else. Once the sound subsides, master of ceremonies Roopesh Aggarwal, vice president/investor relations […]
Colorado primary for U.S. Senator: Candidates John Hickenlooper and Julie Gonzales
The race between U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper and state Sen. Julie Gonzales has emerged as one of Colorado’s most intriguing Democratic primaries. Gonzales is running on a message of generational change, arguing that Democrats need a more aggressive approach and that a vote for Hickenlooper will just mean “more of the same.” Hickenlooper, a fixture […]
The Microsoft Surface Laptop 8 and Surface Pro 12 now come with Snapdragon X2 chips
New colors and high prices.
Colorado health clinic reopens months after shooting
Samsung S95H OLED Review: Not Quite the 'Ultra' Frame TV We Wanted
The Samsung S95H OLED TV is great for gaming, while its color performance could have been better.
Monday Musings: Road tripping
Happy Monday, errrrrrbody. Hope your weeks have gotten off to a great start. It’s been a minute for me on here. Went out West on vacation and had a heck of a time. Hit up western Colorado and eastern Utah. Mesa Verde, Moab, national parks, etc. Pretty damned nice weather and scenery. And that trip […]
Scientists Break Major Barrier: Are We Closer Than Ever to Real Invisibility? - Futura-Sciences
From H. G. Wells to Stealth Mode Invisibility has long been a topic that fires up our imagination. From the colorful camouflage suits designed to outsmart surveillance cameras, to military-grade technology meant to dodge radar, humanity’s efforts to disappear are almost as old as fiction itself. While we’re still far...
Colorado Attorney General Democratic primary: Meet the candidates
One of the most closely watched contests on the June primary ballot is the four‑way Democratic race for Colorado attorney general. With Attorney General Phil Weiser term‑limited and running for governor, attention has shifted to the candidates vying to replace him and the qualifications they bring to the state’s top legal office. Running for attorney […]
NWA Women in Business: Kelli Stueve
Residence: Springdale Education: B.S., mathematics with computer science minor, 2003, Morningside College; MBA, emphasis in finance, 2012, University of Colorado Denver Professional background: Stueve has more than 20 years of...
Secretary Kennedy Joins Secretary Burgum to Launch GetActive.gov During Colorado ‘Take Back Your Health’ Tour
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. launched GetActive.gov, a new national resource to help Americans improve their health.
Colorado flips three-star offensive tackle from powerhouse SEC program
Colorado football pulled off an impressive recruiting flip Sunday evening, landing a three-star offensive tackle from a top SEC program.
Rockies Hit Early, Often, and Late in Destroying Athletics
Colorado Rockies decided to have some batting practice in Las Vegas on Sunday, totally dominate Athletics.
Puerto Rican Day Parade marches through Manhattan with pulsing music and vibrant colors
New Yorkers who weren’t partied out after the Knicks championship found another excuse to celebrate as the National Puerto Rican Day Parade marched through Manhattan with pulsing music and vibrant colors.
Puerto Rican Day Parade marches through Manhattan with pulsing music and vibrant colors
New Yorkers who weren’t partied out after the Knicks championship found another excuse to celebrate as the National Puerto Rican Day Parade marched through Manhattan with pulsing music and vibrant colors | Talk 1370
Puerto Rican Day Parade marches through Manhattan with pulsing music and vibrant colors
New Yorkers who weren’t partied out after the Knicks championship found another excuse to celebrate as the National Puerto Rican Day Parade marched through Manhattan with pulsing music and vibrant...
Colorado health startup helping people with cystic fibrosis stay active
Why I’m voting Democrat
It makes no sense to be a Republican in Colorado. Or a Democrat for that matter. On the day I turned 18, even before I bought my first legal 3.2 beer (remember 3.2 beer?), I went to the courthouse and registered to vote (remember registering to vote?). I joined the Republican Party. Even at 18, […]
Opinion | Dennison: I’ll fight for responsible spending, reducing unnecessary regulations and help small business and more if elected
Like many Coloradans, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated watching Washington become more focused on partisan gamesmanship than solving real problems. Families, workers, retirees and small business owners across Colorado are facing challenges that politicians love to...
Avalanche Expect Full Health Despite Makar Injury Questions After Playoff Exit
From the mat to Mount Elbert, Summit County’s female athletes find success in male-dominated sports
Jess Gresho’s nails are usually painted pink. She often has glitter on her face, and her athletic gear — from her ski pants to her running shoes — boasts bright colors and funky patterns. But...
Colorado Politics Calendar June 15-21
CoPo’s weekly political calendar helps you find political and public policy events throughout Colorado. It includes candidate and issue campaign events, public policy meetings, court hearings, state and local party conventions, assemblies, debates, rallies, parades, speaking engagements, traveling dignitary appearances, water meetings, book signings, county commission hearings, city council meetings and more. As a subscriber, […]
Legislative primaries could determine whether business issues take top priority
Voters will decide 23 legislative primaries on June 30. Many pit candidates focused on economic issues with those focused on social issues.
It’s my tree. Why can’t I cut it down?
Can the government stop you from cutting down your own tree? In many towns and cities these days, removing a tree now requires a permit. You might have to pay a fee, or promise to plant replacement trees. But sometimes, the city won't let you cut down the tree at all, even a tree in your own backyard.That's because trees are important for air quality, for flood control, and for public health. They help keep neighborhoods cool on hot days. But some think that tree protection laws have gone too far — that they might even be unconstitutional.On today's episode, it's the latest showdown between property rights and local zoning laws. Typically, towns and cities enjoy a lot of power when it comes to zoning and permits. They can ban certain types of buildings. They can make you paint your house a certain color. But can they make it illegal to cut down a tree? And what does it mean to "own" a piece of property anyway?Support:Planet Money+Read: Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletterOur weekly Indicator round-up newsletterFollow: InstagramTikTokYouTubeFacebookThis episode of Planet Money was hosted by Jeff Guo and Amanda Aronczyk. It was produced by James Sneed and Emma Peaslee, edited by Jess Jiang, and fact-checked by Vito Emanuel. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez and Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
5 Zelda Characters I'm Excited To See In The Ocarina Of Time Remake (And 5 That Need To Stay Away)
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake is just around the corner, and with it comes a whole lot of colorful (and sometimes creepy) characters.
Bose QuietComfort Ultra Bluetooth Headphones (2nd Gen) drops to lowest price on Amazon
The Bose QuietComfort Ultra Bluetooth Headphones (2nd Gen) in five colors are on sale at Amazon at 16% off the MSRP. It delivers powerful noise cancelling with Bose Immersive Audio and comes with plush ear cushions.
Nissan's Nostalgic 2027 Z Gets More Than Just A New Face
As the refreshed Z arrives in showrooms, Nissan honors its roots, while packing in a host of modern upgrades, like new colors inside and out.
Northern Highland Fishery Research Area Celebrates 80 Years Of Internationally Recognized Fisheries Science
On June 20, 2026, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) celebrates the 80th anniversary of the Northern Highland Fishery Research Area (NHFRA), one of the longest-running fisheries research projects in the world.
Stance On Science Wants Science Elevated In Colorado
Science affects every part of our daily lives in Colorado, yet too often, it is left out of the decisions that build our livelihoods.
iOS 27: All the New Health and Fitness Features
Apple was rumored to be working on an AI health service, but it was scrapped well before the iOS 27 beta came out. It could resurface in the future, but for now, there are a handful of health and fitness changes in the update. Design Apple redesigned the Browse section of the Health app, and it now uses a card-style interface instead of a list. It is more colorful and easier to see the different categories.
Diamondbacks fans demand accountability after sweep by Marlins
PHOENIX — After winning four series against the Colorado Rockies and San Francisco Giants before the end of May, Arizona Diamondbacks fans hoped the momentum would carry into June. Unfortunately, the opposite happened, and now they’re demanding accountability.
Opinion | Dennison: I’ll fight for responsible spending, reducing unnecessary regulations and help small business and more if elected
Like many Coloradans, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated watching Washington become more focused on partisan gamesmanship than solving real problems. Families, workers, retirees and small business owners across Colorado are facing challenges that politicians love to...
Opinion | Dennison: I’ll fight for responsible spending, reducing unnecessary regulations and help small business and more if elected
Like many Coloradans, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated watching Washington become more focused on partisan gamesmanship than solving real problems. Families, workers, retirees and small business owners across Colorado are facing challenges that politicians love to...
Douglas County and Children’s Hospital Colorado partner for new youth mental health crisis services
Today’s youth face a fresh set of expectations and societal pressures that can be difficult to manage. That’s why the Douglas County Board of County Commissioners approved an agreement with…
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. to visit Fort Carson, Colorado
Hidden Nazi symbols discovered in famous German artist’s painting
The white and blue Bavarian flag in this urban landscape used to be a very different color.
More Americans Are Using AI for Health Questions
As more adults, including those 50-plus, turn to AI for advice, research highlights certain limits and concerns, reinforcing the need for human medical oversight.
Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology
Our typology sorts the public into nine groups based on their political and cultural values, not their party – painting a picture of American politics with far more than two colors.
A classic brain test exposed AI's biggest weakness
Researchers gave top AI models a classic attention test used in psychology and found a major flaw. While the models could correctly name colors in short lists, their performance deteriorated sharply as the task became longer and more complex. Some leading systems fell from over 90% accuracy to nearly complete failure.
Kingdom Hearts IV Lights Up With A New Trailer
Sora's older, more mature, but just as colorful as he used to be
Colorado maternal care grade drops
Rural care gaps and limited treatment options remain major barriers.
Small Businesses Outgrow Domestic Payments as Global Sourcing Spreads
An entire generation of American small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have been conducting multinational operations without multinational
New sports betting law protects against addiction, exposure to kids in Colorado, according to lawmakers
A new law signed by Gov. Jared Polis adds restrictions to sports betting in Colorado, preventing ads that target children and young adults and limiting how often bettors can deposit money.
Colorado Scales Back Software and Other Business Tax Exemptions
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed legislation repealing a series of business tax exemptions to raise revenue for an expanded working families tax credit and balance out revenue gaps resulting from President Donald Trump’s 2025 tax law.
We can create the future of science right now
Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence. At Airbnb, he was a product manager leading machine learning teams optimizing search ranking and price suggestions. He also co-founded and led product at Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup, creating an accurate low cost system using a color changing strip and a smart phone to measure salivary lactate. The bottleneck At this point, it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins: I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision-making. I can see second-by-second real-time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society, we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial. Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims, (2) claims linked to evidence, (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence, and (4) continuous updating with new data. What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that, scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example, evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point, most of what’s missing is a fully end-to-end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system. What’s now possible The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them. Document understanding The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I’m confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest. Hypothesis level extraction There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test-statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized controlled trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2. Forensic audit A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future. Methodological review This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3. Reproducibility and robustness Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices. Synthesis This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on. Continuous updating There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task. When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built. The stakeholders are ready The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality. Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress have shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience. A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come. A pilot proposal The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test. Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data. Key Hypothesis Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate. Secondary Hypotheses Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige. If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer. Why this is informative regardless of outcome If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports. Implications for funders Because this burgeoning ecosystem of builders already exists, a well-informed philanthropic or government funder could play a crucial catalyzing role in bringing this future about. They could play at least three roles: creating open structured datasets, publishing open benchmarks and incentivizing the solving of key technical challenges. First, open archives of papers that the government maintains, like PubMed, could be turned into structured data amenable to large scale metascience and claim aggregation. I know the US government already has an interest in doing this, though some key open questions remain unanswered. How do you determine the best models and systems for accurately extracting information from papers? How can you establish a robust way to allow researchers to flag errors and correct them? And finally, how do you create a legal regime in working with publishers to maximize the scope of available papers? For the latter, a university or a private philanthropy may be better positioned to make structured data publicly available under journal subscription terms or fair use. Philanthropists or government funders could also coordinate to create or commission benchmarks that evaluate whether important problems have been solved. For example, an open benchmark for claim extraction from a range of different scientific article types would be extremely helpful. Ensuring the underlying data are accurate is vital for creating these evaluations. I’ve discussed opportunistically using various human-created datasets for this purpose, but a consistent problem is that errors in human data make it difficult for them to serve as a gold standard. Finally, with structured data and benchmarks available, the government or private philanthropy could use them to incentivize groups to develop machine learning systems that meet these benchmarks. Prizes are one potentially valuable tool for this. For example, you could establish a prize for a system that accurately updates a living meta-analysis for a small set of claims. Prizes are particularly useful as signals of problem importance, and can help create vibrant ecosystems of public and private research—see, for example the role the government played in kickstarting the current work on nuclear fusion. Conclusion The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agree, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that’s the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What’s been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That’s what I’m proposing to build. *** 1 I have a broader field map that I’ll release publicly soon. This is me, building in public! 2 If this is something that you are excited about, please reach out and talk to me. 3 More on this very soon too! 4 This tests whether, given the code and the data, you can get the same statistics as reported in the published paper. 5 This tests whether the results are the same as a paper’s given alternative analytical decisions in conducting the analysis (like outlier omission). Closely related is the idea of a “multiverse” where you come up with many different ways of answering the same underlying research question with the same data, and test whether the results hold in all those alternative methods. There’s been work on the latter as well. 6 Some of the replications, e.g. those from the SCORE project, had paired the experiments with forecasts from prediction markets. So we get to look at this for free.
GEO Group sues Colorado to stop law requiring health and safety inspections of immigrant detention facilities
The private company that operate centers like the one in Aurora claims the new law to oversteps the state's authority.
Primary ballots hit mailboxes in high-stakes election year in Colorado
County clerks began mailing primary ballots to voters on Monday, as Colorado wades deeper into a crowded election year. Voters will face a long list of choices in both the June 30 primary and the November general election. Every major state‑level office — the governor’s seat, notably — is on the ballot, while Colorado’s 8th […]
Colorado Supreme Court to decide whether out-of-state defendant may be prosecuted for in-state crime
The Colorado Supreme Court recently announced that it will decide whether Douglas County prosecutors had grounds to pursue criminal charges against a woman in New York whose conduct occurred outside of Colorado. Erin Brennan and her children lived in New York, and her ex-husband moved to Colorado after their divorce. In 2022, she proposed a […]
NEWS RELEASE: More than 1 in 4 Preschool for All providers expanded their small business this year
Thirty-five continuing Preschool for All providers, out of 124 total, expanded their business into at least one additional location this upcoming school year.
National Science Teaching Association Welcomes New Board and Leadership Council Members
NSTA announced the newly elected members of its Board of Directors and the individuals selected to serve on its Leadership Council.
Paving the way for agents in biology
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Weeklong Juneteenth celebration in Harrisburg honors Black history and freedom
JuneteenthHBG coincides with the 250th birthday of America and the 10th anniversary of the Young Professionals of Color.
CR-Connect Dealer Tour | Axis Business Technologies Is Focused on Its Local Colorado Communities
Axis Business Technologies, a traditional office technology dealer, focuses on service & subscription-based, intelligent document processing (IDP).
More than 40,000 Coloradans will need a new health insurance carrier next year. Here’s who is affected.
Cigna is withdrawing from the individual health insurance market nationwide starting in 2027, impacting more than 40,000 Coloradans.
Aging Matters: Colorado scientist’s discovery of a gene for longevity was a ‘game-changer’
Tom Johnson passed away this year at the age of 77. He was known as “the father of genetic gerontology.”
Area boiler business takes home SBA award
Patrick Snyder held back tears of joy and appreciation as the CEO of a commercial boiler business near Muncy was honored with the U.S. Small Business Administration Eastern Pennsylvania Blue-Color Small Business of the Year award this week. “With the team that we have we’re just getting started – it’s the tip of the iceberg,” […]
Bennet wants to be Colorado’s next governor
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet is considered the front-runner in the Colorado Democratic Party primary contest for governor. His major opponent is current Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser. The Democratic primary election is June 30. Registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters who choose to can vote in this election. Ballots are being mailed out starting Monday. Michael F. Bennet, 61, was born in New Delhi, India, where his father […]
Photos: How public health officials track Colorado’s tick populations
2026 is a bad tick year. Colorado is taking a more hands-on approach to studying them.
Is Jared Polis turning into Dick Lamm?
By Jon Caldara Dick Lamm was Colorado’s longest-serving governor, at 12 years in office (a close second goes to Roy Romer). And during those three terms, he slowly drifted to the right. Not because he became a Republican or even a conservative. He never did. He simply spent enough time governing to become less impressed […]
Health officials take notice as bake stands pop up throughout Hilo
Colorful roadside food stands have been popping up around Hilo in recent months.
Hamilton leads Brewers against the Rockies following 4-hit performance
The Milwaukee Brewers take on the Colorado Rockies after David Hamilton had four hits against the Rockies on Saturday
Game Discussion: Milwaukee Brewers (38-23) @ Colorado Rockies (24-40)
Can Jacob Misiorowski master the high elevation of Colorado?
Scientists finally complete Schrödinger’s 100-year-old color theory
Researchers have finally resolved a key problem in a 100-year-old theory of color, showing that the qualities we perceive in colors are intrinsic to the mathematics of color space itself. The discovery sharpens our understanding of human vision and could lead to more precise color technologies and visualizations.
Things to do in the Loveland area on Saturday: Nearly every NoCo community has a festival happening
Nearly every town in Northern Colorado has a festival happening on Saturday, including Bluegrass & Brews Festival and the Colorado Medieval Festival in Loveland, Berthoud Day, Johnstown BBQ Day, Fort Collins Pride 2026 and FoCo EcoFest…
A tale of two debates
By Vince Bzdek Ballots go out Monday as the June 30 state primary elections bear down on us. As a result, it is suddenly the season of proliferating political debates, and there have been some doozies already. I had the chance to see two very different debates in the last week, and comparing and contrasting them speaks […]
A tale of two debates
By Vince Bzdek Ballots go out Monday as the June 30 state primary elections bear down on us. As a result, it is suddenly the season of proliferating political debates, and there have been some doozies already. I had the chance to see two very different debates in the last week, and comparing and contrasting them speaks […]
Decker Warns Democrats Hold Outsized Power in 18–17 Senate Split
Twenty-Five Years Ago This Week: “The Colorado state Senate and the U.S. Senate are quite similar at this point,” wrote state Rep. Richard Decker, R-Fountain. “The 18-17 divide in Colorado doesn’t look significant numerically, but it grants Democrats a huge say in what happens with legislation.” Decker said that if the prospect were reversed, and […]
Colorado Politics Calendar June 8-14
CoPo’s weekly political calendar helps you find political and public policy events throughout Colorado. It includes candidate and issue campaign events, public policy meetings, court hearings, state and local party conventions, assemblies, debates, rallies, parades, speaking engagements, traveling dignitary appearances, water meetings, book signings, county commission hearings, city council meetings and more. As a subscriber, […]
Brewers face the Rockies with 1-0 series lead
The Milwaukee Brewers lead 1-0 in a three-game series with the Colorado Rockies
Capcom Shines Bright With Massive Reveals at Summer Game Fest 2026
'Resident Evil Veronica' announcement, 'Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascendance', and who to look out for in 'Street Fighter 6' Year 4.
Polis signs final bills from 2026 session, including several business-focused laws
The laws impact workers laboring outside, software sales, transportation funding, homeowners' insurance costs and law-firm ownership.
Chautauqua County Health Department Advises Residents Following Confirmed Measles Case in Erie County
MAYVILLE, N.Y. — The Chautauqua County Health Department is alerting residents following confirmation of a positive measles case in Erie County, New York. Local residents may have traveled to locations visited by the infected individual.
MISS shifts the ecosystem of shark science
The program creates a space where women of color thrive as they dive into marine research.
Joel Klatt replaces Kirk Herbstreit as color commentator in EA Sports College Football 27
It was recently reported that Kirk Herbstreit will not be in EA Sports’ College Football 27. Herbstreit served as the color commentator alongside play-by-play announcer Chris Fowler for the “Big Game” broadcast team in College Football 25 and 26, after EA Sports relaunched the popular video game franchise that was previously known as NCAA Football.…
Things to do in the Loveland area on Friday: Bluegrass & Brews Festival, Colorado Medieval Fest and more
The Bluegrass & Brews Festival and Colorado Medieval Fest will be in Loveland on Friday, along with many more entertainment offerings.
Business Incubator Center celebrates 40th anniversary
Nonprofit has supported launch and growth of businesses in Western Colorado for four decades
Business Incubator Center celebrates 40th anniversary
Nonprofit has supported launch and growth of businesses in Western Colorado for four decades
Bennet, Weiser face off in Colorado Politics, 9NEWS debate
The Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics are hosting the debate in partnership with the University of Denver and 9NEWS. DENVER — Candidates vying to be the next governor of Colorado will face off in debates hosted by The Denver Gazette, Colorado Politics and 9NEWS ahead of the state’s primary elections. Michael Bennet and Phil Weiser […]
iPhone 18 Pro: Dark Cherry, Light Blue, and Dark Gray Chassis Leaked
The color options Apple is reportedly planning for the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max have appeared online today in the form of images of chassis parts of unknown origin. Shared by the account name "yeux1122" on the Korean-langauge Naver blog, the images show what appear to be production-ready frames for three of the four colors Apple is rumored to be planning.
Google may have surprising new colors for the Pixel 11 series phones
Leaked wallpapers hint at the new colors of the Pixel 11 phones.
Trump admin cracks down on Colorado school district that allegedly put up to 61 males on girls' sports teams
The U.S. Department of Education warns Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado over allegedly placing up to 61 male students on girls' sports teams.
Massive cosmic dataset made open to scientists, novices and AI
The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) has released all of its immense, information-rich database to the public.
Algal blooms explained: How scientists are helping spot them sooner
Algal blooms can seem to appear overnight. A stretch of ocean that looked clear days earlier can suddenly appear discolored and sometimes pose risks to ecosystems and human health. But scientists say ...
Surveillance data, arbitration bills that worried business get axe from Polis | The Sum and Substance
In veto letters, Gov. Jared Polis wrote that the bills could have harmed the very consumers that they espoused they wanted to help.
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science
With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!
What your hair color might tell you about your health
Research shows that pain threshold, melanoma risk and other conditions could be linked to the color of your hair.
Polis protects system rigged against workers
By Jeremy Ross Shame on Gov. Jared Polis. He used his veto pen again to indulge the billionaire corporate elite by denying the freedom of workers to join together and form a union without being threatened, fired or blocked by a second election. For two years in a row, the Worker Protection Act passed out […]