This is an actual line that was added to the official system prompt for Codex for GPT-5.5 by OpenAI. Usually the system prompt is as minimal as possible, so I assume it would otherwise mention goblins a lot.
AIs are weird.
New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task
I'm making a website for my new lab (!!!). Who should I steal ideas from? (Self-nominations welcome)
📢📢 Announcing this year's conference on the Mathematics of Neuroscience & AI (Rome, 9-12th June). We’ve got a stellar line-up and venue, and invite everyone to join:
www.neuromonster.org
Grace Lindsay
Ethan Mollick
Fred Callaway
But the moment we start taking our models too seriously, we fall into the trap Skinner warned us of: believing things we have no evidence for. I think that cognitive science has largely fallen into this trap (myself included), and that we'd benefit greatly from taking Skinner's ideas more seriously.
This is not to say cognitive models aren't valuable. Going full Hofstadter, the representations in a model are themselves representations: useful ways to understand behavior and brain. This deflates Skinner's critique of cognitivism. Representations aren't true or false; they don't need evidence.
Fred Callaway
This representation parameterization is useful because it (1) tends to generalize better and (2) is more interpretable. But this is just data-efficiency and aesthetics. These properties cannot provide *evidence* against behaviorism. And they provide weak (if any) evidence for the representation.
Fred Callaway
Good read. I'd go further and suggest that scientific evidence against behaviorism is impossible in principle. Behaviorism simply says that you can model behavior as p(behavior | experience, genes). Cognitivism just adds a latent state, r (representation):
p(b|e,g) = ∫ p(b|r) p(r|e,g) dr.
(1/4)
