Does each click of attention cost a bit of ourselves? | Aeon Essays

It costs nothing to click, respond and retweet. But what price do we pay in our relationships and our peace of mind?

Against Modesty’s Bailey

Modesty arguments often say that you should mostly or entirely bow to ‘expert consensus’ or the views of particular others, and who are you to disagree.

In Favor of Enjoying Things on Purpose

The human being is an enjoyment-seeking creature. There’s a reason people are always trying to restrain themselves from excessive eating, drinking, scrolling, and shoppin...

What the Internet Is Teaching Young Men About Desire

When pornography becomes the default sex education, it reshapes how a generation learns about power, intimacy, and attention

Anthropic on Twitter / X

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models.Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with.We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude. pic.twitter.com/aLUPBifxth— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) July 6, 2026

The Imperfectionist: Interest is everything

Interest is everything Each time I sit down to choose a topic for this newsletter, there’s a moment when my self-important inner judge – who loves to involve himself in such mat...

Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think

We all care way too much what other people think of us. Here's why.

'Ask for what you want' is a key skill for the 21st century

Takes practice, and a bit of audacity.

Do LLMs Exhibit Human-like Response Biases? A Case Study in Survey Design

Abstract One widely cited barrier to the adoption of LLMs as proxies for humans in subjective tasks is their sensitivity to prompt wording—but interestingly, humans also display sensitivities to instruction changes in the form of response biases. We investigate the extent to which LLMs reflect human response biases, if at all. We look to survey design, where human response biases caused by changes in the wordings of “prompts” have been extensively explored in social psychology literature. Drawing from these works, we design a dataset and framework to evaluate whether LLMs exhibit human-like response biases in survey questionnaires. Our comprehensive evaluation of nine models shows that popular open and commercial LLMs generally fail to reflect human-like behavior, particularly in models that have undergone RLHF. Furthermore, even if a model shows a significant change in the same direction as humans, we find that they are sensitive to perturbations that do not elicit significant changes in humans. These results highlight the pitfalls of using LLMs as human proxies, and underscore the need for finer-grained characterizations of model behavior.1

Predictive processing frameworks for perception can explain recent drone sightings in the United States

We draw on the predictive processing theory of perception to explain why healthy, intelligent, honest, and psychologically normal people might easily misperceive lights in the sky as threatening or extraordinary objects, especially in the context of WEIRD (western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic) societies. We argue that the uniquely sparse properties of skyborne and celestial stimuli make it difficult for an observer to update prior beliefs, which can be easily fit to observed lights. Moreover, we hypothesize that humans have likely evolved to perceive the sky and its perceived contents as deeply meaningful. Finally, we briefly discuss the possible role of generalized distrust in scientific institutions and ultimately argue for the importance of astronomy education for producing a society with prior beliefs that support veridical perception.

Information foraging

Information foraging is a theory that applies the ideas from optimal foraging theory to understand how human users search for information. The theory is based on the assumption that, when searching for information, humans use "built-in" foraging mechanisms that evolved to help our animal ancestors find food. Importantly, a better understanding of human search behavior can improve the usability of websites or any other user interface.

OkCupid’s Unblushing Analyst of Attraction (Published 2014)

Christian Rudder, president of the online dating service OkCupid, says websites like his should conduct more research, not less, on users’ habits.