I meant to post this on Nov 14 — happy belated birthday to my wonderful PhD advisor, Marc Feldman!

Kaleda K. Denton - Cats Pictures of my foster cats and kittens! For more information about adopting and fostering, feel free to reach out to me at kdenton@ucla.edu

❗I've made important updates to my website... a page for my foster cats www.kaledadenton.com/cats

SFI welcomes Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Maike Morrison Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Maike Morrison builds mathematical tools to quantify and compare biological variation. Her work draws on ecology, population genetics, and information theory to study th...

SFI welcomes Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Maike Morrison.

@maikemorrison.bsky.social develops mathematical tools to quantify biological variation. She draws on ecology, population genetics, and information theory to study population structure, diversity, and stability.

For population genetics and evolutionary biology folks in the Bay Area: the next BAPG will be hosted by Stanford CEHG and the Petrov lab at Stanford on 12/6.
Registration is free but required. The deadline for talk submission is Nov. 16. Hope to see you soon! Pls RT!
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

456: Kaleda Denton | Following the Majority - How Conformity Shapes Culture and AI In this episode of the Armen Show, Armen Shirvanian interviews Dr. Kaleda Denton, a post-doctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. They discuss the interdisciplinary nature of the Institute, the concept of niche construction in biology, and the dynamics of decision-making, particularly the differences between following the mean versus the majority. The conversation also explores the limitations of game theory, the role of cultural evolution in cooperation, and the impact of AI on accessibility and learning. They delve into the importance of reducing polarization while maintaining diversity in viewpoints, emphasizing the need for mixing and collaboration across different fields and perspectives. In this engaging conversation, Dr. Kaleda Denton and Armen Shirvanian explore a variety of topics including the distinction between majority and mean opinions, the challenges of reading in the digital age, and the implications of large language models (LLMs) on culture. They discuss the importance of communication in society, the influence of close circles versus wider communities in learning, and the role of influential figures in personal development. The conversation also delves into the concept of memes and cultural transmission, the impact of role models on cumulative culture, and the question of human uniqueness in the context of cultural evolution. Check out Kaleda's website at https://www.kaledadenton.com/ 00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Guest 03:01 The Santa Fe Institute: A Unique Interdisciplinary Environment 05:56 Niche Construction and Extended Evolutionary Synthesis 08:56 Mean vs. Majority: Insights from Research 12:08 Game Theory and Its Limitations 15:03 Cultural Evolution and Cooperation 17:59 The Role of AI in Learning and Accessibility 20:54 Conformity Across Species and LLMs 23:59 The Importance of Current Information 27:03 Final Thoughts on AI and Human Interaction 36:57 The Quirks of AI Hallucinations 38:53 The Evolution of Language Models 39:35 Agency and Individuality in AI Interactions 41:41 The Flattening of Ideas and Language 43:42 Cognitive Offloading and Its Consequences 45:04 Reducing Polarization Through Interaction 48:39 The Importance of Mixing Perspectives 50:02 The Dangers of Majority Influence 53:51 Understanding Mean vs. Majority Opinions 01:04:32 Risks and Opportunities in Cultural Evolution 01:10:02 The Impact of Headlines on News Consumption 01:11:46 The Need for Positive News 01:15:04 Learning from Close Circles vs. Wider Communities 01:17:23 Influential Figures in Personal Development 01:18:44 The Evolution of Human Uniqueness 01:22:38 Understanding Memes and Cultural Transmission 01:23:10 The Multiplicative Costs of Altruism 01:36:09 The Role of Role Models in Cumulative Culture

Honoured to have done my first ever podcast on The Armen Show! Besides science, math, & academia, we talked about:

-LLMs hyping up bad ideas
-My 5 foster cats, but whether I'm secretly a dog person
-How it would be nice to "skip" & "mute" people in real life 😛

Check it out! 😄

tinyurl.com/yc4hjz2x

I'm so thrilled and honored to be selected for this award, and really grateful to @scicommexcellence.nationalacademies.org for their support of science communication.

www.nationalacademies.org/awards/excel...

#scicomm

Thank you!!

Thank you!!

That's awesome ☺️

Thank you!!

Yes! 🍂

Thank you so much!! 😊

Aww! I love that. 😊

Thank you so much! I can already tell this is a really kind and lovely community 😊

😂

Thank you! Your Corgi in your profile photo is so cute!!

That's awesome! It's so pretty! 💕

Thank you! 😄

Thank you! Yes!! ⛰️

Thank you!! And aww 😢

First post on Bluesky! Here are some fall colours from Santa Fe. 🍂🍁

Do AI Models Perform Human-like Abstract Reasoning Across Modalities? OpenAI's o3-preview reasoning model exceeded human accuracy on the ARC-AGI benchmark, but does that mean state-of-the-art models recognize and reason with the abstractions that the task creators inten...

Do AI reasoning models abstract and reason like humans?

New paper on this from my group:

arxiv.org/abs/2510.02125

🧵 1/10

Congratulations to SFI Postdoc Kaleda Denton, the runner-up for this year’s John Maynard Smith Award from the European Society for Evolutionary Biology!

@eseb.bsky.social

santafe.edu/news-center/...

This year's Runner-Up for the JMS Prize is Kaleda Denton!

Her research was highly commended by the Prize Committee and you can read more about her work here:

eseb.org/prizes-fundi...