Jason Collins blog

I recently read Hans Moravec’s excellent Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence.

For me, the best book critiquing the “nudge” agenda is Robert Sugden’s The Community of Advantage.

Below is a collection of book reviews that I have posted - click the links to go to the full review.

I recently completed BlueDot Impact’s AGI Strategy Course.

Experimental economists don’t deceive their subjects.

As Gary Marcus so often appears in debates about the future of artificial intelligence, I decided to grab his 2008 book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind from my overgrown reading pile.

From a fantastic post by Ashe Vazquez Nuñez on LessWrong about the use of AI by Go players: The appealing, exciting archetype of a cheater is one that uses covert, elaborate methods to get outside information and fraudulently obtain prize money or prestig…

The books I enjoyed the most in 2025 were: Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass: I occasionally consume young adult books that my kids are ploughing through.

This is a story about a study that refuses to die, despite overwhelming evidence it should.

From Donald Redelmeier and Eldar Shafir’s (1995) classic paper in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association: Intervention: The basic version of each scenario presented a choice between two options.

In the early days of the Behavioural Insights Team (aka The Nudge Unit), their successes quickly became part of the behavioural economics canon.

The debate about whether large language models are transformative or overhyped occasionally produces real-world data.

Want to demonstrate human “irrationality”?

This week, language, language models and replication: How To Become A Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher: So much great material in here, even if you’re just interested in getting across LLM foundations.

Experimental psychology research before the mid-2010s was a mess.

This article was intended for a different forum.

This reading list is a balance to the one-dimensional view in many popular books, TED talks, conferences, academic press releases and consultancy sales pitches.

The books I enjoyed the most in 2024, although all were published in different years: Ashlee Vance, When the Heavens Went on Sale: For all the grumbling about how progress in software isn’t matched in the physical world, Vance tells some amazing stories.

In his book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Ethan Mollick describes an experiment by Fabrizio Dell’Acqua: In a different paper, Fabrizio Dell’Acqua shows why relying too much on AI can backfire.

The below are my speaking notes for a presentation in the Innovative methodologies in behavioural science session at BI Connect 2024, hosted by the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabi…