Saturday Attended the Midwest Cognitive Science Conference, and saw Douglas Hofstadter give a talk titled “AI Claims and Cog Sci Aims”. He spent the entire time debunking the most outlandish AI claims. I asked him in the question period afterward if he would tell some cog sci aims. He asked me why, and I said I was interested in hearing something positive. He started to answer, and soon found himself debunking AI some more.

Had dinner at The Snow Lion with some interesting cog sci folks. Spent a while talking with a Jewish woman from Boston who has a New York accent and now lives in Chicago. One fellow at the table declared, “All people who work in marketing should kill themselves.”