Pungent is a web-based note-taking app that I'm working on. I made this because I had a need for something to organize personal notes, but nothing I found was satisfactory. Right now it's essentially a less-featured clone of Workflowy, but I plan to develop it further once I figure out what direction to go in. Development is on hold for the moment while I spend some time using it and figuring out what I want it to do.

I'm also working on a research project to try to understand how human cognition works. I think FAI is really interesting + important, but I'm baffled by the decision theory approach that seems to be popular around here. Not that I have strong reasons to believe that this line of inquiry should not be pursued, but every time I think about intelligent entities purely in terms of decision theory (i.e. as entites with a "utility function" that assigns values to "states of the world", and then takes actions which maximize said utility), I notice that I am confused.

So I'm wading through neuroscience papers at the moment. Spatial cognition and memory seem like a well-studied phenomena that are likely to act as a foundation for other cognitive abilities, and so seems like as good a place to start as any. I don't have a website up yet for my findings, but here's what I've been looking at to start:

• Place cells, grid cells, and the brain's spatial representation system - decent, recent review article for spatial cognition.
• Tracking the Emergence of Conceptual Knowledge during Human Decision Making is a recent paper with some findings that seem relevant to understanding "concepts".
• The Medial Temporal Lobe is a good review of structures in the MTL, which includes structures important for spatial cognition and memory.
• I've also been looking at Jeff Hawkins' work on Hierarchical Temporal Memory because it is not simply another neural network model, but is actually proposed to be a model of the neocortex. Even if his views on intelligence are wrong or highly incomplete, his methodology seems sound: his work is biologically-grounded, but he doesn't get caught up in unnecessary details.

My goal for this project is to become less confused about Friendly AI. I'd like to set up a webpage to record my progress on this project, so I'll likely edit this post when I have a link for that.