I wish I'd come across this a couple of months ago! I read the SSC Surfing Uncertainty review a couple of years back, and started Surfing Uncertainty earlier this year. I found the writing in SU unneccessarily complicated, and was close to aborting it a couple of times, despite how fascinating I found the whole topic. But my biggest gripe with SU was how light it was on technical details. But maybe that's just how it is.
So thanks for writing this! While I would usually send people in the direction of the SSC review, I think now this will be another in the repertoire for introducing people to active inference/predictive processing, and the related theories.
Hey Stian, thanks for the kind words. I remember Surfing Uncertainty was fairly challenging as a book. Being You is definitely an easier way in if you're looking for good introductory books to recommend people, or you could try sending out some of Anil Seth's TED talks or lectures.
I wish I'd come across this a couple of months ago! I read the SSC Surfing Uncertainty review a couple of years back, and started Surfing Uncertainty earlier this year. I found the writing in SU unneccessarily complicated, and was close to aborting it a couple of times, despite how fascinating I found the whole topic. But my biggest gripe with SU was how light it was on technical details. But maybe that's just how it is.
So thanks for writing this! While I would usually send people in the direction of the SSC review, I think now this will be another in the repertoire for introducing people to active inference/predictive processing, and the related theories.
Hey Stian, thanks for the kind words. I remember Surfing Uncertainty was fairly challenging as a book. Being You is definitely an easier way in if you're looking for good introductory books to recommend people, or you could try sending out some of Anil Seth's TED talks or lectures.
The problem I think that you are getting to grips with is that everything in the territory of active inference seems to either be an excessively complex piece of statistical modelling, or almost facile interpretations of that data, over-simplified for the layman. There are a couple of good papers that are approachable but not light on the technical details. You could try this paper from RA Adams (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3637647/), or some of the work of Daniel Yon (https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(19)30261-X? or https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(18)30239-0), and go from there.