Links

Excellent and highly readable review of the rise of remarkable and controversial challenges to the standard model of evolution.

Short, slightly reductive, but useful summary of basic positions in philosophy of science on what science is doing.

The essay is actually, kind of claiming this. More charitably, it argues that historians, specifically, are prone to letting the emotional and moral tension of a story corrupt their commitment to reason and evidence. This is a story (I know, right?) well told, and the cautionary tale is apt, but it kind of skips over the challenge we find in making a distinction between the kind of story that ‘makes us stupid’ and the kind of story that connects the metaphysical foundations of the commitment to rational process of scientific discipline — see Bruno Latour, eg.

Meditation on the making, sharpening, and using of kitchen knives. The most pleasing element is its fine distinction between sharpness as a property of an object vs sharpness as a relation of the knife edge to the practice of cutting — “the aesthetics of the object against the aesthetics of processes”. This wouldn’t have made proper sense to me before I started using a really good Japanese knife…

Long historico-biographical article on the career and habits of Tom Waits at the time of the release of the Frank’s Wild Years trilogy for its 40th anniversary reissue. Good summary of Waits’ work and influence and a timely reminder of these startlingly original and compelling recordings.

The article gets at something in Waits’ sound that reminds me of an interview with Keith Jarrett published by Ted Gioia where Jarrett talks about the essence of music he is grasping after, something unstructured and organic… Something intimated in the Waits article, in passages like this:

Ribot remembers how Waits would often be writing the lyrics moments before he sang them. “The groove was the main thing, which he would keep trying to communicate with the way he was moving his body and guitar.” As Richards recently said in an interview with Uncut: “[Tom] had a lot of rhythms going on in his head and in his body… the groove is another word for the grail. People search for it everywhere, and when you find it you hang on to it.”

A re-publication of a 1986 interview from Keyboard Magazine. A rambling philosophical engagement with the role of music and the responsibility of the musician, the essence of music and its relation to the essence of experience. Beyond my capacity to summarize but there are several passages that are strikingly similar to things said in a recent article about Tom Waits — worth reading these together.

Entertaining and informative lecture on math and geometry using paper to demonstrate ideas.

A dense tour through Hugh Kenner’s ideas on action and intention as revealed primarily in his work on T.S. Eliot. Featuring comparative remarks by Stanley Cavell, G.E.M. Anscombe, and others. A winding literary path into practical reason and moral theory.

Reflections on the idea of nature as something other than human; something in which humans intervene. The thesis is that we can’t make sense of nature by removing ourselves from it, nor make sense of ourselves by removing nature from us. Pleasing anecdotes and a refreshing engagement with the problem of our moral interpretations of animal behaviour beside instances of animal behaviour that seem to make no sense without a moral interpretation.

Striking summary of science/western culture’s prioritizing of vision, therefore light, over hearing and sound and the consequences of that priority for our ways of thinking about things. In contrast, the article presents some interesting stories about sonification in science as a way of revealing patterns in data ‘overlooked’ by standard visual methods of interpretation.

Great overview of his book Debt: the First 5000 Years. Very unusual talk in its informality, almost as if he was asked at a party what he was working on. In consequence it is a bit like watching someone with enormous intellectual resources, and great humility, work through an idea — probably due to this being hosted by Google Talks rather than an academic institution.

Justice for all is composed of the ugliest compromises…
Ben Caplan, Truth Doesn’t Live in a Book

Another outstanding entry in the ACX 2023 Book Review contest. This one a review of the medieval Icelandic classic Njal’s Saga. A hilarious and entertaining reflection on a very strange work as commentary on liberty, justice, and civilization, and the ancient Norwegian example of how we have tried to negotiate them.

Short history of the Vilnius Jazz Trio and their place in the history of both modern jazz and the last decades of the Soviet Union.

ACX’s 2023 book review contest offers another winner. A nicely balanced, only partly skeptical review of Why Machines Will Never Rule the World by Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith. The book argues against AGI on the grounds that math-based, deterministic computing systems can’t replicate fundamentally non-linear, complex systems that produce biological intelligence.

Captain of Team Human realizes the clamour from the tech-bros about AI risk and for AI regulation is just another play for legislative aid in capturing another market…

A good read but interesting mainly for a lot of time spent covering the problems encountered by Carrère, and others, in casting characters based on real people close to the author. The claims generally rest on complaints by those represented that they are not represented, in some sense, truly, and that the author, therefore, has transgressed on the subject’s autonomy in a morally significant way. Carrère himself seems to agree with this claim and likens himself to the torturer. I find the whole thing very odd but it is an interesting starting point for thinking about representation, interpretation, identity, and reality; though perhaps not moral claims…

Entertaining and useful summary mapping the relative locations of internet Rationalists (Scott Alexander, Yudkowsky, Thiel/Musk…) and Post-Rationalists (Venkatesh Rao, David Chapman, Jordan Peterson…) and how the tribes and metatribes got where they are. Amusing and occasionally surprising.

Thoughtful and provocative response to claims of implicit gender bias in GPT-4. The critical and refreshing claims:

1. researchers are too prone to anthropomorphizing LLMs in interactions and interpretations, and
2. LLMs are not as good at language disambiguation as we think.

The lesson we need to keep in mind: language is full of ambiguity that we don’t appreciate because we can negotiate it without much effort, but computers, no matter how impressive, can’t yet.

An entry in the Astral Codex Ten 2023 book reviews competition, by a not-yet-disclosed poster. A deep and coherent summary of Jacob’s philosophy of economics presented in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, an extension of her earlier work on cities with greater focus on their economic significance and how typical, nation-level economic metrics miss their importance — and resulting policy often harms cities, with the further effect of harming the nation.

Excellent and enjoyable writing.

“Any story of madness has a good witch in it, a good witch who is not so good.”

This is a delighfully hallucinatory, poetic summary of The Wizard of Oz as if from the perpective of a psycho-therapist helping unpack Dorothy’s traumatic journey.