Links

Another good talk by Lessig.

Stumbled on this not having seen it in many years and was reminded how amazingly important Lessig is both as a defender of freedom in the commons, as a speaker, and as a pioneer PowerPoint designer.

Reflection on how everything over the last few decades has grown so similar as to be indistinguishably average. Good writing but the photographs supporting the general argument are really compelling.

Amazingly beautiful reflection on the design of the bicycle: how an intersection of physics and human morphology produce an icon of liberation and aesthetic elegance. With captivating visualizations.

Feel overwhelmed by questions? Looking for questions? This may be the antidote: Gwern’s Open Questions — a collection of so many questions. Irresistable, immersive interogative landscape with infinite relational popups.

Excellent and entertaining talk about the preposterous popularity of the idea of Superintelligence among the tech elite. Old but still relevant.

One of several antidote articles showing the limitations of LLMs in action. This is a good example of not so much technical limitation as cognitive limitation, a useful counterpoint to the many commenters who get easily captivated by the apparent facility of LLMs with natural language, tending ineluctably toward anthropomorphism and onward to predicting the enslavement or extinction of humans by our new AGI overlords.

Reflections on finding the essence of art in the removal of what is familiar, or, perhaps, the suppression of context, or something like that. The suggestion is that the artist, rather than suppressing detail in order to create a model that emphasizes a subject, suppresses markers that might provide a context within reality, thereby opening the space for interpretation and imagination — allowing the mind to do more work than the model. Pardoxically, the conclusion is that the artist (Fan Ho, in this case) “is capable of showing more than is really there.” Featuring senryu and photographs by Fan Ho. Short and beautiful.

Excellent introduction to a trend in science away from computational/representational theories of mind — also away from Cartesian/Aristotelian, human/brain-centric assumptions — and toward more active, environmentally-embedded theories that, refreshingly, focus on things other than humans first, like plants.

Fascinating story of a real, early 20th century psychic and his career aiding police and inspiring detective novelists. Nicely balanced and well-told historical story which ends with this pleasing nugget of observation:

“The historian Wouter Hanegraaff has pondered the tortured relationship between esotericism and the knowledge enshrined in academic institutions, and found that the one can’t be narrated without the other. Just as chemistry deliberately distanced itself from alchemy during the Enlightenment, psychology had to make a deliberate effort to rid itself of its occult heritage for the sake of scientific validation. But the resulting « otherness » of Western esotericism could then, over time, make such banished knowledge a magnetic antidote to the emptiness of modern, secular society.”

Cory Doctorow applies his usual cutting analysis to the AI hype that has overwhelmed the common-sense of most commenters, especially tech enthusiasts and a few credulous academics. ChatGPT is new and impressive so it shouldn’t be surprising that media are overreporting; what is surprising is the unself-conscious and unreflective attention from people who should know better. The technology is new and we don’t know what it is for yet and, as usual, we have to wait to find out. What isn’t going to happen immediately is the extinction of humans by chat-bot AGI, but what probably will happen is corporate hacks will figure out ways to use it to put pressure on labour and inflate their ability to extract capital from credulous legislators.

This is exactly the kind of thing Cory is good at reminding us to be careful of and this is a pretty good shot across the bow of AI hype credulity.

The first part of the article is a bracing review of the status of reality in the mind from the perspective of philosophy — which Smith sees as hopelessly conservative, stuck in a tableau barely changed since 1950. This is a startling claim and, somehow, obviously right. His main thrust is to ask why philosophers are apparently so resistant to considering the altered mind as a source of representation of reality. A standard tactic of philosophy is to go to the pathological case when analyzing a concept in order to find the boundaries of the normal case. The assumption that the mind has a ‘normal’ state that presents a ‘normal’ representation of reality, contrasted with an ‘abnormal’ state when altered by psychedelic substance, ultimately just begs the question. The idea of ‘normal’ in minds or representations of reality is itself a metaphysical assumption that needs some attention.

The rest is a tentative, personal engagement with age and loss and the rediscovery of everything outside us that is also part of us — that is, all the other living things we are commonly encouraged to think of as merely things —, and how the object part of reality is less real and less significant than the phenomenal and social part of reality that extends through us. Or words to that effect: he does a good job of intimating with prose what is a job normally left to poetry.

More a sympathetic narrative account of the path down the rabbit-hole of conspiracy theory devotion than an argument about its nature; almost reads like a very well written-short story. Ultimately a plea for liberal forebearance and open-minded empathy.

Scott works at Open-AI and he isn’t terrified. He is one of the best, open-minded, common-sense defenders of not freaking out I have come across. The article isn’t full of deep or abstract or complex arguments, as are commonly found in articles on this subject; he describes his position both rationally and on the basis of intuition, and he comes down on the side of thinking we don’t know what’s going to happen but it probably won’t be as bad as those most infected by tech-anxiety think — and AI may even pull our asses out of the climate-change fire if we are very lucky.

A broad overview of arguments arising from a group of mostly technologists, with some scientists, psychologists, and Genius-Rich-Guys. It is useful as a reference to people speaking within a certain channel on both sides of the AI-alignment/end-of-the-world anxiety spectrum. The author is passionate and worried, like many in his camp, and wants us to worry too.

Of most use, this article highlights many of the strange unspoken assumptions that lie beneath AI discussions — about the nature of intelligence, consciousness, super-intelligence, and about the natural objectives, priorities, and optimizations of intelligent things (mostly including humans, possible aliens, and soon computers). One senses a deep anxiety that requires metaphysical therapy, stat.

Noah brings it… Who was the more active deregulationist: Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan? The answer is a surprise entirely contrary to the standard neo-con->neo-liberal mythology. Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as that…

An extensive and compelling review of two new works on the history of science that challenge the traditional Eurocentric view and the tendency to reduce the path of modern science to a story about a few Great Men. These books cut through the complex relationships of global knowledge creation in the age of European colonialism, on the one hand, and the role of indigenous peoples and common people constructing knowledge through craft and experience, on the other. A nice summary question from the article, attributed to Peter Dear, is the question “what is the history of science the history of?”

Reviewed are the books Horizons: the Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett, and From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World by Pamela H Smith.

A refreshingly thoughful discussion of the historical path of our thinking about and the cultural manifestation of racism. Helpful in broadening one’s perspective beyond the overly simplistic political context of the moment.

Interviewed by Claudia Dreifus, Naomi Oreskes talks about the role of “market fundamentalism” in subverting education, culture, science, and public knowledge on critical issues for policy, from banking to climate change. She describes the agenda of Chicago School economists and neo-liberal conservatives to promote anti-government sentiment and ultimately undermine public mechanisms for representing reality.

This is a really good introduction to a whole cluster of urgent problems covered in her books, written with Erik Conway, The Merchants of Doubt and, more recently, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.

There is so much writing on ChatatGPT and LLMs that it is hard to keep a list — something I started to do in a desultory kind of way but quickly got overwhelmed. This example is one I like. It is provocative without falling for casual anthropomorphism, end-of-the-worldism, or goofy enthusiasm. It does, however, go in for some goofy testing of ChatGPT with literary device experimentation and some conceptual guidance by way of Claude Lévi-Strauss. This is a good one to include for open-minded fun and education.