Bbenzon
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. Intellectually, I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
MY BLOGS
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New Savanna
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 6484 )
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John Dollard on "free-floating" Aggression and Racism
[Note: I'm posting in this, in part, to keep John Dollard's name in my mind.]Why do people need racism? John Dollard addressed this question in his classic... Read more
Posted on 02 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Jason Crawford: What Happened to Belief in Progress?
Jason Crawford, The Lure of Technocracy, The Roots of Progress, March 31, 2022. I’ve said that society was generally optimistic about progress until the early... Read more
Posted on 01 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Scott Alexander on the Argument from Low-hanging Fruit [stagnation, Redux]
Scott Alexander, The Low-Hanging Fruit Argument: Models And Predictions, Astral Codex Ten, April 1, 2022. It begins: Imagine scientists venturing off in some... Read more
Posted on 01 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Maplewood Prophesy [Friday Photos]
Click on photo to enlarge it. Read more
Posted on 01 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s Going on at My Academia Page at the End of March 2022
This graph depicts activity on my Academia.edu page from March 2, 2022 to April 1, 2022 (click on the graph to enlarge it): What happened at the end of March? Read more
Posted on 01 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
It Won't Be Long
Posted on 01 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Scaling in Deep Learning: Compute, Parameters, Dataset [makes My Head Spin]
The paper sought to answer this question: for a given FLOP budget, what is the optimal trade-off between parameters and dataset size? pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 01 April 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Has Yet to Take Over Radiology
Dan Eton, AI for medicine is overhyped right now: Should we update our timelines to AGI as a result? More is Different, March 29, 2022. AI for medicine has a lo... Read more
Posted on 30 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ethical Obligations Toward AIs(?)
Let us assume, as some do, though I do not, that human level artificial intelligence (AGIs) are inevitable. Some are worried that those AIs will go rogue. Do... Read more
Posted on 29 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Adam Roberts on the Future as Imaginative Territory
In a piece that is otherwise about Dickens's ghost stories, Adam Roberts writes: The frame here is that the nineteenth-century saw a new kind of... Read more
Posted on 29 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ramble: Will Computers Ever Be Able to Think Like Humans? Do I Care?
Honestly, I don’t know. Something’s been going on in how I think about this kind of question, but I’m not quite sure what it is. It seems mostly intuitive and... Read more
Posted on 28 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Seinfeld and AI @ 3QD
My latest post at 3 Quarks Daily: Analyze This! AI meets Jerry Seinfeld, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/03/analyze-this-ai-meets-jerry-seinfeld. Read more
Posted on 28 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Star Trek, the Original Series: Go Nuts, Young Man, Go Nuts! [Media Notes 69]
I decided to take a look at the original Star Trek series, the one that started in 1966, though I’m not sure that I saw it then. Read more
Posted on 26 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bessie Smith in “St. Louis Blues” from 1929
From Wikipedia: St. Louis Blues is a 1929 American two-reel short film starring Bessie Smith. The early sound film features Smith in an African-American... Read more
Posted on 26 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tim Burke: What Happened to Belief in Progress?
Timothy Burke, The News: The Broken Promises of Containment, Eight by Seven, March 23, 2022. From the essay: ...containment worked: the Soviet Union fell apart. Read more
Posted on 25 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Margaret Atwood on Utopias
Ezra Klein, Margaret Atwood on Stories, Deception, and the Bible, The New York Times, March 25, 2022. From the interview: Atwood: Well, now. Now we’re getting... Read more
Posted on 25 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Very Interesting Discussion of China in the World and in Relation to America b...
China and America (and Taiwan and Ukraine) | Robert Wright Kishore Mahbubani | The Wright Show 0:58 Kishore’s diplomatic career and recent book, Has China Won? Read more
Posted on 24 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ted Chiang on Ethical Blindness, Capitalism and the Rogue Impulses of Future AI
Ted Chiang, Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear, BuzzFeed, December 18, 2017: This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association... Read more
Posted on 23 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Geometry, Symbols, and the Human Mind
Siobhan Roberts, Is Geometry a Language That Only Humans Know? NYTimes, Mar. 22, 2022. Last spring, Dr. Dehaene and his Ph.D. student Mathias Sablé-Meyer... Read more
Posted on 22 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Physical Scale, Tiny Robots, and Life
Sabine Hossenfelder has an interest post (and video) about small, smaller, and vanishingly small robots, These tiny robots could work inside your body: Here's... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY