Bbenzon
Description
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 ( 7871 )
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Some Tall Buildings as Seen from Hoboken [yesterday Evening]
Posted on 10 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Claudia Goldin on Tenure, Happiness, and Other Matters
Claudian Goldin is an economics historian who just won a Nobel. Tyler Cowen had a conversation with her back in 2021. I’ve picked out a few bits that... Read more
Posted on 10 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Views of Stevens Institute from Sinatra Drive
Posted on 09 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Life and Ideas of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick @3QD
My most recent piece for 3 Quarks Daily: Next year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI... Read more
Posted on 09 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
In Partial Defense of Sam Bankman-Fried on Shakespeare [there IS a Serious...
This passage, which, I gather, is from Michael Lewis’s biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, has been burning up the Twittersphere (Xosphere?) in past couple of... Read more
Posted on 08 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Workism: Work and Identity
David French, The Hidden Moral Injury of ‘OK Boomer’, NYTimes, Oct 8, 2023. Beyond work as identity: Workism tells older Americans who might think otherwise tha... Read more
Posted on 08 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s Up? Jeeves and Wooster [and Now Uncle Fred]
I'm republishing this from The Valve, where it appeared on Oct. 19, 2009 (and still abides on the WayBack Machine), and occasioned a fair amount of debate over ... Read more
Posted on 08 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bye, Bye Black Boxes, Hello Interpretability [artificial Neural Nets]
AI models are not just black boxes or giant inscrutable matrices.We discover they have interpretable internal representations, and we control these to... Read more
Posted on 07 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sutan Has 100 Different Feelings [making Matcha Parfait]
At about 5:00: Do you ever want to play outside with Mommy? Do you? Really? Okay, Mommy has to work hard, too. But when I ask you if you want to go out, you say... Read more
Posted on 07 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Human Voice is the Most Fearsome Sound on the African Savanna
Lesley Evans Ogden, Watch How Animals React to the Scariest Sound on the Savanna, NYTimes, Oct. 5, 2023. The article opens: Panting after chasing the impala... Read more
Posted on 07 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Jersey City, Manhattan, Ellis Island, a New Day
Posted on 06 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Towards Self-Assembling Artificial Neural Networks
Elias Najarro, Shyam Sudhakaran, Sebastian Risi, Towards Self-Assembling Artificial Neural Networks through Neural Developmental Programs, arXiv:2307.08197v1... Read more
Posted on 06 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AIs Are Not Ready to Write for The New Yorker
Neat study that rigorously compares the creative writing of AI to stories published in The New Yorker. The AI, unsurprisingly, performs much worse. Read more
Posted on 06 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Polysemantic "neurons" in LLMs
We hope this will eventually enable us to diagnose failure modes, design fixes, and certify that models are safe for adoption by enterprises and society. Read more
Posted on 05 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Return to South Philly
Posted on 05 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Tyler Cowen Chats with the Remarkable Ada Palmer
About Palmer: Ada Palmer is a Renaissance historian at the University of Chicago who studies radical free thought and censorship, composes music, consults on... Read more
Posted on 05 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
World "model" in Llama-2
Do language models have an internal world model? A sense of time? At multiple spatiotemporal scales?In a new paper with @tegmark we provide evidence that they d... Read more
Posted on 04 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Midtown, Manhattan, Port Authority to the Right
Posted on 04 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Entanglement and Intuition About Words and Meaning
Two things have just occurred to me about my recent post, Word meaning and entanglement in LLMs: 1.) That the issue is one of intuition as well, and 2. Read more
Posted on 04 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
At Last, Someone Has Taken the Proper Measure of Dan Dennett, Who Comes up Short.
Dan Dennett has written and autobiography, I've Been Thinking. I suppose he has. Stuart Jeffries reviews it in The Guardian. He opens with the story of how... Read more
Posted on 04 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
