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 ( 7628 )
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The Brain of the Fruit Fly Has Been Fully Mapped, 3,016 Neurons and 548,000...
This? This is wild. Full connectome of the larval Drosophila brain. https://t.co/s5KiPZL4xC pic.twitter.com/7jPPRd4mUS— Dr. Stephanie (@punkrockscience) March... Read more
Posted on 14 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Historical Psychology – "many Aspects of Psychology Have Evolved Culturally...
Our new paper (with @JoHenrich) is out in Current Directions in Psych Science. https://t.co/0jRV2i5dZO pic.twitter.com/nkyYwooHis— Mohammad Atari... Read more
Posted on 14 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Hits Just Keep Coming on My Academia.edu Page
I’d earlier reported that a post at LessWrong was driving traffic to my Academia.edu page to look at papers on ChaGPT and ayahuasca. Read more
Posted on 14 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bye, Bye, Uncle Noam
This paper draws on so much exciting work by people like @a_stadt, Ellie Pavlick, @chrmanning, @ev_fedorenko, @weGotlieb, @adelegoldberg1, @neuranna, @kmahowald... Read more
Posted on 13 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Seinfeld’s Comedy: Jokes Are Intricately Crafted Machines
Another working paper. Title above, link(s), abstract, contents, and introduction below. Academia.edu:... Read more
Posted on 12 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How Do People Reconcile the Linguistic Fluency of LLMs with the Fact That They...
Let me repeat: How do people reconcile the disconnect between the obvious linguistic fluency of current large language models (LLMs), such a ChatGPT, with the... Read more
Posted on 12 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Robots Are Performing Hindu Rituals
Holly Walters, Robots are performing Hindu rituals – some devotees fear they’ll replace worshippers, The Conversation, March 9, 2023. Read more
Posted on 12 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Issue of Meaning in Large Language Models (LLMs)
Noam Chomsky was trotted out to write a dubious op-ed in The New York Times about large language models and Scott Aaronson registered his displeasure at his... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tweets in Which US Senators Accuse Others of Greed Are More Successful Than Othe...
Eric J. Mercadante, Jessica L. Tracy, and Friedrich M. GĂśtz, Greed communication predicts the approval and reach of US senators’ tweets, PNAS, March... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Uncle Noam Got It Wrong in The New York Times [meaning = Intention + Adhesion +...
So it's real bummer when the world's most famous linguist writes an op-ed in the NYT* and gets it largely wrong.https://t.co/aFyLJvRl7e(*NYT famous for... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Education to a Sophisticated Level of Intellectual Capability
In a discussion over at LessWrong I was asked: I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to compress the training that one gets beginning and throughout a phd... Read more
Posted on 10 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Beyond Attention [& Transformers]
Hyena is a convolutional layer for LLMs that can shrink the gap with attention, while scaling *subquadratically* in seq len (eg train a lot faster @ 64k +... Read more
Posted on 09 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Evidence of a Predictive Coding Hierarchy in the Human Brain Listening to Speech
https://t.co/C1jlSs8IvF so I don't thread hijack.— Sichu Lu (@lu_sichu) March 8, 2023 Abstract from article linked above: Considerable progress has recently bee... Read more
Posted on 09 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two More Thoughts on ChatGPT: Conceptual Spaces and System Time-steps
The mere fact that I’ve posted a substantial article, How ChatGPT tells stories, does not at all imply that I’ve stopped thinking about those issues. Not at all. Read more
Posted on 09 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
From Yesterdays Trip to the Big City
Posted on 09 March 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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ChatGPT Explores the Semantic Differential
3.9.23 – 6:13 AM – Feb 13 Version If you don’t already know what the semantic differential is, look it up in Wikipedia. But you should get the idea from the... Read more
Posted on 09 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Breakfast
Posted on 07 March 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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ChatGPT Explores the Hero’s Journey
After having ChatGPT review the Hero's Journey I have it produce hero stories about the following, in order: Someone like Louis Armstrong Rocket J. Read more
Posted on 07 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Abundance All Around: Substrate, Object, Undecidable, Inexhaustible
Jochen Szangolies, GĂśdel’s Proof and Einstein’s Dice: Undecidability in Mathematics and Physics – Part II, 3 Quarks Daily, March 6, 2023. Read more
Posted on 06 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Stable Diffusion Plug-in for Photoshop
, free and open source. Amazingly powerful tool! 𤯠pic.twitter.com/hAPCwCtTtX— Liberty đđĽ... Read more
Posted on 06 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
