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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This Just In: Jellyfish Can Learn!
Veronique Greenwood, Brainless Jellyfish Demonstrate Learning Ability, NYTimes, Sept. 22, 2023. From the article: Researchers who were not involved in the... Read more
Posted on 25 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Chipping Away at the "opacity" of ANNs
Are deep neural networks really black-boxes whose inner workings are opaque?Not quite:"... for any feed-forward ReLU network, there exists a global linear... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neel Nanda on That Paper: [LLMs] Have a 1 Way Flow from Inputs to Outputs, and...
This paper's been doing the rounds, so I thought I'd give a mechanistic interpretability take on what's going on here!The core intuition is that "When you see '... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sunrise on Nov. 9, 2023 in Liberty State Park
Posted on 24 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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St. George Variations [ChatGPT]
This post is a companion piece to my earlier piece, Can an LLM identify ring-composition in a literary text? [ChatGPT], where I used the story of St. George... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hoboken Terminal [to the World]
Posted on 24 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Culturally, GPT is US-centric [WEIRD in WEIRD Out]
GPT falls between Germany and New Zealand...@mmuthukrishna pic.twitter.com/lVkEhgOTO9— Joe Henrich (@JoHenrich) September 23, 2023 Computer scientists seem... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What We Can Learn About the Origin of the Vertebrate Brain from the Lamprey
What's the origin of the vertebrate brain?No cerebellum for one!https://t.co/D8xoSdvQER pic.twitter.com/i7qVqHGUhy— Luiz Pessoa (@PessoaBrain) September 23, Read more
Posted on 23 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
There's a Better Way to Teach Music to Kids [who Are Born to Groove]
Sammy Miller, We’re Teaching Music to Kids All Wrong, NYTimes, Sept. 23, 2023. Opening paragraph: Each fall, as school starts up again, music educators witness ... Read more
Posted on 23 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is an AI Chill on the Horizon?
Called it. https://t.co/IZLLKFgxhD— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) September 22, 2023 Yeah, he called it. I just wish he weren't so damned self-righteous about it. Read more
Posted on 22 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: What the Hey? [Hoboken All the Way]
Posted on 22 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Better at Chess, Still Sucks at Planning [look at the Red Box]
The new GPT3.5 completion version and the claims on its chess prowess caught my students' attention--and they tested to see if it got better at, you know,... Read more
Posted on 22 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Systems as Infrastructure, Infrastructure as Open Source
AI systems are fast becoming a basic infrastructure.Historically, basic infrastructure always ends up being open source (think of the software infra of the... Read more
Posted on 21 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Are We Feeling Queasy Yet?
Posted on 21 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Chain-of-verification for LLMs Reduces Hallucination
- LLMs like ChatGPT Llama are prone to hallucinate in longform generation- Our method generates short questions that check facts in the full generation. Read more
Posted on 21 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Quick Remark on So-called “hallucinations” in LLMs and Humans
That LLMs “hallucinate” is well-known, though I prefer the term “confabulate.” They just make stuff up. They don’t do it intentionally, or with intent to... Read more
Posted on 21 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Addicted to Disneyland? You Aren't the Only One. [Something's Rotten in the Stat...
Daryl Austin, The scientific reason why you can’t stop going to Disneyland, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 19, 2023. Travel craving: Though research around “travel... Read more
Posted on 21 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I'm Feeling Like Flowers
Posted on 20 September 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Notes on ChatGPT’s “memory” for Strings and for Events
Here I take a look at the results reported in three previous posts and begin the job of making sense of them analytically. Here are the posts: What must be the... Read more
Posted on 20 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Live Forever! This is One MoFo of an Anxiety Management Routine [TechBros...
Charlotte Alter, The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever, Time, September 20, 2023. Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of th... Read more
Posted on 20 September 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
