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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Why Plato is Important to Me
I wrote this as a comment in response to a post at Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen was explaining what he'd learned from Plato when he was in his early... Read more
Posted on 24 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Things Are Still Lively on My Academia Page
Like I reported the other on the 22nd, those spikes at the right reflect a lot of action coming in from LessWrong. People seem to be interested in two papers:... Read more
Posted on 24 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Like I've Been Saying All Along, Minds Are Built from the Inside
Gary Lupyan and Andy Clark, Super-cooperators, Aeon. The lede: Clear and direct telepathic communication is unlikely to be developed. Read more
Posted on 23 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Feeding Frenzy: “There’s Gold in the Them Thar Hills!”
Peter Coy, We’re Unprepared for the A.I. Gold Rush, NYTimes, Feb. 22, 2023. Opening paragraphs: I think I know why artificial intelligence is breaking our... Read more
Posted on 23 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Signs of the Times
Posted on 22 February 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Another Big Jump at Academia.edu [LessWrong] – Turn! Turn!
I posted my first working paper about ChatGPT (Discursive Competence in ChatGPT, Part 1: Talking with Dragons) to Academia.edu on Jan. 4, 2023. Read more
Posted on 22 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two Kinds of Greenery
Posted on 21 February 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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What Happens in Next-token Generation in an LLM During Inference?
“That which gives rise to the next token” is a space far exceeding the scope of next token itself:- What’s in output so far- Embedding space of 1000s dimensions... Read more
Posted on 21 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
ChatGPT: Story Calibration, 2.21.23
A couple of days ago I decided to ‘calibrate’ ChatGPT’s behavior in story-telling. I know, for example, that sometime in the not too distant future, OpenAI is... Read more
Posted on 21 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Men and a Boy in Jersey City on a Special Occasion
Posted on 21 February 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Secrets of ChatGPT
One thing I didn't realize about ChatGPT: it is able to run Python in the background, in service of responding to questions. pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 20 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Art Don't Get No Respect [And That's the Truth, Ruth]
Millet K., Buehler F., Du G. Kokkoris M., Defending humankind: Anthropocentric bias in the appreciation of AI art, Computers in Human Behavior (2023), doi:... Read more
Posted on 20 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Skippy, Author of "From Grundrisse to Hundrisse: How the Dogs Broke out of the...
Posted on 20 February 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Hundrisse Chronicles: ChatGPT on the Marxian Imaginary [more Fun Than a...
I said 'what?' Kind of worried. And then he said, 'I DON'T THINK MY MOM IS GOING TO GIVE MY DOG BACK.'John: Ooh, Karl Marx's unpublished 'Hundrisse'. [I'm that... Read more
Posted on 20 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Hypothetical Brainy Jellyfish [imagined and Drawn by a Human]
Soft-bodied marine animals have evolved all kinds of adaptations. Why do complex brains show up only in cephalopods? Why don't we see complex neural... Read more
Posted on 20 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Idea That ChatGPT is Simply “predicting” the Next Word Is, at Best,...
Yes, I know that that is how ChatGPT is trained. The result of that training is that it builds up a complex structure of weights on the 175 billion parameters o... Read more
Posted on 19 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Street in Hoboken, NJ
Posted on 19 February 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Exploring Lily’s World with ChatGPT [things an AI Won’t Do]
As you know, I’ve been spending a lot of time exploring how ChatGPT tells stories. Most of the time I’d just ask it to tell a story, or tell a new story based o... Read more
Posted on 19 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I See Spots
Posted on 19 February 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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AI and the Future: Are We There Yet?
Tyler Cowen has just posted a section from his current Bloomberg column: Why AI will not create unimaginable fortunes. I responded: Interesting. I wonder what... Read more
Posted on 19 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
