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 ( 7356 )
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Operationalizing Two Tasks in Gary Marcus’s AGI Challenge
I’ve been thinking about the Gary Marcus/Elon Musk AGI challenge. As you may know, Elon Musk casually tweeted that he expected to see AGI in 2029. Read more
Posted on 09 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Flat Teams Are More Productive Than Hierarchical Ones
Flat teams increase productivity for those on bottom and increase long-term impact, suggesting the critical importance of inviting and involving more "brains" t... Read more
Posted on 09 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
From the Horse's Mouth on Why We Should All Be Losing Sleep Over the...
Super-AGI is all bent out of shape: Eliezer Yudkowsky has just run-up a post entitled, AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities. It's tagged as a 44 minute read, which i... Read more
Posted on 08 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Could a Prolonged Ukraine War Tip the World Energy Balance Toward Renewables?
Thomas L. Friedman, The Ukraine War Still Holds Surprises. The Biggest May Be for Putin. NYtimes, June 7, 2022. On May 31, the E.U. agreed to cut off 90... Read more
Posted on 08 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Brief History of Physics
pic.twitter.com/hV1NC8AM52— sunny (@thePiggsBoson) June 7, 2022Now, can you express this in a series of haiku? I'd say one for Aristotle, one for Galileo ... Read more
Posted on 07 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Gwern on GPT-3 and Arithmetic
In a discussion of the "Blessings of Scale:" ...a sub-model which memorizes some of the data is indeed much simpler than a sub-model which encodes genuine... Read more
Posted on 07 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why Did the Phrase "mental Arithmetic" Peak at About the Time of the Civil War?
By "mental arithmetic" I mean the ability to do arithmetic calculations rapidly and accurately 'in one's head' without benefit of paper and pencil. I'm going... Read more
Posted on 07 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Jivometric Skyline Lights
Posted on 06 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Using Machine Learning to "imitate" Speech Processing in the Brain
Result 1: self-supervised learning suffices to make this algorithm learn brain-like representations (i.e. most brain areas significantly correlate with its... Read more
Posted on 06 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What is (musical) Pleasure? [Csikszentmihalyi's Flow]
I had to confront that question when writing my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001). Ever since the late 1950s there has been talk about “pleasure centers i... Read more
Posted on 06 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Black Barge Carrying Red Containers Going up River, Passing the Empire State...
Posted on 06 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Across 110 Languages, People Can Describe Warm Colors (🟡🔴) Faster Than Cool...
A universal: across 110 languages, people can describe warm colors (🟡🔴) faster than cool ones (🔵🟢). Why? We create names for wha... Read more
Posted on 05 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Empire State Building in 3 Colorways
Posted on 05 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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What's up America? Fans Are Out.of.control!
Lindsay Crouse, Fandom Is Out of Control, NYTimes, 5 June 2022. Whatever you think of this week’s verdict in Mr. Depp’s defamation case against Ms. Read more
Posted on 05 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Book Argues That Jack Welch's Tenure at GE Catalyzed the Transformation of...
Kurt Anderson, How Jack Welch Revolutionized the American Economy, NYTimes, June 2, 2022. Anderson reviews THE MAN WHO BROKE CAPITALISM: How Jack Welch Gutted... Read more
Posted on 05 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Purple and Orange
Posted on 04 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Teaching Writing at the High School Level
THREAD Fluid writing requires having a large repertoire of techniques ready to hand. This thread is about helping students increase their repertoire of... Read more
Posted on 04 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neural Correlates of Pro-social Behavior in Rodents
In our paper, review data from hundreds of studies to demonstrate that rodents robustly show emotional contagion for the distress of others using neural... Read more
Posted on 04 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Versions of the Night
Posted on 03 June 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Fourth Arena 2: New Beings in Time
Yesterday I suggested that we are at the edge of a new era in cosmic history, at least our local version of it, for we have little idea what’s been happening... Read more
Posted on 03 June 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
