Bbenzon
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 ( 6430 )
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Flowers and Leaves
Posted on 18 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s the Way to Progress? Evolution, Revolution, Or Revolution Through...
I don’t know. But I suspect evolution, if only by default. I think we’re headed toward collapse or revolution, perhaps revolution via evolution (if the latter... Read more
Posted on 18 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Artistic Progress, the Case of Films
It was once common to talk of the history of art in terms of progress and, for all I know, it may still be [Arthur Danto said that in a paper, but I've lost... Read more
Posted on 17 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
GPT-3 Apocalypse Now [?]
OpenAI’s GPT-3 API automatically generates shockingly high quality text. Here are some samples: https://t.co/E4azTT0oVo What are the societal ramifications... Read more
Posted on 17 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some Videos That That Need to Be Seen Together: From Progress Studies to...
War Boys contemplating the future. * * * * * I'm gathering these things together in one place because I think they belong together. I'm working on it. I'm... Read more
Posted on 17 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
MAGA Inaction: America Has a Smaller Population and More Covid-19 Cases Than...
The population of the US is 330 million The population of the EU is 446 million [source https://t.co/JtQgQFMvj9] pic.twitter.com/DAVWfkIW15 — Max Roser... Read more
Posted on 17 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Kitties in Lockdown
A cartoon by Mike Twohy, from 1995. #NewYorkerCartoons https://t.co/iMIweykasE pic.twitter.com/89mRjiDC4k — New Yorker Cartoons (@nycartoons) June 16, Read more
Posted on 17 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
From Progress Studies to Progress [A Ministry of the Future]
Back in July 2019 Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen called for a science of progress in an article in The Atlantic. The article generated a fair response, some i... Read more
Posted on 16 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Researchers, Where Are They Born, Where Do They Work?
The top AI researchers are born all over the world. But they mostly still come to the US to work. https://t.co/FiWwd3FmiR pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 15 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Earthquakes, 1965-2016
Map shows global earthquake density from 1965 to 2016. Source: https://t.co/z5mflLzCsl pic.twitter.com/lHazXRoRTJ — Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) June... Read more
Posted on 15 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Brief Note on Description in Literary Criticism [Heather Love]
In 2010 Heather Love published an essay that got a fair amount of buzz, “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn” (New Literary History, 41... Read more
Posted on 15 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I’m Feeling Itchy! What’s Going On? – Progress, AI, Movies, Straussian Reading...
Somehow I’m not pushing things out to the blog like I feel I should be doing. Yeah, I know I’m just pulling out of my annual melancholy phase, but still,... Read more
Posted on 14 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Racism in America
We have very strong evidence that racism has been a major factor in shaping our stingy welfare state, our weak labor unions, and our hyper-local education lan... Read more
Posted on 14 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Transition from Egalitarianism to Leadership and Despotism
Powers ST, Lehmann L. 2014 An evolutionary model explaining the Neolithic transition from egalitarianism to leadership and despotism. Proc. R. Soc. B281:... Read more
Posted on 14 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Scans of an Alien Brain
Posted on 12 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ross Douthat on Decadence || the Space Age || I've Been Wrestling with a...
And I think I've finally got an overall narrative/logical shape for the piece. Some Ross Douthat's thoughts on decadence have been helpful. I'm thinking... Read more
Posted on 12 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Into AI Valley: Linguistic Pretraining Allows "VirTex" to Learn Visual Features...
Language is more "semantically dense" than other training signals, leading to more data-efficient learning than either traditional classification pretraining... Read more
Posted on 12 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Agnes Callard on Truth and Jusice
From her conversation with Tyler Cowen back in 2018: COWEN: If I look at at least some parts of the American legal system, there’s a kind of adversarial... Read more
Posted on 12 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Science in Science Fiction 3: New York 2140 [Media Notes 37]
Let’s continue thinking about science in science fiction. I propose we look at Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, to which I’ve devoted a working paper that... Read more
Posted on 11 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is Software a Kind of Mathematics? – From an Ongoing Discussion on the Humanist...
I’ve appended two emails I recently sent to the Humanist list. They’re recent contributions to a long and winding discussion. * * * * * There’s a somewhat... Read more
Posted on 10 June 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY