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 ( 7824 )
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How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75b] – Psilocybin Brings Depth to the...
As I’ve already indicated, I found the first episode in Michael Pollan’s series, about LSD, to be disappointing. The second one, about psilocybin, is much... Read more
Posted on 14 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know
In "Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know", we show that language models can evaluate whether what they say is true, and predict ahead of time whether... Read more
Posted on 14 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Psychedelic Camera
Posted on 13 July 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75] – LSD for Serious People, but...
How to Change Your Mind is a four episode miniseries on Netflix based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same name. It has four episodes, each named after a... Read more
Posted on 13 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Waffles at Turning Point
Posted on 12 July 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Ramble: Waffles and AI [the Physical World, Algorithms, Memory]
I’ve been feeling a need to write a substantial blog post, whatever that is. That’s one thing. But my brain is, if not fried, in no mood for painstaking... Read more
Posted on 12 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hydrangeas in Pink and Bllue
Posted on 11 July 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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My Main Response to LeCun's Position Paper: Why Are Symbols Important? Because...
Yann LeCun recently posted a major position paper that has been receiving quite a bit of discussion: Yann LeCun, A Path Towards Autonomous Machine... Read more
Posted on 11 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Picasso, the Bull, and Visual Abstraction
In Dec. 1945, Picasso created "The Bull", a series of 11 lithographs (stone prints).With each successive print, a bull is simplified and abstracted. Picasso's... Read more
Posted on 10 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
China's Population is Less Than 1.28 B, Not the Official 1.41 B [India is No. 1!]
Recently leaked China's population data confirm my estimates: births began to decline in 1991, with no peak in 2004 or 2011; Population is now less than 1.28... Read more
Posted on 10 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Versions of a Lily
Posted on 10 July 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Where Are the AI Utopians?
Yesterday, July 10, Anonymous showed up with a link to a rather Quixotic video extolling the marvels of a future in which AI helps humanity to a better way of... Read more
Posted on 10 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Visualization and Biology – Here’s an Opportunity for the Picture-drawing and...
James Somers, I should have loved biology. He starts off by telling us how dry as dust high school biology was. FWIW, I thought it was OK, especially when we ha... Read more
Posted on 09 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Still More Hoboken Peek-a-Boo [in Which the City Peeks out Among the Plants]
Posted on 09 July 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Phrasal Lexicon [System 1 Vs System 2 for Language]
David Chapman posted the following tweet this morning (the first in a stream) 🗣 In 1974, Joseph D. Becker pointed out that rigid rationalist Chomskian... Read more
Posted on 09 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Floral Evanescence
Posted on 08 July 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Video About Yann LeCun's “A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence”
Yann LeCun recently released his vision for deep learning, A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence, Version 0.9.2, 2022-06-27,... Read more
Posted on 08 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Trip Through Hoboken Greenery
Posted on 07 July 2022
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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No One Had Predicted GPT-3. How Do You Update Your Priors? [Why Learning from...
More from the Pinker/Aaronson debate on AI scale. Aaronson at comment #240: It’s true that I utterly failed to predict the deep learning revolution. Read more
Posted on 07 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Software 2.0 [machine Learning, Programming with Data]
Building the Software 2 0 Stack (Andrej Karpathy) 48,226 views Aug 29, 2018 A lot of our code is in the process of being transitioned from Software 1.0 (code... Read more
Posted on 07 July 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
