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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Sam Altman’s Big, Bad Idea
Nonzero Newsletter Robert Wright Feb 16, 2024 Nonzero has several topics this week, but NVIDIA (Jensen Huang) and OpenAI (Sam Altman) share the lead article. Read more
Posted on 16 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
OpenAI's Synthetic Video [Sora]
Here's the video they produced: It's spectacular, no? Here's their technical report, Video generation models as world simulators: We explore large-scale trainin... Read more
Posted on 16 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Arthur Stinchcombe on Method in the Social Sciences
In my sophomore year at Johns Hopkins I took a course in social theory taught by Arthur Stinchcombe. It was one of those courses designed for first-year graduat... Read more
Posted on 16 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Follow the Spots of Bright Color [On the Waterfront]
Posted on 16 February 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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GOAT Literary Critics: Part 4: Vamp ‘til Ready – What’s up with the Bard?...
By “the Bard” I of course mean Shakespeare. Both Girard and Bloom put him at the center of their thinking. Girard has written a book about his work, Bloom, two. Read more
Posted on 15 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Lost in Light [Look for the People]
Posted on 15 February 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Workworld: AI is Forcing Us to Ask, "What Are Our Core Capabilities as Humans?"
Aneesh Raman and Maria Flynn, When Your Technical Skills Are Eclipsed, Your Humanity Will Matter More Than Ever, NYTimes, Feb. 14, 2024. Read more
Posted on 14 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
From Conan to State Farm and Beyond, the World [Media Notes 111]
At the top we see a trailer from the first Conan movie, Conan the Barbarian, released in 1982. Below that we have a commercial that just aired during the 2023... Read more
Posted on 14 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
About Capote's Swans, from Blair Sabol, Who Was There
Blair Sabol, No Holds Barred: From Capote’s Swans to Bravo’s Housewives, New York Social Diary, February 14, 2024. I “grew up” in New York City in the late... Read more
Posted on 14 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Winter Afternoon in Hoboken, with the Sun and the River
Posted on 14 February 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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NVIDIA CEO: Every Country Needs Sovereign AI
From the article: Every country needs to own the production of their own intelligence, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang told attendees Monday at the World... Read more
Posted on 14 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
GOAT Literary Critics: An Interlude on Frye, Pharmakos, and Violence [Girard]
I found the following passage in an interview that Girard gave to Diacritics: I find some analyses of Northrop Frye admirable, notably the pharmakon passages... Read more
Posted on 13 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Stop Thinking About the Future Through the Eyes and Ideas of the Past.
The problem with most of the thinking about the future effects of AGI, superintelligence, and so forth, is that its looking at the future through the eyes of... Read more
Posted on 13 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Strange New Worlds
Posted on 13 February 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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What's So Special About Us? Why Do We Insist on Specialness?
Scott Aaronson has just posted "The Problem of Human Specialness in the Age of AI." For the past year and a half, I’ve been moonlighting at OpenAI, thinking... Read more
Posted on 13 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Color Photographs from Over a Century Ago by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
This photo is 113 years old.It was taken by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, an early pioneer of colour photography.If you've ever wondered what the world used to look... Read more
Posted on 12 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
More Hoboken Peekaboo
Posted on 12 February 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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What Happened to Cognitive Science?
Núñez, R., Allen, M., Gao, R. et al. What happened to cognitive science?. Nat Hum Behav 3, 782–791 (2019). https://doi.org/10. Read more
Posted on 12 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Deeper and Deeper [seeds of Recursion]
Posted on 12 February 2024
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Play-by-play Commentary as a Cognitive and Linguistic Act
I’m not much interested in football, or in sports generally. When I was in secondary school, I spent five years in marching band and, as a consequence, went to... Read more
Posted on 12 February 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
