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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Transmission Versus Truth, Imitation Versus Innovation: Children Vs. LLMs
Yiu, E., Kosoy, E., Gopnik, A. (2023). Transmission Versus Truth, Imitation Versus Innovation: What Children Can Do That Large Language and Language-and-Visio... Read more
Posted on 29 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What’s Going On? Antisemitism is Breaking out All Over. Why?
The ostensible reason is Israel’s retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 4 assault. I wonder, though. I suspect something more complex is going on. This is from today’s... Read more
Posted on 29 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sabine Hossenfelder on Climate Change [opportunity Cost]
She's got a thread on X, aka The Site Formerly Known as Twitter. Here's her first Xcerpt: I really feel like there are a lot of people who cannot grasp why... Read more
Posted on 29 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Unfortunate Circumstances
Posted on 29 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Youth Quake Africa: By 2050 One Person in Four Will Be African [Kisangani 2150]
Declan Walsh, The World Is Becoming More African, NYTimes, Oct. 28, 2023. Opening paragraphs: Astonishing change is underway in Africa, where the population is... Read more
Posted on 28 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
ChatGPT Discourses Learnedly on Decorative Facial Hair
So, my good buddy Adam Roberts, ran up this most interesting tweet, to which I replied: "Decorative facial hair," now there's a phrase you don't hear every... Read more
Posted on 28 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
No, LLMs Do Not Have a So-called Theory of Mind
Hyunwoo Kim, Melanie Sclar, Xuhui Zhou, Ronan Le Bras, Gunhee Kim, Yejin Choi, Maarten Sap, FANToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind in... Read more
Posted on 28 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Prefrontal Cortex-inspired Architecture for Planning in LLMS
đ§ Exciting new work w @TaylorWWebb @ShankaMondal @MSFTResearchA Prefrontal Cortex-inspired Architecture for Planning in... Read more
Posted on 27 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Jake Browning: Generative AI is Boring [agreed]
First paragraph: Now that the dust has settled and the hype has died down (except on Twitter), we can give a verdict: generative AI is boring. Read more
Posted on 27 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Mighty Art Ensemble of Chicage, with Guests, Berlin, Oct. 31, 1991
Art Ensemble of Chicago: Lester Bowie - trumpet Roscoe Mitchell - saxophones, percussion Joseph Jarman - saxophones, percussion Malachi Favors Maghostut - bass... Read more
Posted on 27 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Pot Luck
Posted on 27 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Miriam Yevick on Her Colleague, Agnes Berger – Ein Kultivierter Mensch
From a piece Yevick wrote about a recently-deceased friend: Memoir: To Agnes Berger (1916-2002) and Our Friendship, Newsletter, Association for Women in... Read more
Posted on 27 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ezra Klein on Andreesen's Reactionary Futurism [Starship Troopers]
Ezra Klein, The Reactionary Futurism of Marc Andreessen, NYTimes, Ocr. 26, 2023. Now Andreessen has distilled the whole ideology to a procession of stark... Read more
Posted on 26 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
ConvNets Match Vision Transformers at Scale
abs: https://t.co/dUs2I06B9dThis paper from Google DeepMind pretrains a variety of NFNet models on the JFT-4B at various scales and obtain performance on... Read more
Posted on 26 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Light Rail
Posted on 25 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Beyond Projection: We Need to Rethink Human Society, Making Evolutionary Cultura...
In my freshman year at Johns Hopkins I read an essay that Talcott Parsons published in 1947, “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of... Read more
Posted on 25 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Oct 7 Massacre at an Israeli Trance Festival
Having spent some of my best hours at events like this (a long time ago..), this side of Oct 7 is especially vivid, even though the murders at the rave were... Read more
Posted on 25 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
"Inside These Walls" by the Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band
I can't believe that I haven't already put this on New Savanna, but I've done a search, and it's not there. So here it is. It's performed by the Out of Control... Read more
Posted on 24 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Jews and the Historical Imaginary of Half the World’s Peoples
Maybe it’s not (quite) half, perhaps a bit more. I don’t really know. But it’s a big chunk. Historical imaginary? “Imaginary” as a noun showed up in the... Read more
Posted on 24 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Earth Says "hello," the River, the Trees, Too
Posted on 24 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
