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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Carla Bley Big Band - Festival De Jazz De Paris 1988 [+Iverson Interview]
Carla Bley has just died, so I'm bumping this to the top of the queue. It's excerpts from an interview with Ethan Iverson. Note the Louis Armstrong passage... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why LLMs Are Poor at Planning [unroll]
@bbenzon Hello, the unroll you asked for: https://t.co/P4UEFiKnsg Share this if you think it's interesting. 𤗠Thread Reader App... Read more
Posted on 18 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hoboken at Night
Posted on 17 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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ChatGPT Plays 20 Questions [sometimes Needs Help]
One of the questions that keeps coming up about LLMs, and certainly about ChatGPT, is: Can they reason? Well, it depends on what you mean by reason, no? Read more
Posted on 17 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Childhood Deaths Are Down
One thing about the much-lamented rise of more intensively supervised childhood activities is that kids have in fact become a lot less likely to die.... Read more
Posted on 17 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Highlights of the Fireside Chat with Ilya Sutskever & Jensen Huang: AI Today &...
This is the condensed version of the "Fireside Chat: With Ilya Sutskever and Jensen Huang: AI Today and Vision of the Future (March 2023)". Read more
Posted on 16 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Front Porch, Blue Truck
Posted on 16 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Five-Day Office Week Is Dead
Nicholas Bloom, The Five-Day Office Week Is Dead, NYTimes, Oct. 16, 2023. Why have the return-to-office maximalists lost? There seemed to be so much excitement... Read more
Posted on 16 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Once More Unto the Breech! Shakespeare and Bankman-Fried
Over at 3 Quarks Daily, Joseph Shieber has a nice piece on the Bankman-Fried Shakespeare controversy that seems to have gotten so many folks riled up: "Oh,... Read more
Posted on 16 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Precipitating Sunlight
Posted on 15 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Mapping ChatGPT’s Ontological Landscape, Gradients and Choices [interpretability]
By ontological landscape I mean the repertoire of different things it knows about. The parlor game, Twenty questions, was invented in the United States in the... Read more
Posted on 15 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Adults' Subjective Wellbeing
Blanchflower, David G. and Bryson, Alex, The Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Adults' Subjective Wellbeing. IZA Discussion Paper No. 16479,... Read more
Posted on 15 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Yann LeCun on the (near- and Mid-term) Future of AI
To those who say:"but closed source products have billions of investments behind them"I reply:In the mid-90a, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems battled to provide... Read more
Posted on 15 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Along the Hudson
Posted on 14 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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ChatGPT Tells 20 Versions of Its Prototypical Story, with a Short Note on Method
New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, and introduction below. Academia.edu:... Read more
Posted on 14 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
GPT-3 Has Rendered Alan Turing 1950 Obsolete. We Need to Enter a World He Could...
And by that I do not mean that GPT-3 has made the so-called Turing Test – which Turing called the Imitation Game (Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950) –... Read more
Posted on 14 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Copy Suppression Head in GPT-2 [interpretability]
What’s copy suppression? Without head L10H7, GPT-2 naively follows "All's fair in love and" with " love". L10H7 detects the " love" prediction, attends to the... Read more
Posted on 13 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Importance of Children's Play
Peter Gray, D4. The Decline in Kids’ Freedom from 1950 to 1990 was Gradual, with Multiple Causes. Play Makes Us Human, Oct. 5, 2023: In Letter D2 in this... Read more
Posted on 13 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Census of Primate Brain Cells [good Thing I Don't Subscribe and So Can't Downloa...
In 21 papers across Science, @ScienceAdvances, and @ScienceTM, researchers with the #BICCN consortium present an atlas of the human and nonhuman primate brain i... Read more
Posted on 13 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some Wild Flowers in Liberty State Park
Posted on 12 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
