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 ( 7626 )
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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
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Tech Utopians and AI Doomers Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Matt Yglesias pushes back against Andreesen’s Techno-Optimism, The techno-optimist's fallacy. He sets it up: Earlier this year, I kept writing draft versions... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Return to South Philly
Posted on 23 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe as Techno-Optimist of the Future
Well, I’m not proposing that we reanimate him, much less (attempt to) fetch him with a time machine. I suppose what I have in mind is that the ideal... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Let Me Repeat, Scaling Won't Get LLMs to Climb to the Top of Mount AGI
Of course we are good at regurgitating correct-ish answers without any reasoning too (and efficiency often demands it!). One difference is that we are more... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I'll Say It Again, "predict the Next Token" is a Reductive and Misleading Way...
This is an important point.While all the common *sampling* strategies only choose 1 token at a time,attention-layer training does *not* propagate gradients... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ways Hidden and Not So Hidden
Posted on 22 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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On the Road and Out of Control [It’s the Blues, People!]
The road was generally somewhere in the Capital District of upstate New York. Think of it as a bunch of towns and small cities centered around Albany, the... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Getting Ready for Fall
Posted on 21 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Marc Andreesen is No Jack Kennedy, nor is There One Waiting in the Wings
As you may know, a couple of days ago venture capitalist Marc Andreesen – who, incidentally, is co-inventor of the MOSAI web browser – issued The Techno-Optimis... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Rough Beast: Yeats on the Middle East and World Politics
The Second Coming W. B. Yeats 1865 – 1939 Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
