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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Top Posts at New Savanna 19 Mar 23 [& Notes About Why]
Every once in a while I make a post about what’s going on here at New Savanna, though I tend to include action at my Academia page under that tag as well. Back... Read more
Posted on 19 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sabine Hossenfelder on the Race for Practical Fusion Power
From YouTube:In this video we survey the biggest and most interesting nuclear fusion startups which want to make nuclear fusion commercially relevant. Read more
Posted on 18 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Duck Soup and The Magnificent Seven [Media Notes 86]
Yes, I know, a strange juxtaposition. There’s a reason for it. Both films end in carnage, which is quite visible in one, but not the other. Duck Soup is a 1933... Read more
Posted on 18 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Vector Semantics and “Kubla Khan,” Part 2
I want to continue the line of thought I opened up on March 14, Vector semantics and the (in-context) construction of meaning in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan. Read more
Posted on 17 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Incredible Shrinking LLM, and Still (almost) as Powerful as the...
Kudos to @zhansheng for the fast LLaMa implementation and @rtaori13, Ishaan Gulrajani, Tianyi Zhang, @lxuechen, @yanndubs for the incredible Alpaca dataset and... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
GPT-4 Does Cool Stuff, but It Still Hallucinates
pic.twitter.com/Iz1c26t51W— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) March 15, 2023 I think dealing with hallucination is going to prove,... Read more
Posted on 15 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
John Von Neumann, the Greatest Mind of the 20th Century?
0:25 Ananyo’s book, The Man from the Future, about game theory inventor and polymath John von Neumann 6:38 Early life as a mathematical wunderkind 10:16 Von... Read more
Posted on 14 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Vector Semantics and the (in-context) Construction of Meaning in Coleridge’s...
Whatever else I have been interested over a long and varied intellectual career, I have always been interested in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan. Read more
Posted on 14 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Brain of the Fruit Fly Has Been Fully Mapped, 3,016 Neurons and 548,000...
This? This is wild. Full connectome of the larval Drosophila brain. https://t.co/s5KiPZL4xC pic.twitter.com/7jPPRd4mUS— Dr. Stephanie (@punkrockscience) March... Read more
Posted on 14 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Historical Psychology – "many Aspects of Psychology Have Evolved Culturally...
Our new paper (with @JoHenrich) is out in Current Directions in Psych Science. https://t.co/0jRV2i5dZO pic.twitter.com/nkyYwooHis— Mohammad Atari... Read more
Posted on 14 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Hits Just Keep Coming on My Academia.edu Page
I’d earlier reported that a post at LessWrong was driving traffic to my Academia.edu page to look at papers on ChaGPT and ayahuasca. Read more
Posted on 14 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bye, Bye, Uncle Noam
This paper draws on so much exciting work by people like @a_stadt, Ellie Pavlick, @chrmanning, @ev_fedorenko, @weGotlieb, @adelegoldberg1, @neuranna, @kmahowald... Read more
Posted on 13 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Seinfeld’s Comedy: Jokes Are Intricately Crafted Machines
Another working paper. Title above, link(s), abstract, contents, and introduction below. Academia.edu:... Read more
Posted on 12 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How Do People Reconcile the Linguistic Fluency of LLMs with the Fact That They...
Let me repeat: How do people reconcile the disconnect between the obvious linguistic fluency of current large language models (LLMs), such a ChatGPT, with the... Read more
Posted on 12 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Robots Are Performing Hindu Rituals
Holly Walters, Robots are performing Hindu rituals – some devotees fear they’ll replace worshippers, The Conversation, March 9, 2023. Read more
Posted on 12 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Issue of Meaning in Large Language Models (LLMs)
Noam Chomsky was trotted out to write a dubious op-ed in The New York Times about large language models and Scott Aaronson registered his displeasure at his... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tweets in Which US Senators Accuse Others of Greed Are More Successful Than Othe...
Eric J. Mercadante, Jessica L. Tracy, and Friedrich M. GĂśtz, Greed communication predicts the approval and reach of US senators’ tweets, PNAS, March... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Uncle Noam Got It Wrong in The New York Times [meaning = Intention + Adhesion +...
So it's real bummer when the world's most famous linguist writes an op-ed in the NYT* and gets it largely wrong.https://t.co/aFyLJvRl7e(*NYT famous for... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Education to a Sophisticated Level of Intellectual Capability
In a discussion over at LessWrong I was asked: I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to compress the training that one gets beginning and throughout a phd... Read more
Posted on 10 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Beyond Attention [& Transformers]
Hyena is a convolutional layer for LLMs that can shrink the gap with attention, while scaling *subquadratically* in seq len (eg train a lot faster @ 64k +... Read more
Posted on 09 March 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
