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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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
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Some Informal Notes on Higher-level Structures in LLMs
By higher-level I simply mean texts that are more than a sentence long, typically two or more paragraphs, and sometimes many paragraphs. Just how LLMs organize... Read more
Posted on 12 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Understanding LLMs: Some Basic Observations About Words, Syntax, and Discourse...
I seem to be in the process of figuring out what I’ve learned about Large Language Models in the process of playing around with ChatGPT since December of last... Read more
Posted on 11 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Early Evening in Hoboken
Posted on 11 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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What’s in a Word? Did Yevick Actually Use “holographic” in Her 1970 Speech to...
Miriam Lipschutz Yevick ends A Testament for Ariela with a spontaneous speech she gave to Princeton students in 1970, as follows: ... Read more
Posted on 11 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI as Energy Hog
Delger Erdenesanaa, A.I. Could Soon Need as Much Electricity as an Entire Country, NYTimes, Oct. 10, 2023. OpenAI’s ChatGPT exploded onto the scene nearly a yea... Read more
Posted on 11 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some Tall Buildings as Seen from Hoboken [yesterday Evening]
Posted on 10 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Claudia Goldin on Tenure, Happiness, and Other Matters
Claudian Goldin is an economics historian who just won a Nobel. Tyler Cowen had a conversation with her back in 2021. I’ve picked out a few bits that... Read more
Posted on 10 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Views of Stevens Institute from Sinatra Drive
Posted on 09 October 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Life and Ideas of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick @3QD
My most recent piece for 3 Quarks Daily: Next year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI... Read more
Posted on 09 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
In Partial Defense of Sam Bankman-Fried on Shakespeare [there IS a Serious...
This passage, which, I gather, is from Michael Lewis’s biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, has been burning up the Twittersphere (Xosphere?) in past couple of... Read more
Posted on 08 October 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
