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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ChatGPT on Printing, Arithmetic, the Clockwork Universe, and the Steam Engine
Over there at Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen has a post entitled, Who was the most important critic of the printing press in the 17th century? Read more
Posted on 26 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Things You Might Dream About [All at Once? – Why Not?] [hallucinated City]
Posted on 26 February 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Benefits of Dreaming
Carolyn Todd. REM Sleep Is Magical. Here’s What the Experts Know. NYTimes. Feb 25, 2023. When we sleep we go cycle through five stages of sleep. We dream... Read more
Posted on 26 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Mystery Train to Hoboken
Posted on 25 February 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Denying Death the American Way
Jeffrey Kluger, Why Americans Are Uniquely Afraid to Grow Old, Time, Feb. 23, 2023. Why are Americans age averse? But apart from fear of death—which, admittedly... Read more
Posted on 25 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Language Model Crossover
The paper (https://t.co/HYLDzlcVey) shows results in symbolic regression (i.e. evolving equations to match data), text style-transfer (changing text... Read more
Posted on 24 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Life of a Professor at a German University in 1900
Irwin Collier, Germany. University life seen through American eyes. Tupper, 1900-1901, Economics in the Rear-View Mirror, Feb 23, 23. Now for the German... Read more
Posted on 24 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Cute Little Object – a Pincushion Perhaps? – Posed in Several Settings
Posted on 24 February 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Why Plato is Important to Me
I wrote this as a comment in response to a post at Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen was explaining what he'd learned from Plato when he was in his early... Read more
Posted on 24 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Things Are Still Lively on My Academia Page
Like I reported the other on the 22nd, those spikes at the right reflect a lot of action coming in from LessWrong. People seem to be interested in two papers:... Read more
Posted on 24 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Like I've Been Saying All Along, Minds Are Built from the Inside
Gary Lupyan and Andy Clark, Super-cooperators, Aeon. The lede: Clear and direct telepathic communication is unlikely to be developed. Read more
Posted on 23 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Feeding Frenzy: “There’s Gold in the Them Thar Hills!”
Peter Coy, We’re Unprepared for the A.I. Gold Rush, NYTimes, Feb. 22, 2023. Opening paragraphs: I think I know why artificial intelligence is breaking our... Read more
Posted on 23 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Signs of the Times
Posted on 22 February 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Another Big Jump at Academia.edu [LessWrong] – Turn! Turn!
I posted my first working paper about ChatGPT (Discursive Competence in ChatGPT, Part 1: Talking with Dragons) to Academia.edu on Jan. 4, 2023. Read more
Posted on 22 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two Kinds of Greenery
Posted on 21 February 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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What Happens in Next-token Generation in an LLM During Inference?
“That which gives rise to the next token” is a space far exceeding the scope of next token itself:- What’s in output so far- Embedding space of 1000s dimensions... Read more
Posted on 21 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
ChatGPT: Story Calibration, 2.21.23
A couple of days ago I decided to ‘calibrate’ ChatGPT’s behavior in story-telling. I know, for example, that sometime in the not too distant future, OpenAI is... Read more
Posted on 21 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Men and a Boy in Jersey City on a Special Occasion
Posted on 21 February 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Secrets of ChatGPT
One thing I didn't realize about ChatGPT: it is able to run Python in the background, in service of responding to questions. pic.twitter. Read more
Posted on 20 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Art Don't Get No Respect [And That's the Truth, Ruth]
Millet K., Buehler F., Du G. Kokkoris M., Defending humankind: Anthropocentric bias in the appreciation of AI art, Computers in Human Behavior (2023), doi:... Read more
Posted on 20 February 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
