Analects

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marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

You’ve heard of quantum entanglement, probably. Two particles linked in some strange way, regardless of the distance between them. But I’d never heard that this could happen through time too:

The data revealed the existence of quantum correlations between ‘temporally nonlocal’ photons 1 and 4. That is, entanglement can occur across two quantum systems that never coexisted.

Honestly, I understand very little of this. It doesn’t make me very confident about the Instagram videos I’ve idly scrolled through. But it does highlight just how limited the human perspective is. See also The colour of the inhuman world.


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article

The language regions of the brain are the most obvious, but not the most important. If you look closely, you’ll see that our ability to speak just hides the fact that other processes are running the show. Eliminate them, and other consciousnesses start to take over.

Brain regions that are actually interesting pt. I

Article

Brain regions are often oversimplified in popular discourse. The amygdala isn’t just the fear centre, and the prefrontal cortex isn’t solely the ‘smart’ bit. This silly approach to talking about the brain hides the really cool stuff. So let’s talk about those instead.
The language regions of the brain are the most obvious, but not the most important. If you look closely, you’ll see that our ability to speak just hides the fact that other processes are running the show. Eliminate them, and other consciousnesses start to take over.

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marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

Sometimes it’s not parsimony, but complexity that we’re looking for:

The preference for simple explanations, known as the parsimony principle, has long guided the development of scientific theories, hypotheses, and models. Yet recent years have seen a number of successes in employing highly complex models for scientific inquiry (e.g., for 3D protein folding or climate forecasting). In this paper, we reexamine the parsimony principle in light of these scientific and technological advancements. We review recent developments, including the surprising benefits of modeling with more parameters than data, the increasing appreciation of the context-sensitivity of data and misspecification of scientific models, and the development of new modeling tools. By integrating these insights, we reassess the utility of parsimony as a proxy for desirable model traits, such as predictive accuracy, interpretability, effectiveness in guiding new research, and resource efficiency. We conclude that more complex models are sometimes essential for scientific progress, and discuss the ways in which parsimony and complexity can play complementary roles in scientific modeling practice.


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marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

A string of killings has been linked to a group of self-proclaimed Rationlists. People will also get very animated by the heavy trans-identification within the group (e.g. predictably the NY Post who centre the story on this). But don’t be fooled. It’s just a case of Rationalism ascending as an ideology, as I keep pointing out. It’s also notable that Luigi Mangione claimed Rationalist beliefs and though unconnected to this group, the timing of these things seems to hint at some kind of velocity. Ideologies. Can’t escape ’em.


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marginalium

Marginalia are my notes on content from around the web.

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

Finally! Someone wrote this up. Several thousand words complaining about the obviously doomed rationality project, all couched in a story about Luigi Mangione to spice it up:

In many ways, rationalism is the result of people with STEM educations attempting to tackle questions that had long been the purview of the humanities, guided by a stubbornly autodidactic conviction that definitive answers could be reached through a rigorous application of logic untainted by psychological biases … an earnest curiosity about how the world works coupled with a boundless faith in technology’s ability to reshape it, a treatment of social issues as engineering problems reducible to a utilitarian calculus, and a great deal of confidence in one’s own ability to apply this calculus as a “high decoupling” thinker unconstrained by political “tribalism.”

and:

The joke is that rationalist longtermists have produced countless articles, blog posts and podcasts; organized conferences and retreats; and spent billions promoting a supposedly radical new philosophy. The punchline is that the grand result of this project is simply our current system with extra steps

They’re talking about Marxism—rationalist thinking simply working to reify itself. But as I keep complaining about, it’s also just redescribing and suffering from all the inevitable errors in thought we already knew about.


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