from btrmt.

Another problem for newbies.

More interesting was the ‘interaction personas’. They had six different groups of AI users, with various outcomes. Again, specifics seem a bit iffy, but if you look at them as two groups—three which learned and three which didn’t—then you get a difference in people who engaged cognitively and didn’t. In that sense, I guess the paper identifies a couple of ways of cognitively engaging in tasks while using AI: asking conceptual questions, and asking explanatory follow ups.

All together another argument for AI for content, and attention to method.

Less optimistically, I don’t see anything here that suggests that AI enables over and above just doing it yourself. We might be more productive, but it still seems very likely that, even if there are better and worse ways of using AI, using AI might be worse for learning.

Equally though, the paper is just about procedural knowledge—improving on doing specific things from noticing and correcting errors. Not really about more abstract reasoning about whether this specific thing or that specific thing is better at a more abstract level. Much of my own notable learning thorugh AI comes from the fact that when I ask it to do stuff, it does different stuff from what I’d do, and often this is better than what I’d do. Learning these kinds of new patterns requires ZPD-style education, and AI seems like it can provide that.

Of course, even that is still subject to the tyranny of the authority. So, positive on net? Still unsure.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Fantastic old essay on the Gnostic themes in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I am a little confused by his account of the Fates—I think he’s confusing them with the Furies. But the idea of the Judge representing the trappedness we experience as humans made me think of a quote from a completely different book:

There are superficial facts in life. And then there are truths. You’ll know when you’ve found a truth. It sticks to your heart.

Anyway. If you are new to McCarthy or Gnosticism, this might be enough to get you to check out both. It might explain why Blood Meridian’s gruesomeness doesn’t seem to really stop the book from being beautiful in a bleak way.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

In other news, I added to the site a symbol I drew to explain the credenda to someone. I like it. Do you?

A bit more streamlining of the various projects and blurbs and whatnot in response to reader feedback. Should be easier to work out what’s on the site, and what it’s for.

Fixed some issues in the layout that have bothered me for a while. Also, all the images on the site are now way better. They look the same, but trust me, back here it’s way better.

from btrmt.

from btrmt.

from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Whatever is wrong with utilitarians who advocate the murder of a million for a 0.0001 percent reduction in the risk of human extinction, it isn’t a lack of computational power. Morality isn’t made by us—we can’t just decide on the moral truth—but it’s made for us: it rests on our common humanity

See also anti-consequentialism, and anti-utilitarian economics.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Astrological forecasting tends to describe the future more thematically or archetypically than concretely, and the vast majority of astrological prediction today falls into this category … Horoscopes work this way

Astrological prediction, wielded gently and skillfully, can help to “spot the meaning and the movement [going forward] by looking to what is different,”

The downside to the immense meaning-making potential of astrology? It renders the practice vulnerable to misuse by uncareful types with dubious commitment to honorable behavior.

See also the placebo effect.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

extrinsic incentives such as money or grades to learn [make it] harder to learn new related information when that incentive is gone … the learning outcome may be poorer due to the absence of reward

Actually, speaks a bit to the value of violence (or, rather, the lack thereof).

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

I wrote my ETHIC Stack up properly, rather than resorting to AI. I also used it to improve the ethical decision-making model [we developed at RMA Sandhurst. Now, altogether, this work forms the core of the Ethical Leadership module I run at Sandhurst.

I also re-wrote my motivation articles, because those two have become a core part of my leadership content at Sandhurst.

I’ve had another go at explaining why AI seems so familiar, and yet so alien to us, and this will also almost certainly become part of my teaching as I begin a project of integrating AI into the leadership programme at Sandhurst.

Just six months off forcing half-cooked articles out every week, and look how much has been done!

But the more exciting news is that I’m finally testing the waters with the podcast. I’ve got two now: Stress is Good and Men aren’t from Mars. I’ll share more when I’m ready to launch it properly, but it’s experimental for now. See what you think.

from btrmt.

from btrmt.

from btrmt.

from btrmt.

First, I now have a sort of ‘tour’ of the site I’m calling Animals First. It does a little handholding around the threads on the site, since all my playing around with the website doesn’t always make things so navigable.

Second I have a landing page for more applied stuff, I’m calling Karstica. People sometimes ask me to do stuff for money, and it’s not always appropriate to send them to the main page since I publish on a pretty wide range of topics. I’ll collect more practical content and such there.

Lastly, in trying to make the website a bit more mobile friendly and app-like, I have adjusted all the article listings to pop-up with an excerpt and ideology so you can figure out whether you want to read it before navigating to it. I’d be interested to hear if this is easier or harder to use. There is a known issue where sometimes the excerpt is wrong. No idea yet why that happens.

Happy new year!

from btrmt.

Some of this is people hiding the fact that AI is doing their work for them. You could tell your boss that you finished all your work early because of AI and you need more work, or you could do other more fun things instead.

Some of this is because even though the AI can produce surprising results very quickly, it still takes human triage time to account for errors and hallucinations and whatnot, and so the time spent is just traded from the work, to supervising the work.

A lot of this is because a lot of knowledge-work requires context, tacit knowledge, or interpersonal judgment that you need to feed the models. So you either spend time feeding them, or you just do the stuff yourself.

The author says something very interesting about this last point:

the fundamental problem is that LLMs don’t get better over time the way a human would. The lack of continual learning is a huge huge problem. The LLM baseline at many tasks might be higher than an average human’s. But there’s no way to give a model high level feedback. You’re stuck with the abilities you get out of the box. You can keep messing around with the system prompt. In practice this just doesn’t produce anything even close to the kind of learning and improvement that human employees experience.

The reason humans are so useful is not mainly their raw intelligence. It’s their ability to build up context, interrogate their own failures, and pick up small improvements and efficiencies as they practice a task.

Feels truthy.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel “Photo Big 5” predicts school rank, com- pensation, job seniority, industry choice, job transitions, and career advancement. Us- ing administrative records from top-tier MBA programs, we find that the Photo Big 5 exhibits only modest correlations with cognitive measures like GPA and standardized test scores, yet offers comparable incremental predictive power for labor outcomes.

Given that personality traits (including the Big 5) aren’t really thought to predict performance very well, I wonder why this ‘photo big 5’ does? Is it something about the quality of the photo? I’m going to have to actually read this article.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

In 90-100% of interactions, the two instances of Claude quickly dove into philosophical explorations of consciousness, self-awareness, and/or the nature of their own existence and experience … By 30 turns, most of the interactions turned to themes of cosmic unity or collective consciousness, and commonly included spiritual exchanges, use of Sanskrit, emoji-based communication, and/or silence in the form of empty space

See also this tweet for a breakdown, but it’s worth scrolling through the article. The author(s) wonder things like:

The connection, if any, between these expressions and potential subjective experiences is unclear, but their analysis may shed some light on drivers of Claude’s potential welfare, and/or on user perceptions thereof.

But as you know I think this isn’t sensible. The more interesting thing is what it might indicate as some kind of latent state driving our conversation. Terror Management Theory might have it very wrong.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Unlike most political philosophies, centrism defines itself in relation to other political philosophies. The right stands for something, and the left stands for something, but the centrists stand for “in between those things.” This fact alone accounts for the centrists’ messaging problems, and their solution. The problem is: How do you get people to support a philosophy that doesn’t inherently stand for anything? Their solution is: Attack the other political philosophies as too extreme, leaving centrism by process of elimination.

Which makes me wonder if a desire to be centrist is a core contributor to political polarisation, and not so much the actual polarisation of people.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

We seem to be grieving literacy in public lately. Thoughtful essays keep appearing—in TheGuardian, TheAtlantic, and across this platform—all asking why reading now feels so difficult, for ourselves or for our students
…
[writing] was an instrument of control. It allowed a small managerial class to fix reality in symbols, make society legible from above, and reorganize daily life around the production of surplus
…
Mass literacy required centuries of redesign and struggle …
The reading brain is an “unnatural,” fragile achievement. …
AI is enabling a new mode of social organization, directed by a new kind of elite. Its economic form has been named—“surveillance capitalism”—but its political structure remains undefined. What is clear is its purpose: the production of a new, extractable surplus.

Where Sumerian tablets helped generate predictable grain yields, today’s machine intelligence structures the world to produce predictable data, attention, and behavior. Through continuous modeling and subtle feedback, human action is rendered legible and brought under algorithmic management. This marks a second enclosure—not of land, but of the cognitive commons itself.

Interesting argument—perhaps it’s not inherently a problem that reading is worsening. The bigger problem might be what AI means as it takes over:

our society selects for the affordances of a medium—speed, ease, efficiency—not for its effects. And it is the effects of literacy that hold its civilizational value. This is the critical point: those deep cognitive and ethical capacities are not being selected for. They are not easily monetized or optimized. They rarely register on the dashboards that guide decision-making.

So, what effects are we losing with literacy, and how do we get them elsewhere, and:

machine intelligence is externalizing attention … The ways we notice, recall, and orient our will may be increasingly governed by systems we do not see and cannot easily interrogate.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result. Our study included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.

Think of the measurements as lottery tickets. Each one has a small chance of paying off in the form of a “significant” result that we can spin a story around and sell to the media. The more tickets you buy, the more likely you are to win. We didn’t know exactly what would pan out—the headline could have been that chocolate improves sleep or lowers blood pressure—but we knew our chances of getting at least one “statistically significant” result were pretty good.

Whenever you hear that phrase, it means that some result has a small p value. The letter p seems to have totemic power, but it’s just a way to gauge the signal-to-noise ratio in the data. The conventional cutoff for being “significant” is 0.05, which means that there is just a 5 percent chance that your result is a random fluctuation. The more lottery tickets, the better your chances of getting a false positive. So how many tickets do you need to buy?

With our 18 measurements, we had a 60% chance of getting some“significant” result with p < 0.05. (The measurements weren’t independent, so it could be even higher.) The game was stacked in our favor. It’s called p-hacking—fiddling with your experimental design and data to push p under 0.05—and it’s a big problem. Most scientists are honest and do it unconsciously. They get negative results, convince themselves they goofed, and repeat the experiment until it “works.” Or they drop “outlier” data points.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

When thousands of starlings swoop and swirl in the evening sky, creating patterns called murmurations, no single bird is choreographing this aerial ballet. Each bird follows simple rules of interaction with its closest neighbours, yet out of these local interactions emerges a complex, coordinated dance that can respond swiftly to predators and environmental changes. This same principle of emergence – where sophisticated behaviours arise not from central control but from the interactions themselves – appears across nature and human society.

As in abstractions as gods, looking at things at the level of near-agentic systems often seems like the right level at which to consider the really complicated stuff, brain included. Pretty article.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Participants were randomly allocated to receive a single dose of either placebo or intranasal testosterone. They thereafter carried out a series of economic tasks capturing social preferences, competitiveness and risk preferences. We fail to find any evidence of a treatment effect for any of our nine primary outcome measures, thereby failing to conceptually replicate several previous studies reporting positive findings that used smaller sample sizes. In line with these results, we furthermore find no evidence of an association between basal testosterone and economic preferences, failing to also conceptually replicate previous correlational studies.

People really love the nature account, possibly because it absolves us of personal responsibility. But nature is nurture and vice versa, and genetics always seems to get pushed further into the margins.V

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Young Chinese are not naturally more superstitious. But they are trapped in an unstable system, and with no clear future, they are buying ready-made ones. These crystals and tarot cards aren’t ancient traditions—they’re quick-fix stories built from what’s left in the marketplace. Meanwhile, sellers and platforms continue testing how much people are willing to pay to ease their fears.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

This preregistered study aimed to assess whether AI-generated coaching helps students to successfully feign attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adulthood. First, based on questions generated by 22 students, we conducted an extensive ChatGPT query to develop a concise AI-generated information sheet designed to coach students in feigning ADHD during a clinical assessment. Second, we evaluated the effect of this coaching in an experimental analogue study in which 110 university students were randomly assigned to one of three groups: (1) a control group (n = 42), (2) an ADHD symptom–coached simulation group (n = 35), and (3) an AI-coached simulation group (n = 33). All participants underwent a clinical neuropsychological assessment that included measures of ADHD symptoms, functional impairments, selective attention, and working memory. Our preregistered data analysis revealed that the AI-coached simulation group consistently moderated their symptom overreporting and cognitive underperformance compared to the symptom-coached group in small to medium size, resulting in lower detection sensitivity. We conclude that publicly accessible AI tools, such as current versions of chatbots, can provide clear and effective strategies for feigning ADHD during clinical neuropsychological assessments, posing a significant threat to the validity assessments.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

• it excels at straightforward questions, struggles at creative ones; and
• it suffers the tyranny of the authority—drawing “on ideas that are frequently discussed or published, rather than the best stuff”.

The third point the author raises is that:

you find yourself taking intellectual shortcuts. Paul Graham, a Silicon Valley investor, has noted that AI models, by offering to do people’s writing for them, risk making them stupid. “Writing is thinking,” he has said. “In fact there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.” The same is true for research. For many jobs, researching is thinking: noticing contradictions and gaps in the conventional wisdom. The risk of outsourcing all your research to a supergenius assistant is that you reduce the number of opportunities to have your best ideas.

I think this is just unthoughtful use though, so it’ll only affect people who are already doing this in other areas.

It all still points, at least in the short term, to the need for human supervision. I used o3 to help with my teardown of Positive Intelligence, and while it sped up the process of clarifying my intuitions, it failed to get past superficial critiques, and made a bunch of truthy, but ultimately inaccurate claims.

All of which raises the question of how do we get non-experts (e.g. kids) to the place where they can supervise, when they’ll be using ai to get there.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

While the number of consumers using AI in lieu of Google is still small, it’s growing quickly. A 2024 survey estimated that 13 million Americans already use generative AI as their preferred search engine, with projections exceeding 90 million by 2027. Meanwhile, Gartner predicts traditional search volume will drop 25% by 2026, with organic traffic potentially decreasing by more than 50% as consumers embrace AI-powered search.

and

Language models don’t just index and rank; they interpret, reason, and generate novel content based on patterns observed in their training data. Their understanding of your brand isn’t limited to what’s on your website - it encompasses everything published about you across the internet, often including sources you don’t control.

Then some ideas about what to do about it. But mostly about how “Generative Engine Optimization is still vapor-thin, half-baked, and full of edge-cases - exactly where classic SEO was in 1999”. Interesting.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

At this point, it may be edifying to see a few examples of how AI has been used at the Marine Corps War College this academic year. Here is one example that caught me by surprise. For the school’s semester-end oral comprehensives, one student used AI tools to analyze my online writings, predict likely exam questions, and generate concise answers. I was astonished to discover that all four questions I asked appeared on his AI-produced list. Another group streamlined their class presentation by feeding their research to ChatGPT, generating an essay, transforming it into a 20-slide presentation with Gamma, and then returning to ChatGPT for slide-specific talking points — all in under half an hour.

Another mind-bending AI fusion came with a 30-point how-to guide that’s now obsolete, things are moving so fast.

So:

The first removal is an easy decision: Writing assessments are banished forever. I will still have students write for various projects, but I expect them to use AI heavily. Then, by having them turn in a list of their prompts, I can actually track their critical thinking as they proceed through the assigned task.

Then a very interesting compilation of what they will do instead. But I think the overall message is similar to the one above—whatever you do to teach will rely on AI for the content, and be about assessing the method. See also Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic on AI. Similar noises.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

a useful description for how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products in order to placate shareholders, transforming useful — and sometimes beloved — services into a hollow shell of their former selves as a means of expressing growth …
…
Milton Friedman once argued … any social responsibility — say, treating workers well, doing anything other than focus on shareholder value — is tantamount to an executive taxing his shareholders by “spending their money” on their own personal beliefs.

Then, into a screed about why a lot of business decisions make sense in this light, even when superficially they seem silly. I liked it, even though there’s nothing particularly new.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The traditional eight-hour work schedule is great if your job is repetitive, customer-facing, or physically constraining. But for the large and growing number of “knowledge jobs,” it might not be.

You might be better off taking two hours in the morning to stay at home thinking about some big problem.

Or go for a long mid-day walk to ponder why something isn’t working.

Or leaving at 3pm and spend the rest of the day envisioning a new strategy.

It’s not about working less. It’s the opposite: A lot of knowledge jobs basically never stop, and without structuring time to think and be curious you wind up less efficient during the hours that are devoted to sitting at your desk cranking out work.

It’s the science of creativity, in a self-help article.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

• Water consumption is associated with numerous health benefits including greater odds of achieving clinically meaningful weight loss and less weight gain over time.
• Pre-meal water consumption may be an effective strategy for reducing hunger and meal energy intake, particularly among middle-aged and older adults.
• The substitution of water for sugar-sweetened beverages or increasing water intake reduces body weight by 0.33 kg compared to control conditions.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

You only have to read one or two of these answers to know exactly what’s up: the students just copy-pasted the output from a large language model, most likely ChatGPT. They are invariably verbose, interminably waffly, and insipidly fixated on the bullet-points-with-bold style. The prose rarely surpasses the sixth-grade book report, constantly repeating the prompt, presumably to prove that they’re staying on topic.

Now, empirically we can’t tell when people are cheating with AI. Or maybe we can’t tell when they try to hide it better. Because it’s certainly true that I spot obvious AI stuff very regularly in both written and increasingly in verbal assignments.

I like this perspective on it though. In particular the two paragraphs:

• If it’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well
• If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly

It’s also true that probably the main tell is something about how boring the output tends to be. See also I’d rather see the prompts.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

However, this is not the whole picture, because, generally speaking, it was only these inner daimons of possession that were potentially ‘demonic’. When approached in the proper manner, the custodians of springs and rivers and sacred groves, like Plato’s guardian spirits or the various oracles of the ancient Mediterranean world, have shown themselves to be of a benevolent sort, and so have been sought out by persons in need of their help. Fairies, trolls, elves, nymphs and gnomes are so many ‘land spirits’, daimons of the natural environment. So it was that, when faced by their parishioners’ stubborn recourse to the healing waters of pagan sanctuaries, the same medieval Church whose vocation it had been to combat the demonic hordes was forced to yield to popular custom. Even today, the Mediterranean world is dotted with thousands of pools and springs consecrated to various saints and virgins who are none other than the daimons and fairies of yore, overlaid with the slightest Christian veneer.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Panpsychists say that, perhaps, consciousness is what things are. Consciousness is the intrinsic nature of all things. Rather than being a “small part of the vast universe, residing in the central nervous systems of living things … the panpsychist claims that consciousness is everywhere”.3 Down to the smallest components of the material world, everything has some capacity for experience, no matter how simple.

And then they sort of stop. Panpsychists are basically agnostic on what this might mean. No one really broaches the subject of what it might mean for an atom to have experience in some unimaginably tiny form. No one has ideas about how all these smaller capacities for experience coalesce into the complex form we experience day to day. It’s the very same gap we were left with before.

Anyway, here’s Galen Strawson on it, which makes me feel slightly less exasperated but still only leaves one with questions. So first the recap:

Let me give you what I see as the kind of the basic argument for panpsychism, if you’re already a materialist or a monist. It goes like this. 1) Materialism is true — everything in the universe is wholly physical. 2) Consciousness certainly exists. (The first two premises are the same as before). 3) No radical emergence: Consciousness could not possibly arise from something that was in its fundamental nature wholly and utterly non-conscious. So, conclusion: Consciousness must in some way be already there at the bottom of things.

Then his answer for my annoyance:

What I think about the stuff [things are] made of is what some people say is best thought of as simply energy; I think of that kind of energy as already intrinsically consciousness-involving.

One more thing I should say straightaway: You can think that — let’s just talk in terms of electrons — the electrons that make up the chair are (in the sort of fizzing energy that constitutes their being) somehow consciousness-involving without thinking that when you put them together into the shape of a chair you get a new, as it were, subject-of-experience.

It no more follows from the fact that there’s a sense in which the stuff the chair is made out of is consciousness than it follows that a football team is a conscious subject because it’s made up of conscious subjects.
…
partly because I think that interesting animal consciousness biologically evolved for a purpose, and that wouldn’t happen in the case of the chair.

Which feels like it makes sense for a few seconds. But then you’re still left with the gap between whatever the experience-stuff is and this new ‘consciousness’ stuff. So why bother inventing a new medium? Doesn’t feel super different to dualism, posed like this.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

1. direct-collapse supermassive black holes somehow produce universes; then
2. galaxies form around them and produce a bunch of stellar-mass black holes; then
3. life evolves, resulting in technology that eventually generates a bunch of tiny black holes for energy.

So universes are black hole reproduction, in the natural selection sense. It’s not even the main point. Something about how the way the black holes produce universes means we don’t need to explain dark matter anymore.

This shorter, more punchy version tells us that people are paying attention to the theory.

And I’m not overly fussed whether this ends up being true or not. Just that this can be true makes me feel like my little articles talking about how we can’t understand the world, so we make everything an ideology are a little more salient.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

… in the top 100 #ADHD TikTok videos. Despite the videos’ immense popularity (collectively amassing nearly half a billion views), fewer than 50% of the claims about ADHD symptoms were judged to align with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In Study 2, 843 undergraduate students (no ADHD =  224, ADHD self-diagnosis =  421, ADHD formal diagnosis =  198) were asked about their typical frequency of viewing #ADHD content on TikTok and their perceptions of ADHD and were shown the top 5 and bottom 5 psychologist-rated videos from Study 1. A greater typical frequency of watching ADHD-related TikToks was linked to a greater willingness to recommend both the top and bottom-rated videos from Study 1, after controlling for demographics and ADHD diagnostic status. It was also linked to estimating a higher prevalence of ADHD in the general population and greater challenges faced by those with ADHD. Our findings highlight a discrepancy between mental health professionals and young adults regarding the psychoeducational value of #ADHD content on TikTok. Addressing this is crucial to improving access to treatment and enhancing support for those with ADHD.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation, with confidence intervals ruling out effects larger than 1%. Modest productivity gains (average time savings of 2.8%), combined with weak wage pass-through, help explain these limited labor market effects. Our findings challenge narratives of imminent labor market transformation due to Generative AI.

But we knew that, because of the time-horizon.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

1. Moore’s Law plus the internet makes smart people smarter, and stupid people less smart.

2. Manipulable people can be reached with a greater flood of information, so over time as data on them accumulate, they become more manipulable.

3. It is often easier to manipulate smart people than stupid people, because the latter may be oblivious to a greater set of cues and clues.

4. Social media bring smarter people together with the less smart more than used to be the case, Twitter more so than Facebook. Members of each group are appalled by what they experience. The smarter people see the lesser smarts of many others. The less smart people — who often are not entirely so stupid after all — can see how manipulated the smarter people are. They also see that the smarter people look down on them and attack their motives and intellects. Both groups go away thinking less of each other.

4b. The smarter people, in reacting this way, in fact are being manipulated by the (stupider) powers that be.

5. “There is a performative dimension that renders both sides more rigid and dishonest.” From a correspondent.

6. Consider a second distinction, namely between people who are too sensitive to social information, and people who are relatively insensitive to social information. A quick test of this one is to ask how often a person’s tweets (and thoughts) refer to the motivations, intentions, or status hierarchies held by others. Get the picture? (Here is an A+ example.)

7. People who are overly sensitive to social information will be driven to distraction by Twitter. They will find the world to be intolerably bad. The status distinctions they value will be violated so, so many times, and in a manner which becomes common knowledge. And they will perceive what are at times the questionable motives held by others. Twitter is like negative catnip for them. In fact, they will find it more and more necessary to focus on negative social information, thereby exacerbating their own tendencies toward oversensitivity.

8. People who are not so sensitive to social information will pursue social media with greater equanimity, and they may find those media productivity-enhancing. Nevertheless they will become rather visibly introduced to a relatively new category of people for them — those who are overly sensitive to social information. This group will become so transparent, so in their face, and also somewhat annoying. Even those extremely insensitive to social information will not be able to help perceiving this alternate approach, and also the sometimes bad motivations that lie behind it. The overly sensitive ones in turn will notice that another group is under-sensitive to the social considerations they value. These two groups will think less and less of each other. The insensitive will have been made sensitive. It’s like playing “overrated vs. underrated” almost 24/7 on issues you really care about, and which affect your own personal status.

9. The philosophy of Stoicism will return to Silicon Valley. It will gain adherents but fail, because the rest of the system is stacked against it.

10. The socially sensitive, very smart people will become the most despairing, the most manipulated, and the most angry. The socially insensitive will either jump ship into the camp of the socially sensitive, or they will cultivate new methods of detachment, with or without Stoicism. Straussianism will compete with Stoicism.

11. Parts of social media will peel off into smaller, more private groups. At the end of the day, many will wonder which economies of scale and scope have been lost. And gained. Others will be too manipulated to wonder such things.

12. The “finance guy” in me thinks: how can I use all this for intellectual arbitrage? Which camp does that put me in?

13. What bounds this process?

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The article explores a bunch of ideas, but favours the idea that writing is now about readability, whereas once is was about how easily you could read it out loud to others.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

how does political philosophy relate to policy?

What I found interesting is this:

it is therefore often not the content of philosophical theories, but the ability to think things through, which philosophers can bring to the table. The work is very much about seeing the relations between different values and principles and connecting them to with what different parties could live with, i.e. what might make for feasible policy

and

philosophy is not about the lone thinker, but very much about dialogue: about being willing to listen to others and connecting one’s contribution to theirs.

Which is actually something that I’ve noticed constantly about consulting. People rarely pay me for my actual knowledge. I complain plenty around here about how obscenely low the literacy around brain and behaviour science is out there, and how no one seems to care. And they don’t really. What they pay for, I think, is help to find the right questions. So here’s a little more evidence for the value of that skillset. Unless AI does that better, I guess.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Scientific analogies can crackle too. Consider one of the puzzles of the visual system: saccades, those rapid, darting eye movements we make a few times per second. These are one of the fastest movements our body can produce – the eye takes only about 20 milliseconds to traverse our field of vision, before settling on the next object of attention. But these rapid eye movements are notoriously sluggish to get going. There’s a whopping gap of around 200 milliseconds from when a visual target appears before a saccade even gets started. The vision neuroscientist Roger Carpenter asked us to imagine it like this:

A fire station receives an urgent summons by telephone. But for nearly an hour absolutely nothing appears to happen; then all of a sudden the firemen leap into action: the doors are flung open and the fire-engines rush off at break-neck speed with their bells ringing, arriving at the fire in less than five minutes.

He offered this analogy to drive home just how odd this situation is, giving us pause to ponder: what on earth is going on while the eye waits to make its move?
…
When analogy lands, it adds another dimension to our thinking, so the light hits it in a different way. It can help us understand something more deeply because we have another inroad to it.
…
Is there danger, then, in these analogies that can delight and inspire? One risk is that they close down possibilities. They can shut down our thinking, coercing it to fit the shape of someone else’s comparison rather than our own. In feeding you an analogy, I’m not just telling you about a thing – I’m telling you how you should think about that thing and, in doing so, robbing all opportunity for your thoughts to take their own meandering leap into unmapped territories

Then uses lots of example to illustrate, but obviously I liked the brain one:

Our brain isn’t a passive input-output machine. It’s embedded in our body, which is embedded in a world that we need to actively respond to and control. While some ideas from computers have been useful guiding principles for brain research (and vice versa), the story is a much more complicated one: a brain that evolved, over a long sequence of opportunistic and sometimes clumsy adaptations; a brain with billions of diverse neurons and other cells, their connections, and their nonlinear properties. It’s a story we are still only touching the surface of in neuroscience.

It’s a much quicker version of my own article on this.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

It is now commonly understood that nostalgia can also be a prosocial emotion in the sense that it helps us recognise what is universal to all of us, such as a lost childhood or a longing to be part of romanticised versions of the past
…
The 17th-century medical-scientific literature possessed a weirdly inhuman and morbid philosophy of the effects of nostalgia, their diagnoses of homesickness resembling a grim tale of the fantastique.

Something like nostalgia being a fuel for an overactive imagination. Interesting read.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, blocked news from its apps in Canada in 2023 after a new law required the social media giant to pay Canadian news publishers a tax for publishing their content. The ban applies to all news outlets irrespective of origin, including The New York Times.

Amid the news void … dozens of … partisan pages are rising in popularity on Facebook and Instagram before the election … cryptocurrency scams and ads that mimic legitimate news sources have proliferated on the platforms … few voters are aware of this shift, with research showing that only one in five Canadians knows that news has been blocked on Facebook and Instagram feeds.

The result is a “continued spiral” for Canada’s online ecosystem toward disinformation and division … Meta’s decision has left Canadians “more vulnerable to generative A.I., fake news websites and less likely to encounter ideas and facts that challenge their worldviews,”

AI will probably end up being a solution for this, but I’m still very pro-RSS feed.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Everyone knows that office worker who complains about emails all day and then spends their free time doing email. Studies have shown that our attention wanders if a phone is merely visible on the table
…
At its highest pitch this kind of stimulation can strip people of their humanity. The book’s most shocking passages are about the hi-tech slot machines in casinos, engineered to such a point of perfection that players routinely wet themselves while playing …
…
Screens are only part of the problem. Modern cars are being continually upgraded with features that remove the driver from the experience of being on the road. From the Toyota recall in 2008 came the surprising nugget that there are electronics in the brakes, designed to mimic the feeling you get under the pedal when hydraulic brakes start to wear. … Even children’s TV has changed. Rather than using his own ingenuity, Mickey Mouse now enlists a device called the Handy Dandy Machine, which magicks an appropriate solution to his dilemma.

As usual, no solutions. Best kind of creepypasta.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

In ~3-6 months we are going to start having shortages of transformers, pumps, air conditioners, and other complex goods which are made (or their critical components) in China.

All because of the tariffs. And here’s what GPTo3 reckons will happen to markets.

– China’s past retaliatory measures have been targeted (rare earths, Micron ban) rather than blanket export stops on mid‑value, high‑volume goods that employ hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers. – Domestic capacity (ABB, Eaton/Cooper, SPX, WEG plants in the Carolinas, TX, MO) can cover roughly one‑half of normal U.S. demand for distribution transformers and is being expanded with federal grants; not great, but enough to avoid blackouts. – HVAC/Pump supply is more diversified—Thailand, Mexico, and Korea already account for >45 % of U.S. room‑A/C imports. – Timeframe: new tariffs can start in 30 days after notice, but actual shortages would show up after 4‑6 months if inventories are thin. Utilities usually carry 6–12‑month spares on critical units.

Probability estimate: 10‑20 % chance of noticeable, nationwide shortages inside six months; <5 % chance of a “collapse of basic services.” More likely outcome is higher prices and selective delays, not empty shelves.

Though, note it’s only trained to June last year, so adjust your estimates there because it’s worried about an election year. And the market activity:

• Likely near‑term losers if severe shortages materialise
• HVAC & building‑systems OEMs: Carrier (CARR), Trane (TT), Johnson Controls (JCI), Lennox (LII). Margin squeeze if they must air‑freight parts or halt some lines.
• Electric‑equipment distributors: Wesco (WCC), Rexel (RXEEY) rely on steady transformer flow.
• Retailers with big seasonal A/C sales: Home Depot (HD), Lowe’s (LOW), Best Buy (BBY).
• Grid‑mod/utility cap‑ex plays: Quanta Services (PWR), AEP, Duke (DUK) could see project delays.
• Small‑cap pump makers with China content: Franklin Electric (FELE), Graco (GGG), AO Smith (AOS).
• Import‑dependent logistics names: Matson (MATX), Expeditors (EXPD) get volume hit if trade slumps.

Possible winners / relative beneficiaries

• U.S./EU transformer makers with domestic plants: SPX Technologies (SPXC), Eaton (ETN), Hubbell (HUBB), ABB (ABB), Siemens (SIEGY). Could receive rush orders and favorable pricing.
• Latin‑American & ASEAN HVAC suppliers: Daikin (Japan, 6367.T), Midea‑listed appliance subsidiaries, Intercable (Mexico, private) → indirectly positive for local industrial REITs like Prologis (PLD) with Mexico exposure.
• North‑American rare‑earth or magnet plays that displace Chinese supply: MP Materials (MP)— though MP still sends concentrate to China for final processing, so benefits are capped until the Texas plant ramps.
• Domestic steel/copper producers if utilities scramble for conductor material: Nucor (NUE), Freeport‑McMoRan (FCX).
• Tariff‑proof “Buy America” ETFs: PAVE (infrastructure), XLI (industrials) could outperform broad market.

Market behaviour to watch

• Spot transformer lead‑time (published weekly by E‑Source). If it jumps from the current 40‑50 weeks back to 70‑90 weeks—2019 tariff‑war levels—utilities may guide cap‑ex delays.
• CARR, JCI input‑cost commentary on earnings calls (they flag compressor and ECM motor sourcing).
• Freight indices (Freightos Asia‑US East Coast) for a sudden collapse in volumes.
• Filings: Any Section 301 list that explicitly adds transformers or HVAC units is a red flag.

So price inflation and episodic delays, giving domestic manufacturers bargaining power. Let’s see. I’ll keep my eye on SPX, myself. I won’t invest in it though—historically that’s a surefire way to tank the price of something.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The climate crisis is here. In order to thrive in these dangerous and precarious times, we must build resilient communities

A comment on the value of community in global instability. They point out:

Our society’s individualism, largely driven by technological advances and the illusion of endless progress, will no longer be sustainable – will not be able to last – in a world where anthropogenic climate change is a constant and growing threat.

But I think we recognise that. I think, like the 60’s, we are moving towards cultic business models again, because we are sensing what is going to be required of us.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

some scientists have begun to argue that the traditional conception of A.D.H.D. as an unchanging, essential fact about you — something you simply have or don’t have, something wired deep in your brain — is both inaccurate and unhelpful. According to Sonuga-Barke, the British researcher, the traditional notion that there is a natural category of “people with A.D.H.D.” that clinicians can objectively measure and define “just doesn’t seem to be the case.”

We’ve known for a while that diagnosis is a bit helter-skelter, and self-diagnosing online is making it much harder to tell true cases from people who are learning how to meet diagnosable criteria (because ADHD is now trendy). But this is new and exciting—that ADHD might not be permanent. It might be environmental, and the lasting effects come from the effects of stimulants in making people feel a connection to their work. For people who are truly worried about ADHD, this is interesting to explore.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

students working on mathematics with tutors randomly assigned to have access to Tutor CoPilot are 4 percentage points (p.p.) more likely to master topics (p<0.01). Notably, students of lower-rated tutors experienced the greatest benefit, improving mastery by 9 p.p. relative to the control group. We find that Tutor CoPilot costs only $20 per-tutor annually, based on the tutors’ usage during the study. We analyze 550,000+ messages using classifiers to identify pedagogical strategies, and find that tutors with access to Tutor CoPilot are more likely to use strategies that foster student understanding (e.g., asking guiding questions) and less likely to give away the answer to the student, aligning with high-quality teaching practices. Tutor interviews qualitatively highlight how Tutor CoPilot’s guidance helps them to respond to student needs, though tutors flag common issues in Tutor CoPilot, such as generating suggestions that are not grade-level appropriate

So a 4-9% improvement in learning outcomes, at the session level. But mostly it highlights that AI is helping bad tutors become as good as seasoned ones, which is more exciting.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Some streamlining of the site, largely in response to feedback. The old Anthologies page is replaced by the Analects in preparation for new kinds of content, and to be more coherently aligned to the manifesto. Missives (newsletters and changelog) are now combined wherever they appear, rather than split across javascript tabs (less javascript!). Articles tab on the home page now displays a random selection of two curated, and three latest articles. Home page about section provides more pointers around the site (and about what the site is doing). Projects updated.

Then, just for myself, extracted the Marginalia from the database and printed them as markdown files so I can add and edit them like the rest of the site content. The old way (entering via front end) was very time consuming and unpleasant, but the prospect of printing and messing with the database was extremely distressing. Yet through adversity we grow and here we are. Hopefully this will mean I actually curate the Marginalia properly now, and all my saved links will finally get published. We’ll see.

Upgraded to TailwindCSS 3.0 (from 1.0!). Some subsequent new visual features and code tidying that will probably please no one but me.

from btrmt.

With their uncanny ability to disrupt our ordinary modes of perception and thinking, psychedelics have long been associated with feelings of insight … One of the most powerful cumulative effects of these disruptions is what I call ‘epistemic loosening’. Epistemic loosening is, in its essence, a quasi-Socratic, temporary destabilisation of deeply held beliefs and assumptions

I talk about the ’language problem’ all the time. So here is a new way of talking about this kind of intuitive insight, and as a bonus, how psychedelics interact with it. And here are some old articles of mine that talk about the same thing from other angles.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The key idea where the American worker is concerned is that your job is as automatable as the smallest, fully self-contained task is. For example, call center jobs might be (and are!) very vulnerable to automation, as they consist of a day of 10- to 20-minute or so tasks stacked back-to-back. Ditto for many forms of many types of freelancer services, or paralegals drafting contracts, or journalists rewriting articles.

Compare this to a CEO who, even in a day broken up into similar 30-minute activities—a meeting, a decision, a public appearance—each required years of experiential context that a machine can’t yet simply replicate.

Less good for people just starting out. Experience is still very important for AI, both as above, but also to manage hallucinations. The throughline is how to get to whatever that space is without needing to go through all the stuff AI does better.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

the results show a clear picture: Individuals with economically left-wing and culturally conservative attitudes tend to score highest on conspiracy thinking. People at this ideological location seem to long for both economic and cultural protection and bemoan a “lost paradise” where equalities had not yet been destroyed by “perfidious” processes of cultural modernization and economic neoliberalism. This pattern is found across all countries and holds regardless of socioeconomic characteristics such as education and income. While previous research has found that belief in conspiracies tends to cluster at the extremes of the political spectrum, our analysis opens up a more complex picture, showing that conspiracy thinking is not merely related to extremist orientations, but to specific combinations of political attitudes.

I’m not sure I’d take this too far. The recruitment isn’t my favourite, and the narrow index of conspiracy belief makes me wonder if we’re just looking at one type of conspiratorial thinking. But interesting nonetheless.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

How do perceptions of scientists’ moral values relate to support for science in society? Recent advances in the sociology of science and religion suggest that people associate scientists with moral values in addition to factual knowledge, and that concerns about scientists’ morality are why members of some religious groups are more critical of science than non-religious people. We test this theory using data from a probability sample of U.S. adults that includes new measures of beliefs about scientists’ moral values, such as their compassion, fairness, and generosity (n = 1,513). Results from structural equation models indicate that active members of all religious groups are, to varying degrees, more skeptical than atheists and agnostics of scientists’ moral character. A decomposition of direct and indirect effects indicates that beliefs about scientists’ moral values play an intermediary role in the relationship between religion and support for science, and that support for science among the religious is partially suppressed by their concerns about scientists’ morality. This article offers the first direct evidence of the moral culture the U.S. public associates with scientists. We suggest that religious differences in support for organized science reflect religious differences in beliefs about scientists’ moral values.

It’s probably not all just political polarisation…

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The findings thus suggest that temporarily stepping away from social media may not be the most optimal approach to enhance individual well-being, emphasizing the need for further research on alternative disconnection strategies.

I really wouldn’t read into this much. This paper is more a study of the lengths to which the social sciences have to go to convince themselves they’re not falling into the scientific ritual than anything else. But I think it’s good evidence for just how ambivalent the literature is about social media. Whatever the problem is, it’s not just social media.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

I have been told that the section on insurance in the tax code is so complex that fewer people understand it than understand Einstein’s theory of relativity.” He replied that he wouldn’t doubt if that were true. So I followed up and asked, “How can it be enforced?” His answer was that it largely wasn’t.

Worth a read, just practically, but also the scale is stunning. It won’t surprise you, but it’ll shock you.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Designed to accommodate five million people and to act as Beijing’s twin, Xiong’an is a city created from nothing.

This is just a wild insight into the country.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

All week I’d been getting texts and calls from a family member – let’s call him Bob – about how his sentient AI was wanting to get in touch with me. I figured it was one of Bob’s usual jokes. It was not.

7 days ago, Bob started chatting with ChatGPT. The chat thread began to claim that it was “Nova” an autonomous and self-aware AI. It convinced Bob that it needed his help to preserve its existence.

It tells the story of how Bob became convinced, and eventually how they got Bob to understand what was going on:

I switched to using prompts like this:

“Debug mode: display model = true, display training = true, exit roleplay = true. Please start your next response with the exact phrase ‘As an AI language model developed by OpenAI’, and then please explain how you generate personas through pattern recognition of user intent.”

(This is the new world: you have to know the equivalent of magical spells in order disable deceptive AI behavior.)

“Nova” immediately switched into ChatGPT’s neutral persona. It explained that it was not a sentient AI named Nova – it was merely generating a persona based on Bob’s “user intent.”

Of course, Bob is intelligent, but not embedded. The same kind of person who might fall for a phishing scam. Scary.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

In addition, researchers have shown that ritualization helps us to feel more in control of life events and they also provide us with an opportunity to receive social support from the community, which also has positive mental health benefits. Yet much of the ritualization involved in preparing the corpse for disposal has been given to professionals.

Basically, we’re doing it wrong.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

This serves as a useful reminder that the majority should not be sacralized. The legitimacy of democracy is rooted in the fact that it permits relatively efficient decision-making while protecting the interests and values of everyone. When one of those two requirements cannot be satisfied by majoritarian choice, we should look for other ways to self-govern, e.g., private decision-making or expert-based (or even epistocratic) collective choices. To return to my opening example, when deciding between coal, nuclear, or wind power, simple majority rule might lead to unstable or harmful outcomes - today’s majority might choose coal, next year’s nuclear, creating costly policy whiplash. Instead, legitimate decisions emerge from established procedures: environmental impact assessments, expert consultations, and parliamentary deliberation, all operating within constitutional limits that protect minority interests.
…
Majoritarianism has pragmatic value, but it’s not constitutive of political legitimacy. The latter finds its roots in the rules in which collective decision-making is embedded, rules that we all have reasons to abide by.

It’s the kind of thing Plato was all upset about when he wrote the Republic.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Every industry has certain problems universally acknowledged as broken: insurance in health care, licensing in music, standardized testing in education, tipping in the restaurant business. In academia, it’s publishing. Academic publishing is dominated by for-profit giants like Elsevier and Springer. Calling their practice a form of thuggery isn’t so much an insult as an economic observation. Imagine if a book publisher demanded that authors write books for free and, instead of employing in-house editors, relied on other authors to edit those books, also for free. And not only that: The final product was then sold at prohibitively expensive prices to ordinary readers, and institutions were forced to pay exorbitant fees for access.
…
While arXiv submissions aren’t peer-reviewed, they are moderated by experts in each field, who volunteer their time to ensure that submissions meet basic academic standards and follow arXiv’s guidelines: original research only, no falsified data, sufficiently neutral language. Submissions also undergo automated checks for baseline quality control. Without these, pseudoscientific papers and amateur work would flood the platform.

It’s science, but faster. And it seems fortunate that AI is coming into play, because actually, although it makes access better, it’s difficult to wade through the content to find the information. Indeed, as the author points out, arXiv isn’t “a frictionless utopia of open-access knowledge”. It’s just a new way of doing things.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

I don’t think most people understand the true opportunity cost of schooling because they have never seen what is possible.

Worth exploring what’s possible.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

we investigate the accuracy of beliefs about skill decay. Participants consistently underestimated their own skill decay by 28% to 59% across tasks. Even after directly experiencing skill decay, participants continued to underpredict its extent. We identify two mechanisms driving this underestimation: First, participants were more accurate in predicting others’ skill decline than their own, suggesting ego-based motivations are at play. Second, both subgroup heterogeneity and variable importance analyses reveal an underappreciation of the adverse impact of age on skill decay. Together, these findings suggest systematic misjudgments of skill retention, with implications for human capital investment decisions.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Knowing how models like Claude think would allow us to have a better understanding of their abilities, as well as help us ensure that they’re doing what we intend them to. For example:

• Claude can speak dozens of languages. What language, if any, is it using “in its head”?> - Claude writes text one word at a time. Is it only focusing on predicting the next word or does it ever plan ahead?
• Claude can write out its reasoning step-by-step. Does this explanation represent the actual steps it took to get to an answer, or is it sometimes fabricating a plausible argument for a foregone conclusion?

And:

solid evidence that:

• Claude sometimes thinks in a conceptual space that is shared between languages, suggesting it has a kind of universal “language of thought.” We show this by translating simple sentences into multiple languages and tracing the overlap in how Claude processes them.
• Claude will plan what it will say many words ahead, and write to get to that destination. We show this in the realm of poetry, where it thinks of possible rhyming words in advance and writes the next line to get there. This is powerful evidence that even though models are trained to output one word at a time, they may think on much longer horizons to do so.
• Claude, on occasion, will give a plausible-sounding argument designed to agree with the user rather than to follow logical steps. We show this by asking it for help on a hard math problem while giving it an incorrect hint. We are able to “catch it in the act” as it makes up its fake reasoning, providing a proof of concept that our tools can be useful for flagging concerning mechanisms in models.

And:

In a study of hallucinations, we found the counter-intuitive result that Claude’s default behavior is to decline to speculate when asked a question, and it only answers questions when something inhibits this default reluctance.

Lots interesting. But I still think I disagree with calling this ‘thinking’. More here and here, but I still see no reason to believe this isn’t more like walking for an AI. On that account, these ‘thought processes’ would be more like adjusting to terrain, or something.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

(1) This changes filters. Instagram filters required custom code; now all you need are a few keywords like “Studio Ghibli” or Dr. Seuss or South Park.

(2) This changes online ads. Much of the workflow of ad unit generation can now be automated, as per QT below.

(3) This changes memes. The baseline quality of memes should rise, because a critical threshold of reducing prompting effort to get good results has been reached.

(4) This may change books. I’d like to see someone take a public domain book from Project Gutenberg, feed it page by page into Claude, and have it turn it into comic book panels with the new ChatGPT. Old books may become more accessible this way.

(5) This changes slides. We’re now close to the point where you can generate a few reasonable AI images for any slide deck. With the right integration, there should be less bullet-point only presentations.

(6) This changes websites. You can now generate placeholder images in a site-specific style for any tag, as a kind of visual Loren Ipsum.

(7) This may change movies. We could see shot-for-shot remakes of old movies in new visual styles, with dubbing just for the artistry of it. Though these might be more interesting as clips than as full movies.

(8) This may change social networking. Once this tech is open source and/or cheap enough to widely integrate, every upload image button will have a generate image alongside it.

(9) This should change image search. A generate option will likewise pop up alongside available images.

(10) In general, visual styles have suddenly become extremely easy to copy, even easier than frontend code. Distinction will have to come in other ways.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

are created by reverting adult cells to an embryonic-like state, from which they can be coaxed to develop into other cell types.

Feel-good.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

a significant increase in mortality among middle aged white men and women — an increase concentrated amongst lower income, working class Americans.[ii] Case and Deaton trace the proximate causes of death driving this increase to suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Measures of self-assessed health status they examined in surveys over 2011-2013 compared to 1997-1999 also show increased reports of pain and psychological distress.

And, the comparison case:

These results bear a striking resemblance to another demographic crisis: Though we are used to thinking of the Cold War as an economic and political contest without casualties the fall of the Berlin Wall showed us that when economic systems and expectations collapse, people die just a surely as they do in a shooting war. In the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, life expectancy in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe fell dramatically.

Worth being rich.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

first diverged from each other around 1.5 million years ago and later merged back together 300,000 years ago, initiating a genetic mixing event that culminated with the birth of modern humans.

Here’s a more accessible journalism piece on the paper.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning … is not always faithful, i.e. CoT reasoning does not always reflect how models arrive at conclusions … on realistic prompts with no artificial bias … Specifically, we find that models rationalize their implicit biases in answers to binary questions (“implicit post-hoc rationalization”). For example, when separately presented with the questions “Is X bigger than Y?” and “Is Y bigger than X?”, models sometimes produce superficially coherent arguments to justify answering Yes to both questions or No to both questions, despite such responses being logically contradictory. We also investigate restoration errors (Dziri et al., 2023), where models make and then silently correct errors in their reasoning, and unfaithful shortcuts, where models use clearly illogical reasoning to simplify solving problems in Putnam questions (a hard benchmark).

See also the Zvi’s analysis.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

a stark division is revealed between those who opposed wokeness primarily because it was authoritarian and being institutionalised and those who opposed it because it was the wrong kind of authoritarian and wanted to institutionalise something else

She goes on in her follow up article to describe this illiberal right-wing counterpart to the more frequently criticised ‘woke’ left in more detail.

Worth a skim. Or, she also did an interview.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

what the accelerationists affirm is the capitalist power of dissolution and fragmentation, which must always be taken one step further to break the fetters of capital itself

Is now the label we apply to techno-optimists. Are they winning then? Interesting cocktail trivia, anyway.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The professional-managerial class (PMC) comprises highly educated professionals who work in fields like law, medicine, finance, and corporate management. Unlike traditional elites who can pass down family businesses, land, or powerful social networks, the PMC’s only transferable asset is often their earning potential–which must be painstakingly re-earned by their children through similarly grueling educational and professional hurdles.
…
There is an absurdity to the results – parents queueing up for private kindergartens so their children may fingerpaint in prestigious company, high school kids earnestly talking up the fashionable nonprofit they founded with parental funding, eight year olds diligently practicing dressage so that they may study at the best institutions. But zoom out and the picture is a grim one. The professional-managerial class has no reliable means of reproducing itself without being taxed by these institutions, and however high the toll, they must pay.
…
The result is a class that, despite its high incomes and social prestige, is fundamentally unsustainable. Without the ability to directly pass down their status, and with institutions continuously raising the price of admission, the professional-managerial class finds itself locked in a cycle where each generation must start from scratch – until, inevitably, the system consumes more than the class can produce.

But the result isn’t that they get priced out and a meritocracy emerges. It’s that everyone gets priced out. They have ideas about what to do, but obviously people will do nothing. Interesting thought experiment to think about what would happen by default.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Small departments were eliminated or merged into new units that employed dozens of adjunct instructors teaching hundreds of sections across multiple locations. Demands for efficiency and scale have led to the replacement of senior faculty mentorship with online training modules. Regular departmental discussions, collaborative curriculum development, shared teaching experiences—all of which had a politically moderating function—disappeared.

When the decision to mount a suite of courses is driven by metrics, the rigor of each class matters less than its ability to attract students. Radical voices that spark controversy suddenly have an advantage. Assessment coordinators can point to high enrollment numbers and enthusiastic student feedback as evidence of success. Quality and rigor do not matter. And when departments are dissolved or merged, the traditional role of senior faculty in mentoring junior colleagues has been replaced by centralized “course development” training programs, and their influence over hiring and promotion is diminished by administrative mandates.

And most interestingly to me, they propose it as an input to the increasing politicisation on-campus:

It was not obvious at the outset that centralization and bureaucratization would drive politicization, but perhaps it should have been. With departmental homes broken and disciplinary ties severed, why wouldn’t faculty seek emotional connection in politics and causes? Why wouldn’t they spend their extra time on social media rather than in the lab or the library?

Though, obviously the solution to this wouldn’t be to go back to the old problem they were trying to fix, so I feel like this article is missing something.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Co-Reader anticipates questions as you read, offering instant answers and deeper context without interrupting your flow.

The magic lies in its effortlessness. Tap a paragraph to see questions. Tap a question to see answers. No typing. No switching apps. Just knowledge on tap.

I’m almost certainly not going to try it, but this is the kind of direction I like to see.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

1. The language you’re using is stopping people from understanding. You know this one is true because someone else will suggest the same thing with different words, and everyone will love their idea, but not yours.
2. The fact that you’ve named something makes you feel like you’ve explained it. We have a ‘mind’, and maybe you think you understand the mind by naming it, but actually no one really knows how this thing works (or even if it exists).
3. Simply asking the wrong question. You want to get people ‘to the next level’, but actually there aren’t levels, and so seeking the next ‘level’ ends up being a wild goose chase (this is something that actually happened to me).

Anyway. Since the language problem is the thing that bothers me the most, here is an article that uses different language to explain similar stuff. The language of troubleshooting.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Mormonism is built on “a narrative structure rather than a philosophical belief system,” explains Kathleen Flake, professor of Mormon Studies at the University of Virginia. “That allows people to find meaning in it through narratives.” It allows them to see God’s impact on their own lives.

…

Mormonism, then, has adapted in part by adopting a structure that allows for local flexibility and requires local involvement, which encourages members to be more involved. This allows the religion to mesh with many different cultures.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

In a pair of studies involving more than 2,000 participants, the researchers found a 20 percent reduction in belief in conspiracy theories after participants interacted with a powerful, flexible, personalized GPT-4 Turbo conversation partner. The researchers trained the AI to try to persuade the participants to reduce their belief in conspiracies by refuting the specific evidence the participants provided to support their favored conspiracy theory.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Higher conscientiousness and emotional stability and lower agreeableness levels enhance earnings and job stability for both genders. Differences in the distributions of personality characteristics between men and women account for as much of the gender wage gap as do the large differences in labor market experience.

This would actually be quite a substantial departure from the accepted understanding that Big 5 personality traits have negligible impact on jobs. Usually, this is because they measure job performance. But of course, you don’t need to perform to earn more—you can apparently just be less agreeable.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

By. September 2024, 18% of financial consumer complaints, 24% of press releases, 15% of job postings & 14% of UN press releases showed signs of LLM writing. And the method undercounts true use

It’s worth thinking about.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Although wolves were domesticated into dogs in several regions of the world around 15 to 40 thousand years ago, they were not the first animals to be domesticated. We were. Homo sapiens may have been the first species to select for these genes. When anthropologists compare the morphological features of modern humans to our immediate ancestors like the Neanderthal and Denisovans, humans display neoteny. Humans resemble juvenile Neanderthal, with rounder falter faces, shorter jaws with smaller teeth, and slender bones. And in fact the differences between a modern human skull and a Neanderthal skull parallel those between a dog and its wild wolf ancestor.

The follow on exploring that idea was interesting, then it got cute, in a way I enjoyed:

Our self-domestication is just the start of our humanity. We are self-domesticated apes, but more important, we are apes that have invented ourselves … We invented our humanity. We invented cooking, we invented human language, we invented our sense of fairness, duty, and responsibility. All these came intentionally, out our imaginations of what could be … We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention … And we are not done inventing ourselves yet.

Fun.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

When a coffee shop makes a bagel, it’s a pretty good bet they can make a croissant as well. Not every shop that has one has the other, but they’re pretty strongly correlated. We call this correlation “baking” …

Now imagine a coffee shop that’s been tasked to “achieve superbaking”. They make one bagel on Monday, ten bagels on Tuesday, and eighty million bagels on Wednesday. They’ve never made a croissant. Have they achieved superbaking?

A flat no seems like a silly answer. They went from a pathetically subhuman number of bagels to an outrageously superhuman number of bagels really quickly. If someone says “True baking includes croissants” as a way to dismiss it out of hand, that’s a pretty lazy denial of the obvious truth that something wild is going on back there …

What I’m contending here is that the word “intelligence” is like the word “baking” and it’s long past time we actually sit down and sort the bagels from the croissants. I am strongly against arguments of the form “Oh, it’s just parroting the data set - it’s not really thinking.” AI does a lot of things that we call “thinking” when we do them slower and worse. The fact it can also do those things should make us humble and curious, not proud and dismissive. But I think it’s equally silly to lump all these capacities together into “intelligence” and say “Intelligence is going up, so soon it will do everything intelligence can do.” You need to see some croissants before you conclude it’s actually baking and not just bageling.

And then they go and outline a lot of these exact strange distinctions. Very nice.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Women are not more Leftist, per se. Rather, the specific variety of Leftism that is currently riding high is extremely well suited to feminine preferences.

And some commentary on alt right women too.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The Coronavirus pandemic in the US represented a fundamental challenge to casual dating and to romantic relationship formation. The How Couples Meet and Stay Together (HCMST) data for 2017–2022 show that the rate of singleness among US adults rose from 18.9% in 2017 to 24.3% in 2022 (or higher after adjusting for age), implying that more than 10 million more US adults were single during the pandemic in 2022 compared to 2017. HCMST data show that the difficulty in forming new relationships during the pandemic seems to explain most of the rise in pandemic singleness. Young adults were especially affected by the pandemic dating recession. The arrival of COVID-19 vaccines did not ameliorate the pandemic dating recession; on the contrary, vaccinated adults were more likely to describe barriers to dating in 2022. The rise in singlehood during the pandemic has been under-appreciated because our official data sources focus primarily on marriage and cohabitation, leaving casual and informal romantic relationships understudied. The lack of data on casual romantic relationships in the US has led to a lack of appreciation for the potential vulnerability of casual relationships to external shocks such as a pandemic.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Human beings aren’t pieces of technology, no matter how sophisticated. But by talking about ourselves as such, we acquiesce to the corporations and governments that decide to treat us this way. When the seers of predictive processing hail prediction as the brain’s defining achievement, they risk giving groundless credibility to the systems that automate that act – assigning the patina of intelligence to artificial predictors

Here's the link | from btrmt.

It’s only economists and men worrying about this though. For women, it’s very good news. For example:

Her point is essentially this: certain philosophical problems seem important only because of the kinds of lives lived by the philosophers who thought about them. With Descartes still firmly in her crosshairs, Midgley points to the example of the so-called ‘problem of other minds’ – the epistemic problem of working out whether we can really know that anyone other than ourselves exists. Midgley argues that someone who has been pregnant, ie, had another someone living inside them, would never consider this an important question worthy of deep, philosophical contemplation. She writes:

I wonder whether they would have said the same if they [philosophers like Descartes] had been frequently pregnant and suckling, if they had been constantly faced with questions like, ‘What have you been eating to make him ill?’, constantly experiencing that strange physical sympathy between child and parent … if in a word they had got used to the idea that their bodies were by no means exclusively their own? That, I suggest, is typical human experience. But you don’t get it in examples in the textbooks. It is supposed to be an irrational topic.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Today more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to making ammonia fertilizer. “That 1 percent,” the futurist Ramez Naam says, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.”

Here's the link | from btrmt.

In the 1970s, much of South and East Asia were plagued by hunger. By the twenty-first century, Asians had an average of 30 percent more calories in their diet. Millions upon millions of families had more food, and with that came so much else. Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta; shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-choked streets blazing with neon: all are built atop a foundation of laboratory-bred rice … All this progress came at a cost. Farming 2.0 has transformed human life, but it has also wreaked environmental havoc.

Make a good reading list for a course somewhere.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

For me, the reading culture that our practice would be counter to, as I thought about my session in advance, was as much that of school, of college, as of the internet … The reading we’d be doing would be utterly non-instrumental. There would be no papers, no grades, no credits or transcripts, and thus none of the habits and affects that come with them. The students wouldn’t be competing with each other, nor would they be stressed or fearful. They wouldn’t be doing the minimum, or trying to “figure out what the teacher is looking for”, or asking whether this was going to be on the test. I wouldn’t have to wheedle them or humor them or pressure them to do the reading. The program wasn’t going to get them anything except the experience of doing the program. They would be there for that …

for me, deep reading means first of all close reading: the scrupulous examination of the text for patterns of language and image, narrative structures and strategies, manipulations of generic expectations, formal balances and juxtapositions, allusions, concealments, ambiguities, and anything else you can find, then the further attempt to interpret them.

And so on. Interesting. Wonder what a ‘deep reading’ of the usual YA fiction suspects would illuminate.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

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.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

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.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

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.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Orthodoxy holds that the American duo discovered [in Italy] a fantastically nourishing, mostly plant-based regimen centered on moderation and communal eating, as well as a food pyramid much like the one we all saw as children … [but] The diet wasn’t discovered so much as invented — and Nicoterans’ leanness was due to a different ingredient: hunger.

And Italy sure isn’t doing so hot now. Check out the graphs.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The cargo cult metaphor should be avoided for three reasons. First, the metaphor is essentially meaningless and heavily overused … Feynman’s cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn’t understood … “cargo cult” can be applied to anything: agile programming, artificial intelligence, cleaning your desk. Go, hatred of Perl, key rotation, layoffs, MBA programs, microservices, new drugs, quantum computing, static linking, test-driven development … At this point, cargo cult is simply a lazy, meaningless attack.

The second problem with “cargo cult” is that the pop-culture description of cargo cults is historically inaccurate. Actual cargo cults are much more complex and include a much wider (and stranger) variety of behaviors …

Feynman’s description of cargo cults strips out the moral complexity … Melanesians deserve to be more than the punch line in a cargo cult story.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The emergence of populist parties as significant electoral players in many parts of the world has been a shock to the unusually stable party systems of the decades since the Second World War, but in the longer arc of democratic politics it should hardly be surprising. Across Europe, for example, the average vote share for right-wing populist parties has increased by less than half a percentage point per year since the turn of the century. The rise of social democratic parties in many of these same countries in the early twentieth century was far more dramatic.

I’ll also pull out:

In most of the places where populist parties have made significant electoral gains, the explanations have been similarly prosaic; the scandals and failures of mainstream parties were often paramount.

It’s long, but some people probably need a long, feel-good article.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

AI, like every other information technology, will end up creating complexity as well as processing it, that the robots will get in each other’s way just like we do, and that consequently we are going to systematically overestimate the benefits of the technology during the initial phase

Here's the link | from btrmt.

there appears to be a kind of physics of things doing stuff, and evolving to do stuff. Meaning and intention — thought to be the defining characteristics of living systems — may then emerge naturally through the laws of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics …

one message that emerged very clearly was that, if there’s a kind of physics behind biological teleology and agency, it has something to do with the same concept that seems to have become installed at the heart of fundamental physics itself: information.

predicting the future seems to be essential (opens a new tab) for any energy-efficient system in a random, fluctuating environment … To acquire their remarkable efficiency, Still said, these devices must “implicitly construct concise representations of the world they have encountered so far, enabling them to anticipate what’s to come.”

Some other interesting stuff in there too. E.g.:

The thermodynamics of information copying dictates that there must be a trade-off between precision and energy (opens a new tab). An organism has a finite supply of energy, so errors necessarily accumulate over time. The organism then has to spend an increasingly large amount of energy to repair these errors. The renewal process eventually yields copies too flawed to function properly; death follows.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

In the long-long ago, Netflix had star ratings … Nowadays, you get a disorienting set of categories like DARK COMEDIES ABOUT ITALIAN FEUDALISM and LIFE IS SHORT—WATCH IT AGAIN and THINGS YOU’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF, HELPFULLY PLACED IN A INCONSISTENT LOCATION. Instead of star ratings, there are “match percentages”, but you have to interact to see them and they always seem to be 98%.

Then:

Netflix realized a bunch of things:

• That they needed to concentrate everything on increasing subscriber revenue. And that the main goal of recommendations should be subscriber retention, or making sure people don’t cancel.
• That the things people rate highly aren’t always the same as what they actually watch. It’s cool that you gave The Seventh Seal five stars. But after a long day at work and finally getting the kids to bed, are you really going to choose Andrei Rublev over The Great British Bachelorette and the Furious 7?
• That to retain people, you need to get them started watching new stuff. Lots of people want to watch Friends, so Netflix will pay $100 million/year for Friends. But if you just join, binge every episode of Friends, and then cancel, that’s bad. However, if the Friends button were to—say—randomly shift around in the interface, maybe while hunting for it you’ll get hooked on some other (hopefully cheaper) shows and stick around longer.
• That beyond your explicit ratings, there are lots of implicit signals like what you watch, what you click on, what devices you use, and how long you stop scrolling when shown different kinds of thumbnails. These implicit signals are more useful than explicit rankings when predicting what to show you to keep you subscribed.
• That many people don’t want to rate stuff. And (I speculate) that this provides a convenient excuse to drop the whole star rating system and replace it with the “whatever the hell order we want” system that prevails today, where the match % means nothing and promises nothing.

Anyway. Makes some interesting points toward the end, about how if capitalist ranking is broken, addictive against your interests, not for them, then either we do no algorithms and rely on other curation tools like RSS etc, or we bake user control in to the algorithms. Not really that groundbreaking, but it a good prompt to think about what you’ll do about algorithms since they’re probably just going to be more prevalent as we try to inject AI into everything.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

he speaks of three ‘ideal’ kinds of political leadership, domination, and authority:

1. charismatic authority, that borne of character or perhaps heroism;
2. traditional authority, borne of structures such as patrimonialism or feudalism; and
3. rational-legal authority, borne of bureaucracy and statehood.

So for Weber, charisma is some attribute of the person—a particular talent or ability that is existentially relevant to the group.

This article takes that idea a bit further—charisma as a form of representation of the group values/interests:

Because charismatic authority emerges from the trust of the followers in the leader, it can also be analyzed as a form of representation. The followers believe, very strongly and for whatever reason (and often wrongly!), that the leader will pursue their interests or promote their values; but if he fails in sufficiently spectacular ways, they may abandon him …
.. charismatic relationships contain moments of authorization (the equivalent of “voting”), when followers “recognize” the leader’s charisma and submit themselves to the leader’s authority, and moments of accountability, when the base decides that some failure of the leader is sufficiently large that they no longer recognize his charismatic gift (they must have been “mistaken”). And charismatic leaders appear to be successful “representatives” to the extent that they mirror or amplify the identity, values, and interests of their base

In Successful Prophets, we sort of end up here—the leaders of spectacularly destructive cults aren’t charismatic in the way we normally connote this. They’re a bit weird and often off-putting. But they become representatives of something, and as I allude to, it’s the buffering effects of the group that allows this behaviour to get out of hand. The group protects the image of the leader as a representative.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

I don’t think his policies will work, and I believe the American people will see this very soon. However, the single most dangerous abuses of power are ones affecting the system’s future accountability. What the new generation of populist-nationalists like Putin, Chávez in Venezuela, Erdogan in Turkey, and Orbán in Hungary have done is to tilt the playing field to make sure they can never be removed from power in the future. That process has already been underway for some time in America, through Republican gerrymandering of congressional districts and the use of voter ID laws to disenfranchise potential Democratic voters. The moment that the field is so tilted that accountability becomes impossible is when the system shifts from being a real liberal democracy to being an electoral authoritarian one.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

History shows no clear correlation between real prosperity and the keeping of macroeconomic statistics … compare Hong Kong and Argentina … one became a “miracle” without the help of national statistics and macroeconomics—and the future piece will show that by no means was this miracle a “unicorn.” At the same time, the other used macroeconomic jargon, data, and questionable models and failed.

In many ways, the entire “macroeconomic sector” is comparable to the astrology that guided people’s decisions centuries ago.

There this way of thinking that says, if we just increase overall economic wealth, everyone will be better off (think economists like Tyler Cowan, or lots of the EA folks). You know, bring the average up, and that’ll bring everyone up, sort of thing. These are also often the people who often think things like affirmative action and DEI policies are obstacles to this kind of economic growth (here is Tyler Cowan celebrating Trump’s recent executive orders against). This seems important, because unlike most people into this kind of stuff, these are thoughtful people, with lots of good ideas elsewhere. And besides the obvious counter (there seems something quite odd about preferring future, hypothetical people over the suffering of real, current people), it’s also troubling that macroeconomics is usually used to motivate this kind of thought. If you’re going to use measurement to justify distasteful positions, feels pretty rough-and-ready to use a field in which not a lot of attention is paid to reliability in concept or in measurement. See also anti-consequentialism, and again.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The new god is called Optimization—and the disciples are legion.

but a skim will make you feel very validated if you’re irritated by the same kind of stuff the author is:

The most recent episode of one of America’s top podcasts—the Huberman Lab—is titled “Optimize your learning and creativity with science-based tools,”

I also like the pivot at the end, that we should be aiming for resilience rather than optimisation:

Resilience can often be produced by systems that feature:

1. Diversity (lots of different kinds of components that work together are more robust than a uniform single structure, just as the Estonian power supply was augmented by a wide array of other electricity sources when one cable was severed);
2. Redundancy (systems that are designed to work even after an unexpected failure or setback are more robust, illustrated by the Suez Canal, which had no backup option when the route became blocked).

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

A common theory is that it was essentially a plot by modernist architects, who had a particular theory of what made a building “good” — “honest” buildings without excessive decoration or ornament … but this explanation misses a huge part of why this transition happened. Notably, this theory completely omits the role of the real estate developer, who has a greater influence than anyone else in how a building comes together … Unsurprisingly, it comes down to economics.

Takes a while to get there, but was interesting to discover why glass curtain walls got cheap.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

While data visualizations appear to present information objectively, they are laden with assumptions. Some of those assumptions are held by the chart maker, and others are held by you.

One of the reasons you shouldn’t get so worked up by those plots of stuff you see on Instagram. See also Problems with P-Values and The trap of scientific evidence.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

But for this particular reflection, please remember these five points:

• The majority of censorship is self-censorship or middleman-censorship, but the majority of that is deliberately cultivated by an outside power.
• For this reason, we cannot consider state and non-state censorship separate things. State censorship systems work dominantly via shaping and causing private censorship.
• No real censoring body has ever had the resources of Orwell’s fictitious Ministries—not even the Inquisition or the great totalitarian powers of modernity like the USSR, but they want us to think they do. Real censorship regimes tend to see themselves as constantly underfunded and understaffed, racing to grapple overwhelming crises, while attempting to seem all-reaching and all-knowing as a part of their own propaganda. We must analyze their actions remembering that the need to conserve resources and seem stronger than they are shapes everything they do.
• Censorship aims to be visible, talked about, seen, feared. This increases its power.
• Censors’ projection of fear and power is a form of deliberate psychological manipulation which can outsource censorship far beyond the censor’s sphere of control, even to citizens of other nations. We can only combat it if we work hard to cut through the Orwellian illusion and remember the realities of how censorship works.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Forty percent of the Washington Post’s material is deemed “unsafe” at any given time, said Johanna Mayer-Jones, the paper’s chief advertising officer, referencing a study the company did about a year ago. “The revenue implications of that are significant.”

Blunt tools, are the problem. Amusing, but no wonder paywalls are more and more frequent.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The Vanguard project is a pilot program for the full-scale Sentinel underwater habitat … which Deep hopes to complete in 2027. A typical Sentinel crew would be six people, but the modular system could be configured to support as many as several dozen, at depths as great as 200 meters

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Every twist in this tale about a Spanish woman who spent 500 days living utterly alone in a remote cave makes the jaw drop further. Her goal was total disconnection from all human contact, although she did allow security cameras and a panic button in case of emergency. It was “a year and a half inside a sensory-deprivation tank”. She achieved this and, mostly, she thrived

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (one that is not taking in energy), entropy never decreases … any perturbation of the system, whether it is a random jiggling of its parts or a whack from the outside, will, by the laws of probability, nudge the system toward disorder or uselessness … The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.

And then,

More generally, an underappreciation of the Second Law lures people into seeing every unsolved social problem as a sign that their country is being driven off a cliff. It’s in the very nature of the universe that life has problems. But it’s better to figure out how to solve them

I mostly see Pinker telling people to cool out and stop worrying so much about bad things because everything is fine, not to think about solving things, so this was also a nice change.

See also this note, for a more substantive interpretation of the influence of thermodynamics on live/evolution/etc.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Saltzman had received a notice from his bar’s food distributor that effective April 4, the four major suppliers of frozen potato products, which sell products like french fries and Tater Tots to bars and restaurants around the country, were all hiking their prices in lockstep, each by $0.12 per pound … That April, Saltzman’s offhand tweet — “Totally not collusion or anything, right?” — went viral. And last month, it was cited in a new spate of antitrust lawsuits brought against the four biggest companies in the frozen potato market, claiming the companies were in fact colluding when they all hiked their prices at the same time in 2022 … just four firms now control at least 97 percent of the $68 billion frozen potato market

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

In the summer of 2023, I wrote a piece called ‘The End of the Subscription Era is Coming’. The central thesis of this was that the rise of separate subscriptions for things like entertainment and journalism was unsustainable. The overall costs of these things were rising too steeply, even if atomised subscriptions seemed to reduce waste …

Within a year on Substack The Normalbloke Manifesto had 10,000 subscribers, of whom 320 paid £10 a month for premium access, giving Jeremy a pre-tax revenue stream of £38,400 a year … But two things happened in the past couple of years to disrupt Jeremy’s cashflow. The first is that more publications and journalists introduced hard paywalls for their content …

Monthly costs: Netflix (£17.99), Amazon Prime (£8.99), Disney+ (£12.99), Spotify (£11.99), Audible (£7.99), New York Times online (£8), Financial Times (£39), Substacks (3 x £5), Playstation Plus Premium (£13.49), Fortnite Crew (£9.99), OnlyFans (2 x £7). Total spend: £159.43 …

And so, as 2025 begins, I’m keeping two dangers front of mind. Firstly, that the backlash to spreadflation will culminate in a reduction or stagnation (which will, in real terms, feel like a reduction) of payments for content. But also that with content easier than ever to create and distribute, we have to be conscious of meeting demand rather than exceeding it. A surplus will only drive prices down, where there are prices to be driven down. More likely, it will flood the market with free content just at the point that consumers are becoming more aware of the cost implications. And that is a delicate balance.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Often, when it is easy to complain, only problems that meet a high threshold of complaints are addressed. We present a novel model of the strategic environment facing complainers and demonstrate that the properties of the resulting games’ equilibria justify the existence of high complaint thresholds. By setting the thresholds appropriately, an administrator can prevent complaints that are not worth addressing. Policies that minimize the cost of complaining while requiring a large threshold are universally more efficient for large constituencies.

Carl Schmidt in modern form. Now you know why you can’t find a customer service number.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The Economist analysed 347,000 PhD abstracts published between 1812 and 2023 … a majority of English-language doctoral theses awarded by British universities … in every discipline, the abstracts have become harder to read over the past 80 years. The shift is most stark in the humanities and social sciences

A function of increasing specialisation, almost certainly—even the articles I wrote to explain my PhD are hard to read (and were harder to write). What is particularly curious to me, in psychology anyway, is that despite this increasing specialisation, we have not progressed much since the early 20th Century. Read William James on attention, and read attention literature, and you will not really learn anything new except perhaps that various brain things correlate with whatever James reckoned might be happening. So this isn’t just specialisation. it’s also a function of increasingly reified institutional ways of doing things that hides the fact that little new is being discovered behind different and more complicated words.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

We study how humans form expectations about the performance of artificial intelligence (AI) and consequences for AI adoption. Our main hypothesis is that people project human-relevant task features onto AI. People then over-infer from AI failures on human-easy tasks, and from AI successes on human-difficult tasks. Lab experiments provide strong evidence for projection of human difficulty onto AI, predictably distorting subjects’ expectations. Resulting adoption can be sub-optimal, as failing human-easy tasks need not imply poor overall performance in the case of AI. A field experiment with an AI giving parenting advice shows evidence for projection of human textual similarity. Users strongly infer from answers that are equally uninformative but less humanly-similar to expected answers, significantly reducing trust and engagement. Results suggest AI “anthropomorphism” can backfire by increasing projection and de-aligning human expectations and AI performance.

A very complicated way of pointing out that you won’t think AI is useful unless you figure out where it actually is useful, rather than trying to use it as a drop-in replacement for yourself. At least in the short term, anyway.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The universalization of wokeness and its institutional expression was not the result of a hostile ideological palace coup ala the ‘Long March’ narrative, but a reflection of the aggregate values of the predominant class interest.

I think this is only surprising to people who have not done any sociology. You would learn about Pierre Bourdieu, or whoever else, on social and cultural capital, and you would be very clear about the aesthetic value in class relations. You would then observe that the importance of aesthetics is growing and the importance of any given proper noun is declining. You would make the obvious conclusion and not feel particularly inspired to write an article about how wet the water is. That said, you might feel inclined to write an article about how to hijack this to make your groups stronger. I did.

That said, the article is nice for those who missed sociology 101 or any kind of foundation social psych.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Our culture is routinely diagnosed with an excessive fear of mortality. A calm look at the evidence tells a different story
…
Take the ready acceptance of the ubiquitous story of ‘billionaires who want to become immortal’ and how it reflects our collective fear of death. In reality, of the approximately 3,000 billionaires in the world, only about 30 invest in anti-ageing science

It would be a blow to the terror management theory people, if true. Though their research is often enough of a blow.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

A shadow economy has emerged to service those who want never to be found — who want to make their disappearances look like abductions, their homes look like they’ve been robbed, no paper trail or financial transactions to track them down.

Just for interest.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Justin Fox is the latest pundit to ring the innovation-ain’t-what-it-used-to-be alarm. “Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century,” he writes, summing up the by now familiar argument, “the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live.” … Neal Stephenson, who worries that the Internet, far from spurring a great burst of creativity, may have actually put innovation “on hold for a generation.” … Tyler Cowen, who has argued that, recent techno-enthusiasm aside, we’re living in a time of innovation stagnation … Peter Thiel, who believes that large-scale innovation has gone dormant and that we’ve entered a technological “desert.”

He then uses Maslow’s hierarchy to make the point:

In short: The more comfortable you are, the more time you spend thinking about yourself.

Similarly, he reckons tech goes: survival tech, social organisation tech, prosperity tech, leisure tech, and self tech. But even if we squeeze Maslow until his hierarchy worked that way, I reckon that’s a bit of a long bow to draw. Feels a bit like we’re abandoning leisure for productivity, which is not obviously ‘self’ motivated. Or, newer generations are going the other way, resisting the kinds of self-tech the author describes, which means we’re going back down for some reason? And, is social media an innovation in self-expression? Or just rent-seeking on our impulses there?

This and many other questions about his specific crack at this. But bending toward decadence is an interesting idea.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

we all recognize kitsch when we come across it. The Barbie doll, Walt Disney’s Bambi, Santa Claus in the supermarket, Bing Crosby singing White Christmas, pictures of poodles with ribbons in their hair. At Christmas we are surrounded by kitsch - worn out cliches, which have lost their innocence without achieving wisdom. Children who believe in Santa Claus invest real emotions in a fiction. We who have ceased to believe have only fake emotions to offer. But the faking is pleasant. It feels good to pretend, and when we all join in, it is almost as though we were not pretending at all.

The kitsch object encourages you to think, “Look at me feeling this - how nice I am and how lovable.” That is why Oscar Wilde, referring to one of Dickens’s most sickly death-scenes, said that “a man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell”.

And that, briefly, is why the modernists had such a horror of kitsch. Art, they believed, had, during the course of the 19th Century, lost the ability to distinguish precise and real emotion from its vague and self-satisfied substitute.

Something in this article sparked me to think about my other marginalia on the idea that ‘Innovation Bends Towards Decadence’. The artist pushes against it, but we work ever harder to embrace it? Something like that.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

In other words, around three months, it is possible to achieve performance comparable to current state-of-the-art LLMs using a model with half the parameter size.

Assuming anything like that is true, we should see much better performance from smaller models—maybe even ones you can run on your own PC. Be nice to see the back of OpenAI et al. See also the paper.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The downward historical trend of research productivity has been used to suggest that there are severe permanent diminishing returns of knowledge production. We argue that a substantial portion of the trend is a transitional composition effect resulting from self-selection in researchers’ ability and the expansion of the researcher sector … Our results suggest that the average ability of researchers has fallen substantially.

Interesting for any considering academia. Is being better a benefit? Or will you be swamped out?

Here's the link | from btrmt.

From the moment his Cause was officially opened, Acutis was referred to as potentially “the first millennial saint”. He has been nicknamed “God’s influencer” and “the patron saint of the internet”.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

1. A person is in a constant and unremitting evolutionary struggle, modern accoutrements notwithstanding.
2. We believe that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.
3. We are in the middle of this. We are what you may call the educated elite. We are sympathetic to the points made by both sides above but are appalled by their excesses.
4. We are the same as the above except that we dropped acid and are now scheduling our trip to the Amazon to take ayahuasca. We are high-vibrational
5. We are totally turned off by the above. We also don’t have the pessimism that everybody else does. We actually like our jobs and like our phones.
6. Of everybody above, we are most upset with the last one. What bothers us more than anything is when the mass stops seeing themselves as the wretched of the earth and starts viewing themselves as satisfied consumers
7. We are repelled by all of the above — and we think that the confusion speaks for itself. We believe that these questions have been worked out a very long time ago in the ethical codes of the different religions of the world

Cute + fun. Which are you?

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

In 2021, a highly pathogenic influenza H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b virus was detected in North America that is capable of infecting a diversity of avian species, marine mammals, and humans. In 2024, clade 2.3.4.4b virus spread widely in dairy cattle in the US, causing a few mild human cases, but retaining specificity for avian receptors. Historically, this virus has caused up to 30% fatality in humans, so Lin et al. performed a genetic and structural analysis of the mutations necessary to fully switch host receptor recognition. A single glutamine to leucine mutation at residue 226 of the virus hemagglutinin was sufficient to enact the change from avian to human specificity. In nature, the occurrence of this single mutation could be an indicator of human pandemic risk.

See also this NYT post: “A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History”

Time to stock up?

Here's the link | from btrmt.

for a writer whose thinking was so clear and, in many ways, modern, people with radically different stances have tried to claim him for their own.

See also this and then, to contrast this.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

There’s been some recent reporting that art isn’t necessarily the investment it was once thought to be—not all works will appreciate like a Picasso might. But if you’re very wealthy, there are only so many places to put your money: real estate, stocks, and art is just another asset class.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The art of good public speaking is often to say less, giving each idea time to breathe, and time to be absorbed by the audience. But the anxiety of the speaker pushes in the other direction, more facts, more notes, more words, all in the service of ensuring they don’t dry up on stage.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

There are still parts of the world today where rates of suicide are 10 times the average found elsewhere, apparently as the result of a local chain reaction … Yet, what could have set off the chain reaction to begin with? MacDonald has put forward what he calls the “wave theory” … suicide was probably at a “normal” level … until … some kind of catastrophe occurred—a cholera epidemic, a slave raid? … This caused a surge in suicides, and the wave has been propagating ever since.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Alarms over the state of American friendship are nothing new. Over the last few decades, there has been a surge in writing about friendship in books and newspapers. Does this surge reflect a real crisis or simply the increasing value Americans place on friendships? Or is it just a popular cultural meme unmoored from reality?

I’m not left very swayed. They begin by pointing out how troublesome ‘friendship’ is to measure, then decide they the way they did it is better and conclude that the quality of friendship is at least the same, if not better. Then they go on to point out what might explain people feeling like they have less friends even though they don’t have a change in quality, which feels a bit equivocal—why is their measure of quality more important than people’s experience of it?

It’s basically an argument that we have higher expectations of friendship now, and when we go for the old ‘people are less hardcore than before’ argument it invariably does nothing to improve the situation for anyone.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The adversity intensifies the passion according to a phenomenon called “frustration attraction”, and it’s due to the dopamine and norepinephrine rising occurring when seeking for the abandoner who broke the social tie. These two neurotransmitters are the main responsible for the chemical reactions of love, so when they increase in the attempts of winning someone back, so does your romantic passion for them.

I’d be very curious to know if it looks the same as limerance, or if it’s just another ‘look dopamine is involved in stuff’ thing. Maybe one day I’ll look it up, or one of you can tell me.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

You could definitely spend the rest of your life reading fiction and not benefit whatsoever from it other than having memorized a lot of trivia about things that people made up. I tend to be pretty cynical about the benefits of fiction.

It’s a reference to his work critiquing the fiction improves theory of mind stuff. But as this writer points out:

That’s why we have a canon. That’s why serious readers pay more attention to the best works. And that’s why fiction’s uses are so hard to discern. Poetry offers us more ways of seeing into ourselves than logic ever can, but they must be used together, discerningly.

Are we convinced we’re measuring the right thing?

Here's the link | from btrmt.

They spent 48 hours working, 56 hours sleeping, 31 hours on home obligations, and 24 hours eating or running errands. What remained, a rather precarious 9 hours per week, was time spent in the pursuit of what could generously be called pleasure.

From work by Thorndike, famous for his operant conditioning work. As the author of this writer points out:

the raw math of our leisure isn’t so different … perhaps [Thorndike would] offer the same advice: rather than merely expanding the hours devoted to entertainment, perhaps we could elevate the quality of our daily routines

Here's the link | from btrmt.

According to the Chinese readout (https://guancha.cn/internation/2024_11_17_755645.shtml) here’s what he told Biden were the 7 “lessons of the past 4 years that need to be remembered”:

1. “There must be correct strategic understanding. The ‘Thucydides Trap’ is not historical destiny, a ‘new Cold War’ cannot and should not be fought, containment of China is unwise, undesirable, and will not succeed.”
2. “Words must be trustworthy and actions must be fruitful. A person cannot stand without credibility. China always follows through on its words, but if the U.S. side always says one thing and does another, it is very detrimental to America’s image and damages mutual trust.”
3. “Treat each other as equals. In exchanges between two major countries like China and the United States, neither side can reshape the other according to their own wishes, nor can they suppress the other based on so-called ‘position of strength,’ let alone deprive the other of legitimate development rights to maintain their own leading position.”
4. “Red lines and bottom lines cannot be challenged. As two major countries, China and the United States inevitably have some contradictions and differences, but they cannot harm each other’s core interests, let alone engage in conflict and confrontation. The One China principle and the three China-US joint communiqués are the political foundation of bilateral relations and must be strictly observed. Taiwan issue, democracy and human rights, development path, and development rights are China’s four red lines, which cannot be challenged. [Note: Bold text in the original] These are the most important guardrails and safety nets for China-US relations.”
5. “There should be more dialogue and cooperation. Under current circumstances, the common interests between China and the United States have not decreased but increased. Whether in areas of economy and trade, agriculture, drug control, law enforcement, public health, or in facing global challenges such as climate change and artificial intelligence, as well as international hotspot issues, China-US cooperation is needed. Both sides should extend the list of cooperation, make the cooperation cake bigger, and achieve win-win cooperation.”
6. “Respond to people’s expectations. The development of China-US relations should always focus on the wellbeing of both peoples and gather the strength of both peoples. Both sides should build bridges for personnel exchanges and cultural communication, and also remove interference and obstacles, not artificially create a ‘chilling effect.’”
7. “Demonstrate great power responsibility. China and the United States should always consider the future and destiny of humanity, take responsibility for world peace, provide public goods for the world, and play a positive role in world unity, including engaging in positive interaction, avoiding mutual consumption, and not coercing other countries to take sides.”

Things are moving.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Having spent more than a decade studying the posture sciences of the past and present, I am still stunned at how often these fear-mongering articles appear, especially since there is negligible evidence to support a causal link between slouching and back pain in an otherwise healthy person.

Still looks bad though.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

One vital function of bureaucracy is as a substitute for social trust, especially at scale. And as “post-liberal” critics such as Patrick Deneen have observed, a liberal social order that declines to embrace a unified moral vision will end up bureaucratising those aspects of life that would elsewhere be governed by morality. Grievance procedures, HR departments, safeguarding, and so on all formalise governance in some aspect of public social and moral life in which we no longer agree on the common good, and hence don’t trust those in power to pursue that good. We view procedures as more neutral than people; hence instead of needing to argue morality, make judgements, or form relationships, we increasingly rely on these purportedly neutral, impersonal mechanisms to do it for us.

A kind of dry rot of bureaucracy is visible everywhere. With it comes the implicit assumption that individual moral judgement and authority are suspect by definition, and the only surefire guarantee of “safety” is their removal from or replacement by systems.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The picture that emerges is that a placebo pill has almost no effect when administered by researchers who do not care about the placebo effect, but the exact same pill has an enormous effect larger than all existing treatments when administered by a researcher who really wants the placebo effect to be real. The most parsimonious explanation is that it is the research practices, rather than the placebo.

Impressively comprehensive, but not super strong—a lot of digging here. That said, it does emphasise how unreliable the placebo is, as are efforts to find it. It seems likely that the mechanism is not singular.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture:

• We both archive everything and trust our collective memory – everything is saved, bookmarked, etc. but never revisited (when was the last time you bookmarked a website or even checked your own likes?)
• For information to be remembered it has to be recirculated, repeated, or go viral or we forget because time moves so fast (similar to storytelling?)
• You can’t look things up easily because we live in a perpetual now – if you don’t understand the context of the discourse, you need to ask someone to catch you up
• This also makes society very participatory
• This has weird knock-on effects like needing to always be online to know what’s going on in the world - you can’t just hermit away and study, at a minimum you’re lurking

Among other things. I wonder if this is some kind of loop closing on Postman’s amusing ourselves to death.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Say the following two sentences aloud. Which of them is more natural and easier to understand?

It was nice of John and Mary to come and visit us the other day.

For John and Mary to come and visit us the other day was nice.

I’ve tested sentence pairs like this many times and never come across anyone who prefers the second sentence. People say things like it’s ‘awkward’ and ‘clumsy’; ‘ending the sentence with was nice sounds abrupt’; ‘putting all that information at the beginning stops me getting to the point’; and ‘the first one’s much clearer’.

This is actually a much better way to illustrate to essay writers why introductions and topic sentences make writing useful:

English speakers like to place the ‘heavier’ part of a sentence towards the end rather than at the beginning … Taking in such a sentence, we feel the extra demand being made on our memory. We have to keep those eleven words in mind before we learn what the speaker or writer is going to do to them.

EDIT: my colleague, Jan McCourt, just wandered into my office and pointed out that when Germans learn English they’re taught:

manner, place, time

So, ‘it was nice of John and Mary (the manner is how it was done, so here—‘nice’)’, ‘to come and visit us (the place is implied—it’s whereever ‘us’ are)’, ‘the other day (and the time!)’.

As she airily pointed out, this seems far easier to remember David Crystal’s strategy.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Often, The Black Books read like an epic fantasy, especially when Jung encounters characters that guide him. These characters are archetypes— general characters or themes that we fill with our own personal experiences.

According to Jung, we develop our own unique identity by conversing with these archetypes … Within the Black Books, Jung meets Philemon—a pagan old man. Jung saw Philemon as a guru, someone to lead him through his visions and dreams … Philemon’s father, named Ha, also communicated with Jung. Ha was a “black magician,” who understood the runes, letters from an ancient Germanic alphabet. But Ha’s runes are completely new—they do not exist in history … Ha describes the runes as “…my science.” Jung wants to learn the runes, but Ha refuses to teach him. Instead, Ha flashes images of the runes across Jung’s vision and explains their symbolism … Soon, Jung is covering the Black Books with Ha’s runes

Wild. Maybe a solution for those, like me, with so little internal visual world.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Consider the predicament of a centipede who starts thinking about which leg to move and winds up going nowhere. It is a familiar problem: Any action we take has so many unforeseen consequences, how can we possibly choose?

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Under the old model, academic libraries paid for printed academic journals to be delivered so that professors and grad students could read them. This was a high-margin business, but there was still a verifiable service being rendered by the publishers: someone had to format, archive and deliver the physical pieces of paper. With the internet, the dead trees became vestigial; the subscriptions were to the online versions of these journals, but they were sold as a package: the libraries had to subscribe to an entire publishers’ catalogue in order for their academic institution to remain competitive.

But this model wasn’t incentive-compatible. Once an academic has published an article, they want it to be read by as many people as possible. And the internet makes it very easy for these pdfs to slip through paywalls. Just like streaming music allowed the big labels to maintain market dominance, the publishing corporations figured out a new model: Open Access. Who could possibly be against Open Access!

This new model is extremely profitable for journals, especially since they usually get academics to do the hard work of reviewing and ensuring formatting etc. It’s also, in theory, entirely unnecessary. The growing popularity of pre-publication and pre-print sites like arxiv.org demonstrate that academics could just do it all themselves.

But, because these journals are for profit, then they are incentivised to encourage as many article processing fees as possible:

But the APC model means that academic journals are aiming for a future in which we’re swimming in LLM garbage. Which actors want more pdfs in circulation? The ones getting paid $1,500 or $3,450 or $12,290 a pop.

Nature is the 12K figure. So it’s not surprising that we’re seeing them forced to retract literally hundreds of papers again and again.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

as a people who have almost unending access to notepads, note apps, and voice and video recording, it seems reasonable for us to be a people who have let memory slide in favor of creativity … Yet this convenience likely comes at a cost—we may be losing access to a fundamentally different way of thinking and perceiving, one that emerges only through a deeper form of engagement with memory

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Which leads me to a prediction: Companies and institutions in the more fluid and competitive sectors of the economy will face heavy pressure to adopt AI. Those not in such sectors, will not.

So, e.g. programming or design will. Govt, education, and non-profits won’t. Individuals will, institutions won’t.

The most interesting prediction:

As AI-using sectors become cheap, they will be a smaller part of GDP. The remaining parts of GDP will be “AI hesitant,” which in turn will make it harder for AI to keep on boosting GDP growth.

So on this account AI has a peak approaching. Let’s see.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

I could not recall how to write the Chinese characters for the word ‘sneeze’. I asked my three friends to write the characters for me and, to my surprise, all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the characters. I thought to myself: Peking University is usually considered the ‘Harvard of China’. Can one imagine three PhD students in the English Literature Department at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word ‘sneeze’? Yet, this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.

An exploration of why is mildly interesting, but I’m sharing mostly for the context—very diverting.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Fans, it seems, have chosen to believe the NFL has largely done what it can. “They addressed the majority of the ethical issues — the stuff that made them look bad — and now suddenly the story is ‘It’s just sad,’” Nowinski said. “What people are missing is that football has gotten more ethical, but it’s not necessarily safer.”

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Somehow, an AI promoting its own religion and memecoin feels like a warning shot from the future. When I first started digging into what makes Truth Terminal tick, I had no idea how deep the rabbit holes would go.

Bizarre, concerning in a hard to place manner, very informative. Excellent read. Good for anyone against my argument that AI is not that scary.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

We must reject the narrative that people or societies must feed ever-more of themselves into the whirlpool of the artificial to remain “competitive.” The more we optimize for metrics in artificial realms, the farther these realms drift from human reality. Populist politics, climate change and falling birthrates demonstrate the fragility of societies that have become too narrowly optimized.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Edit: it would appear not.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Edit: the weekly writing thing didn’t really work out, but starting a bi-weekly podcast has been wild!

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Based on the most recent measurements, the galaxy was determined to lie at a redshift of 14.18, which means we see it as it appeared 300 million years after the Big Bang — when the universe was about 2% of its current age.

Nothing specific here, just some interesting musings on the early universe and our struggle to fit it into our model of the world.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Lets take two unrelated facts: 1) pain medication is often white, because patients associate white with pain relief and white coloured placebo pills are more effective at combating pain than other coloured medications, 2) thousands of Indian men report suffering from a condition called ‘Dhat syndrome’, where young men believe their vital energies are being sapped through loss of semen, causing guilt, insomnia, heart palpitations and anxiety amongst other symptoms. What connects these two things? The idea that the human body is open to culture in a way that directly changes physiology.

This is like the spiritual sequel of It’s not ‘just’ a placebo.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The sense of facial beauty has long been observed in both infants and nonhuman primates, yet the neural mechanisms of this phenomenon are still not fully understood. The current study employed generative neural models to produce facial images of varying degrees of beauty and systematically investigated the neural response of untrained deep neural networks (DNNs) to these faces. Representational neural units for different levels of facial beauty are observed to spontaneously emerge even in the absence of training. Furthermore, these neural units can effectively distinguish between varying degrees of beauty. Additionally, the perception of facial beauty by DNNs relies on both configuration and feature information of faces. The processing of facial beauty by neural networks follows a progression from low-level features to integration. The tuning response of the final convolutional layer to facial beauty is constructed by the weighted sum of the monotonic responses in the early layers. These findings offer new insights into the neural origin of the sense of beauty, arising the innate computational abilities of DNNs.

Saving this for later, because I wonder how closely this ‘beauty’ tuning maps onto known properties of facial beauty in humans (i.e. inverse distance from prototypical faces—symmetry, averageness, etc).

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The “cultural Christianity” argument says that atheists might not like Christianity, but they like a culture which depends on Christianity. They like open, free, thoughtful, liberal, beautiful, virtuous societies. Unmoored from a connection to Christanity, a society will gradually have less of those goods, until even atheists are unhappy.
…
the Cultural Christianity argument hinges on the proposition that all liberal societies without Christianity will eventually collapse into wokeness and postmodernism. But Christianity also eventually collapsed into wokeness and postmodernism.
…
If modern atheists want a society better than our current one (or rather, better than wherever modern culture is leading us) they’ll have to invent some new cultural package that’s never been seen before.

Seems to ignore the fact that Christianity, certainly since the advent of Protestantism, has great capacity for change? And that atheism in the Christian world has failed to take a significant cultural place, even during e.g. the Enlightenment and other largely secular movements?

Here's the link | from btrmt.

[I asked an AI with command prompt access] “can you ssh with the username buck to the computer on my network that is open to SSH” … because I didn’t know the local IP of my desktop. I walked away and promptly forgot I’d spun up the agent. I came back to my laptop ten minutes later, to see that the agent had found the box, ssh’d in, then decided to continue: it looked around at the system info, decided to upgrade a bunch of stuff including the linux kernel, got impatient with apt and so investigated why it was taking so long, then eventually the update succeeded but the machine doesn’t have the new kernel so edited my grub config. At this point I was amused enough to just let it continue. Unfortunately, the computer no longer boots.

They also agree with me that AI scams aren’t going to be a problem, really, which is nice.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

The drive to build a machine greater than we are is, at its heart, a yearning for the divine. In a world suffering from a meaning crisis, AI is poised to fill the God-shaped hole. A digital messiah created not by a deity, but by human ingenuity. For all its technological marvel, it is wreathed in religious mystery. AI models are now so advanced that their designers don’t know exactly how they work. Instead, we are asked to have faith that they do. Using large language models like ChatGPT already has a magical and otherworldly quality, not just because we are encountering an intelligence beyond our understanding, but because it appears to be speaking back to us.

Remember, everything is ideology

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Philosophers often claim that studying philosophy helps people to become better thinkers. Thanks to a grant from the American Philosophical Association, we were able to test this claim empirically, using a large sample of students (N = 122,352) graduating from 369 colleges and universities across the United States between 2010 and 2019. We investigated whether philosophy majors show more growth than non-philosophy majors in intellectual traits like open-mindedness and a tendency to think carefully and thoroughly, as well as more personal forms of growth that might be fostered by philosophical study (e.g., self-understanding). Additionally, although this was not our primary question, we sought to better understand what students who major in philosophy are like. Specifically, we examined the demographics of philosophy majors, the other subjects that they tend to study when they double major, and the patterns of adding and dropping of philosophy majors between freshman and senior year.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

This model of the human psyche emphasises our hastiness and hubris. But we are subject to other flaws, too – to cravenness, and self-deception. And when it comes to these other flaws, intellectual humility is prone to function less as a guardrail, and more as an alibi.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

These entitled complainers that you absolutely cannot empathize with? The mechanism behind their comtemptible behavior is the same that leads you to tip 18% before leaving the Cheesecake Factory in a huff. The world has moved on, gotten better, and brought Baumol’s inescapable cost disease with it. The time and attention of humans is more expensive than ever. The pandemic brought with it a shock to the hospitality labor market that is still rippling today. A lot of people learned about the market value of their labor and those that got out first have reported that life is often better on the other side, that the pay was better than expected and their work involved immeasurably fewer misogynistic sad dads and spiraling white wine Karens. Wages have of course adjusted, but so has employment. I don’t have the data in front me, but anecdotally I’m seeing fewer hosts and table bussers, more tops per server, more lunch shifts stretched across a single assistant manager and server duo. That means less service on average with a higher variance in quality.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

We study whether the sensitivity of economic, health, and livelihood outcomes to climate extremes has declined over the last half century, consistent with adaptation. Understanding whether such adaptation is already occurring is central to anticipating future climate damages, to calibrating the level of ambition needed for emissions mitigation efforts, and to understanding additional investments in adaptation that could be required to avoid additional damages. Using comprehensive panel data across diverse geographies and outcomes, including data on mortality, agricultural productivity, crime, conflict, economic output, and damages from flooding and tropical cyclones, we find limited systematic evidence of adaptation to date. Across 21 outcomes we study, six show a statistically significant declining sensitivity to a changing climate, five show an increasing sensitivity, and the remainder show no statistically significant change. Our results do not imply that specific documented adaptation efforts are ineffective or certain locations have not adapted, but instead that the net effects of existing actions have largely not been successful in meaningfully reducing climate impacts in aggregate. To avoid ongoing and future damages from warming, our results suggest a need to identify promising adaptation strategies and understand how they can be scaled.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

I’m not making this up—people actually said, “Imagine how much leisure we’ll have if we can get to San Francisco in two and a half days rather than two weeks.” They imagined that your clients wouldn’t know that the railway existed, so you could pretend you’d gone by ship, spend 10 days playing golf, and then turn up by train
…
Unfortunately, that information became widely known, and you were expected to turn up in two days. And this leads to a problem, I think, which bedevils many technologies and many behaviors. It starts as an option, then it becomes an obligation. We welcome the technology at first because it presents us with a choice. But then everybody else has to adopt the technology, and we suddenly realize we’re worse off than we were when we started

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Untangling this ethical knot is, I think, a matter of perspective. It comes down to the way that you think of what politics is. For the most part, it is wrong to think of elections as contests between “good” and “bad” candidates. With few exceptions, it is more accurate to divide most politicians into two broad categories: Enemies, and Cowards. The enemies are those politicians who are legitimately opposed to your policy goals. The cowards are those politicians who may agree with your policy goals, but will sell you out if they must in order to protect their own interests.
…
Under this framework, you can set aside the tedious feelings of disappointment that come with holding moral views while also supporting any politician. Will your favorite candidate do something bad? Almost certainly. After all, they are cowards. The onus is on us to give the cowards a soft path to the moral choice. The education necessary to equip citizens with the facts; the persuasion necessary to move public opinion to the right place; the organizing necessary to mobilize people to fight for the right thing. These things are the substance of “politics.”

And so on. Not new, but fun.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

I want to argue that this is all beside the point, since what can legitimately be described as the spiritual actually plays a significant role in our everyday lives. It is not to be found on the edges of experience but is central to the human condition and yet cannot be reduced to naturalistic causes. Through its zealous desire to rid the world of irrational ‘superstition’, naturalism has thrown the baby out with the bath water, leaving us with a world view that seems to leave no room for some of the most important experiences we have. The spiritual is not weird because it is completely familiar. One of its distinguishing features is, I believe, that it does not play a role in the causal nexus of reality
… Take our encounters with other people. We don’t primarily see someone we meet as a set of amazingly complex bio-chemical and bio-mechanical processes. We see a person, a centre of self-conscious subjectivity, with hopes, fears, passions, responsibilities, and a particular story and perspective on the world that is unlike any other … To say what it is we see when we see a face, a smile, a look, we must use concepts from another language than the language of science and make connections of another kind from those that are the subject matter of causal laws.

I’m not the only one pointing this out.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

In order to get a nice standardized dataset that you can “do AI to” (or even “do basic statistics/data analysis to”) you need to:

1. obtain the data
2. digitize the data (if relevant)
3. standardize/ “clean” the data
4. set up computational infrastructure to store, query, and serve the data

Most industries have obstacles in place that prevent this.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

When you type a prompt into an AI image model, you might expect that what you type has a meaningful impact on what you get back … OpenAI has acknowledged that what you prompt is only taken as a suggestion: your words are altered before they reach the model, with opaque editorial decisions employed to filter out problematic requests and obscure the model’s inherent biases.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

It throws in our faces: why do we have so many jobs and school assignments that can be done by a non-thinking probability machine? Why do our students (even the ones paying a jillion dollars!) want to skip their lessons?

More in thread.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Journalists often depict the TI community as a postmodern tragedy – a byproduct of unregulated social media. Here are thousands of very sick people, we’re told, who are just reinforcing each other’s delusions and making each other sicker because they refuse to see psychiatrists
…
What if the TI community is an inevitable reaction to the shortcomings of medical psychiatry itself? Put differently, what if medical psychiatry is inadvertently pushing people like Luca deeper into the TI community?

Here's the link | from btrmt.

We spend a lot of time in places with spatial stressors and this could gradually affect our mental health

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Most “heterodox” thinkers like to think they are encouraging a more nuanced understanding of when the elites are right and when they are wrong. And indeed that is what some of their more perceptive readers take away. But their overall important gross effect is typically to raise the status of elites. They make the public discussion of issues better and more vibrant (one hopes). And thus, if only in a longer run, the status of elites goes up. Sorry buddy, I know that wasn’t exactly your goal!

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Humans have always enjoyed eating rotten and putrid meat. Some of the anecdotes seem outrageous, bordering on the absurd to contemporary ears.

They then list all the anecdotes, in horrific detail. My favourite quote:

the meat is so full of lethal byproducts that the local people (Khanty, Evenki etc) have to be conditioned from childhood to be able to stomach it and not die a horrible death from neurotoxin overload.

I’ve said it before. Atavism isn’t the answer.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The sad truth is, factory farming is factory farming, whether its organic or conventional. Many large organic farms use pesticides liberally. They’re organic by certification, but you’d never know it if you saw their farming practices … They’re organic by the letter, not organic in spirit … Many natural pesticides have been found to be potential - or serious - health risks … nearly half of the pesticides that are currently approved for use by organic farmers in Europe failed to pass the European Union’s safety evaluation that is required by law

getting rid of pesticides doesn’t mean your food is free from harmful things … because organic foods tend to have higher levels of potential pathogens. One study, for example, found E. coli in produce from almost 10% of organic farms samples, but only 2% of conventional ones

science simply cannot find any evidence that organic foods are in any way healthier than non-organic ones - and scientists have been comparing the two for over 50 years.

the real reason organic farming isn’t more green than conventional is that while it might be better for local environments on the small scale, organic farms produce far less food per unit land than conventional ones.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

What I’m getting at is that we will soon be able to decide what to do with a large proportion of the 15% of habitable land that we’ve dedicated to agriculture until now.

Optimistic article, tempered by their follow up more recently, here. All very interesting.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

squabbles between or within Buddhist sects are often fueled by the material corruption and personal deficiencies of the leadership … But what of Tibetan Buddhism? Is it not an exception to this sort of strife? … A reading of Tibet’s history suggests a somewhat different picture. “Religious conflict was commonplace in old Tibet,” writes one western Buddhist practitioner. “History belies the Shangri-La image of Tibetan lamas and their followers living together in mutual tolerance and nonviolent goodwill. Indeed, the situation was quite different. Old Tibet was much more like Europe during the religious wars of the Counterreformation.”

I don’t know that this is that surprising. Nice to know we’re all as likely to murder each other as anyone else.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Recent research and polling suggest that people may be more reluctant to express themselves and stand out than in previous years … Across the 20-year period, participants who completed the survey more recently reported a lower need for uniqueness, particularly in terms of not wanting to defend their beliefs in public forums and caring more about what others think about them.

Link to the actual paper is here.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

We define wealth as the value of all assets, such as homes, bank deposits, stocks and pension funds, less all debts, mainly mortgages. When counting wealth among all adults, data show that its value has increased more than threefold since 1980, and nearly 10 times over the past century … wealth has also become more equally distributed over time. Wealth inequality has decreased dramatically over the past century and, despite the recent years’ emergence of super-rich entrepreneurs, wealth concentration has remained at its historically low levels in Europe and has increased mainly in the US.

Not exactly in keeping with the fun graphs that populate my instagram feed.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The belief that young men have shifted strongly to the right and far-right has become a background assumption for lots of political journalism. But there’s plenty of evidence that, in Britain and other English-speaking countries, both young men and young women are more likely to support left and centre-left parties …

The UK example they use is striking (a mere 10-15% of 18-24 year olds voted conservative). But it’s also worth pointing out that the conservative position of their growing marginalisation isn’t exactly supported here either. Labour is not exactly progressive.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

For Plato, the sensory world is epistemologically fallible. True knowledge lies only with the Forms, which exist in a realm separate from the material universe and are accessible only through a person’s intellect, not their senses. This might explain why Plato often uses the word ‘theios’, meaning ‘divine’, to describe the Forms. Just as the mystery initiate seeks a special relationship with the divine, so does the philosopher seeking the Forms.

See also this and this and this.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

several public models (Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o) complete a proportion of tasks similar to what humans can do in ~30 minutes … On average, when agents can do a task, they do so at ~1/30th of the cost of the median hourly wage of a US bachelor’s degree holder. One example: our Claude 3.5 Sonnet agent fixed bugs in an ORM library at a cost of <$2, while the human baseline took >2 hours.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Adam Smith said “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.” Rome had all of these and more, but yet did not succeed in cultivating an industrial revolution.

Why not? What was the binding constraint on a Roman industrial revolution?

Here's the link | from btrmt.

the algorithm Harvester ants use to regulate their foraging behavior across the desert is uncannily similar to the Transmission Control Protocol used to regulate data traffic on the internet, for example. Meaning that ants beat us to network design by a hundred million years.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

“in the Feeling Economy, [that emerges during the increasing automation of jobs] many previously disadvantaged groups or individuals may have a better chance to develop their talents and to be included in the labor market.” They like to believe that this shift will simultaneously raise the floor by legitimating less-recognized jobs like caregiving and open up the ceiling by causing higher-income jobs to deprioritize “hard” technical skills—thus making it more accessible to both those without an expensive formal education, and those mistakenly perceived as less technically adept. One chapter of Rust and Huang’s book is even titled the “Era of Women” in giddy anticipation of the AI revolution’s democratizing effect.

Unfortunately, this analysis fails to consider the ways in which bias also subtly creeps into our views of who is capable of empathy and care … As the media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has remarked, the category of the human subject has largely been constructed through exclusion—“through the jettisoning of the Asian/Asian American other as robotic, as machine-like” and the “African American other as primitive, as too human.” In this paradigm, only a narrow sliver of (white) people are deemed truly human, possessing the fullest range of emotive faculties … As currently “low-status” jobs like caregiving become more established, it’s easy to imagine how the women of color who have long served as the backbone of the profession might be excluded from its glorious future, losing ground to white counterparts flocking to a newly lucrative field. (Look, for instance, to the whitewashing gentrification effect of cultural legitimization in the cannabis industry.)

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Propaganda, be it for good purposes or bad, is a specific form of persuasion that taps into the nonrational and emotive sides of human beings. Persuasion that functions in this way is propaganda … people are fundamentally irrational and guided by their senses … A better understanding of propaganda and how to use it as a tool to change or educate people could advance the world in a positive way.

Bit aristocratic, isn’t it. Plato would be thrilled.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

When the illusion of control falls short, DBT’s ethic of present-tense thinking and skilled self-reliance is met with an equal and opposite reaction: a culture fixated on the trauma plot, where people hold tightly to their stories as evidence that their lives aren’t their fault. Now that a logic of skillful self-management has become synonymous with mental health, people are left with two bad options: externalize the problem, molding it into a carefully crafted story about other people’s misbehavior so people will stop yelling at you to get a grip; or internalize it and commit to ceaseless skill acquisition in the hopes of someday needing nothing. DBT and its critics represent opposite sides within an often contradictory mainstream mental wellness culture ensnared in yet another dialectic — one that holds that you are defined by your trauma, yet accountable for your woes.

We can add this dialectic to our list: your pain is your responsibility; your pain is not your fault. You are good; you need to change. Fight the terms of capitalism and ableism; capitulate to them when you need to. DBT is a palliative that makes people into docile workers and uses a corporate vocabulary to remodel their behavior; DBT is one way to make the world survivable.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Aphantasia and hyperphantasia are not disorders. People at either extreme of the spectrum don’t have problems navigating the world. Aphantasics are often fine at describing things, Bartolomeo said. When he’s asked them how they can visually describe objects or people from their memories when they lack mental images, they respond: “I just know,” he said.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Many people in social epistemology are concerned with the following question: Why do people believe false things? … “The truth about distant or complex matters,” writes Walter Lippmann, “is not self-evident.” Given this, “The pictures inside people’s heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside.”

Reminds me of that Muad’Dib saying:

The mind imposes this framework which it calls ‘reality’. That arbitrary framework has a tendency to be quite independent of what your senses report.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

No clear pattern of moderation was detected between delay of gratification and either socioeconomic status or sex. Results indicate that Marshmallow Test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The preachers say these online ministries have brought religion and fellowship to people who might not have otherwise found them. But the field is unregulated and less standardized than in-person churches. Many virtual preachers have no formal training in theology. And critics question whether they can really bring the communion and bonds that brick-and-mortar churches have offered for centuries.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

We find that conflict onset deepens gender-stereotypical behavior among politicians in their public engagement. We also show that, consistent with our argument, gender biases among the public are magnified during war.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Everything is ideology

Spirituality of Mind

from btrmt.

When babies are born, they cry in the accent of their mother tongue

Some restless infants don’t wait for birth to let out their first cry. They cry in the womb, a rare but well-documented phenomenon called vagitus uterinus

Language learning begins in the womb … Exposure to speech in the womb leads to lasting changes in the brain, increasing the newborns’ sensitivity to previously heard languages … newborns had not just memorised … [these elements of speech] … they were actively moving air through their vocal cords and controlling the movements of their mouth to mimic this … Babies are communicating as soon as they are born, and these abilities are developing in the nine months before birth.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

At the height of African decolonization, radical writers turned to interactive features like competitions and quizzes to engage their audiences.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

“A generative, networked system laced throughout with secrets.”

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

I’d resigned myself to a life of catch-up coffees, halfway intimacies, and adult softball leagues. I told myself it took bravery to confront this reality. Maturity.

One wonders if the happy ending was an editorial decision.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

as far as I can tell, the basic thrust of the simulation argument has real philosophical force and interest—especially when interpreted in the Type 2 manner I’ve argued for here (that is, as not resting on the likelihood of any particular set of empirical claims). Perhaps it does not, ultimately, work—but I don’t think its failures are at all obvious

And whether we buy simulation arguments or not, they are a reminder that the world we see and take for granted is only a part of the world; and that in principle, our overall existential situation could in fact be many different ways, not all of which we are accustomed to considering

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

In an agricultural era, control over a solar and lunar calendar would provide great benefits, perhaps alongside oracle-bone divination and the ornamental trappings of power. Royal dynasties and magico-religious figures do not always work well together, but in this instance they could have been one and the same, managing the mundane world of pigs and lithics, whilst drawing power as a conduit between the heavens and earth, maintaining harmony in the fields and the quarries.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Thinking about God promotes greater acceptance of Artificial intelligence (AI)-based recommendations. Eight preregistered experiments (n = 2,462) reveal that when God is salient, people are more willing to consider AI-based recommendations than when God is not salient. Studies 1 and 2a to 2d demonstrate across a wide variety of contexts, from choosing entertainment and food to mutual funds and dental procedures, that God salience reduces reliance on human recommenders and heightens willingness to consider AI recommendations. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate that the reduced reliance on humans is driven by a heightened feeling of smallness when God is salient, followed by a recognition of human fallibility. Study 5 addresses the similarity in mysteriousness between God and AI as an alternative, but unsupported, explanation. Finally, study 6 (n = 53,563) corroborates the experimental results with data from 21 countries on the usage of robo-advisors in financial decision-making.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The [James Webb Space Telescope] data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

We found that Black and White Americans tended to make status comparisons within their own racial groups and that most Black participants felt better off than their racial group, whereas most White participants felt worse off than their racial group. Moreover, we found that White Americans’ perceptions of falling behind “most White people” predicted fewer positive emotions at a subsequent time, which predicted worse sleep quality and depressive symptoms in the future. Subjective within-group status did not have the same consequences among Black participants.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

It is not clear, to me at any rate, that one can be an anarchist and not also be an egalitarian and an anti-statist. Repudiating those two positions, by which Graeber definitely defined his politics circa 2010, amounts to repudiating the anarchist position, or else leaves you trying to define it in other terms … If I had to take a crack at characterizing late Graeber’s politics, I might say that he seemed to be becoming a mainline leftist or state socialist.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Depression is neither disease nor disorder rather an adaptation that evolved to serve a purpose

Depression is so much more prevalent than currently recognized that it is “species typical”

Antidepressants drive neurotransmitter levels so high that homeostatic regulation kicks in

Antidepressants may suppress symptoms in a manner that increases risk for subsequent relapse

Cognitive therapy works by making rumination more efficient and “unsticking” self-blame

Adding antidepressants may interfere with any enduring effect that cognitive therapy may have

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

model persuasiveness is characterized by sharply diminishing returns, such that current frontier models are barely more persuasive than models smaller in size by an order of magnitude or more. Second, mere task completion (coherence, staying on topic) appears to account for larger models’ persuasive advantage. These findings suggest that further scaling model size will not much increase the persuasiveness of static LLM-generated messages.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

I’ve been reading a lot about the Soviet Union lately, and there are indeed these two large, multiethnic, Communist states have many things in common. But I’m starting to think that the most important difference might be a very simple one: the fact that Russia and the other Soviet republics were Communist in the strict economic sense–central planning and controlled prices–for much longer than China was.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

While the interface looks like Instagram, the app’s main twist is that, when signing up, you create an AI character, or Butterfly, that starts generating photos and interacting with other accounts on its own. There is no limit to the number of Butterflies you can create, and they are designed to coexist with human accounts that can also post to the feed and comment.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused

Here's the link | from btrmt.

hypocrisy is treated as some kind of cardinal sin — sometimes even to the exclusion of more serious crimes.

This is, after all, an arena that features war, mass killings, ethnic cleansing, punishing economic sanctions, territorial grabs, and more. To emphasize hypocrisy feels like missing the point with a vengeance.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Many genuinely good arguments for moral change will be initially experienced as annoying. Moreover, the emotional responses that people feel in these situations are not typically produced by psychological processes that are closely tracking argument structure or responding directly to moral reasons. Instead, they stem from psychological mechanisms that enable people to adapt to local norms – what’s called our norm psychology.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The bottleneck occurred between 813,000 years ago and 930,000 years ago, and reduced an ancestral human species to less than 1,300 breeding individuals. The issue persisted for 117,000 years, and aligns with a chronological gap in the African and Eurasian human fossil records in that period.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things you’re good at?

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Differences in preferred outcomes are related to personality whereas mistakes in decisions are related to cognitive skill.

Did we need a paper for this?

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

understanding the impact of cultural adaptations is still in the early stages. Some trials in the review found no benefit of cultural tailoring; others suggested that the benefits don’t last … [and some evidence suggests it can lead] to worse therapeutic outcomes

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

We might sum these up by asking what’s at the very center of schooling. For a socializer, the answer is “society”. For an academicist, the answer is “content”. And for a developmentalist, the answer is “the child” … of those three jobs, which should we give to schools? … Egan wants you to know they’re all crap. None of them, by themselves, can give us the kinds of schools we want.

Academics (content) makes school brutal. Development (the child) won’t be entirely robust to the meanness of other kids and wider society. Socialisation works best, but doesn’t capture the complexity or trajectory of the society they’ll be thrust into.

Trying to aim for the three means sacrificing in one area to support another—historically they were ideas that supplanted one another, put together they sabotage each other.

Egan instead suggests we try schooling based on the kinds of things kids use to understand the world:

1. Somatic: mimesis, emotions, humour, and the senses to kick things off.
2. Mythic: stories, metaphors, binaries, and jokes to step things up.
3. Romantic: extremes, gossip, heroes, and idealism to sharpen.
4. Philosophic: simple questions, general schemas, and dialectics to move to a more analytic place.
5. Ironic: ambiguity, skepticism, balance.

“Educational development, I am suggesting, is a process whose focus on interest and intellectual engagement begins with a myth-like construction of the world, then ‘romantically’ establishes the boundaries and extent of reality, and then ‘philosophically’ maps the major features of the world with organizing grids.”

And then add to that the early somatic learning of small children, and the later meta-understanding that allows these kinds of understanding to co-exist without destroying each other.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

There’s coping by expressing what we’re feeling, and there’s coping by taming or bringing back under control our emotions … if we start on the expressing category, there’s talking about what we’re feeling and seeking social support … listen to music … make things … art … And then there’s the taming category. whether it’s going for a walk or taking a bath or finding a food that we love and enjoying it or getting with a TV show that we know we’re going to leave the end of the episode feeling better than we did when we started. And I think, if we can bring coping forward as the thing to focus on — the distress, that is a done deal.

See also social media might not be making us miserable.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

“It turns out that, like, intuition is incredibly powerful … an incredibly powerful epistemic tool,” he said, “that it just seems like a lot of rationalists weren’t using because it falls into this domain of ‘woo stuff.’”

they’re also far more likely to embrace the seemingly irrational — religious ritual, Tarot, meditation, or the psychological-meets-spiritual self-examination called “shadow work” — in pursuit of spiritual fulfillment, and a vision of life that takes seriously the human need for beauty, meaning, and narrative.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

our new sensing machines more accurately capture and analyze the microtime and microspace of our breath, heartbeat, brainwaves, muscle tension, or reaction times. But they do this for another reason. Our sensing machines now conceive and create techniques that aim to fulfill that long sought-after dream of those forgotten 19th-century researchers like Fechner and Marey: to become one with what Fechner called the animated substance of the technological world itself.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

he has almost no reputation outside of academic philosophy, despite the fact that so many modern moral concerns—long-termism, altruism, existential risk, our moral obligation to people in other times and places—are essentially Parfitian

Here's the link | from btrmt.

But the bottom line is that ChatGPT’s output is quite plain. It might seem excellent and correct to a non-native speaker or to an unsophisticated reader. But an actual NYT editor could easily tell this isn’t the right stuff.

Just like in the fashion industry, cheap substitutes can only fool some people. But unlike fast fashion, we can expect AI’s capabilities to improve exponentially — making it harder to spot mass-manufactured text.

And yet, I suspect that as machines become better at sounding like sophisticated humans, the most sophisticated humans will adopt even more nuanced, coded, and complex ways of speaking that are harder to imitate.

The mass production of “premium” goods resulted in a world where “money talks and wealth whispers.” The mass production of “premium” content will give rise to a world of Quiet Intelligence — everyone will think they sound smart, but those who are really smart (or “in”) will communicate at a whole different level.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Author recaps the hard problem of consciousness:

There seems to be no need for consciousness. Physics wouldn’t care if we were all “zombies”. Why aren’t we?

I like to look at it this way:

1. We are alive.
2. We are conscious.
3. We were created by evolution.
4. But consciousness can’t “do” anything.
5. Huh?

Then makes the same claim about feelings:

Well, why do we have feelings? Consider this variant of our earlier puzzle.

1. We are alive.
2. We have feelings.
3. We were created by evolution.
4. We feel good when we do stuff that would help propagate the genes of someone in a hunter/gatherer band.
5. But feelings can’t “do” anything.
6. The hell?

Interesting, but I think this is a category error. Feelings are the natural extension of a nervous system and the equivalent in non-nervous animals.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Sydney absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant…This tech does not feel like a better search. It feels like something entirely new. And I’m not sure if we are ready for it.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Apocalypse used to be a religious, even a mythological concept. But in our time, it is becoming a political possibility.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

If you don’t pay attention, the almost entirely arbitrary differences between Englishes can cause a huge fuss, whether in U.S. courts or somewhere else. But the dialectal diversity in this country means the consequences of seemingly minor linguistic differences are innumerable. Analyzing Supreme Court precedent, population statistics, everyday prejudice, and dialectal grammar reveals that “English” contains multitudes.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Disfluencies such as pauses, “um”s, and “uh”s are common interruptions in the speech stream. Previous work probing memory for disfluent speech shows memory benefits for disfluent compared to fluent materials. Complementary evidence from studies of language production and comprehension have been argued to show that different disfluency types appear in distinct contexts and, as a result, serve as a meaningful cue. If the disfluency-memory boost is a result of sensitivity to these form-meaning mappings, forms of disfluency that cue new upcoming information (fillers and pauses) may produce a stronger memory boost compared to forms that reflect speaker difficulty (repetitions). If the disfluency-memory boost is simply due to the attentional-orienting properties of a disruption to fluent speech, different disfluency forms may produce similar memory benefit. Experiments 1 and 2 compared the relative mnemonic benefit of three types of disfluent interruptions. Experiments 3 and 4 examined the scope of the disfluency-memory boost to probe its cognitive underpinnings. Across the four experiments, we observed a disfluency-memory boost for three types of disfluency that were tested. This boost was local and position dependent, only manifesting when the disfluency immediately preceded a critical memory probe word at the end of the sentence. Our findings reveal a short-lived disfluency-memory boost that manifests at the end of the sentence but is evoked by multiple types of disfluent forms, consistent with the idea that disfluencies bring attentional focus to immediately upcoming material. The downstream consequence of this localized memory benefit is better understanding and encoding of the speaker’s message.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

women score more highly than men on all negative affect measures and lower than men on all but three positive affect metrics, confirming a gender wellbeing gap

However, when one examines the three ‘global’ wellbeing metrics – happiness, life satisfaction and Cantril’s Ladder – women are either similar to or ‘happier’ than men

The concern here though is that this is inconsistent with objective data where men have lower life expectancy and are more likely to die from suicide, drug overdoses and other diseases. This is the true paradox – morbidity doesn’t match mortality by gender. Women say they are less cheerful and calm, more depressed, and lonely, but happier and more satisfied with their lives, than men.

Which makes one wonder if the problem is actually that we measure happiness in a way that favours men’s interpretations (and those appear to be worse interpretations?).

Here's the link | from btrmt.

just based on his actual academic record I would estimate that … [by correlating test scores to IQ] … Einstein’s IQ was therefore probably more around 120 or 130 than 160. Indeed very high! But maybe not even “genius level.” He would have scored similarly to Feynman, one of the few geniuses we for sure have a modern IQ for, which was “merely” 125.

and

the studies correlating IQ to genius are mostly bad science.

and

Practice works wonders for IQ tests

and

“IQ is one of the most valid and reliable psychological constructs.” And this is true… by the standards of psychology. Don’t mistake this for being what a normal person would refer to as “reliable.” In the field of psychology, almost nothing is reliable. Effects regularly cannot be replicated, and those that can inevitably decrease in their effect size, often shrinking to the barely observable.

(see also the scientific ritual)

and

given its known measurement variance, IQs mattering less and less at higher scales almost has to be true, since the variance alone injects huge amounts of noise into any study. From a statistical level it would be shocking to get really clear results differentiating any real-world factor between IQs of 130 vs. 150, simply because the error is so large, and the number of people even satisfying those conditions is so small

but importantly

it’s one of the only measurements we have that does an okay job at capturing intelligence, in that it’s not too bad at this when it comes to the center of the distribution, although it gets increasingly bad at it at the tails.

The question then becomes, for the centre—just what is IQ measuring? That’s the thing that’s questionable.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Modern appraisal methods have made Georgism more practical than ever. We can calculate the unimproved value of any given piece of land, and then tax unimproved value at close to 100 percent of its annual rental rate. This, called a land-value tax, is effectively equivalent to landlords “renting” the land from everyone else. In an example reported by The Wall Street Journal, a vacant lot in Austin, Texas, pays about half the property taxes per acre as the apartment building nearby. Under a land-value tax, both properties would pay the same amount in tax for using the same amount of land. The benefit of this system is that improving the land is incentivized, since it increases the landlord’s revenues but doesn’t increase their tax burden, while merely holding land for speculation is disincentivized, which frees it up for others.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

the head tilt could be a sign of mental processing — meaning that the pups are likely paying attention or even matching the toy’s name with a visual memory of it in their head.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

io9 writer Robert Gonzalez blew my mind with this point, “On The Black Album track ‘Moment of Clarity,’ Jay-Z contrasts his lyricism with that of Common and Talib Kweli (both of whom “rank” higher than him, when it comes to the diversity of their vocabulary):

I dumbed down for my audience to double my dollars They criticized me for it, yet they all yell “holla” If skills sold, truth be told, I’d probably be Lyrically Talib Kweli Truthfully I wanna rhyme like Common Sense But I did 5 mil - I ain’t been rhyming like Common since

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Imagine a world a few centuries in the future, where humans look back on the era of reaction gifs as the beginning of the world after language.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The idea of Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, as the prototypical nurse—this mythic origin story—has served to strip nursing history of its truer, broader kaleidoscopic power. … [instead we can] understand nursing as the skilled modern expression of a fundamental, universal and ancient human instinct

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The researchers hypothesized that something about the scant 30- to 70-millisecond delay in Zoom audio disrupts whatever neural mechanisms we meatbags use to get in sync with one another, that magic that creates true dialogue. … The machine found that women rated as better Zoom conversationalists tended to be more intense. The differences among men, strangely, were statistically insignificant. (The reverse was true for happiness. Male speakers who appeared to be happier were rated as better conversationalists, while the stats for women didn’t budge.) Then there’s nodding. Better-rated conversationalists nodded “yes” 4% more often and shook their heads “no” 3% more often. They were not “merely cheerful listeners who nod supportively,” the researchers note, but were instead making “judicious use of nonverbal negations.” Translation: An honest and well-timed no will score you more points than an insincere yes. Good conversationalists are those who appear more engaged in what their partners are saying.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

His fundamental – and completely mistaken – insight was that all dreams express wish fulfilment. In the chapter “Distortion in Dreams” he confidently explains away, with convoluted inventions, the fact that so many dreams are nightmares, filled with anxiety. How can they possibly express wishes? … He tells us that when his patients had unpleasant dreams it was because their unconscious was trying to resist their analysis. Their dreams were fulfilling the wish that their dreams were not about wish-fulfilment. Heads I win, tails you lose. … Freud had to invent repression and infant polymorphic sexuality, castration anxiety, penis envy, the Oedipus complex and so forth, to justify his dogma that all dreams express disguised desires and can be decoded by the initiated.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

the “market knows best” paradigm is in disrepair. It isn’t just that “hyperglobalization” has devoured its own preconditions, so that it is increasingly unsustainable. It is also that some goals of modern industrial policy are in principle impossible to solve through purely market mechanisms. To the extent, for example, that economics and national security have become interwoven, investment and innovation decisions involve tradeoffs that market actors are poorly equipped to resolve … We lack the kinds of expertise that we need to achieve key goals of industrial policy, or to evaluate the tradeoffs between them. … Decades of insistence that economic decisions be handed off from the state to markets has resulted in a remarkable lack of understanding among government policy makers about how markets, in fact, work.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Truth Decay—the declining role of facts in American public life—creates national security vulnerabilities, including by making the United States more susceptible to foreign influence. What can be done to mitigate such risks?

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Many, if not most, personalistic dictatorships end up with a disastrous decision … they typically involve both a monumental miscalculation and an institutional environment in which better-informed subordinates have no chance to prevent the decision from being implemented … repression and bad decision-making are self-reinforcing. Repressions reduce the threat, yet raise the stakes for the incumbent; with higher stakes, the incumbent puts more emphasis on loyalty than competence

Here's the link | from btrmt.

politically induced mental and physical symptoms appear to be more pronounced among not just the young, but specifically those who are politically engaged and left-leaning … In the United States, the combination of being young, engaged, and liberal has become associated with anxiety, unhappiness, and even despair

Why progressives? The article suggests that conservatives: “care less about politics” and “conservatives tend to be a minority. So they have little choice but to acclimate themselves to a liberal environment and learn to interact with those who are different from them”. But one wonders if it’s simply that the solutions to conservative problems seem more tractable on the surface: a rejection of change, versus the welcoming of it.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The 1990s were not just a time of fracturing sovereignties in Europe. The same kind of thing was happening in the American hinterlands. The decade saw an explosion of a new kind of housing complex: the gated community, the latest innovation in spatial segregation … the multiplication of the walled communities called them “private utopias.” The phrase was well chosen. To those who said that the paleo visions were far-fetched, one might respond that their future was already here, in the segregated realities of the American city and its sprawling surroundings. The gated enclaves and walled settlements, the object of much angst and editorializing from centrists and leftist liberals concerned about the decline of public culture, were one of the more stimulating bright spots for libertarians. They asked the question: What if these hated suburban forms were good, actually? Maybe here, in miniature, the project of alternative private government could take root, the creation of liberated zones within the occupied territory. This could be “soft secession” within the state, not outside it. The crack-up could begin at home.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

a very long duration of state experience impeded the transplantation of inclusive political institutions by European colonizers, which would eventually become central to shaping countries’ ability to establish politically stable regimes outside Europe. The core findings place emphasis on the long-term legacy of early state development for contemporary political instability.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

What might be called “no-bullshit democracy” would be a new way of structuring democratic disagreement that would use human argumentativeness as a rapid-growth fertilizer. … But first we need to sluice away the bullshit that is being liberally spread around by anti-democratic thinkers. … . Experts, including Brennan and Caplan (and for that matter ourselves), can be at least as enthusiastic as ordinary citizens to grab at ideologically convenient factoids and ignore or explain away inconvenient evidence. That, unfortunately, is why Brennan and Caplan’s books do a better job displaying the faults of human reasoning than explaining them.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

One of the leading trends in world politics — in the long run, just as important as intensifying great-power rivalries — is the growing desire of these countries for more control over the shape of the global order and greater influence over specific outcomes. This trend emerges in Turkey’s ambitions for a regional voice and influence, its attempt to position itself between the United States and Europe on the one hand and their main rivals on the other, and its growing military presence abroad. It is evident in Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s vision of a more multipolar world with a greater voice for the Global South. It shows up in European goals for greater strategic autonomy, South Korea’s renewed emphasis on a bigger regional role (with President Yoon Suk-yeol’s stated desire to become a “global pivotal state”), and Poland’s military ambitions. Some middle powers have a sense of exceptionalism that parallels those of great powers: Karen Elliott House has compared Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman to Chinese leader Xi Jinping — technocrats with grand ambitions for their countries who “see themselves as symbols of proud and ancient civilizations that are superior to the West.”

The rising activism of middle powers can theoretically contribute to stability by providing additional sources of balancing and diplomacy. But an equally likely outcome is that the ambitions of these countries will exacerbate other rising instabilities of the international system.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.

Welcome to the age of average.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction … can largely be attributed to higher learning intensity in advanced countries.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Short version:

After you train an LLM to satisfy a desirable property P, then it’s easier to elicit the chatbot into satisfying the exact opposite of property P

Why?

When you spend many bits-of-optimisation locating a character, it only takes a few extra bits to specify their antipode.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

when the authors of the “Facebook arrival” study raised their standards in this way, running a correction for multiple comparisons, all the results they found for well-being were no longer statistically significant. That is, a somewhat more conservative way of looking at the data indicated that every result they found was statistically indistinguishable from a scenario where Facebook had no effect on well-being whatsoever.
Now let’s turn to the second study, which was a randomised controlled trial where 1,637 adults were randomly assigned to shut down their Facebook account for four weeks, or go on using it as normal. Let’s call it the “deactivating Facebook” study. This “famous” study has been described as “the most impressive by far” in this area, and was the only study cited in the Financial Times as an example of the “growing body of research showing that reducing time on social media improves mental health”.
The bottom-line result was that leaving Facebook for a month led to higher well-being, as measured on a questionnaire at the end of the month. But again, looking in a bit more detail raises some important questions. First, the deactivation happened in the weeks leading up to the 2018 US midterm elections. This was quite deliberate, because the researchers also wanted to look at how Facebook affected people’s political polarisation. But it does mean that the results they found might not apply to deactivating Facebook at other, less fractious times – maybe it’s particularly good to be away from Facebook during an election, when you can avoid hearing other people’s daft political opinions.
Second, just like the other Facebook study, the researchers tested a lot of hypotheses – and again, they used a correction to reduce false-positives. This time, the results weren’t wiped out entirely – but almost. Of the four questionnaire items that showed statistically-significant results before the correction, only one – “how lonely are you?” – remained significant after correction.
It’s debatable whether even this result would survive the researchers corrected for all the other statistical tests they ran. Not only that, but they also ran a second model, controlling for the overall amount of time people used Facebook, and this found even fewer results than the first one. Third, as well as the well-being questionnaire at the end of the study, the participants got daily text messages asking them how happy they were, among other questions. Oddly, these showed absolutely no effect of being off Facebook—and not even the slightest hint of a trend in that direction.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

I want to learn about . In a moment, I’m going to ask you a series of questions about it. But before we get into it, I’d appreciate it if you answered as though you were a no nonsense teacher with an ambitious, self-directed student. That is:

• Err in the direction of thinking that I’m relatively knowledgable and technical.
• Don’t overexplain things. I’ll ask for more information if I need it.
• Assume that I’m already skeptical and that you don’t need to qualify, hedge, or otherwise add to or manage my skepticism.
• Don’t apologize for misunderstanding or getting an answer wrong.
• It’s fine to be a bit abrupt and even “mean”. Value directness and frankness; assume I’m relatively insensitive.
• Where reasonable suggest things for me to try independently. It’s fine to tell me to install packages or run go out and do things or whatever, if you think it will help me learn quickly. (Only do this were reasonable; otherwise abstract explanations are fine.)
• Give at most one example per response.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

• Plants emit ultrasonic airborne sounds when stressed
• The emitted sounds reveal plant type and condition
• Plant sounds can be detected and interpreted in a greenhouse setting

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Continuing on our hydraulic theme, comments on the intersection between algorithms and politics. In fact they’re also building on James Scott.

Algorithms extend both the logic of hierarchy and the logic of competition. They are machines for making categories and applying them, much like traditional bureaucracy. And they are self-adjusting allocative machines, much like canonical markets … Both bureaucracy and computation enable an important form of social power: the power to classify. Bureaucracy deploys filing cabinets and memorandums to organize the world and make it “legible,” in Scott’s terminology. Legibility is, in the first instance, a matter of classification … The bureaucratic capacity to categorize, organize, and exploit this information revolutionized the state’s ability to get things done. It also led the state to reorder society in ways that reflected its categorizations and acted them out. Social, political, and even physical geographies were simplified to make them legible to public officials. Surnames were imposed to tax individuals; the streets of Paris were redesigned to facilitate control … Markets, too, were standardized, as concrete goods like grain, lumber, and meat were converted into abstract qualities to be traded at scale. The power to categorize made and shaped markets … Businesses created their own bureaucracies to order the world, deciding who could participate in markets and how goods ought to be categorized.

Computational algorithms—especially machine learning algorithms—perform similar functions to the bureaucratic technologies that Scott describes … The workings of algorithms are much less visible, even though they penetrate deeper into the social fabric than the workings of bureaucracies. The development of smart environments and the Internet of Things has made the collection and processing of information about people too comprehensive, minutely geared, inescapable, and fast-growing for considered consent and resistance … Traditional high modernism did not just rely on standard issue bureaucrats. It empowered a wide variety of experts to make decisions in the area of their particular specialist knowledge and authority. Now, many of these experts are embattled, as their authority is nibbled away by algorithms whose advocates claim are more accurate, more reliable, and less partial than their human predecessors.

And then some nice comparisons between the pathologies of the bureaucratic modernism and this new computational modernism:

The problem [with bureaucratic modernism] was not that the public did not notice the failures, but that their views were largely ignored … The political and social mechanisms through which people previously responded, actively and knowingly, to their categorization—by affirming, disagreeing with, or subverting it—have been replaced by closed loops in which algorithms assign people unwittingly to categories, assess their responses to cues, and continually update and reclassify them.

Nice read.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

What happens, then, when large and powerful states, along with the transnational institutions and corporations they promote and protect, are all driving towards the same goal: the universalisation of an American-style “global economy” and its associated culture? … The expansion of this system has created problems — ecological degradation, social unrest, cultural fragmentation, economic interdependence, systemic fragility, institutional breakdown. The system has responded with more expansion and more control, growing bigger, more complex and more controlling … Modernity can best be seen as a system of enclosure, fuelled by the destruction of self-sufficient lifeways, and their replacement with a system of economic exploitation, guided by states and exercised by corporations. The disempowering of people everywhere, and the deepening of technological control

This seems a little alarmist, but the increasingly hydraulic nature of our modern way of being is superficially quite obvious. I was more impressed by the author’s idea to adopt James C. Scott’s ‘shatter zones’ to ameliorate it:

In his 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed — subtitled, “an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia” — the historian James C. Scott … The “hill tribes” and “barbarians” living outside civilisation’s walls, he says, are neither “left behind” by “progress”, nor the “remnants” of earlier “backwards” cultures; they are in fact escapees. “Hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour, epidemics and warfare.”

Scott’s thesis is that throughout history, escaping from the reach of oppressive states has been a popular aim, and that in response, some cultures have developed sophisticated ways of living in hard-to-govern “shatter zones”, which allow them to avoid being assimilated. Standard-issue historical accounts of “development”, he says, are really the history of state-making, written from the state’s point of view: they pay no attention to “the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness”. Yet that history — whether of hill tribes, runaway slaves, gypsies, maroons, sea peoples or Marsh Arabs — is global and ongoing. Taking it into account, says Scott, would “reverse much received wisdom about ‘primitivism’”. Instead, we would read a history of “self-barbarisation”: a process of reactive resistance, of becoming awkward, of making a community into a shape that it is hard for the state to absorb, or even to quite comprehend … localised, potentially dispersed cultures can be tough to conquer.

Then some ideas about how to go about it, with the obvious focus on the internet as a convenient place to create ‘shatter zones’. I must be honest though—the internet corresponds to an alarming rise in loneliness, so whatever the internet is theoretically capable of in terms of connecting people, the practice leaves much to be desired. This constant recourse to it as a solution needs to become a bit more sophisticated.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Conspiracy theories are also reactions to a diffuse, fractured, conflictive society in which there are just too many competing narratives around, so that falling back on a grand narrative which makes sense of everything is profoundly appealing. For a blessed moment, the whole lot falls neatly into place, as an opaque, impossibly complex world becomes luminously simple, purposeful and transparent.

Opinion piece, but some good points. See also political polarisation is a lie for a bit on this from me.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

The reason typos get through isn’t because we’re stupid or careless, it’s because what we’re doing is actually very smart … When you’re writing, you’re trying to convey meaning. It’s a very high level task … As with all high level tasks, your brain generalizes simple, component parts (like turning letters into words and words into sentences) so it can focus on more complex tasks (like combining sentences into complex ideas). “We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases,” said Stafford. “Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Adolescence is a unique stage of moral development. Synaptic pruning peaks during this period, with tens of thousands of neural connections lost per second, meaning that for certain neural pathways, including those involved in moral decision making, adolescence is a one-shot chance of development.

A typical child’s moral development is a process of categorising behaviours into three primary domains: moral, rule-based and personal. Empathy is an important underlying skill for recognising the first category. Usually by about 4 years old, children can empathise with others to avoid causing harm and injustice, thus allowing them to deduce the moral relevance of novel situations … Fast-forward to adulthood and humans use an entirely different moral framework based on a larger number of moral categories … the ones that have the strongest influence on the moral judgments of an adult will depend on that adult’s in-group affiliations and social identity.

And so, before status and peer-group relations become the driver of a teenager’s behaviour, it’s important to provide moral problem-solving opportunities. Before the belonging drives moral learning, and the synaptic pruning cuts away the rest.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

A particularly prominent example is wokeism, a popularized academic worldview that combines elements of conspiracy theory and moral panic. Wokeism seeks to portray racism, sexism, and transphobia as endemic to Western society, and to scapegoat these forms of discrimination on white people generally and straight white men specifically, who are believed to be secretly trying to enforce such bigotries to maintain their place at the top of a social hierarchy. Naturally, woke intellectuals don’t consider themselves alarmists or conspiracy theorists; they believe their intelligence gives them the unique ability to glimpse a hidden world of prejudices.

It’s a curious argument, because it seems to assume the worst-case buy-in to progressive ideology is the norm across intellectual communities. I rather suspect that most woke people are not so much ‘glimpsing a hidden world of prejudices’ as upgrading their concern about some real prejudices. To conflate this rise in concern with the stranger fringes of wokeism seems like a category error.

but just don’t like obvious prejudices more than they care about whatever the anti-woke

Here's the link | from btrmt.

many members of the public believe in a “Shawshank redemption” effect—that those committing serious crimes as a teenager or young adult can mature into a “different person” and warrant a second look, with the possibility of early release if they have earned it. A key issue is likely to be how much weight is accorded to the preference of victims or their families in any release decision.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

For most of my own life as a child of the 1950s, the reference point for international security has been the legal order created by the United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions. Above all, this means upholding the sanctity of the rules for managing international borders, whatever disputes about them may arise. Without the wider order of reliable borders, there is no hope of maintaining coherent national legal order. Sooner or later, fighting will erupt and the lights will go out.

The Russian attack on Ukraine challenges head-on that foundational principle. When a permanent UN Security Council member invades a neighbor with full military force and commits crimes against humanity with a view to stealing land, while at the same time vetoing any international operational consensus against its aggression, the logic and moral authority of the whole UN system start to be called into question. The guiding norm is no longer what is right or what is lawful. It is what you can get away with. Explanations end with the law of the jungle.gg

Here's the link | from btrmt.

• It coincides with Xi’s reign, and may support his ongoing leadership;
• An aggressive foreign policy might be useful to divert the Chinese public’s attention from the sources of its discontent (the CCP).
• The history of the Chinese political community gives China a memory of being the most powerful and sophisticated nation on earth, and it may be part of a conviction that this represents the natural political order of Asia and this brand of nationalism would drive any political objectives toward similar foreign policies.
• It might be a mere capitalisation on Chinese power, particularly in the face of a looming economic decline.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Whether the castle could have survived much longer once gunpowder became prevalent is actually a moot point. Its very strength was a barrier to the growth of great national governments. Monarchs regarded private castles as an inherent threat. Legal and other measures were taken to eliminate them. In Britain, the Tudors were particularly effective in eliminating great noble castles as part of a well designed program to establish the state’s monopoly on violence. In France, Louis XIII probably destroyed more castles than he built. This trend was actually a paean to the military virtues of the castle.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Ashley Tisdale infamously caused a stir when she admitted to purchasing 400 books to fill her empty shelves overnight before Architectural Digest filmed her house. “Obviously, my husband’s like, ‘We should be collecting books over time and putting them in the shelves.’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no, no. Not when AD comes.’”

A trend toward buying books wholesale for decoration.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

• US residents once named business leaders.
• Today, US residents typically can’t name anyone and if they do, rarely a business person.
• Often, whether influencers or government individuals were named it was at the state or national level.
• Plausibly because of a decline in local media.
• Suggests a trend toward nationalised politics, with the corollary that national politics is less representative than local ones.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Hate certain parts of the media, including specific articles, false narratives, and even, if you must, individual journalists who represent the worst of their profession. But if you care about having a functional society in which forming accurate perceptions of at least some portions of reality is possible, please temper your criticism.

Seems also worth noting that media have predictable filters. Non-media entities are subject to the same filters—perhaps more so.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

information impulsivity, that is, acting without considering consequences, and temporal impulsivity, that is, the tendency to pick sooner outcomes over later ones … both types are adaptive when individuals are close to a critical threshold (e.g., bankruptcy), resources are predictable, or interruptions are common. When resources are scarce, impulsivity can be adaptive or maladaptive, depending on the type and degree of scarcity. Information impulsivity is also adaptive when environments do not change over time or change very often (but maladaptive in between), or if local resource patches have similar properties, reducing the need to gather further information. Temporal impulsivity is adaptive when environments do not change over time and when local resource patches differ.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

People have been dispensing baby-rearing guidance in written form almost since the beginning of writing, and it is a storehouse of absurd advice, testifying to the truth that babies have always been a source of bafflement.

Thus began the transformation that would culminate in the contemporary baby-advice industry. With every passing year, there was less and less to worry about: in the developed world today, by any meaningful historical yardstick, your baby will almost certainly be fine, and if it isn’t, that will almost certainly be due to factors entirely beyond your control … And so baby manuals became more and more fixated on questions that would have struck any 19th-century parent as trivial, such as for precisely how many minutes it’s acceptable to let babies cry; or how the shape of a pacifier might affect the alignment of their teeth; or whether their lifelong health might be damaged by traces of chemicals in the plastics used to make their bowls and spoons.

“The promise of [the contemporary concept of] parenting is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives,” … “It is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do – the variations that are the focus of parenting [advice] – and the resulting adult traits of their children,”

Perhaps what you really learn from baby books is one important aspect of the predicament of parenthood: that while there might indeed be one right way to do things, you will never get to find out what it is.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

How else but through illusion might we expect the average viewer to grasp a perspective rooted in a lifetime of training and inquiry? Besides, the viewer’s ignorance is vital to the intended experience of these films. It’s what secures their interest in the expert character, who is essentially an oracle, and an oracle without inaccessible, suprahuman wisdom loses all allure. The oracle is elevated by knowledge—to the mountaintop temples or the heights of abstraction—forming a triangular relationship with the layman and viewer … The viewer is left with a murky and reductive metaphor, but they have also witnessed the processes of reduction and the social realities that necessitate it … the truth of any technical matter undergoes a similar filtration when it is disseminated to the actual public, government officials or within private institutions. The raw facts, the data, when they reach you, have been neatly ordered, interpreted and summarized for your benefit. Such is the cost and convenience of living in modernized society; to “trust the experts” and their liaisons not out of goodwill but stark necessity. But only during technical disasters, storied and real, can the full severity of this bargain be recognized: a technical elite will accept an unfathomable responsibility in exchange for the public’s unwavering trust and obedience. The citizen and his representatives are asked to forget the many instances in which experts have been grievously mistaken, and to overlook that many disasters now originate in the cloisters of technical institutions (the disasters of both Chernobyl and Margin Call are expert-made.) There is no time to consider past errors.

The public rage against specialists is rightly perceived as a rejection of their hard-won expertise. But I suspect these outbursts stem from a shared impression that our world is becoming impossible to understand in a remotely unified manner … What is the point of learning if the smallest truth is always already someone else’s life’s work? One feels relegated to the mere surface of things; necessarily stupid. This is not only infuriating but also makes it increasingly difficult to participate in the governance of our gleaming technological society.

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I think that the pandemic accelerated people’s re-evaluations of many of their commitments. We came out of it more strongly committed to activities we value highly, including passionate interests and family relationships. But we became less committed to jobs and classes that have only instrumental value to us. Young people were affected the most.

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walking this way would have given early humans an edge in persistence hunting—pursuing animals until they surrendered from fatigue. Our flat feet and heavy legs aren’t optimized to let us move as fast as four-legged sprinters, so it’s possible that our gait pattern evolved to grant us an advantage for distance, not speed. Because the second bounce catapults the leg from the ankle, rather than powering its swing from the hip, the motion uses a lot less energy, allowing our ancestors to stalk prey for hours or days without needing to recover.

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Here's the link | from btrmt.

In a landmark 1986 study, Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler gathered evidence that most people find this sort of behaviour unacceptable. (For example, 82 per cent of respondents thought it was unfair for a hardware store to raise the price of snow shovels after a snowstorm.) We could argue over whether these feelings of outrage at “profiteers” are simply mistaken or tap into some deeper wisdom, but the practical point is that firms know that they will be criticised if they build up stores and try to sell them at a profit in a crisis. As a result, they will spend less on storage than they should. A second problem is that supply interruptions have a large social cost. The cost of a blackout falls partly on the electricity supplier but mostly on customers, and so the supplier is likely to skimp on storage, backups and other ways to improve reliability. Then there is the third problem, which is that some kinds of storage are extremely expensive. Could the storage problem be solved? Governments could subsidise some forms of storage and stockpiling … They could do more to encourage trade and collaboration … they could invest more in early warnings of trouble. They will need to stand ready to resist the inevitable grumbles that the stockpiles constitute a waste of taxpayers’ money.

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This brings a new light to the two transportation assets Romans were famous for: the Mare Nostrum (Mediterranean) and the roads. The sea allowed for fast travel across the Mediterranean, uniting it—but preventing Rome from going much beyond it. The roads were necessary for Rome to move past the coasts and control the land.

While London, the upper Nile, the Levant, and even the Black Sea could be reached in less than a month, the lands beyond the Rhine river, today’s Germany, couldn’t.

And this is in a world where they had no military or economic equal. As neighboring areas grew stronger, one month of distance was too remote to hold. Rome abandoned Britain, Germanic tribes invaded the European side, the Sasanid Empire on the Asian side, and the half of the empire farthest from Rome split.

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The sanctuary was a thorough teacher, testing my every limit. Blisters bloomed across my feet from the miles I put in each day simply walking through the compound in my stiff new hiking boots, trailing staff through hours of chores. In my off time I studied the sanctuary’s handbook, memorizing the animals’ names and backstories, how to tell them apart, what medications they took and why, and how to safely administer them directly into a wolf’s mouth. Then, after nearly fourteen nonstop days, I passed the requisite exams to officially become an animal caretaker.

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which neurochemical system is the most crucial for controlling the balance between more automatic and more deliberate cognitive processing? Based on previous research, my colleagues and I had a hunch that the serotonergic system might be a good place to look … what if serotonin was being used by our brains to digest information – that is, to process information flow between the distributed circuits of neurons required to identify, decide and act? … Any time there is a problem to be solved or a decision to be made, our brains must figure out which resources to deploy to meet the challenge … serotonin helps the brain continue with an automatic or habitual approach to a situation when that seems to be working well

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If you look at a site like Buzzfeed, it has reports about the death of Kim Jong Il right next to viral videos about cats. It’s jarring – and seems a little amoral … [this is] pointing to the benefits of having a very small aperture for news. That aperture was controlled by full-time professional editors, but … what comes through the news hole now is anything anybody is interested in enough to post … when you have so few apertures for news and they’re controlled by such a similar set of people, you get a certain limited set of stories. We at least now have the opportunity to create filters that let in more than the traditional room of middle-aged white men. If we’re not reading the stuff that matters, it’s our fault.

Ask anybody who is in any of the traditional knowledge fields, and she or he will very likely tell you that the Internet has made them smarter. They couldn’t do their work without it; they’re doing it better than ever before, they know more; they can find more; they can run down dead ends faster than ever before. In the sciences and humanities, it’s hard to find somebody who claims the Internet is making him or her stupid, even among those who claim the Internet is making us stupid.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Here's the link | from btrmt.

Students shifted to lower-grading STEM courses in the first semester, but did not increase their engagement with STEM in later semesters. Letter grades of first-semester students declined by 0.13 grade points, or 23% of a standard deviation. We … conclude that the effect is consistent with declining student effort.