Never heard of it before---just ordered it
12.03.2026 01:16
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Never heard of it before---just ordered it
absolutely correct IMO, and it makes me think a lot of the ordinary 'work ethic' discourse conflates *work* with effortful engagement in a task. we can (and should) want less of the former, but the latter is part of living well
Frieren finally giving us late sleepers some representation
today i'm feeling broadly supportive
"ok explain to me how human consciousness works" ok you need a fat slice of g e moore to the temple
ah when you say it that way, i hear the same thing---'metamorphosis' being a developmental process w natural teleology
heard this again recently and it's incredible how much perfectly cut and polished power pop is in the first 35 seconds youtu.be/vsxyaZhdW1s
why 'The Transformation' over 'The Metamorphosis'? i would think (naively) they're just Latin vs Greek expressions of the same notion in English. and fwiw German uses 'verwandlung' to mean quick changes, conversions, and insect development alike
this is an article Phillippe would write for his little pretend newspaper in Achewood
(I suspect he'd be thrilled, and treat it as vindication of his "spaceship" diagram, but who knows)
More generally, I wonder what Paul would have made of the fact that LLMs treat the meanings of words as just more high-dimensional vectors (and transformer architectures using these vectors to generate next tokens with astonishing success), without any perceptual underpinnings whatsoever
as the original paper "Attention Is All You Need" made explicit. IDK about *biological* realism, but it certainly seems *psychologically* realistic in a way I think Paul would have been friendly to.
Loved this, Matt, thank you. A note: when you say "Generative models and transformers do some of the same work that Paul wanted to do with recurrent networks [...] which makes GAI less biologically realistic"—the transformer model is easily interpreted as having an attention mechanism,
wait was this an attempt to settle the question from the armchair? i thought at first it must have been discussion of some developmental psych papers
[stealing a surrogate corpse bit] this is my friend, colston cree murray
because it turns out my introduction to the sciences of the human was, i now know, handed to me by a bunch of names in the epstein files, and epstein himself
i count myself fortunate to have continued learning about experimental design, statistics, methodology in the social sciences, and feminist approaches to linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and philsci
i could add to the list of ideas that ALdaily and Edge introduced me to: huntington's "clash of civilizations," sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, sam harris's screed against muslims, dawkins's selfish gene. or thinkers like dennett being placed alongside the likes of michael crighton
and this is where, later, i first saw defenses of summers's 2005 harvard speech. Edge carried the imprimatur of serious scientists, and so at least for me at my young age, epstein's strategy to buy the imprimatur of science worked. completely.
this is where my young mind first encountered the larry summers argument about the dearth of women in science & tech, with the tails of distributions dominated by men for reasons of biology/innateness (explicitly endorsed by epstein in this email)
it so happens that one of the frequently linked blogs was john brockman's edge.org, which had epstein funding, and which styled itself as cutting through a bunch of humanities crap to discuss hard questions about the future and about human nature
i am suddenly thrown back to being 17 and at college and trying to become more intellectually sophisticated. at the time blogs had really taken off, and i was a regular visitor to Arts & Letters Daily, a clearinghouse for "intellectual" articles, essays, and posts
this is one (of many) things I like about the Wildsea RPG: knowledge of languages brings corresponding cultural knowledge as well
have you been channeling some kind of parsing muse recently because these are all delightful
instances of deontology vs consequentialism are gonna be hard to kill
‘Lmfao’ finishes the line
mentioning the pink ice cube effectively jumpscared me—bravo
I can still remember being in the audience near the end of one such Q&A when the chair said this kind of thing and the next professor in the queue began "Ok so this is a two-part question ..."
Happens to me every time I see live music
