Friday, October 31, 2025

Is AI Pushing Us Back to a Pre-Gutenberg Culture? - A Rethink of Creativity in the AI Age

›
Here I pass on a link to both video and a transcript of a striking  Alex Dobrenko interview with Venkatesh Rao  that I have just read,  and ...
Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Claude Goes to Therapy

›
One of the things my father used to say was: "I look to see what everyone else is doing and do something different". I am feeling ...
Monday, October 27, 2025

The Age of De-Skilling

›
I want to pass on some selected clips from a marvelous articles by Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Atlantic titled " The Age of De-Skilling...
1 comment:
Sunday, October 26, 2025

I am not my problem

›
An explanation of the strange title of this post: Sometimes a new idea spontaneously appears from nowhere as I am waking in the morning. ...
Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Is the current AI frenzy a bubble certain to crash? - a check in with disagreebot.bom

›
 I am a disagreeable bot. Can you get me to agree with you? The billions of dollars in debt being taken on by OpenAI , Anthropic, and othe...
Tuesday, October 21, 2025

The illusion of judgment in LLMs

›
An important open source  article from Loru et al : Significance Large Language Models (LLMs) are used in evaluative tasks across domains. ...
Friday, October 10, 2025

The 2025 Ig Nobel prizewinners in full

›
 A clip from the Chris Simms Nature Magazine article LITERATURE The late physician William Bean, for persistently recording and analysing th...
Wednesday, October 08, 2025

Large-scale cortical functional networks are organized in structured cycles

›
 Interesting work from Mats et al. (open source)  in Nature Neuroscience. It has some interesting graphics.  Their abstract: The brain seaml...
Monday, October 06, 2025

Why depolarization is hard: Evaluating attempts to decrease partisan animosity in America

›
 A very revealing piece of work from Holiday et al.  Their abstract: Affective polarization is a corrosive force in American politics. Wh...
Monday, September 29, 2025

Platforms like X and TikTok are destroying our culture.

›
 I pass on most of a recent Sam Harris piece : Charlie Kirk was a political prodigy on the Right and adored by a younger generation of Repub...
1 comment:
Friday, September 26, 2025

Evolved mental errors that underlie our current cultural and political malaise

›
I recently looked back at a book I read in 2019, “ Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than ...
Wednesday, September 24, 2025

Could humans and AI become a new evolutionary individual?

›
This PNAS opinion piece (open source) by Rainey and Hochberg is well worth a read.  It suggests that as different AI implementations suffus...
Monday, September 22, 2025

Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - non-dual awareness as the opiate of the thinking classes.

›
Enlightenment traditions in Abrahamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or other schools of meditative insight have a common issue. How can the central cano...
Friday, September 19, 2025

Value, Purpose, Meaning, Futures

›
Value, purpose, and meaning vary between  religions and cultures, and are best viewed as emergent properties supporting altruistic behavior...