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1626.054873
Ugliness is the opposite of beauty. So we may learn what beauty is, by investigating ugliness, and turning the result upside-down. Ugliness is deformity. Two arguments for this thesis may be given: an argument from the dictionary, and an argument from the writings of famous long-dead philosophers. …
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4778.055052
Suppose a man has already murdered most of your family, including several of your children, for no other reason than that he believes your kind doesn’t deserve to exist on earth. The murderer was never seriously punished for this, because most of your hometown actually shared his feelings about your family. …
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75915.055083
What do large language models actually model? Do they tell us something about human capacities, or are they models of the corpus we’ve trained them on? I give a non-deflationary defence of the latter position. Cognitive science tells us that linguistic capabilities in humans rely supralinear formats for computation. The transformer architecture, by contrast, supports at best a linear formats for processing. This argument will rely primarily on certain invariants of the computational architecture of transformers. I then suggest a positive story about what transformers are doing, focusing on Liu et al. (2022)’s intriguing speculations about shortcut automata. I conclude with why I don’t think this is a terribly deflationary story. Language is not (just) a means for expressing inner state but also a kind of ‘discourse machine’ that lets us make new language given appropriate context. We have learned to use this technology in one way; LLMs have also learned to use it too, but via very different means.
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83957.055101
Mental multiplication is an advanced, abstract cognitive task that separates adults from non-human animals, AI systems, and young children. We present a biologically and psycholog- ically plausible spiking neural model of simple mental multipli- cation, expanding on previous work on mental addition [1, 2].
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88189.055117
I specialize in trillion-dollar ideas: policy reforms which, if implemented, would generate trillions of dollars of net social benefits. Ideas like open borders, educational austerity, and by-right construction. …
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91240.055155
You can cut a hole in a cube that’s big enough to slide an identical cube through that hole! Think about that for a minute—it’s kind of weird. Amazingly, nobody could prove any convex polyhedron doesn’t have this property! …
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161834.055179
Suppose there are two opaque boxes, A and B, of which I can choose one. A nearly perfect predictor of my actions put $100 in the box that they thought I would choose. Suppose I find myself with evidence that it’s 75% likely that I will choose box A (maybe in 75% of cases like this, people like me choose A). …
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174581.055195
In 2015, Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendren, and Erzo Luttmer released an NBER working paper called “The Value of Medicaid: Interpreting Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment.” The paper’s results were a slap in the face of Social Desirability Bias — and the authors boldly advertised them right in the abstract:
Our baseline estimates of Medicaid's welfare benefit to recipients per dollar of government spending range from about $0.2 to $0.4, depending on the framework, with at least two-fifths – and as much as four-fifths – of the value of Medicaid coming from a transfer component, as opposed to its ability to move resources across states of the world. …
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177601.055221
I’ve been wondering what to allow and what to disallow in terms of AI. I decided to treat AI as basically persons and I put this in my Metaphysics syllabus:
Even though (I believe) AI is not a person and its products are not “thoughts”, treat AI much like you would a person in writing your papers. …
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177601.055236
Here’s a plausible immediate regret principle:
- It is irrational to make a decision such that learning that you’ve made this decision immediately makes it rational to regret that you didn’t make a different decision. …
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177602.055251
When I was in 5th grade, I read a fun little book called Donkey’s Can’t Sleep in Bathtubs and Other Crazy Laws. Since I didn’t know any economics at the time, the idea of “crazy laws” was novel to me. …
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178577.055266
Interactions between agents are supported through a continuous process of detecting and responding to behaviors that are contingent upon the other agent’s behavior. Here, we explore the temporal dependence of these mechanisms, focusing on the role of timescale compatibility in inter-agent interactions. Using continuous-time recurrent neural networks (CTRNNs) to control embodied agents in a minimal social interaction task, we demonstrate that effective interactions require agents to operate on compatible timescales. Our results indicate that time scale mismatches disrupt agents’ ability to distinguish other agents from non-social entities, revealing a timescale threshold beyond which agents begin mis-classifying slower agents as static objects and faster agents as non-social animate objects.
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322142.055281
We present a causal model for the EPR correlations. In this model, or better framework for a model, causality is preserved by the direct propagation of causal influences between the wings of the experiment. We show that our model generates the same statistical results for EPR as orthodox quantum mechanics. We conclude that causality in quantum mechanics can not be ruled out on the basis of the EPR-Bell- Aspect correlations alone.
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322165.055297
This paper is divided in two parts. In part I, I argue against two attempts to naturalise the notion of scientific representation, by reducing it to isomorphism and similarity. I distinguish between the means and the constituents of representation, and I argue that isomorphism and similarity are common (although not universal) means of representation; but that they are not constituents of scientific representation. I look at the prospects for weakened versions of these theories, and I argue that only those that abandon the aim to naturalise scientific representation are likely to be successful. In part II of the paper, I present a deflationary conception of scientific representation, which minimally characterises it by means of two necessary conditions: representation is essentially intentional and it has the capacity to allow surrogate reasoning and inference. I then defend this conception by showing that it successfully meets the objections and difficulties that make its competitors, such as isomorphism and similarity, untenable. In addition the inferential conception explains the success of various means of representation in their appropriate domains, and it sheds light on the truth and accuracy of scientific representations.
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326595.055321
The early study Tennant [11] sought to show how the role played by formal semantics in furnishing models that would invalidate unprovable first-order arguments from premise-sets to conclusions could be taken over by proofs and disproofs. (A disproof of a set of premises is a proof of ⊥, i.e., absurdity, from it.) For any given invalid first-order argument, these latter would be proofs and disproofs in Peano Arithmetic (PA), employing suitable substitutions of arithmetical predicates for the primitive predicates involved in the argument. PA-proofs would be furnished for the premises of the invalid argument, and a PA-disproof would be furnished for its conclusion. This was an early move towards a general proof-theoretic semantics—the approach to By a theorem of Hilbert and Bernays [4], these arithmetical predicates can be taken to be of arithmetical complexity no greater than Δ .
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329283.055349
Suppose I am choosing between options A and B. Evidential decision theory tells me to calculate the expected utility E(U|A) given the news that I did A and the expected utility E(U|B) given the news that I did B, and go for the bigger of the two. …
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346074.055365
Economists have long scoffed at know-it-all business and financial gurus with the rhetorical question, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” And sometimes the gurus use the same question to scoff at know-it-all economists. …
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349151.05538
When thinking about big social problems like climate change or factory farming, there are two especially common failure modes worth avoiding:
Neglecting small numbers that incrementally contribute to significant aggregate harms. …
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349152.055395
As part of the summer break, I’m publishing old essays that may be of interest for new subscribers. This post has been originally published January 13, 2023. If not already the case, do not hesitate to subscribe to receive free essays on economics, philosophy, and liberal politics in your mailbox! …
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421295.055409
An important feature of theoretical projects that aim to promote social justice is their commitment to empowering those in oppressive circumstances so that they can solve their own problems. There are two reasons to take this approach. First, the oppressed have situated knowledge of the circumstances that others lack. But situated knowledge may not be enough to prompt critique. The second is that because both knowledge and values are shaped by social practices, a collective engagement with historically and materially grounded practices can provide a new frame for agency that enables a creative and potentially emancipatory restructuring of social relations. I argue that such path dependency of values is compatible with social justice being objective, but not to be discovered by theory alone.
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436711.055425
Reminder: everyone is welcome here, but paid subscriptions are what enable me to devote the necessary time to researching and writing this newsletter, including pieces like this one on Katie Johnson, the woman who alleged Trump sexually assaulted her at the age of thirteen at a party of Jeffrey Epstein’s. …
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506294.055444
It’s widely held that we perceive not only low-level properties, such as colors and shapes, but also high-level properties, such as the property of being a dog or of being a moving train. Debate about which types of property we perceive has recently eclipsed the question of how perceiving itself operates. We focus here on that latter question, proposing an account on which perception of low-level properties occurs by way of mental qualities alone, whereas perception of high-level properties occurs by way of mental qualities together with conceptual content of the type that figures in thinking. It is central to our account that mental qualities have a type of representational character unique to them, so that mental qualities can interact representationally with conceptual content in perceiving. We present a number of advantages of this account, including how it fits with a range of experimental findings, and address several objections to it.
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513716.055472
I have toyed with a pair of theories. The first is what I call gaze-dualism. On gaze-dualism, our sensory conscious experiences are constituted by a non-physical object—the soul—“gazing” at certain brain states. …
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513716.055497
There is a vast and rather radical diversity in the inner conscious lives of human beings. Start with the differences in dreams: some people know immediately whether they are dreaming and others do not; some are in control of their dreams and others are not; some dream in color and others do not. …
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520032.055521
1. Liu’s Theory
The title is a reference to Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel, The Dark Forest, from the Three Body Problem trilogy. (That trilogy, by the way, is among the greatest works of science fiction.) …
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522002.055545
This paper critically analyses the “attention economy” within the framework of cognitive science and techno-political economics, as applied to both human and machine interactions. We explore how current business models, particularly in digital platform capitalism, harness user engagement by strategically shaping attentional patterns. These platforms utilize advanced AI and massive data analytics to enhance user engagement, creating a cycle of attention capture and data extraction. We review contemporary (neuro)cognitive theories of attention and platform engagement design techniques and criticize classical cognitivist and behaviourist theories for their inadequacies in addressing the potential harms of such engagement on user autonomy and wellbeing. 4E approaches to cognitive science, instead, emphasizing the embodied, extended, enactive, and ecological aspects of cognition, offer us an intrinsic normative standpoint and a more integrated understanding of how attentional patterns are actively constituted by adaptive digital environments. By examining the precarious nature of habit formation in digital contexts, we reveal the techno-economic underpinnings that threaten personal autonomy by disaggregating habits away from the individual, into an AI managed collection of behavioural patterns. Our current predicament suggests the necessity of a paradigm shift towards an ecology of attention. This shift aims to foster environments that respect and preserve human cognitive and social capacities, countering the exploitative tendencies of cognitive capitalism.
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523036.055569
A few months into the pandemic, my wife and I adopted a new pastime: we would complete the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. The puzzle gets more difficult as the week goes on, Mondays being easiest, with the qualitative peak on Saturday and the quantitative Sunday, when the crossword is nearly twice as large. …
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602974.055592
When bad news gets me down, I often get insomnia. I wake up in the middle of the night, start thinking about how we’re all doomed, and can’t easily stop. To break out of these doom loops, I do elaborate visualization exercises. …
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609510.055617
Wilhelm Keitel was made chief of staff of the Armed Forces in 1938. If that sounds like a vote of confidence, in fact Hitler regarded the man with disdain: Keitel had “the brains of a movie usher.” So why promote him? …
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679962.05564
In the first lecture, I argued that societies are complex dynamic systems and that in order to promote social change we must attend to material meso-level systems, e.g., heath care systems, education systems, criminal justice systems, and the like, and their patriarchal, White supremacist, and capitalist dynamics. This complex systems approach – together with attention to the social formation of subjects within practices – helps us capture the phenomenon of intersectional oppression and is suited to the strategic thinking needed for social transformation.