Meghan O’Gieblyn at n+1:

GPT-3’s most consistent limitation is “world-modeling errors.” Because it has no sensory access to the world and no programmed understanding of spatial relationships or the laws of physics, it sometimes makes mistakes no human would, like failing to correctly guess that a toaster is heavier than a pencil, or asserting that a foot has “two eyes.” Critics seize on these errors as evidence that it lacks true understanding, that its latent connections are something like shadows to a complex three-dimensional world. The models are like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, trying to approximate real-world concepts from the elusive shadow play of language. 

But it’s precisely this shadow aspect (Jung’s term for the unconscious) that makes its creative output so beautifully surreal. The model exists in an ether of pure signifiers, unhampered by the logical inhibitions that lead to so much deadweight prose.

more here.

Shannon Mattern at Art In America:

Yet rather than imagining the Shakers as a romantic ideal, it might be more valuable to acknowledge the community’s contradictions and compromises. The Shakers manifested their faith through both rapturous movement and rigorous order; they embraced both simplicity and technological progress; they espoused gender equality while upholding traditional gendered labor roles; they promoted social equality while governing their own community through what some apostates and critics regarded as a rather autocratic centralized authority. They were removed from the world yet regularly did business with it. As Brother Arnold Hadd of the Sabbathday Lake Shakers—the last remaining active Shaker community—said in a 2014 interview, “We are the ultimate capitalistic communists.” On a 2020 Shaker Museum panel discussion about the sect’s continuing relevance, religious scholar Ashon Crawley explained that the Shakers performed labor as a spiritual practice in order to sustain their community, while also knowingly interacting with a world market committed to exploitation and profit. This interaction required that they willingly compromise on their vow of separation. Especially as their commercial enterprises ramped up and their population declined, Shakers occasionally hired laborers from outside the community, relying on non-Believers to produce their divinely inspired wares.

more here.

On Reading I Am Malala

courage is a mountain of crystal
has a breadth and grandeur
some mistake brashness for it
a loud voice, rudeness
barging past other’s boundaries
to get what they think they want
they are, of course, wrong
courage is the crocus
that has never known the brisk air
but comes into this world with an exuberance
and a beauty that says
I will die here if only I can sing my song for you

by Marc Steven Mannheimer
from, Poetry Feast

Jesse Robertson in The Baffler:

A CLASSIFIED REPORT from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP), or UFOs in Pentagon-speak, analyzed 366 sightings. It included videos shot by Reaper drones depicting anomalous orbs and close encounters between Navy F-18 fighter pilots and objects that defied the known laws of physics. Only half of them could be explained. Delivered to Congress on October 31, 2022, the briefing was a follow-up to the June 2021 “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” The takeaways were hazy at best, underscoring that UAP “may pose a challenge to U.S. national security” and that further investment in research and development was necessary. While these investigations seemed to mark a shift in the government’s willingness to take UFOs seriously, they were hardly the revelatory disclosure UFO enthusiasts had long pined after.

More here.

(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to Black History Month. The theme for 2023 is Black Resistance. Please send us anything you think is relevant for inclusion)

Jeremy Pressman in the Boston Review:

In the 1970s and ’80s, many American Jews backed pro-Israel interest groups in Washington, D.C., which quickly gained resources and political influence. By the late 1990s most Jewish leaders not only embraced Israel for the country’s sake but also believed that supporting Israel was key to the survival of U.S. Jews—the largest diaspora Jewish community. Since 1967 Israel’s centrality to Jewish identity has only deepened. The most obvious manifestation is the Birthright program, which was launched in 1999 and has since brought more than 800,000 young American Jews on entirely free ten-day or two-week trips to Israel, with many of its participants visiting the country for the first time. This year the State of Israel celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary, marking less than a century of existence during which the country has shifted profoundly. Israel is now the most powerful state in the Middle East. Not only is it independent, wealthy, and nuclear-armed, it is also embraced by many Jewish cultural, political, and religious organizations around the world.

Alterman’s book then comes at an opportune time, tracking “the debate over Israel in the United States” and offering a close study of ethnoreligious identity, diaspora relations, and foreign policy as the landscape of Israeli support has grown increasingly complex. The book also teases out four important consequences of American Jews centering the Israeli state in Jewish identity.

More here.

Allison Whitten in Quanta:

The neocortex stands out as a stunning achievement of biological evolution. All mammals have this swath of tissue covering their brain, and the six layers of densely packed neurons within it handle the sophisticated computations and associations that produce cognitive prowess. Since no animals other than mammals have a neocortex, scientists have wondered how such a complex brain region evolved.

The brains of reptiles seemed to offer a clue. Not only are reptiles the closest living relatives of mammals, but their brains have a three-layered structure called a dorsal ventricular ridge, or DVR, with functional similarities to the neocortex. For more than 50 years, some evolutionary neuroscientists have argued that the neocortex and the DVR were both derived from a more primitive feature in an ancestor shared by mammals and reptiles.

Now, however, by analyzing molecular details invisible to the human eye, scientists have refuted that view.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

We live in an age in which in most societies there is a moral abhorrence of racism, albeit that in most, bigotry and discrimination still disfigure the lives of many. We also live in an age saturated with identitarian thinking and obsessed with placing people into racial boxes. The more we despise racial thinking, the more we seem to cling to it.

This paradox is at the heart of my new book. Not So Black and White is a retelling of the history both of the idea of race and of the struggles to confront racism and to transcend racial categorisation, a retelling that challenges many of the ways in which we think both of race and of antiracism.

Most people assume that racism emerges when members of one race begin discriminating against members of another. In fact, the opposite is the case: intellectuals and elites began dividing the world into distinct races to explain and justify the differential treatment of certain peoples. The ancestors of today’s African Americans were not enslaved because they were black. They were deemed to be racially distinct, as black people, to justify their enslavement.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Most of us strive to be good, moral people. When we are doing that striving, what is happening in our brains? Some of our moral inclinations seem pretty automatic and subconscious. Other times we have to sit down and deploy our full cognitive faculties to reason through a tricky moral dilemma. I talk with psychologist Molly Crockett about where our moral intuitions come from, how they can sometimes serve as cover for bad behaviors, and how morality shapes our self-image.

More here.

Rory Sullivan in Prospect Magazine:

After 50 years of globetrotting, the celebrated travel writer Pico Iyer asks himself whether it is possible to find paradise in a violent, fragmented world. In pursuit of an answer, he stitches together a selection of his trips to beautiful, troubled spots, including Jerusalem and Kashmir, for his latest book. At first, his enquiry seems too wide and too vague. Iyer’s disparate writings on Iran, Israel and Australia only scratch the surface of the problems in each country, while “paradise” itself is defined too broadly. The author’s visit to Broome, a remote town hundreds of miles from Perth, is especially lacking in depth: interesting snippets about, for example, the effect of the 19th-century pearl boom on its Aboriginal community, do not receive further investigation.

However, the book improves immensely as it progresses through stops in Sri Lanka, Japan and India—and as Iyer’s conversational skills become more apparent. His exchange with the caretaker of a Sri Lankan colonial cemetery is touching, as is his visit to the Varanasi home of a 78-year-old Indian professor who starts reciting Paradise Lost from memory. Striking images also drift into the text: the roofs of Japanese temples resemble “the prows of seagoing vessels about to sail off into the mist”.

The book’s search for paradise comes to take on an internalised dimension, beyond the aesthetic and religious. To quote Milton, the quest is to find “a Paradise within thee, happier far”. For Iyer, this means coming to terms with uncertainty in a world that “seems always to simmer in a state of answerlessness”.

More here.

(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to Black History Month. The theme for 2023 is Black Resistance. Please send us anything you think is relevant for inclusion)

various people at The Guardian:

Tom played an incredibly important role in the history of modern cinema. Back in the 1970s, Tom was part of a counterculture generation who saw something new in the arthouse films being made in Europe. To him they were radical in a completely new way. They could change the world. Culture could be political.

Tom believed that very deeply – and he brought directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog over to the west coast and showed their films to a new generation like Francis Ford Coppola. Out of that came American independent cinema which flourished in the 1990s. But Tom was different from many of his counterculture generation. He was very aware of what happened to those radical ideas once they were injected into Hollywood.

more here. (h/t Brooks Riley)

Come In

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music—hark!
Now it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By slight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush’s breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went—
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn’t been.

by Robert Frost
from Homage to Robert Frost
Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1996

Rob Reid in Ars Technica:

Shocking output from Bing’s new chatbot has been lighting up social media and the tech press. Testy, giddy, defensive, scolding, confident, neurotic, charming, pompous—the bot has been screenshotted and transcribed in all these modes. And, at least once, it proclaimed eternal love in a storm of emojis.

What makes all this so newsworthy and tweetworthy is how human the dialog can seem. The bot recalls and discusses prior conversations with other people, just like we do. It gets annoyed at things that would bug anyone, like people demanding to learn secrets or prying into subjects that have been clearly flagged as off-limits. It also sometimes self-identifies as “Sydney” (the project’s internal codename at Microsoft). Sydney can swing from surly to gloomy to effusive in a few swift sentences—but we’ve all known people who are at least as moody.

No AI researcher of substance has suggested that Sydney is within light years of being sentient. But transcripts like this unabridged readout of a two-hour interaction with Kevin Roose of The New York Times, or multiple quotes in this haunting Stratechery piece, show Sydney spouting forth with the fluency, nuance, tone, and apparent emotional presence of a clever, sensitive person.

For now, Bing’s chat interface is in a limited pre-release. And most of the people who really pushed its limits were tech sophisticates who won’t confuse industrial-grade autocomplete—which is a common simplification of what large language models (LLMs) are—with consciousness. But this moment won’t last.

More here.

Claudia Dreifus in The Nation:

The publication of Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change in 2010 helped transform how science news was reported in the media. The book persuaded reporters worldwide to become more skeptical of industry-sponsored “experts”—particularly on issues like global warming. Oreskes and Conway hope their latest collaboration, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (Bloomsbury), will have a similar impact. I recently caught up with Oreskes, who teaches science history at Harvard, and is also the author of Why Trust Science, Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know About the Ocean, and Plate Tectonics An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth. Long ago, in another life, Oreskes was a geologist. During our conversation, we discussed The Big Myth and how free-market economics became a dominant force in American public policy.

—Claudia Dreifus

CLAUDIA DREIFUS: How did the idea behind The Big Myth come to you?

NAOMI ORESKES: After the success of Merchants of Doubt, Erik and I started thinking about doing another book together. At first, we thought we’d write about the technological solutions to climate change. But every time we started, what kept coming up was that a lack of the right technologies wasn’t the problem—most of the technologies we need already exist. But to get them in place, you need the right policies. That’s mostly a political question. That threw us back to something we’d been thinking about since we began researching Merchants of Doubt. In that book, the big question was “Why would intelligent people deny science?” In particular, why would famous scientists attack science to create doubt about the dangers of smoking, the thinning of the ozone layer, and climate change?

More here.