As Duncan Black observes, Marc Andreesen and company are definitely not OK; conversing wiþ Tyler Cowen; actually using my laptop's microprocessor; Katha Pollitt has a must-read; Doctorow, Ewing...
I listened to the chat with Tyler Cowen this morning while out walking in overcast Bethesda. It was a very good discussion of lots of things. Your comments on the evolution of the German university in the second half of the 19th century was good and I want more. Perhaps some of this is on the cutting room floor when you were paring down Slouching prior to publication. The evolution of science both physical and biological was just amazing. When you look at the early Nobel prize awards, they went disproportionately to Germans. It was the rise of Hitler that forced a migration of many talented scientists who ended up in either England or the US.
"The Chatbot aspect of Bing was often extremely unsettling"
Narayanan & Kapoor's substack today is also about the anthropomorphizing of LLMs. I still think the unsettling aspect is not so much how easily we are fooled into thinking an LLM is like us, but more the queasy question of just how much we might be like an LLM. I mean it's not zero, right? Maybe there's no "thinking fast and slow", but only statistically predicting fast and thinking slow.
I was surprised by the comment from Chat-GPT regarding growth rate of wealth and quality of life. I didn’t see it in the manuscript, but only details suggesting QOL. Is this inferential logic? I’m stunned.
Yes, 19th century German universities made British universities look lame. However, 19th century British science was reasonably competitive with German science, except perhaps for chemistry. Oliver Heaviside was never an academic, and Maxwell was only a perfunctory academic. Neither Davy nor Faraday worked at a university. And there was also this fellow named Charlie Darwin.
Does Mac Whisper running on your M1Pro serve as a supplemental heat source on cold days like today? Might you be adding HEPA filters to have it do double duty as an anti-viral filtration box?
I listened to the chat with Tyler Cowen this morning while out walking in overcast Bethesda. It was a very good discussion of lots of things. Your comments on the evolution of the German university in the second half of the 19th century was good and I want more. Perhaps some of this is on the cutting room floor when you were paring down Slouching prior to publication. The evolution of science both physical and biological was just amazing. When you look at the early Nobel prize awards, they went disproportionately to Germans. It was the rise of Hitler that forced a migration of many talented scientists who ended up in either England or the US.
"The Chatbot aspect of Bing was often extremely unsettling"
Narayanan & Kapoor's substack today is also about the anthropomorphizing of LLMs. I still think the unsettling aspect is not so much how easily we are fooled into thinking an LLM is like us, but more the queasy question of just how much we might be like an LLM. I mean it's not zero, right? Maybe there's no "thinking fast and slow", but only statistically predicting fast and thinking slow.
I loved the aside about "DeLong does not have a favorite video or computer game", and how it was just thrown in there.
I was surprised by the comment from Chat-GPT regarding growth rate of wealth and quality of life. I didn’t see it in the manuscript, but only details suggesting QOL. Is this inferential logic? I’m stunned.
Yes, 19th century German universities made British universities look lame. However, 19th century British science was reasonably competitive with German science, except perhaps for chemistry. Oliver Heaviside was never an academic, and Maxwell was only a perfunctory academic. Neither Davy nor Faraday worked at a university. And there was also this fellow named Charlie Darwin.
Does Mac Whisper running on your M1Pro serve as a supplemental heat source on cold days like today? Might you be adding HEPA filters to have it do double duty as an anti-viral filtration box?