Links

Names are powerful, reckons Dan Reich. Use it to make ideas tangible

Tyler Cowen’s predictions from 2013

Holden Karnofsky offers suggestions on what AI companies & people who work at these companies could do today to help with the “most important century”

Keeping things brief this week – lots happening around me to be able to keep up volume of reading.

James Vincent: Introducing the AI Mirror Test, which the author says, very smart people are failing.

Larry Lessig has some thoughts on presentation software, particularly Keynote.

Paul Devlin wrote rejection letters to the universities that sent him rejection letters. Himesh Patel reads one of them at Letters Live.  By the way, those letters were written in 1981!

Dustin has a video explainer on an ingenious invention called rollerons on the sidewinder missile

 

 

Learning by teaching, I stumbled upon this blogpost about equations to describe a square that has took me down another rabbit hole in desmos.

I laughed out loud at the Rob Wringham’s headline “Spare a thought for the Taliban” but it’s a serious issue indeed.

Beautiful:

The Artist Who Couldn’t Draw is a sweet reminder to do something every day.

Finally began to catch up on Lex podcasts, & was impressed with this conversation between him and Aella on sex work, OnlyFans, porn, escorting, dating and human sexuality. Aella has a fantastic way of responding to questions; and oft times it sounded like she was interviewing Lex.

Paul Ford: God did us a favour by destroying Twitter. So many gems 🙂

 

 

Language matters.

Reminder: RLHF = Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback. You can’t get away from humans, even when you want to get rid of humans.

Stephen Wolfram’s long essay on What is ChatGPT doing & why does it work?

The implications of AI are going to upend the way we see, live & experience the world. Cheap training, and a soaring imagination – David Rozado trained RightWingGPT that manifests the opposite political biases of ChatGPT.

Here’s another practical fallout: a trend of spammy magazine submissions that is correlated with the release of ChatGPT

Robin Hanson: Expert vs Elite “Innovation”

William H Starbuck, NYY Stern: Strategizing Realistically in Competitive Environments.

3D printed houses . On their website, Mighty Buildings claims to cut down construction times by half.

Staying power: Nick Axten earned his PhD 50 years after he started it.

Childhoods of exceptional people.

James Clear: “Before you throw more time at the problem, throw more focused action at the problem. You don’t need more time, you need fewer distractions.”

Quote of the week:

Technology does many things well, nuance is not one of them. – Brian Morrissey

Seth Godin: Fidelity, Compression & Culture: “Meetings at work are largely low fidelity and ultimately quite compressed. Unlike a memo that can be in and of itself, a meeting is a performance, and then it’s summarized, and summarized again, until it becomes a story that’s a shadow of what the person who started the whole thing had in mind. Nuance disappears.”

Rohit Krishnan on Beyond Google, to Assistants with Personality “the case of Google Vs Bing is fascinating, because it tries to talk about “Search” as one thing. It isn’t. Search is many things. It’s about getting you to the right endpoint quickly. For code, it’s code. For factual questions, it’s an answer. For curiosity driven explorations, it’s the next node you need to get linked to.”

to watch later: Social Media Rewires Your Brain: Author Max  Fisher in conversation with Rich Roll

Ed Brenegar on Synthesizing Reality:  (I found that previous video in this article)

Seth Godin gives another way to think about learning curves – as leaping curves.

 

While the world was fascinated with the balloons last week, there was a very very close near-hit of two Fedex & Southwest Airlines planes. As bad as it gets without body-bags

Tom Scott, a video essay: I tried using AI. It scared me.

Warp News: Why are people so pessimistic about the future? Wrong about facts, it turns out.

From the Rebooting: The Race to Define AI  “By directly answering our questions, writing our stories for us, and creating images and videos, what it deprives us of is what makes us most human – the ability to create new things in the world.”

WSJ: Here comes the 60 year career

HBR: Sabbaticals to recover when vacations aren’t enough.

Patricia Lockwood – Saving a life

Jeremy Keith on Artificial Insemination aka AI

An Infinite LEGO Domino Ring

To read later: Ali Minai on Love & Loathing in the time of ChatGPT

 

 

Geoff Marlow writes about focusing on key influencers when attempting to make organisational change

The fascinating story of master forger  Adolfo Kaminsky who passed away recently at age 97.

7 Principles for managing knowledge, from Cynefin. A good reminder that “We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down”

Terence Eden experiments with Midjourney and gets some fascinating if weird results. Art isn’t the exclusive domain of artists, but what’s with AI’s hands and feet?

The school that solved its teacher shortage by recruiting its students. Creativity at the fore.

Rob Miller on Coordination without communication, or the effectiveness of Schelling points

 

More questions about “design thinking” are cropping up: Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?  Nick Foster (head of design at Google X) had a special post about this about a year ago too.

A black professor trapped in an anti-racist hell.

Another professor, Aswath Damodaran, rails against The Theocratic Trifecta: The Allure and False Promise of ESG, Sustainability and Stakeholder Wealth