In a recent, very enjoyable, podcast with Sean Carroll DC Dennett mentions his earlier work on patterns, and it is fascinating.

Doubt comes too cheap. The idea that you are allowed to suspend belief and doubt anything without an effort or valid reason is key to understanding the challenge to our democratic discourse. When you doubt something you should really have to show why you doubt it, and not just why…

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Hartmunt Rosa has observed, in numerous essays and texts, that it is useful to analyze our age with a mental model built around acceleration. He finds that we accelerate along three different axes — technological, social and subjective — and that this acceleration has profound impact on the way we can live our lives.…

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手机上这么好用的功能 你用过吗？ - huanqiu.com:2021-9-30 · 十几年前，还是功能机的时伕，相信很多人都会觉得用手机拍照、听歌众及上网都是很新奇的事情。然而，现在的手机拥有了越来越多新奇有趣的 ...

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There are plenty of studies of gossip as a social phenomenon, and there are computer science models of gossiping that allow for information distribution in system. There are even gossip learning systems that compete with or constitute alternatives to federated learning models. But here is a question I have not…

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Plato’s use of the idea of a noble lie was oppressive. He wanted to tell the people a tale of their origin that would encourage them to bend and bow to the idea of a stratified society, and he suggest that this would make everyone better off — and we…

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In a previous post we discussed computational vs “biological thinking” and the question of why we assume that chunking the world in a specific way is automatically right. The outcome was that it is not obvious why the sentence (i) Linda is a bank teller and a feminist should always…

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Pursuant to the last note, it is interesting to ask the following question: if human discovery of a game space like the one in go centers around what could be a local maxima, and computers can help us find other maxima and so play in an “alien” way — i.e.…

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If we examine the space of all possible chess games we should be able to map out all games a really played look at how they are distributed in the game space (what are the dimensions of a game space, though?). It is possible that these games cluster in different…

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One model for thinking about the issue of misinformation is to say that we are navigating a flat information desert, where there is no topology of truth available. Now hills of fact, no valleys of misinformation. Our challenge is to figure out a good way to add a third dimension,…

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A thought experiment. What would happen if we crowdsourced a price – not just a sum – per kilo of ocean plastic retrieved? This would require solving a few interesting problems along the way but would not be impossible. First, we would need to develop a means to crowdsourced prices…

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When we speak about the future of work we often do this: we assume that there will be a labor market much like today, and that there will be jobs like the ones we have today, but that they will just be different jobs. It is as if we think…

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