Results for “self-recommending” 168 found
My excellent Conversation with Reid Hoffman
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
In his second appearance, Reid Hoffman joined Tyler to talk everything AI: the optimal liability regime for LLMs, whether there’ll be autonomous money-making bots, which agency should regulate AI, how AI will affect the media ecosystem and the communication of ideas, what percentage of the American population will eschew it, how gaming will evolve, whether AI’s future will be open-source or proprietary, the binding constraint preventing the next big step in AI, which philosopher has risen in importance thanks to AI, what he’d ask a dolphin, what LLMs have taught him about friendship, how higher education will change, and more. They also discuss Sam Altman’s overlooked skill, the biggest cultural problem in America, the most underrated tech scene, and what he’ll do next.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Given GPT models, which philosopher has most risen in importance in your eyes? Some people say Wittgenstein. I don’t think it’s obvious.
HOFFMAN: I think I said Wittgenstein earlier. In Fireside Chatbots, I brought in Wittgenstein in language games.
COWEN: Peirce maybe. Who else?
HOFFMAN: Peirce is good. Now I happen to have read Wittgenstein at Oxford, so I can comment in some depth. The question about language and language games and forms of life and how these large language models might mirror human forms of life because they’re trained on human language is a super interesting question, like Wittgenstein.
Other good language philosophers, I think, are interesting. That doesn’t necessarily mean philosophy-of-language philosophers à la analytic philosophy. Gareth Evans, theories of reference as applied to how you’re thinking about this kind of stuff, is super interesting. Christopher Peacocke’s concept work is, I think, interesting.
Anyway, there’s a whole range of stuff. Then also the philosophy, all the neuroscience stuff applied with the large language models, I think, is very interesting as well.
COWEN: What in science fiction do you feel has risen the most in status for you?
HOFFMAN: Oh, for me.
COWEN: Not in the world. We don’t know yet.
HOFFMAN: Yes. We don’t know yet.
COWEN: You think, “Oh, this was really important.” Vernor Vinge or . . .
HOFFMAN: Well, this is going to seem maybe like a strange answer to you, but I’ve been rereading David Brin’s Uplift series very carefully because the theory of, “How should we create other kinds of intelligences, and what should that theory be, and what should be our shepherding and governance function and symbiosis?” is a question that we have to think about over time. He went straight at this in a biological sense, but it’s the same thing, just a different substrate with the Uplift series. I’ve recently reread the entire Uplift series.
Self-recommending!
*All Desire is a Desire for Being*
A new collection of essays by Rene Girard:
Edited by Cynthia L. Haven, self-recommending, buy it here.
Marc Andreessen on AI safety and AI for the world
So far I have explained why four of the five most often proposed risks of AI are not actually real – AI will not come to life and kill us, AI will not ruin our society, AI will not cause mass unemployment, and AI will not cause an ruinous increase in inequality. But now let’s address the fifth, the one I actually agree with: AI will make it easier for bad people to do bad things.
In some sense this is a tautology. Technology is a tool. Tools, starting with fire and rocks, can be used to do good things – cook food and build houses – and bad things – burn people and bludgeon people. Any technology can be used for good or bad. Fair enough. And AI will make it easier for criminals, terrorists, and hostile governments to do bad things, no question.
This causes some people to propose, well, in that case, let’s not take the risk, let’s ban AI now before this can happen. Unfortunately, AI is not some esoteric physical material that is hard to come by, like plutonium. It’s the opposite, it’s the easiest material in the world to come by – math and code.
The AI cat is obviously already out of the bag.
Here is the full essay, self-recommending…
Patrick Collison interviews Sam Altman
I haven’t heard this one yet, but if ever there was such a thing as self-recommending…link here. Hat tip Alex T.!
Robin Hanson’s Overcoming Bias blog is now on Substack
You will find it here. Self-recommending!
Friday assorted links
1. Which condiments or sauces are worth being obsessed with?
2. Why life on Titan is such an important question.
3. The House of Representatives is making its first film ever, on economic inequality.
4. What would Rene Girard say? (Couples with the same name, WSJ)
5. Are you a brokenist? And is there a category “Straussian non-brokenist”?
6. Merchandise (self-recommending).
Shruti Rajagopalan has a new Substack
“Get Down and Shruti” (how many of you get the musical reference?). Here is an excerpt from the first post, “Why everyone should pay more attention to India”:
Globally, one in five people below 25 is from India. 47% of Indians, about 650 million, are below the age of 25. This group of young Indians has some unique characteristics.
First, they have grown up in a market economy, post-command-and-control socialism. Two-thirds of Indians were born after the 1991 big bang reforms and have not experienced rationing and long lines for essential goods (other than episodic shortages during Covid). They have lived in an India that has averaged about 6 percent annual growth for three decades. They have access to global goods and content, and this generation of Indians wants and expects to compete with the world.
Second, a large proportion of these young Indians have grown up with access to the internet, with more coming online each year. Close to two-thirds of the population has access to a smartphone, and by 2040, it will be over 95% of Indians. Indians have access to some of the cheapest mobile data plans in the world, and charges are $0.17 per gigabyte on average, with plans as low as 5 cents per gigabyte.
The Substack is available for free, self-recommending.
Lu Wei Peter Zhang
If you want to open a new Peter Chang restaurant in Fairfax, but not quite tell people it is Peter Chang…call it Peter Zhang! (Isn’t that a bit like hiding the kid from Anakin Skywalker and calling him Luke Skywalker?)
This is the most casual outpost in the Chang empire, by far. You order from a screen and there are only a few tables. Many of the dishes are marinated meats from central China, with some hot pot, noodles, and semi-Sichuan options. It is the “most Chinese” of the current Chang portfolio. Here is some basic information. I’ve only been once, and haven’t yet figured out the best dishes, but you should all know about this right away. It is near the intersection of Rt.50 and 123, centrally located for Fairfax.
Self-recommending.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Lookism in TikTok. Which visual features predict video success?
2. This is slightly worrying for the diehard Brexit haters.
3. Ezra Klein and Patrick Collison podcast, self-recommending.
4. What exactly what was the new economic policy news event for the UK on Monday?
5. Potential tools of chess cheating, here and here. Good thing no one does this stuff! On top of that, the devices probably do not even exist. Nor might any similar devices exist.
My EconTalk podcast on *Talent*
With Russ Roberts, here is the link and here the summary:
How do you hone your craft on an everyday basis? It could be writing, meeting with experts, even listening to podcasts, just so long, argues economist and blogger Tyler Cowen, as it makes you better at what you already do. Perhaps more than anything else, he believes, it’s practice that divides middle managers from founders, and mere good hires from the creative obsessives who end up transforming the world. Join Cowen and EconTalk host Russ Roberts for a conversation about Talent, Cowen’s new book on how (and how not) to identify the talented. Hear Cowen explain why, for high-level positions, unstructured interviews are important, why stamina is usually preferable to grit, and why credentials are largely a relic of the past.
Self-recommending…
Rubin and Koyama on the Industrial Revolution
From Dylan Matthews:
The big question is what drove this transformation. Historians, economists, and anthropologists have proposed a long list of explanations for why human life suddenly changed starting in 18th-century England, from geographic effects to forms of government to intellectual property rules to fluctuations in average wages.
For a long time, there was no one book that could explain, compare, and evaluate these theories for non-experts. That’s changed: How the World Became Rich, by Chapman University’s Jared Rubin and George Mason University’s Mark Koyama, provides a comprehensive look at what, exactly, changed when sustained economic growth began, what factors help explain its beginning, and which theories do the best job of making sense of the new stage of life that humans have been experiencing for a couple brief centuries.
Here is the full coverage with interview. And you can order the book here from Amazon. I haven’t read it yet, but this is surely self-recommending…
What I’ve been reading
1. Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle. She covered 3000 miles in the 1960s, and as she notes in the introduction: “Epictetus put it in a nutshell when he said, “For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.” Self-recommending. But don’t be fooled by the title — hardly any of the narrative takes place in India.
2. David E. Bernstein, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America . A scathing and unfortunately spot-on indictment of America’s schemes of racial classification. So often those schemes turn out to be racist themselves. The Hmong cannot count as an “underrepresented group” because they are Asian!? Come on, people. There is no good way to do this work, and I am pleased to see David pointing this out so effectively.
3. Nelly Sachs, Flight and Metamorphosis, Poems. A lovely bilingual edition, covering her less-known post-Holocaust poetry. The quality is still very high and the page display is excellent.
Serhi Plokhy, Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters is exactly what the subtitle promises.
Fernanda Melchor, Paradais is a new Mexican novel that has received a lot of attention. I thought English was “not good enough for it,” though the slang and format would challenge my Spanish. If you can read this properly in Spanish, I suspect it is excellent.
Daisy Hay, Dinner with Joseph Johnson is a good book about the Enlightenment publisher who interacted with Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Benjamin Franklin, Priestly, Fuseli, and Mary Wollstonecraft, among others.
Halik Kochanski, Resistance: The Underground War Against Hitler, 1939-1945. So far I have had time only to browse it, but it appears to be both excellent and definitive.
What I’ve been reading
1. Susanne Schattenberg, Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman. Can you have an interesting biography of a life and man that was fundamentally so…boring? Maybe. He ruled the world’s number two power for eighteen critical years, so surely he deserves more attention than what he has received. “Nevertheless, Brezhnev had dentures and only stopped smoking in the mid-1970s because his doctors told him his false teeth would fall out at some point if he didn’t.” And “Analysis of why Brezhnev’s children made themselves known largely for their drinking and scandals would fill another book.” I’ll buy that one as well.
2. Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics. One of the very best books on Ireland and Irish ideas, and more broadly I can recommend virtually anything by Kiberd. Do note, however, that much of this book requires you have read the cited Irish classics under consideration. Nonetheless there is insight on almost every page, recommended.
3. Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville. A self-recommending biography of one of the greatest social science thinkers. Easy to read, and good for both the generalist and specialist reader. Note that it is a complement to reading Tocqueville, in no way a substitute.
4. Kevin Lane, The Inca Lost Civilizations. Short and readable and with nice photos, maybe the best introduction to this still underrated topic?
Paul Sagar, Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics considers the broader implications of Smith’s thought from a “freedom as non-domination” perspective.
John E. Bowit, Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia’s Silver Age. The early twentieth century, basically. Beautiful plates, good exposition, and if nothing else a lesson in just how far aesthetic deterioration can run. A picture book!
Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism is interior to my current knowledge set, but clear and I suspect for many readers useful.
Rainer Zitelmann’s Hitler’s National Socialism is a very thorough, detailed look at Hitler’s actual views.
James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington also serves as a better than average general history of the city.
The Fanfare meta-Want List
Every year I read through the Fanfare Want Lists for new classical music releases, and collate the new recordings that are recommended by more than one person as one of the five most noteworthy releases of the year. This time around I noticed the following as multiple nominees:
1. Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony, Beethoven Symphony number nine.
2. Daniil Trifonov, Silver Age, two CDs of Russian music.
3. Pavel Kolesnikov, Bach, Goldberg Variations.
I am happy to give another thumbs up to each.
If you google the word “self-recommending,” the first three items are all connected to me. Yet I learned the term by reading Fanfare, where it is used repeatedly. Of these three items, the Trifonov is the one that comes closest to being self-recommending. The performers on items #1 and #3 are highly regarded, but to invoke the name Daniil Trifonov is a kind of magic, and as far as I know without fail. It is hard to give any praise to #2 that goes much higher than simply stating that Trifonov has produced a recording of that music.
For those who need it, here is a (only slightly out of date) 2009 MR vocabulary guide.
Best movies of 2021
Listed in the order I saw them, noting that foreign releases get classified by their USA release year. And sometimes you will find a review of mine behind the link.
The Dig. Archaeology and British restraint, circa 1939.
Minari, Korean immigrant family in Arkansas.
Promising Young Woman, black comedy, wow, brutal.
Another Round, Danish film about alcohol. Against it.
Sweat, fame, social media, and gender, but insightful rather than the usual b.s.
Old, Shyamalan, plot twists and conceptual thought experiments about the biomedical establishment. Imperfect, but delivers in some significant ways.
Night of the Kings, Ivory Coast prison movie.
Nine Days. If you were choosing who gets to be born and walk on the earth, which interview questions would you ask them and how would you evaluate their answers?
“Ich bin dein Mensch” — should you date a robot?
McCartney 3, 2, 1 (Hulu). Self-recommending and consistently interesting, the best segment is when you get to hear just how much value Paul’s bass line added to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
Lamb (Icelandic), one of my favorites for the year.
Get Back, directed by Peter Jackson. Amazing and epic, my pick for best of the year. And the whole world is responding. And read this on the miracle of the production side.
Cinema is not back to where it used to be, but this list is way better than what last year was able to deliver. And as always I will let you know if I see anything notable between now and the end of the year (notable films often cluster in December, though they tent not to be my personal favorites, furthermore the release schedule remains somewhat disrupted).
What else was there?