culture
The dream of a Liberal (arts) education—which is the scaled, democratic form of the Keatsian ideal of negative capability—cannot hold up when liberalism itself is held to be suspect.
Zohar Atkins • The Liberal Arts Are Dying Because Liberalism is Dying
"It is easy to forget how to talk to a person, because you’re not talking to a person: you’re Replying."
Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter-intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget. By comparing LRMs
... See moreParshin Shojaee • The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity
“The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity.” They can’t think. Water is wet.

How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain,... See more
The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
