reading, watching & listening to
sharing a selection of things I'm reading and find thought provoking
reading, watching & listening to
averageness is a feature of modern life. scaling means figuring out what works on average.
Models All The Way Down
knowingmachines.org
a really well done ELI5 explainer on AI training models. read this closely and you’ll learn a lot about how the incentives of the commercial web impact the quality of the training data.
Habitat Chronicles: You can't tell people anything
habitatchronicles.comEpisode #188 Achievement Society and the rise of narcissism depression and anxiety - Byung-Chul Han
youtube.comThis was illuminating. My notes:
Negative power is the way people have been control for most of human history.
Negative power means being controlled by prohibition or limitation, telling people you can’t do this or that. Today, people are controlled through positive power. Positive power tells you you can be whatever you want, you’re in charge, so you have no limitations. As long as you can put your head down, focus, grind, achieve your short term goals, set new ones and achieve those.
Authenticity is an ad campaign of neo-liberalism. It's a self absorbed nightmare. People now have to define themselves through themselves without any sort of help from the outside. Everyone is their own little personal project. Everything we learn is not just learning anymore. It's an investment in ourselves. Everything is about mentally optimizing yourself working, producing more efficiently with your mind.
Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those val-ues; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets,... See more
PhilPapers
excellent work by C. Thi Nguyen