Debbie Foster

The intrinsically social nature of language games incurs a major challenge for LLMs, who have no way of knowing to whom they are speaking, and have to guess the user's likely knowledge, beliefs or goals from the words contained in the prompt alone. This is why ChatGPT tends to give rather generic answers to many queries, like a politician who is

The time-symmetric, retrocausal framework advanced by Aharonov and his colleagues is sometimes called the two-state vector formalism

resistance reveals preference and affinity, and fear and suspicion, political sympathy and personal antipathy, and the way these might come or go together. This is resistance as conflicted engagement

When it comes to learning, Triumph is the real foe; it’s Disaster that’s your teacher. It’s Disaster that brings objectivity. It’s Disaster that’s the antidote to that greatest of delusions, overconfidence. And ultimately, both Triumph and Disaster are impostors. They are results that are subject to chance. One of them just happens to be a better

he had the appearance of someone who would be completely at ease in the human world, but he often entered it like a scuba diver with forty-five minutes of air and a weight belt to keep himself down.

Anything shadowy, liminal or strange excited the Romantic imagination: atypical mental states, such as dreams, daydreams, madness and creative genius; paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy, ghosts, demons and doppelgangers. The Romantics were even fascinated by the 'otherness' of animals. Cats and dogs often behave as though they can see or hear

In theory, there's nothing wrong with fiction being aspirational: one of the things that fiction can provide is a space to imagine what doesn't exist in reality. But in the case of The West Wing, aspiration and inspiration went further into something like delusion, a desire to patch the problems of American political reality through the re-creation

But Quentin believed in reading as a lifeline to the past—to the store of experience that made the foundation of our species. By assembling our thoughts like risers in a staircase the generations would climb. Those who could draw from this reservoir would exist beyond the jealous shackles of time, grasp the utterness of contingency, and know the

There's no version of "control the poets" that's easily compatible with a free society.