Jun8

Bravo! Your last sentence perhaps may be called anti-autological: condemning a certain kind of prose by performing the opposite. Brought to mind Pope’s An Essay on Criticism.

Here's an idea that I've retrained for the longest but never acted on:

Give people a survey, to identify movies, books, etc. they like. Then summarize all this into a visual symbol. Then you can print this on a t-shirt on a laptop sticker, etc. Humans get the general areas you like but it's machine readable, too - take a photo and you get all the details that he person chose to share!

Thoughts?

Doesn’t have to. There are petabytes of experimental physics data that can be fed to AI to extract additional insights. The only holdup is this is slightly harder to than math. With bio, you’re right, generally designing and conducting an experiment goes hand in hand and theoretical biologist is not a common label.

Excellent optimistic post in a sea of negativity, and with actual suggestions, too. After reading, my mental image is this: think of Olympiads in Ancient Greece.

* A weightlifter was only awarded a laureate if he were able to lift a heavy stone (have no idea what they were lifting, for illustrative purposes only :-)

* Along comes Archimedes who invents what we would call an exoskeleton. Now any regular guy can lift twice as much as last year’s athlete.

* What to do? You can cancel the Olympiads, but they are actually useful as training, motivation, etc So now you have to give the prize on other factors, eg how well he can lift, has he opened a gym in the city, etc

BTW, physics and bio are not exempt, so those researchers better read and try to stay ahead.

Thought-provoking article. When the cave painters were at work, they most probably didn’t see themselves as “artists” and of course not scientists, philosophers. That was an age where all those things were together at once, living in a religious state, I think. Little by little, they separated (to sometimes unhappy results). Brings to mind the old myth where humans were both male and female originally, but gods, fearing their power, separated them, leading us to look for our half. Same with art and science, I think.

So while Picasso is perhaps right to say “We have invented nothing “ as quoted in the article when he means art is as old as humans, the realization that something is art, is perhaps invented afterwards.

I also reject the two kinds of art thesis that’s proposed here:

“It follows that there must also be two kinds of art – similarly different and yet, somehow, complementary. The first is what I call artifice: art conceived so as to confirm, reinforce and extend the empire of facts in which we ordinarily live. … Examples come readily to mind: propaganda, pornography and advertising; sentimental, moralistic or didactic art”

Many current artists would lump, say, paintings by Old Masters into this category. Facing the statue of David past month in Florence, it was eye opening how much such a classic statue of a human can move people!

Oh boy, this reminded me of The Boy Who Sailed Around the World Alone by Robin Lee Graham, which I randomly found and read in my school's library when I was 12 or 13. Still remember it 40+ yrs later.

Similar to how Cypher puts it: I know this is “just” next token inference, matrix mult and just software, ie there’s no “intelligence” there BUT, looking at this convo … damn!

The fascinating this is that the LLM is not acting as a tool here AFAIk, but very much like a colleague.

I have no knowledge of the domain and have only PhD EE level math knowledge, so maybe my bar is too low.

I love this koan and what makes it even better is that is based on a true event: Minsky’s real answer was “It has them, you just k ow what they are yet”