I. Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. An
About the author Professor, Faculty of Philosophy & Director, Future of Humanity Institute & University of Oxford Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher and polymath with a background in theore
At first glance, the We Are Washington rally might have looked like an early Fourth of July celebration, all bright stars-and-stripes Americana. It was a cool May morning in the state capital, Olympia
6 min read · Aug 24, 2020 -- The following is a collection of thoughts that I put together on the topic of AI democratization. Some of the points below were quoted in an article by OneZero, an online
× John Nacion/AP Photo Kelton argues that, for a country that issues its own currency, there is never a danger of debt spiraling out of control. The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth
Noah here. I love 2x2s. For the uninitiated, they’re the little charts with four-boxes that frequent WITI emails as a way to understand an idea. In their essence, the 2x2 (alternative name: four-box)
Thinking in Public Musings on Innovation, Tools For Thought, Open Source, Venture Capital, Communities, Software Sustainability, and the Future of Foam. July 26, 2020 It’s been a month since I release
Wade Davis holds the Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. His award-winning books include “Into the Silence” and “The Wayfinders.” His new book, “
About me I’m on sabbatical (supported by Emergent Ventures ). Previously, I led work in science (ML for drug discovery), public health (US COVID response), and AI with major US federal agencies at Pal
mail: Bill Thayer Italiano Help Up Home This webpage reproduces the essay De Defectu Oraculorum (Περὶ τῶν Ἐκλελοιπότων Χρηστηρίων) by Plutarch as published in Vol. V of theLoeb Classical Library editi
0.0 Context setting It’s Wednesday, 5th August 2020. This is a Very Special Episode of Things That Have Caught My Attention. Normally I write a combination of one or two longer-form observations about
There are plenty of applications for machine learning, and one of those is natural language processing or NLP. NLP handles things like text responses, figuring out the meaning of words within context,
Practical ontology A tool for making sense of new domains and knowledge areas Published in Analyst’s corner · 10 min read · Jun 30, 2020 -- As analysts, we often find ourselves delving deep into new s
A few years ago I found myself on a stageat the MIT Media Lab, arguing with NicholasNegroponte in front of 700 people. Nick wasrhapsodizing about a world in whichcomputerized "intelligent agents" will
In March of 2015, protests broke out at the University of Cape Town in South Africa over the campus statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes, a mining magnate who had gifted the land on whic
As humans, we tend to favour our present self at the expense of our future self. Our present self will eat an extra piece of cake, skip a training session, drink too much, stay up late, or procrastina
The Tyranny of Evaluation Henry Lieberman MIT Media Lab Reject! This paper has no empirical evaluation of the user interface. Reject! The methodology of this evaluation is flawed. Reject! Too few subj
Introduction There are important convergences between ecological psychology and enaction but also differences. Some differences are due to historical accidents, as in the use of technical terms such a
http://www.antiatlas-journal.net/pdf/03-harris-gayle-an-invitation-to-category-theory-for-designers antiAtlas Journal #3, 2019 An Invitation to Category Theory for Designers Edmund Harriss et Rhett Ga
Products are easier to reason about when you think of them as functions. They transform an input situation into an output situation. This lets you describe what the product does as a transformation of
Technique 3: Framing with your Team You don't have to frame alone Framing is not meant to be a solitary process. It’s an opportunity to develop a common language between teams and collaborators, and a
Opetopic Complexes In their original paper introducing the opetopes, Baez and Dolan described a notation which they called metatree notation for working with them. This notation was then refined and i
The loglo, overhead, marking out CSV-5 in twin contrails, is a body of electrical light made of innumerable cells, each cell designed in Manhattan by imagineers who make more for designing a single lo
by and When Coda w as founded, we found ourselves faced with a number of tricky choices. From years of working together previously at YouTube, (our founding PM) and I had developed a bit of
Chrome: If you’ve ever read an article and then went through your history later to find it again, or wanted to clear specific portions of your history, Enhanced History can help. It’s a fork of and im
This post was written by Dan Shipper and Annaliese Griffin . Ask Anne-Laure Le Cunff how she built her productivity stack and you get an answer that sounds more like a Zen koan than a list of apps and
From Popular Mechanics A new analysis suggests rocks are likely to break into their Plato-assigned shape: cubes. The Platonic solids are 3D shapes that Plato also gave a "classical element" value. Par
I continue my AI poetry generation experiments with Open AI’s 2020 GPT-3, which is 116× larger, and much more powerful, than the 2019 GPT-2 . GPT-3, however, is not merely a quantitative tweak yieldin
This is a subscriber-only post which I am making open access until July 25th. Please consider subscribing . How should we think about OpenAI’s new language model, GPT-3? (For background on GPT-3, plea
Our model, called GPT-2 (a successor to GPT ), was trained simply to predict the next word in 40GB of Internet text. Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not rele
Trilobites Scientists Say You Can Cancel the Noise but Keep Your Window Open Researchers in Singapore developed a system that’s sort of like noise-canceling headphones for your whole apartment. Views
So, here's a Vision Of The Future that's popular right now. It's a lot of this sort of thing. As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work . I had the opportuni
Creating an infocomic to journal about my understanding of Lambda Calculus. I hope to reorganize this to create a structured product at some point in the future. But for now, here is what I have: Lamb
A crash in prices. A round of bankruptcies. And wave after wave of layoffs. On top of all the turmoil Oklahoma oil producers have had to deal with since the start of the coronavirus pandemic , the Sup
During Coronavirus Lockdowns, Some Doctors Wondered: Where Are the Preemies? Hospitals in several countries saw dips in premature births, which could be a starting point for future research. A prematu
Greetings from the Great North,
As Kanye West said to his presidential campaign consultants, let’s keep this short.
When I started working on my first book, I got a great piece of advice from a philosopher. (I know that sounds pretentious, but it’s true. He was an academic philosopher who wrote…
[Content warning: Politics, religion, social justice, spoilers for “The Secret of Father Brown”. This isn’t especially original to me and I don’t claim anything more than to be explaining and rewordin
Zeno
What are space and time? Do they exist absolutely, or only relative to matter? Do they constitute the fixed background or stage upon which the drama of life is played out — or do they themselves also take part in the action? Such questions are as old as philosophy itself.
The Stoic philosopher…
7 min read · Jul 14, 2020 -- The team ordered me a custom Bedell with everyone's signatures. It did me in. Balled like a baby. Yesterday, at the end of nearly six years at Pluralsight, I realized ther