Pinned
🆕 “When I adopt someone else’s mindset for a while, it can be exhilarating!” Academia understood as a series of lousy BDSM scenes instead. Good enough reason to leave!
🔗 Link in reply tweet! ⤵️
David Chapman
64K posts
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.
Joined September 2010
- Wow, I did NOT know this: Buddhist logicians had discovered the Gettier problem c. 770 AD:
- Prophesy: Leo Szilard—the physicist who first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction and who urged the US to undertake the Manhattan Project—explaining how science would stagnate, in 1948. rootsofprogress.org/szilard-on-slo…
- The older you get, the harder to resist saying "I told you so." When OO programming came in, it made no sense to me, and I've never used it. Everyone said I was too old to understand. Thirty years later, everyone's snapping out of it and wondering wtf they'd been thinking.
- 🗣 In 1974, Joseph D. Becker pointed out that rigid rationalist Chomskian linguistics was an emperor without clothes, and explained how syntax actually works. Rigorously ignored for decades, his theory seems powerfully confirmed by current AI text generators.
- Philosophy is what happens when smart people think “I’m so smart I can probably figure this out just by thinking about it.” But other than maybe in math, you can’t figure anything out by just thinking about it. You have to poke things and see what happens.
- The simplest, most obvious alternative to universities would be much cheaper and better. scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/01/modern… ♻️@St_Rev
- _Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination_ (By Paul Veyne) "Believe" is not a natural category. It's an invention of rationalist metaphysics. It bears scant relationship with what anyone actually does.
- My father, a high school English teacher, once took and aced the AP Physics exam with zero knowledge of the subject, to prove a point: you do well on standardized tests by knowing how to take tests. LLMs know how to take tests.If you believe anything remotely resembling this pace of progress is likely to continue, things are going to get weird really fast. situational-awareness.ai/wp-content/upl…
- Realizing that Joseph Campbell's "monomyth" idea, that myths all have the same heroic arc— has had an enormously distorting effect on our understanding of what myths are about and what they are for. It's a modern meta-myth: a myth about myths, flattering modern sensibilities.
- AI labs should compete to build the smallest possible language models, which “know” as little as possible—and retrieve “knowledge” from a defined text database instead. LMs are a very expensive and unreliable way to store “knowledge.” We already know how to do this.
- no one goes on a vision quest and discovers that their True Purpose In Life is to be a reliable, hardworking, morally upstanding parent, friend, and member of the local community although plausibly that's the right answer
- Software engineers are eating the world. Why? Because, in the fallen state of universities, they are the only people educated in building and maintaining enduring systems. We've lost critical social technologies, so rule by software is the only feasible systematicity left.
