[newsletter]
On Cynosure and other things
7 Mar 2025
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: I use a lot of odd words around here, to mark out my interpretation of things to others. But they aren’t unique ideas. And mapping them to where I found them is one way of explaining them. So here I explain the idea of cynosure: the three values I hold closest, and the three things I think we should all focus on.
Main idea: Cynosure is the idea betterment is empty without gratification and connection. No true betterment can occur without celebrating the fruits of our success and betterment is only meaningful in its reflection in the lives of others. Everyone agrees.
AI is puncturing conspiracy theories:
In a pair of studies involving more than 2,000 participants, the researchers found a 20 percent reduction in belief in conspiracy theories after participants interacted with a powerful, flexible, personalized GPT-4 Turbo conversation partner. The researchers trained the AI to try to persuade the participants to reduce their belief in conspiracies by refuting the specific evidence the participants provided to support their favored conspiracy theory.
–
Personality traits and gender gaps:
Higher conscientiousness and emotional stability and lower agreeableness levels enhance earnings and job stability for both genders. Differences in the distributions of personality characteristics between men and women account for as much of the gender wage gap as do the large differences in labor market experience.
This would actually be quite a substantial departure from the accepted understanding that Big 5 personality traits have negligible impact on jobs. Usually, this is because they measure job performance. But of course, you don’t need to perform to earn more—you can apparently just be less agreeable.
–
Is God A Mushroom? A nice overview of the crazier and less crazy attempts to integrate the fact that psilocybin reliably induces spiritual experiences and the intuitive connection to religious tradition. Mostly for interest, I don’t think there’s anything mind-blowing here.
–
Everything will be written by AI:
By. September 2024, 18% of financial consumer complaints, 24% of press releases, 15% of job postings & 14% of UN press releases showed signs of LLM writing. And the method undercounts true use
It’s worth thinking about.
–
We are the only self-domesticated animal:
Although wolves were domesticated into dogs in several regions of the world around 15 to 40 thousand years ago, they were not the first animals to be domesticated. We were. Homo sapiens may have been the first species to select for these genes. When anthropologists compare the morphological features of modern humans to our immediate ancestors like the Neanderthal and Denisovans, humans display neoteny. Humans resemble juvenile Neanderthal, with rounder falter faces, shorter jaws with smaller teeth, and slender bones. And in fact the differences between a modern human skull and a Neanderthal skull parallel those between a dog and its wild wolf ancestor.
The follow on exploring that idea was interesting, then it got cute, in a way I enjoyed:
Our self-domestication is just the start of our humanity. We are self-domesticated apes, but more important, we are apes that have invented ourselves … We invented our humanity. We invented cooking, we invented human language, we invented our sense of fairness, duty, and responsibility. All these came intentionally, out our imaginations of what could be … We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention … And we are not done inventing ourselves yet.
Fun.
–
I loved this. Why our conversations about AI are so weird to me. I have complained about this before. But this author does a better job:
When a coffee shop makes a bagel, it’s a pretty good bet they can make a croissant as well. Not every shop that has one has the other, but they’re pretty strongly correlated. We call this correlation “baking” …
Now imagine a coffee shop that’s been tasked to “achieve superbaking”. They make one bagel on Monday, ten bagels on Tuesday, and eighty million bagels on Wednesday. They’ve never made a croissant. Have they achieved superbaking?
A flat no seems like a silly answer. They went from a pathetically subhuman number of bagels to an outrageously superhuman number of bagels really quickly. If someone says “True baking includes croissants” as a way to dismiss it out of hand, that’s a pretty lazy denial of the obvious truth that something wild is going on back there …
What I’m contending here is that the word “intelligence” is like the word “baking” and it’s long past time we actually sit down and sort the bagels from the croissants. I am strongly against arguments of the form “Oh, it’s just parroting the data set - it’s not really thinking.” AI does a lot of things that we call “thinking” when we do them slower and worse. The fact it can also do those things should make us humble and curious, not proud and dismissive. But I think it’s equally silly to lump all these capacities together into “intelligence” and say “Intelligence is going up, so soon it will do everything intelligence can do.” You need to see some croissants before you conclude it’s actually baking and not just bageling.
And then they go and outline a lot of these exact strange distinctions. Very nice.
–
I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,