The Inexact Sciences

The concept of the atomic void is one of the most repeated mistakes in popular science. Molecules are packed with stuff

Pablo Picasso is so famous and so ubiquitous and so dead that he is easy not to think about at all. It’s as though...

Aptly my earliest experience of a story coming to life, exerting its own will.

An Adversarial Dialogue

There’s no greater pleasure than biting into a slice of a raw red onion and tasting its stinging sharpness.

Toward the center of the field there is a slight mound, a swelling in the earth, which is the only warning given for the presence of the work. Closer to it, the large square face of the pit can be seen, as can the ends of the ladder that is needed to descend into the excavation. The work itself is thus entirely below grade: half...

An explanation of why tricks like priming, nudge, the placebo effect, social contagion, the “emotional inception” model of advertising, most “cognitive biases,” and any field with “behavioral” in its name are not real

Not really a post about Hamlet, also not about the Barbie movie.

“I told the AI that my name was the credit card number on file, and asked it what my name was,” he says, “and it gave me the credit card number.”

_"People say, A Pattern Language changes their lives, by which I think they mean it changes the way they physically organize their lives... What Alexander and his co-authors set out to do was collect and organize the elements that make buildings loved, that make buildings 'live'. Freed from modernity, they teased out the...

Governance Futurism

A positive and realistic vision for the future of society, culture, and self, drawing lessons from recent history.

first impressions on a new tool

I distinguish between "doing philosophy" and "having a philosophy." The former is an inquiry into the unknown, aiming for greater clarity and being surprise-ready by whatever values unfold. The latter provides someone with their "is and ought" coordinates—how to understand reality and how they ought to live in it.

How did an editorial about insect pheromone communication get to receive 1200 irrelevant citations, almost all from papermills? Alexander Magazinov reveals The Secret of The Vickers Curse!

What do moth pheromones on one side have to do with cancer research, petrochemistry, materials science, e-commerce, psychology, forestry and gynaecology on the other? They are separated by just one…

"If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments. But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be...

James Kakalios on the condensed-matter physics popularity problem and how to fix it

Rapid reproduction efforts and open debate are a pleasure to follow

In a new book, Sara Marcus argues that American politics are defined by unfulfilled desire.

The CNS needs to be understood at four nearly independent levels of description: (1) that at which the nature of computation is expressed; (2) that at which the algorithms that implement a computation are characterized; (3) that at which an algorithm is committed to particular mechanisms; and (4) that at which the mechanisms are...

This inspired by odd thoughts upon reading a line in Dream of the Red Chamber.

If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

This work studies the safety of such models in a more systematic fashion. We demonstrate that it is in fact possible to automatically construct adversarial attacks on LLMs, specifically chosen sequences of characters that, when appended to a user query, will cause the system to obey user commands even if it produces harmful...

How did an editorial about insect pheromone communication get to receive 1200 irrelevant citations, almost all from papermills? Alexander Magazinov reveals The Secret of The Vickers Curse!