David Chapman

Insightful essay on current social dysfunction wrapped in a book review. Growing understanding that replacing the old American ruling class with the management class has left elites bereft of any sense of purpose, context, or responsibility. [via @St_Rev]

"People tell you everything you need to know about them in the first minute after you meet them"

On graduating, my sometime-collaborator Phil Agre went to interview for a faculty job at Yale, where Roger Schank was the senior AI guy. Phil came back somewhat shaken... (1/n)

I have been meaning to post a review for ages! If you like Heinlein, Illuminatus!, Laumer' Retief (intergalactic James Bond), you may love it. I did!

It's an unabashed celebration of masculinity, too. Avoid it if that squicks you.

_Thought and Language_ is his best-known work. It's quite short and a pretty easy read. It's largely framed as a critique of Piaget, so you do need to know some about that as background.

Nobody knows what to think about AI now (although many express strong opinions). Excellent survey of positions, and the tribes-in-formation adopting them, by @jonst0kes. This thread contains the essence of the post (but that's worth reading too).

Remarkable & indescribable essay by @bbenzon — about Coleridge's Kubla Khan, structuralism and poststructuralism, computational linguistics, ChatGPT, and the mystery of meaning

I recommend @flantz's new AI substack. He writes beautifully, conveying the OMG THIS IS INCREDIBLE feeling of the shock of the new.

An extraordinary essay on ethics by @jkcarlsmith, highly recommended for those willing to work through its difficulty. What happens when you realize moral philosophy doesn't and can't work, but saying "whatever, then, I guess" is also utterly inadequate?

This recent essay by @jkcarlsmith is an outstanding exploration of what happens when you realize both moral realism and moral anti-realism are unworkable:

Yeah, that's a great piece!

☸️ Oral histories of influential recently-passed Buddhist teachers and how their students related to them. A group project that may be important for historians, and also for anyone who wants to understand how mentoring works, in Buddhism & elsewhere.

🎙️ Great interview with Holden Karnofsky! How to reason when the difficulty is absence of an adequate ontology (not just uncertainty about facts). As @LG_Rocket suggests, this is meta-rationality (stage 5).