Anyone for music?
One of the joys of living in Cambridge is the amount of live music on offer every week.
Quote of the Day
”Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
- Schopenhauer
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Liam O’Flynn and Arty McGlynn | Water under the keel
Long Read of the Day
Trump As Sovereign Decisionist
This is a perceptive summary by Nathan Gardels of how the world has changed as a result of Trump’s re-election.
The impact of this dramatic departure of the United States from being the leading promoter and defender of a liberal internationalist order to the chief architect of its demolition is only just beginning to register worldwide. By definition, if the guarantor of that order is out only to defend and promote its own interests by severing all ties of interdependence, everyone else must follow suit or foolishly expose themselves to vulnerability.
Worth reading because it hammers home that we need to adjust to new realities. If you have any doubt about that need, take a few minutes to read the transcript of J.D. Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference last week.
Europe’s long holiday from history is over.
AI Roundheads vs. Tech royalty
Yesterday’s Observer column…
An interesting fault line has opened up in the field of artificial intelligence. Felix Martin, a perceptive Reuters columnist, sees it as a forthcoming civil war. “On one side,” he writes, “are those who strive for artificial general intelligence (AGI), the point where machines match or surpass human capabilities. Let’s call them AI Cavaliers. Facing them are AI Roundheads who are focused on the more mundane goal of solving specific problems as efficiently as possible. Deciding which side to back in this AI civil war will be a defining decision for investors in the world’s hottest technology.”
It’s a colourful metaphor with more than a grain of truth.
Do read the whole article
Books, etc.
Screenshot
I loved Lyndal Roper’s book on Martin Luther, and so sat up when her new book came out, especially after reading Thomas Meaney’s review in the New York Times.
Here’s an excerpt that struck me:
For Roper, who lived in Berlin in the years after the wall fell, the history of the German Peasants’ War became, if anything, only more urgent in the wake of the revolutions of 1989, when the communist system of Eastern Europe collapsed. Whether “the people” of those revolutions ended up as beneficiaries, and were even the revolution’s prime movers, or whether the gains redounded to a new set of modern princes — in the form of oligarchs — depends on whom you ask.
In the 21st century, however, one thing remains clear: The legacy of the Peasants’ War is still being co-opted for opposite ends. Some of the most recent invocations of the Peasants’ War in Germany have appeared at rallies for the far-right political party, the Alternative for Germany…
Funny thing about history, it keeps coming back to bite us. Just like Trump’s mercantilism.
My commonplace booklet
How to teach people how to work with AI
Tyler Cowen has had an idea.
Given them some topics to investigate, and have them run a variety of questions, exercises, programming, paper-writing tasks — whatever — through the second or third-best model, or some combination of slightly lesser models.
Have the students grade and correct the outputs of those models. The key is to figure out where the AIs are going wrong.
Then have the best model grade the grading of the students. The professor occasionally may be asked to contribute here as well, depending on how good the models are in absolute terms.
In essence, the students are learning how to grade and correct AI models…
If I were still teaching, I’d be doing something like this. And maybe reading Ethan Mollick’s book first. Oh, and listening to Alison Gopnik on LLMs.
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