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The Mythical Liberal Past
In a recent piece, Joshua Rothman suggests that the internet is transforming political speech . He contends that the spontaneous,...
Jake Browning
4 days ago3 min read
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The Philosopher of Negativity--or what Arthur Brooks gets Wrong about Hegel and Happiness
Ruby Bridges being escorted to school Can Hegel provide us with the keys to happiness? Is his call for situating ourselves in a moral...
Jake Browning
Mar 98 min read
7 views
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The Anti-Neoliberalism Election: What Chait Gets Wrong
In a recent article, Jonathan Chait argues that Democrats failed in the last election despite they aggressive populist economic...
Jake Browning
Mar 98 min read
2 views
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DeepSeek and the Limits of AI Dominance
There is nothing particularly surprising about DeepSeek's success, but it certainly surprised a lot of people. China's newest large...
Jake Browning
Jan 273 min read
14 views
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But Can ChatGPT Reason?
Can ChatGPT reason? What the heck does that even mean?!
Jake Browning
Dec 6, 202414 min read
43 views
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Dead Eyes and Pointless Prose: On Ted Chiang's Art Piece
Ted Chiang's pieces tend to cause a stir whenever they come out, mostly because he is such a fantastic writer and thinker. But the pieces...
Jake Browning
Sep 5, 20248 min read
24 views
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Copyright and Generative AI
The recent wave of cases concerning generative AI, such as Silverman v OpenAI, have not gone well. From a legal perspective, this isn't...
Jake Browning
Sep 4, 20247 min read
4 views
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Underpopulation, Overpopulation, and Other Screwy Debates
There is an increasing anxiety about underpopulation, one that mirrors the anxiety about overpopulation in decades past. But debates...
Jake Browning
May 20, 20246 min read
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Critical Comment on "The Psychology of Misinformation"
The Psychology of Misinformation, by Roozenbeek and van der Linden, is an excellent book. Short, balanced, readable. The authors are also...
Jake Browning
Apr 17, 20243 min read
9 views
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Why isn't Multimodality Making Language Models Smarter?
Philosophy has something called the "symbol grounding" problem. The basic question is whether the words and sentences of language need to...
Jake Browning
Jan 19, 20245 min read
248 views
2 comments
The Pre-History of Misinformation Studies (or "Why Misinformation Studies is Problematic")
Every once in awhile, someone reinvents a wheel. This is especially common in academia, since there is just so many papers in so many...
Jake Browning
Jan 12, 20245 min read
13 views
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AI Doom and the Insurance Argument
In Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem, it is discovered that an alien civilization is on its way to Earth, intent on conquering the...
Jake Browning
Dec 22, 20234 min read
18 views
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Gemini, Grok, and the Crowded Field of Language Models
Tourists on a guided program in Europe often come up with a simple complaint about the area, summed up as ABC: Another Bloody Church....
Jake Browning
Dec 13, 20233 min read
15 views
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Language Models and the "Inevitable" Flood of Misinformation
If there has been a constant trope since GPT-2 it is that large language models (LLM) will soon flood the internet with misinformation....
Jake Browning
Dec 13, 20234 min read
14 views
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Our Overly Managed Social Media Ecosystems
The current proliferation of Twitter-wannabes--and their failure--suggests people learned the wrong lessons from the rise of first-gen...
Jake Browning
Nov 6, 20238 min read
22 views
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Musings on the Language of Thought Hypothesis
Jake Quilty-Dunn, Nicolas Porot, and Eric Mandelbaum recently published a robust defense of the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH)....
Jake Browning
Oct 29, 202311 min read
78 views
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Falsification, Paradigm Selection, and Integrated Information Theory
A strange response to integrated information theory (IIT) being labeled a pseudoscience is the claim that "scientists only know Karl...
Jake Browning
Oct 29, 20237 min read
34 views
0 comments

Generative AI is Boring
Now that the dust has settled and the hype has died down (except on Twitter), we can give a verdict: generative AI is boring. We already...
Jake Browning
Oct 26, 20234 min read
8,497 views
3 comments
Integrated Information Theory and the Dispute over the Airpump
After "the letter" arguing Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is a pseudoscience, many people responded by condemning the letter writers...
Jake Browning
Oct 21, 20235 min read
95 views
0 comments
A Blinkered Take on Technology and Capitalism
Manifestos are silly things by nature. A glance at the manifestos of the 20th century reminds us that you need to have an immense ego to...
Jake Browning
Oct 18, 20233 min read
2,490 views
1 comment
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