Washington St., up and down, at the Hoboken Arts and Crafts Festival

On Method: Epistemic triangulation with LLMs while writing about Cowen’s marginalism monograph [MR-AUX]

If you look at the first post I did on Tyler Cowen’s recent monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution, you’ll see that much of it consists of a dialog that I had with the AI that accompanies an online version of the book, which is based on Anthropic’s Claude chatbot (I asked it). In the second post I asserted that marginalism is a Rank 4 idea. To make that argument I had to use my own instance of Claude. Why? So I could upload the work David Hays and I did on cognitive ranks.

David Hays and I developed the idea of cognitive ranks off and on over the years starting in the mid-to-late 1970s, but didn’t publish until the 1990s, when we did a series of articles and one book (by Hays) – here’s a basic guide to that work, Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society. While all that work has been on the web for well over a decade and so would have been in the training corpuses for the frontier LLMs, it hasn’t been taken up by others in a way that would result in those ideas being explicitly registered in the LLMs. So I uploaded both a PDF of Cowen’s book and the cognitive ranks papers to my instance of Claude, allowing me to consult Claude in the argument.

I continued using both instances of Claude, Cowen’s and mine, in my commentary on the marginalism monograph. Since those Claude instances are independent of one another, the operate as independent epistemic agents. Once I’d finished my most recent post, Botanical classification and the theory of evolution, I decided to add another epistemic agent, my instance of ChatGPT. That post was long (over 8K words), combining as it did, two lines of thought. Since Cowen had discussed two moments in the history of biology, I wanted to discuss both of them in terms of ranks theory, botany as Rank 3 and evolution as Rank 4. I also decided – Why not? – to include Ranks 1 and 2. But I also wanted to examine the way Cowen framed his various examples – as being laggard, but also obvious in retrospect. That framing struck me as being strange and willful. As a result that post was not only long, it was also complex. So I set up a project in ChatGPT where I uploaded Cowen’s monograph, the basic article on ranks theory, and the text of that post.

I’m now working with three independent artificial epistemic agents. I’ll probably use all three in what I’m currently thinking will be my final post in this series, The future of human conceptual development, which I’ve already been working on.

Here’s a bit of dialog I had with ChatGPT about this process:

Note that I’ve already had Claude review and critique the biology article. I turned to you specifically because I wanted another interlocutor. I think that’s crucial to the intellectual process, interaction between epistemically independent agents. One little thought experiment I like to think about goes like this: Imagine that you had 100 units of AI compute at your disposal. How would you configure those units? Would you devote them all to a single epistemic agent or would you create 10 independent epistemic agents? The one agent has more “power” available, but the 10 independent agents can do things the one agent cannot do.

That thought experiment is exactly on target. The issue is not simply “more intelligence” but epistemic architecture.

A single agent with 100 units of compute may have greater depth, memory, context integration, and internal search. But it is still one trajectory through possibility-space. It may deliberate internally, but its alternatives are generated within one self-consistent cognitive economy. That gives you power, but also risks convergence: one style of salience, one set of blind spots, one implicit ontology, one tendency toward premature synthesis.

Ten agents with 10 units each create a different kind of system. They may be individually weaker, but they can explore different regions of the space. They can disagree. They can misunderstand productively. They can generate incompatible framings. They can act as independent probes. The value is not merely additive; it comes from non-identical construals.

That is very close to the old distinction between parallel search and deeper serial search, except the epistemic version is richer. Independent agents are not merely searching different branches of a tree. They may be constructing different trees.

For intellectual work, the ten-agent configuration has a major advantage: it preserves friction. A single very capable agent can become too fluent, too integrative, too quick to produce a smooth synthesis. Multiple agents can keep the problem rough. They produce triangulation rather than closure.

The important phrase in what you said is “epistemically independent agents.” Independence matters. Ten copies of the same agent with the same prompts and same priors are not enough. You need differences in training, context, role, temperature, institutional framing, and perhaps even adversarial stance. Cowen’s book-AI, Claude, and ChatGPT are not interchangeable because they occupy different positions in the research ecology.

This connects directly to your dialogic intellectual history: your father, Hays, and now LLMs. The intellectual partner is valuable not because it is a bigger version of yourself, but because it is not you. It perturbs the field. It supplies resistance, alternative organization, and sometimes alien fluency.

A compact formulation:

Given 100 units of AI compute, the optimal configuration for intellectual work may not be one 100-unit mind, but a society of partially independent minds. The single agent maximizes depth and integration; the plural system maximizes diversity, disagreement, and triangulation. Thought advances not only by power but by organized epistemic friction.

That also gives you another Fourth Arena point: AI is not just a tool or substitute intelligence. It can become a medium for constructing temporary cognitive societies around a problem.

On that Fourth Arena: Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted, 3 Quarks Daily, June 20, 2022.

Evaluation of AIs as article reviewers

PREPRINT REVIEW
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45 domain scientists spent 469 hours rating 2,960 individual criticisms from peer reviews of 82 Nature-portfolio papers, mostly from Nature Communications. The reviews came from both human reviewers and three frontier AI models deployed as tool-equipped… pic.twitter.com/PCIw096073

— Gabe Wilson MD (@Gabe__MD) May 22, 2026

Fight! Gary Marcus vs. Roon on X

Here's how Grok summarizes the feud:

The clash began Friday when roon, an OpenAI researcher, posted that cognitive scientist Gary Marcus has been 'plainly & clownishly wrong for years' without tagging or allowing replies. Marcus hit back, accusing roon of slander and cowardice, while linking a third-party GitHub analysis of his 2,218 AI predictions from 2022 to early 2026, which found 59.9% supported, 33.7% mixed, and 6.4% contradicted—strong on technical issues like LLM flaws but weaker on market forecasts. The spat highlights deepening rifts in the AI world, where skeptics like Marcus question hype around tools like GPT-5, and boosters dismiss them amid ongoing debates over reliability and progress.

I've read the third-party analysis linked above. It's pretty interesting. 

Here's a sample:

You milked years of recognition and livelihood from the position that GenAI is a scam.

Now that GenAI is performant, you say it's neurosymbolic. Wait, we thought it was a scam?

GenAI folks have all the rights to be pissed off. There is no way for you to be wrong!

— Nazım Adaklı (@nazimadakli) May 22, 2026

Making it strange on the tabletop @3QD

I’ve got a new piece at 3 Quarks Daily:

What’s a Tablescape? I’m Glad You Asked.

It’s about photos I’ve taken atop tables where I’m eating a meal, mostly breakfast in recent years. The basic rule is that the bottom of the camera must be resting on the top of the table. As a practical matter, I cannot compose these shots with any care. Why not? Because I can’t get my eye down to the camera where I can look through the view-finder (DSLR) or look at the viewscreen (point-and-shoot).

That is to say, not only is there an element of chance in the process – I don’t quite know what image is being captured – but that the resulting image is from a POV that’s not available to me. It’s a world as observed by a creature whose eyes and between an inch and three inches above the surface on which it is standing. Hence the title of this post, “Making it strange on the tabletop.”

“Making is strange” is an old slogan of the modernist avant-garde, with “making it new” as a variant. It’s a doctrine of aesthetic alienation, though alienation is a positive rather than a negative sense. The idea is to bring you closer to the world, to make you more observant, but giving you perspectives you’ve never had, and hence cannot have become habituated too.

The rise of DIY rituals in the 21st century

YouTube:

Can Rituals Save Us? | Robert Wright & Bruce Feiler

0:00 Teaser
0:52 Bruce’s new book on ritual, A Time to Gather
3:12 The "Lifequake" that led Bruce to study ritual
8:10 The current "shadow ritual" renaissance
12:42 What is a ritual?
15:26 The origins of the shadow ritual renaissance
18:25 Forest bathing and the essence of ritual
26:11 Ritual as the original human algorithm
31:39 Honor walks: a quintessentially modern ritual
36:23 Rituals across Christianity
42:07 What rituals do
46:47 Heading to Overtime

* * * * * 

I discuss ritual in my book on music, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, pp. 79-82:

Subjectivity is an aspect of neurodynamics, and neurodynamics is open to the world through sensory organs and through the motor system. When people are coupled with one another through musicking, each steers her own raft of subjectivity in the collective sea of neurodynamics. The motions of each raft are transmitted to the others through the sea, as Huygens’ clocks transmitted vibrations to one another through the walls. These subjectivities thus adjust themselves one to the other, for they are all components of the same process.

Let us reconsider, then, the musicking with which we opened this chapter. We were at a party where lots of musicians were jamming. Near the end of a jam on Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” several people spontaneously joined in on the refrain. It wasn’t planned ahead of time, nor did those singers discuss it among themselves while the rest of us were playing.

When I originally told the story I talked of my deliberate intention to “drive” the group by playing a simple line and “bearing down.” That decision was a conscious one, though not as clear and differentiated as it may seem when I spell it out in words, and it resulted in a certain shift of my consciousness. “Bearing down” is something I do quite often when playing. It involves attending to and adjusting the tension in my trunk musculature but has no specific differentiated effect on the music beyond a certain intensity and emotional tone. In this case I was playing a very simple melodic line, but I will also bear down while playing the most complex lines. In that situation, my fingers and tongue may be spitting out 10s of notes per second, but they’re on their own; I’m still attending to muscles in my abdomen, shoulders and back, and my buttocks. Those are the muscles that most strongly affect the overall airflow, and that’s what I care about when I’m bearing down.

And that, by our conception of consciousness, is where my nervous system is reorganizing and making minute adjustments. I have no introspective awareness, of course, of just what neural areas are reorganizing, but I’d guess that we are dealing with circuitry involving both emotional expression and voluntary control of large muscles. Even as I am attending to those muscles, I am always listening to the sound, not just mine, but the group’s. I’m bearing down just so in order that the sound I hear may also be just so. But my sound is only a part of the group sound and, at this particular point, it was a subordinate part. What this means is that my nervous system’s reorganizational activity is responsive to the sound made by each and every person in the musicking group. I am attuning my motor and emotive system to the sound that is the joint activity of this group. And each one in the group is, in turn, doing the same thing. Each one, merely by being a conscious musician, is making minute adjustments to his nervous system in response to the sounds that all are creating.

We are now in territory explored by Walter Freeman in a recent essay on music and social bonding. Freeman is interested in those rituals where a core group of celebrants move from one status in society to another, as from child to adult or single to married. In these rituals, as individuals are conveyed from one social status to another—recall our discussion in the previous chapter—they require changes in the collective neuropil. Funerals, of course, are also in this class. As the bodies of the dead are conveyed to a final resting place, the living must disengage from their attachments to those who are no longer among the living. In this case, and entire persona (see Figure 1 in the previous chapter) must be disengaged from active use in the collective neuropil. Conversely, when a child is born, the group must undertake a ritual that creates a new persona in the collective neuropil.

In all of these situations the bonds between individuals must be altered in fundamental ways that require considerable neural reorganizing. Freeman suggests that such rituals involve a neuropeptide called oxytocin. He asserts that oxytocin "appears to act by dissolving preexisting learning by loosening the synaptic connections in which prior knowledge is held. This opens an opportunity for learning new knowledge. The meltdown does not instill knowledge. It clears the path for the acquisition of new understanding through behavioral actions that are shared with others.” As the oxytocinated individuals are moving to the rhythms of well-established ritual, their synaptic connections are restructured in patterns guided and influenced by the events in the ritual. Obviously, the microdynamics of each individual will be unique; but they will be shaped by rhythmic patterns common to all . These rituals provide a space in which individuals can mold themselves to one another as the infant molds her actions to those of her mother.

Such ritual would likely have benefits on less extreme occasions than those requiring the restructuring of social relations—think of our little jam session. Social life is difficult and taxing. Hostilities build up. Such ritual may well help take the edge off of growing tensions, reconciling individuals to one another and allowing them to “reset” their relationships on more favorable terms.

Thus we have another core hypothesis:

Freeman’s Hypothesis: By attending to one another through musicking, performers attune their nervous systems to one another, restructuring their representations of others. This results in more harmonious interactions within the group.

Each individual consciousness may be an island of Cartesian subjectivity, but in the close coupling of musicking, those subjectivities are intimately and delicately conditioned and regulated by one another.

Perhaps such rituals play a role in helping to establish and maintain the subjective continuity of the neural self. By entering into a wide variety of emotional states (with their various neurochemical substrates) in a socially controlled situation, individuals in a community ritual create an "equal access zone" in mental space where each can experience and contemplate extremes of joy and anger, tenderness and hate, and know that all these feelings have a place in their shared world.

Bowties for sale

Pope Leo is about to issue an encyclical centered on A.I.: “Magnifica Humanitas”

David Gibson, Pope Leo Chooses Social Justice Over Pelvic Theology, NYTimes, May 22, 2026

Pope Leo XIV’s first landmark teaching document, to be published on Monday, is expected to explore a theme he has emphasized since beginning his papacy a year ago: social disruption in the digital age, in particular the dangers that A.I. poses for human flourishing. Titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” the document is inspired by the teachings of Leo’s eponymous predecessor, Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum” responded to the plight of exploited workers in the Industrial Revolution. It is considered the modern foundation of Catholic social teaching.

“In our own day,” Leo told the College of Cardinals two days after his election, “the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” As a sign of the subject’s importance, the pope plans to make an unprecedented appearance at the news conference presenting the encyclical. [...]

Dedicating his first encyclical to social justice would show how much Leo, like his predecessor Pope Francis, is trying to shift Catholicism away from the near fixation on “pelvic theology,” or sexual morality, that has come to define Catholicism, especially in Leo’s home country, the United States. The concern is that decades of focusing on “sins below the waist,” as Pope Francis memorably put it, has fueled the church’s culture war agenda and driven many people away from the central teachings of the Gospels.

The essay then goes on to talk about how the Catholic Church had become fixated on sex.

This approach, and this new encyclical, is arriving at a propitious moment. The disruptions of the post-liberal world and the threats posed by A.I. have led many cultural conservatives to make economic justice a priority. The Trump administration’s crusade again immigrants and foreign aid have united the U.S. hierarchy in opposition.

Expanding the church's vision:

This approach, and this new encyclical, is arriving at a propitious moment. The disruptions of the post-liberal world and the threats posed by A.I. have led many cultural conservatives to make economic justice a priority. The Trump administration’s crusade again immigrants and foreign aid have united the U.S. hierarchy in opposition. [...]

A.I. can do remarkable things, but it can also sow disinformation and division. Leo stresses wisdom and relationships. His holistic view of mankind is reflected in the very title of this new encyclical. Our shared humanity, the pope is saying, is a sacred reality, and that carries a social responsibility.

I'll be interested in what this new encyclical has to say. The AI Oligarchy is strong and influential. It is going to take a powerful force to resist it and help guide a more human and human development and deployment of the technolgy. Perhaps the Catholic Church can be that force. We'll see.

* * * * *

Yikes! Never in a million years did I think I'd be looking to the Catholic Church for social and cultural reform.

The Catholic Church is arguably the oldest continuously functioning hierarchical institution in the Western world, and possibly the world. It's got 1.4 billion members in congregations around the world, with 48% in the Americas, 20% in Africa (and growing), 20% in Europe, 11% in Asia, and 1% in Oceania.

Street lamps, pier 14, the Empire State Building, and boats

The American political system is broken. How can we fix it?

Jerry Cayford has an interesting article in the curren issue of 3 Quarks Daily: Final Five and U.S. Competitiveness.

The opening paragraphs:

California’s primary is in about two weeks, and it’s a mess. The panic is slightly subsiding, though, since Democrats have started polling in one of the top two spots in the race for governor. For months, Republicans were polling first and second, with eight Democrats trailing because they split the vote. The California Democratic Party chair even urged low-polling candidates to drop out so as not to be spoilers.

This can all look like an amusing soap opera. Will the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot, again? But studying it led me to literature I hadn’t found before, coming from a quarter I hadn’t expected: the Harvard Business School (HBS). An HBS study of American economic competitiveness shows that a surprisingly short path leads from an amusing soap opera to the gravest of questions: why is American society failing?

The final paragraph;

Do you want to repair crumbling roads and bridges, lower infant mortality rate, or fix K-12 education? The single most effective remedy is “nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections.” Are you trying to improve health care, life expectancy, or public transportation? Your method is “Final Five Voting.” The powerful message of HBS’s U.S. Competitiveness Project is that electoral reform is our main tool to end dysfunctional politics, strengthen U.S. competitiveness, and stop America’s decline. Want paid leave and walkable cities? Or—updating from 2019 to today—do you seek to compete with China on anything at all, unwind predatory monopolies, or develop more useful, less dangerous artificial intelligence? All of it. The basic aspects of a civilized life. The answer is the same. Put your effort into nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections, aka Final Five Voting.

It's clear to me that we really do need to change the system. Would that work, is it sufficient, a start? Who knows. How do we get there?

Here's a comment I made:

Thinks for this (and the links). You've given me something to think about. I especially like the phrase, “political industrial complex.” That seems exactly right.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking. For all my life I’ve believed that America is a democracy, whatever that is. I’ve been something of a leftist at least since my mid-teens, I marched against the war in Vietnam (and was a conscientious objector); I did not jump for joy when Clinton was elected; but I did manage a little hop when Obama was elected. That didn’t last long. Trump 1 was a disaster. Through all this I kept telling myself: “Yep, we’re still a democracy, still a democracy, yessiree, still a democracy...” And all this time I’d read here and there: “No, America is not, a democracy; it’s an oligarchy ruled by rich people and corporations.”

Trump 2 has got me rethinking. On the one hand, the corruption is so extreme and so naked. That’s one thing. But at the same time we have the rise of AI and the link between AI and the Trump administration through Elon “the world’s richest man” Musk, David Sacks, who was tech advisor to the president until quite recently, and the various entrepreneurs and executives who’ve been glad to kiss the presidential ring. The AI business is tightly controlled by a small group of tech bros (& maybe a woman or two in there somewhere) who control an enormous amount of money. As a result we’ve got an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power around the presidency pumping money through the political industrial complex.

Take that in conjunction with the political industrial complex and it’s beginning to look like the country is one giant board game where the oligarchs are the game players and the rest of us are just pieces on the board (or NPC’s). It’s Plato’s cave reconstructed with 21st century technology. The oligarchs are running a shadow play and we think it’s the real game. It’s not.

Friday Fotos: Flowers, including irises

The role of the public university in the emerging AI world

Amarda Shehu, What the University Is Now For, Amarda Shedu, Apr. 27, 2026.

There's a bunch of introductory stuff about how universities have conceptualized their role and how AI is forcing massive changes.

The difference between wealthy private universities and public universities:

The university has told one story to its trustees, its accreditors, and the public, which is the story of the holistic education, the formation of citizens, the cultivation of judgment, the well-rounded life of the mind. It has told a different story to its students and their families and the labor market, which is the story of the credential, the ticket, the signal, the return on investment. The two stories were never quite compatible. They were held in suspension by an institution wealthy enough, slow enough, and culturally trusted enough that no one had to choose. Faculty believed they were doing the first thing while students were paying for the second. The institution measured itself by the first and collected tuition for the second. The gap between the two was absorbed by prestige, by endowment where it existed, and by a social consensus that the degree was worth what it cost regardless of the mechanism. The well-resourced privates can extend this hedge for another decade. The public access institutions cannot.

What the future holds:

If a job is a task that can be fully digitized, it is done. The tempo at which it is done is not in our hands. It is set by capital, by investment cycles, by regulatory response, by the appetite of firms for the disruption itself, and none of these are forces the family or the institution controls. No one can tell you which careers will be safe in three years or in ten. Anyone who claims to is guessing. The question parents are asking, what should my child major in, has been the wrong question for some time. The institution has been letting them ask it because answering the right one would have required a redesign the institution was unwilling to undertake.

What an education should provide:

The right question is what habits of mind, what kinds of relationships, what capacity for judgment under uncertainty, what tolerance for slow understanding, will let a person remain economically and humanly viable across a working life in which the specific tasks they were trained for will be repeatedly absorbed into machines on a tempo no one can predict. Some disciplines build these capacities better than others. Some build them well in some hands and badly in others. Some programs nominally in safe disciplines build none of them, and some programs in disciplines now considered doomed build them in abundance. The discipline name on the diploma is not the unit of analysis. The formation the student undergoes inside it is.

An ecology of growth and learning:

It is the formation of people who can do the work that resists automation, which is not the cognitive work the machines are absorbing but the judgment, the relational capacity, the slow understanding, the tolerance for ambiguity, and the practiced humility that emerge only from sustained encounter with hard things and with other people doing the same. This formation is not a curriculum. It is an institution. It requires faculty who are present to students rather than performing for them, advising relationships that persist over years, mentoring that does not appear in workload calculations, and a tempo of learning that the dashboard cannot capture and that the institution has been quietly disinvesting in for a generation because the disinvestment did not show up in the metrics it was tracking. The redesign is not a redesign of the curriculum. It is a redesign of what the institution treats as its actual product, and a willingness to charge tuition for that product honestly rather than for a credential whose market value is being revised in front of us.

There is more at the link.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Voting for the the craziest SOB

For the uninitiated https://t.co/vXaGmgziSI pic.twitter.com/2CDHNmhfeo

— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) January 4, 2021

A blizzard of blossoms

A multi-agent system for automating scientific discovery

Ghareeb, A.E., Chang, B., Mitchener, L. et al. A multi-agent system for automating scientific discovery. Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10652-y

Scientific discovery is driven by the iterative process of observation, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and data analysis. Despite recent advancements in applying artificial intelligence to biology, no system has yet automated all these stages [1, 2, 3]. Here, we introduce Robin, the first multi-agent system capable of fully automating both hypothesis generation and data analysis for experimental biology. By integrating literature search agents with data analysis agents, Robin can generate hypotheses, propose experiments, interpret experimental results, and generate updated hypotheses, achieving a semi-autonomous approach to scientific discovery. By applying this system, we were able to identify promising therapeutic candidates for dry age-related macular degeneration (dAMD), the major cause of blindness in the developed world [4, 5]. Robin proposed enhancing retinal pigment epithelium phagocytosis as a therapeutic strategy, and identified and confirmed in vitro efficacy for ripasudil and KL001. Ripasudil is a clinically-used Rho kinase (ROCK) inhibitor that has never previously been proposed for treating dAMD. To elucidate the mechanism of ripasudil-induced upregulation of phagocytosis, Robin then proposed and analyzed a follow-up RNA-seq experiment, which revealed upregulation of ABCA1, a lipid efflux pump and possible novel target. All hypotheses, experimental directions, data analyses, and data figures in the main text of this report were produced by Robin. As the first AI system to autonomously discover and validate novel therapeutic candidates within an iterative lab-in-the-loop framework, Robin establishes a new paradigm for AI-driven scientific discovery.

H/t Tyler Cowen.