Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Walking is good for creative thinking
Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz, Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2014, Vol. 40, No. 4, 1142–1152. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0036577
Abstract: Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after. In Experiment 1, while seated and then when walking on a treadmill, adults completed Guilford’s alternate uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking and the compound remote associates (CRA) test of convergent thinking. Walking increased 81% of participants’ creativity on the GAU, but only increased 23% of participants’ scores for the CRA. In Experiment 2, participants completed the GAU when seated and then walking, when walking and then seated, or when seated twice. Again, walking led to higher GAU scores. Moreover, when seated after walking, participants exhibited a residual creative boost. Experiment 3 generalized the prior effects to outdoor walking. Experiment 4 tested the effect of walking on creative analogy generation. Participants sat inside, walked on a treadmill inside, walked outside, or were rolled outside in a wheelchair. Walking outside produced the most novel and highest quality analogies. The effects of outdoor stimulation and walking were separable. Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity.
Eh? So much for “Magnifica Humanitas.” Lots of words, the substance is weak.
Matthew Walther, The Pope Should Be Going to War Against A.I. Why Isn’t He? NYTimes, May 26, 2026.
This is not exactly the Unabomber manifesto. One is even tempted to call it naïve. The encyclical certainly does not live up to its billing as the A.I. equivalent of “Rerum Novarum,” the revolutionary text on the Industrial Revolution with which his predecessor and namesake Leo XIII inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching in 1891. The presence of Christopher Olah, a founder of the A.I. firm Anthropic, at the presentation of the encyclical on Monday rightly raised eyebrows. (Imagine if Leo XIII had invited John D. Rockefeller to hear him speak on the dignity of labor!)
For those of us who see the rise of A.I. as unambiguously evil, Leo’s emphasis on its ethical use is a nonstarter. He seems to underestimate A.I.’s ability to exacerbate existing crises and to accelerate processes of cheapening and redefinition. The encyclical says nothing, for example, about how A.I. abets the replacement of medicine as a humanistic profession with an algorithmic conception of health care justified by the language of “access.”
In perhaps the most telling passage, Leo contrasts the dangers of a myopic, self-aggrandizing “idealism” with what he calls “authentic realism,” a clearheaded outlook that “does not give up on changing the world” but rather, “by clearly identifying interests, fears, constraints and power dynamics,” is able to “determine what can be achieved, and the measures needed to achieve it.” (This, perhaps, is an implicit rebuke to technophobic critics.)
The pope’s sanguine attitude should not surprise anyone who is familiar with his personality. Unlike Francis, a well-known Luddite, Leo is an internet user, a quaint phrase that describes roughly six billion of us.
What might be possible:
For years now I have believed that, in the face of the technological destruction of human relationships, literacy and contemplation, the church may well become the only guardian of humanistic values, even for secular people. But it will not fulfill this role by publishing encyclicals or issuing sterner disciplinary measures, but simply by staying true to itself.
Catholics are able to bear witness not only to the power and beauty of holiness but also to forgotten habits, practices and values, to the importance of craftsmanship and deliberation, to the past as a worthy and even delightful object of study rather than a catalog of forgotten barbarisms. They are able to present truth as something immutable and transcendent rather than contingent and self-constructed, and to speak to the value of liberality, magnanimity, filial piety and countless other shabby neglected virtues.
How exactly the church’s message will reach a distracted world is unclear. But it will almost certainly not be a top-down endeavor, dependent upon the actions or personal charisma of a pope. What seems more likely is that in the decades to come we will see the emergence of a distinctly Christian cultural movement that defies standard political categories but is united against technological utilitarianism and the subsuming of human life into digital frameworks.
At the heart of this resistance, I suspect, will be the Mass. With its grand symbolic gestures, its hieratic language and profound silences, the liturgy exists outside the framework of ordinary human experience and even of time itself. The sacraments are impervious to technological improvement.
There's more at the link.
R.I.P. Sonny Rollins - September 7, 1930 - May 25, 2026
Jazz Video Guy (Brett Primack):
Rollins sits at the intersection of two things that rarely coexist: absolute technical mastery and genuine spontaneous risk-taking. Most musicians have one or the other. He had both, and he used them in a way that reshaped what jazz improvisation could be.
The core contribution is what's called "thematic improvisation." Where most bebop players treated a song's melody as a launching pad — state the head, then depart into harmonic territory — Rollins kept circling back to the thematic material itself. He'd take a fragment of a melody and develop it the way a composer would, spinning variations, inverting it, stretching it rhythmically, then bringing it back transformed. A Rollins solo has an architectural logic to it. It feels inevitable in retrospect.
He also expanded the harmonic vocabulary of the saxophone without abandoning swing. His sound was enormous — a rough, almost vocal quality — and he could play "outside" harmonically while still making you tap your foot. That's harder than it sounds.
The trio recordings without piano, especially "Way Out West" and "Freedom Suite" (1958), were genuinely radical. Removing the chordal instrument forced both Rollins and the listener to reimagine where harmony lives in jazz. Bass and drums suddenly became structural, not just rhythmic support. That influenced a generation of players and opened the door to the free jazz experiments that followed.
Then there's the Williamsburg Bridge period (1959-1961), when he withdrew from performing to practice on the bridge in the middle of the night. He came back with "The Bridge" (1962) and demonstrated that a major artist could step away, reassess, and return with something new rather than coast on reputation. That act of self-criticism at the height of his fame meant something to other musicians.
He also bridged swing and post-bop without breaking stride. He'd played with Miles, Monk, the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet — he'd absorbed all of it and kept moving. His longevity (still performing into his eighties) and consistency are part of the argument too.
The short version: Rollins proved that jazz improvisation could be compositionally intelligent without losing its immediacy.
Monday, May 25, 2026
The old religion (Christianity) vs. the new (A.I.)
David Streitfeld, As A.I. Fever Rises in Silicon Valley, Pope Leo Has a Few Words, NYTimes, May 25, 2026.
A dozen paragraphs or so into the article:
Magnifica Humanitas arrives as a challenge to tech moguls like Mr. Musk, whose power and influence rival such medieval popes as Innocent III. Pope Innocent asserted that the papacy was the sun and mere kings the moon: The latter could not be seen without the light cast by the former.
Love ’em or hate ’em, Mr. Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and their peers exert similar influence on our modern kings, which is to say politicians. The American economy is being propped up by spending on A.I. The technology is being deployed in offices and classrooms with dizzying speed and unknown effect.
The old religion challenging the new is a dramatic story, the stuff of thrillers.
Silicon Valley has encountered little public opposition in its 50-year history. Certainly nothing with the sweep and authority of Magnifica Humanitas. Pope Leo is the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics, and instructing them to be cautious or even suspicious of A.I. — especially if the warning is regularly reinforced among the laity — could put a dent in tech’s global ambitions.
“How much influence does the pope have in our secular Western world?” asked Timothy Ahn, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, studying the development of A.I. in religious institutions. “We’re about to see. I doubt that tech executives in Palo Alto are going to be reading this encyclical.”
In the best-case scenario, said Mr. Ahn, a former seminarian, the encyclical “will shape some moral deliberations.”
Popes have traditionally worked with the long term in mind, and any evaluation of the encyclical’s effect is years away. Those who know both Silicon Valley and the Vatican say any expectations of a head-on confrontation, much less a holy war, are misguided. A decade ago, Pope Francis began inviting tech luminaries in for an annual A.I. conference called the Minerva Dialogues.
In any case, if Leo confronted Silicon Valley outright, he would probably lose.
The fact that the Vatican unveiled the encyclical with Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, the self-styled “good” A.I. firm, pointed to the possibility that Leo is trying less to undermine A.I. than simply participate in the conversation around it. When Francis released his scathing encyclical about climate change in 2015, no oil company executives were invited to speak.
The new religion of A.I.:
Mr. Thiel, the tech investor, gives lectures about the Antichrist, which he says has arrived in the form of environmentalists. A former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, set up a church in 2017 to “promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence,” closed it and then opened it again in 2023.
Mr. Levandowski, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google but was pardoned by Mr. Trump, was ahead of his time. A.I. is now widely seen in tech and tech-sympathetic circles as quasi-divine.
Market share:
Whatever ethical and humanist reasons Pope Leo has to protest A.I., he also needs to defend his market share, much the way Walmart had to defend itself against the upstart Amazon.
The tech world’s initial reaction to the encyclical was muted on the holiday weekend. Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, recirculated it to his millions of followers on X.
For all the noise over religion in Silicon Valley, Leo doesn’t have many faithful there. A character on the satirical show “Silicon Valley” once joked that Christianity was “borderline illegal” in the tech community, although the reality is more complicated.
Is it too late? The article concludes with an observation by Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard:
“The pope is really doing the Lord’s work here, and I say that as an atheist. There are so few institutions left on planet Earth that have the gravitas, the strength, the communal network to take on this phenomenon, which is trying to become inevitable and superhuman.” [...]
“Big Tech is essentially its own religion with its own theology and rites, not to mention its own power and influence,” Mr. Epstein said. “Pope Leo’s encyclical will be automatically viewed as false doctrine.”
Yes. But Silicon Valley does not yet rule the world. And lots of people are becoming wary of A.I.
There's more at the link.
Meta-level note: The New York Times is giving this encyclical a LOT of coverage today.
Pope Leo presents Magnifica Humanitas while standing next to a tech founder
Motoko Rich and Elisabetta Povoledo, Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical, NYTimes, May 25, 2026.
Leo’s declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to “all people of good will” that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.
This, obviously, is a political move. And it makes sense that Anthropic would be chosen to represent the AI industry. For one thing, recent events in the United States (I’m thinking of the contretemps with the Pentagon) have pushed it onto the stage ahead of OpenAI. Then we have machines, that it’s founders split from OpenAI because they felt that OpenAI had lost sight of it’s mission, to develop “safe” AI. Finally, Chris Olah is one of the original researchers in mechanistic interpretability. On the other hand, from my point of view, Anthropic seems no less vulnerable to hubristic overreach than any other AI company. Despite the “feel good” nature of Dario Amodei’s essay, Machines of Loving Grace, his statement from February, 2026, that AGI is imminent, late 2026 or 2027, is not evidence of epistemic humility.
The article foes on:
While emphasizing that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he wrote that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.”
Among other things, Leo called for:
- government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I.
- protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened
- education to help students think critically about the technology
- action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I.
- safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons.
Above all he emphasized the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all human beings. “A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment,” he said.
“This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,” he added.
Some background on the encyclical:
Although Leo publicly presented his encyclical on Monday, he formally signed it on May 15, the 135th anniversary of the publication of “Rerum Novarum,” — or “Of New Things” in English — a major encyclical written in 1891 by his namesake, Leo XIII.
The pope’s encyclical was timed to prompt comparisons with that earlier document, which guided Catholic teaching on how to protect workers after the technological and industrial disruptions of the 19th century.
Written amid the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, “Rerum Novarum” sought to safeguard the rights and dignity of the working class and became one of the foundational texts of modern Catholic social teaching. It called on governments to “save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money making,” even as it praised the “discoveries of science.”
In the new encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” Leo struck a similar tone, warning of the new threat to workers posed by artificial intelligence.
Work, he wrote, is more than a way of earning income, but “a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment.” He called for “the protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual.”
Leo expressed concern at how emerging A.I. tools might take over many routine tasks and jobs, implicitly devaluing those who do not have the training or ability to perform the work that remains available to humans. Leo wrote of the importance of preserving human dignity and warned of the “insidious” ideology that “suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective.”
Do I detect an opening for Homo ludens? The document also warns about the development of A.I. for wartime use.
Going on:
Although the encyclical includes significant references to scripture and religious teachings, the document in many ways reads like a policy paper from a think tank or a lawmaker.
Hmmm....
Will the document have any effect on the tech industry?
Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University in Northern California, said some technology leaders “will have to take it seriously in a sense,” partly because it provides them with “a moral imperative.”
Writing in the encyclical, the pope recognized the autonomy of governments and private companies. The church, he said, “does not claim to supplant the responsibilities of politics or institutions, but offers itself as a foundation,” urging other institutions to “recognize and promote whatever serves the dignity of persons, the vitality of communities and the common good.”
Others said that an encyclical’s primary targets are the clergy and the faithful.
“I don’t think the ‘tech bros’ in Silicon Valley will listen that much,” said Prof. Noreen Herzfeld, director of a program on technology and ethics at St. John’s School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, Minn. “But I think within the church, it will be there as a reference for priests and bishops and particularly for those of us who are educating seminarians or young people.”
I agree with Herzfeld. I doubt that the tech bros care about anything other than money, power, and (personal) glory.
There's more at the link. You can read or download Magnifica Humanitas here.
ADDENDUM: That is to say, the generous, altruistic, and even utopian statements by powerful techbros may be grounded in sincere intentions. But the business environment in which they operate negates those intentions. Furthermore, consider AI Doomers. OpenAI, after all, was founded out of fear of AI Doom. The founders of Anthropic left OpenAI because they felt OpenAI had all but abandoned its commitment to “safe” AI. But just what is their commitment to safety? Well, sure, yes, they’ve held back Mythos from general release.
But they’re continuing on toward Mount AGI, followed by ASI, though they fear/know there’s a possibility of Doom ahead. Why? “Because we’ve got to beat the Chinese”, that’s why. Give me a break. More and more I’m thinking that AI Doom is a way to square the ethical circle, to have your cake and eat it too, to continuing developing AI while knowing that it will likely cause tremendous disruption in the lives of OTHERS, but not the developers, not the developers, who’ll be sitting fat and sassy behind the walls of their gated communities.
Sunday, May 24, 2026
Jaron Lanier talks sense about AI with Neil deGrasse Tyson [Homo Ludens]
YouTube:
There Is No AI Really (It’s Just People), with Jaron Lanier
Is the internet too far gone or can we still fix it? Neil deGrasse Tyson, and co-hosts Negin Farsad and Gary O’Reilly, sit down with Jaron Lanier, computer scientist, and father of virtual reality, to diagnose what went wrong with the web, how it’s changed with AI, and ideas for a new path back.
Learn about Jaron’s initial dream behind virtual reality and why it's been a commercial disappointment. Why does VR make some people sick? We break down why VR didn’t take off like he had hoped. Are lawsuits the way of beating social media addiction?
We discuss social media and the mathematical force at the heart of the internet's dysfunction: the network effect. Lanier explains how low-friction digital networks inevitably centralize power, concentrate wealth, and reward the loudest voices. What does a media-addicted personality look like? Is everyone vulnerable? We discuss the dominant business model in Silicon Valley, how it taps into the fight or flight response, and how it contributes to the internet we have today.
Can the internet be saved? We explore alternative business models and address the tech oligarchs who appeared on the U.S. presidential inauguration stage, and that the current wave of public discontent may be the beginning of a real correction. How does AI contribute to the problems of today’s internet? We talk about the problems with mythologizing AI and take it out of its black box. We explore his concept of "data dignity" — the idea that data originates with people, and should be compensated as such. Plus we address the difficulty with privacy and that maybe outlawing predicting human behavior.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction: Jaron Lanier
06:17 - The Thinking Behind Virtual Reality
08:33 - Why VR Flopped
16:57 - Social Media Addiction Lawsuits
21:42 - The Social Media Addicted Personality
22:42 - The Internet’s Business Model
30:28 - Is Social Media Equally Bad for Everyone?
36:22 - AI’s Changes to the Internet
38:39 - Stop Mythologizing AI
43:30 - There Is No AI
52:24 - Data Dignity & Inventing a New Jobs Under AI
58:19 - Why Privacy is Difficult
01:06:20 - Is the Internet Toast?
01:08:28 - Everyone’s Suing AI
01:10:54 - Closing Thoughts
LLMs can't distinguish between what they know and where they're guessing
But then how could they possibly know that?
Google just figured out why AI lies with confidence.
— AlphaSignal AI (@AlphaSignalAI) May 23, 2026
Large language models still make confident mistakes on simple factual questions.
A new paper from Google Research explains why this keeps happening.
Models cannot reliably tell what they know from what they are guessing.… pic.twitter.com/CXPpQwqzfr
Tyler Cowen on Robert Wright’s The God Test
Here’s Cowen’s post in full, but without the internal links:
The subtitle is Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, due out June 23.
In the first chapter, Wright summarizes four of his perspectives, these are my paraphrases of his pp.5-6:
1. When it comes to AI, we should be somewhere on the awe spectrum.
2. We can create a future where the upside of AI far outweights the downside, though that involves steering human understanding toward the better side of the awe spectrum.
3. A major reorientation of human thought is required, and right now few people seem inclined to do that.
4. The worldviews of the current AI acclerationists and also doomers are not cosmic enough.
It is a good time for this book to be published, and I agree with much more of it than I disagree with. My main difference is that I am more focused on very small things — such as Rainier cherries and the forthcoming three to four hour Apichatpong movie — than on cosmic awe per se. For better or worse, I was not born with those genes, and unlike Wright I am far from Buddhism. I do think there will be a transformation of “observed awe,” and I am somewhat worried that it will not go well. Will we be good at building a fairly new world, if not from scratch, on the basis of some new premises about what is possible and what is not? I will in any case interpret the pending transformation through a Straussian lens, namely thinking that a lot of the observed transformation of awe will be about something other than what people are claiming. It will be about people arguing over relative status, but under different guises. Not as tasty as a good Rainier cherry, but interesting to follow as well.
But are we still good at steering and evolving grand visions? Christianity and the Enlightenment are a hard act to follow.
Here’s the comment I posted in reply:
I’ve been following Wright for years, from back when he was writing for The New Republic (and was even the (acting?) editor for minute). I’ve read NonZero and sorta’ like it. As for AI, what I think is that we need to get over the awe spectrum. Only then will we be able to steer human understanding into the “cosmic” implications of AI.
What do I mean by that? Well there’s this article I published in 3 Quarks Daily, Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted. The first three arenas: 1) inanimate matter, 2) life, 3) human culture. The fourth arena arises through the interaction of humans and AIs. As for what that might be like, this working paper gives a hint of that: Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, A Working Paper. That title, the part before the colon, is derived from Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, which is set in New York City in 2140, after global climate change. I’m taking a look at the world 10 years later, from the point of view of Kisangani, which is in the heart of the Congo Basin.
I’ll be interested to see just what Wright has to say about the awe spectrum. As for Christianity, I believe that Pope Leo XIV will be issuing an encyclical on Labor Day, Magnifica Humanitas, which will be directed at AI.
I’ve had my own experience with some of the outer reaches of the awe spectrum, at least that’s what I think it is, and I’ve recounted them in various places, most recently in this long post at 3 Quarks Daily, Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?, where I place those encounters in a more extensive life context. But I’d be a bit surprised if my use of the word (“awe”) is quite the same as Wright’s.
Come to think of it, Cowen’s penultimate line is critical: “But are we still good at steering and evolving grand visions?” At the moment we don’t have one. Oh, the AI hypsters and the transhumanists have “big” ideas. But they’re short in the vision category.
* * * * *
In this intriguing but unconvincing treatise, journalist Wright (Why Buddhism Is True) argues that the decisions humans make now about AI “could put us on the path to irreversible dystopia, even catastrophe—or, alternatively, the path to a world much better than the world we have now.” He describes the fears of “AI doomers,” citing how AI models consistently choose harm over failure (Anthropic’s Claude, for example, attempted blackmail to evade being shut down) and their ability to deploy deception to meet goals (OpenAI’s GPT-4 convinced people online it wasn’t a robot to get them to respond to CAPTCHA challenges on its behalf). Wright builds on priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion that technology links human minds into the noosphere, a global network of thought, to demonstrate that AI might well lead to a worldwide authoritarian state overseen by power-hungry human actors or by AI itself. Despite such dangers, Wright is cautiously optimistic that people can avert a frightening future by practicing cognitive empathy, pushing back against tribalism, and working to create a true global community. “Shared trepidation,” he says, “can foster cooperation.” Throughout, Wright offers an accessible overview of the transformative power of AI, but his solutions for combatting its potentially catastrophic effects are overly simplistic. Readers seeking concrete solutions will be disappointed.
Saturday, May 23, 2026
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.
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