Hot reflections in Lower Manhattan

The Greatest Night in Pop [Media Notes 132]

The Greatest Night in Pop (2024) is a documentary about making “We Are the World” in 1985. Harry Belafonte initiated the project in December of 1984 and it was recorded a month later between January 22 and 28 of 1985.

From Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert:

After that kind-of-generic VH1 intro segment, when everyone gets to the studio, “The Greatest Night in Pop” lives up to its potential. There’s tons of footage from the night and some great trivia, much of it shared by participants like Sheila E., Bruce Springsteen, Huey Lewis, and Smokey Robinson, who reveals how he talked Jackson out of some bad lyric changes because he was one of the people not scared to stand up to the King of Pop. From Richie’s eating habits to Dylan’s apprehension at the vocal range to changing lyrics in the moment, those who love music process docs will be enraptured. Music bio-docs may be running out of steam, but “The Greatest Night in Pop” works by being specific and enlightening.

Richard Roeper, The Chicago Sun-Times:

With Quincy Jones producing and a handwritten sign saying, “CHECK YOUR EGO AT THE DOOR,” the 46-member super-group knocked out the song over the course of eight hours.

It’s great fun to hear Dionne Warwick’s honey-coated voice meshing with Willie Nelson’s raw but still smooth vocals and to see how Wonder used his incredible mimicry skills to show Bob Dylan how Dylan could contribute his lines. [...]

Looking back all these years later, it’s something of a miracle that, in the days before texts and emails, when you had to communicate by fax and messenger and landline phone calls, so many performers who were used to being the biggest star in the room agreed to get together on relatively short notice and figure out a path to record one of the most impactful singles in music history.

Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson wrote the tune in record time, but, as I’ve already said, the project was initiated by Harry Belafonte. Thus it was only fitting that in the middle of the recording session Al Jarreau starting singing “Banana Boat Song (Day O),” the 1956 hit that made Belafonte a star. Everyone joined in and sang along with him. For me, that was the hit of the evening, perhaps because I remember Belefonte from my childhood. When it came time for Bob Dylan to sing his solo part, they cleared the studio so he could do it without onlookers. This film has many such details.

Evaluating the World Model Implicit in a Generative Model

Keyon Vafa, Justin Y. Chen, Jon Kleinberg, Sendhil Mullainathan, Ashesh Rambachan, Evaluating the World Model Implicit in a Generative Model, arXiv:2406.03689v1. 

Abstract: Recent work suggests that large language models may implicitly learn world models. How should we assess this possibility? We formalize this question for the case where the underlying reality is governed by a deterministic finite automaton. This includes problems as diverse as simple logical reasoning, geographic navigation, game-playing, and chemistry. We propose new evaluation metrics for world model recovery inspired by the classic Myhill-Nerode theorem from language theory. We illustrate their utility in three domains: game playing, logic puzzles, and navigation. In all domains, the generative models we consider do well on existing diagnostics for assessing world models, but our evaluation metrics reveal their world models to be far less coherent than they appear. Such incoherence creates fragility: using a generative model to solve related but subtly different tasks can lead it to fail badly. Building generative models that meaningfully capture the underlying logic of the domains they model would be immensely valuable; our results suggest new ways to assess how close a given model is to that goal.

What LLMs can and can't do

He also builds his own ideas, which feature minor original inventions. Like this "jeep" which has a spare tire on the back -- not something he saw in any official set. Lego is the best toy ever by the way pic.twitter.com/MtBAZbYy5M

— François Chollet (@fchollet) June 22, 2024

There is no AI system today that can invent and assemble its own Lego car after having seen only a handful of Lego sets in total.

And that's why it makes no sense to me when people say that LLMs have "the intelligence of a high-schooler".

When it comes to knowledge, a LLM has…

— François Chollet (@fchollet) June 22, 2024

Another Diebenkorn photo, my first

Almost two weeks ago I posted a photo that I’d entitled “Diebenkorn on the table-top.” It was shot looking through two screen-covered windows taken from a camera resting on the top of a table (where I was having breakfast). Richard Diebenkorn was not a photographer. He was a painter who worked mostly in the San Francisco Bay area. I became acquainted with his work in the Summer of 2004 when I was in Chicago. I was there to give a keynote address for the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS), but I also took a bunch of photographs of Millennium Park, which had just opened. Since the Art Institute of Chicago was nearby, I visited it. That’s where I became acquainted with Diebenkorn.

I took this photograph while standing in the garage beneath Millennium Park, which is built over a garage and railroad yards. I didn’t have a car, but I went down into the garage more or less so I could take photos like this. When I got that photo out of my camera, I said to myself: “That looks like a Diebenkorn.” It still does, as does that previous photo. They’re of very different subjects, but, when flatted out, their compositions resemble Diebenkorn’s composition.

Scaling the size of LLMs yields sharply diminishing persuasive returns

We find that:

➡️ current frontier models (GPT-4, Claude-3) are barely more persuasive than models smaller in size by an order of magnitude or more, and

➡️ mere task completion (coherence, staying on topic) appears to account for larger models' persuasive advantage.

— Kobi Hackenburg (@KobiHackenburg) June 21, 2024

Improvisation and Ives || Fascinating discussion! [American music]

From the YouTube page:

The second installment of the Society's popular series of panels about Charles Ives, All the Way Around and Back! This very entertaining conversation features an in-depth look at the fascinating and even surprising convergences between the music and influence of Charles Ives and the history and current practice of jazz, big band, blues, rock, film music, and pop. Moderated by Judith Tick, the panel includes Jack Cooper, Bill Frisell, Eric Hofbauer, Ethan Iverson, Phil Lesh and David Sanford.

If you don't want to listen to the whole interview, which is a bit over two hours, start at about 1:33:19 where they play "The Alcotts" from Ive's Concord Sonata. Then listen to the conversation that follows, that ranges from Ives through Beethoven, Keith Jarrett, and John Williams, to parlor piano, on to Thelonious Monk and then to being a church organist, as Ives had been.

Friday Fotos: Chicago, Summer 2004

I bought my first camera, a Canon Powershot A75, to take photos of Chicago's Millennium Park, which had opened in the summer of 2004. But I also took photos of Chicago. These are some of those Chicago shots, though one of the structures in the park is just visible left of center in the background of the second photo.

Oppenheimer [Media Notes 131]

I didn’t see Oppenheimer when it was in theaters, but I’ve just watched it on Amazon. Was it a tad long, at 180 minutes? Possibly. The texture reminded me a bit of Maestro, moving between color and black-and-white, with vision/dream sequences, and quick movement between scenes. I note, however, that while Maestro moved chronologically, Oppenheimer moved around in time, with a security hearing from 1954 functioning as a temporal focal point. Most of the action takes place before that point, but there is a bit after.

Mostly, however, I was struck by rough parallels between events in the film and current controversies about AI. On the one hand there is the theme of existential threat. Creating massive destruction, obviously, is the point of building an atomic bomb. Beyond that, however, Edward Teller had done some preliminary calculations that suggested an atomic explosion might set the atmosphere on fire and thus destroy all life on earth. In the case of AI, I believe that the threat of a rogue AI dominating earth is mostly projective fantasy, leakage from the (Freudian) unconscious world into the public sphere.

Such leakage does, however, lead to a lot of interpersonal jockeying for position and recognition. In the case of the film, the major jockeying is between Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss, a major bureaucrat in the government security apparatus, but there’s enough to spread around among a half-dozen to a dozen characters. In this scrum technical and scientific questions become inextricably intertwined with policy and security. The same thing is now happening in AI. The technical and scientific questions are obscure, more so than in the case of the atomic bomb. That obscurity means that those issues will inevitably mix with the questions of social policy and security that are also in play. Everyone who’s visible enough to be mentioned in The New York Times seems to be making a play for the history books. Billions of dollars are being wagered in the process. And you can watch it play out in real-time on X.

It’s crazy. 

I mean, sure, yeah, social forces, whatever. But the insecurities of powerful men, what a trip. Yikes!

Pixar's "Inside Out 2" is helping autistic people understand their emotions

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Negation via "not" in the brain and behavior

Two related articles about negation, courtesy of Victor Mair at Language Log:

Coopmans CW, Mai A, Martin AE (2024) “Not” in the brain and behavior. PLoS Biol 22(5): e3002656. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002656

Negation is key for cognition but has no physical basis, raising questions about its neural origins. A new study in PLOS Biology on the negation of scalar adjectives shows that negation acts in part by altering the response to the adjective it negates.

Language fundamentally abstracts from what is observable in the environment, and it does so often in ways that are difficult to see without careful analysis. Consider a child annoying their sibling by holding their finger very close to the sibling’s arm. If asked what they were doing, the child would likely say, “I’m not touching them.” Here, the distinction between the physical environment and the abstraction of negation is thrown into relief. Although “not touching” is consistent with the situation, “not touching” is not literally what one observes because an absence is definitionally something that is not there. The sibling’s annoyance speaks to the actual situation: A finger is very close to their arm. This kind of scenario illustrates how natural language negation is truly a product of the human brain, abstracting away from physical conditions in the world

And here is the study:

Zuanazzi A, Ripollés P, Lin WM, Gwilliams L, King J-R, Poeppel D (2024) Negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives. PLoS Biol 22(5): e3002622. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002622

Abstract: Combinatoric linguistic operations underpin human language processes, but how meaning is composed and refined in the mind of the reader is not well understood. We address this puzzle by exploiting the ubiquitous function of negation. We track the online effects of negation (“not”) and intensifiers (“really”) on the representation of scalar adjectives (e.g., “good”) in parametrically designed behavioral and neurophysiological (MEG) experiments. The behavioral data show that participants first interpret negated adjectives as affirmative and later modify their interpretation towards, but never exactly as, the opposite meaning. Decoding analyses of neural activity further reveal significant above chance decoding accuracy for negated adjectives within 600 ms from adjective onset, suggesting that negation does not invert the representation of adjectives (i.e., “not bad” represented as “good”); furthermore, decoding accuracy for negated adjectives is found to be significantly lower than that for affirmative adjectives. Overall, these results suggest that negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives. This putative suppression mechanism of negation is supported by increased synchronization of beta-band neural activity in sensorimotor areas. The analysis of negation provides a steppingstone to understand how the human brain represents changes of meaning over time.

I've not yet read the articles, but the issue has bothered me for a long time. Why? Because, to quote: "Negation is key for cognition but has no physical basis, raising questions about its neural origins."

Higher-order interactions in coupled dynamical systems

Higher-order interactions in dynamical systemshttps://t.co/kgc1A64lBg pic.twitter.com/pGrazogLvo

— Luiz Pessoa (@PessoaBrain) June 20, 2024

Flowers and the street [alliums, lilacs, irises]

How an infant investigates a banana [left and right]

The infant’s mother has cut a banana in half, and then sliced one of the halves lengthwise. She then places the two slices flat-side down on the tray in front of her infant.

Me and banana 🍌 #shorts #shortvideo #babyalex https://t.co/TeWxUWaJpT via @YouTube

— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) June 19, 2024

Three things interest me about what the infant does:

1. While it is able to grab a banana slice and move it around on the tray, it can’t get its fingers around it in order to pick it up. So, mother turns one piece over and places it back on the tray.
   
2. Now the infant manages to grab that piece with its right hand. Notice, though, when it finally manages to pick it up, it’s not looking at its hand. It appears to be looking at mama. That action is guided entirely by touch and movement.
   
3. After it has brought the banana to its mouth and managed to at least taste it a bit, what does it do? After it visually inspects the banana a bit, it moves its left had toward the banana and touches the tip with its left index finger.

That last item is what interests me most. I believe that it isn’t until about six months that infants are able to coordinate the right and left halves of their body in the same space. Before that time, the left and right hands, in effect, don’t “know” about one another. So, when the infant touches the banana with its left hand, it’s making sure that the banana is at the same position in space for both hands. 

NOTE: Remember that the two halves of the body are controlled by the opposite halves of the brain. The right half of the body is controlled by the left half of the brain, and vice versa. While the two halves of the brain certainly communicate with one another through the corpus callosum, a bundle of the 200-300 million neurons, they are not a continuous field. They’ve got to ‘learn’ about one another.

Language is primarily for communication, not thinking

Fedorenko, E., Piantadosi, S.T. & Gibson, E.A.F. Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought. Nature 630, 575–586 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07522-w

Abstract: Language is a defining characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions, that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking. We begin by introducing the brain network that supports linguistic ability in humans. We then review evidence for a double dissociation between language and thought, and discuss several properties of language that suggest that it is optimized for communication. We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.

Carl Zimmer has an article about this in the NYTimes. After giving some background, specifically noting we have a language network in the brain that's distinct from other networks:

The researchers then scanned the same people as they performed different kinds of thinking, such as solving a puzzle. “Other regions in the brain are working really hard when you’re doing all these forms of thinking,” she said. But the language networks stayed quiet. “It became clear that none of those things seem to engage language circuits,” she said.

In a paper published Wednesday in Nature, Dr. Fedorenko and her colleagues argued that studies of people with brain injuries point to the same conclusion.

Strokes and other forms of brain damage can wipe out the language network, leaving people struggling to process words and grammar, a condition known as aphasia. But scientists have discovered that people can still do algebra and play chess even with aphasia. In experiments, people with aphasia can look at two numbers — 123 and 321, say — and recognize that, by using the same pattern, 456 should be followed by 654.

If language is not essential for thought, then what is language for? Communication, Dr. Fedorenko and her colleagues argue. Dr. Chomsky and other researchers have rejected that idea, pointing out the ambiguity of words and the difficulty of expressing our intuitions out loud. “The system is not well designed in many functional respects,” Dr. Chomsky once said.

Zimmer's article links to a number of other studies.

Wiser Than Me [Media Notes 130]

A bit over a week ago I posted the conversation Julia Louis-Dryfus had with Carol Burnett (91). Now I’m posting her conversation with Jane Fonda (86):

On the premiere episode of Wiser Than Me, Julia sits down with the one and only Jane Fonda. With a career spanning over six decades, Jane – now 85 years old – hits all the highlights: staying fit at any age, fantasizing about funerals, getting heckled on set by Katharine Hepburn…and something about a fake thumb.

I’ve since watched some other podcasts in her Wiser Than Me podcast series: Diane von Furstenberg (77), Amy Tan (72), Sally Field (77), Gloria Steinem (90), and Debbie Allen (74). I list the ages because that’s one of the first questions Louis-Dreyfus asks her interlocutor, “Are you comfortable if I say you real age?” FWIW Louis-Dreyfus is currently 63. All of the conversations so far have been wonderful, some more wonderful than others, but all wonderful. But I’m not going to binge the rest. I need to dole them out sparingly to make them last.

As for wisdom, that’s tricky. It’s always held a somewhat mysterious, even mystical, quality for me, yet the dictionary definition is straight-forward: “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment.” Do I qualify? I’ve certainly got experience and knowledge, good judgement? Not so sure. When I was much younger, too young to be in the running for wisdom, I found this well-known statement by George Bernard-Shaw in Man and Superman: “If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.” The thing about the wisdom in these podcasts is that so much of it sounds humble and straightforward, nothing with even a whiff of “the sound of one hand clapping” mystique. And yet it all rings true, at least to this (I hate to say it) old man. They should know. They’ve lived it.

Here's a section from a recent interview Lulu Garcia-Navarro conducted with Louis-Dreyfus in The New York Times Magazine (June 8, 2024):

I recently heard an episode of “Wiser Than Me” in which you interviewed Patti Smith, and you talked about the different ways that you’ve processed the death of people in your own life. Have the conversations you’ve been having on your podcast helped you process the many ways people deal with the hard things in their life? Yeah, it’s really one of the many impetuses to making this podcast, because all of these women I’m talking to have lived very full, long lives. And that of course means they’ve experienced loss. And I’m really interested to talk to them about how they move beyond it or with it or into it. I’m just loving those conversations, to hear from these women who have experienced an enormous amount of life.

I find what’s comforting about them, and sometimes a little depressing, is how many of the same themes — sexism, prejudice, self-doubt — they have experienced themselves. What is your takeaway from hearing these women having gone through so many of the things that we’re still going through? There’s a sense with most of them, not everybody, but there’s a sense of, OK, I’m done with that [expletive]. I don’t know if we can swear.

You can swear. But anyway, I’m done with that. I’m done with self-doubt. I’m done with shame. I’m done with feeling weird about being ambitious. You know, the list is long. We all know what it is. I think for me, the takeaway is: Oh, we can be done with that sooner than we thought. We don’t have to take 60, 70 [expletive] years to come to that conclusion.

What are you done with? I’m done with [pause] — I’m working on being done with self-doubt. I’m working on being done with shame. And I’m working really hard on finding joy.

I like the way you paused and really thought about your wording, because you said, “I’m done with,” and then you said, “I’m working on being done with … ” Well, I haven’t accomplished all of this yet! Old habits die hard.

SPANG!

The Lives of Literary Characters [digital humanities #DH]

Come contribute one of the final annotations to our Citizen Science project on "The Lives of Literary Characters." Over 80,000 annotations to date on character relationships and identities. https://t.co/YDrPPeFHSW pic.twitter.com/DlCLNQPFcI

— Andrew Piper (@_akpiper) June 17, 2024

From the project site:

The goal of this project is to generate knowledge about the behaviour of literary characters at large scale and make this data openly available to the public. Characters are the scaffolding of great storytelling. This Zooniverse project will allow us to crowdsource data to train AI models to better understand who characters are and what they do within diverse narrative worlds to help answer one very big question: why do human beings tell stories?

In the nineteenth-century heyday of the novel, there were over 1.5 million literary characters invented just in English alone. Today, with the continued growth of literary markets around the world and the explosion of creative writing on the internet through fan communities, that number is orders of magnitude higher.

How on earth can we possibly understand all of this creativity?

This is where you, the reader, come in. We need your help to build better, more transparent AI models to understand human storytelling. To be clear: our goal is not to build AI to generate stories or create smarter chatbots. Our aim is fundamentally academic: we want to develop models to help us understand stories and thus learn more about this essential human activity. Most AI development is happening inside of black boxes behind closed doors. Our models will be open to the public as will all of the annotations made by readers like you. You are a key participant in how we will understand the future of stories.

There's much more HERE.

Social bonding in the brain

Here's a news article summarizing the article: Brain’s Social Bonding Mechanism Unveiled. The original research:

Jun Kunimatsu, Hidetoshi Amita, and Okihide Hikosaka, Neuronal response of the primate striatum tail to face of socially familiar persons, iScience, May 22, 2024DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.110043

Highlights

• Neurons in the striatum tail strongly respond to socially familiar faces
  
• The face-responsive neurons in the striatum tail encode long-term object value
  
• Strength of social familiarity and object value coding are positively correlated
  
• Social familiarity and object value information may be mediated by a common mechanism

Summary

 Recent studies have suggested that the basal ganglia, the center of stimulus-reward associative learning, are involved in social behavior. However, the role of the basal ganglia in social information processing remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate that the striatum tail (STRt) in macaque monkeys, which is sensitive to visual objects with long-term reward history (i.e., stable object value), is also sensitive to socially familiar persons. Many STRt neurons responded to face images of persons, especially those who took daily care of the subject monkeys. These face-responsive neurons also encoded stable object value. The strength of the neuronal modulation of social familiarity and stable object value biases were positively correlated. These results suggest that both social familiarity and stable object value information are mediated by a common neuronal mechanism. Thus, the representation of social information is linked to reward information in the STRt, not in the dedicated social information circuit.

Emergence and computation [separation and mixing of scales | lumpability]

Fernando E. Rosas, Bernhard C. Geiger, Andrea I Luppi, Anil K. Seth, Daniel Polani, Michael Gastpar, Pedro A.M. Mediano, Software in the natural world: A computational approach to hierarchical emergence, arXiv:2402.09090v2

Abstract: Understanding the functional architecture of complex systems is crucial to illuminate their inner workings and enable effective methods for their prediction and control. Recent advances have introduced tools to characterise emergent macroscopic levels; however, while these approaches are successful in identifying when emergence takes place, they are limited in the extent they can determine how it does. Here we address this limitation by developing a computational approach to emergence, which characterises macroscopic processes in terms of their computational capabilities. Concretely, we articulate a view on emergence based on how software works, which is rooted on a mathematical formalism that articulates how macroscopic processes can express self-contained informational, interventional, and computational properties. This framework establishes a hierarchy of nested self-contained processes that determines what computations take place at what level, which in turn delineates the functional architecture of a complex system. This approach is illustrated on paradigmatic models from the statistical physics and computational neuroscience literature, which are shown to exhibit macroscopic processes that are akin to software in human-engineered systems. Overall, this framework enables a deeper understanding of the multi-level structure of complex systems, revealing specific ways in which they can be efficiently simulated, predicted, and controlled.

Five flowers, four kinds, for Tuesday [88°]

Creativity Has Left the Chat [How could it be otherwise? Alignment is always the enemy of creativity.]

Behnam Mohammadi, Creativity Has Left the Chat: The Price of Debiasing Language Models, arXiv:2406.05587 [cs.CL]

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing but can exhibit biases and may generate toxic content. While alignment techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) reduce these issues, their impact on creativity, defined as syntactic and semantic diversity, remains unexplored. We investigate the unintended consequences of RLHF on the creativity of LLMs through three experiments focusing on the Llama-2 series. Our findings reveal that aligned models exhibit lower entropy in token predictions, form distinct clusters in the embedding space, and gravitate towards "attractor states", indicating limited output diversity. Our findings have significant implications for marketers who rely on LLMs for creative tasks such as copywriting, ad creation, and customer persona generation. The trade-off between consistency and creativity in aligned models should be carefully considered when selecting the appropriate model for a given application. We also discuss the importance of prompt engineering in harnessing the creative potential of base models.

From the article:

An intriguing property of the aligned model’s generation clusters in Experiment  is that they exhibit behavior similar to attractor states in dynamical systems. We demonstrate this by intentionally perturbing the model’s generation trajectory, effectively nudging it away from its usual output distribution. Surprisingly, the aligned model gracefully finds its way back to its own attractor state and in-distribution response. The presence of these attractor states in the aligned model’s output space is a phenomenon related to the concept of mode collapse in reinforcement learning, where the model over-optimizes for certain outputs, limiting its exploration of alternative solutions. This behavior contrasts with the base model, which exhibits greater flexibility and adaptability in its outputs.

This is particularly interesting (note the highlighted text) in view of recent work, What’s the Magic Word? A Control Theory of Llm Prompting, where LLM behavior is investigated in light of control theory.

The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings [Media Notes 129]

I saw The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings when it came out in 1976 and have been waiting to see it on TV or streaming ever since. I just watched it on Amazon.

Why? For one thing, it stars Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones, and Richard Pryor. For another, it’s about professional-league Negro (the word they used back then) baseball. Blacks couldn’t play in the White leagues, so they had to establish their own. Bingo Long, played by Bill Dee Williams and based roughly on Satchel Paige, decides he’s tired of being exploited by the (black) owner of his club and decides to go rogue. He contacts other stars who are similarly dissatisfied and they start their own team, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings.

They go barnstorming through the South and Midwest, playing whatever teams will play against them. Once they get hip to the schtick they need to do – parading through town – to attract an audience, they become successful, successful enough that the Negro league owners come after them. They don’t quite succeed.

To be honest, it wasn’t what I’d been hoping for all these years. Yes, I liked the feel of the film, the glimpse it gave into baseball barnstorming back in the 1930s, and Richard Pryor was OK. But on the whole, the film was a bit flat.

Baby on Bach

Most of the world's semiconductor chips are fabricated in Taiwan and South Korea

Crazy pic.twitter.com/1F0Px2sg11

— Sam Zeloof (@szeloof) June 17, 2024

Contrasting visions of order in the world

Affective Technology @ 3QD

I’ve decided to do a three-part series at 3 Quarks Daily. The topic is affective technology, affective because it can transform how we feel, technology because it is an art (tekhnē) and, as such, has a logos. The first article is now posted:

Affective Technology, Part 1: Poems and Stories https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/06/affective-technology-part-1-poems-and-stories.html

In this first article I present the problem, followed by some informal examples, a poem by Coleridge, a passage from Tom Sawyer that echoes passages from my childhood, and some informal comments about underlying mechanism. The idea is simple. Although we do not have direct control over our emotions, that is, we cannot will them into existence nor extinguish or diminish them at all, we can manipulate them indirectly through art. In this series, at least in the first two articles, I’ll be concerned with literary texts.

The second article has a working title: Affective Technology, Part 2: Emotion recollected in tranquility. The title phrase is from Wordsworth’s well-known preface to the Lyrical Ballads:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

I expand on Wordsworth’s idea with two ideas: 1) Warren McCulloch’s concept of behavioral mode, which is a theory about the function of the reticular activating system, one of the oldest portions of the nervous system, and 2) an idea from the early 1970s, Charles Tart’s concept of state-specific learning. I illustrate this with an analysis of Shakespeare’s well-known Sonnet 129, Th’Expense of Spirit, which depicts the anguish of a man who cannot prevent himself from abusing women sexually even though he is inevitably overcome with recrimination afterward.

In the third article, Affective Technology, Part 3: Coherence in the Self, I’ll open with dissociative identity disorder (DID), in which an individual mind is fractured in two or more quasi-independent personalities. I will argue that that possibility is inherent in the structure and processes of a nervous system that operates according to McCulloch’s model. Artistic works, however, help us keep a unified personality by providing an affectively ‘neutral’ ground – the Wordsworthian space of tranquil recollection – in which the various modes can coexist.

Some of these ideas have been worked out in further detail in the following papers:

Lust in Action: An Abstraction, Language and Style 14, 1981, 251-270, https://www.academia.edu/7931834/Lust_in_Action_An_Abstraction.

The Evolution of Narrative and the Self, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 16(2): 129-155, 1993, https://www.academia.edu/235114/The_Evolution_of_Narrative_and_the_Self.

Talking with Nature in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison." PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November, 2004, https://www.academia.edu/8345952/Talking_with_Nature_in_This_Lime-Tree_Bower_My_Prison_.

Three views of a waffle: before, during, and mostly gone

Fatherhood changes the brain and brings meaning and purpose

Darby Saxbe, Dad Brain Is Real, and It’s a Good Thing, NYTimes, June 15, 2024.

The brain and hormonal changes we observe in new dads tell us that nature intended men to participate in child-rearing, because it equipped them with neurobiological architecture to do so. They too can show the fundamental instinct for nurturing that’s often attributed solely to mothers.

Not only that, but men’s involvement in fatherhood can have long-term benefits for their brain health — and for healthy societies. At a time when boys and men seem to be experiencing greater social isolation and declining occupational prospects, the role of father can provide a meaningful source of identity. [...]

In a 2022 study, my colleagues and I collaborated with researchers in Spain to gather brain scans of a small number of first-time fathers before and after their babies were born. Our results echoed studies of mothers done by some of the same researchers. In several landmark studies, they found that as women became mothers, their brains lost volume in gray matter, the layer of brain tissue rich with neurons, in regions across the brain, including those responsible for social and emotional processing.

Although a shrinking brain sounds like bad news, less can be more: These changes might fine-tune the brain to work more efficiently. [...] Women who lost more brain volume showed stronger attachment to their infants after birth, indicating that the shrinkage promoted bonding.

Our findings for fathers were similar. Men also lost gray matter volume in new fatherhood, in some of the same regions that changed in women. But volume reductions for dads were less pronounced.

Fatherhood brings meaning and purpose:

Even so, most fathers tell us that they derive tremendous meaning and purpose from their connection to their children. Contemporary fathers are almost as likely as mothers to say that parenthood is central to their identity, and men are even more likely to report that children improve their well-being than women are. And the newest data suggests that parenting may ultimately promote long-term brain health; among older men and women, a brain-age algorithm estimated that the brain looked younger among people who had children.

There's more at the link. I've linked the original research below the asterisks.

* * * * *

Magdalena Martínez-García, María Paternina-Die, Sofia I Cardenas, Oscar Vilarroya, Manuel Desco, Susanna Carmona, Darby E Saxbe, First-time fathers show longitudinal gray matter cortical volume reductions: evidence from two international samples, Cerebral Cortex, Volume 33, Issue 7, 1 April 2023, Pages 4156–4163, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac333

Abstract: Emerging evidence points to the transition to parenthood as a critical window for adult neural plasticity. Studying fathers offers a unique opportunity to explore how parenting experience can shape the human brain when pregnancy is not directly experienced. Yet very few studies have examined the neuroanatomic adaptations of men transitioning into fatherhood. The present study reports on an international collaboration between two laboratories, one in Spain and the other in California (United States), that have prospectively collected structural neuroimaging data in 20 expectant fathers before and after the birth of their first child. The Spanish sample also included a control group of 17 childless men. We tested whether the transition into fatherhood entailed anatomical changes in brain cortical volume, thickness, and area, and subcortical volumes. We found overlapping trends of cortical volume reductions within the default mode network and visual networks and preservation of subcortical structures across both samples of first-time fathers, which persisted after controlling for fathers’ and children’s age at the postnatal scan. This study provides convergent evidence for cortical structural changes in fathers, supporting the possibility that the transition to fatherhood may represent a meaningful window of experience-induced structural neuroplasticity in males.

Sayesha Chowdhury TABLA WIZARD

From the YouTube page:

A Tabla duet by Pt. Pandit Keshab Kanti Chowdhury & Sayesha Chowdhury (grand daughter & shishsya at age of 7) performing on the occasion of CA TV California Festival on 15 Jan 2023 in the Church of Scientology of Los Angeles under the direction of Shuvananda Puri Maharaj Ji who heads the media broadcasting channel CA TV California.

Thanks a lot Shuvananda Puri for giving us this opportunity to showcase Delhi Gharana original Tabla in a duet form.

Sayesha Chowdhury, age 7, is learning Tabla since the age of 1.5 years and have been performing for the last 3 years in national and international level. She has been awarded by CATV California, Sarb Akal Music Society Calgary Canada, Born to Shine ZEE India, Sangeet Kala Kendra Agra and many more.

Listen to the vocables that they utter while they're playing. 

Red Yellow White

Read the classics guided by experts whose voices and ideas have been cloned into an AI.

Steven Kurutz, Now You Can Read the Classics With A.I.-Powered Expert Guides, NYTimes, June 13, 2024. The article opens:

For the past year, two philosophy professors have been calling around to prominent authors and public intellectuals with an unusual, perhaps heretical, proposal. They have been asking these thinkers if, for a handsome fee, they wouldn’t mind turning themselves into A.I. chatbots.

John Kaag, one of the academics, is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is known for writing books, such as “Hiking With Nietzsche” and “American Philosophy: A Love Story,” that blend philosophy and memoir.

Clancy Martin, Mr. Kaag’s partner in the endeavor, is a professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and the author of 10 books, including “How Not to Kill Yourself,” an unflinching memoir about his mental health struggles and 10 suicide attempts.

They met, became friends, and then...

In April 2023, Mr. Kaag received an email from John Dubuque, a businessman who had become a patron of sorts.

Before joining his family’s plumbing-supply business in St. Louis, Mr. Dubuque had been a philosophy major at the University of Southern California. Feeling that he was stagnating intellectually, he began paying philosophy professors to take him through “Being and Time” by Martin Heidegger and other works.

Mr. Dubuque, 40, hired Mr. Kaag for a six-week tutorial on “The Varieties of Religious Experience” by William James. [...] At the time, Mr. Dubuque’s family business had recently been sold, and he was looking for what to do next. During his talks with Mr. Kaag, he suggested that they team up to create a publishing company.

As Mr. Dubuque envisioned it, the imprint would pair a world-class expert with a classic work and use technology similar to ChatGPT to replicate the dialogue between a student and teacher. In theory, readers could ask, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin about presidential speeches or delve into Buddhist texts with Deepak Chopra.

Mr. Kaag jumped on board and brought his friend Mr. Martin to the project. The result is Rebind Publishing.

This reminds me of an old TV series by the multifaceted entertainer Steve Allen called Meeting of Minds, which ran on PBS from 1977 to 1981: "The show featured actors playing historical figures, but in a talk-show format. Guests would interact with each other and host Steve Allen, discussing philosophy, religion, history, science, and many other topics."

The Times article is not very clear about how it works and the five minutes I spent on the Rebind website didn't clarify things very much. The idea seems to be that the expert readers will have their voices cloned and their ideas about the book will be precipitated into an AI so that the reader can then have a real-time virtual conversation with the expert reader. So, they've got Laura Kipnis on Romeo and Juliet, Depak Chopra on various Buddhist texts, Doris Kearns Goodwin on six presidential speeches, Margaret Atwood on A Tale of Two Cities, and others. 

I should also note that Tyler Cowen has provided AI enhancements for his recent book: GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? You can use those enhancements (for ChatGPT, GPT-4, or Claude) to "converse" with the book, in effect with Tyler, on economics.

Can you tell which is AI? [Rick Beato]

Friday Fotos: Sinatra Drive and the Shipyard, Hoboken

The N.B.A. in Africa

Tania Ganguli, The N.B.A. Sees Its Future in Africa, NYTimes, June 14, 2024.

The N.B.A. has been promoting basketball in Africa for more than 20 years, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort. The aim is to cultivate an immense potential fan base, the way it has in China, while also tapping into the rich talent pool on the continent. Much of the league’s work is concentrated in Senegal, where it operates an academy for high-school-age players, an N.B.A. Africa office and the headquarters of the Basketball Africa League. N.B.A. Africa’s investors include former N.B.A. players and former President Barack Obama (who also has an equity stake). The B.A.L. was announced in 2019 with FIBA, the sport’s international governing body. Its first season was in 2021.

Although N.B.A. Africa is not yet profitable, the investment seems to be producing results. Soccer may still be the king of sports on the continent, but basketball is becoming increasingly popular. People throughout Africa play on local club teams and in after-school programs. The N.B.A. has generated plenty of good will by building courts, libraries and homes; administering basketball camps and other development programs; and supporting gender equality. But some wonder about the league’s long-term commitment and whether the support needed for basketball to flourish can be sustained.

“As much as we are investing in Africa, the opportunity is so enormous I worry that we’re under investing,” Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, said in an interview. “There’s so much opportunity, but it’s not always easy to know how to deploy capital, which government you should be dealing with, who the honest brokers are. And so we’re learning as we go.”

Currently "about 10 percent of N.B.A. players are either African or have at least one parent from Africa," but most are African-American.

There's much more at the link.

Noam Chomsky and Charles Hockett on the History of Linguistics

Julia S. Falk, Turn to the History of Linguistics: Noam Chomsky and Charles Hockett in the 1960s, Historiographia Linguistica, Volume 30, Issue 1-2, Jan 2003, p. 129 - 185 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.30.1.05fal

SUMMARY: In the 1940s and 1950s, the leading proponents of American synchronic linguistics showed little interest in the history of linguistics. Some attention to historiography occurred in subfields of linguistics closest to the humanities — linguistic anthropology, historical linguistics, modern European languages — but the ‘science of language’ developed by Leonard Bloomfield and his descriptivist followers demanded autonomy from other disciplines and from the past. Increasing American contact with European linguistics during the 1950s culminated in the 1962 Ninth International Congress of Linguists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here Noam Chomsky presented a plenary session paper that appeared in print in four versions between 1962 and 1964, each version incorporating an increasing amount of discussion of the early 20th-century precursors to the descriptivists and a number of 17th- and 19th-century studies of language and mind. Charles Hockett responded by organizing his 1964 presidential address to the Linguistic Society of America as a history of linguistics, emphasizing periods, figures, and ideas not included in Chomsky’s work. Historiographers of the time recognized a surge of American interest in the history of linguistics beginning in the early 1960s and most attributed it largely to Chomsky’s work. Historiographic publication increased significantly among the descriptivists; at the same time it emerged among the generativists, most of whom followed Chomsky in exploring pre-20th-century philosophical ideas or reconsidering concepts and practices of the descriptivists’ forerunners. The resulting visibility and impetus to the history of linguistics contributed to the foundation upon which linguistic historiography matured in North America in the later decades of the 20th century.

Mohini Dey Hartsuch in rehearsal {insane}

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