22 NOV 2024 by ideonexus
AI as Longterm Memory
The current state-of-the-art Gemini model can fit roughly 1.5 million words in its context. That’s enough for me to upload the full text of all fourteen of my books, plus every article, blog post, or interview I’ve ever published—and the entirety of my collection of research notes that I’ve compiled over the years. The Gemini team has announced plans for a model that could hold more than 7 million words in its short-term memory. That’s enough to fit everything I’ve ever written, p...29 MAY 2014 by ideonexus
Scientific Worldview Arises from Specialization
... an explicit scientific world view may arise by a higher specialization of the same basic grammatical patterns that fathered the naive and implicit view. Thus the world view of modern science arises by higher specialization of the basic.It grows more refined.
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
The Web of Causation
...complex systems, such as financial markets or the Earth’s biosphere, do not seem to obey causality. For every event that occurs, there are a multitude of possible causes, and the extent to which each contributes to the event is not clear, not even after the fact! One might say that there is a web of causation. For example, on a typical day, the stock market might go up or down by some fraction of a percentage point. The Wall Street Journal might blithely report that the stock market move...Nigel Goldenfeld explains why the simplistic explanations for market movements so popular in the news media are also so ridiculous.