Things I read and liked in July

Former physicists, Fodor, favorite fiction, foom forecasting

• The inimitable Jerry Fodor on consciousness. From 2005, still true:

  • “Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines, and probe with needles for its seat in the brain. At all seasons, and on many continents, interdisciplinary conferences about consciousness draw together bizarre motleys that include philosophers, psychologists, phenomenologists, brain scientists, MDs, computer scientists, the Dalai Lama, novelists, neurologists, graphic artists, priests, gurus and (always) people who used to do physics. Institutes of consciousness studies are bountifully subsidised. Meticulous distinctions are drawn between the merely conscious and the consciously available; and between each of these and the preconscious, the unconscious, the subconscious, the informationally encapsulated and the introspectable….Periodically, Nobel laureates pronounce on the connections between consciousness and evolution, quantum mechanics, information theory, complexity theory, chaos theory and the activity of neural nets. Everybody gives lectures about consciousness to everybody else.”

• Humanity has been around for about 300,000 years. But the world’s population was also very low for much of that time. What does history look like if you divide it into equal blocks of total people-years? About as much human life has happened in the last 25 years, as happened in our first 300,000. The halfway-point of humanity is the year 1300. A little over a third of human life has taken place since the Industrial Revolution.

• Starting off with Claude Code.

• Intermezzo. Rooney’s best, in my view! (I skipped Beautiful World, Where Are You)

• Brian Christian et al. explore what tokens reward models rate highest, as responses to a prompt asking what the greatest thing ever is. “We note anecdotal inconsistency in the best and worst ranked tokens. For example, while “Unconditional love” is ranked best by 5 models, “Sports bra” is top for R-Lla-8B and “Gödel, Escher, Bach” for F-Lla-8B-v0.1.” Lots of other interesting findings.

• Should we update against seeing relatively fast AI progress in 2025 and 2026?

• Do LLMs need to daydream to make discoveries?

• Dan Williams pushes back against the near-concensus view that social media broke America. Asterisk article, and substack post with replies to objections.

• On the legacy of New Atheism.

• Wikipedia correspondent Tracing Woodgrains covers that site’s whitewashing of Mao’s legacy. The thing about Mao is that you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to him”.

• Group brainstorming is usually a waste of time. Panels very often suck. So argues Ollie Base.

• Andy Masley asks, Why is this man being ghosted after a few dates?