No one knows the answer, and that’s the point — Harvard Gazette
I would have loved this so much as a college student! And it's a great idea: carve out time for unbiased, curious freshmen to come up with fresh solutions to the big unsolved problems in science.
How Mark Rober hides "science vegetables" in viral videos (Transcript)
Mark puts out the most engaging, curiosity-muscle-building content there is. This is a great conversation about his motivations, his success, parenting, and critical thinking.
What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images | Quanta Magazine
Turns out most people actually see pictures in their mind when they imagine something! Not me -- I have no "mind's eye." But language is so full of visual metaphors that I never knew phrases like 'mind's eye' or 'picture this' were literal.
we don’t know if the error rate will go away, and so we don’t know whether we should be building products that presume the model will sometimes be wrong or whether in a year or two we will be building products that presume we can rely on the model by itself. That’s quite different to the limitations of other important technologies, from PCs to the web to smartphones, where we knew in principle what could change and what couldn’t.
The AI boom has raised deep questions left and right, but my favorite is "what are LLMs for?" I see a surprising number of people using them for tasks that require a right answer, but LLMs don't do "right." What applications will we find for magic that might be wrong?
"So many little buddies everywhere!" This article may have changed my mind about panpsychism. It sounds crazy at first, but the idea that there's a tiny component of consciousness in all matter might make more sense than alternative theories about what consciousness is made of.
A crazy - but fun - theory that a spinning comet created a spiral in the sky, leading to the independent emphasis on spirals at certain points across human history.
Did you know that America's big coal deposits exist because it took 60 million years after trees evolved bark for fungi and bacteria to evolve to decompose it, so wood just got buried for 60 million years, forming coal at a faster rate than now?
"I don’t know why more people don’t just come out and say “LOOK, REALLY OUR MAIN PROBLEM IS THAT ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS COST TEN TIMES AS MUCH AS THEY USED TO FOR NO REASON, PLUS THEY SEEM TO BE GOING DOWN IN QUALITY, AND NOBODY KNOWS WHY, AND WE’RE MOSTLY JUST DESPERATELY FLAILING AROUND LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS HERE.” State that clearly, and a lot of political debates take on a different light."
"When billion dollar tech companies die, it usually isn’t at the hands of their direct competitors. It’s simply because they go from one day being the best at what they do, to the next day being still the best at what they do except it doesn’t matter."
It looks like the research bears out my suspicion that relying GPS every time you drive is bad for your brain. And there's something that just feels calming about knowing your position relative to the earth, the sun and the stars - it lets you zoom out a bit from our everyday human-focused trivialities.
Making the Grade: Why the Cheapest Maple Syrup Tastes Best
"After the Revolution, Americans looked at the maple tree in a new light. To the eminent Philadelphia patriot and physician Benjamin Rush, maple sugar seemed perfectly tailored to the new republic. Here was a commodity that could compete in a global market, bolstering the independence of yeoman farmers, and demonstrating the superiority of free labor. It tapped an abundant resource, required only a small amount of labor, and used supplies most farmers already owned. Best of all, it would destroy the market for Caribbean sugar cane, produced by slaves laboring in horrifying conditions. Rush set down his reflections in the form of a letter to his friend Thomas Jefferson..."
"Changes must be planned and executed decades in advance of the usual signals of crisis, but that’s like asking healthy, happy sixteen-year-olds to write living wills.
Not only is the task daunting, it’s strange. In the name of nature, we are asking human beings to do something deeply unnatural, something no other species has ever done or could ever do: constrain its own growth."
So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class ... (Published 2014)
Currently this stuff -- no big deal, just humanity's actual best answers to "where are we, how did we get here, where did the world come from, where are we all going" -- isn't taught all together. What a tragic missed opportunity!
