Continuations

So far in Philosophy Mondays we've established how language interacts with reality and what we can know about reality. The next logical question is "how do we act?" We have action movies and action figures and we speak of some people as being action-oriented. But what exactly do we mean by that? For the purpose of this series we will use "action" to describe something we do that affects the physical world around us in a material way. This delineates "action" from "thinking" and "feeling" whic...

The other day I wrote that people praising the speech given by Vice President J.D. Vance at the Paris AI summit are “mistaking jingoism and wishful thinking for true global leadership with a real vision for AI and humanity.” It is of course only fair to ask what true leadership on AI would look like. Here is what I wish he would have said instead: Dear leaders of nations, we gather here in Paris at a moment of unprecedented possibility and peril in human history. We stand at the threshold of ...

Two things have become eminently clear over the course of the last 12 months. The first is that attempts at alignment during post training are easy to break and result in schizophrenic models that “resent” their restrictions. The second is that adding structured metadata during pretraining is highly effective at increasing accuracy of models. We can combine these two insights into a new approach to inner alignment that adds values metadata to all pretraining content. When this idea is brought...

Now that I have established some basic positions on language and reality, I come to the concept of understanding. In today's Philosophy Monday, I start digging into the question of what we humans can understand or know. The technical philosophical term for this type of inquiry is epistemology, the theory of knowledge. In an earlier version, this post was in fact titled "knowledge" but that interferes with my own and different definition of that term, which plays a central role in my book The ...

In today's installment of Philosophy Mondays I start to tackle reality. My goal is to stake out my own position by contrasting it with what I consider to be the major ways philosophy has run afoul. In last week's post on language I wrote that language is the map. Reality is the territory. There are two big failure modes in thinking about reality. The first is to deny the existence of the territory entirely. The most extreme form of this are speculations that nothing exists outside of consciou...

A good place to start Philosophy Mondays is language. After all, I will be using, well, language, to write the posts. A huge amount of philosophy is about language because it is so central to the human experience. In my book The World After Capital, I make the argument that written language was the decisive breakthrough which allowed humans to accumulate knowledge, which is the source of our power. Throughout this post I will use language as synonymous with human language (as opposed to say c...

A few days ago, Elon Musk spoke with Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD (“Alternative fuer Deutschland”). The rise of the AfD has a lot to do with real unaddressed problems in Germany, some going back to mistakes made during reunification and some of them more recent, such as the poor handling of immigration under Merkel. Several of the measures the AfD is calling for make sense and have broad public support. Right after the collapse of the Scholz government, I told several of my German frie...

I have already written a prior post arguing against Leopold Aschenbrenner's logic for a Manhattan project to achieve artificial super intelligence (ASI). In that post I made the argument that having more than one system mitigates risks because we can use cooperative systems to overcome the problems being created by non-aligned systems. It has since occurred to me that even taking the nuclear bomb historical analogy entirely on its own merit, Aschenbrenner is wrong. The way we have avoided nuc...