"I’ve now written [...] and, each time, [...] with a sense of low-level anxiety. A worry that I have misunderstood something fundamental... That I don’t know what I don’t know..."
Thankfully, the rest of the piece and the book itself are both uplifting and wondrous.
"If we are constrained by others, then we are not free to be ourselves. But if we are altogether unconstrained then we don’t have to try."
That's why games matter - because they don't matter.
Both the book and Runciman's piece are superb.
Nobel laureate misunderstands the historicity of the concepts "lab", "technological progress", and "getting up to reasonable speed in a number of areas that aren’t your domain"...
Artificial intelligence systems will allow a single PhD student’s output to match that of a whole laboratory, according to Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate for chemistry.
‘“Games matter,” C. Thi Nguyen says, “because games don’t matter.” If we can remember this, we will do far better in a world in which hidden forms of coercion are proliferating.’
David Runciman on keeping score.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Can bees stop doing stuff please?
On the disquiet of writing, rethinking assumptions, and the question of intelligence.
open.substack.com/pub/nicholar...
Demis Hassabis says science is on the brink of an era of artificial intelligence-driven discovery
Come & hear about @histparl.bsky.social's Oral History of Parliament on 24 June @19:00.
With clips from David Blunkett, Malcolm Rifkind, Gisela Stuart & others,the session explores who makes it to Westminster, how Parliament has changed & who challenged its ways
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/westminste...
It seems a good day to remind people that in the UK 3 times as many people work in Indian restaurants or for McDonalds as in the whole coal and steel industry. 5 times as many are academic staff at universities. If Labour does not understand its electorate, there is no way to appeal to it.
Anastasia Christakou 💙
Remember the current NIH director going on about protecting researchers from government censorship?
Today his people called the police in to forcibly remove my colleagues from their own society meeting for sharing an editorial published in their flagship journal that was critical of him.
Gift link
A fellow of the Royal Society slashed funding for disease prevention, leading directly to the deaths of uncounted children. He promotes white supremacy and is actively encouraging racist violence in the UK.
But he's Elon Musk, a billionaire. So the Royal Society does nothing. @royalsociety.org
www.eventbrite.co.uk
‘A mix between arcane procedure and schoolboy-ish behaviour’? Westminster as told to the History of Parliament’s Oral History Project
