come for Chris Olah on stage with the pope, stay for the failure of dictionary learning and the collapse of two traditions of reification
In _The Ideas Letter_, Leif Weatherby, Tyler Shoemaker, and I wrote about the creation of reality through pseudoscience, religion, and psychosis. Of course, the piece is mostly about AI.
The authors contend that contemporary efforts to render AI systems interpretable rest on a mistake: reification, the process of treating abstractions and statistical artifacts as if they were concrete...
