Joining the Conversation
So the question I'm left with, and that I pose to anyone reading: if intelligence was never going to *arrive* because it was always already here and we've simply joined it — what should we actually be worried about?
More issues
The Mattering Instinct
Why do we care so intensely about our own significance? Where does meaning come from? What separates a life worth living from mere biological persistence?
Uncommon Knowledge
Social media fragments common knowledge. When different groups consume different news, share different assumptions, and inhabit different epistemic worlds, the recursive structure of common knowledge fails.
Limits of the Transformer Architecture and a QCD-like Alternative
The transformer architecture has no physics below the token scale. You cannot ask "what is the next character" if you trained on subword units — the question is literally undefined.
The Transformer as Renormalization Group Flow
The forward pass through a transformer implements a Kadanoff-Wilson renormalization group flow, coarse-graining microscopic token representations into stable semantic attractors.
A Stationary Action is Stable Information
There is a maximum amount of information that any observer can extract from a physical system. This limit emerges from the structure of phase space itself. A system's state occupies a region defined by its position and momentum, and quantum mechanics forbids this region from shrinking below a
The Hard Problem as Hidden Relationality
There is a pattern in the history of physics. A puzzle appears insoluble for generations. Brilliant minds propose baroque solutions — new entities, hidden mechanisms, radical revisions to metaphysics. Then someone notices that the puzzle rested on an unexamined assumption. Remove the assumption, and the puzzle doesn't get solved.
It from Bit, Bit from It
tldr; If we view the limit where measurement efficiency \(\eta\) approaches 1 as a boundary condition, then what the Quantum Zeno Effect seems to show is that a quantum-to-classical transition requires an irreversible step that dissipates at least the Landauer bound.
If you have ever felt uneasy reading about quantum
The Synchronization Tax
A physicist, a computer scientist, and a banker walk into a bar. They cannot agree on who got there first.
This is not a joke. This is a central problem of physics, computer science, and economics.
The physicist points out that simultaneity is relative — who was there "first"
Estimation Culture
Reason recently published a lovely article by Davidson Heath about the history of statistical significance and estimation. I enjoyed the article very much, but I'm afraid that even for people who use the tools described in the article in their day-to-day work, the message might be a little