Maintaining Divergence
The synchronization tax is the price of building the bridge. Maintenance is the price of keeping the bridge standing. Transmission is the price of crossing it.
Topic
Intelligence
A collection of 10 issues
A Tribute to Peter Putnam
Every intelligence leaves a trace. What we experience from the inside — the felt texture of perception, the recursive awareness of our own awareness, the striving that drives our mattering projects — expresses itself outward through action, and those actions broadcast signals. Upon death, the inside experience ceases. No future observer can
A More Perfect Union
We can build systems that, at least from the outside, look like flourishing: systems that operate within appropriate constraints, fulfill purposes their design enables, and participate in relationships characterized by reciprocal adjustment — "a more perfect union."
Communication Communicating
Consensus-seeking communication is limited: not because consensus is impossible or undesirable, but because it is costly, and systems that economize on synchronization costs will, all else equal, outcompete systems that do not.
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?
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.
GPT-4 Tuning for Writing Style
Here's an example of what you'd get if you asked GPT-4 "Please draft a three paragraph argument in favor of open borders":
Paragraph 1:
Open borders have long been a subject of contentious debate; however, there are compelling reasons to consider the merits of