J Bostock

Doublehaven remains unaffiliated with Inkhaven 1. Cruel April Two posts per day, for fifteen days. Breeding posts from the dead earth of my drafts, and the recesses of my mind. I would guess a little over twenty thousand words. It was not difficult, just costly. Writing takes time, and time...

The Mirror Test is kind of like Hitler. In any discussion of animal cognition, somebody is going to bring it up. The conversation usually goes like this: > A: So, most animals can’t recognize themselves in the mirror > > B: Which animals specifically? > > A: Oh, dogs, cats,...

Modus ponens is the logical operation which goes like: * If A then B * A * Therefore B You might see examples like: * * * Or, in natural language * If there is a fire, you should leave the building * There is a fire * Therefore you...

This is a small, stand-alone piece of work, which introduces a conjecture about how models can generalize. I haven't had a huge amount of time to stress-test it, but I think it's a neat finding. TL;DR: Transformers can generalize representable group and monoid operations, but find it much easier to...

There's an adage from programming in C++ which goes something like "Yes, you write C, but you imagine the machine code as you do." I assumed this was bullshit, that nobody actually does this. Am I supposed to imagine writing the machine code, and then imagine imagining the binary? and...

One particularly pernicious condition is low morale. Morale is, roughly, "the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve." If your morale is low, you can't push through adversity. It's also very easy to accidentally drop your morale through standard rationalist life-optimization. It's easy to optimize for wellbeing...

Predictive coding talks about the "handshake" between top-down and bottom-up priors. The upper layers of the brain make a guess as to what's going to happen, and the lower layers (closer to the sensory input stream) report back. Their report either contains some amount of surprise, or just says "Close...