Paul Rowe

Paul Rowe

@pauldrowe.bsky.social

Applied logician. Polyglot. Interested in curiosity, not dogma.

697 followers223 following439 posts

Do you ever think how cool it is that the discovery of the hat and ghost family of aperiodic monotiles was discovered before the boom in AI math results? 🧮 #MathSky

This does seem like an important step in the right direction. I think it creates many new issues around managing the proofs (especially given the scope and scale). But that is a good thing to worry about. What would a Mathlib analog really look like here, and how could we leverage it effectively?

From season one of The West Wing in 1999, the president says to his college-aged daughter, “But you’re coming of age in the 21st century, a century in which, I promise you, mathematics will play a starring role.” #MathSky 🧮

See, it’s extra funny because if you read the digits of the hand in binary, it represents one of e-mudra’s private keys.

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This continues to be well outside my expertise, but an article by @kristinandrews.bsky.social brought my attention to the key analogy between (unknown and disputed) animal consciousness and AI consciousness.

Evan Washington@eewash.bsky.social

"There's no teapot floating in the asteroid belt." That's a strong claim which implies a lot of things about teapots and orbital mechanics. It requires strong evidence.

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It’s likely just my bias, but I wonder how many people willing to attribute consciousness to current AI are also willing to attribute it to dolphins. To cats? To ants?

Understanding where the (fuzzy) line might be is the point. It’s hard work! So, yes, we can’t definitively rule out consciousness without further consideration. But those claiming AI consciousness almost never propose doing the work required to really investigate it either.

This continues to be well outside my expertise, but an article by @kristinandrews.bsky.social brought my attention to the key analogy between (unknown and disputed) animal consciousness and AI consciousness.

Evan Washington@eewash.bsky.social

"There's no teapot floating in the asteroid belt." That's a strong claim which implies a lot of things about teapots and orbital mechanics. It requires strong evidence.

At the very least, our methods for investigating animal consciousness should inform those for AI. We should also be aware of a possible common ancestry for animal consciousness (though octopuses provide a potential escape).

Paul Rowe reposted

"There's no teapot floating in the asteroid belt." That's a strong claim which implies a lot of things about teapots and orbital mechanics. It requires strong evidence.

Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social

Again: “AIs aren’t conscious” is a strong, affirmative claim. It implies a lot of specific things about consciousness. It requires strong evidence. “We can’t say for sure if AI is conscious” is a weaker, cautious claim. It doesn’t make any particular evidence about consciousness.

My most charitable interpretation of what this could be* is to guess that they want to continue to train models on user inputs and don’t want to add abusive content to their training. But also don’t want to put actual guards in place to check for content. *not necessarily of what I think k this is

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com

Anthropic's new User Policy forbids you from engaging in "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models". It does not, however, explain what the fuck this could possibly mean.

Paul Rowe reposted

I think one reason it’s good to have a liberal arts education in the classic sense is that you don’t then spend time trying to invent the concept of “intellectual pursuits” from first principles

For anybody interested in philosophy and its history, this is podcast is for you. If podcasts aren’t your thing, he has been publishing book versions of the series. They are wonderful overviews and intros to philosophical texts. And the no gaps approach is real but not unreasonable.

Peter Adamson@histphilosophy.bsky.social

As of today the original #HoPWAG series has reached 500 episodes! Thanks to all who have listened and the many who have supported the series over the years, not least all the interview guests. #philsky #podcast #philosophy

Having Monday trash pickup is incredible privilege because you have all of Sunday to decide when to put trash out. It’s a privilege I waste almost every week 😔

I believe we can prove the NY Times SpellingBee game wrong, BlueSky! We just have to reply and quote with pictures of all your pets’ boopable noses.

My running joke about Ed Sheeran is that he is the best song writer since the Beatles. This is from the film Yesterday where he challenges the protagonist to a fast song writing contest and he loses to the protagonist “writing” The Long and Winding Road.

I often feel conflicted by art from the 1920s. This is no exception. I like the forward facing eye projected from the (sideways) figure. The angles evoke Cezanne (good), but overall effect is somehow … I don’t know. If this speaks to you, I’d love to hear why and learn.

Guggenheim Collection@guggenheim.bsky.social

Man in a Tower by André Masson, 1924 https://botfrens.com/collections/212/contents/137779

Paul Rowe reposted

this is perhaps the most useful thing that LLMs and GenAI have done: to provoke people into articulating (over again) that even the 'hardest' of 'hard sciences' are human endeavours, with human meaning, and concerned with human understanding of the significance of the world we all inhabit

Boston Review@bostonreview.bsky.social

“Mathematics only makes sense as a gift economy. It has no trade secrets. Substituting a monetizable ersatz culture for the one evolved through historical experience is a particularly insidious form of knowledge collapse.” Mathematician Michael Harris on the AI companies coming for math:

Home Library h-index: The largest value n such that there are n authors for whom you own (alternatively, have read) n of their books. I believe mine are Own: 7 Read: 5 I’m curious how this compares with others. #BookSky #MathSky

Paul Rowe reposted

You know those viral fb posts that reduce to order of operations quibbling? Please deploy this associahedron-based interactive viewer in order to subvert those threads with interesting mathematics: kyleormsby.github.io/parse-explor... 🧮

ꭓle Ormsby 𓆙@e-infinity.space

Resolving ambiguity in order of operations is easy: simply enumerate all possible parsings of a given expression, compute each value, and then average. E.g., for 9-3-3÷3, ((9−3)−3)÷3 = 1 (9−(3−3))÷3 = 3 (9−3)−(3÷3) = 5 9−(3−(3÷3)) = 7 9−((3−3)÷3) = 9 so 9-3-3÷3 = (1+3+5+7+9)/5 = 5. Voilà! 🧮

Paul Rowe reposted

I was up at the buttcrack of dawn this morning when it was still dark out. It had been pouring all night. Took this picture with my phone. It isn’t even a shot of something. It just captured… I don’t know… the vibe? Regardless, I like it.

As a non-philosopher I find the current #PhilSky discourse on flirting fascinating. More than most topics, it has seemed to open lines of disagreement that expose how philosophers actually think and engage with ideas, both on their own and in conversation with others.

This movie poster is absolutely inspired! It immediately sheds surprising philosophical insights on (our memory of) the cartoon, and sets expectations about how the film will treat the subject.

DiscussingFilm@discussingfilm.net

New poster for ‘COYOTE VS ACME’ In theaters on August 28.

Paul Rowe reposted

In case you were wondering WHY someone would mail their scabs, the earliest inoculation available for smallpox involved grinding up the scabs and inoculating someone with a scratch on the skin. This method reduced the fatality rate from 30% to about 1%. 🧪 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variola...

en.wikipedia.orgVariolation - Wikipedia
Ada Palmer@adapalmer.bsky.social

Historian friend was reading a civil war era letter in an archive, the letter said “In this envelope I include my smallpox scabs” and sure enough there they were. Had to call CDC for a hazmat team.