Opens profile photo
Follow
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.
meaningness.com/about-my-sitesJoined September 2010

David Chapman’s Tweets

A hearty tail-slap for this thread.
Quote Tweet
A single beaver pond holds an estimated 1.1 million gallons of water and recharges underlying aquifers with an even greater amount of water. Upon European arrival to North America, as many as 65 million beaver dams strung together waterways and hydrated landscapes.
Show this thread
Image
38
🤖 Becoming an outstanding case study in the ways AI researchers fool themselves: because so many different, common types of mistakes were made in a single seemingly-spectacular paper.
Quote Tweet
For those who (like me) were interested in the "GPT can ace MIT" paper, Here's a great short writeup by three MIT EECS seniors explaining the many things wrong with analysis. dub.sh/gptsucksatmit
Show this thread
2
15
I think there are too many of us non-specialists who are following AI closely and who are doing a lot of “this is a great paper go check it out!” with these preprints but we’re not really equipped to evaluate the work. Saw that w/ this one. Way too many such cases right now.
Quote Tweet
A recent work from @iddo claimed GPT4 can score 100% on MIT's EECS curriculum with the right prompting. My friends and I were excited to read the analysis behind such a feat, but after digging deeper, what we found left us surprised and disappointed. dub.sh/gptsucksatmit 🧵
Show this thread
1
33
Show this thread
…but the downside is people outside the field don’t get the tools to tell the difference between cargo cult and good work. I don’t have any idea how to fix it. It probably always existed. wrote it here, but needs whole community to change.
1
10
Replying to and
Cargo cults are a problem in all the fields I’m involved in. It sucks! And when you highlight that a work is cargo cult, you look like an impolite jerk; it just really kills the vibe, so not many do it. Internal to the field, you can whisper opinions to friends and students…
1
10
I was recently on a panel with several other professors and we were asked to give some tips to graduate students in machine learning. It got me thinking about why professors are so bad at giving advice. So here are some reasons why you should not take advice from professors.
8
1,117
Show this thread
Distributed scientific cognition. No one person can read more than a minute fraction of the new papers in a field, so we rely on informal networks of personal trust to figure out what's true and what's meaningful. Same process for pseudoscience and political conspiracy theories!
Image
5
52
Replying to
what was notable in my semiotics/anthro/human geo. education is that while the previous intellectual generation abandoned old systematicities because of outcomes and internal flaws, the generation that taught me largely denied that "systematicity" had ever been real or sincere -
1
2
I've been thinking about the teacher-student relationship in traditional Vajrayana for years. It's important and functions in a way that can't be replaced with collective practice. And yet the relationship is reified, fixed, and locked into an unhelpful power dynamic.
1
6
Show this thread
Aha! I just saw this. Jake is way ahead of me, as usual, and I'm out of my depth and should shut up until I've read some things :)
Quote Tweet
Replying to @Meaningness and @eigenrobot
Lasch on the shared belief of pseudopomos and their conservative critics that the death of foundationalism meant anything goes (first two) and Fukuyama on connection to First World War (second two)
Image
Image
Image
Image
1
6
Show this thread
Perhaps the liberal arts side of academia had had a nihilistic lack of belief in the value of what they were teaching already for several decades before the '70s? And they grabbed pomo as lifeline: something new and exciting at last, that could replace the discredited classics.… Show more
Image
4
10
Show this thread
The Great War (WWI) was a profound blow to the West's self-conception, and plausibly that was when doubts about the foundations of the Western tradition started to bite hard enough to damage the classical curriculum:
Image
Quote Tweet
Replying to @eigenrobot and @Meaningness
period covered is earlier than the pomos but i wonder if the death of the prewar worldview in the trenches girdled belief in the old educational model in some important way, and what stuck around until pomo was already functionally dead
4
12
Show this thread
Apparently the destruction and replacement of the liberal arts curriculum was already under way by the early 20th century, so 1970s pomo can't be the whole answer—even if it was the killing blow.
Quote Tweet
I’m curious how true this characterization of the death of the great books is - I’m deeply ignorant of early 20th century educational trends.
Show this thread
Image
2
13
Show this thread
Replies have been helpful, thank you! My interest here is somewhat unusual. I understand pomo, and the opposition to it. What I don't know is why decision makers didn't understand replacing the undergrad humanities curriculum would be a disaster.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @JakeOrthwein
Thanks! The axe I want to grind here is that the classical curriculum was used to teach systematicity to non-STEM elite undergrads (cf my "bridge" piece), and the replacement stuff doesn't. (This is going to be the Maldon essay, btw.) For purposes of this piece, I don't care what… Show more
1
12
Show this thread
࿇ Just found this, from 2012, while looking for something else. Lots of jokes in it for geeks who care about the history of Tibetan Vajrayana... as a Star Wars episode opening crawl. Can't remember, but think I was planning an animated short!
Image
2
20
An academic rant: startling cluelessness where I'd expected intelligent error... I'm trying to understand how pomo replaced the classical undergraduate humanities curriculum, and how how people thought about it at the time, in preparation for writing about the consequences.…Show more
29
97
Show this thread
I suggested a similar explanation a few weeks ago; in today's essay, works out the implications in detail.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @s_r_constantin and @JakeOrthwein
Yes, this seems like what happened here. And I agree with the generalization, and I think it’s somewhat difficult to explain why AI is an exception. A good pro-AI position should address those claims seriously. Maybe Andreesen is capable of doing that but thinks lay people… Show more
1
Show this thread
🤖 Why some brilliant people make terrible arguments for ignoring AI risks, which they can't possibly believe. What to do? We can start with the underlying disagreement: how much complexity can the public & decision makers take in? twitter.com/TheZvi/status/
Image
Quote Tweet
The promised explanation from last week: The Dial of Progress, freedom to do things, and do them without asking permissions. A belief that there is no room for nuance or detail in public discourse, all we can do is move the dial up or down. shorturl.at/ghwLN
3
8
Show this thread
cool beetle thread! 😃
Quote Tweet
Beetles are the archetype of biological diversity: ~1/4 of described lifeforms are beetles. Why this "inordinate fondness" is one of evolutionary biology's enduring questions. We connect it to evolution deep down at the cellular level: biorxiv.org/content/10.110
Show this thread
Image
18