https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/ recent bookmarks from jm 2026-06-22T17:06:26+00:00 https://bactra.org/weblog/feral-library-card-catalogs.html jm For some years now, I have been saying to anyone who'll listen that the best way to think about large language models and their kin is due to the great Alison Gopnik, and it's to regard them as cultural technologies. All technologies, of course, are cultural in the sense that they are passed on from person to person, generation to generation. In the process of leaping from mind to mind, cultural content always passes through some external, non-mental form: spoken words, written diagrams, hand-crafted models, demonstrations, interpretive dances, or just examples of some practice carried out by the exemplifier's body [1]. A specifically cultural technology is one that modifies that very process of transmission, as with writing or printing or sound recording. That is what LLMs do; they are not so much minds as a new form of information retrieval. [...] What follows from all this? 1. These are ways of interpolating, extrapolating, smoothing, and sampling from the distribution of public, digitized representations we [6] have filled the Internet with. Now, most people do not have much experience with samplers --- certainly not with devices that sample from complex distributions with lots of dependencies. (Games of chance are built to have simple, uniform distributions.) (In fact, maybe the most common experience of such sampling is in role-playing games.) But while this makes them a novel form of cultural technology, they are a cultural technology. 2. They are also a novel form of social technology. They create a technically-mediated relationship between the user, and the authors of the documents in the training corpora. To repeat an example from the paper, when someone uses a bot to write a job-application letter, the system is mediating a relationship between the applicant and the authors of hundreds or thousands of previous such letters. More weakly, the system is also mediating a relationship between the applicant and the authors of other types of letters, authors of job-hunting handbooks, the reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback workers [7], etc., etc. (If you ask it how to write a regular expression for a particular data-cleaning job, it is mediating between you and the people who used to post on Stack Overflow.) Through the magic of influence functions, those with the right accesses can actually trace and quantify this relationship. 3. These aren't agents with beliefs, desires and intentions. (Prompting them to "be an agent" is just conditioning the stochastic process to produce the sort of text that would follow a description of an agent, which is not the same thing.) They don't even have goals in the way in which a thermostat, or lac operon repressor circuit, have goals. [8] They also aren't reasoning systems, or planning systems, or anything of that sort. Appearances to the contrary are all embers of autoregression. (Some of those embers are blown upon by wishful mnemonics.) [...] Large models have learned nearly all of the formulas, templates, tropes and stereotypes. (They're probability models of text sequences, after all.) To use Barzun's distinction, they will not put creative intelligence on tap, but rather stored and accumulated intellect. If they succeed in making people smarter, it will be by giving them access to the external forms of a myriad traditions. ]]> intelligence intellect llms technology alison-gopnik henry-farrell language text information cultural-technology james-evans https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2c0a435370e0/ 2026-01-15T12:56:57+00:00 https://theconversation.com/why-people-believe-misinformation-even-when-theyre-told-the-facts-271236 jm [Marwick] argues that it thrives through three mutually reinforcing pillars: the content of the message, the personal context of those sharing it, and the technological infrastructure that amplifies it: People find it cognitively easier to accept information than to reject it, which helps explain why misleading content spreads so readily; When fabricated claims align with a person’s existing values, beliefs and ideologies, they can quickly harden into a kind of “knowledge”. This makes them difficult to debunk; [When social media platforms] prioritise content likely to be shared, making sharing effortless, every like, comment or forward feeds the [misinformation] system. The platforms themselves act as a multiplier. ]]> misinformation disinformation alice-marwick research psychology social-media fake-news information debunking facts factchecking https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:336127ecadd8/ 2013-11-08T18:08:16+00:00 http://thestory.ie/2013/11/08/killing-freedom-of-information-in-ireland/ jmTheStory.ie will, in all likelihood, cease all FOI requests. And we will not seek funding from the public to support an immoral, cynical, unjustified and probably illegal FOI fee regime. We will not pay for information that the public already pays for. We will not support a system that perpetuates an outrageous infringement of citizen rights. The legislation was gutted in 2003 and it is being gutted again. More generally the number of requests from journalists from all news organisations in Ireland will fall as a result of these amendments, and the resulting efforts to shine a light on the administration of the State will certainly deteriorate. And secrecy will prevail. ]]> ireland politics foi information secrecy law https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:829028df755f/ 2012-07-03T14:45:02+00:00 http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html jm dataviz visualization information design ui via:aileen https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c265af0eacf0/ 2011-09-25T20:29:40+00:00 http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/lovelaces-leap.html jm jgc history ada-lovelace computing software information code babbage https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:72d7f08ac4d6/