Links 4/29
I just want to acknowledge that it might seem weird for some of you to see metascience and spirituality and AI all juxtaposed. You can change your subscription settings to receive only metascience, though links will continue to be in the main section. There is actually a connection between all of these topics, which I promise to elucidate soon. In the meantime:
Natalie Cargill on Olively, an AI app that rewrites your texts to your partner and decodes theirs back to you. Cargill very persuasively makes the case that AI-mediated communication is helping people avoid the real work of attachment repair. I think the reality is more nuanced -- when the AI has the right information it can do more than erode our coping abilities, and help facilitate real therapeutic insight. The full argument will require more than a blurb. Just! Stop! Communicating! — Natalie Cargill
Erik Hoel diagnoses 21st century cultural stagnation as overfitting — algorithmic feeds and hyper-discriminatory measurement converge culture on narrow in-distribution outputs, with the AI em-dash tic as a canonical small-scale instance and “no better marker of culture’s unoriginality than everyone talking about culture’s unoriginality.” Big Erik Hoel fan - his book on the nature of consciousness, The World Behind the World, is a must read. Our Overfitted Century — Erik Hoel
Ben Recht: p-values are a regulatory mechanism, not a measurement device. Recht takes this view maybe a bit further than I would, but viewing statistics as a mechanism for technocratic decision making seems largely correct. This view is one reason I’m so fixated on better evaluation of randomized control trials, the most load bearing method we have in policy decision-making. Milton Friedman’s p-values — Ben Recht