Monthly Links, May 2024
Monthly Links, May 2024
Res Extensa #67 :: the 10,000-year clock, cities as compost heaps, the origins of western music, and the minds of LLMs
🕰️ Danny Hillis on the 10,000-year Clock
The "Clock of the Long Now" is an experimental clock being built by the Long Now Foundation, an exercise in what it takes to think on long time horizons. This Q&A with inventor Danny Hillis talks more about the motivations for the project:
Humanity has lots of artifacts that help us extend our imagination to the past. The great pyramids are an example. You see a picture of a pyramid in the desert, and you naturally think about the people who built it. It conjures up a memory of the long human history that shaped our own culture. But we really don't have any such symbols for the future. What do we have that connects us to a thousand years ahead of us? Maybe science fiction, which helps us imagine specific hypothetical futures. The clock is more open-ended. It helps us imagine a future unconstrained by specific predictions. It gives us room to imagine. The 10,000-year time frame reminds us that our future is very big and so it’s worth striving to make it better.
When you think about the fact that everything we consider modern technology — the entire collection of "the technium" — was discovered or invented in the last 400ish years, 10,000 years starts to sound bafflingly unpredictable. Especially when you factor in the exponential change in technology and culture even over the last 50. Aside from the clock itself, the process of designing one forces deep thought about what future possibilities to plan for. Here’s a segment showing the project from the documentary We Are As Gods:
🏙️ Cities Are Like Compost Heaps
I love this metaphor. Cities generate diversity. Cities mix layers of distinctly different cultures, behaviors, attitudes, motivations. Mixing creates volatility, collaboration, conflict. And almost every attempt to build useful, enjoyable cities by design has failed. They only come about through gradual accumulation. Gordon quotes William Gibson:
Cities are like compost heaps — just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent.
From
’s notes.🎺 Western Music Isn’t What You Think
Riffing on these urban mixing zones, but for a different purpose,
points out that the innovative moments in music history happened on the peripheries — in places where immigrants, outsiders, and slaves encounter vastly different cultures than their own. New Orleans, Cordoba, Venice, Seville. Port cities, borders, and hinterlands are breeding grounds for cultural innovation.You might say that Lesbos is like New Orleans, where jazz originated. The ingredients for innovation were the same in both instances:
Located at a port on a major trade route
At a border point or boundary between countries/cultures
Boasting a diverse, multicultural population
New Orleans was the most diverse city in the United States at the time when jazz emerged. The population drew from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America—and this diversity was further supported by a constant flow of trade and visitors via the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.
Western culture didn't form from whole cloth with distinctions of its own. Western culture is unique in its ability to invite, embed, and assimilate other cultures into the mix. It's been historically dominant because it doesn't need to thwart other cultures; it absorbs them. Amazingly in the west we have incredible reverence for what makes "outsider" culture unique.
This is the truth about Western culture nobody wants to tell you. People treat it like a monolithic system of established elites, but the exact opposite is true.
I have more thoughts on the value of these kinds of "collision zones" that I plan to write about soon.
🧠 Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model
The research team at Anthropic published a paper that gives an inside look at how their Claude Opus LLM works:
We were able to measure a kind of "distance" between features based on which neurons appeared in their activation patterns. This allowed us to look for features that are "close" to each other. Looking near a "Golden Gate Bridge" feature, we found features for Alcatraz Island, Ghirardelli Square, the Golden State Warriors, California Governor Gavin Newsom, the 1906 earthquake, and the San Francisco-set Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo.
💡 Create Good Problems to Have
"That's a good problem to have" is a common statement. What does it mean? What defines a "good problem"? Gordon has some ideas:
What makes a problem good to have? A good problem to have is a problem that emerges after the flywheel is already spinning. It emerges at scale, under rapid growth. Since the flywheel is already spinning, the momentum of the flywheel can be turned toward solving the problem. A rapidly growing ecosystem will be intrinsically motivated to solve obvious problems of scale.
"Good problems" are ones that are visible, boxed-in, readily observable. They're problems worth solving. They're ones that signal demand for a solution. One might say that your product getting so many signups that you can't process the payments fast enough is a good problem to have. Sure, it's one that needs solving, but it's a problem cropping up that's clearly worth solving.
The world is chock full of problems that we know are problems through one lens or another. But often these sorts of problems aren't "good" because we aren't even sure there's enough demand to warrant much attention. Or they're difficult to get a grasp on and articulate.
📚 The Fierce Urgency of Tao
A great piece from Jonah Goldberg on moral relativism, the importance of a meaningful truth, and how "seeing through" things can lead to bad places:
This idea is not original to me. It’s one of the great insights of C.S. Lewis, who writes in The Abolition of Man:
“You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”
Lewis believed that some things are simply—or complicatedly, but discoverably—true. There is an order, a reality, a moral universe outside of ourselves that is true because it is real, and it is real because it is true. “This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike,” Lewis said, “I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao.’”