What I’ve Been Reading; February 2024

Nonfiction

  1. A quick introduction to Lambda Calculus. While good, it left me wanting to learn more about lambda calculus, like how do we know it’s equivalent to Turing machines, etc.
  2. Nostalgebraist on AI scale and progress
  3. Nora Ammann on Cognitive Revolution talking about PIBBSS.
  4. TechCrunch covers the firing of Spotify’s technical engineers including Glenn McDonald, and the subsequent uncertain status of the music library-categorisation website-project “Every Noise at Once”.
  5. Ninell Oldenburg and Tan Zhi-Xuan posted a new paper on Learning and Sustaining Shared Normative Systems via Bayesian Rule Induction in Markov Games, which I hope to cover in an upcoming “Journal Club” post.

Fiction

  1. Consider Phlebas, by Iain M. Banks, a classic Sci-fi novel. It was pretty good, in many ways a standard “man on a quest makes a rag-tag band”, but the fact that it was fairly early in the genre means that probably it set the precedent for this trope in some ways, it also included many interesting political and social larger-scale drama, the Culture is an incredible setting, Minds are very cool, as are the different human races. In some ways the book was trying very, very hard not to be too ideas-driven, as the main character (Horza) was trying to convince himself he wasn’t fighting in the War for ideological reasons (of course he was), and I think Horza kind of succeeded in that (in the sense that he had narrative control over the book…).
  2. Neuropath, by R. Scott Bakker. Bakker writes one of my favourite epic fantasy series, the Second Apocalypse, where he explores themes related to rationality, consciousness, free will, and more. Neuropath was one of his earlier books, and in many ways it feels like a test bed for the things he would explore in the later Second Apocalypse books. Neuropath is written in 2008, and describes a near-future science-fiction scenario where humanity’s knowledge of neurocognition and brain biology has advanced massively, and certain people are able to basically edit people’s values, experiences, and sensations as they please. This of course brings up the normal themes of: a) what should we value when we can choose what to value, b) what does this tell us about free will/consciousness/values, etc. Overall, I enjoyed the Second Apocalypse more than I did Neuropath, but that’s partially because Second Apocalypse’s higher word count (7 long books and counting) allows it to take more time to build up its characters & world views, settings, stakes, conflicts, and philosophy more than Neuropath. If you’ve read Second Apocalypse, I don’t think Neuropath adds much to the conversation, but if you’re wary of committing to a full series, Neuropath is a fine enough substitute. I will give a warning, however, that Neuropath is pretty brutal at times, and that Bakker often writes gruesome scenes in general; these books are not for the squeamish.