Kickoff for August 5, 2024
Thanks to everyone who took part in the poll about the number of links to include in each edition of The Monday Kickoff. I have a bit to think about around that and will let you know what's happening soon.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
Are All Workplaces Inherently Toxic? — Wherein Samia Madwar explores the titular question, looks at what workplace toxicity is and why it exists, and at ways to break the cycle of toxicity.
From the article:
[M]aybe we shouldn’t accept misery at work as being normal.
The Battle for Attention — Wherein Nathan Heller takes us on yet another exploration of why our attention is being constantly fragmented, what advertisers are doing to try to grab shards of that broken attention, and the seemingly quixotic efforts of some people to take attention back.
From the article:
For most people, attention is not a point of visual focus but something nearer to a warm breeze through an open window, carrying fragrances from far away. We feel its power when we read an absorbing novel. We find it when we visit a new place and notice everything for the first time.
Where does culture come from? — Wherein Terry Eagleton explores that question, looking at the economic and religious connections to culture's development, and how the idea of culture seems to have devolved into ideology.
From the article:
You can’t have culture in the sense of galleries and museums and publishing houses unless society has evolved to the point where it can produce an economic surplus. Only then can some people be released from the business of keeping the tribe alive in order to constitute a caste of priests, bards, DJs, hermeneuticists, bassoon players, LRB interns, gaffers on film sets and the like. In fact, you might define culture as a surplus over strict need.
Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning — Wherein we're introduced to yet more research into the cognitive benefits of going analog, the effects that can have on the learning and development of children, and why using pen or pencil and paper can be beneficial for adults.
From the article:
Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.
How does ChatGPT ‘think’? Psychology and neuroscience crack open AI large language models — Wherein we take a look into the inner workings of large language models like ChatGPT and discover how those models learn and the methods researchers use to study them.
From the article:
In the face of this difficulty, researchers have turned to the field of explainable AI (XAI), expanding its inventory of tricks and tools to help reverse-engineer AI systems. Standard methods include, for example, highlighting the parts of an image that led an algorithm to label it as a cat, or getting software to build a simple ‘decision tree’ that approximates an AI’s behaviour.
Time Bandits — Wherein we learn about the work of, and unlikely friendship between, physicist Albert Einstein and mathematician Kurt Gödel, how they both seemed to fall into professional despondency towards the ends of their lives, and about the impact the ideas of both men had.
From the article:
A certain futility marked the last years of both Gödel and Einstein. What may have been most futile, however, was their willed belief in the unreality of time.