Tag
Essays
15 posts tagged Essays, newest first.
The FORGIVE protocol
Fabric-Overload Relief: Gradients under Iteration-Varying Exemption. A receiver acknowledges past bytes a switch trimmed, within a loss budget that tightens on steps most sensitive to loss. A congested ML training network can then trade bounded loss for less time spent throttled.
Machine-checked proofs for AI-written software
A product manager writes the requirements, one agent turns them into Lean, another writes the code, and the checker proves the code satisfies the spec. The human reviews only the formalization, and most of that pipeline already works today.
Pruning the LLM context beats the maximalist approach
An agent I built for an HCI study in March could search a chunked psychology textbook, carry memory across tool calls, reach a few MCP servers and run a web search, on every question. Calling all of them every time turned out to be the wrong default.
Functional correspondence without isomorphism: evaluating the brain-ANN analogy
A term essay: the brain does not run backpropagation, and language models still out-predict neuroscientists on their own literature. Marr's levels let both be true; the brain-ANN analogy lives at the computational level.
Language as a cognitive scaffold: inner speech and chain-of-thought
A term essay: inner speech in humans and chain-of-thought prompting in LLMs do the same job, using language to break hard problems into steps. The differences a well-known comparison found are mostly methodology.
Dynamical Systems Theory is efficient, not sufficient
An exam essay: the Watt governor buys intelligent behaviour at near-zero representational cost, and that same thrift is why Dynamical Systems Theory cannot account for language, logic, or planning.
Upgrading the Turing Test beyond imitation
A term essay: the Turing Test rewards convincing conversation, and Eugene Goostman showed convincing is cheap. Telling imitation from understanding means looking inside the model, at its attention and activations.
A warm-up phase for the mental rotation task
A term essay: the linear relation between rotation angle and response time may be part practice effect, and a distinctive shape may hint at which axis to turn. A redesign that spends the learning before anything is measured.
Cognitive load decides whether you multitask or switch
A term essay: multi-object tracking says we attend to several things at once, and the psychological refractory period says we take turns. Both results hold, and the cognitive load of the task is what selects between them.
Four dimensions, same problem
A paper on Sider's four-dimensionalist treatment of the Ship of Theseus. Written as a state and a transition function, the four-dimensional view turns out to need exactly what the three-dimensional causal unity account needs, so it inherits that problem rather than escaping it.
The mathematics physics actually needs
A paper on Field's nominalism: if mathematics is only a conservative shortcut, its axioms could be chosen freely. Quantum mechanics needing complex numbers suggests they cannot, and the consistency the argument rests on cannot be proved.
Causation is contested only at the edges
A paper on Godfrey-Smith's proposal to treat causation as an essentially contested concept. The boundary really is blurry, but the ordinary use is stable enough that courts agree on most of it, which is not how a contested concept behaves.