Author: robert.adlington

There are no rules around rule making, only that you treat them with some reverence, some gravity, treat them as loosely canonical, possible to be broken, but only broken with proper justification. It’s when you abide by a rule, feel out its contours and edges, and then consciously break it, that interesting work begins to…

a kind of conceptual universality—a shared abstract space where meanings exist and where thinking can happen before being translated into specific languages. More practically, it suggests Claude can learn something in one language and apply that knowledge when speaking another. Studying how the model shares what it knows across contexts is important to understanding its…

Good chains of reasoning in economics are not too long and complicated.  If they run on for very long, there is probably something wrong with the argument.  The length of these effective reasoning chains is well within the abilities of the top LLMs today. Plenty of good economics requires a synthesis of theoretical and empirical…

I’ve added a new content type to my blog: notes. These join my existing types: entries, bookmarks and quotations. A note is a little bit like a bookmark without a link. They’re for short form writing – thoughts or images that don’t warrant a full entry with a title. The kind of things I used…

Some filmmakers start in commercials, honing their chops in anticipation of making personal projects later. A select few go in the other direction, realizing their distinctive vision before fielding offers from companies who want a piece of that vision’s cultural currency. Open Culture, openculture.com — Read on www.openculture.com/2018/07/watch-commercials-david-lynch-directed-big-30-minute-compilation.html

This finding has pushed back systematic bone tool production by more than a million years and challenges previous assumptions about the technological capability of early hominins. Crafted from the bones of elephants and hippopotamuses, these tools showcase an advanced level of cognitive ability and craftsmanship, which was thought to have emerged much later in human…

Individuals with economically left-wing and culturally conservative attitudes tend to score highest on conspiracy thinking. People at this ideological location seem to long for both economic and cultural protection and bemoan a “lost paradise” where equalities had not yet been destroyed by “perfidious” processes of cultural modernization and economic neoliberalism. — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/03/who-believes-in-conspiracy-theories.html

Semantic diffusion occurs when you have a word that is coined by a person or group, often with a pretty good definition, but then gets spread through the wider community in a way that weakens that definition. This weakening risks losing the definition entirely – and with it any usefulness to the term. — Read…

So much of education is teaching people context.  That is why it is hard, and also why it often does not seem like real learning. — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/context-is-that-which-is-scarce-2.html

“I don’t think we ultimately know who we really are all the time. The task for all these different things, whether it’s acting, music, painting, ceramics, the main task is getting out of the way, letting the thing come through you. And it can be frightening sometimes. But sometimes it just has its way with…