wondering if you tried with nonlinear (NL) methods. Many neural reps live on NL manifolds (V1 orientation tuning, Moser’s hippocampal grid code, Churchland’s motor “factors”). Might low rank NL manifolds be mischaracterized as too high d by linear methods?

Great work, seen preliminary versions (CCN or COSYNE). Seems like the low d representations paradigm may be a convenient oversimplification (albeit a productive one), and it’s important to recognize where and how it hits its limits. That said,

This book is about communism. Wrong end of the spectrum. Our authoritarians eliminate efforts to promote the collective good (USAID, science) and today are pushing to cut food and medicine for the poor and pay the rich (tax breaks and interest payments to cover the resultant budget shortfall).

I’m actually skeptical of the gendered take on literacy. I want to see details on who is reading what, not a simple binary take. I suspect reading comprehension, book length, complexity and subtly is down on all fronts, regardless of gender, but gender makes for better clickbait.

The problem of the future is social, not medical or epidemiological. Literacy rates are in retreat among college grads.

www.ft.com/content/e2dd...

It’s hard not to look at student’s cognitive capabilities these days and not fear a catastrophic cultural loss stemming from social media and LLMs.

Do you think anti intellectualism is a new feature of American society? Alexis de Tocqueville supposedly commented on it in 1835. Others have echoed this.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-in...

Fine suggestions, but these are coding practices that are already largely embraced in sci programmers seeking maximal convenience and expedience. What about design principles and architecture? This is what is most lacking/deficient in sci programming IMO.

The educational system is not at risk, but the credentialing system is. Any student that wants an education can still do the work and have it. The scandal is that none are actually there for an education, revealing the rot underlying what is effectively a cast sorting system for indentured service.

Interesting how you use word embedding models as a way to explain why LLMs hallucinate. Presumably we’re several steps removed from something that simple. That could be fine for a general audience but what’s the more nuanced take?

lol. Touché.

That said, I am nevertheless concerned about the erosion of democratic norms, and suspect that the latest metrics, whatever they may be, lag considerably behind the reality we now live in.

Strictly speaking it doesn’t. You imply that the threshold for competitive authoritarianism is quite low though, and that is inconsistent with what most people familiar with the phrase (eg the readership of foreign affairs) are likely to understand by it. That is what I take issue with.

This is deceptive. For comparison consider Turkey and Hungry, which epitomize competitive authoritarianism today. Both have lower indices of liberal democracy in 2025 than pre 1970 US.

v-dem.net/data_analysi...

These statements were never made.

Related statements were made in 2019, and the blasphemy was not nearly as overt as claimed.

Truth matters. It the only viable long term strategy for a functioning democratic society.

Blocked.

apnews.com/article/f498...

Take heart. Some stand firm.

“Lawyers and big firms: For God’s sake, stand up for the legal profession, and for the Constitution. Defend the oath you took when you became officers of the court. If we stand together and fight, we will win.”
-Keker, Van Nest & Peters

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/o...

Hard paywall. Taylor Francis hasn’t been covered directly by any university I’ve been affiliated with (Minnesota, Colorado, Northwestern, Boston, Dartmouth). Don’t publish with them if you want people to read your work.

You seem regretful that these people didn't catch on sooner, but given that the major motivation behind generative AI financing seems to be labor replacement and weapons development rather than scientific advancement, I'm not sure it's a bad thing that they've been on the wrong track.