https://abhinavgautam.in/A reader's edition of the sourceshttps://abhinavgautam.in/the-argument-compiled/https://abhinavgautam.in/the-argument-compiled/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:27:20 +0000Eighty-seven sources, written between the sixth century before the common era and this year, answer four questions about working with a machine that produces work. How do I get good output from it. How do I know the output is right, and how do I…https://abhinavgautam.in/the-yoga-vasistha/https://abhinavgautam.in/the-yoga-vasistha/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 15:16:49 +0000A prince comes home from a pilgrimage and stops eating. He is sixteen, the heir of Ayodhyā, and he will not say what is wrong. His chamberlain reports that he goes through the motions of bathing and resting like an automaton, that he spurns the…https://abhinavgautam.in/the-consciousness-of-self/https://abhinavgautam.in/the-consciousness-of-self/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:57:53 +0000James opens the tenth chapter of The Principles of Psychology by naming his route: begin with the self in its widest acceptation and follow it to its most subtle form, from the empirical Me to the pure Ego. The widest sense is deliberately coarse. A…https://abhinavgautam.in/the-society-of-mind/https://abhinavgautam.in/the-society-of-mind/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:51:32 +0000In the late 1960s Minsky and Seymour Papert set out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build a machine that could play with children's building-blocks. It had a mechanical hand with pressure sensors in its fingertips and a television camera for an eye, and…https://abhinavgautam.in/why-are-there-still-so-many-jobs/https://abhinavgautam.in/why-are-there-still-so-many-jobs/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:46:33 +0000A Time story of 24 February 1961 reported on the automation jobless and warned that machines were about to move from the factory into the office. Three years later Lyndon Johnson empanelled a national commission on technology and automation to face the possibility that productivity…https://abhinavgautam.in/why-language-models-hallucinate/https://abhinavgautam.in/why-language-models-hallucinate/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:40:16 +0000Asked for Adam Kalai's birthday, with the instruction to answer only if it knew, an open-source model of six hundred billion parameters returned three different dates on three attempts. None was right; the true date is in autumn. Kalai, Nachum, Vempala and Zhang treat that…https://abhinavgautam.in/gps-and-the-cognitive-map/https://abhinavgautam.in/gps-and-the-cognitive-map/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:39:32 +0000By 2020 a satellite navigation device had sat on the windscreen of most cars for a decade, and the experiments on it had all asked one question: how much of a route does a driver learn while the machine is talking? That answer was settled.…https://abhinavgautam.in/the-mythos-of-model-interpretability/https://abhinavgautam.in/the-mythos-of-model-interpretability/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:38:22 +0000By 2016 a machine learning paper could claim interpretability the way it claimed accuracy, without saying what had been claimed. Lipton reads that literature and offers two readings: either the definition is agreed and nobody has managed to write it down, or the term is…https://abhinavgautam.in/the-impact-of-generative-ai-on-critical-thinking/https://abhinavgautam.in/the-impact-of-generative-ai-on-critical-thinking/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:36:43 +0000Lee and his co-authors begin with a list of complaints: Socrates against writing, Trithemius against printing, arithmetic teachers against calculators, and a long line of objections to the Internet. They do not dismiss the list. They take it seriously by way of Bainbridge, whose irony…https://abhinavgautam.in/pancadasi/https://abhinavgautam.in/pancadasi/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:23:51 +0000Mādhava was a minister, a general and a viceroy before he was a philosopher. He helped Bukka and Harihara found the empire of Vijayanagara, commanded the army sent to relieve Goa, governed the western districts from Chandragutti, and had his gifts of villages to brahmins…https://abhinavgautam.in/the-reflective-practitioner/https://abhinavgautam.in/the-reflective-practitioner/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:03:07 +0000Donald Schön finished this book at MIT in 1982, at the end of two decades in which the American professions had gone from being celebrated as the engine of national progress to being blamed for a war, a run of failed social programmes and a…https://abhinavgautam.in/what-the-buddha-taught/https://abhinavgautam.in/what-the-buddha-taught/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:03:07 +0000Walpola Rahula finished this book in Paris in July 1958. He had been trained as a monk in a pirivena in Ceylon, had taken a doctorate on the history of Buddhism there, and was at the Sorbonne preparing a study of Asaṅga. He wrote for…https://abhinavgautam.in/from-bacteria-to-bach-and-back/https://abhinavgautam.in/from-bacteria-to-bach-and-back/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:03:06 +0000Dennett asks how there come to be minds at all, and how it is possible for minds to ask and answer that question. His answer takes three turns, and each costs the reader an intuition. The first is Darwin's: the design saturating the biosphere is…https://abhinavgautam.in/noise/https://abhinavgautam.in/noise/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:59:49 +0000The book opens at a shooting arcade. Four teams of five friends share a rifle and each member fires one shot. Team A's shots cluster on the bull's-eye. Team B's cluster just as tightly but off to one side; the team is biased, and the…https://abhinavgautam.in/complacency-and-bias-in-human-use-of-automation/https://abhinavgautam.in/complacency-and-bias-in-human-use-of-automation/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:42:00 +0000Parasuraman and Manzey take two terms that grew up in separate literatures and argue that they name the same thing. Complacency came out of aviation, where investigators used it for crews who stopped checking, and it was studied in supervisory control, where an operator watches…https://abhinavgautam.in/language-models-in-a-programming-course/https://abhinavgautam.in/language-models-in-a-programming-course/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:26:35 +0000Jošt, Taneski and Karakatič ran a second-year React course at the University of Maribor and turned the last week of it into a measurement. For nine weeks thirty-two students built four applications in React and TypeScript, free to use any language model they wanted and…https://abhinavgautam.in/what-is-intelligence/https://abhinavgautam.in/what-is-intelligence/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:08:36 +0000Agüera y Arcas argues that prediction is not one component of intelligence but the whole of it, and that the same principle, taken far enough, explains life as well. He defines life as self-modifying computronium selected for dynamic stability, and intelligence as the ability to…https://abhinavgautam.in/ai-snake-oil/https://abhinavgautam.in/ai-snake-oil/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:16:03 +0000Narayanan and Kapoor open with a world that has no words for cars, bicycles or rockets, only the collective noun vehicle. In that world people argue about whether vehicles are good for the environment without noticing that one side means bicycles and the other lorries,…https://abhinavgautam.in/co-intelligence/https://abhinavgautam.in/co-intelligence/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:16:03 +0000Ethan Mollick teaches innovation and entrepreneurship at Wharton and is not a computer scientist, which he offers as a qualification rather than an apology: his subject has always been how people actually use a technology, and he began assigning generative AI to his students four…https://abhinavgautam.in/determined/https://abhinavgautam.in/determined/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:03:49 +0000Sapolsky's claim is that there is no point in the causal chain at which an uncaused intent could enter, and that almost everything we do about blame and credit assumes there is one. A behaviour happened because of the state of a brain a second…https://abhinavgautam.in/behave/https://abhinavgautam.in/behave/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:03:49 +0000Sapolsky takes a single act — someone pulls a trigger, someone touches an arm — and refuses to explain it with one discipline. He proposes a procedure instead. Ask what happened in the brain in the second before. Then ask what sight or smell in…https://abhinavgautam.in/using-cognitive-psychology-to-understand-gpt-3/https://abhinavgautam.in/using-cognitive-psychology-to-understand-gpt-3/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:03:49 +0000In 1904 sixteen members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences put their names to a statement that a horse called Clever Hans could solve arithmetic problems at the level of a person. It took Oskar Pfungst years of experiment to show that the horse was…https://abhinavgautam.in/machine-psychology/https://abhinavgautam.in/machine-psychology/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:03:49 +0000A language model is trained to do one thing, predict the next token, and then does a great many things nobody trained it to do. There are two ways to find out what those things are: open it and read the weights, or leave it…https://abhinavgautam.in/the-extended-mind/https://abhinavgautam.in/the-extended-mind/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:03:49 +0000Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? Clark and Chalmers open with that question and decline both of the answers usually given to it. One draws the line at skin and skull. The other, impressed by the argument that the…https://abhinavgautam.in/are-emergent-abilities-of-large-language-models-a-mirage/https://abhinavgautam.in/are-emergent-abilities-of-large-language-models-a-mirage/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:03:49 +0000By 2022 one shape of plot had become the standard picture of what scale does to a language model: performance sits flat near chance across two or three orders of magnitude of parameters, then at some size lifts off. Wei 2022 defined the abilities behind…https://abhinavgautam.in/emergent-abilities-of-large-language-models/https://abhinavgautam.in/emergent-abilities-of-large-language-models/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:03:49 +0000By 2022 the standard result about language models was that they improve smoothly. Cross-entropy loss falls as a power law in compute, parameters and data, over more than seven orders of magnitude, and the curve can be fitted on small models and used to forecast…https://abhinavgautam.in/training-language-models-to-follow-instructions-with-human/https://abhinavgautam.in/training-language-models-to-follow-instructions-with-human/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:03:49 +0000Making a language model bigger does not make it better at doing what a user asked. GPT-3 was trained to predict the next token of a web page, and the alignment team at OpenAI argues that this objective has little to do with following an…https://abhinavgautam.in/influence/https://abhinavgautam.in/influence/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 07:47:13 +0000Cialdini opens by calling himself a lifelong patsy, an easy mark for peddlers and fundraisers who kept finding himself in possession of magazine subscriptions he did not want. He turned that into a research question — what makes one person say yes to another —…https://abhinavgautam.in/descartes-error/https://abhinavgautam.in/descartes-error/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 07:45:55 +0000Damasio was brought up on the advice that sound decisions come from a cool head, and he had in front of him the coolest and least emotional intelligent man he could imagine, whose practical reason had collapsed. The patient had lost his savings to a…https://abhinavgautam.in/studies-of-independence-and-conformity/https://abhinavgautam.in/studies-of-independence-and-conformity/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 07:35:55 +0000Solomon Asch set out to study independence and is remembered for its opposite. He seated one student among seven to nine others who had met the experimenter beforehand, and asked the group to say aloud which of three lines matched a standard line on a…