Q🇺🇸

Applied Math @ BYU.

[GL @gldivittorio]

Bar

[Q🇺🇸 @jackqcook]

@NoahKingJr Religion

[Anarch97 @anarch97]

Edits are probably the most important art form right now

[Q🇺🇸 @jackqcook]

@MTSlive Rare Walz W

[Q🇺🇸 @jackqcook]

@chrisbest @josiezayner I’m bummed more people don’t mention the LIGO project

[Q🇺🇸 @jackqcook]

“We are all adventurers here, I suppose, and wild doings in wild countries appeal to us as nothing else could do. It is good to know that there remain wild corners of this dreadfully civilised world.” — Robert falcon scott

[Q🇺🇸 @jackqcook]

@SuhailKakar @jxnlco It’s a true step change

[Q🇺🇸 @jackqcook]

@BrendanFoody 🫡

[Q🇺🇸 @jackqcook]

@Cam_Jourdan Tough to see Rose not pull it off today. Feels criminal that he may never win a green jacket

[Markus Covert Lab @MarkusCovertLab]

Very true - it's time to call for a Human Cell Project, analogous to the Human Genome Project, to systematically and comprehensively characterize and model first the simplest and then the most complex cells. A moonshot to catapult biology to the next era🦠🚀💪 - let's go!!

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

I concluded my Henry Family lecture at the University of Miami last Thursday by saying:

“Two things are important right now in life: deep learning and fertility. Everything else is noise.”

We are only starting to glimpse what these two forces will do to global life over the next fifty years. And they interact: deep learning will reshape demographics, and demographic collapse will reshape automation.

Nearly all my posts on X (except some parochial commentary on Spanish economic policy) revolve around these two facts. So does most of my current research. Even work that does not seem directly connected turns out to be, once you look carefully.

My papers on geoeconomics and international macro are about figuring out some of the consequences of deep learning and fertility. For example, my work on China focuses on its abysmal demographic future and how the U.S. is positioning itself (rightly or wrongly) to address it.

And my work on political polarization and the welfare state is about the consequences of decades of low fertility in Western Europe. When people talk about political change in Western Europe, they are talking about low fertility, whether they know it or not. It is not clear that modern representative democracy can survive sustained fertility rates of 1.3. I do not say that with glee.

The reason I decided to spend my life on academic work in economics is that I realized, when I was much younger, that daily events are irrelevant. The things that concern the media and 99 percent of commentary on X are largely irrelevant. One political party does better or worse in the next electoral cycle because of internal fights or a good campaign. At a fundamental level, none of it matters: the political outcome 25 years from now will not depend on those accidents. As Alexander Gerschenkron said, Clio is not a tidy housewife. The rise of any political movement is always full of advances and retreats. Social change waxes and wanes.

But at the end of the day, as my favorite historian Fernand Braudel put it:

“The events of history are merely surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.”

or in the much better original:

“Les événements de l’histoire ne sont que des agitations de surface, des crêtes d’écume que les marées de l’histoire portent sur leur dos puissant.”

The tides of history today are deep learning and fertility.

[j⧉nus @repligate]

I met Nick Land a few weeks ago. He mentioned that many people in his circles were anti-LLMs. Someone asked why he thought so many people were. His answer was better than anything so short I thought of:

“People like to exist critically with respect to something.”

This I think accurately characterizes a lot of people whose outputs and inputs primarily consist of “discourse” about rather than direct contact with the reality at hand. Existing critically with respect to something makes it easy to seem cool, sophisticated, above something, hard-to-impress and therefore worth trying to impress, especially to others who also don’t have contact with the phenomena itself.

And for that reason I think it’s cheap. And to someone who has an inside view of what is being discussed, it’s always so transparent and boring and compressible.

I’m far more impressed by someone who is capable of loving something and showing others why it’s beautiful or good. Doesn’t have to be LLMs, but anything at all.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Even today there are tombs to be opened, and often the stones sealing them are so heavy and so closely guarded that they seem to be immovable. Some weigh heavily on the human heart, such as mistrust, fear, selfishness and resentment; others, stemming from these inner struggles, sever the bonds between us through war, injustice and the isolation of peoples and nations. Let us not allow ourselves to be paralyzed by them! #Easter

[François Chollet @fchollet]

One of the biggest misconceptions people have about intelligence is seeing it as some kind of unbounded scalar stat, like height. "Future AI will have 10,000 IQ", that sort of thing. Intelligence is a conversion ratio, with an optimality bound. Increasing intelligence is not so much like "making the tower taller", it's more like "making the ball rounder". At some point it's already pretty damn spherical and any improvement is marginal.

Now of course smart humans aren't quite at the optimal bound yet on an individual level, and machines will have many advantages besides intelligence -- mostly the removal of biological bottlenecks: greater processing speed, unlimited working memory, unlimited memory with perfect recall... but these are mostly things humans can also access through externalized cognitive tools.

[Alexander Doria @Dorialexander]

weirdly enough, i feel we might have another ml/deep learning boom as this is all so easy to train now.

[Q🇺🇸 @jackqcook]

@michaelmiraflor Always has been

[Q🇺🇸 @jackqcook]

@kingofknowwhere These are the kids who are going to win

[Q🇺🇸 @jackqcook]

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” — David Lynch