Marc Burgauer

Complexity is a device used by societies to solve problems, and they ratchet up effort and sophistication until the marginal return slopes down over time. JA Tainter

Read this excellent essay by @beenwrekt.bsky.social In short, forget OpenAI; we need to build open AI. www.argmin.net/p/the-world-...

It’s difficult not to suspect that journalistic institutions, like politico here and most others, are intentionally playing up to AI companies by deflecting agency from AI companies to their products. So no politico journo is a good writer ? It’s just the characters choosing to arrange themselves?

Our statement on the recent Green Party of England and Wales motion 'Zionism is Racism'. europeangreens.eu/news/egp-pos...

The thing that gets me about these lurid anti-Zionist statements, like the one the Greens just passed, is that it is *so fucking easy* to criticise the Israeli government without engaging in that type of language.

Someone should write that paper that demonstrates how thoughtleadering makes you inevitably a dick and the more complex your matter, the faster that happens.

Trains leaving a minute early has become a thing!! I grew up in Switzerland, the gold standard for how to operate trains. Not done there. How has this become a thing in the UK?? As a cultural artefact, what does it say about how we’re changing? Baffling.

The Green party motion on Zionism shows little understanding of what Zionism is, who Jews are or how antisemitism works. Latest column www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

And there is no reasonable interface that I can imagine ever existing that would translate those skills in a culturally competent way — and it’s all cultural — for people to make that leap.

Project Airtag update! It's currently at Babington House, I assume enjoying an overpriced morning coffee. If/when this works, I will NEVER shut up about it.

“Zionism is racism” is itself a racist position.

Anyone supporting this motion is, at best, an imbecile. More likely they're a straight up cunt. If Polanski backs it, it would be an outrage. But even his failure to speak out against it is pretty damning. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

"You might think I'm making this up; I'm not. I'm reporting on things that other people made up" "I wish I were making this up, but I'm not" ... things we have to say when talking about the apocalyptic AI Harry Potter fanfic sex cult.

OH: "if you are at Columbia or Harvard or any of those universities: you *are* the oppressor because any oppressed cannot afford to go there, no matter the funding".

New pet hate: people vaping on the train. I find the scent absolutely revolting. I can deal with sound pollution with noise cancelling headphones, but how do I cope with that scent?

There's a serious problem here. A lot of scientists outside biology, especially in physics and computer science, seem to have largely a 1960s view of biology.

You thought trade with us would make us more liberal. In fact we learned you didn't care about our barbarities so we took it as a green light to do it again. So we did. If anything "change through trade" made your governments more like ours, rather than us more democratic.

I did a podcast on my book Serving The Reich yesterday, & in looking back through the book I came across this quote from Paul Rosbaud (an extraordinary man) on the response of the German professors to the 1933 Civil Service Laws. Ring any bells in relation to alleged "wokeism in academia" in the US?

We need to stop this nonsense of insisting on viewing scientific error as a problem to be eliminated. Scientific error is the fuel we need for scientific progress. Without uncertainty, we don't need science. With forced certainty and required faith, we get religion

Read Peter Wehner, on the significance of Natalie Harp www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

When a man has expertise, he is asked to lead. When a woman has expertise, she is seen as biased.

The Dunbar number points at an important limitation: that we have a limited capacity to form and maintain relationships, but the number itself is simplistic and a poor representation of what is a complex dynamic and therefore inevitably conflate the problem in context in a toxic way.

This piece rather misses the fact that large corporates are increasingly becoming direct political players, and arguably in doing so undermining the notion of free markets that The Economist is supposed to support.

Was reminded of this post. New insight since then: your best might not be needed, it might even be a local optima preventing your team’s best.

One of French puppeteer Raphaël Gromy’s most recognizable performances features a puppet painting real artworks on canvas, blending puppetry, live performance, and visual art into a unique theatrical experience. 😊 IG: @artistsuniversum @raphael_gromy

Yes, you could decide to suggest that academics with autism were rare before universities "made this decision", but only if you have extraordinary historical ignorance. (Or because you've chosen not to care about actual history.)

Imagination makes very bad blueprints for the possible.

One of the data points that make me truly worried about the progress of polarisation is how liberal lefties (like on #ogwn) rationalise the indefensible (incitement to violence, even if only on a re-posted t-shirt pic). The segment was pure us vs them bias & that us:them attitude is now everywhere.

On this basis, we can't be sure that atoms or toasters aren't conscious. How many more times are we doomed to keep hearing this? Tell us something we don't know already.

"We do not know for sure whether or not current AI systems are conscious or moral patients, and we do not know when or whether future systems will be." I'm so fed up with this line, which is basically "We don't understand consciousness, so who knows?"

I was wrong! 😆

Not that anyone who reads me here cares, but have to express how intrigued I am by all the uk football pundits forgetting the 14 minutes after the goal where England collapsed before Tuchel made changes. Yes, all! 14 mins wiped from their memory. Fascinating.

Funny how people out themselves as ignoramuses not knowing what the Luddites really were. (Understood technology perfectly well and accurately predicted its economic impact.)

I know a movie George Lucas should check out...

This is not good. Today it's a reward, tomorrow it will be prerequisite. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The irony of The Reverse Centaur argument is that it assumes the same belief in the agency of technology as what it aims to criticise. It is pulling in the same direction.

Unpopular opinion: there should be a law that if you stood for an elected political position and got elected, you cannot stand for another elected position during the period you were elected for.

The vehemence by which people reply to this without realising they’re proving Roz’ point would be amusing, if it wasn’t also evidencing the debilitating dogmatism of the UK left.

yeah, and it has a very long history of erasing women bsky.app/profile/oliv...

Another good example of how the “statistical” nature of LLMs distort the world. Undoing centuries of social progress one bias (network gravity well) at a time.

Giving this another round. Here I've explored the phenomenon of mutational buffering, whereby variants of coding genes that might be deleterious are kept "hidden" by a buffering mechanism that restores proper functioning of the gene product. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The special issue of Biological Theory "Continually Discovering Complexity: Essays in Honor of William Bechtel" is finally out with all the contributions, including ours! @lauramenatti.bsky.social #philbio #philmed @biologicaltheory.bsky.social link.springer.com/journal/1375...