Lalit Panda

For some time now, events have made it increasingly clear that the right against discrimination is a central social and political question for India. @AanisHusain and I have finally put out a concise report on the subject: vidhilegalpolicy.in/research/the-s…

@LedermanHarvey @ZoltnGborSzcs1 @rbnmckenna86 @BrianLeiter Honestly, it’s not looking like you did yourself. The broader problem, of which the take-home essay seems to be a necessary if local part, is the breakdown of social proofs. It is concern for integrity that you are pooh-poohing.

@ZoltnGborSzcs1 @rbnmckenna86 @BrianLeiter Did you read the post I was responding to?

Two thoughts: 1) academics are so shortsighted! We’re faced with a transformative technology and all anyone can talk about is plagiarism. Use blue books! It’s not that big a deal. 2) AI may very well destroy the university as we know it. It will change what it makes sense to teach and more importantly how it makes sense to teach. We could offer thousands of classes with AI tutors guided by faculty, we could teach new skills that help people navigate the new world, habits of mind could be more important than content, maybe more radically human society could focus more on leisure/schole and the university could take up more of our lives as we focus on fulfillment. We supposedly have imagination and creativity! Let’s start using them instead of focusing narrowly on one issue with assessment

"A man from Chu who sold shields and spears boasted, 'My shield is so strong that nothing can pierce it. My spear is so sharp that there is no object it cannot pierce.' Someone asked him, 'Would you like to be in Forbes?'" - Han Feizi (c. 240 BC)

No matter how good AI gets, it won’t beat markets | Financial Post financialpost.com/opinion/ai-can…

dawg

Coming back to Hayek’s argument, there was another aspect of it that has always bothered me. What if computational power of central planners improved tremendously? Would Hayek then be happy with central planning?

If AI scientists are writing millions of papers, many of which are slop, and some of which are incremental progress, how would we identify the one or two which come up with an extremely productive new idea? In 1948, Shannon was one of hundreds of engineers at Bell Labs working on how to cleanly send voice signals over noisy copper wires. His paper sat in the same technical journal as reports on reducing static and building better filters. How would you recognize that he has come up with this very general framework for thinking about information and communication channels, which over the coming decades would have enormous use from domains as far apart as cryptography to genetics to quantum mechanics? It seems like it can take fields multiple decades to recognize the significance of unifying new concepts. Because it is on that time scale that the fruits of such general concepts lead to new discoveries across many different fields. We’ve managed to solve this peer review problem for human scientists (at least somewhat). Now we’ll need to do it at a much greater scale for the mass of AI science that will be thrown at us.

If your social circle gets large enough and sufficiently robust you start developing institutions and state capacity by accident

1. The ongoing war in West Asia as well as the widening cracks in the global trading system should bring back to public notice a book written in 1945 by one of my favourite economists, Albert Hirschman. The title of his book is "National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade".

I write for The Telegraph on why the idea of “trust-based” regulation or “Jan Vishwas” makes good sense for anyone committed to meaningful freedom, but also on how this same commitment also raises fundamental problems.

Look at the way the headline is framed, shifting the violence to the Opposition with "trains guns", thereby whitewashing the BJP's incitement to violence against Muslims The best one could expect from gold standard India Today I suppose.

New research from @thesamasher et al. using data from 1.5 million urban and rural neighborhoods in India. "Muslim and Scheduled Caste segregation in India is high by global standards, and only slightly lower than Black-White segregation in the US" nber.org/system/files/w…

#westandwithdeepak #MuhammadDeepak A mountain-like man doesn’t break before mobs... he breaks when his mother is made to tremble. Father died 15 years ago for standing up for the weak. A tea-stall mother raised a son with courage. Today she’s scared. That’s the damage done. Is this your strength? Bullying the vulnerable, traumatising mothers, and calling it nationalism? History won’t remember this as power... It will remember it as shame.

I just watched a really great conversation about the future of AI. Every politician should watch it before they join the lemmings saying that regulation of AI will interfere with innovation. youtube.com/watch?v=rGAA59…

Wallace Shawn is trending, so it's a great time to read The Fever. It's a beautifully written monologue of the experience of being in the intelligentsia/middle class of the imperial core, and coming to terms with what that means for your way of life. Listen to an audiobook.

Many readers took issue with Milton's anachronistic and "grotesque" introduction of cannons to the celestial war in Book VI of Paradise Lost, but a WWI veteran asserts here that in all his time searching for something akin to his feeling in the trenches, only Book VI came close.

My husband needed an ultrasound so I came with him. At the imaging reception they saw a man and a pregnant woman and they looked at us and said 'ultrasound?'. I feel like I'm living in a philosophical counterexample about justified true beliefs.

Lalit Panda argues that legal, constitutional and even the army's cultures suffer from contradictions. #IndianArmy #Religion #Christianity #Sikhism #Judiciary @leo_mukherjee telegraphindia.com/opinion/grey-l…

I understand that it can be difficult to comprehend the full significance of the practices of the armed forces from outside, but it’s important that we speak about our concerns without hesitation. As with the Army, so for other connected evasions on the matter of discrimination.

A Christian officer was dismissed from the Army for refusing to take part in the religious parades of the Sikh squadron he led. The court upheld this by treating the puja as a military duty here. I’ve written in The Telegraph on the case: telegraphindia.com/opinion/grey-l…