Reading statuses — How deeply the paper was READ — not whether it is any good, which is lit-statuses. The two disagree in every direction: a foundational paper can carry a Skimmed note, and a paper in the attic can carry a Read one, since reading it carefully is often how it got there (ADR-025).
Skimmed — abstract, figures and selected sections; honest, useful, and explicitly not enough to source a practice from.
60 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-147 | Wigner — Symmetry and conservation laws | Wigner argues that invariance principles stand to the laws of nature as laws stand to events — they give structure to the laws — and distinguishes geometrical invariances (formulated on events; yielding energy/momentum/angular-momentum conservation, most directly in quantum kinematics) from dynamical ones such as gauge invariance and, he holds, general covariance, which are tied to specific interactions. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-179 | Brandom, inferentialism and meaning entitlement | Boghossian’s objection to substantive, entitlement-based theories of meaning (drawn from pejoratives like “Boche”) works against Dummett but not against Brandom. Brandom’s material inferences are non-monotonic and ceteris paribus, so one can grasp a concept while refusing to endorse the inferences it licenses. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-220 | Jorgensen & Tian, Noncommutative Analysis (GNS, RKHS) | The textbook puts the kernel construction and the GNS construction in one frame. It calls building a Hilbert space from a positive definite function “the GNS construction”, and proves (Cor. 1.35) that the feature map realising a kernel as inner products is unique up to a unitary among minimal realisations. It also states that in the abelian case states are exactly probability measures, so that “the GNS construction is non-commutative measure theory”. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-274 | Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics, and Gauges | The authors cast CNNs, GNNs, Deep Sets, Transformers, spherical, mesh and gauge CNNs, and LSTMs as instances of one “blueprint” (p. 29). Each is a stack of linear G-equivariant layers, pointwise nonlinearities and local pooling, capped by a G-invariant global pooling, with the domain Ω and its symmetry group G given in advance (p. 27: “a symmetry group G”; p. 4: “exploiting the known symmetries”). The two priors are symmetry and scale separation. The Fourier transform is derived as the joint eigenbasis of shift-commuting (circulant) operators, which requires distinct eigenvalues (p. 37). Its group-theoretic generalisation via irreducible representations is announced and deferred to “future work” (p. 43). | Skimmed |
| NOTE-291 | Analysis of Boolean Functions | Every f: {−1,1}ⁿ → ℝ has a unique multilinear (Fourier–Walsh) expansion f = Σ_S f̂(S)χ_S over the parities χ_S(x) = ∏{i∈S} x_i, which are an orthonormal basis (Thm 1.1, Thm 1.5) and are the characters of the group F₂ⁿ, χ_S(x+y) = χ_S(x)χ_S(y) (eq. 1.5; §3.2; §8.5). The central operators are all diagonal in this basis with eigenvalues depending only on |S|: the noise operator T_ρχ_S = ρ^{|S|}χ_S (Prop. 2.47) and the Laplacian Lχ_S = |S|χ_S (Prop. 2.37). Influence, noise stability and Arrow’s Theorem (via Stab{−1/3}) become statements about the Fourier weight at each level (Thms 2.20, 2.38, 2.49, 2.56). | Skimmed |
| NOTE-315 | The Theory of Signal Detectability. Part I: The General Theory; Part II: Applications with Gaussian Noise | Peterson and Birdsall show that the criterion approach (maximise P_SN(A) − β·P_N(A), or maximise detection at fixed false-alarm k) and the Woodward–Davies a-posteriori approach are all solved by one receiver that computes the likelihood ratio ℓ(x) = f_SN(x)/f_N(x) and thresholds it (Part I, Theorems 1–7). They introduce the receiver operating characteristic, whose slope at each point is the threshold β (Theorem 8, Eq. 2.51). For a signal known exactly in white Gaussian noise, ln ℓ is normal with equal variance 2E/N₀ under both hypotheses and means 2E/N₀ apart, so the ROC is a one-parameter family indexed by the “detection index” d = (M_SN − M_N)²/σ² = 2E/N₀ (Part II, Eqs. 4.1–4.8, Fig. 4.1). The receiver is a correlator or matched filter (Eq. 5.3, 4.10). | Skimmed |
| NOTE-335 | Putnam — Psychological Predicates | Pain is hypothesised to be a functional state of a whole organism, a probabilistic automaton’s state fixed by its machine table, rather than a physical-chemical brain state, because a functional organisation common to all pain-feelers is a likelier invariant than a physical one. The hypothesis carries the anti-nesting condition (3): no pain-feeler has a decomposition into parts that separately possess the pain-capable kind of Description. Its only stated motive is to exclude swarms of bees. Its clause (1) is empty, since everything is a probabilistic automaton under some Description. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-418 | Pattern formation outside of equilibrium | Read for the record’s question only. Patterns away from equilibrium are classified by the linear instability of a uniform state (type I_s, III_o, I_o) and described near onset by universal amplitude equations. There is in general no free energy or Lyapunov functional selecting them. Bénard’s own 1900 hexagons were surface-tension-driven, not Rayleigh’s buoyancy convection. Closed chemical systems must reach equilibrium, so their patterns are transients or need pumping. No global minimization principle exists beyond a perturbative one near threshold. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-457 | Internal Family Systems Therapy | Chapter 1 only. Schwartz tells how IFS grew out of structural and strategic family therapy. Clients with bulimia described warring “parts”. Coercing parts made matters worse, and curiosity revealed that they protected the client. When interfering parts were asked to “step back”, a calm, compassionate “Self” appeared that needed no development. The chapter ends with eight essentials: ecological respect for protectors, Self-leadership, unblending, attention to polarizations, non-pathologizing burdens, movement between system levels, and innate self-healing. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-507 | Damasio & Damasio — Homeostatic feelings and the biology of consciousness | An Essay with no data. Consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as one’s own, provided by continuous homeostatic feelings that are conscious in themselves and “lend” consciousness to exteroceptive images. Feelings are hybrid because interoceptive pathways (unmyelinated, partly non-synaptic, barrier-free) let the body act on its own map. Evidence is cited clinical contrast: posterior brainstem lesions cause coma, extensive cortical lesions may not; anaesthetics act at membrane-level sensing below feeling. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-596 | Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory | Four chains of ten adults each learned a 27-item artificial language from 14 items and passed their test output on. Transmission error fell and string–meaning structure rose. Unfiltered (Experiment 1), the languages collapsed to 2–5 words that systematically underspecified meanings (colour lost in every chain). With homonyms filtered from training (Experiment 2), they became compositional, with substrings for colour, shape and motion. Participants believed they were copying. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-601 | Seven Sketches in Compositionality | From Chapter 1 and Section 3.4: an observation is a monotone map, and a generative effect is its failure to preserve joins, Φ(a) ∨ Φ(b) < Φ(a ∨ b); left adjoints preserve joins, and out of a preorder with all joins a monotone map preserves joins iff it is a left adjoint. Database schemas are categories, instances functors to Set, and a schema map induces migrations Σ ⊣ Δ ⊣ Π. The other five chapters were seen only at their openings and summaries. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-618 | Structuralism | From a one-page-in-four preview of chs. I–IV: a structure is defined by wholeness, transformation and self-regulation. Its elements are subordinated to laws of composition; “all known structures… are, without exception, systems of transformation”; and in logic and mathematics regulation is perfect because every operation has an inverse. Structures whose transformations unfold in time, linguistic or social, are regulated but not fully reversible. Structures are real only if governed from within, by a subject defined as “the center of functional activity”. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-622 | Making It Explicit | In the core of chapter 3, asserting undertakes a commitment, licenses others to reassert it and takes on a responsibility to show entitlement if challenged. Entitlement passes by justification (across contents) and by deferral (between people), and holds by default until challenged. Each interlocutor keeps score of everyone’s commitments and entitlements, so scorekeeping is doubly perspectival. A speech act’s significance is the change it makes to the scores, determined by its content’s inferential role. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-624 v2 | The Geometry of Causality | Empirical models on any cover of a space of input histories are exactly the points of a causaltope, a product of simplices sliced by linear causality equations, which makes supported and causally separable fractions linear programs. Defines causal separability relative to an ambient space and shows, with entangled and contextually controlled quantum switches, that the causally separable fraction is bounded below by the separable local fraction and can equal it. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-642 | Morphology of the Folktale | In chs. II–III of the 1968 English text, Propp’s four theses and his 31 functions appear as in the Russian. The functions are named by nouns of action under capitalised headings, with Greek signs for the seven preparatory functions and Latin ones after. “Dramatis personae” and “characters” alternate for the same word, and the class studied is “fairy tales”, under a title Dundes calls misleading. The second edition’s additions are visible on the page: Wagner’s notes correct about forty of Propp’s tale references in two chapters and renumber the tales to the later Afanas’ev numbering. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-696 | Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference | From four excerpts the author posts: an intervention do(X = x) is a surgery that deletes X’s structural equation, sets X to x and solves the rest, while observing X = x violates no equation and is ordinary conditioning, “given that we see”. Structural equations are therefore not algebraic equalities: they stand for every submodel an intervention can produce, and a structural coefficient is ∂E[Y | do(x)]/∂x, not a regression slope. The Epilogue contrasts two components of science, observation and intervention, and states the three rules of the do-calculus without their derivation. The excerpts have no three-level hierarchy of association, intervention and counterfactual. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-710 | boyd (2008), Taken Out of Context: collapsed contexts | Networked publics remove the boundaries that kept a person’s social contexts apart. Self-presentations that differ by audience coexist while the audiences are segmented, and collide when the medium brings them together. People manage the collision by scripting it (a wedding), by noticing it (meeting the boss while out with friends), or by rebuilding walls (privacy settings, false details). Online, the collision often goes unseen by the person it happens to. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-734 | Grice — Logic and Conversation | pp. 45–47 only: conversational implicatures are to be tied to a Cooperative Principle (contribute what the accepted purpose of the talk exchange requires) and to maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. Grice flags the second Quantity maxim as disputable, defers Relation, and calls the information-exchange framing too narrow. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-737 v2 | Schmid, Selby & Spekkens — Unscrambling the omelette of causation and inference | In a process-theoretic framework that keeps causal and inferential structure apart, generalized noncontextuality becomes the demand that a realist representation preserve inferential equivalence. A Leibnizian classical realist representation implies a generalized-noncontextual one, so every noncontextuality no-go theorem is a no-go for Leibnizian representations; the converse is a conjecture. Bell-like theorems deny any classical realist representation, a weaker assumption, while noncontextuality theorems apply even to a prepare-measure scenario with no Bell-like constraint. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-772 v2 | Kothapalli — Neural Collapse: A Review on Modelling Principles and Generalization | A survey, not a source of results. It sorts accounts of neural collapse into unconstrained-features models (the last-layer features are free variables) and local elasticity, and reports that every one of them derives the collapsed state or its dynamics only after removing the data. On generalization it finds the literature in conflict. Collapse on the training set does not guarantee good test error, test-set collapse is much weaker and dataset-dependent, and there is no agreed threshold for calling a network collapsed. It also reports that networks more collapsed on ImageNet transfer worse. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-823 | Pereboom — Living without Free Will | From the Introduction and Chapter 1’s first ten pages only. Hard incompatibilism: moral responsibility in the basic-desert sense is incompatible with determinism and with the indeterminacy of standard quantum mechanics; agent-causal libertarianism may be coherent, but we have no evidence for the indeterminacy it needs, so we have no evidence that we are morally responsible. Frankfurt-style cases defeat alternative-possibilities conditions but not the core incompatibilist condition, which concerns an action’s causal history. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-829 | Jorgensen & Tian — Noncommutative Analysis (GNS, RKHS) | The book calls the kernel-to-Hilbert-space construction “the GNS construction” (Remark 1.34) and states that minimal realizations ϕ(x,y) = ⟨Φ(x), Φ(y)⟩ are unique up to a unitary (Cor. 1.35). It does not prove the corollary; the proof is “left as an exercise”. The parallel uniqueness for states and cyclic representations is proved (Thm 4.35), and the argument transfers. The commutative GNS space L²(μ) is written out explicitly (Ex. 4.86, Lemma 3.28). | Skimmed |
| NOTE-832 | Fricker — Epistemic Injustice (précis) | From the author’s précis only. Epistemic injustice is a wrong done to someone in her capacity as a knower. Testimonial injustice is a prejudicially deflated credibility judgement by a hearer. Hermeneutical injustice is a gap in collective understanding, owed to the relative powerlessness of the subject’s group, that keeps her from making sense of a social experience. Each has a corrective virtue, and each virtue is at once intellectual and ethical. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-848 | Dwork et al. — The reusable holdout (supplementary material) | From the Supplementary Material: if the max-information between the dataset and the analyst’s chosen function is at most log₂e·τ²n, the chance that the function’s empirical mean is more than τ above its true mean is at most e^{−τ²n}; pure ε-differential privacy bounds max-information by log₂e·εn. Thresholdout answers m adaptively chosen statistical queries on a holdout of size n = O(ln(m/β)/τ² · min{B, √(B·ln(m/β))/τ}) to accuracy τ with probability 1 − β, where B budgets the times the training estimate is found to overfit. The main text was not read. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-863 | Goldreich — Foundations of Cryptography, Vol. 1 (1995 fragments): computational indistinguishability and pseudorandom generators | In the 1995 draft of Volume 1, computational indistinguishability is a strictly coarser equivalence than statistical closeness, and the book proves this two ways. Proposition 3.3 does it unconditionally: a counting argument shows there are ensembles supported on at most 2^(n/2) strings that no circuit of size 2^(n/8) tells from uniform with gap 2^(−n/8) or more, but such an ensemble cannot be sampled efficiently. §3.3.1 shows that the output of any pseudorandom generator is statistically far from uniform yet, by definition, indistinguishable from it. That witness is efficiently samplable, and it needs pseudorandom generators, which exist if and only if one-way functions do (Theorem 3.29, stated without proof). That efficient post-processing preserves indistinguishability is set as Exercise 1 of §3.8.4, not proved in the text. All of this is asymptotic, about ensembles indexed by n, not about single pairs of distributions. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-974 v2 | Isett — A proof of Onsager’s conjecture | The negative half of Onsager’s conjecture. For every α < 1/3 there is a nonzero weak solution of the 3D incompressible Euler equations on the periodic box, in C^α in space and time, that vanishes outside a finite time interval and so does not conserve energy. It is built by iterating a Main Lemma that first glues exact local Euler solutions so that the error lives on separated short time intervals, then cancels each piece with a single transported Mikado-flow wave. For the record, it shows that a coarse-grained energy flux can survive the limit of vanishing scale for rough fields; it does not show a one-way dissipative cascade, since these solutions gain energy and then lose it. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1010 | Random Hyperbolic Graphs: Degree Sequence and Clustering | Proves for the threshold hyperbolic random graph (curvature −1, density exponent α > 1/2, R = 2 log n + C) that the average local clustering coefficient is Θ(1) with high probability and that the degree sequence is a power law with exponent 2α + 1 up to the maximum degree n^(1/(2α)+o(1)), with exact asymptotics for the fraction of each degree. Skimmed: the statements and the method were read, the proofs only in outline. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1011 | Clustering and the hyperbolic geometry of complex networks | For Krioukov et al.’s hyperbolic random graph with 0 < ζ/α < 2, proves that below temperature 1 (β > 1) the global clustering coefficient converges to an explicit positive constant when ζ/α < 1 and to zero when 1 ≤ ζ/α < 2, and that at or above temperature 1 it converges to zero; clustering among vertices of bounded type stays positive for all ζ/α < 2 when β > 1. Skimmed: §1 and the theorem statements read, the proofs not. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1012 | Consciousness and the Collapse of the Wave Function | Chalmers and McQueen make consciousness-collapse precise as a super-resistance model (IIT’s Q-shape resisting superposition, with a continuous-collapse dynamics), find simple versions refuted by the quantum Zeno effect, and argue that collapse is the gap in causal closure that interactionist property dualism needs. Skimmed: the introduction, the objections and §8 were read, the formal §§2-7 were not. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1022 | Giri, Kwon and Novack — The L³-based strong Onsager theorem | The L³-based strong Onsager theorem: for every β < 1/3 there are weak Euler solutions in C⁰_t(B^β_{3,∞} ∩ L^{1/(1−3β)}) satisfying the local energy inequality and strictly dissipating total energy. In the proof the Duchon–Robert measure is exactly the smooth density −e e′ρ₀², positive in a periodic array of pipes and zero outside, fixed at the first step; so the coarse-grained flux into vanishing scales is one-signed locally in space and time, in the limit (THEORY-772), with its place and rate chosen by the construction. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1027 | Isett — Continuous, globally dissipative Euler flows | The first continuous weak Euler solutions satisfying the local energy inequality with nonzero dissipation: C^α_{t,x}, α < 1/15, on T^d, d ≥ 3, with a Cantor family sharing one initial datum and one dissipation measure. In the construction that measure is a function of time alone, so the coarse-grained flux into vanishing scales is one-way at every place in the limit and uniform in space, switched on only while the solution is drained to zero (THEORY-821). | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1035 | Hyzen, Van den Bulck, Puppis, Kulig and Paulussen — Epistemic welfare and algorithmic recommender systems | A theory paper with no data. Epistemic welfare is “creating and maintaining the conditions and capabilities for individuals’ epistemic agency in the public sphere”. It combines veritistic social epistemology, welfare theory and communication research. Goldman’s five standards (reliability, power, fecundity, speed, efficiency) are applied to news media’s recommender systems. The paper argues that transparency duties alone, as in the EU AI Act, are not enough, and that profit-optimized recommenders cannot secure epistemic welfare. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1072 | FEMA — National Incident Management System, third edition | The U.S. national doctrine for incident management. The parts read establish a single command function (one Incident Commander, or a Unified Command in which “there is no one ‘commander.’” and each agency keeps its own authority), unity of command, modular delegation, a briefed transfer of command, and a Safety Officer who “alters, suspends, or terminates any activities that are immediately dangerous to life and health”. It is doctrine, stating how incidents should be organized, not evidence of how they are. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1077 | Abbott — Linked ecologies (through its French precursor) | In the precursor, Abbott’s audiences for professional claims, above all the state, are themselves ecologies of competing actors, so every event in a profession’s history sits in two ecologies at once and succeeds only if it serves actors in both. New York’s medical licensing swung back and forth because it was a minor issue in politics and a major one in medicine; differences of tempo between the ecologies changed the doctors’ allies. “Hinges” are named and left undeveloped. The published article’s universities, avatars and English case were not reached. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1080 | Cooley — Human nature and the social order | The looking-glass self is one large class of the social self, not its definition: “I” is a feeling of appropriation attached to any idea, and in the looking-glass kind its tone is set by an imagined judgement in an imagined mind. The imagined others need not be living, present or accurately pictured, and the group is realized in the mind through imagined persons. Non-conformity driven by opposition is itself steered by what others enjoin. An essay from observation and literature, with no method that could fail. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1090 | Rogers Commission — Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger accident | The presidential commission’s account of Challenger. The physical cause was a field-joint seal design “unacceptably sensitive” to temperature and other factors; the contributing cause was a “flawed” launch decision in which Thiokol’s engineers’ recommendation against launch was reversed by Thiokol management “at the urging of Marshall”, and neither that dispute, the July 1985 launch constraint nor its six waivers reached Levels I and II. The joint had a nine-year history of warnings, accepted erosion and loosened criteria, and the safety, reliability and quality-assurance function was understaffed, subordinate to the offices it checked, and absent from the decision. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1112 | Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of Economic Equilibrium | Read for §4.6 only. Not every complete preorder has a utility function: the lexicographic ordering of R² has none. Under a continuity assumption (closed upper and lower contour sets), a complete preorder on a connected subset of Rˡ, and more generally on a connected separable space, has a continuous utility function, and conversely. Debreu credits the separable form to Eilenberg (1941), and his own 1954 paper for dropping connectedness on second-countable spaces. Utility is defined only up to increasing transformation. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1283 | Remembrance of Brains Past | The authors of Shomrat and Levin 2013 announce its result on a community blog. Planarians trained to a laser-etched chamber recognised it, by eating liver there sooner than naive worms, and recognised it again after head removal and regeneration, given a brief refresher. An automated device trained 12 worms at a time, around the clock, scored by computer, to meet the objections to McConnell’s hand-run work. The authors infer that memory can be stored outside the brain and imprinted on a new one, and suggest bioelectric networks of non-neural cells as the store. No numbers or controls are reported. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1312 | The Concept and Psychological Consequences of Symbolic Immortality | A 1991–92 ANU master’s thesis testing Rank’s claim that people need to feel they transcend death, through children, an afterlife or creative work, and Lifton’s two added modes, nature and experiential transcendence (a mystical expansion of the self). 440 Australians aged 18 to 88 rated vignettes as consolation in imagined terminal illness. Having a mode, such as children, predicted accepting it, and so did religious affiliation; education lowered acceptance. The secular modes went with accepting death as final. The modes predicted death anxiety, neuroticism and personality only weakly; Rank’s sex-difference and neuroticism hypotheses failed. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1326 | Sarkar, Mukherjee and Sato — Relational composition as parallel transport | The companion paper’s premise, stated by its authors: per-entity frame freedom is “a chosen inductive bias, not a consequence of fresh names”. Under it, scores go through ⟨xᵢ, Tᵢⱼxⱼ⟩ and transports must be supplied. Its parsed-benchmark controls show the premise’s orthogonality helping on StepGame and costing 64.6 points on CLUTRR. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1355 | SEI CERT — Common Sense Guide to Mitigating Insider Threats, seventh edition | A practitioners’ guide of 22 best practices for insider risk, each with challenges, quick wins and mappings to NIST SP 800-53 and other standards, grounded in the CERT repository of more than 3,000 insider cases that ended in conviction or civil liability. Its separation of duties practice turns on collusion, and its positive-incentives practice argues, from three rated cases and a 23-response survey, that perceived organizational support lowers insider misbehaviour. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1375 | Joint Task Force — NIST SP 800-53 Revision 5 | A catalogue of security and privacy controls in 20 families, each a control statement with organization-defined parameters, a discussion, related controls and enhancements, chosen by a separate risk process. The controls the record cites, separation of duties (AC-5), least privilege (AC-6) and dual authorization, are short, parameterized and name collusion as the residual risk. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1382 | Herd and Moynihan — Administrative Burden, the introduction | The introduction only. Administrative burden is the learning, compliance and psychological costs of a person’s encounter with the state; the book’s three themes are that burdens are consequential, distributive (heaviest on those least able to bear them) and constructed by political and administrative choice, and that they can be reduced or shifted from the person to the state. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1430 | van Rooyen — On Experiments | For finite sets and a fixed prior π, Theorem 26 proves Le Cam’s randomization theorem: the least π-averaged total variation between a garbling of e and e′ is at most ε exactly when e’s minimum Bayes risk exceeds e′‘s by at most ε‖L‖∞ for every action set and loss. The proof is a minimax argument after Torgersen. It is right for losses in [0, 1] and loses a factor of 2 for signed ones, and it is not the uniform statement; the uniform one follows from it at every prior with one more minimax exchange. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1432 | boyd — Taken Out of Context: networked publics and context collapse | In boyd’s full chapters on networked publics, collapsed contexts are one of three dynamics produced by four properties of networked media: without spatial, social and temporal boundaries, distinct contexts are hard to keep apart, and a performer may not see the collision. The teens’ documented collisions are mostly one presentation read by an unintended audience that lacks its context, and their remedy is to control the audience, not to unify the presentation. The evidence is ethnographic, with no comparison of conflict when audiences are kept apart against when they meet. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1435 | Gutt — Translation and Relevance (thesis, 1989) | Gutt’s thesis puts translation under Sperber and Wilson’s interpretive use. Utterances resemble each other to the degree that the assumptions each communicates in its own cognitive environment overlap, so identical propositional form does not guarantee identical interpretation. A translation is faithful when it resembles the original closely enough in the respects that make it relevant to its audience, which is a context-dependent standard. Direct translation is complete interpretive resemblance in the context the original envisaged; its communicative clues, from word order to connectives and greetings, are fixed by their effect on interpretation, not by their form. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1437 | Moreno & Mossio — Biological Autonomy, the Introduction | The Introduction alone. Moreno and Mossio state their programme: the organism, not natural selection, is biology’s central idea; its core is a closure of constraints, which they say fundamentally differs from the process loops and self-organisation of dissipative structures, and which grounds teleology, normativity and function. With regulation and agency, closure makes an autonomous system, an organism; ecosystems meet only closure. The arguments are announced for chapters 1–7, which this reading does not cover. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1440 | Rung & Madden — Experimental reductions of delay discounting | A systematic review and category-wise meta-analysis of 92 papers that tried to lower delay discounting without drugs or lesions. Most kinds of manipulation worked, learning-based ones such as bundling and delay fading best. Clinical interventions moved discounting little, and mindfulness and ACT, two studies, only at trend level (g = 0.32, p = .06). Mediation was almost never tested, so how any manipulation lowers discounting is unknown. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1454 | Flynn, Kanerva & Bhadkamkar — SDM principles and operation | Kanerva and co-authors state SDM’s critical distance in words and do not derive it: a cue within it converges on the stored pattern under iterated reads, a cue beyond it wanders and may settle on another pattern, the distance shrinks as the memory fills, and in a sparsely filled memory it is below the sum of the write and read radii. For single patterns convergence and divergence are “easy to distinguish in practice”; for stored sequences they are not. The rest of the report is a hardware design. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1462 | Chen, Lau, Mendel, Wei & Murfet — dynamical versus Bayesian transitions in TMS | In Elhage et al.’s toy model of superposition with two hidden dimensions, regular k-gons are critical points of a closed-form population loss, and their local learning coefficients predict, through the free energy formula, a Bayesian phase transition from the 5-gon to the 6-gon near n = 600 that MCMC confirms. SGD trajectories plateau at the same critical points and move to lower loss and higher estimated complexity. The paper’s Bayesian antecedent hypothesis is one-directional, that training’s transitions have Bayesian counterparts; it says outright that there is “no necessary relation” between the two kinds, and its main Bayesian transition, 5 → 6, was never seen in training. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1472 | Falasco & Esposito — macroscopic stochastic thermodynamics | Builds macroscopic stochastic thermodynamics from Markov jump processes with local detailed balance. Under extensive rates and potentials, a deterministic dynamics emerges whose Lyapunov function is the quasi-potential I_ss, and a large-deviation theory of fluctuations around it. Transition rates between attractors go as e^{−VΔI_ss} and are bracketed by the entropy produced along relaxation and escape paths; the bracket closes only near detailed balance. Gaussian-noise Langevin equations mis-estimate both the barriers and the entropy production. Read for those parts and the Schlögl example; field theory and two of three applications not read. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1486 | Massumi — The Principle of Unrest | Interviews and an essay in activist philosophy. Movement is qualitative relational transformation, and capitalism an ontopower feeding on “bare activity”. Micropolitics aims at “a maximally inclusive co-patterning of contrasting tendencies” (p. 64), an aesthetic ideal that affirms discord rather than resolving it. The parent paper’s quotation is exact; it turns the ideal into a description of organizational becoming. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1499 | Metzinger — The Elephant and the Blind | More than 500 meditators’ retrospective reports of “pure awareness”, from a survey of 1,403 people in 57 countries, are offered as evidence that consciousness occurs without time, self-location, an egoic self-model or a first-person perspective. Pure awareness is modelled as the top level of a nested active-inference hierarchy, “a highest-level but nonegoic self-model” of the organism’s own epistemic openness. The book concedes that retrospective reports cannot show that a state was selfless when it happened, and its summary calls nonegoic consciousness “empirically established” all the same. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1504 | Heymann & Vanden-Eijnden — The geometric minimum action method | The Freidlin–Wentzell quasi-potential, a double minimization over paths and their duration, is rewritten as a single minimization over curves of a parametrization-free action, which has minimizers when the end points are equilibria and is computed by a string-method-like relaxation (gMAM). For a diffusion it is V = 2 inf ∫ |b| sin²(θ/2) ds. In gradient systems with identity noise the most likely transition paths are parallel to the drift; in the nongradient Maier–Stein model they depart from the heteroclinic orbit once the drift is far enough from gradient. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1505 | Lu, Gallagher, Michala, Fish & Lindsey — The Assistant Axis | Role vectors for 275 archetypes in Gemma 2 27B, Qwen 3 32B and Llama 3.3 70B span a low-dimensional persona space whose first component runs from fantastical roles to Assistant-like ones, with the default Assistant at one end; the contrast vector from it, the Assistant Axis, is largely present in base models. Steering along it modulates role-taking and persona jailbreaks. In synthetic multi-turn conversations the model’s position along the axis is set mainly by the latest user message, and therapy-like and AI-philosophy conversations drift away from the Assistant; capping the projection cuts persona-jailbreak harm by about 60% without measured capability loss. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1524 | Chen, Arditi, Sleight, Evans & Lindsey — Persona vectors | Difference-of-means directions in the residual stream, extracted automatically from a trait’s name and description, steer and monitor evil, sycophancy and hallucination in Qwen2.5-7B and Llama-3.1-8B. The shift that finetuning induces along a trait’s vector correlates with the trait’s expression afterwards (r = 0.76–0.97); steering against the vector, or towards it during training, limits the shift; and projecting training data onto the vector flags data that will induce the trait. Prompt-time monitoring works mainly between prompt types. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1532 | Juarrero — Context Changes Everything | Juarrero’s restatement of her 1999 constraint account as a general natural philosophy, self-described “speculative metaphysics” (p. 32). Context-independent constraints take conditions away from equiprobability, context-dependent ones away from independence (Gatlin), and enabling constraints couple separate processes into coherent “interactional types” whose constitutive constraints double as governing, “second-order” constraints that hold components to a subregion of state space, top down, “as constraints, not efficient causes” (p. 25). Levels are demarcated by rate discontinuities, wholes are slower than parts, and inter-level control is lost when the rates converge (ch. 12, from Salthe and Allen and Starr). It adopts Montévil and Mossio’s closure of constraints verbatim (pp. 93–94). It has no formal model of its own and does not discuss Kane, free will, chaos or contextual emergence. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1535 | Bishop — Chaos (SEP) | The 2024 revision of Bishop’s SEP entry. Chaos is a property of deterministic models; unpredictability is not indeterminism. The sensitive-dependence argument that chaos amplifies quantum events is qualified: damping, negative local Lyapunov exponents and, in the brain, “parallel redundancy” may stop amplification. For Kane, sensitivity alone does not give incompatibilist freedom, and the incompatibilist must still show agents can “harness” indeterminism. §6.2–6.3 state Bishop’s contextual emergence as an ontological account: larger-scale stability conditions that constrain and enable smaller-scale behaviour. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1536 | Scheffer et al. — Early-warning signals for critical transitions | A review of generic early-warning signals for critical transitions. At a fold bifurcation the dominant eigenvalue goes to zero, so recovery from small perturbations slows (critical slowing down). Under ongoing perturbation that shows as rising lag-1 autocorrelation and rising variance. Skewness and flickering are further signals, not caused by slowing down. Spatial systems add rising cross-correlation and specific pattern sequences. Evidence from climate, ecosystems, epilepsy, asthma and finance is reviewed. The signals mark proximity to a broad class of thresholds, not only catastrophic ones, so they do not say which kind; false positives and negatives are named. Cyclic and chaotic systems are “less well studied”. | Skimmed |