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davidbau.com In Defense of Curiosity

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At the NeurIPS Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop, I was asked to respond to Neel Nanda's recent blog post on "pragmatic interpretability." I chose to respond by recounting the story of Venetian glassmaking. Venice has been a historical center of glassmaking since the Roman Empire, and you can still get fine artistic glass from Murano today. This engraving depicts Venice's Doge visiting glassworks in Murano in the 17th century, and you can see some of the artistic glass on the table. I chose this topic because Murano in the 17th century was going through a transformation that very much reminds me of the moment we are going through in mechanistic interpretability today. If you visited Murano in 1600, you would see "Pragmatic Glassmaking" everywhere. The artisans had mastered the secret of making the finest flawless "cristallo" glass, and they had discovered that the fine glass could be ground into lenses. And that if you do it right, you can cure blurry vision. Thank goodness for gla

davidbau.com In Defense of Curiosity davidbau.com A Dabbler's Weblog << A Halloween Investment Thought | Main | Vibe Coding >> December 09, 2025 In Defense of Curiosity At the NeurIPS Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop , I was asked to give an opinion on Neel Nanda's recent blog post on " pragmatic interpretability ." I chose to respond by recounting the story of Venetian glassmaking. Venice has been a historical center of glassmaking since the Roman Empire, and you can still get fine artistic glass from Murano today. This engraving depicts Venice's Doge visiting glassworks in Murano in the

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