Rithika Korrapolu

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on the atlas — 21

highlights — 10

Oh my God, I’ve lived a very simple life! You can say, Oh yes, at thirteen this happened to me and at fourteen . . . But those are facts. But the facts can obscure the truth, what it really felt like. Every human being has paid the earth to grow up. Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility …
Maya Angelou Interview | Paris Review
Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language. On an evening like this, looking out at the auditorium, if I had to write this evening from my point of view, I’d see the rust-red used worn velvet seats and the lightness where people’s backs have rubbed against the back of the seat so that it’s a light orange, then the beautiful colors of the people’s faces, the white, pink-white, beige-white, light beige a…
Maya Angelou Interview | Paris Review
My objection is not with A.I. in general. For better or for worse, we are inextricably immersed in A.I. It is more a kind of sad, disappointed feeling that there are smart people out there that actually think the artistic act is so mundane that it can be replicated by a machine. I find that insulting. There’s no earthly reason why we need to invent a technology that can mimic this most beautiful and mysterious creative act. Particularly writing a song. The thing about writing a good song is that it tells you something about yourself you didn’t already know. That’s the thing. You can’t mimic th…
Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life | The New Yorker
And I don’t think this situation resolves itself as you grow older. In fact, more people just die. Loss becomes the primary condition of living. That doesn’t mean you’re in a hopeless, grief-stricken state all the time; it just means that you carry a deeper understanding of what it is to be human. We suffer as human beings, but out of that can come enormous joys, and genuine happiness, too. It can run in tandem with this ordinary sense of suffering. Otherwise, joy doesn’t resonate fully. Joy seems to leap forth out of suffering. Regardless of your loss, you see how beautiful, how meaningful, h…
Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life | The New Yorker
Because grief doesn’t just go away. You become more resilient; you become more effective at navigating and dealing with your feelings. Yet the fundamental loss remains—it doesn’t just dissipate—and, in a strange way, I think it can become a magnet for other losses. We come to see we are all simply creatures carrying around our ever-deepening loss. Small griefs seem to collect around the bigger primary grief. I think this realization allows us to become a true human being.
Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life | The New Yorker
We are often hyperconscious of the way our grief makes others feel. We become like antimatter sucking everything into the vacuum of our anguish, the air, the life. I don’t know. I just found it difficult to talk normally to people about it. I had to work out a way where I could talk about it without driving myself and everyone else crazy. It’s easier to talk to you about these sorts of things, Amanda, because I know you’re in, as they say, “the club.” The club no one wants to be in.
Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life | The New Yorker
Yes, I just didn’t recognize myself anymore. Did you feel the same way? I would look in the mirror and not really know who was staring back. I just seemed like a different kind of being. Grief is extraordinary in its capacity to completely alter us on an almost atomic level. Suddenly, we inhabit a different body. Our relationship with everything seems to change. It’s as if we’re simply a different person. I meant that quite literally. I changed from one person to another person.
Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life | The New Yorker
The Platform Assembly: An example with Facebook political ads in the United States
Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure | Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
As an alternative, modern democratic processes9 such as citizens’ assemblies explore different mechanisms for ensuring representation and deliberation, addressing many of the pitfalls of electoral democracy (e.g. poor knowledge of the issues, low engagement, politicization, little incentive to understand others perspectives, destabilizing electoral campaigns, lobbying, etc.). Instead they rely on the hypothesis that if one takes a representative sample of a population, and provides them compensation, training, expertise, facilitation, and stakeholder perspectives, they can make good decisions …
Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure | Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
The hot mess theory of intelligence: The more intelligent an agent is, the less coherent its behavior tends to be. Colloquially: getting smarter makes you a hotter mess. Figure 2: As we make AIs more intelligent, how will their coherence change? Most work on AGI misalignment assumes that any superintelligent AI will belong in the upper right corner of this figure. I suspect that as machines are made more intelligent, they instead tend to become less coherent in their behavior, and more of a hot mess.
The hot mess theory of AI misalignment: More intelligent agents behave less coherently | Jascha’s blog