The wiki article doesn't say domestication occurred roughly 14k years ago, it says at least 14k years ago, because that's the earliest definitive evidence of a domesticated dog. Here are the next two sentences from the wiki article:
"The remains of the Bonn–Oberkassel dog, buried alongside humans between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago, are the earliest to be conclusively identified as a domesticated dog.[9][7] Genetic studies show that dogs likely diverged from wolves between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago."
> the current algorithms are clearly a dead end for thinking machines.
These discussions often get derailed into debates about what "thinking" means. If we define thinking as the capacity to produce and evaluate arguments, as the cognitive scientists Sperber and Mercier do, then we can see LLMs are certainly producing arguments, but they're weak at the evaluation.
In some cases, arguments can be formalised, and then evaluating them is a solved problem, as in the examples of using the Lean proofchecker in combination with LLMs to write mathematical proofs.
That suggests a way forward will come from formalising natural language arguments. So LLMs by themselves might be a dead end but in combination with formalisation they could be very powerful. That might not be "thinking" in the sense of the full suite of human abilities that we group with that word but it seems an important component of it.
> suggests a way forward will come from formalising natural language arguments
If by this you mean "reliably convert expressions made in human natural language to unambiguous, formally parseable expressions that a machine can evaluate the same way every time"... isn't that essentially an unreachable holy grail? I mean, everyone from Plato to Russell and Wittgenstein struggled with the meaning of human statements. And the best solution we have today is to ask the human to restrict the set of statement primitives and combinations that they can use to a small subset of words like "const", "let foo = bar", and so on.
Whether the Holy Grail is unreachable or not is the question. Of course, the problem in full generality is hard, but that doesn't mean it can't be approached in various partial ways, either by restricting the inputs as you suggest or by coming up with some kind of evaluation procedures that are less strict than formal verifiability. I don't have any detailed proposals tbh
Yesterday I got AI (a sota model) to write some tests for a backend I'm working on. One set of tests was for a function that does a somewhat complex SQL query that should return multiple rows
In the test setup, the AI added a single database row, ran the query and then asserted the single added row was returned. Clearly this doesn't show that the query works as intended. Is this what people are referring to when they say AI writes their tests?
I don't know what to call this kind of thinking. Any intelligent, reasoning human would immediately see that it's not even close to enough. You barely even need a coding background to see the issues. AI just doesn't have it, and it hasn't improved in this area for years
This kind of thing happens over and over again. I look at the stuff it outputs and it's clear to me that no reasoning thing would act this way
As a counter I’ve had OpenAI Codex and Claude Code both catch logic cases I’d missed in both tests and codes.
The tooling in the Code tools is key to useable LLM coding. Those tools prompt the models to “reason” whether they’ve caught edge cases or met the logic. Without that external support they’re just fancy autocompletes.
In some ways it’s no different than working with some interns. You have to prompt them to “did you consider if your code matched all of the requirements?”.
LLMs are different in that they’re sorta lobotomized. They won’t learn from tutoring “did you consider” which needs to essentially be encoded manually still.
> In some ways it’s no different than working with some interns. You have to prompt them to “did you consider if your code matched all of the requirements?”.
I really hate this description, but I can't quite filly articulate why yet. It's distinctly different because interns can form new observations independently. AIs can not. They can make another guess at the next token, but if it could have predicted it the 2nd time, it must have been able to predict it the first, so it's not a new observation. The way I think through a novel problem results in drastically different paths and outputs from an LLM. They guess and check repeatedly, they don't converge on an answer. Which you've already identified
> LLMs are different in that they’re sorta lobotomized. They won’t learn from tutoring “did you consider” which needs to essentially be encoded manually still.
This isn't how you work with an intern (unless the intern is unable to learn).
The whole point about an intern is that after a month they can act without coaching. Humans do actually learn- it is quite a revelation to see a child soak up data like an AI on steroids.
> As a counter I’ve had OpenAI Codex and Claude Code both catch logic cases I’d missed in both tests and codes
That has other explanations than that it reasoned its way to the correct answers. Maybe it had very similar code in its training data
This specific example was with Codex. I didn't mention it because I didn't want it to sound like I think codex is worse than claude code
I do realize my prompt wasn't optimal to get the best out of AI here, and I improved it on the second pass, mainly to give it more explicit instruction on what to do
My point though is that I feel these situations are heavily indicative of it not having true reasoning and understanding of the goals presented to it
Why can it sometimes catch the logic cases you miss, such as in your case, and then utterly fail at something that a simple understanding of the problem and thinking it through would solve? The only explanation I have is that it's not using actual reasoning to solve the problems
> Is this what people are referring to when they say AI writes their tests?
yes
> Any intelligent, reasoning human would immediately see that it's not even close to enough. You barely even need a coding background to see the issues.
[nods]
> This kind of thing happens over and over again. I look at the stuff it outputs and it's clear to me that no reasoning thing would act this way
and yet there're so many people who are convinced it's fantastic. Oh, I made myself sad.
The larger observation about it being statistical inference, rather than reason... but looks to so many to be reason is quite an interesting test case for the "fuzzing" of humans. In line with why do so many engineers store passwords in clear text? Why do so many people believe AI can reason?
> That suggests a way forward will come from formalising natural language arguments.
Hot take (and continue with the derailment), but I'd argue that analytic philosophy from the last 100 years suggests this is a dead end. The idea that belief systems could be formalized was huge in the early 20th century (movements like Logical Positivism, or Russell's principia mathematica being good examples of this).
Those approaches haven't really yielded many results, and by far the more fruitful form of analysis has been to conceptually "reframe" different problems (folks like Hillary Putnam, Wittgenstein, Quine being good examples).
We've stacked up a lot of evidence that human language is much too loose and mushy to be formalised in a meaningful way.
We've stacked up a lot of evidence that human language is much too loose and mushy to be formalized in a meaningful way.
Lossy might also be a way of putting it, like a bad compression algorithm. Written language carries far less information than spoken and nonverbal cues.
> These discussions often get derailed into debates about what "thinking" means.
"SAL-9000: Will I dream?
Dr. Chandra: Of course you will. All intelligent beings dream. Nobody knows why. Perhaps you will dream of HAL... just as I often do."
From 2010
> A government right now is using its power to selectively defund and wipe out big chunks of scientific research and communications that ultimately exist to protect your future.
This is the significant point. The govt is defunding yet another scientific research institute. To me it seems more productive to get more specific and more substantive from there: How much of the research presently carried out at NCAR will continue? Are there alternative institutes or sources of funding that might save some of it? What are the likely tangible implications? Is the whole place even closing down or just some of it?
Going in the other direction, less specific, more amorphous abstraction about whether or not this is a free speech issue risks derailing the conversation into semantics.
There are interesting questions about wider meaning of free speech than what's protected by the first amendment, but getting moralistic because someone doesn't consider this a free speech issue, while you both agree that it's government defunding a research institute, and that it's bad, seems unnecessarily fractious
Very much so. But the specificity and severity of what he knows is not clear just from this. Not necessarily to the point of "bright flashing warning lights" as the top-level comment put it. Anyway, I certainly am glad that people are (as far as I can tell?) more or less on top of the post-quantum transition.
Yes, it can easily just mean that he has some kind of inside information about progress that he doesn't want to divulge, but this is still far from "crypto is broken, guize"
Still, if that's true, it's an example of the very thing Scott's talking about: there are advances in the field that aren't being made public.
> We know that the Inca didn't build Sacsayhuaman because they said that they didn't.
Where are you getting this from? The Spanish chroniclers report Inca tradition that the 15th century leader Pachacuti initiated the building. The wiki article has a few long excerpts from Pedro Cieza de Leon's Cronicas del Peru, including details of how many labourers were involved and some of the methods for quarrying, transporting stone, and construction:
Yes, this is what tfa says, and it's a good point. But tfa also points out that the archaeologists/reconstructionists know that what they're producing differs from the original. The thing is the discipline of reconstruction means that they only use pigments that they have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers. The problem is this is seldom explained when the reconstructions are presented to the public
Reconstructioniats say that they only show th colours they can prove existed.
The article suggests they obstinately do this because they know it creates a spectacle.
I think there's another explanation - if they use their own judgement to fill in the gaps (making the statues more classically beautiful) then everyone will accuse them of making it all up, even if they were to base it on fairly rigorous study of e.g. the colour pallets used in preserved Roman paintings etc.
I’m reminded of a Reddit thread long ago about a reconstruction of Roman garum by some American scientists. In their paper they conclusively declared that it tasted foul and a Filipino Redditor replied saying “This actually sounds a lot like the fish sauce we use in SE Asia. I wonder if people from a different culinary tradition would find it less off putting or even tasty?” Cue a bunch of Redditors downvoting the poor sap to hell for daring to disagree with the scientists’ assessment of the flavor.
There might even be a directish connection, one way or the other, between garum and SE Asian fish sauce, since Roman coins have been found in Vietnam.
Can't find the better source on that specifically now but this is a nice article about the Roman trade with India and mentions the coins found in Vietnam and even Korea about half way down
That's funny, I thought Worcestershire sauce was based on some Asian fish sauce because it has the colonial ingredients like tamarind etc. I had a look on wiki and seems it's not known where the recipe comes from but it dates from the 19th century
The problem is that there is no "missing data" color, so that discipline would default to marble white, which is just as made up as the rest.
I think the Augustus statue is a good example of that: Part of the garish effect comes from the contrast between the painted and nonpainted areas. The marble of his face and harness work well if everything is marble - but in contrast to the strong colors of the rest, the face suddenly seems sickly pale and the harness becomes "skin-colored". The result is a "plastic" or "uncanny valley" effect.
If the entire statue were painted, the effect would be weaker.
>The problem is that there is no "missing data" color
they should use "green screen green" and give you viewing glasses that fill in the colors to your own historical preference (e.g. rose colored? blood-soaked?). then if you point a finger with your "anhistorical" complaints, there will be 3 fingers pointing back at you!
Architectural restoration often solves this by using an inoffense, but still visibly detectable, "new material color". Some British castles have been rebuilt this way.
They're making it up no matter what they do, since we don't know how these things were originally painted and have no way of knowing. They should just present the reconstructions as interpretations and actually try to do a good job painting them. I agree with the article that what they're doing now is harmful to the public understanding.
I mean, we kind of do though? We could assume that the surviving images of statues showing how they were painted are accurate. If you know the colour of the underlayer, this actually lets you determine exactly what the colouration of the paint on top of that is despite it not being present whatsoever
This gives you a general trend of how brightly underlayed statues tended to be painted afterwards to finish them, and lets you infer how other statues without surviving coloured pictures of them would have appeared based on the likely prevailing style at the time
That is how scholarship works. It’s like a math proof: they’re interested in proving the base case. If someone else wants to do more speculative work to theorize what a well-painted version would look like, that would be super cool, but it wouldn’t be scholarship.
And that's a fine standard to maintain when you're writing an academic paper.
When you are instead putting together a museum exhibition intended for the general public, and you observe over and over again that they will interpret your work as representing what the statues actually looked like, it is irresponsible to keep giving them that impression.
It's not an either/or question. They could do some of the statues with just the pure archaeological approach of only using the paints they found in the crevices, and do others in a layered approach that is more speculative but probably closer to how they actually looked. If they did that, this article would not be necessary.
Imagine if we refused to publish any material or exhibit recreations of dinosaurs because the only evidence we have are fossilized skeletons and a few skin texture impressions.
Dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park were fairly well represented considering what we knew in the late 80s. But our knowledge of dinosaurs has grown, with feathers being the most emblematic change. Yet the Jurassic Park movies steadfastly refuse to put feathers on their 3D monsters in the current movies, because viewers do not expect feathers on the T-Rex.
We might be at that point with repainted statues. Museum visitors are now starting to expect the ugly garish colours.
I've not seen the latest Jurassic Park movie, but I've seen a clip with velociraptor's with feathers, and maybe quetzlcoatalus too? Along with colourful skin on eg compsagnathus.
They seem to have moved on a bit, they're balancing audience expectations with latest research, I expect.
My knowledge of dinosaurs is a few decades old really - any good sources for a summary of T-rex developments in particular or dinosaurs more generally?
I could imagine there's some great videos out there? I'd be keen to have scientific basis given rather than speculative artwork.
“The reason I’m totally misleading you with a speculative example is because of scholarship.”
No way. When they engage the public, they are not longer exclusively scholars. They responsible for conveying the best truth they can to non-experts.
A journal paper can be misunderstood when the reader lacks the context to interpret it. Out in the public square, that is not the reader’s fault anymore.
Give the scholars full editorial control of the newspaper the public is getting their news from, and you might get better public understanding of their scholarship.
You generally can't hold someone responsible for what someone else says about them.
"Dance your PhD" exists for several reasons, but one of them is to point out that the divorce between scholarship and art in some academic fields isn't "required" but an accident of how we separated colleges and how hard it can be to do multi-disciplinary work.
You can do both: prove the base case and reach across the aisle to the art college next door to see if someone is interested in the follow up "creative exercise". You can present both "here's what we can prove" and "here's an extrapolation by a skilled artist of what additional layering/contouring might have done".
I would agree with you, but archeologists often classify finds as "for ritual purposes" without any proof or evidence that it was used in a ritual, without specifying what ritual is involved, or how the find would be used in the ritual.
Likewise archeologists will classify finds as tools when they don't have nearly enough knowledge about the craft in question to be able to do this properly (see the extensive mis-classification of weaving swords/beaters as weapons [0], but there are many other cases).
So I'm a little reluctant to cut them some slack and say "this is how scholarship" works when they get all petulant about including colours that we know the ancients had, in ways we know they used them, for this kind of reconstruction.
>As a result, we internalized a deep-seated attachment to an unblemished white image of Greek and Roman art. We became, to use David Bachelor’s term, chromophobes. It is this accidental association between Greek and Roman art and pristine white marble, we are told, that accounts for the displeasure we feel when we see the statues restored to color.
And there's indeed been quite a bit of push-back since the story first broke. Unspoken is the reason. Primacy bias is probably a part of it, but what really accounts for the intensity of the attachment to the idea of white marble finishes? I'm sure you can imagine.
>Bond told me that she’d been moved to write her essays when a racist group, Identity Evropa, started putting up posters on college campuses, including Iowa’s, that presented classical white marble statues as emblems of white nationalism. After the publication of her essays, she received a stream of hate messages online. She is not the only classicist who has been targeted by the so-called alt-right. Some white supremacists have been drawn to classical studies out of a desire to affirm what they imagine to be an unblemished lineage of white Western culture extending back to ancient Greece. When they are told that their understanding of classical history is flawed, they often get testy.
So, yes, it was important to categorically falsify the notion that the statues, frescoes, etc., were unpainted. Anything that left it open would have been something for the worst sorts of people to latch onto. Now that that's out of the way, possibly even more accurate explanations can be given the time of day, instead of being stuck having to hash out, "Oh, but were they even colored at all?"
Maybe it's just me, but this "We have to fudge the truth because nuance would support the alt-right" business just seems to drive a bigger wedge into the political divide than would just being reasonable. Folks closer to center see it as controlling the narrative, lies, and conspiracy when the full truth comes out. I'd prefer not driving more people into the fringes.
They didn't fudge the truth. They reported exactly what the scientifically-supportable findings at the time were. Even if they had a notion that they were only looking at underpainting that was covered by more intricate work, they couldn't prove it. And, at the point, when they were trying to draw a distinction between objective fact and subjective sentiment, it was paramount that they come down solidly on the side of objective fact. Which they did. They proved that there was originally a weathered-away chroma layer above the base marble on these statues.
>Folks closer to center see it as controlling the narrative, lies, and conspiracy when the full truth comes out.
And this, I reject. The people who think this way aren't in the center, and they were never interested in the truth. Their aim has always been promoting the primacy of Western classical art (often as part of larger notions of white supremacy). They fought hard for the debunked no-chroma interpretation until another angle presented itself: that the chroma scientists were trying to purposely make the statues seem ugly, in order to devalue Western classical art, or to dictate its value outside of their control and terms. It's the same tack as right-wing gamers claiming that female characters are being made purposely "ugly" in order to alienate male heterosexual gamers.
And while the reason for changes in female representation in games are less objective and more complicated than the scientific inquiry that produced the knowledge of painted statues, most of the people driven to the fringes by the evolution of these topics, as knowledge and circumstances develop, are people who share their fringe (and incorrect) ideas. Implicit there is that there's no "full truth coming out", just a developing collective understanding.
If you want narrative control, lies, and conspiracy, look at Wall Street.
I would be curious to know if the treatment of statues in terms of "making them ugly and ridiculous to the point of being insulting" is roughly uniform across the different historical cultures being treated to this "reconstruction" procedure.
i.e. is there evidence that there is comfort in trolling using Roman or Greek vs Assyrian, Nubian etc. Or do they just like to make everything bright and blocky.
This practice of defining a reconstruction so pedantically as to be wholly unlike real life is just so dumb to me, as a layperson. This would be like “recreating” the experience of using a Commodore 64 but we can’t find any intact copies of the software at all so we provide a fake “OS” that requires the user to write code in ASM only, and say “Ladies and gentlemen, behold our reconstruction! This is what it was like!”
The archeologists are already adding fake detail, just at a different level of abstraction. Did they constrain themselves to only painting in the places where they find remnants of pigment? No, otherwise there would be gaps, cracks, and random interruptions of other colors in the painted figures. And there's the guesswork involved in going from spectral analysis (+ other tools) of a pigment sample to an actual paint that could have been plausibly available to the artist.
Reconstruction, (similar to translation) is an art that combines carefuly study of evidence and craftfully filling in gaps and adding in detail where necessary (or leaving details unfilled and ambiguous to communicate the impossibility of total translation or reconstruction!) to present some communicable form of the original that gives the viewer some closer but imperfect access to it.
A while back the Met in New York had an exhibit of painted reconstructed statues where they let artists make reasonable guesses about what the statues would have looked like. It was pretty fantastic.
Bare marble and garish underlayer reconstructions could be seen as two extreme ends.
The article points out that the garish underlayer reconstructions have (maybe accidentally) been successful at correcting the widely held misperception of bare marble.
There’s also something in… the bare marble reconstruction maps somehow to our idea of sophisticated. Garish underplayed reconstruction, our idea of silly, frivolous, or childish. There were a lot of Greeks, they didn’t all live on one end of that spectrum.
Borderline deception is a bad way to correct inaccurate knowledge.
And frankly, if I wanted to ridicule the ancients and flatter my own age, I could think of no better way than to make the old stuff look bad.
I would much rather have an exhibit that showed the bare marble, then a conservative reconstruction based on what direct evidence merits (to the degree possible, noting that it is not a complete reconstruction), then more liberal but reasonable reconstructions based on indirect evidence.
I think it is hard to say to what extent there actually is even borderline deception. The internet amplifies random and funny things. In this article (which, we should note, is even-handed but leaning skeptical toward the garish reconstructions), it is noted that the images that have spread are the ugliest of the exhibit. If the exhibit tells the full story, and the internet just amplified the silt bits, that’s not deception on the part of the exhibit.
The "garish" statues are more akin to a false color image of mars that shows topography or something. That they're a visual representation of a particular portion of the pigments found and are not supposed to be an accurate recreation of how the statue looked at the time it was created.
The people who produce dinosaur illustrations don't seem to have as much of a problem with adding all sorts of details (extravagant plumage, wacky colors/patterns, starry eyes and acrobatic postures) that are neither directly supported nor contradicted by available evidence.
They only started adding feathers after they found evidence of them being feathered, though.
Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours so there's no option but to use guesswork in these cases.
And a lot of dinosaur reconstructions may be more for edutainment value rather than reflecting a scholarly best-guess. There's no uniform methodology across all these disciplines.
> Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours
This is no longer true! Starting with Sinosauropteryx in 2010, paleontologists have identified what they believe to be fossilized melanin-containing organelles. These organelles, called melanosomes, have different shapes depending on which color they produce, and those shapes are preserved well enough to be visible under an electron microscope.
Amazing, thanks for pointing it out. In the meantime, there's been some rejigging of the classification so it's this related genus where they've found the melanosomes
Isn't a rather good deal of color from feathers a result of "structural color", rather than pigmentation? I'd be curious if fossilized feathers could ever, in theory, preserve enough microscopic detail to guess at that.
Is there someone who tries to achieve beauty similar to what the original might've looked like?
Would be interesting to see a painted statue that's actually pleasant to look at, rather than these "let's smear this one pigment we found in the armpit all over the face"-style "reconstructions"
How much of the article did you read? The main substance of it is not that the UN rankings are flawed, but how the rankings change based on the broader analysis by Blanchflower and Bryson. That result can't so easily be read off from our cynical preconceptions
At $113B, 2019 was the third-highest year on record for VC deal volume.
2019 had the second-highest volume of “mega rounds” ($100M deals or greater)–mega rounds represented 44% of total annual deal volume.
Revenue grew by an average of 12.2% in 2019 and the total revenues of the tech giants was greater than the GDP of four of the G20 nations.
Yes, tech hiring in 2025 is down from 2019. That's a lot like saying "tech hiring is down from 2000" in 2003.
"The remains of the Bonn–Oberkassel dog, buried alongside humans between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago, are the earliest to be conclusively identified as a domesticated dog.[9][7] Genetic studies show that dogs likely diverged from wolves between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago."
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