Cognitive Abilities and Limitations

Posted on Tuesday 22 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How AI is being used to solve math problems that humans have been unable to;
  • How anti-vaxxers are at core angry, fearful, and despairing;
  • NYT’s Brett Stephens complains that none of the National Book Award finalists are by or about people like him.
  • Beck’s new album Ride Lonesome.
– – –

On the general theme of humanity’s cognitive ability. I’ve mentioned before that, as with morality, there’s a wide range of positions. At the high end, we know of prodigies like Srinivasa Ramanujan, who had preternatural mathematical skills; we know of Savants who can tell you what day of the week a particular date falls (and oddly these are associated with autistic people); and so on.

The AI revolution is revealing that there are things that can be known that even smart humans figure can’t out.

Scientific American, Lyndie Chiou, today: Mathematicians use AI to find mysterious symmetries, solving decades-old problem

Subtitled: In parallel, a race by amateurs and mathematicians has found all 25,000 cases of one “inverse Galois problem”

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Martin Rees: JUST SIX NUMBERS

Posted on Monday 21 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitle: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
(UK 1999; this US edition: Basic Books, 2000, x + 173pp, including 12pp notes and index)

This is a book from a series of short science books (~200p each) published in the 1990s and 2000s by Basic Books. Rees is an astrophysicist whose early books were in his field, and whose later books (beginning after this one, and including ON THE FUTURE, 2018, reviewed here) became big picture in a different way, with musings on humanity’s future and the future of science.

This book is ostensibly focused on six key physical constants (actually ratios) and how they determine that the cosmos we exist in is possible. If they were a bit different, we wouldn’t be here. This is a topic familiar to creationists who thus argue for a creator who set those ratios, though of course that doesn’t follow at all, as Rees explains. In fact, the book is also a clear, efficient overview of all the basic topics of cosmology. Black holes, gravity, the creation of heavier elements in supernova, the idea of a multiverse, etc.
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It’s Not Just MAGA

Posted on Monday 21 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • There’s right-wing rejection of modern values in Europe, too;
  • The end of American exceptionalism, which has been going on for some time;
  • Who does Trump want to shoot with snipers on his Triumphal Arch?
  • A study about children exposed to religion.
– – –

NY Times, news analysis by Steve Erlanger, today: The Fuel That Feeds Europe’s Far Right: Nostalgia and Lost Pride, subtitled “The populist emphasis on national identity and threats to it, real and imagined, finds a deep response in voters adrift in a world they no longer understand.”

The rise of a far-right party in Germany, the Alternative for Germany, represents a skewing of history, fueled by its own, sometimes imaginary vision of the past. It feeds, analysts say, on widespread alienation from a liberal, multicultural, united Germany committed to the memory of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes.

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Science, Ultimate Questions, and Belief

Posted on Sunday 20 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Scientific American on whether some questions may never be answered, with my thoughts on humanity’s cognitive limitations;
  • David Brooks interviews astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan about humanity’s place in the cosmos: we’re significant because we can shape our realm, even though we may not.
– – –

Science is asymptotic.

Scientific American, Sarah Scholes: 15 Sep 2026: The questions science may never answer, subtitled “Will some of the biggest mysteries in science remain forever unsolved?”

Science, at its best, is a striving toward truth. It is not, although we often think of it as such, the search for absolute truth. It’s more a process of systematically gathering and interpreting data about the universe to understand its past and present and predict its future. What results is the best approximation we can access at any given time with the information, methods and instruments we have.

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Thomas Paine: COMMON SENSE

Posted on Sunday 20 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitle: Of the origin and design of government in general. With concise remarks on the English Constitution.
(First published January, 1776; expanded edition February 1776; this edition Dover, 1977, 58pp)

I finally read this short book, or essay, in July, around the 4th, since I couldn’t find my Penguin 60 copy of the Declaration of Independence. (I have since.) I read one little book by Thomas Paine (considered one of the Founding Fathers) previously, THE AGE OF REASON (review here), a critique of Christianity and the Bible, published twenty years later.

This essay is said to have inspired the American Revolution. It sold 500,000 copies within a few months, according to this Dover Thrift edition. So what is its point? Common sense about what?

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AI and Human Nature

Posted on Saturday 19 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Considering whether doomers and skeptics about AI are both a little bit right (I remain agnostic);
  • What ‘misalignment’ means;
  • Istvan Csicsery-Ronay on what to expect if AI is built on human literature.
– – –

It’s usually not true that the truth lies somewhere in the middle of two competing claims. If mathematics says 2+2=4 and that infamous pastor who said something like ‘If the Bible said 2=2=5, I would believe it’ says differently, the truth is not that 2+2=4 1/2. Some things are just wrong, e.g. most religious claims that challenge scientific conclusions about the objective reality of the world. Philosophy, and politics, moves forward as they are driven by such unresolved claims. So here’s an issue I haven’t staked a claim yet to either side.

The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel, today: Treat AI Like a Normal Crisis, subtitled “What if the doomers and skeptics are both a little bit right?” [gift link]

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Alan Lightman: THE MIRACULOUS FROM THE MATERIAL

Posted on Saturday 19 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: “Understanding the Wonders of Nature”
(Pantheon, November 2024, ix + 193pp, including 8pp acknowledgements and notes.)

This is a valuable book even though Lightman irks me, as he has in some of his other books, by casually using words like “miraculous” and “spiritual” in ways to indicate his subjective feelings of awe but which are quite different from the common definitions of these words by ordinary people, e.g. that miracles involve God’s intervention, or that spiritual indicates something supernatural. Lightman (who has a PhD from CalTech in physics) is too honest a scientist to literally invoke supernatural causes, and by using those words he’s doing a bait and switch, in a sense, to draw readers in to explore what he explains are entirely naturalistic aspects of the world.

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Possibilities of Apocalypse

Posted on Friday 18 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • An essay about how the dangers of technology, like AI, have been avoided before (e.g. with nuclear technology), through various kinds of government regulations (not to mention international cooperation);
  • And yet there are more incidents of bad AI behavior;
  • Now RFK Jr. wants to investigate chemtrails;
  • Trump is steadily eliminating freedom of the press;
  • Beethoven: String Quarter #14.
– – –

I have no commitment to either side of this, at least not yet. But here’s some perspective.

NY Times, opinion by The Editorial Board, today: Humanity Has Avoided Apocalypse Before. Let’s Do It Again.

Their comparison is to nuclear technology, that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s.
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Sam Harris: FREE WILL

Posted on Friday 18 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

(Free Press, March 2012, 83pp, including 17pp acknowledgements, notes, and index)

Here’s another short book on a theme of continuing debate. Like most current scientists and philosophers, Harris tries to explain why the free will humans (naively) think they have cannot actually exist, given what we know about how brains work and how causality works. (Coincidentally, there a case in the news about a mother who killed her children, supposedly under the influence of post-partum syndrome, and how the jury could not reach a decision. The core issue is related to that of free will.) Note claims that free will doesn’t exist doesn’t mean the future is predetermined. That’s where quantum matters make a difference.

This may be a quandary best thought of in terms of different ‘realms,’ as I’ve been exploring. Free will may not exist in the naïve way we think it does, but it’s useful to think it does in the realm of ordinary human interactions.

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Which Core Education?

Posted on Thursday 17 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conservatives want to install a particular kind of core education in universities;
  • Now Trump threatens to tear down the Kennedy Center, if he can’t get his name on it;
  • Brief items about praying for political success; Trump delusionally thinks the world respects him; how Christians fantasize overturning the Constitution; the Republicans’ neo-Nazi problem; free speech except concerning the gays; dismissing AI concerns like they did climate change and Covid;
  • Schubert’s 9th, “The Great”.
– – –

I’m actually guardedly sympathetic to this.

NY Times, 14 Sep 2026: How Conservatives Are Changing College Requirements, subtitled “Politics and other factors are causing universities to reconsider what classes are part of the core required for graduation. In some places, civics and classics are replacing climate change and sociology.”
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