We’re back in learning mode. It’s a lot of fun and really interesting.

To start, we’ve been learning a lot since our book was published, mainly how the topics resonate broadly with different interested parties across a wide swath of society, why they find the topic and our treatment of it compelling, and why they are worried about where science is today. It’s made us glad we pushed ourselves to write when we did.

Now, our next adventure awaits. Heading to our session at Charleston Premiers on November 5th, we are busy building Ad Fontes Science to the point where we’ll have something to show.

This means doing the kind of work the CEO of Ad Fontes Media, Vanessa Otero, believes is the real fun of creating a new offering on the market, and the kind of work two product development people also adore — figuring things out, adapting and adjusting, and making the initial build-outs, prototypes, and personnel connections every start-up needs to hit the ground running.

We talk about some of this — but not too much — and share our Discoveries of the Week, including one about a particular spooky season accessory:

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Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/

arXiv was the first major preprint server, a practical Internet solution for a community seeking to exchange findings in areas like high-energy physics, particle physics, and astrophysics, all of which were growing at a rapid rate at the time due to machine-readable outputs and new sensor abilities.

First housed at Los Alamos, it moved to Cornell for a time before spinning out as an independent non-profit earlier this year. It has always been a bit of a financial albatross, so going it alone may mean more financial austerity is in the cards.

But now that it’s taken its future into its own hands and making changes, maybe it’s time to leave arXiv alone?

For its rather arcane origins and purposes, it has punched above its weight in how it has influenced thinking and been used as an example, inspiring utopian visions around the unfettered sharing of scientific findings that have proven misleading in the end.

Suffice to say, platforming preprints didn’t scale as an idea. Commercial forces of various kinds have done their best to abuse, corrupt, and extract value from them, and they have led to a litany of problems as readers here know.

But arXiv retains a talismanic power in some minds, so when extra review steps, limits on article types, and caps on article submissions were proposed, a clamor of alarm and disdain predictably followed — from the kinds of tourists and peanut gallery postulators who have taken roost in the open science era.

So today we’ll discuss a basic question about freedom, community boundaries, and grace:

• Can’t we just leave arXiv alone now?

We discuss why treating care and trust as antediluvian is ridiculous, why others keep wanting to exploit our infrastructure, why gatekeeping has become a more blunt, quantitative instrument, and how techno-fascism is monoculture-adjacent and why this matters.

We also share our Discoveries of the Week.

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Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/

The history of science and tech is at some level a history of fabulists — people who imbued new technologies with magical powers of one sort or another, and others who dethroned the magicians and seers with empirical evidence. Now, physicists are actively asking if freewill is an illusion, and if the laws of physics are so deterministic that our consciousnesses are themselves an illusion.

Now, we’re using technology to make new forms of what looks like consciousness to reassert some magic into our world.

Information technology and religion merged early on, with “book religions” expanded by the printing press, which itself spread rapidly largely because the Catholic church printed and sold indulgences to absolve believers of sin — for a price.

With money on the table, there was a good reason to build or buy a printing press.

But the fabulism of indulgences didn’t last. Fortunately, the technology was general use.

We may be living through a similar period when it comes to digital technologies, with fabulists making money and adoption while the larger world seeks general use to solve problems or expand human capabilities.

As we wrestle LLMs to the ground, we seem to be turning a corner as three related trends emerge:

1. The fantasies are being identified and deconstructed
2. Practical applications and sensible approaches are starting to emerge — they are not as grand as the fabulists wanted us to believe, no surprise
3. The general use purpose of LLMs and GAI is being questioned at a fundamental level

• One great new source about AI sense-making is a podcast by Catharina Doria, an excellent AI debunker who made her mark on Instagram and is now moving over to podcasting.

That doesn’t mean we aren’t in danger of allowing fabulists to wreck things. Their ability to shift agency away, to spin fantasies, and to hide behind ideologies creates a lot of risk.

It all hurts science and scholarship, because the fabulists also hide the specifics of their technologies inside a black box of beliefs and make claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny. And the flood of information they are producing is shutting down legitimate scientific data, discourse, and distribution as fabulism seeks dominance.

We discuss all of this, and more.

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week,” including the egopantis.

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Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/