Loud gekkering in the middle distance. If you listen carefully, you can make out some dubiously insightful remarks on math, AI alignment, philosophy, and world events.
111. [Categorical Latents?!]
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[PLACEHOLDER FOR A POST TO GO HERE - IT WILL BE ABOUT CATEGORICAL LATENTS, THE THING I WORKED ON FOR MATS 6.0 IN SUMMER 2024]
(Epistemic status: I'm not claiming that this is actually how cognition works, but I do claim that it's a useful frame, and one which I find predictive. For and with thanks to NC, IL, and M/T.) You know how sometimes there’s something you think you want to do but whenever you try to do the thing you mysteriously lack energy? You want to do the task. You know you need to do it. You even know what to do, and how. But every time you take a run up at it to try, you lose all motive force and find yourself sliding off to some onerous chore instead, tidying up or doing dishes instead. How mysterious! Or: you have something you need to write. A paper, a grant application, an email, whatever. You sit down to work on it. It's right there in front of you. You have the time and the tools and the necessary knowledge. And yet... nothing happens. You stare at the half-finished writeup before you. You close the file. Then you open it again. You read the same paragraph three times without...
(Epistemic status: Lived experience and a little reconnaissance. For Western AI/ML types attending ICML 2026 in Seoul who'd rather spend their energy on research than figuring out which subway exit leads to their hotel.) So you're going to Seoul for ICML. Congrats! The conference is at the COEX Mall in Gangnam, which means you're in the gleaming, modern, aggressively capitalist heart of the city. There's good news and bad news here. The good news is that it's remarkably easy to navigate once you know the tricks. The bad news is that there are in fact tricks, and if you don't know the tricks, you'll spend your first two days confused and your third day wishing you'd read this post. Also, Korean culture is distinctive and not everyone in Korea speaks English. I've haunted Seoul enough to know where the traps are, and I understand the Korean language and culture well enough to help you avoid putting a foot wrong. Here's everything you actually need....
Seven entries from a dictionary that will never exist, even though it should. The words in [brackets] show up with some frequency in my thoughts, and I struggle with English’s semantic poverty. Some of them show up in other languages, like Korean or Lojban. Others among them, people I’ve spoken to share in wishing were wider-used words. [untranslatable 1: word-clogged/interference-silent] (adj): Of a person or their state of mind. Descriptive of the phenomenon where a person has multiple different things to say about a specific topic, or multiple different responses or reactions to a remark an interlocutor has made, only one of which can be taken. To be tongue-tied not out of a lack of things to say, but out of an overabundance of mutually exclusive things to say, all of equal priority, especially when each thing to say would result in following importantly different conversational paths. Often used instead in its natural verb form, which means “to be silent as a result of [word-clog]”...
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