I stopped halfway through this paragraph and just googled Peter Putnam.
If I want an article to take hours to get to the point I'll go read a recipe blog.
> If I want an article to take hours to get to the point I'll go read a recipe blog.
I don't appreciate all the extra text in recipe blogs either.
Y'all know humans are kinda "made of" stories, right? Stories are the unit layer that we add on top of biological structure. It's not "data"
Imho it is essentially self-loathing of the human condition to valorise raw data and detest linear narrative as much as this crowd seems to do
EDIT: Narrative is the wings, without which data cannot travel through enough of the bell curve of minds. Being anti-story is being anti-democratic is toward authoritarianism. </ hot-take>
Narrative is suasion, not substance.
The storytellers know of no other way to tell the audience what is important, so the medium is the message.
EDIT: and…the trope anticlimactic downvotes seal the drama
But in my defence, I'm in a "punching up" mode here, in the minority sense. I'd probably argue for valorising data more in an arts space.
But something about the current tech world-builders not having respect for narrative makes me frustrated and afraid. How can we ever build things that account for parts of minds and life that we don't respect. (I sense a lack of respect for why and how narrative has been the vehicle of so much human progress and growth)
We're not sitting around a campfire shining flashlights into our faces. We're reading an article supposedly about an unsung genius named Peter Putnam. Such an article should open with who he was and what he did that was so important yet unsung, and THEN delve into story details, not bury the important bit behind mountains of "It was a dark and stormy night" type filler.
The short story in your comment, OTOH, is very much better. I can see the scene, my mind has filled in some details, and it took only a couple seconds to read.
Putnam himself would feel perfectly comfortable here.
Your post is a sort of sad admission that your attitude will prevent you from seeing the beauty in everyone.
You do you though. I am sure there is a reason you are this way ;)
It's messy. Anyone who claims one way (myself included) is probably Very Wrong On The Internet
I do wonder about Putnam's research though. Has it been looked into by experts in the field more recently? The article doesn't really give an answer to this.
Regarding the point about current research, I found in the article:
"Gary Aston-Jones, head of the Brain Health Institute at Rutgers University, told me he was inspired by Putnam to go into neuroscience after Clarke gave him one of Putnam’s papers.
“Putnam’s nervous system model presaged by decades stuff that’s very cutting edge in neuroscience,” Aston-Jones said, and yet, “in the field of neuroscience, I don’t know anybody that’s ever heard of him.”"
That’s when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn’t a goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it’s baked into the very nature of things—to exist from one moment to the next is to repeat your existence. “This goal function,” Putnam wrote, “appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself.”
So, here’s the game. The system starts out in a random mix of “on” and “off” states. Its goal is to repeat that state—to stay the same. But in each turn, a perturbation from the environment moves through the system, flipping states, and the system has to emit the right sequence of moves (by forming the right self-reinforcing loops) to alter the environment in such a way that it will perturb the system back to its original state."
I'm a big fan of this line of thinking. I've been arguing for years that RL should be based in homeostasis and this seems right along those lines. I wish I could have talked with him!
morninglight•3h ago
Not even close.