Hi, I’m Bhuvan.This is my commonplace book.

We are the stories we tell

"To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they could unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people." [1, 2]

Sweden's crime problem

Gunnar Strömmer, Sweden’s justice minister, calls gang crime “a systematic threat to society” on a par with or above that posed by terrorism. On a visit to Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city, he notes that almost a year has gone by since a deadly shooting there. So bad was the country’s reputation that politicians in neighbouring Denmark and Norway talked about “Swedish conditions” as shorthand for everything they did not want…

Feelings that defy language

Post type: A very in-the-moment stream of consciousness, voice-typed and lightly cleaned up with ChatGPT. Language is probably one of the greatest inventions of mankind. I don’t think there would have been civilization, at least not in any recognizable form, without our ability to speak to one another, communicate,…

India after Gandhi

I often tell my friends that I'm white at heart because I know far more about American and European history than Indian history, and it's a shameful fact that I'm working to fix. One of the books I bought a while ago was Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi, which I hadn't got around to reading. I finally picked it…

Visualizing the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident

Not bad Here's what I got

The bear case for AGI

At a higher level, I guess I’d say there’s a sort of refusal to think carefully about what models are or are not useful for in a rigorous way which I find personally quite annoying, and instead a reliance on some nebulous notion of being “AGI pilled” as a replacement for serious thought. I think people are very quick to anthropomorphize LLM intelligence because humans communicate through words and we infer the intelligence of…

Research on the wealth effect

Now, you might think that broader participation in the stock market would increase the strength of the wealth effect, with more households exposed to market volatility. But this is not quite right. ++New research++ from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that the more widely Americans hold shares, the weaker the effect of a rate change on the real economy, which is the opposite of what you might expect: instinctively,…