Finally a week with more than two links!
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Beatrice de Graaf is a Professor at Utrecht University. Her talk at Stanford on The Quest for a Third Rome describes using text mining techniques to analyse Putin’s speeches since 1999. The paper, written with her student Neils Drost, is open access: Putin and the Third Rome:: Imperial-Eschatological Motives as a Usable Past
“In this corpus, we ask how Putin used the combination of history and Russian Orthodox theological, biblical tropes as a usable past, to create his powerbase, to understand how he built up to defending and legitimizing the invasion in Ukraine”
A similar area was covered by Teitelbaum in his book War for Eternity about the influence of Alexsandr Dugin and mysticism on both Putin and Steve Bannon in the US.
Does Putin believe it? Maybe. Is he using mysticism and religion for his own ends? For sure. -
In the US, billionaries are radicalising themselves via group chats: The Group Chats that Change America
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Moving on from politics and back to LLMs: Melanie Mitchell has two posts on her Substack about if/how LLMs have a model of the world. Spoiler - right now, probably not. They seem instead to learn massive sets of hueristics. LLMs and world models: Part 1 and Part 2
As anyone who has watched a highly skilled professional colleague totally fail to understand their laptop at work will know, heuristics can get you a long way. -
And finally…using dead spiders as robot grippers - Necrobotics (IEE Spectrum) This is absolutely as crazy as it sounds
Header image by Larry Wkoester