brettworks

• An essay on a history of Western classical music.

“We scarcely know where music resides; we cannot fix it in place; it flows past us; to varying degrees it envelops us, carries us away, floods our mental space. It’s especially hard to disentangle ourselves from music’s emotional content. Great music moulds time, such that we can hold in our minds musical argument, narrative, architecture, despite the transience of the sounds these shapes are made of, and to some degree we grasp these acoustic patterns intuitively. But there is more to music than its performance in time. It can be read as a body of knowledge, played through and studied in score, removed from the hot medium of experience to the cool and dispassionate space of contemplation.”

“Music is both too difficult and too easy to access, and it seems that we have opted to stick with ease over difficulty. We don’t bother to teach ourselves the language of music because we don’t need to, and maybe we don’t want to, in case, in knowing more about it, in involving ourselves in its difficulties, we dispel its magic or, at the very least, lose the value it has for us as a place where we do not have to think.”

• An essay on ways of building AI models.

“The second general point to be learned from the bitter lesson is that the actual contents of minds are tremendously, irredeemably complex; we should stop trying to find simple ways to think about the contents of minds, such as simple ways to think about space, objects, multiple agents, or symmetries. All these are part of the arbitrary, intrinsically-complex, outside world. They are not what should be built in, as their complexity is endless; instead we should build in only the meta-methods that can find and capture this arbitrary complexity. Essential to these methods is that they can find good approximations, but the search for them should be by our methods, not by us. We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered. Building in our discoveries only makes it harder to see how the discovering process can be done.”

• An essay on AI’s effects on cognition.

“Frequent AI use fosters a passive acceptance of information, reducing the internal friction and inquiry that drive genuine curiosity and problem-solving. The brain depends on mental struggle and overcoming failure to rewire and strengthen our neural pathways. Bypassing that friction reduces our overall cognitive reserve over time.”

“Dedicate specific hours of your day to completely screen-free activities. Read books, write with pen and paper or go for a walk without your phone and see how differently things feel for you after six weeks of consistent effort. Intentionally building friction into the frictionless online experience is hard – but I promise that your brain will thank you for it.”