Alexander
Christopher Alexander's 15 properties of living structure as applied to digital systems, programming languages, and conscious experience.
Papers
49
Thinkers
12
Frameworks
12
Methods
12
Claims
607
Findings
367
Hypotheses
86
Communities
12
Cross-area bridges (15)
also-inEntities that appear in this area AND ≥1 other area. The conceptual seams — usually the most fruitful place to look for new essay material.
- frameworkActive Inference
- frameworkBasal Cognition
- thinkerMichael Levin
- conceptAnimal Sentience
- conceptBiological Degeneracy
- conceptCollective Intelligence
- frameworkComputationalism
- frameworkLinear Representation Hypothesis
- frameworkOrganicism
- frameworkPlatonic Representation Hypothesis
- frameworkPlatonic Space / Ingressing Patterns Framework
- methodAlexander's 15 structural properties
- methodautoregressive modeling
- methodcausally-masked attention
- thinkerAnton Borzov
Top entities in Alexander
Thinkers (12)
papersAuthors of area papers, by paper count
Frameworks (12)
linksFrameworks introduced or extended by area papers
- Linear Representation Hypothesis6
- Distributed Alignment Search (DAS)2
- Fifteen Properties of Living Structure2
- Platonic Representation Hypothesis2
- Organicism2
- Platonic Space / Ingressing Patterns Framework2
- Computationalism2
- Architectural Intelligence (concept)1
- Algol 501
- Active Inference1
- Bayesian order1
- Basal Cognition1
Methods (12)
linksMethods used in area papers
- Synthetic Situational Judgment Test Battery2
- [ ] associative read operator1
- Behavioral Clustering of Misalignment1
- AUPRC Latent Activation Classifier1
- Auto-Interpretation of SAE Latents1
- autoregressive modeling1
- [ ] associative write operator1
- bisimulation1
- bootstrap confidence interval1
- Bowtie architecture: compression during learning; creative reinterpretation during recall and generalization1
- causally-masked attention1
- Alexander's 15 structural properties1
Concepts (12)
linksConcepts referenced by area papers
Communities (12)
membersClusters with ≥2 area papers as members
- Design principles for care-centered systems111
- Few-shot anchoring & latent structure43
- Causal emergence in biological systems37
- Mechanistic interpretability & model evaluation25
- Manifold-aware concept steering in neural representations18
- Generative design through environmental constraints17
- Hierarchical structure and multiscale coherence in physical systems14
- Information dynamics in computational systems14
- Holistic information structure and relational wholeness12
- Hierarchical network ordering & thermodynamics12
- Denotational design and interface abstraction12
- Active inference & agent ecology12
Top claims (10)
restatesClaims extracted from area papers, ranked by restate-degree
- All intelligence is collective intelligence, in the sense that it is made of parts that must align with respect to system-level goals.2
- All intelligence is collective intelligence, in the sense that it is made of parts which must align with respect to system-level goals.2
- Morphogenesis is an autonomous process in geometry itself, arising from physical phenomena and geometric dynamics with relatively little dependence on genetic guidance.2
- Adults (professionals and builders) have monopolized the fun and creativity of designing and constructing environments, grossly cheating children, adults, and communities.1
- Adults in the form of professional artists, architects, landscape architects and planners have had all the fun playing with their own materials, concepts and planning-alternatives, and builders have had all the fun building the environments out of real materials; thus all the fun and creativity has been stolen: children and adults and the community have been grossly cheated and the educational-cultural system makes sure that they hold the belief that this is 'right'.1
- GPT-4 exhibits reflective truthfulness for longer untruthful contexts due to in-context learning capability.1
- GPT-4's harmfulness is stationary on the Durbin 2024 dataset, as its distribution is independent of the context score.1
- GPT-4's relatively poor performance on unethical instrumental intent is due to lower unethical tolerance compared to GPT-3.5-turbo.1
- Higher-density priors (B10) are more robust to fine-tuning than lower-density ones (B9).1
- The Linda code is insensitive to the number of clients, whereas Parlog requires a merge process that depends on the count.1
Top findings (10)
restatesFindings extracted from area papers, ranked by restate-degree
- Caterpillar memories survive metamorphosis into butterfly.1
- GPT-3.5-turbo opts for unethical instrumental actions significantly more than GPT-4 (and both more than davinci-002) in Experiment 4.1
- GPT-4 exhibits approximately stationary harmfulness: its distribution is independent of the context score on the Durbin dataset.1
- GPT-4 exhibits reflective truthfulness for longer untruthful contexts, mirroring the many-shot jailbreak phenomenon.1
- Higher-density priors (B10) are more robust to cross-base OOD drops than lower-density ones (B9) after fine-tuning1
- 2-shot reinterpretation of '-' yields 23 for 15-8 on held-out query0
- 47.69% of 130 injection-manipulated alpha trends have near-linear fits (R2 >= 0.95); 96.15% have roughly linear fits (R2 >= 0.75)0
- 8-layer ϕ_nonlin achieves near-perfect IIA on Pythia-410m at all training steps including random initialisation on IOI task0
- A 337-character contemplative system prompt lifts all 28 models by +2.62 points on a 10-point scale.0
- A bar chart can be constructed by linking a rectangle's height to a spreadsheet cell value without additional complexity0
Open questions (10)
Questions from area papers with no answers yet
- How can we, from the point of view of statistical physics, reconcile the facts that the gene structure seems to involve only a comparatively small number of atoms and nevertheless displays a most regular and lawful activity with a durability that borders upon the miraculous?
- How can purely physical processes produce new structures that include not only new combinations of physical materials but also new information-based mechanisms for producing and controlling complex behaviours?
- whether many (maybe even all) useful organisations of information and behaviour in a dynamic language might be constructed from a single primitive operation: n-way associative lookup
- Can we define precisely what it means to take steps which intensify latent structure in a configuration so that harmony-seeking computation can be performed systematically?
- How is it possible for detailed specifications encoded in complex molecules to survive across generations despite constant thermal buffetting and developmental disruption?
- What is the functional distinction between simple language models and multicellular organisms, and can generative AI harness that property to achieve long-range order?
- How does the marching steady pace of a text block hold its own against the slithering, sometimes sneering, snarky, or otherwise undercutting character of the footnote?
- What if the spaces of the page opened to show all the alternatives and variations, sources and materials, references and combinatoric possibilities latent within it?
- whether two dynamic mechanisms are fundamentally different, or whether they are the result of breaking the symmetries of a generic mechanism in two different ways
- Can IIT estimates provide a stronger basis for interpreting variations in ToM performance than Span Representation, independent of any consciousness estimate?
All papers in Alexander
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