archaeans

The essay is just bad. Its answer to "How important were the Achaemenids as a template for Sasanian power?" is "very important" and proceeds to squeeze that from the analysis at any costs. There is no nuance, no balance, just hammering on the point that it was very important.

Take this passage for example:

"The importance of the Achaemenid model for Sasanian power was profound yet selective, manifesting most clearly in royal ideology, administrative structures, and religious policy, while being mediated through the complex filters of historical memory, practical necessity, and contemporary innovation."

This is nonsense. "Profound yet selective" what does that even mean? Was it profound or selective?

Another problematic passage:

"Ardashir's son Shapur I's Res Gestae (ŠKZ) explicitly invokes the memory of past Iranian greatness, presenting the Sasanian dynasty as restoring a glory that had been diminished under Parthian rule."

It most certainly does not. There is no such claim to "restoring" something the Parthian rule had "diminished".

As usual, LLMs can write very convincing nonsense if you don't or can't scrutinize.

This is bad historical analysis dressed up as a pompous essay that looks knowledgeable to the lay person.

The so-called "scaling laws" are expressing diminishing returns.

How is it that "if we grow resources used exponentially errors decrease linearly" ever seen as a good sign?

And the often missed caveat is that we should only care about whether the software does what it is supposed to do.

Under that light, LLMs are just buggy and have been for years. Where is the LLM that does what it says it should do? "Hallucination" and "do they reason" are distractions. They fail. They're buggy.

Every argument about LLMs of that is a variant of "humans same" is self defeating because it assumes a level of understanding of human cognition and the human brain that doesn't really exist outside of the imagination of people with a poor understanding of neuroscience.

"It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language."

- Sapir

It's hard to take these discussions on cognition and intelligence seriously when there is so much lossy compression going on.