A famous science journal called Nature says that today’s computer programs like ChatGPT are now smart enough to be called Artificial General Intelligence. That means they can think and learn like humans. I think there are some small arguments about what this really means, but I mostly agree with them.
Is Wallace Shawn the only artsy person who gets stopped by people on the street in Times Square? Normally, headlines that ask questions have obvious answers, but I think in this case, the answer might actually be yes.
. And if you’ve never seen it before … Babylon 5 episodes are being uploaded (by the owner) to youtube.
Toddlers expect ingroup loyalty to override personal preferences when outgroups are present — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As always with psychology papers, grains of salt are in order; but the presence of “naive biology” and “naive physics” in babies well established, so “naive social structure” seems reasonable1.
Michael Rosenberg is on the short list of “best (bridge) card play technician in the world.”2 He’s been presenting some of his notes on card play and I’ve literally never heard of some of these rules, but they make total sense. There Are Many Situations. (This is deep stuff, Rosenberg says its all theoretically correct but even most of his national+ caliber partners don’t play it. I think I understand the 87xx example and some of the others).
Police Squad only had six episodes …
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Your clickbait argument generation list for this month is
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What Happened to Amazon3 — How culture changes. (I heard a quote a few years ago that resonated with me. “Culture is what you let people get away with” (or “Culture is what you tolerate.” If you no longer tolerate well-intentioned failure, you won’t get innovation). After that I skimmed some of the author’s other articles and came upon an interesting and I think correct take on Iron Man — The Suit was Never the Point
(short video essay).
Rented Virtue or, “There never was a secular alternative.”
…. I know what I’ll be doing next month.
Lords of the Ring — A Harper’s magazine discussion of “The cultural politics of sumo wrestling”
A quick summary on the replication of psychology. (Or massive lack thereof).
- My oldest (not the TaoLing) was actually a test baby at Duke’s Psychology Dept. for some experiments, and so was presented with very cute “B.S.”, “M.S.”, and “Ph.D” degrees (all in “Baby Science”) which sadly did not help her resume. There is no point to this footnote, I just find it adorable. ↩︎
- Arguably, he is the entire list, although partially that’s because Bob Hamman is over 80. ↩︎
- I added this link to the list before seeing that Amazon had lost $~400M in market cap over the last week or two. ↩︎