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Trad-Blog Topic Week: Day & IQ
Fate seems to have determined that this week the blog is dedicated to classic topics like “silly thing Larry Correia said” or “what’s going on with the Dragon Awards”, so what better way to keep the trend going than “what bollocks did Vox Day just say about IQ?” Day picked up a comment at a…
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Cognitive Load, Genre and Tropes
This is a sort of follow up to yesterday’s post and an expansion of a comment I made. First of all, for those not familiar with the idea, “cognitive load” is a concept that comes from the study of problem-solving and is associated with an Australian academic called John Sweller. However, people are probably more…
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Bullshit and AI
In the comments to my previous post was a link to a paper on bullshit and intelligence. “Navigating social systems efficiently is critical to our species. Humans appear endowed with a cognitive system that has formed to meet the unique challenges that emerge for highly social species. Bullshitting, communication characterised by an intent to be…
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An interesting paper on GPT 4 and creativity
I’ve been reading a paper that makes some bold claims about the current set of large language model AIs and creativity. Here’s the abstract (my emphasis): “A widespread view is that Artificial Intelligence cannot be creative. We tested this assumption by comparing human-generated ideas with those generated by six Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) chatbots: alpa.ai,…
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Sometime in the near future, a machine will generate a good short story
But not yet and I can’t say when and it is a terrible idea to attempt it. Firstly I want to deal with an objection. People may reasonably object that short of the machine being actually intelligent, it cannot possibly generate a good short story. There are a set of arguments of this nature that…
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Binomial misnomers
I was reading a thing about “effective altruism” or at least the version of the term adopted by tech/finance gurus. The term rapidly headed from an interesting philosophical position to a way for wealthy people to rationalise the way the power of wealth can be abused through philanthropy. A longer discussion on the term is…
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GPT and the Chinese Room
One of the many famous philosophical thought experiments is John Searle’s so-called Chinese Room argument. There’s an extensive encyclopedia entry on it here https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ which quotes Searle’s own summary of the argument: “Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together…
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Religion & Despair
I’m reading an interesting paper whose conclusions I’m sceptical about. Entitled “OPIATES OF THE MASSES? DEATHS OF DESPAIR AND THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN RELIGION” the paper is published by the National Bureau of Economic Research which is a private economic research group of some influence. The paper is looking at the known phenomenon: the increase…
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What happened to serial killers?
This post came out of some tangential reading around trends in a related topic: the increase in mass shootings in the US (or rather whether there was an increase). Murder is an ugly topic and multiple murders even uglier but it is also a topic that generates a lot of cultural engagement via news, true…
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Could you rewrite the Lord of the Rings as a techno-thriller?
Despite my attempt to resolve forever the difference between fantasy and science-fiction, apparently, my typography-based typology has yet to catch on and the never-ending discourse continues. I have mentioned before that while we make conscious attempts to define categories by sharp rules, our brains do weird things with them. One model (disputed) for the underlying…
Camestros Felapton
FELAPTONL
Camestros Felapton 