This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Politicians and ChatGPT — A few politicians seek success by being ultra-glib. In so doing, they achieve momentary plausibility. Feedback notices a similarity between those politicians’ shiny, hollow speech and the shiny, hollow text generated by ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence computer programs. Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries and Joe Slater at the University of Glasgow, UK, did a study called “ChatGPT is bullshit“….
- Morbid dating — If one craves morbid romance, one could, if one wished, write an algorithm to select an attractively morbid prospective mate or a recreational date. Coltan Scrivner, the curiosity-driven inventor of the Morbid Curiosity Scale (Feedback, 19 November 2022), has looked into a new use for his tool. He and two colleagues, in a new study, explain that “Behavioral attraction predicts morbidly curious women’s mating interest” in men with dangerous personalities….
- Limits of curiosity — What are the limits of your curiosity? Is there a reliable, simple way to find out? Here is one possible test. Feedback has a copy of a paper that Subhash Chandra Shaw and his colleagues published in Medical Journal Armed Forces India. The title of that research might tell you – by your reaction to it – something about yourself.The paper is called “Missing anus: Do not miss it“.
- Trivial superpower — Aline Berry confesses and professes to having a trivial superpower that potentially isn’t trivial. She writes: “I believe I have a super power which I have taken for granted all my life. When someone complains that they have been looking everywhere for something, I usually find it within 5 minutes….
- Swirl of interest — Here is an exercise in dimensional scaling. Which is more powerful: a) a storm in a teacup or b) a tempest in a teapot? Experiment is the real way to settle the question….