Morbid relationship
If one craves morbid romance, one may, if one wished, write an algorithm to pick an attractively morbid potential mate or a leisure date.
Coltan Scrivner, the curiosity-driven inventor of the Morbid Curiosity Scale (Suggestions, 19 November 2022), has seemed into a brand new use for his device. He and two colleagues, in a brand new examine, clarify that “Behavioral attraction predicts morbidly curious women’s mating interest” in males with harmful personalities.
They cite earlier analysis displaying that these “women are aware of potential costs associated with such men”. The brand new analysis goals to assist mentioned ladies. It says: “Despite the potential costs of high-dark triad men, it could benefit morbidly curious women to upregulate their preference for such men to satisfy short-term mating goals.”
The analysis doesn’t pursue the apparent enterprise potential right here. Suggestions envisions a brand new period of specialized morbid tool-making and gear use. Cheery days lie forward, perhaps, for the business that initially was known as “computer dating”.
(For the curious, Scrivner has additionally created a simple manner so that you can measure the place you lie on his scale: a free on-line Morbid Curiosity Check. Earlier than beginning it, you may be knowledgeable that “‘morbid’ does not mean the curiosity is bad – it simply refers to the fact that the topic is related to death in some way”.)
Limits of curiosity
What are the bounds of your curiosity? Is there a dependable, easy technique to discover out? Right here is one potential check.
Suggestions has a replica of a paper that Subhash Chandra Shaw and his colleagues revealed in Medical Journal Armed Forces India. The title of that analysis would possibly let you know – by your response to it – one thing about your self.
The paper known as “Lacking anus: Don’t miss it“.
Chatting politics
A number of politicians search success by being ultra-glib. In so doing, they obtain momentary plausibility.
Suggestions notices a similarity between these politicians’ shiny, hole speech and the shiny, hole textual content generated by ChatGPT and related synthetic intelligence pc applications.
Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries and Joe Slater on the College of Glasgow, UK, did a examine known as “ChatGPT is bullshit“, which appears in Ethics and Information Technology. They argue that “describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems”. The group mentions a first-rate instance of bullshit: a politician saying explicit issues solely as a result of the phrases would possibly “sound good to potential voters”.
Suggestions admires the talent, if little else, of these politicians who, like ChatGPT, can utter limitless streams of easy-to-swallow-though-not-to-digest patter. A number of of essentially the most profitable of these ChatGPT-ish politicians, in a number of nations, additionally show a visible counterpart to their phrases – a just-fleetingly-plausible bodily facet of themselves. They adorn their heads with hair, or stuff that momentarily plausibly passes for hair, of ChatGPT-ish high quality. There may be, as but, little revealed analysis about why and the way that occurs.
Not so trivial
Suggestions continues the hunt to compile an inventory of trivial superpowers. Aline Berry confesses and professes to having a trivial superpower that probably isn’t trivial.
She writes: “I consider I’ve a brilliant energy which I’ve taken with no consideration all my life. When somebody complains that they’ve been trying in every single place for one thing, I often discover it inside 5 minutes. One way or the other, like Sherlock Holmes, I get rid of the apparent which they should have checked out and 0 in on the lacking merchandise, which can be out in view however camouflaged in such a manner that it’s missed.
“In one instance lately, a friend had been frantically looking for her car keys ‘all morning’ and asked for my help. I stood looking around, realising it would be useless for me to go over everything, and asked her if she had looked in the refrigerator. Her eyes lit up. She had put her keys on top of something cold to remind her to take it with her and had promptly forgotten about it.”
One other potential manifested in childhood: “I came to a new school several weeks late and was presented with a geometry problem. I had not previously taken geometry and did not know any of the rules, so I looked at the graph and put down the answer. It was correct. The teacher accused me of cheating and gave me a problem she had drawn, which no one could have seen before. I put down the correct answer again. She punished me by giving me 10 problems which I had to do the ‘proper’ way. Since I did not know what the proper rules were, I was glad when I got the news I would be going to another school.”
Swirl of curiosity
Right here is an train in dimensional scaling. Which is extra highly effective: a) a storm in a teacup or b) a tempest in a teapot? Experiment is the actual technique to settle the query. Please survey your colleagues (minimal of fifty), then submit your tripartite findings (variety of respondents, storms and tempests) to: Swirl of curiosity, c/o Suggestions.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the journal Annals of Inconceivable Analysis. Earlier, he labored on uncommon methods to make use of computer systems. His web site is inconceivable.com.
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