[newsletter]
Men and women are from earth, fool and other things
13 Sep 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Men and women are from earth, fool
Excerpt: I’m going to shit all over this ridiculous 30-year old pseudo-psychology book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus that people keep trying to talk to me about now that gender essentialism is getting trendy again. Here I cover the obvious grifter that is John Gray, and his first, disturbing chapter.
Main idea: Not only is there is absolutely no difference between men and women in how they complain or offer criticism, but the ‘men’ Gray could be used as textbook example of people with social anxiety.
The feeling of the ‘a-ha’ moment fosters conspiracy theories. Really emphasises some of my critiques of the whole leadership consulting thing.
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PaperQA2, the first AI agent that conducts entire scientific literature reviews on its own.
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Can other animals understand death? Video on grief displays in other animals. Good companion to what animals think about death, which talks about e.g. the phenomenon of ‘playing possum’. More than just instinct it would appear. More evidence that humans aren’t so special after all.
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Shadow Prompting—how your AI prompts are altered:
When you type a prompt into an AI image model, you might expect that what you type has a meaningful impact on what you get back … OpenAI has acknowledged that what you prompt is only taken as a suggestion: your words are altered before they reach the model, with opaque editorial decisions employed to filter out problematic requests and obscure the model’s inherent biases.
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AI ideologies, or how to use AI better. The using them better part requires some reading between the lines, but it’s true that e.g. AI is mostly a procrastination tool vs a productivity tool. The best benefit of AI in writing papers etc is to have it show you how not to write something and then edit that heavily until its correct, or realise the right way to write it. I don’t know anyone who has successfully used large chunks of output verbatim. Similarly, the ‘prompt myth’ leads many (including me) to get frustrated. You keep explaining yourself in the chat, why won’t it understand? Moving to the API and simulating chat, but letting me edit the chat to remove information I don’t want, or sharpen answers improves the subsequent ‘chat’ dramatically. Why I stress the fact that, AI isn’t like us. Better to treat it thus.
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This is many things. A book review. A biography. An ode to David Forster Wallace. But I liked in particular the diagnosis of Wallace’s philosophy.
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Chat GPT as cultural criticism:
It throws in our faces: why do we have so many jobs and school assignments that can be done by a non-thinking probability machine? Why do our students (even the ones paying a jillion dollars!) want to skip their lessons?
More in thread.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,