Flubbed headlines are fun. There are typically two meanings. One is the obvious meaning, meant by the writer of the headline. The second is an interpretation, which can be hilarious.
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If you suspected that last week’s talk of baseball was just a distraction from the real puzzle hint, now you can find out.
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To solve last week’s puzzle, you don’t need to know the distance. Check the problem again for the number you do need to know.
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To answer Micro Softy 48, consider: How might Freddy be moving his car from place to place without exerting much physical energy at all?
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In our minds, as in our cells, we can see the clear signature of a Mind beyond this universe.
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The comparison doesn’t really work but it underlines the *doctrine* that human intelligence is just another type of animal intelligence.
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Oxford researchers studied chimpanzee tool use for evidence that chimpanzees really do think a lot like humans. If that were true, it would deepen the mystery.
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In reality, where language is concerned, there is a vast gulf fixed. It is not between primates and other mammals but between humans and all other life forms.
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A controversy about whether we need language to think pits two MIT scholars against each other: Noam Chomsky (yes) vs. Evelina Fedorenko (no). For a long time, it was only a philosophical issue: Plato saw thinking as a conversation with oneself. If you don’t form concepts into words are you really thinking? Chomsky agreed. But later, neuroscientists like Fedorenko got involved, offering some research findings. Last summer at the New York Times, science writer Carl Zimmer reported, When Dr. Fedorenko began this work in 2009, studies had found that the same brain regions required for language were also active when people reasoned or carried out arithmetic. But Dr. Fedorenko and other researchers discovered that this overlap was a mirage. Part Read More ›
This recent find in evolution studies is strikingly negative. There is no physical limitation to chimpanzee speech; rather, the limitation is a mental one.
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The most prominent example of unintended uses I can think of came about with the development of the internet itself.
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Although Narayanan frowns on pro-lifers using information to show the individual humanity of the unborn child, that’s clearly where the science points.
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My mother died of Alzheimer’s, and she was never less than fully human and as worthy of love and regard when she became incompetent.
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The researchers warn against using chatbots in research writing: While it can compose correct English, what it says may be false, inaccurate, or confabulated.
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This article is reprinted from National Review with the permission of the author. Our most august medical journals are in danger of becoming more woke ideological-advocacy publications than disseminators of learned scientific studies. This is particularly true of the New England Journal of Medicine, which regularly publishes progressive gibberish pushing “equity” that is often nearly impossible to understand. Here’s the latest example. From “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize — Focusing on Health Care Equity”: We believe that health care–centric goals — equity in patient experience and clinical outcomes — should be the primary equity-related targets for clinicians, health care administrators, health plans, and payers. The health care sector is best positioned to improve the effectiveness and equity of the care it Read More ›
People have noticed political biases in artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot systems like ChatGPT, but researcher David Rozado studied 24 large language model (LLM) chatbots to find out. Rozado’s (preprint) paper, “The Political Preferences of LLMs,” delivers open access findings from very recent research, and declares: When probed with questions/statements with political connotations, most conversational LLMs tend to generate responses that are diagnosed by most political test instruments as manifesting preferences for left-of-center viewpoints. The Chatbots’ Landslide of Opinion As reported in the New York Times, the paper restates that “most modern conversational LLMs when probed with questions with political connotations tend to generate answers that are … left-leaning viewpoints.” Using the verb “tend to” makes the conclusion appear tepid. The Read More ›
Physicist Werner Heisenberg saw in the dilemma of language — the specific vs. the general — an analogy to his famous Uncertainty Principle in physics.
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We can research many questions about language but it’s not realistic to hope either that we can easily explain its origin or simply reduce it to software.
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Terrace attempted to teach infant chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky to form a sentence but conceded defeat. His apparent early successes were traced to human prompting.
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Animal languages deal in emotions and sometimes in basic information but not in ideas. Humans can understand them to the extent that we can follow the emotions.
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