TagReading
Are We Experiencing a Universal Cognitive Decline?
People are increasingly having trouble reading, focusing, and solving complex problems.A new study shows that people are struggling more than ever to read, concentrate, and solve problems. The research comes just a few months after Oxford’s indicative decision to make “Brain Rot” its 2024 “Word of the Year.” Common experience itself lends itself to the conclusion that we are struggling to focus, that our attention is fragmented, and that simply thinking about one issue for more than a few seconds is difficult. The Financial Times reported that intelligence and reasoning capacities have declined since the early 2010s. While the COVID-19 pandemic is commonly blamed for the plummet and is indeed responsible for much of the cognitive decline, the downward trend preceded the crisis according to the study. John Burn-Murdoch reports: Read More ›
Jean Twenge: Gen Z Isn’t Reading
Zoomers were born into smartphones, not Shakespeare
Why You Should Read More Fiction
The mental benefits for reading good stories are many.When looking for “solutions” to today’s mental health crisis in the United States, particularly among the millions of men who are checking out of society, reading fiction may not immediately come to mind. However, a new article from Psychology Today argues that reading fiction is “essential” for today’s men. The author of the article, psychologist Jett Stone, focuses on men in part because today’s literary market is largely geared towards women, and fiction and femininity are often closely associated. Nonetheless, he believes that reading fiction can benefit both women and men. He writes, Recent research indicates that reading fiction fosters critical thinking by presenting ideas subtly and in more roundabout ways than nonfiction. One study of adolescents found that frequent fiction readers possessed more Read More ›
AI vs. Human Intentionality
If ChatGPT were trained over and over on its own output, it would eventually turn to gibberishWe can do a simple experiment that demonstrates the difference between AI and human intentionality. ChatGPT and the like are a sophisticated form of a mathematical model known as a Markov chain. A Markov chain is based on the Markov assumption that the future is entirely a product of the recent past. In other words, if we know the recent past, then nothing else we learn about the more distant past will improve our ability to predict the future. In ChatGPT terms, this means ChatGPT is based on the assumption that everything we need to know to predict future words is contained within a limited window of previously seen words. ChatGPT’s window was 3,000 words, and I believe the newest version has Read More ›