Category: ideas

“The annual Loebner competition, where participants attempt to show that a machine can pass for a human in conversation, is based on Alan Turing’s theory that such a test would be an adequate demonstration of intelligence. But Turing was wrong. A machine should not demonstrate intelligence by emulating a human. In fact, in some regards today’s expert systems are displaying intelligence far beyond the capability of a human.”

“Somewhere between checked out and freaked out lies an anxiety sweet spot, some researchers say, in which a person is motivated to succeed yet not so anxious that performance takes a dive. This moderate amount of anxiety keeps people on their toes, enables them to juggle multiple tasks and puts them on high alert for potential problems.”

“One school of thought in psychology holds that self-control is like a muscle: When you’re trying to abstain from, say, alcohol, you expend mental energy, just as if you were lifting weights. … A new study suggests a simpler way to bolster self-control, as it begins to flag: Think of money.”

“Ominously… happiness studies have been diverted into an applied science. The happiness measurers very much want to direct us and are itching to engineer a happy society. They do not know what they are talking about, but are very willing to put “policies” about it into practice anyway.”

“Not only do Democrats and Republicans hold different political beliefs but they even have distinct differences in consumer behavior — from their preferred brand of coffee to their favorite gaming console.”

“Less intelligent people are better at doing most things. In the ancestral environment general intelligence was helpful only for solving a handful of evolutionarily novel problems.”

Japanese (along with many lesser-known languages) doesn’t distinguish between blue and green. Koreans divide what anglophones see as green into two different colors; Russians do the same with blue. These differences do affect the ways in which we perceive color, studies indicate – although the effect isn’t equal across people or even across parts of the brain.

“Email, upper case, lower case, any case, is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today — and email was invented in 1978 by a 14-year-old working in Newark, NJ. The facts are indisputable.”

“For Rousseau, theater was little more than an app of a broken society, and it was the world that had gone wrong. … Staged productions representing life, he believed, distracted us from one another, and from ourselves. Theater replaces lived experience with vicarious experience and condemned participants to wander the sea of the non-present.”

Recharge your phone simply by walking (albeit with a slightly weird attachment at the knee) – no batteries required? Sounds like heaven. Can we have this soon, please?