Newsletter

Hello,

Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:

New Articles:

Positive Intelligence pt.I

Excerpt: A lot of people were upset with me for teasing the ‘neuroscience-based’ coaching programme ‘Positive Intelligence’, so I thought I’d do a little autopsy. This is part one, on the context that should make you pretty worried about it.

Main idea: It says it’s based on the latest research, but actually it’s based on a 40 year old version of the concept of an ‘inner critic’, and a pack of very well worded porky-pies.

New Marginalia:

LegoAI makes Lego models from text prompts.

–

Drink water, get skinny. Highlights of the journal article:

• Water consumption is associated with numerous health benefits including greater odds of achieving clinically meaningful weight loss and less weight gain over time.
• Pre-meal water consumption may be an effective strategy for reducing hunger and meal energy intake, particularly among middle-aged and older adults.
• The substitution of water for sugar-sweetened beverages or increasing water intake reduces body weight by 0.33 kg compared to control conditions.

–

Greening Australia. And other fairly speculative ideas about how to make Australia wealthier. I’m not very interested in the wealth creation thing, but the greening Australia idea was fun.

–

I’d Rather Read The Prompt. Another perspective on AI in assignments:

You only have to read one or two of these answers to know exactly what’s up: the students just copy-pasted the output from a large language model, most likely ChatGPT. They are invariably verbose, interminably waffly, and insipidly fixated on the bullet-points-with-bold style. The prose rarely surpasses the sixth-grade book report, constantly repeating the prompt, presumably to prove that they’re staying on topic.

Now, empirically we can’t tell when people are cheating with AI. Or maybe we can’t tell when they try to hide it better. Because it’s certainly true that I spot obvious AI stuff very regularly in both written and increasingly in verbal assignments.

I like this perspective on it though. In particular the two paragraphs:

• If it’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well
• If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly

It’s also true that probably the main tell is something about how boring the output tends to be.

–

On Eurasian Demonology. I wrote an article this week about a very expensive faux-neuroscience-based program that talks about your inner demons, and it seems fun to see the places that our historical concept of actual demons overlaps. But also how we make abstractions gods and how we Christianised them:

However, this is not the whole picture, because, generally speaking, it was only these inner daimons of possession that were potentially ‘demonic’. When approached in the proper manner, the custodians of springs and rivers and sacred groves, like Plato’s guardian spirits or the various oracles of the ancient Mediterranean world, have shown themselves to be of a benevolent sort, and so have been sought out by persons in need of their help. Fairies, trolls, elves, nymphs and gnomes are so many ‘land spirits’, daimons of the natural environment. So it was that, when faced by their parishioners’ stubborn recourse to the healing waters of pagan sanctuaries, the same medieval Church whose vocation it had been to combat the demonic hordes was forced to yield to popular custom. Even today, the Mediterranean world is dotted with thousands of pools and springs consecrated to various saints and virgins who are none other than the daimons and fairies of yore, overlaid with the slightest Christian veneer.

–

I hope you found something interesting.

You can find links to all my previous missives here.

Warm regards,

Dorian | btrmt.