Pathological dating
People with a craving for pathological romance could, if they so wished, write algorithms to select attractive, pathological prospective spouses or recreational dating partners.
Driven by curiosity, Coltan Scribner, inventor of the Morbid Curiosity Scale (Feedback, November 19, 2022), has explored new uses for the tool. He and two colleagues have study explains that “behavioral attraction predicts mating interest among morbidly curious women” toward men with risky personalities.
They cite previous research that shows those “women are aware of the potential costs associated with such men.” The new study aims to help those women, stating: “Despite the potential costs of men high on the dark triad, it may be beneficial for women with pathological curiosity to develop a preference for such men to fulfill short-term mating goals.
The study doesn’t delve into the obvious business potential here. Feedback envisions a new era dedicated to the making and use of morbid gadgets. Perhaps brighter days lie ahead for this industry, originally called “computer dating.”
(For those interested, Scribner has also created a simple way to measure where you stand on the scale: a free online Morbid curiosity test Before we begin, we’re told that “‘morbid’ doesn’t mean curiosity is bad, it simply refers to the fact that the topic is related to death in some way.”
The limits of curiosity
What are the limits of your curiosity? Is there a foolproof, easy way to find out? Here’s a test.
The feedback includes a copy of a paper published by Subhash Chandra Shaw and his colleagues. Indian Army Medical Journal The title of the study and your response may tell you something about yourself.
This paper is Missing anus: don’t miss it“”.
Talking about politics
Some politicians seek success through extremely eloquent speeches, which give them a momentary sense of persuasion.
Feedback noticed a similarity between the flashy but empty speeches of these politicians and the flashy but empty texts generated by ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence computer programs.
Michael Townsen-Hicks, James Humphreys and Joe Slater of the University of Glasgow in the UK said: ChatGPT is bullshit“”teeth, Ethics and Information Technology They argue that “describing AI misinformation as bullshit is a more useful and accurate way to predict and discuss the behavior of these systems.” As a classic example of bullshit, the team cites a political candidate saying certain things simply because those words “might create a positive impression on potential voters.”
The feedback at least celebrates the skill of politicians who, like ChatGPT, can deliver endless streams of easy-to-swallow but indigestible chatter. In some countries, some of the most successful ChatGPT-esque politicians also display a visual counterpart to their words, a momentarily plausible physical aspect: they adorn their heads with ChatGPT-esque hair, or what might be mistaken for hair for a moment. There is little published research on why and how this happens.
It’s not such a small thing
Feedback continues its quest to create a list of trivial psychic powers, with Aline Berry confessing and professing that she has a trivial psychic power, which may not be trivial at all.
She writes, “I believe I have a superpower that I’ve taken for granted my whole life: when someone complains that they’re looking around for something, I usually find it within five minutes. Somehow, like Sherlock Holmes, I filter out the obvious things they no doubt see and focus on the lost item that’s camouflaged in such a way that it can easily be overlooked if not seen.”
“Recently, a friend of mine asked me for help after frantically searching for her car keys all morning. I stopped, looked around, realized there was no point in looking everywhere, and asked her if she’d looked in the fridge. Her eyes lit up – she’d placed her keys on something cold to remind herself to take them with her, but promptly forgot.”
Another skill emerged during her childhood: “I started a new school a few weeks late and was given a geometry problem. I had never studied geometry before and didn’t know any of the rules. So I looked at a graph and wrote the answer down. I was right. The teacher accused me of cheating and gave me a problem that I had drawn myself, that no one had seen. I wrote the right answer again. As punishment, the teacher gave me ten problems that had to be solved the right way. I didn’t know the correct rules, so I was happy when I got the news that I was going to a different school.”
A whirlwind of interest
An exercise in dimensional scaling. Which is more powerful: a) a storm in a teacup, or b) a storm in a teapot? An experiment is the real way to answer this question. Survey your colleagues (at least 50 people) and submit the three survey results (number of respondents, storm, and tempest) to Swirl of interest, c/o Feedback.
Marc Abrahams is the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founder of the journal Annals of Improbable Research. He previously worked on unusual uses of computers. His website is Impossible.
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