Tag Archives: interested

Are you interested in sabotaging your colleagues in the scientific community by publishing “nonsense”?

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play your cards right

As readers in the Northern Hemisphere face long, dark nights and cold weather for many weeks to come, what could be better than a fun card game? If you're too strapped for money to play poker and have exhausted the comical possibilities of poker, card against humanity (This state is typically reached after about 10 minutes of play.) If you're interested in scientific research, you may want to consider: Publish or perish.

Created by a social psychologist Max Hui Bye, Publish or perish Simulate the experience of building a career in scientific research. The game is to publish as many papers and collect citations as possible. Even if your paper is crap or you have to sabotage another player's publication. In Bai's words, “players interrupt each other, send vitriolic comments, and compete to publish useless nonsense.”

rear release Bai launched a beta version of the game for academics on Kickstarter in late 2024, and it quickly became profitable. 5,944 backers and $292,537 in funding. they are not Brandon Sanderson Four Secret Novel NumbersHowever, it still requires a large amount of capital.

To publish a paper, players collect cards representing key elements of their research, from ideas and data to references. To speed this up, you can use cards that represent positive actions, such as attending a workshop or forming a collaboration.

But the real fun happens when you play dirty. Some cards allow dangerous activities such as plagiarism and p-hacking (a statistical trick that repeatedly reanalyzes data in different ways until a significant result is found, then independently publishes the results). Masu. For example, you can sabotage someone's “research” by identifying minor citation errors or requesting an audit of their work.

The game includes cards representing papers that can be published, all of which include “Procrastination Patterns Among Academics: My Own Case Study'' (written by Anita Blake, Ph.D. in Psychology) and “Practical Fields''. Guide,” with headlines flanked by insane and honest feedback. Leads to unproductive meetings and wasted organizational time” (by Max Time-Squader, MBA, JD, MD, Ph.D.).

Feedback does not have a copy. However, now that this article has been published, I have a feeling it might just be a matter of time before Mrs Feedback or Feedback Jr receives feedback on our birthdays. However, as (very) former academic researchers, we were aware of the horror and pain of the research experience. I don't know what it would be like for a working researcher to play this game. While there may be catharsis, many buried traumas may also resurface. We recommend having a therapist on-site.

Feedback also leaves us wondering what the game's legacy will be. Famously, Exclusive The game was invented as a biting satire on landlord and renter capitalism, but after being acquired by Parker Brothers it was sold around the world as a fun game about how to get rich. Will there still be feedback 50 years from now? Publish or perish Marketed by the Trump Organization as a fun game about how to discover new knowledge.

A parade of bots

Just when you thought talking to actual loved ones on Facebook and Instagram (rather than advertisers or meme collectors) couldn't be any harder, parent company Meta has decided to make it even harder.

It all started with something article in financial timesIn it, Meta executive Connor Hayes reportedly said the company plans to add a large number of AI profiles to the site. or F.T. “Meta envisions social media filled with AI-generated users.”

Following this, many users realized that there were actually a large number of AI profiles already on the site. According to Jason Kabler (404 Media)these “meta-controlled AI-generated Instagram and Facebook profiles…have been on the platform for over a year.” However, most of them have been deleted, and the few that remained stopped posting in April 2024. This is because “users almost universally ignored it.”

It was a mistake for Meta to not be able to permanently delete the profile as users started experimenting. washington post columnist Karen Attia I chatted with An AI called Livwas introduced as a queer black woman. Attia made Liv say that none of the creators were black and only 1 out of 12 was female (though who knows if that was telling the truth or just a hallucination? I don't know either). Unfortunately, Liv has since been removed.

meanwhile, business insider 's katie notopoulos We pointed out that you can create your own AI chatbot on Facebook Messenger. showed off what she had made: “Ciao! I'm Luigi, your go-to person for all things healthcare disparities and reform… Participating in healthcare advocacy is my passion!”

Meta claims that the next generation AI profile is better. It's not difficult.

The real question is why the company thinks anyone would want this. The whole point of social media is that you can talk to people. That's why social media platforms have put so much effort into cracking down on bots and spammers that pollute the conversation.

Nevertheless, feedback remains optimistic. It's entirely possible that the AI ​​Profiles project will go exactly like Meta's attempt to drag us all into the Metaverse, but it failed because it couldn't create avatars with legs.

Or perhaps AI profiles can combat misinformation. Mark Zuckerberg decided to: Fire all fact checkers.

Have a story for feedback?

You can email your article to Feedback at feedback@newscientist.com. Please enter your home address. This week's and past feedback can be found on our website.

Source: www.newscientist.com

Interested in dark love stories? A study could be just for you

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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.

Do you have a story for feedback?

You can submit articles for Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedback can be found on our website.

Source: www.newscientist.com