Josie Ford
Morbid dating
If one craves morbid romance, one could, if one wished, write an algorithm to select an attractively morbid prospective mate or a recreational date.
Coltan Scrivner, the curiosity-driven inventor of the Morbid Curiosity Scale (Feedback, 19 November 2022), has looked into a new use for his tool. He and two colleagues, in a new study, explain that “Behavioral attraction predicts morbidly curious women’s mating interest” in men with dangerous personalities.
They cite earlier research showing that those “women are aware of potential costs associated with such men”. The new research aims to aid said women. It says: “Despite the potential costs of high-dark triad men, it could benefit morbidly curious women to upregulate their preference for such men to satisfy short-term mating goals.”
The research doesn’t pursue the obvious business potential here. Feedback envisions a new era of specialised morbid tool-making and tool use. Cheery days lie ahead, maybe, for the industry that originally was called “computer dating”.
(For the curious, Scrivner has also created an easy way for you to measure where you lie on his scale: a free online Morbid Curiosity Test. Before starting it, you will be informed that “‘morbid’ does not mean the curiosity is bad – it simply refers to the fact that the topic is related to death in some way”.)
Limits of curiosity
What are the limits of your curiosity? Is there a reliable, simple way to find out? Here is one possible test.
Feedback has a copy of a paper that Subhash Chandra Shaw and his colleagues published in Medical Journal Armed Forces India. The title of that research might tell you – by your reaction to it – something about yourself.
The paper is called “Missing anus: Do not miss it“.
Chatting politics
A few politicians seek success by being ultra-glib. In so doing, they achieve momentary plausibility.
Feedback notices a similarity between those politicians’ shiny, hollow speech and the shiny, hollow text generated by ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence computer programs.
Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries and Joe Slater at the University of Glasgow, UK, did a study called “ChatGPT is bullshit“, which appears in Ethics and Information Technology. They argue that “describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems”. The team mentions a prime example of bullshit: a political candidate saying particular things only because the words might “sound good to potential voters”.
Feedback admires the skill, if little else, of those politicians who, like ChatGPT, can utter endless streams of easy-to-swallow-though-not-to-digest patter. A few of the most successful of those ChatGPT-ish politicians, in several countries, also display a visual counterpart to their words – a just-fleetingly-plausible physical aspect of themselves. They adorn their heads with hair, or stuff that momentarily plausibly passes for hair, of ChatGPT-ish quality. There is, as yet, little published research about why and how that happens.
Not so trivial
Feedback continues the quest to compile a list of trivial superpowers. Aline Berry confesses and professes to having a trivial superpower that potentially isn’t trivial.
She writes: “I believe I have a super power which I have taken for granted all my life. When someone complains that they have been looking everywhere for something, I usually find it within 5 minutes. Somehow, like Sherlock Holmes, I eliminate the obvious which they must have looked at and zero in on the missing item, which may be out in view but camouflaged in such a way that it is overlooked.
“In one instance lately, a friend had been frantically looking for her car keys ‘all morning’ and asked for my help. I stood looking around, realising it would be useless for me to go over everything, and asked her if she had looked in the refrigerator. Her eyes lit up. She had put her keys on top of something cold to remind her to take it with her and had promptly forgotten about it.”
Another ability manifested in childhood: “I came to a new school several weeks late and was presented with a geometry problem. I had not previously taken geometry and did not know any of the rules, so I looked at the graph and put down the answer. It was correct. The teacher accused me of cheating and gave me a problem she had drawn, which no one could have seen before. I put down the correct answer again. She punished me by giving me 10 problems which I had to do the ‘proper’ way. Since I did not know what the proper rules were, I was glad when I got the news I would be going to another school.”
Swirl of interest
Here is an exercise in dimensional scaling. Which is more powerful: a) a storm in a teacup or b) a tempest in a teapot? Experiment is the real way to settle the question. Please survey your colleagues (minimum of 50), then submit your tripartite findings (number of respondents, storms and tempests) to: Swirl of interest, c/o Feedback.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is improbable.com .
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