A new twist on the Turing test?

Recent developments in AI technology and its spawning of personalized chatbots has renewed attention in the Turing test.

The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human. In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine’s ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human.

It seems clear that, by and large, these AI chatbots can simulate human conversation pretty well, apart from the tendency to occasionally hallucinate, to make up stuff and say it will confidence, a trait that many humans also exhibit. If one is not aware of the details of what it says, one might easily be convinced that the made-up fact is genuine. For example, a mathematician friend of mine said that his son (also a mathematician) tested out an AI system. He multiplied two very large integers together and then fed the result into the AI system and asked whether the number was ‘prime’ i.e., not divisible by any number other than 1 and itself. The machine said ‘yes’.

But despite those well known problems, people are treating the AI bots as being at least partly sentient, as demonstrated by those who seem to have formed long-term ‘relationships ‘with them and consider them as friends or even more. So at least as far as these people are concerned, these bots seem to have passed the Turing test.
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Is mathematics invented or discovered?

The above question has been a long-standing source of debate. ‘Discovered’ means that the structures of mathematics exist objectively and independently while ‘invented’ implies that mathematics is the free creation of the human mind. The same debate exists in science.

An article profiles a mathematician Sergiu Klainerman who is convinced that it is discovered.

The equations that govern black holes were true before there were black holes. That claim is hotly contested, and cuts through one of the deepest fault lines in the philosophy of mathematics. On one side are those who hold that mathematical structures, including well-established principles and basic geometric shapes like the tetrahedron, exist independently of human thought – not as a language we invented to describe reality, but rather as the substrate of reality itself. On the other side of the debate are those who argue that mathematics is the product of human labours, imposed on a world that would be wholly indifferent to it were we not here.

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Is agnosticism a viable stance on the existence of God?

I am busy today and in lieu of an original post, thought that I would post an old article of mine that was published in the UK magazine New Humanist in July 2011. I moved my blog to FtB in 2012 from my earlier platform where it started in 2005, so the article appeared before many current readers would have started reading the blog and they may find it of interest.

The topic was whether being agnostic on the question of the existence of God was a viable position to take. I argue that the answer is no, hence the title of No Doubt that I gave the piece.

That magazine used to have a more playful, irreverent style that you can see just below the header. It later became more staid.

Good grief! How can people do this?

Most of us take some steps to look our best selves, especially if we are going out in public. Usually those are limited to how we dress and some minimal efforts at grooming. But as with so many things, there are those who take this to an extreme, leading to a phenomenon known as ‘looksmaxxing’, one of the recent trends that have had the suffix ‘maxxing’ added to it to give the cachet of sounding cool and hip.

Perhaps the most viral example of maxxing is looksmaxxing, a cultural phenomenon that originated in the incel (a.k.a. involuntary celibate) community, encouraging boys and young men to take intense, often dangerous, measures to enhance their physical appearance. That includes undergoing intrusive surgeries, using steroids to bulk up, or using a hammer to smash your facial bones in hopes of accentuating one’s jawline. Looksmaxxing promises one sole goal: that by being exceedingly and unattainably hot, men can achieve the utmost confidence, social clout and sexual success.

The article goes on to describe other forms of maxxing, all involving taking some ordinary activity to the extreme, including food, with things like protein and fiber being targeted for maxxing.

On TikTok and Instagram, the protein hysteria reached a fever pitch. Influencers showed off their high-protein diets filled with protein powders, eggs, egg whites, cottage cheese, poultry and red meat. Some also pushed for eating more high-protein snacks, ranging from meat sticks and cold cuts to homemade chicken chips made from seasoned, ground meat. Everyone was hellbent on maxing out on the macro.
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That’s all to say that our food was never intended to be maxxed. Certain nutrients and so-called superfoods were never meant to be heavily prioritized at the expense of other beneficial ingredients. Regardless of how severe the spectrum is, maxxing implies that more is always better. It’s in the name. But that’s not what healthy eating is all about. Per the World Health Organization, a healthy diet is made up of four basic principles: adequacy, balance, moderation and diversity. Maxxing, for the most part, fails to satisfy three of those principles — adequacy, balance and diversity.

It also raises the question of how much food maxxing is necessary in the future to undo the damage of previous maxxing trends. First, it’s protein. Then, fiber, which many U.S. adults aren’t eating enough of already. What’s next? Carb-maxxing to compensate for the lack of carbohydrates in our diets? Or perhaps, raw greens-maxxing?

As the age-old adage goes, “too much of a good thing is a bad thing.” It feels especially pertinent in a new era of maxx eating.

It seems to me that people are disregarding the health of their future selves by emphasizing short-term gains and ignoring the possibility of serious long-term damage to their bodies. We will not know the real consequences of such actions until these people age and by then it may be too late to repair any damage. We can place some of the blame on so-called influencers who boast that they have become successful by doing all these things and selling products that they claim they used to achieve that look, whether that is true or not.

Novel legal strategy to eliminate smoking

Cigarettes and other smoking-related products are, as has been pointed out, things that can and will kill you even when used as directed. Not only does it kill, it causes many health problems not just for smokers but for those around them due to breathing in the smoke.

The IHME – in their annual Global Burden of Disease study – estimates that 8.7 million people die prematurely from tobacco use every year. As of November 2023, these are the latest estimates and refer to deaths in the year 2019. The references can be found in the footnote.

7.7 million of those deaths result from smoking, while 1.3 million are non-smokers who are dying because they are exposed to second-hand smoke. (An additional 56,000 people die annually from chewing tobacco.)

The unpleasant smell of smoke also penetrates into clothes and any permeable material so that as soon as one enters a room, one can tell if a smoker has been there.

However, thanks to massive marketing and the hiding of its negative effects, the tobacco industry has managed to create a large number of addicts. The industry has a massive army of lobbyists who work diligently to make sure that governments do not do more to curtail or ban their death-dealing industry. Banning smoking outright will not be easy because of the power of the lobby and those who will argue that it infringes on their personal freedom.
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John Oliver on AI chatbots

I have written before about my adventures with AI chatbots which were underwhelming, to put it mildly. Now John Oliver has come up with a detailed look at it, and all its problems. He points out that the companies have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on software development and hardware and data centers but have no significant revenue as yet.

The business model for chatbots seems to be to get as many people hooked on using these chatbots as possible by providing people with an experience that they enjoy, mostly for free. Once people get hooked, we can expect the companies to steadily degrade the free experience in order to get users sign up with paid subscriptions for ‘better’ versions, often similar to the one they previously got for free or sometimes with enhanced features. It is the same tactic that has been used over and over again by the tech and internet companies, as Cory Doctorow documents in his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, to lure people in before turning the screws on them.
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Suppressing good news that goes against your agenda

You would think that a CDC report that showed reduced hospitalization and emergency room visits among healthy adults last winter would be good news, right? Not if it is for reasons that go against Trump-Kennedy vaccine dogma.

A report showing the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine that was previously delayed by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been blocked from being published in the agency’s flagship scientific journal, according to three people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The report showed that the vaccine reduced emergency department visits and hospitalizations among healthy adults by about half this past winter.

The move, which has not been previously reported, has raised concerns among current and former officials that information about the vaccine’s benefits is being downplayed because they conflict with the views of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been an outspoken critic of the shots.
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The report is gaining attention at a delicate political moment: The Trump administration has sought to soften its public posture on controversial vaccine actions ahead of the midterm elections. GOP pollsters have warned of the political risks of vaccine skepticism, and many voters oppose Kennedy’s efforts to roll back vaccine policies. Publishing findings showing the vaccine’s effectiveness would be at odds with the administration’s moves to restrict its use, particularly for children, former CDC officials say.

The report had cleared the agency’s scientific-review process, which includes dozens of scientists, according to two of the three people who spoke to The Post. Stopping an MMWR report at that stage is highly unusual, former CDC officials say.

So there we are. Kennedy and his appointees are so anti-vaccine that they do not want success stories to be issued, presumably because that would highlight the benefits of vaccines and might result in more people desiring them. The fact that fewer people will succumb to the serious effects of covid-19 does not seem to matter to them.

It is these people who are sick.

The dangerous allure of self-medication

Before a new drug is approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration in the US, say for cancer treatment, it has to go through quite a stringent process of at least three phases of clinical trials, with each phase having a different purpose.

  • Phase I trials test if a new treatment is safe and look for the best way to give the treatment. Doctors also look for signs that cancer responds to the new treatment.
  • Phase II trials test if one type of cancer responds to the new treatment.
  • Phase III trials test if a new treatment is better than a standard treatment.
  • Phase IV trials find more information about long-term benefits and side effects.

The Phase I trial stage is where a new treatment can get shut down quickly if it shows signs of causing harm. Phase II is meant to show that the treatment does work in the way advertised. Phase III can be a difficult bar to reach because you need to show that the new treatment is better than what is already available.

Nowadays most people think of these measures as reasonable precautions to prevent people from being harmed by untested drugs and other treatments. But as Dhruv Khullar writes, the idea that the government should be able to decide what people can put into their bodies has been, at least in the US, a controversial issue, and at one time there was nothing to stop people from doing whatever they liked.
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Trump and RFK Jr are going to kill us all

The invaluable investigative news source ProPublica has a highly disturbing article about how crank RFK Jr’s; health agenda, backed by Trump, risks unleashing waves of childhood plagues that we thought we had ended for good. Much news coverage has focused on measles but there are a whole lot of other diseases that risk becoming widespread as well. Some of them had been absent for so long that doctors had never seen cases and thus had trouble identifying them in the sick children brought to them. The diseases include diphtheria, rubella, and polio among others.

The article starts with a doctor puzzling over the symptoms displayed by an infant.

The baby’s life was in danger, and Ratner needed to figure out why. He worried the culprit was bacterial meningitis, an infection of the membranes that protect the brain.

What came back on her lab tests was something out of the history books.

The infant’s meningitis was caused by invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, a type of bacteria that used to kill nearly 1,000 children a year in the U.S. A shot introduced in the late 1980s was so effective that Ratner, a veteran pediatric infectious disease doctor, was among the generations of physicians who had never seen a case. But the baby’s parents, Ratner learned, had chosen not to vaccinate her.

Disheartened, he told his colleagues, “This should be a never event.”

It wasn’t. The following year, Ratner treated another infant with Hib, then another, each of them unvaccinated. Two went home, but one had to be discharged to a rehabilitation facility. That 5-month-old boy had huge black pupils that didn’t respond to light, and he needed a ventilator to breathe. Ratner and his colleagues noted an “absence of brain stem reflexes,” indicating severe damage.

The U.S. government took a half century to build a vaccination system that shielded children from such a fate. Its success depended on two fundamental pillars: parents trusting in vaccines and children having access to them. Both are now in peril, thanks in no small part to the man steering America’s health policy.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccine group and once likened the immunization of children to a holocaust, is transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of shots into one that spreads doubts about their safety here and abroad.

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Tucker Carlson on the Oscars

SNL had Jeremy Culhane play Tucker Carlson giving his take on some of this year’s nominees. I have not seen any of the films but I thought Culhane really nailed the impression of Carlson, from his facial expressions to his rhetorical tics and right down to his weird laugh.

SNL also had a skit that was based on the hospital drama The Pitt except that it was a hospital that was run on RFK Jr’s crackpot ideas.