There is one point stricty related to the measurement issue of intelligence that only @nntaleb 's follower get, that is the robustness of what is measured under stress. No IQ test will ever try to check how well the human mind works under inhumane conditions. When it matters!

People complain about the catalogue of ships in the "Iliad", but "Argonautica" begins with a 10-page catalogue of the crew.

Quentin Tarantino says Stanley Kubrick was a hypocrite. "His party line was, I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence.” “It’s just, like, Get the f**k off. I know and you know your d!ck was hard the entire time.”

According to Saxo Grammaticus, in medieval Danish law when a foreigner slew a Dane, two foreigners must be put to death. Disproportionate penalty was seen as justice because foreigners lacked the same kinship and legal protections (weregild) that Danes enjoyed, so the society mandated a harsher, collective penalty for them. They believed rulers owed their people an uncompromising deterrent to prevent outsiders from disturbing the peace or assaulting native Danes. Something to think about.

A toothpaste company has quietly killed the entire market research industry and nobody is talking about it. Colgate published a paper showing you can predict real purchase intent at 90% accuracy by simply asking LLMs to roleplay customers. And this is beyond insane. If you ask an AI, "Rate this product from 1 to 5," it gives safe, middle-of-the-road garbage. So researchers invented a method called Semantic Similarity Rating (SSR). Instead of asking the AI for a number, they asked it to roleplay. They gave the LLM a demographic profile. They showed it a product concept. And they asked it to write down its raw, unfiltered thoughts. Then, they used a semantic model to translate those written thoughts into a numerical score. The results are staggering. Tested against 57 real corporate surveys and 9,300 actual human responses, the synthetic AI consumers matched real human buying behavior with 90% reliability. They perfectly mirrored how different age brackets and income levels react to price changes. And they provided detailed, qualitative feedback that was deeper and more critical than what actual humans wrote. This destroys the economics of traditional market research. You don't need to wait a month to see if a product will sell. You can simulate 1,000 hyper-targeted customer interviews overnight. You can A/B test pricing across every demographic instantly.

There is an emperor's new clothes problem with one of the worlds leading economists and almost nobody wants to speak frankly about it because he sits at the height of academic power and prestige, but many admit it behind closed doors.

Umberto Eco on reading

boats are very og cybernetic technologies. one must appreciate the boat

A Chinese robot wearing a clown wig kicked a child in the stomach.