Some Holiday Weekend Reading

1. If AI Is Sentient Then So Is ‘Age of Empires II’

"The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphize too readily."

That sentence says it all. No notes.

2. Using AI to help physicians diagnose rare genetic diseases affecting children

My medical history is a string of non-diagnoses, wrong diagnoses, and other near-fatal botches - and I'm a straight, white, male college grad who has always had health insurance. Medical errors are one of the leading causes of death (although maybe not as bad as headlines indicate). Bring on our robot doctors! 

(Interesting: General-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools. Again: LLMs get things wrong / hallucinate.* But again: it isn't like doctors always get it right. More importantly, very few people in the U.S. have easy access to full medical care. "Always ask: What is the alternative?")

3. From Tobias, The Vegan Strategist, who is far better than I am at not descending into "Angry old man yells at cloud": A small, unforgiving club won't get us there.

(Be warned: In the next week or two, there will be a yelling at cloud post.)

4. An inconvenient truth: CO2 is greening the Earth. 

Why can't we set a realistic "social cost of carbon"? Because it isn't clear that there is a net social cost of carbon! That "CO2 is greening the Earth" link is fuller exploration of this point from Carbon Cult Cruelty:

Over a decade ago, I came across a sentence buried in a New Scientist article noting that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased crop yields. Asking ChatGPT today to summarize the research on crop yields and increased carbon dioxide concentrations produced this table:

📊 Summary of Average Yield Increases Under Elevated CO₂ (~550 ppm)

Wheat 10–15% 

Rice 10–15%

Soybeans 15–20% 

Maize 0–5%

Now, a serious question for you:

Did you know that our most important crops were more productive because of increased carbon dioxide concentrations?

Another serious question:

Why do you think that fact isn’t known? 

5. And finally: Recycling is stupid and "the most ardent vegan activists are almost certainly doing more harm to their cause than good."  

For those who don't know, that quoted line about the most ardent vegan activists accurately sums up the "half failed" portion of Losing My Religions' subtitle. And it is the topic of my upcoming "yelling at clouds" post (uh-oh!).  

* From here (plenty more fun stuff at the link):

A new study claims that an eight-minute conversation with ChatGPT can reduce belief in conspiracy theories by about 20%, and that these effects last at least two months. ... I bet most 9/11 truthers have never spoken to a skeptic who both took them seriously and who knew a lot about 9/11. ...

37% of Americans—a plurality—believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. 40% don’t understand how a control group works. 26% think that the sun goes around the Earth. For these people, talking to a chatbot is likely to leave them with a more accurate view of reality.